Clash of Eagles (31 page)

Marcellinus was dismayed at how hard he found the climb. The long
winter was leaching away his physical conditioning. If as a Praetor he’d seen a legionary having this much difficulty toiling up a simple hill, he’d have ordered his centurion to have the man run six miles in full gear every afternoon until he shaped up or dropped dead.

At the first plateau he turned and looked out across the city. In the Great Plaza, several games of chunkey had broken out; stone disks were rolling, spears flew, and men and boys shouted in good-natured competition. Over to the west the Cahokian crowds still milled around in the sacred circle of the wooden poles, where they had just celebrated midwinter, the shortest day of the year.

As far as Marcellinus could tell, the Cahokians deduced the date of midwinter with the help of the spacing and orientation of the tall cedar poles. Standing at the center pole and looking outward, specific poles in the outer ring had some significance in terms of where on the horizon the sun rose and set on key days of the year. It was a giant calendar in wood, a sundial of the seasons, and although it was all worse than Greek to Marcellinus, the Cahokians relied on what they learned about the sky from Youtin to decide when to plant their corn and when to harvest it. Since it now looked as if the winter corn would last till springtime despite the losses from fire, Marcellinus supposed all that astronomical wizardry must be good for something.

Marcellinus was partly worried to find out they were only half done with winter and partly relieved that he still had as much time ahead for his brick-making and metalworking activities as he’d had already. He was also cheered that there would be a feast that night, a welcome relief from an early dinner standing in front of Nahimana’s hut, shoveling stew and flat bread into his mouth and stamping his feet against the cold, followed by a tactical retreat to his hut with a few fire-heated stones for his hearth.

He also was cheered by this: an invitation to climb the mound with the war chief in much friendlier circumstances than his last visit, with an opportunity to see inside the Longhouse of the Wings.

The view from the top of the mound was dreary, with snow-covered fields stretching away in all directions and visibility so poor that they
could scarcely see the icy snake of the Mizipi curling in the distance. Still, at least the wind wasn’t blowing.

“Bleak,” he said, pointing around him, and Tahtay said a Cahokian word and made a sign that may or may not have been the appropriate translation for bleakness.

Marcellinus turned away from the winter-gripped countryside. On his last trips to the top of the mound, he had been too distracted to realize how large the longhouse really was. It was a monstrous thing, a basilica of a building that sat on its own slightly raised soil platform a foot or so above the level of the rest of the plateau.

“Made of?” he said to Tahtay as they approached.

“House? Wood,” said the boy. “Stout poles of wood. Then smaller wood, like weaving? And then clay.”

Still wattle and daub, then, even though it looked so solid and permanent. Constructed with much more care than the pole and thatch style of Cahokian houses, though similar in appearance to the granaries, which had the same need for good insulation. Probably susceptible to damp, but that could be managed with care. No falcon warrior would want to hurl himself into the sky on a wing that might be suffering from rot.

“In spring, take it down,” Great Sun Man said.

“Down?”

Tahtay nodded. “All of it. The mound, here? Every year we put more clay and soil on, make it bigger. Make,” he said, gesturing, “straight, tidy. And new reeds for roofs here and in houses in the city. Big time of building and making new.”

Marcellinus was still catching up. “The whole longhouse, you take it down? Add earth to the mound? And then put up the building again?”

“Of course,” Tahtay said.

Then they took Marcellinus inside the longhouse, which swiftly curtailed his architectural musings.

He was surrounded by wings. The entire building housed a single room, and dozens of Hawk wings hung from the rafter in browns and greens and yellows, swaying in the breeze caused by their entrance. It
was like being surrounded by a flock of stately bats hovering and curtseying around him.

“Holy Jove,” he said reverently.

Each wing dangled from a rope. Great Sun Man lowered one for him to examine. It was surprisingly light and felt fragile.

“How it folds for launch?”

Great Sun Man shook his head and made a face. “I should not. Maybe I break it.”

“Hmm.” Marcellinus reached out a finger and pushed gently at the fabric.

The war chief looked at him shrewdly. “So. How you make this better?”

“Stop.”

Sintikala stalked into the longhouse dressed all in leather, the tanned deer hide outfit she wore to fly. A falcon mask hung from her hand. She moved like a panther.

Marcellinus had not seen her for weeks. Great Sun Man came often to watch him drill his Cahokian cohort. He had even spent a while learning how to cut and thrust with a Roman gladius before declaring himself happier with his war ax, whereupon Marcellinus had, rather rashly, promised him a better ax one day. But Sintikala he did not see. Perhaps she lived up here, alone in the Longhouse of the Wings.

