Clash of Eagles (26 page)

“I am not Iroqua,” the boy said. “My name is Pezi, and I am from Etowah.”

“Etowah?” said Tahtay.

“Ha!” The younger woman clouted Pezi over the head. Losing patience, Marcellinus pushed her off and helped Pezi to his feet.

“Thank you,” said the boy. “I am yours.”

“Etowah is a big mound-builder town,” Tahtay said. “It is far from here, far, to the south and east. It is not Iroqua.”

“I am from Etowah. I was born farther south, nearer the Market of the Mud. I was captured by Iroqua from Tuscarora. I have been theirs for two years.” Pezi spit. “I am glad they are dead.”

The Tuscarora, Marcellinus knew, were a tribe affiliated with the Haudenosaunee in the more southerly lands. Probably, many of the Iroqua
who had harassed his legion early on the trek had been Tuscarora. “You speak Cahokian, and Iroqua, and …?”

“The words of the People of the Hand. Not well. But men of that tribe would come to my village when I was young.”

He was young now. Marcellinus shook his head.

In Latin, Tahtay said, “I do not trust him, Hotah. Look at him. He would say anything to live.”

“I am looking. I see a boy like you.”

“Like me? No.” Tahtay paused. “He belongs to the women, and they want to kill him.”

Marcellinus thought briefly of Fuscus dying at his feet. “Perhaps he belongs to Etowah. And good translators are useful. Great Sun Man should decide.”

“We do not kill boys.” With no great enthusiasm, Great Sun Man agreed that Pezi should live and return to Cahokia with them.

It was growing late in the afternoon. The Cahokians would sleep inside the palisade tonight and maybe the following night, too. Then most would return to the Great City, but others would stay here a few weeks longer, or perhaps even all winter if they chose, to lend further assistance. For any brave without strong family ties to Cahokia, Woshakee might represent an opportunity.

Great Sun Man had offered the people of Woshakee safe passage to Cahokia under the war party’s protection so that they could overwinter there. But the clan leaders, who were all women and had all survived, spoke otherwise: it was their city, it was their home, and they would stay. They asked only not to be forgotten and for more good Cahokian men to come and visit them in the springtime. Otherwise, the inhabitants of Woshakee would take it from there.

Marcellinus admired their resolve. Secretly, too, he admired Tahtay’s strength. Marcellinus himself had been a pretty tough kid at the age of eleven winters, but he had never been forced to experience a full battle against a numerically superior foe, had never witnessed a town bearing up in the aftermath of that bloody warfare, with menfolk slaughtered, homes wrecked, and enemy corpses littering the streets.

Woshakee was still vulnerable, and Marcellinus did not feel safe even inside its wooden walls. The sooner they got home to Cahokia, the happier he would be.

One of Great Sun Man’s warriors ran up and handed him a long band of rolled-up fabric. Marcellinus took it, uncertain. “This is what?”

From there,
the warrior hand-talked, pointing up at the ridge.
For fly the Hawks. Look. Pull.

Marcellinus tested it. When he tugged at it, it stretched, and when he let it go, it snapped back to its original length.

“Interesting. Some kind of animal gut?” He didn’t think so, but no matter; he could study it further on the long paddle home.

Perhaps they should take home one of the Iroqua Hawk wings, too. Marcellinus wondered if he should try to persuade them that it was worth the effort to find one in good condition and pack it up to carry it with them just in case the Iroqua had come up with some other innovation the Cahokians hadn’t thought of yet. Although he was pretty sure he could predict Great Sun Man’s response to this idea: “Cahokian wings, fastest and best!”

The war party beached its canoes and entered Cahokia in triumph. Tahtay marched at the very front with his father, accepting the accolades of the Cahokians as if he had raised the siege of Woshakee all by himself. Behind them the other warriors hooted, howled, and danced their way into the city.

Marcellinus left the preening to the others and walked in almost anonymously in the rear of the group with Pezi. He did nod to one person in the crowd: Chumanee, the healer, who was wearing a fine buckskin he had not seen before. Her hair was in one braid instead of two, and until she waved at him, he did not recognize her.

She walked alongside him as the war party made its way to the Great Plaza and made a great play of scrutinizing his arms and legs. “You not wounded,” she said. “This very strange. You not at the battle?”

