Clash of Eagles (20 page)

“I am well,” he declared. “Gaius not sick. Ready to work.”

Tahtay cheered. Kimimela looked dubious. Enopay looked resentful. Marcellinus sighed. “Tell the warriors to return tomorrow.”

“Who warriors?” Tahtay prompted in Latin, unsure whether he understood.

“The nine warriors from before.” Marcellinus pointed at the Roman swords and armor that he had made the children bring inside his hut and pile in the corner to preserve them against theft and the elements. Despite that, the steel badly needed cleaning. “I teach? Fight with Roman spear, sword?”

Kimimela poked him in the stomach. The slash he had sustained there was mostly healed, but still he winced, and she raised her eyebrows at his response. Marcellinus poked her right back. “Stop worrying. Are you my mother now?”

“Eyanosa kill Iroqua?” said Enopay, and Kimimela cringed. Only Enopay called the Roman Eyanosa. Eventually Marcellinus would find out what it meant.

“Well,” said Marcellinus. “Gaius sit down in winter, kill Iroqua in spring.”

“Huh,” Tahtay said.

Marcellinus turned to him. “What? Nine warriors not want to learn now?”

“Not know,” said Tahtay. “Maybe warriors not here. Maybe they away, fight Iroqua.”

Despite Tahtay’s dismissiveness, Marcellinus told the children to spread the word. The following dawn when he awoke and went to his doorway, he found sixty-five Cahokian warriors sitting cross-legged outside
his hut and Tahtay and Kimimela sitting among them, grinning from ear to ear.

The more Marcellinus had learned about the Cahokiani, the easier his decision had become.

After the battle Marcellinus had not sacrificed his life by falling on his sword. Since then he had continued to show weakness in abundance, if only to himself; he had drunk wine to try to float the shame from his mind, and then he had made a rash—and, to the Cahokians, baffling—choice in walking out into the hostile night of a continent he barely understood.

If Marcellinus had believed in the Fates, he might have said that he was meant to intercept the Iroqua war party, that the battle and its consequences were foreordained or a sign from the gods indicating what he should do. As a good Stoic, he acknowledged it as merely a chance encounter. But either way, Marcellinus had been lucky to survive, and he was not eager to repeat the experiment now that he knew how many Iroqua enemies lurked out in the hills and bottomlands, so close to Cahokian city boundaries.

Today he saw nothing sane or valiant in striding alone to an Iroqua death. And since he could not get back to Roma, he would have to work with what he had right here and now.

Let Roma come to him.

Let another legion or two make the long, exhausting trek. Romans surely would be back eventually—Marcellinus could not imagine Hadrianus III giving up his claim to Nova Hesperia simply because a single ragtag legion had failed. It was just a matter of time. And once the new Romans arrived, let them witness what Marcellinus had done with these people in the meantime.

The next Roman army must not make the same mistakes Marcellinus had made. If Marcellinus did not want another legion to suffer the fate of the 33rd or the Cahokians to be slaughtered at their hands, he had a lot of work to do. Cahokia had to be prepared, and then Roma would have to be persuaded of the strategic and economic benefits of waging peace rather than war.

The Cahokians had wings but no idea how to run an army. They had no tactics, no strategy, little metal, and no steel. Their “roads” were laughable, and because of that they had no use for the wheel. They had no writing. No baths.

Marcellinus would help with all that.

Cahokia would hardly be the first province to be hauled out of an older time by the civilizing power of Roma. There was more than one way to conquer a people.

Besides, he could not sit idly by. Marcellinus was not a man given to passivity. He was used to a structured life of military discipline, order, and regulation. He had to work, and he had to show leadership. And really, that was all there was to it.

He would make them a province worth having, for Roma. Even if the first thing the next Romans did when they arrived was execute him for his pains.

That evening, after his first training session with his Cahokian braves, Marcellinus walked out to the Roman wagons. He felt weak but nowhere near as achy as he had feared.

He took every single wineskin he could find and poured all the wine out into the dirt. It took quite some time.

