Clash of Eagles (30 page)

In the meantime he created the world’s largest, clumsiest, and least efficient wheelbarrows.

The Cahokian elders had dismissed Marcellinus’s wild claims for the wheel, and by and large they were right to do so. Without Roman engineers and the Imperium’s massive work crews of soldiers and slaves, the trading paths that crisscrossed Nova Hesperia would never be wide enough or level enough for a wheeled wagon. Nor did the continent possess the horse, donkey, ox, camel, elephant, or any other beast of burden capable of hauling human beings around on a regular basis. But that did not mean that the wheel was worthless to them.

The iron wheels on the Roman carts were half as tall as a man, and it took Marcellinus and his willing team of child labor several hours to unload the carts and then figure out how to unhitch the wheels from their axles. After that nightmare, it was relatively straightforward to strip planks off the carts and hammer them together to make the barrow part, in the process realizing that after bricks, axes, and hoes, the next items he needed to learn how to mass-produce were nails.

His first wheelbarrow was long and tall, and it took two men to lift it, steer it, and keep it stable against toppling. Two men or six boys, for Marcellinus had learned his lesson well and realized that the children of Cahokia had a much greater appetite for novelty than did the adults. In short order he had to make a second wheelbarrow the same size as the first, so that at the end of the day, when all the bricks had been hauled out of his furnaces and wheeled to central Cahokia, his teams of urchins could race the unlikely vehicles back and forth across the plaza.

The wheelbarrow races caused a sensation, but it was short-lived. Cahokians might let their eleven-year-olds tag along on battles against the Haudenosaunee, but they drew the line at letting them risk their necks in Marcellinus’s chariot races.

Nonetheless, the wheelbarrow lesson had been learned. Cahokians built mounds religiously but slowly; there were always several being built at any one time, and the rectangular mound over the mass grave of the warriors who had fallen to the Romans was still only waist high. Until now the primary method of earthmoving had been the basket,
and building a tall mound could take years. A few words in the right ears and three more wheelbarrows were quickly made and pressed into service to haul earth.

Marcellinus could only imagine how quickly they might build mounds once he could make even better wheelbarrows. But a better wheelbarrow required a smaller wheel, which required a proper ironworking furnace to cast the wheel rims, not to mention thinner planks of wood and many more nails.

And that was just wheelbarrows, the smallest and most trivial invention that Marcellinus had in mind for his new community.

Arriving at the brickworks one morning, Marcellinus discovered that he had just missed Pezi.

“He wanted to come in, look around,” Dustu said darkly. “To learn. To be useful.”

Marcellinus had seen almost nothing of Pezi since they had returned to Cahokia after liberating Woshakee. “So?”

“I told him to go and drown himself in a borrow pit. He is interested in too much.”

Marcellinus shook his head, bemused. “He speaks languages. We might need him.”

“Huh,” said Dustu. “My fist speaks languages, too.”

Dustu was a year younger than Pezi but strong and capable. He already had his first warrior tattoo, from a skirmish with the Iroqua to the north. His hair was long and full and gleamed with deer fat, with feathers braided into it with a care that his casual nature belied. Marcellinus had seen him sparring with a gladius with Mikasi and Hanska as well as with Tahtay. If he was matched against Pezi, with or without a weapon, Marcellinus had little doubt who would be victorious.

“If you want to keep him out, keep him out,” he said. “But try not to damage him. One day he might be useful.”

“Others can talk to Iroqua,” Tahtay said.

“He also speaks the language of the People of the Hand.”

“And when do we need to talk to them? We cannot trust him. It is dangerous to trust people who speak out of both sides of their mouths.”

“Does he?”

Hurit propped herself up on one elbow and pointed at Marcellinus. “The Wanageeska was dangerous, and we kept him alive.”

“So far,” said Dustu. “And not everyone agrees about that, either.”

Marcellinus winced. “Let’s get back to Pezi. You can talk about killing me when I’m not standing here with you.”

Hurit stood and stretched. The two boys eyed her, but she held Marcellinus’s gaze steadily. When Hurit was older, she was going to be dangerous herself, and not just with a sword. “Ojinjintka says that Pezi wants to fly Wakinyan. What do you think?”

