Clash of Eagles (29 page)

But Sintikala had no mercy. Her will was remorseless. Unlike Great Sun Man, she had seen what the 33rd had wrought, and she had not seen Marcellinus fight at Woshakee. Her perception of him was completely different from the war chief’s.

Marcellinus tried to answer honestly, but not so honestly that they would slit his throat where he sat.

“If we had won … I would have taken over the city. Made myself chief.”

Sintikala gestured,
Go on. More.

“Cahokia would be province of Roma. Province?” He worked on translating that concept for a while with Kimimela, stalling for time, until Sintikala waved impatiently.
More.

Well, what else? Marcellinus would have quartered the 33rd Legion in Cahokian houses. He would have fed his men with Cahokian corn. It would have been Roman soldiers he drilled in the Great Plaza. And he would have scoured the entire city for gold and found none.

Then? Then, with some time left in the season before winter came in, Marcellinus probably would have taken the bulk of the 33rd Hesperian onward into the west, perhaps leaving a cohort and a tribune—Aelfric, perhaps, or Corbulo or Tully, if in this scenario they had never
mutinied—as a garrison to hold the city. As Praetor, his duty would have been to march onward, blazing the trail across Nova Hesperia, until the cooling weather brought him back to overwinter at Cahokia.

After
that,
imagination failed him. It depended on too many things that he did not know, events that had never come to pass.

Halfway through his halting explanation, Sintikala held up her hand and spoke to him directly in pidgin Latin. “Cahokia be … slave.”

Marcellinus bowed his head, sick at the thought. Who had she learned that word from? Fuscus?

“Cahokia, woman. Romans … use.”

Here Sintikala used the Latin word she had learned in his presence months ago. And Kimimela made the hand-talk for it, a coarse and obvious gesture Marcellinus had learned from Akecheta in ribald banter and was a little horrified that a girl so young would know.

“No,” said Marcellinus. “No. No. No.”

“Yes.”

He looked rather desperately at Sintikala and at Kimimela.

“And, next: death.”

Creeping, reptilian, it began to uncoil inside Marcellinus, the horror of how it might have been.

“No!” he said. “Roma rules provinces … wisely. Brings law. Peace and trade. Baths, even. All peoples …”

He stopped. That was true enough. Roma’s provinces did reap extensive benefits from their alliance with the Imperium. But not right away. And certainly not if they had resisted annexation.

“Slaves,” Sintikala said again, in Latin. “Slaves. Slaves.”

There was no escape. Marcellinus lifted his head. “Yes.”

They stared back at him.

If he had defeated them in battle … as enemy chiefs, Marcellinus probably would have had Great Sun Man and Sintikala chained. Eventually even taken them back to Roma as prisoners. For successfully conquering Nova Hesperia, Hadrianus would have awarded Marcellinus a triumph. These two, and other elders of Cahokia, would have been dragged through the streets of Roma behind Marcellinus’s chariot and then publicly strangled in the Forum.

But it had not happened, and it would not happen, and he said so. “We did not win. Instead, you kill all of my Romans. All except me. And now—”

“ ‘You would make slave of my daughter?’ ”

“What?”

This time Kimimela had said the words in direct translation of what Sintikala had said.

Marcellinus stared at the girl. Kimimela stared back at him, terrified, the tension in her body betrayed by the veins in her neck and the set of her shoulders.

Rage flooded him.

He leaped up, and they all recoiled except the warriors, who stepped forward ready to slay him in an instant if he threatened their chiefs. But that was far from Marcellinus’s intent. He turned and walked away blindly, his mind filled with a murderous fury directed only at himself.

Kimimela hurt. Kimimela enslaved, at the mercy of his Legion. The idea was unbearable. The images seared him.

The earth gave way beneath him. Marcellinus fell and rolled several yards before he stretched out his arms and brought himself skidding to a halt. He had walked off the level plateau of the mound and tumbled down its side.

He lay still and did not try to get up.

Marcellinus never cried, but his face contorted and he bent forward. Breathing was difficult. He brought his knees up to his chest.