The wine was growing vinegary, anyway. And he did not like the way he had leaned on it like a crutch. From now on Marcellinus would drink water.

Returning home, he built a little shelf at the back of his hut by bending up the bottom of one of the reed mats and set up his lares, the little golden household gods that traveled with him.

Marcellinus folded his destroyed Roman tunic and put it on the floor under the shelf. On it he placed his pugio and the Iroqua tooth that Chumanee had dug out of his leg. Aside from his weapons and the Cahokian clothes that he was wearing at that moment, he was looking at the sum total of his possessions.

Marcellinus had no incense or candle to light, but he wafted the air as if he had and performed a small daily ritual over the lares. It was not that he believed that little golden figurines could aid him or guide his
future, more that the ritual helped him maintain his Romanness here in the wilds of barbarian Nova Hesperia.

Or rather, here in the center of Hesperian civilization.

For Marcellinus no longer thought of them as faceless natives. Training with them that day, teaching them the positions of the sword and how to stand in ranks in open and close order and, gods help him and them both, how to march in step, he had come to know them as individuals. Paradoxically, in the middle of drill, which was designed to remove individuality from a group of soldiers and create a corps of comrades instead, Marcellinus had felt the uniqueness and humanity of each person under his “command.”

His legionaries were gone. There was no one else who spoke tolerable Latin in whole sentences within a thousand miles, maybe five thousand. Marcellinus’s enemies had become his keepers. And his keepers were not a mass of barbarians but a motley collection of human beings. Whatever rituals they spoke before their own gods before they went to bed were surely no wiser or more foolish than the words Marcellinus had just spoken to his “toy persons,” as Sisika had termed them all those moons ago.

And so Marcellinus lay himself down to sleep after his first day as a Cahokian drill sergeant, almost intolerably weary but—at long last—a little more at ease about his survival and purpose deep in this alien land.

O
n the night of the first frost, two of the Cahokian granaries burned.

Once again the streets and plazas of the Great City came alive in the middle of the night. Marcellinus pulled his tunic over his head and ran from his hut as the first alarm was sounded with the pounding of drums and the clash of rocks against large copper sheets on the Master Mound. Outside, Cahokians stumbled blearily out of their houses into the chilly air; Marcellinus had to push his way through them to get to the plaza.

The burning granaries were to the west and east of the Great Mound, bracketing it with twin fiery calamities. Smoke streamed into the night sky, and the reek of burned corn filled the air.

Shielding his eyes from the blaze, Marcellinus peered between the houses, across the city. It looked hopeless. Obviously the two granaries had not set themselves aflame, but the culprits were long gone. The Iroqua arsonists had presumably fled the scene long before the fires had become established.

The western granary was nearer. Marcellinus began to run. His Praetor’s instinct was to try to take control, to bring order to the chaos, but he did not know the right Cahokian words for this crisis and he was an outsider here; no one would listen to him. In any case, once Marcellinus navigated his way through the crowd to the granary, order had somehow already appeared from nowhere. Bucket chains had formed of their
own volition; men and women were passing large pots of water all the way from Cahokia Creek past the Master Mound to the granaries. In partial states of undress, their sweating faces reflecting the baleful light from the conflagration, they were a stirring sight to Marcellinus.

Stirring yet potentially desperate. Cahokia had a dozen granaries spread across the city, but the fall harvest had been disappointing, and that corn had to feed a city of twenty thousand people through what Enopay had told Marcellinus was expected to be a long, bitter winter.

The granaries were the same kind of structure as many other huts and lodges of the city but much larger, with floors raised on stout wooden beams to deter vermin and keep the corn dry. Several of the western granary’s support beams had already sheared, and the rectangular building slumped like a drunkard. A woman thrust a sodden blanket at Marcellinus and ran by him to step up into the blaze; he could already see other men clambering through the burning wooden struts, beating at the flames with wet blankets and rugs in a futile attempt to bring the fire under control as other Cahokians continued to hurl water into the building.