Ojinjintka was the chief of the Wakinyan clan, an old woman who looked as if she might blow away in the breeze of a Thunderbird’s passing. Tahtay and Dustu both snorted. “No,” Dustu said. “Pezi stays on the ground where we can see him.”

“Maybe he just wants to help,” said Hurit. “To belong. He has already gotten himself adopted by the Deer clan.”

“Probably because he’s so good at running away,” Marcellinus said without thinking.

Dustu and Hurit gasped in disbelief. Tahtay looked around them quickly and then shook his head. “Wanageeska. We three here, we know that you speak lightly, but better not let a warrior of the Deer clan hear your words or you will find yourself eating them.”

“Of course. Sorry.” Marcellinus cleared his throat. Mahkah was of the Deer clan, and many other good men he knew. “That was stupid of me. Anyway. I brought Pezi here, and that may not have been wise, either. But I made a mistake once before in … disposing of someone who could speak many languages. Pezi can be useful as long as we keep him under control.”

Later, Marcellinus ran Pezi down in the neighborhood where they made adzes, bows and arrows, and other tools for peace and war.

“What are you doing here, Pezi?”

The boy shuffled his feet. He had the talent of looking guilty even when—perhaps—he was not. “If I want to eat, I must work for Cahokia. Here there are no words to be spoken. Perhaps working wood is not so hard to learn as other things. But no one will teach me.”

Marcellinus studied him and came straight to the point. “Pezi, you say you are from south of Etowah, and you lived in your village and in Etowah until the Iroqua captured you.”

“It is true.”

“Yet Ojinjintka says you do not speak Cahokian like a man of Etowah.”

“I try to speak it the way they all speak it. I have known many men of Cahokia. I know many languages. I grew up learning them.”

“And you know the language of the People of the Hand, who never came so far north as Etowah.”

“We fought them, my people of Etowah. You think I lie?”

Marcellinus looked at him appraisingly. “That’s the thing, Pezi. I don’t know. Anyway, why are you here? What do you want?”

“I want to live,” the boy said. “I want to be free. And I do not ever again want to be any man’s …” He made a coarse gesture.

Marcellinus flushed and looked away. He could not have been a Roman commander without knowing of such things, but still they made him uncomfortable. “The Iroqua asked that of you?”

“Asked? No.”

“I am sorry, Pezi. That will not happen to you here.”

“I know. I just want to work so I can live here and not always be taken from place to place and war to war, and then …” Pezi shook his head. “What I can do is speak words. Perhaps I can learn to speak yours.”

“Latin?” Marcellinus had already considered it. The boy would undoubtedly be quick to learn, but Marcellinus didn’t have the time and inclination to teach him. He might have tried to persuade the children to teach him, but Tahtay had taken an instant dislike to the translator that had quickly rubbed off on Kimimela and Enopay.

Marcellinus had brought Pezi here, and he had to keep the boy out of mischief somehow. He sighed. “You want to learn to turn wood? All right. Let me talk to some people.”

What Marcellinus needed first and foremost was good axes. And because iron was so hard to work into steel, he turned to the idea of making
bronze. Certainly there was no shortage of copper; the women wore disks of it in their ears, and the men around their necks. In the ceremonies Marcellinus mostly avoided, he had seen dancers wearing large beaten sheets of the metal. It came from the Great Lakes, far to the northeast of Cahokia, mined there in its natural form and shaped using cold hammering rather than smelting.

He already had tin. Tin was light and flexible and abundant in Europa; most of the Legion’s pans and cooking utensils had been made of it. Eventually he would need a local supply, but for the time being he mined his own carts and came up with thousands of tin pans, dishes, and spoons. It became another game for the endlessly useful children of Cahokia to ransack the Roman wagon train and separate out the tin.

Bronze could be made at a much lower furnace temperature than steel. For steel getting exactly the right measure of charcoal and air into the mix was crucial, but for bronze the proportions were more forgiving—one part tin to nine parts copper, a bit of care with the melting and mixing, and that was all there was to it. Before midwinter Marcellinus was turning out bronze ax heads and hoe blades by the score.