Marcellinus grinned. “Oh, I was there. But this time, clever. See, few of the men I fought with have bad wounds either.”

Marcellinus was inordinately pleased. There could be no better validation
of the Roman methods and armor than this. And Great Sun Man had been much less curt with him on the journey home.

“Perhaps you all run away,” said Chumanee.

For a moment he was irritated. But Chumanee was just joking. She was not a warrior and did not know how insulting that suggestion was.

And then they were at the Great Plaza, and the clamor of the cheering crowds drowned out whatever else Chumanee might have tried to say, and Nahimana was there, and Enopay, and then Kimimela came running at him screaming like a little girl, which she wasn’t quite, not anymore. Wachiwi appeared from nowhere and startled him with a hug, and Marcellinus gave himself up to the joy of the moment.

He had never thought to have friends again, and now he had them. Those gods he didn’t believe in had smiled on him beyond any consideration of his merit or worth. He had gone from being the unluckiest Roman in the Imperium to being the luckiest Roman out of it.

Did he deserve it? No, absolutely not. But as Chumanee had once said, maybe one day he would.

“It was a good fight. It was not enough.”

The elders stilled and looked at him. Marcellinus began to speak again, but his mouth was dry from the smoke. They waited for him to stop coughing and drink water and begin again.

For the first time, the chiefs and elders of Cahokia had invited Marcellinus into their sweat lodge on the Mound of the Smoke. Both names were well earned; the fire pit in the center of the lodge warmed the air almost to the scalding point, and only a small fraction of the smoke made it out of the hole in the eastern side of the lodge’s ceiling. As if that were not enough, from time to time one of the younger braves would pour a wooden cupful of water onto the hot hearthstones that surrounded the fire, adding a gout of steam to the air with a hiss and crackle.

Even worse was the smoke from the red flint-clay pipe the elders were passing from hand to hand. Marcellinus did not know what it was, but he knew how to mimic the man who had held it before him. After
he sucked deeply, his lungs filled up with fumes that had made his mind buzz almost audibly while at the same time making him want to throw up the venison and askutasquash he had feasted on not an hour before.

He looked around them all again. The sweat lodge was circular, built on a frame of arched willow poles that formed a dome over them. Around him a dozen or so elders sat in a circle, stripped to the waist or simply dressed in tunics. Most were tattooed and scarified, although Marcellinus no longer found the sight of such damaged skin remarkable. Aside from the marks on the men’s bodies they displayed no signs of rank or insignia of office. Great Sun Man stood out from the others only by his relative youth.

Tahtay was not there, of course, and Marcellinus keenly felt the lack. Here he had to rely on his limited Cahokian vocabulary and his slightly more extensive hand-talk.

“Good to fight for Cahokia,” Marcellinus said. “For your farms, your people. But your farms, people are
here.
Woshakee was your city, now freed. Now we must go
there.
Strike Iroqua in their lands, in their center. Strike at Iroqua hearts.”

He turned to Howahkan, one of the principal elders and the one who was paying the most attention to his ravings. “Look now. If my anger is with you—
if,
I say; I make story, I … compare. Yes? If my anger is with Howahkan, do I fight his corn? Do I pull thatch from his roof? No. My anger with you, my fight then with you.”

Half of them got it. He had lost the other half. Marcellinus struggled on. “Cahokia’s fight with Iroqua warriors, Iroqua nation, not with … family, women.” Suddenly the heat squeezed his chest, and he could not go on. Tears were flowing down his cheeks freely now and dripping to the floor. He ignored them; perhaps the men farther away might mistake it for sweat. “If my anger is with you, is it enough to keep you out of
my
house? Stop you kicking
my
dog, breaking
my
pot? No. My anger is with you, I come to
your
house.

“Our battle is with warriors. With Iroqua chief, Iroqua city. We take fight there. To Iroqua city.”

They laughed at him.

Damn. Immediately crestfallen, Marcellinus bowed his head. “I speak too much, wrong words. I am sorry.”

“No, is good,” said Great Sun Man. “Wanageeska’s heart is strong. Elders make laugh because Iroqua have no city.”

“Shit,” Marcellinus said. “Really? No city?”

“Small town, village, farm. No mounds. No big city.”

