Clash of Eagles (23 page)

Marcellinus picked at his dried meat and berries with the rest of them. Normally he was not a man to fret the night before a battle, but normally he had the weight of several thousand well-trained men at his back. By contrast, this small Cahokian skirmishing force worried the hunger right out of him. His orders might prove to be a dangerous distraction to the men he supposedly commanded. What if he failed again? What would he do if Tahtay was killed the next day or, worse, if something Marcellinus did
got
him killed?

When the fire died down, the men all huddled together for warmth, rather too close for Marcellinus’s taste, though he had to admit it helped keep the night chill at bay.

The next day dawned frosty. Marcellinus was already awake when the rest of the braves stirred; he had volunteered to take third watch with half a dozen other warriors and had blinked his way sleepily through to the coming of the sun. He went and splashed his face with chilly river water to wake himself up.

“Here,” said Great Sun Man.

Marcellinus had been expecting food. Instead he was presented with a tall young warrior who blinked owlishly and scratched himself. “Yes?”

“This man, Mahkah. He know the city the Mohawk have taken.”

“Ah, good. When was he last there?”

“When last?” Great Sun Man frowned, and Tahtay, returning from his morning ablutions in the bushes, had to ask that question for Marcellinus.

“Twelve winters,” was the reply.

Marcellinus eyed his informant. “And how old is Mahkah?”

“Seventeen winters.”

“Tahtay …”

“No worry,” the boy said blithely. “Later we get you another.”

As it turned out, Tahtay was right. Marcellinus had pumped Mahkah for all he knew about the lay of the land at their destination. It wasn’t a lot, and Marcellinus suspected that Mahkah was following the established Cahokian custom of making up answers when he didn’t know for sure. But after two hours paddling along the Oyo the meaning of “we get you another” became apparent.

“Canoe,” Marcellinus said tersely. “Get bows, arrows?”

On the southern bank the branches of a willow hung down low over the water, half its brown leaves already shed but still providing a little cover. From beneath it a small canoe was gliding out.

“Arrows?” said Great Sun Man with mild contempt. “Shoot? No. Our men, that.”

And so they were. The canoe held three young Cahokian warriors, obviously scouts sent ahead to check the terrain and now waiting there for the war party to arrive. Marcellinus grinned. Even now it was surprising how often he failed to ask the right question and how often nobody around him understood him well enough to provide the right answer regardless. But at least their little army would not totally lack for information.

“Make plan while paddle,” Tahtay said.

The other canoes moved in and bunched up, the formation closing.
The men in his canoe shipped their paddles as canoes slid into position on either side. The braves on the outer edges of the formation continued to paddle. Behind them, similar bunches of canoes moved up against them, gentle as a kiss. Paddling and momentum carried them up the Oyo.

Great Sun Man turned to his scouts, who began to talk about the city ahead, the layout of the land around it, and the number and disposition of the Mohawk warriors.

“Paint, my son,” Great Sun Man said. Tahtay looked serious and excited at the same time as his father applied blue and red war paint to his cheeks.

Marcellinus looked around him. Many of the men had been painted for war since they had left Cahokia but were now making final preparations. As the male warriors stripped to the waist, he saw again the jagged patterns of the war tattoos and paint on their chests and arms. Some men attached feathers to the ends of their braids. Hanska, the only woman among them, wore shells braided into her hair and a buckskin jerkin, her arms as tattooed as the rest. The archers were strapping on leather wrist bracers. Many men donned wooden or reed mats against their chests, the simple armor Marcellinus remembered from his battle against them. Others, mostly the members of his First Cahokian, pulled on Roman breastplates.

Memories resurfaced of the wild melee in which he had cleaved many such mats with Roman steel and sent warriors crashing dead into the dust. With those memories came a surge of energy and an equal surge of guilt.

Marcellinus did not push those emotions away but collected them and refined them in his heart. He was about to go into battle. The oddness of his situation must not distract him. He was as likely to die in today’s fight as in any he had ever fought, and he needed his wits about him. A seasoned campaigner made use of whatever energies he could muster.