“Stop. Please stop.”

Kimimela stood on the edge of the plateau with the two warrior guards standing warily a few feet behind. Marcellinus squinted up at her, silhouetted against the clouds, then turned his face away.

“All right. Wait up there. Wait for just a moment.”

Great Sun Man and Sintikala were packing up the blankets, talking quietly. The braves watched Marcellinus through narrowed eyes as he approached.

“Sintikala. Great Sun Man. I have more to say.”

They stopped and looked at him.

“I have killed Algon-Quian. I have taken slaves. I attacked Cahokia. I brought fear to Cahokia. I did that, and I accept full … responsibility? For that. You beat us. That was … fate. That was meant to be.”

Kimimela steadily translated as best she could. Sintikala listened calmly and spoke through her daughter. “ ‘Cahokia never feared you. We pitied you. We knew you could not win.’ ”

Marcellinus swallowed. “I am sorry for waging war on your people. It was not well done. But now I am here for a purpose. I can help you.”

Sintikala was a statue. “Today, you say so.”

“I say so today and tomorrow, and winter and summer.”

“And if Romans come?”

“Romans?”

“She means another army,” Kimimela explained. “If more Romans come here, to Chesapica and then to Cahokia? If Romans come, then you will fight for Romans, against us?”

“No,” Marcellinus said.

The atmosphere was brittle. Sintikala cocked her head. The braves had their spears pointed at him, waiting for the word, but Marcellinus would not lie.

“I will not go back to Romans and fight against Cahokia. And I will not fight for Cahokia against Romans. I will try to help Romans and Cahokians make peace. I want no more fighting between Roman and Cahokian. Believe me.” He took a deep breath.

What he really wanted was to re-create Cahokia in the image of a Roman provincial city and for Nova Hesperia to be ultimately a civilized ally of Roma. But that would be an almost impossible idea to convey to Sintikala and Great Sun Man. He would have to work up to that gradually.

An uncomfortable gray area remained unspoken. The fact was that Marcellinus was arming and training Cahokians who might one day fight against Romans if this went badly.

He elided it in his mind. No solution was perfect.

There could be no doubt that the Iroqua were a more imminent threat than the Romans. Marcellinus had to make the best choices he
could on each day that was given to him. No one could demand more of him than that.

He closed his eyes for a moment. “And as I have lost my Legion, all my Roman warriors, the new Romans may take me prisoner and kill me anyway.”

Great Sun Man and Sintikala were still silent, so Marcellinus spoke again. “If you want to make me slave, I will be slave. I agree that it is what you might be if …” He gestured back and forth.
If our positions were reversed
was much easier for him to mime than for Kimimela to translate.

“I will be slave. Either way, I help you now. And every day, I learn.”

Sintikala’s eyes drilled into his skull like a pilum. He stood and accepted it.

Eventually she nodded once.

Turning, the two chiefs walked away into the longhouse.

Unhappily, Kimimela watched them go. Marcellinus was surprised that she did not follow her mother. Then he realized that at no point during this long morning had Sintikala shown any affection toward her daughter. She had not leaped to Kimi’s defense during the tense moments with the warriors, had not spared her a compassionate glance during the most painful parts of the conversation. Marcellinus had shown Kimimela more care and attention than Sintikala had.

Someday he would learn more about that. But not today.

The braves still stood close by. Not knowing what to do, Marcellinus signed,
Question?
They bowed and pointed toward the main steps that led down the Master Mound.

More evidence that the Roman bow was catching on in Cahokia.

“Come,” he said. “Come, Sintikala’s daughter.”

Kimimela shrugged helplessly. If Tahtay took pride in his father, Kimimela’s feelings were more complicated.

They walked together to the edge of the mound and onto the steps, side by side.

“And so you are Sintikala’s daughter. And Sintikala is Great Sun Man’s daughter?”

Kimimela recoiled in surprise, perhaps even horror. “No!”

“Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

Not “daughter of chieftain,” then, after all. Or was Sintikala the daughter of some other chieftain? Marcellinus gave it up. He had no more energy for the complexities of Cahokian society. He blew out a long breath and tried to relax the taut feeling in his shoulders.

Then, halfway down the mound, Kimimela tapped him on the arm and screwed up her face as if she’d chewed a lemon.

“Question,” she said. “Wachiwi?”

Nahimana and Tahtay waited for them at the gates, looking relieved.

“Hotah not dead, then,” said Tahtay, straight-faced.

“Not today.” Marcellinus was about to explain, but the boy had already turned to Kimimela and asked her something. She shook her head wryly. Tahtay sighed and looked sympathetic.

To Nahimana, Marcellinus signed,
Gaius is well. Thank you for coming.

Nahimana glanced at the unhappy children and said firmly, “Food.”

It was a good call. Marcellinus was starving.

And exhausted. It was not yet noon, but it felt like he’d been awake for a week. Facing Sintikala was tougher work than fighting Haudenosaunee.

M
arcellinus hit his first major snag the very next day: he needed bricks to make a kiln and a kiln to make bricks.

It was frustrating. He had assumed that the Cahokians used kilns to fire their pottery. But they did not. Instead, they put their unfired pots and bowls into a hole in the ground; filled the hole with logs, sticks, and twigs; and lit the whole mess on fire. It worked surprisingly well—the Cahokians’ pots were beautiful, and their pottery making was a fine art—but Marcellinus could not easily make bricks in a pit, let alone steel. To make steel he would need a proper furnace and bellows, and a hole in the ground would not get hot enough or give him enough control over the process.

With Tahtay’s help he talked to a number of women who specialized in making pots but could not interest any of them in his project. They spent their days fashioning beautifully shaped and painted bowls and had no interest in putting that aside to make and fire hundreds of flat, boring slabs of mud. However, Cahokians rarely decided anything quickly, and it took a while for Marcellinus to realize just how lost his cause was.

As they walked home, dejected, from the western suburbs, Kimimela ran over to find out why they wore such long faces. Tahtay explained it to her. Kimimela turned to Marcellinus and said simply: “Boys like fire.”

“Well, yes,” said Tahtay.

Exit the craftswomen, enter the street urchins; by noon the next day Tahtay and Kimimela had rounded up a good thirty boys—and girls—who liked playing with fire and were eager to be in at the beginning of something important. Two days later brick production began in Cahokia, first in rough-and-ready ones and twos that often broke from not being heated evenly and then in the dozens, and it did not stop even though Marcellinus had enough bricks for five kilns within the week.

Iron would be the next problem, and it would take far longer to solve. After hearing Marcellinus talk of iron at some length, the elders had confidently assured him that there were caves just three days’ run southwest of Cahokia where you could get all the iron you could ever need if only you were strong enough to carry it back. However, since no Cahokian had previously had a real use for it and three days’ run in summer translated to a very long and cold walk in the winter, it proved difficult for Marcellinus to be sure that anyone truly knew where those caves were and impossible for him to persuade anyone to go there before the ground unfroze the next spring. In the meantime he pulled the iron fittings off the Roman wagons and also assembled sets of Roman tools—hammers, saws, punches, picks, files, and tongs, even an anvil.

He had plenty of broken Roman swords that could be beaten into plowshares. Marcellinus was confident that once he had won the Cahokians over with the virtues of plentiful steel, getting them to bring iron for him to make more would be straightforward enough.

Turning his dreams into reality proved to be a lot harder. He started playing with his new forge, assisted by Tahtay’s warrior friend Dustu and by Hurit, the big-eyed tomboy Tahtay’s age whom the Cahokians had adopted from the Algon-Quian. However, he made such poor initial progress that he had to swear them to silence. Marcellinus had spent a lot of time with blacksmiths and metalworkers; he could forge, punch, cut, and weld iron with a reasonable degree of skill. But he had never before tried smelting, and it turned out that this art was much more complex than it appeared. Even with a fine brick furnace and a reasonable supply of charcoal, all he succeeded in doing was making the existing iron more brittle. New steel would be a long time coming.