“Huh.” Marcellinus yielded the floor, feeling stupid. How had that never come up before? Why had it never occurred to him to ask before shooting his mouth off in a council of the Cahokian elders?

More to the point, how could you fight an enemy with no center, an enemy that was everywhere?

Well, he knew that one.

“Give me pipe.” He sucked the fumes greedily, and his mind sharpened again. “This is … good pipe …” They all laughed at him again with companionable good nature as he coughed and tried not to retch, and once more he had to swallow water to keep his gorge down. His ears rang like a bell. The nausea faded.

So the mound-builder civilization of Cahokia was centralized … just like Roma. And the Iroqua were decentralized like many of Roma’s historical enemies. Of course, the traditional Roman way was to pillage and lay waste to the land, forcing the enemy to consolidate and form an army against them. But even if Marcellinus had the stomach to ravage Nova Hesperia to the north and east, he was pretty sure the Cahokians would balk.

“All right. Then we make Iroqua come to us, bring big army. Pretend to be wounded deer, bring hunter. Then we turn on them like lion. Um, I mean like wolf, like bear. Just like you Cahokians, uh, defeated my army.”

A broad-shouldered elder whose name Marcellinus could not recall stirred and raised his hand to be heard. “Iroqua know we have Wakinyan. Iroqua not bring army here.”

“I …”

Perhaps Marcellinus should shut up now. He bowed his head, exhausted. There would be other nights; with luck this would not be the last time he was invited to smoke by the elders. So long as he did not completely embarrass himself tonight.

Great Sun Man prodded him. “Wanageeska say more.”

The mental sharpness instilled by the pipe remained. He obviously needed to know more about the Mourning War, but fighting was not Marcellinus’s only skill. His ambitions here were greater than just the bloody slaying of Iroqua. They were the immediate problem, but a future wave of Romans would be the ultimate threat. Marcellinus still had his duty to the Imperator.

If he were legate here and not merely a tolerated prisoner, what would he do next?

“All right,” Marcellinus said. “I will say more, ask some questions, tell you things I know. Things I think we might do …”

The sweat lodge broke up some two hours later. By then even the Cahokians were hoarse and beginning to nod off. It was a cold, crisp night, and Marcellinus walked into the middle of the plaza. A dog lying across the threshold of a Cahokian home awoke and studied him suspiciously before resting his head back down on his paws. Aside from the elders ambling home, no one was afoot, although Marcellinus knew sentries were now keeping watch, looking out from the top of the Master Mound and patrolling the perimeter of the Great City. Never again would Cahokia be caught by surprise by raiders and saboteurs in the night.

It was good to feel the sweat drying on his skin, to feel the energy of the smoke drain from his body, to be replaced by a healthy solid weariness. Good to look up at the stars in their familiar shapes and constellations even this far from home.

Marcellinus drank his fill of the heavens, then turned and gazed on the Great Mound of Cahokia, tall and stark against the night, surrounded by its palisade of wooden logs.

Another palisade should encircle the whole city, at least the central square mile or so. With bastions and lookout posts every few hundred feet. Even with the new sentries Great Sun Man had assigned after the granary burning, Cahokia was ridiculously vulnerable to a night attack. It was something else to think about over the winter.

His skin was grimy. He reeked of smoke. After the palisade, the next thing Cahokia needed was a bathhouse.

Walking toward the mound, he followed the line of its palisade around to the right. Beyond it snaked the Cahokian creek, and despite the chill of the night air and the even sharper bite of the water, Marcellinus waded in and splashed his legs, arms, and chest until the layer of stale smoke was almost gone. Then he realized it must be in his hair as well and, before he could talk himself out of it, ducked his head into the icy creek.

Baths and a basilica. The plebs of Urbs Cahokiani should have the right to hear the decisions of their leaders, not just the patrician classes, or at least their local equivalents in the sweat lodge.

A proper forum. The central plaza was a good start, though it was more like the Campus Martius or an arena without seating than a real forum. Theaters next, amphitheaters and circuses, and then aqueducts, sewers. The march of Imperium was surely irresistible.

He ran through the list of items he had shared with the elders in the sweat lodge, attempting to commit it to memory before he slept, since this city had no parchment or wax tablets on which he could take notes. And he realized that of all the things the Cahokians needed, a forum and law courts were among the least of them.