Marcellinus was a peculiar hybrid these days: Cahokian tunic,
Roman breastplate, Cahokian belt with a Roman sheath and a Roman gladius hanging from it, Roman army sandals on his feet. He had a Roman helmet, too, not the shiny gilded steel helmet with the fancy crest of a Praetor that he had once worn but one from a simple legionary. A dead man’s helmet.

“Paint, Wanageeska?” Great Sun Man asked.

The war chief was talking to Marcellinus. His fingertips were daubed red and blue.

“No,” Marcellinus said by reflex. Go into battle painted like a wild man?

Then again, it was their battle he was fighting. And Great Sun Man was frowning.

“Yes, sir,” said Marcellinus. “You honor me.”

If he was to fight shoulder to shoulder with Cahokians, he needed them to treat him as one of their own, at least for a few hours. Why stand out even more than he did as a creature alien to them? And if there really was any special energy to fighting in paint, why reject it?

Great Sun Man’s fingers worked deftly on his cheeks and across his forehead. As far as Marcellinus could tell, the chief was applying the same simple pattern of paint across his face that Tahtay had. He wondered briefly whether he was being adorned with the pattern of a boy’s paint rather than a man’s. But when he looked around at the other Cahokians, every man’s paint was different. Tahtay’s was not inferior to anyone else’s. And nobody was laughing at Marcellinus; to the contrary, he saw nods and distracted half smiles, the self-absorbed camaraderie of soldiers around the world preparing for combat while accepting the companionship of the men around them.

“Thank you,” he said.

“One thing more,” said Great Sun Man, and reached into the long bag at his feet where he kept his ax and club.

He drew out a gladius and a pugio, shiny Roman steel. They were Marcellinus’s original weapons: the gladius with the ornate hilt he’d had specially made for him before he had set off as a newly minted tribune to make war against the Khwarezmian Sultanate and carried ever since
and his more straightforward standard-issue pugio with the nicks in its pommel where he had used it as a hammer to fix his sandal one afternoon during the long march through Appalachia. He had not seen those weapons since he had laid them down in surrender on the Master Mound months before.

“Is good?” Great Sun Man asked, eyes narrowed.

Marcellinus understood his caution. Like Romans, Cahokians took omens seriously. Perhaps Marcellinus might not want back the weapons he had wielded in defeat.

But Marcellinus did, and the trees bounding the river shimmered a little in his vision as he took his old gladius and raised it up in front of his eyes.

A lump formed in his throat. He took and absorbed the energy of that, too, once again focusing it outward. Suddenly Marcellinus felt strong and ready to fight and kill.

“It is very good,” he said. “I thank you, Great Sun Man.”

The breeze picked up on their final approach to Woshakee. It blew northerly, scattering ripples across the waters of the Oyo and tending to push the canoes leftward toward the riverbank. For the Cahokian war party this was the least favored direction the wind could have taken; was even the air in the pay of the Iroqua despite their rites at the great rock? Great Sun Man grimaced.

Mostly flat for the past few days, the land had begun to crumple up around them over the last twenty miles. The southern bank was sparsely lined with trees. They were within arrow range but just barely, and so the Cahokians kept careful watch on those trees for Iroqua archers. The northern bank swelled into a gentle slope that steepened to end in a low ridge several hundred yards away. The land cover was grassy rather than cultivated; according to the scouts, the Woshakean cornfields lay east and north of the city, in fields that were more level and easier to till, and also east and south on the other side of the Oyo. It was pretty, well-behaved countryside, and if the Legion had marched through more land like this on its long trek west, Marcus Tullius might not have
been quite so scathing about Romans wanting to farm Nova Hesperia one day.

Though in order to give away land parcels to Roman veterans or civilian migrants, they’d have to evict the local farmers who were already there. Marcellinus shied away from that thought.

Once again Great Sun Man’s canoe led the Cahokian flotilla, with the rough-and-ready boat of the three scouts paddling alongside. One of those scouts raised his hand in a signal that Marcellinus didn’t understand, a Cahokian warrior sign, not a gesture in the hand-talk that all Hesperians understood.

“Next bend,” came the whispered word through the lead canoe, and the signal was passed by warrior sign back through the canoes that followed. The rearmost five canoes broke away and headed in toward the shore. The remainder maintained position in the center of the river.