Memories uncurled, galvanizing Marcellinus into action. He dropped the blanket and ran forward, screaming and waving his arms. “No! Get off granary! Away, all away! Very bad, very bad!”

His warning came much too late. The water on the burning grain in the confined space had already done its work, creating a flammable gas. Now that gas ignited. The granary exploded, sending a plume of flame into the sky and bowling Marcellinus off his feet, backward into the dirt.

It took until dawn for calm and order to return to Cahokia, but this time Marcellinus was one of the many men and women circulating through the plaza explaining what had happened and helping with the dead and wounded. Close to dawn he came upon Chumanee tending to the burns of one of the braves caught in the blast from the western granary; she peered up at him, dirty and weary, and he nodded to her as he went by.

A new crowd had clustered around the still smoldering eastern granary, and Marcellinus walked over. A tall brave was speaking, the same man Marcellinus had been forced to explain himself to with Tahtay’s help the night the Iroqua war party had raided the outskirts of Cahokia. Fortunately, Tahtay was already there and could translate, for the tall brave was not using the hand-talk. Currently he was stating the obvious, which was that the Iroqua had sneaked into their city like cowards to attack their winter grain and weaken them and saying the things a leader should say: this outrage would not go unpunished, Cahokian vengeance would be swift and sure, and so on. The crowd cheered, but Marcellinus wondered exactly how they would get vengeance on sneak thieves, murderers, and arsonists who performed acts of sabotage and then melted away into the night.

The tall brave finished his oration and strode on toward the wreckage of the western granary.

“So,” Marcellinus said to Tahtay. “Chief, that?”

“That was Great Sun Man,” Tahtay said proudly.

“Really?” The brave wore the same kind of tunic as any other man, and his hair and tattoos gave no clues to his rank. Without the clothes and regalia of office that Marcellinus had seen on top of the Master Mound, there had been no way for Marcellinus to tell him apart from any other Cahokian warrior.

Marcellinus had assumed that Great Sun Man lived high up on the Master Mound, just as an Imperator might hide himself away on the Palatine. But it was the reverse: Great Sun Man lived with his people, just a man among men, emerging from the throng only in times of crisis when someone needed to take control. It was an unusual style of leadership that Marcellinus would need some time to think about.

Tahtay was beaming while watching Great Sun Man’s progress through the crowd. Suddenly it all made sense. “So, Tahtay? Great Sun Man?”

“War chief. In peace, elders and clan chiefs make law. In war, war chief. And today-now, always war.”

“Yes, yes.” Marcellinus knew that already from his evening conversations.
It was rather like the difference between the Senate and a general. But now the rest of it had fallen into place.

“Tahtay? Gaius think Great Sun Man is your father.”

And Tahtay puffed up his chest and grinned at him.

“The Seneca, that tribe is the western door. Mohawk, that tribe is the eastern door. The Onondaga, that tribe holds central flame of the Haudenosaunee League. Flame? Is like fire. The light.”

Marcellinus chewed and swallowed. Wachiwi, the woman now describing the many tribes that made up the Iroqua, was young, gorgeous, and distractingly unclothed; her breasts bobbed as she pointed at positions on an imaginary map in the air and bobbed again as she reached into her bowl for a piece of duck meat or a slice of askutasquash. But she was also the most knowledgeable about Iroqua geography and politics, being of Iroqua descent herself; Wachiwi had been born into the Onida tribe, captured during a raid and adopted by the Cahokians as a child of only six or seven winters.

Kimimela was eating with them tonight, as was Tahtay. Nominally they were there to help with translation, but Marcellinus suspected them of baser motives. Tahtay was clearly mesmerized by Wachiwi, studying her lessons in geography and politics a little more avidly than their content deserved. Kimimela was just as clearly the reverse, resentful and distrusting of this charismatic new creature in their midst and glowering at Marcellinus whenever she thought he showed the woman too much attention, which was most of the time. Enopay was there, too, but was fast asleep on the floor of Nahimana’s hut.