If he had stopped there, he would already have redeemed himself in the eyes of most Cahokians. But Marcellinus had the bit between his teeth. Fully recovered from his wounds, working all the daylight hours and some of the night too, he was a man possessed.

By the time the spring festivals rolled around, Marcellinus planned to be living in a whole new Cahokia.

Marcellinus did not live a life solely of innovation. It was winter, and the landscape around them was icy and unfriendly. Everyone had to pull his or her weight. So in addition to his teaching and his experiments with brick making and smelting, Marcellinus carried water and chopped wood and hauled grain in his wheelbarrow to the families that were too elderly to fetch it themselves. Marcellinus had never been too proud to get his hands dirty, and as the sole representative of the Roman people, he wanted the Cahokians to think well of him.

And they did, if only for his kilns; many was the day Marcellinus would show up to supervise the results of his latest experiments in
smelting and discover dozens of people sitting around the structures, warming themselves by the radiating bricks.

Naturally that opened up another possibility, and Marcellinus had soon persuaded several of the able-bodied to help him build a large brick house with half a dozen rooms near the Cahokia Creek on the downstream side of the Master Mound. He built it with a raised floor in the style of the granaries, but underlaid the structure with brick rather than wood and did his best to seal the outside. The real trick was getting the hot air from the furnace room to circulate under the floor. He managed it eventually, though it required bribing children to pump the bellows of makeshift fabric for him from time to time.

Unfortunately, the Cahokians would forever be limited to bricks and crude mud-and-clay mortar for their heavy construction. Roma had the best concrete in the world, but much to his embarrassment and frustration, Marcellinus had no idea how it was made.

The first deep snows came halfway through the Long Night Moon. Marcellinus was alarmed; officially, the following month was the Snow Moon and the month after that was the Hunger Moon, so they obviously had quite a bit of winter left ahead. The ground froze hard every night, and it was often midmorning before people ventured out to melt snow over their cooking fires and make their tea or bean broth. In the afternoons Marcellinus pressed on with his military school. His warriors were eager to keep practicing with the unusual weaponry and to keep up their strength and fitness. And so, of course, Marcellinus indulged them. He suspected that by the time the Hunger Moon waned their enthusiasm might wane with it, and he wanted to make all the progress he could.

Finally, once the land truly descended into the grip of Old Father Winter, there were the reading lessons. Marcellinus’s reading class attracted two dozen at the outset, dwindling to fourteen once people realized how many letters there were to memorize. Enopay, Kimimela, and Tahtay were there, of course. But Akecheta, Takoda, Napayshni, and Hanska also showed up—four of the smartest warriors in his First Cahokian Cohort—plus Pezi, who was quick with languages and keenly
interested, and six of the men and women responsible for keeping track of the winter grain and making sure the food did not run out before the Crow Moon. These were precisely the people Marcellinus had hoped to entice into his mystery cult of message sending and record keeping, and he was encouraged by his success.

On several more nights, and especially as the weather grew harsh, Wachiwi would be waiting in his hut when he returned. Sometimes Marcellinus was too exhausted from his wood chopping and building and smelting and teaching to do any more than collapse into her arms. Usually, though, she could entice him into further diligent efforts that were rewarding for both of them and helped keep the chill of winter at bay.

Nonetheless, with each night Marcellinus realized the error he had made in tumbling into bed with the first woman to present herself. Wachiwi made few further attempts to speak his language and grew bored with his attempts to speak or hand-talk hers. Their bond had only one purpose, and although Marcellinus was fond of her in a rather functional way, he knew it would not last and should not. The sniggering among the Cahokians had faded away, and he no longer feared that some warrior relative or clan chief would appear from the woodwork and force the two of them to wed at spear point. But his heart was not in it, and it did not feel right.

And so he had tried to explain and ask her not to come to his house again. Wachiwi had pouted briefly but had not made a scene. She had pulled her clothes on and left within minutes, and he had not seen her again since.

This time Marcellinus climbed up the central southern stairway of the mound with Great Sun Man at his side and Tahtay scampering up the stairs ahead of them, waiting for them to pass him, then running by them again. As the cedar steps were thick with packed snow, this was not without its risks, but neither Tahtay’s father nor Marcellinus felt inclined to restrain the boy’s enthusiasm.