The bend was a long, slow turn to the right. As they rounded it, the landscape that the scouts had described came into view. The occupied mound-builder city of Woshakee sat on the left, northward bank about a half mile distant. The stockade that surrounded it came within a dozen feet of the Oyo. Obviously, here the river did not make a habit of bursting its banks. Trails of smoke rose above the stockade, dispersing in the breeze, but it was the orderly thin smoke of fire pits, not the vicious black smoke of destruction. Although the wind was wrong, Marcellinus caught the distant aroma of meat simmering in a pot. His mouth watered even though his stomach was tight with anticipation.

Perhaps two hundred feet inside the stockade he saw a mound thirty feet high, topped with a longhouse. Unlike Cahokia, in this city the chieftain had actually lived on the city’s main mound until he was scalped and burned alive by the Mohawk. Marcellinus was sure that the longhouse now served a more pragmatic purpose for the invaders.

The Mohawk would be watching. It was unrealistic to hope that the approach of the Cahokians had gone unnoticed. Woshakee had been taken by specialists in war, essentially professional warriors, the expansionist arm of the Haudenosaunee League. Such men would not be caught napping in their stolen houses with their stolen women. Yet
there was no sign of Iroqua readiness to fight. Certainly they were not all lining up outside their palisade ready for battle in the way the Cahokians had awaited the Romans.

And it was impossible, of course, to tell how many Iroqua there were behind that palisade, within that city that normally might have housed five hundred or a thousand people. The Cahokian scouts’ description of the land had been excellent, but they had not been inside and did not know the size of the Iroqua force.

Roman history was full of sieges in which a few hundred defenders inside a fortified city had successfully held off armies of many thousands for weeks or even months. Those cities had often been built of stone and usually had a river or some underground water source flowing through them. Nonetheless, even if there were as few of the Iroqua as there were of the Cahokians, the defenders held a strong advantage over Great Sun Man and his warriors.

But the Iroqua were not armed with Roman steel.

Marcellinus looked again at the north ridge. No movement from up there yet. Far behind him, the five Cahokian canoes already bobbed empty against the riverbank. To his left, five more canoes pulled ashore carrying the heaviest of the Cahokian war items—Marcellinus’s precious shields. Those canoes contained members of his First Cahokian Cohort, including Akecheta and Takoda. The remainder of the men he had trained were distributed in canoes all around him. Marcellinus itched to get onto shore himself and get his cohort into formation before something happened.

And then something did.

Within the city, beyond arrow range, a man clambered up on top of the longhouse and gazed out at them. He appeared calm and unsurprised, with the solid demeanor of a war chief. Great Sun Man grunted, obviously coming to the same conclusion.

A second figure appeared, climbing the wooden steps to the top of the mound and passing something up to the chief. A spear? The war chief knelt to take it and held it high for all to see.

Yes, a spear. And impaled on its point a bloody head.

The man gestured widely in the universal hand-talk of Nova Hesperia, a simple message that even Marcellinus could understand.

Tahtay translated it anyway. “ ‘You die.’ ” He cleared his throat. “ ‘You all die. Come, fight, die.’ ”

From the crest of the hillside to the north, a Hawk wing rose into the air. It hung in the wind, then dipped into a big loop to the right, angling for altitude. Whatever mechanism had thrown it up there, it was not as powerful as the launching rail of the Cahokians, but it would certainly be enough to give the Iroqua the air advantage.

“Keep your eyes up,” Marcellinus said to Tahtay. “See everything. Assume nothing.”

The boy swallowed. His face was pale, his eyes wide.

“Stay calm. Keep thinking. Never panic. Be brave, be ready, be fast. If you are attacked, dodge a blow rather than blocking it. If a Mohawk is down, show him no mercy. Stay with your father. Make him proud.”

“All that?” Tahtay asked.

Marcellinus grinned tautly. “And more.”

The Cahokians had passed a copse of oak and hickory on the northern bank a hundred yards back. From those trees came a sudden fusillade of Iroqua arrows.

Great Sun Man shouted, but the Cahokian warriors already on the bank were prepared, raising Roman shields. The Iroqua had their range right away, but the arrows bounced harmlessly off glinting steel.