To Great Sun Man she said in Cahokian, “What is the Roman doing here?”

Marcellinus could not fully follow Great Sun Man’s response, though its gist was clear: he was showing the Wanageeska the wings, teaching him more about how the Cahokians flew, so that he could help them fly better. Marcellinus also picked out the unmistakable Cahokian words that guided so much of what they did these days: “Kill Iroqua.”

Sintikala walked over to them. Marcellinus and Great Sun Man towered over her, but her taut power made the size difference irrelevant. Her physical presence was daunting. Marcellinus could not imagine how he could have been so oblivious to it when she had been brought into his Praetorium tent as Sisika a lifetime ago. Now she was liquid
flame, a razor-sharp ax, a Coliseum lioness. He looked down at the floor, disturbed by his strong reaction to her.

“Look at eyes,” she commanded, and reluctantly he lifted his head.

This was the second time he had been forced to stare deep into Sintikala’s eyes. They were a deep brown and very clear. She gazed into his in return. Neither of them blinked. Time stood still.

“All right,” she said. “Teach him.”

“Yes?” Great Sun Man ventured cautiously.

“
You
teach me,” said Marcellinus.

Sintikala raised her eyebrows in disbelief.

“When you … launch,” he said, and stopped. He had said “launch” in Latin, and she wouldn’t know that word. He tried again, using hand-talk.
When you fly, in sky, Hawk. Question: How …?
He folded his arms around himself and ducked to mime what he meant.

“How do you fold wing around yourself?” Tahtay said in Cahokian.

Sintikala nodded. Pulling the Hawk wing up from the floor, she hoisted it up over her head. Ungainly by itself, it slid over her shoulders like a glove and became part of her body. She deftly fastened the straps that held it to her torso and reached into the wing. Then she scrunched and dropped, rolling onto her back, and wrapped the wide wings around herself like a ball.

“Now,
that’s
impressive,” Marcellinus said.

She said something, her words muffled by the layers of fabric that enclosed her like a seed. Opening the wings, she lay there on her back.

“She need help now,” said Great Sun Man with more than a trace of amusement, and Tahtay added, “That is position when she launch. But without launch, now she cannot get up without hurting the wing.”

“Funny,” Marcellinus said, though he didn’t smile in case Sintikala took offense. Great Sun Man lifted the wing carefully from the top, with her on it, and Tahtay guided her feet back under her so she could stand again.

Freeing herself from the straps, Sintikala shrugged the wing off. She hooked it back onto its rope and hoisted it up into the rafters. “Just for ‘launch.’ In sky, like bird. On ground, is like—” She mimed it.

“Beetle, that,” Marcellinus said to Tahtay, who translated unnecessarily, since it was obvious what Sintikala was imitating.

“Put it back on. Please? Show me how the wing locks rigid in flight. How it stays …” He gestured. “And when you twist to turn in the air, what do you do?”

Sintikala looked at Great Sun Man. Great Sun Man nodded. She sighed. “All right. Pull over the bench, there. I need to lie down. In air, I am flat.”

She donned the wing again and lay on the bench on her front and for the next several minutes showed Marcellinus how she controlled the wing, how she gained and lost height, how she circled and swooped, how she landed.

Marcellinus struggled to hold it all in his mind. He had to force himself to concentrate; what he was learning was mechanical, not magical. But also not simple.

“Incredible,” he said. “Incredible.”

“What?”

“Very good,” he amended. “And how long can you fly for? How long you stay in air?”

She sat up and looked at him icily.

“Next, Gaius see Wakinyan,” Great Sun Man said hurriedly. He looked to Sintikala for confirmation. “Yes?”

Sintikala pulled off the wing and attached it to the rope once more. “You big war chief. Show him what you like.”

They made their way through to the back of the Longhouse of the Wings. Now that he was less blinded by the broad spread and multicolored beauty of the Hawk wings, Marcellinus noted the piles of falcon masks that lay on the floor on either side of him, the empty pots ready to hold liquid flame, the bows and thigh quivers of arrows, everything the well-equipped Cahokian birdman or birdwoman would need. And he also finally made sense of something else he had seen. Before the battle between Cahokia and the Legion, he had seen the falcon warriors take off from the top of the mound and spiral down to the ground. The
warriors surely had been warming up for battle, but once equipped they also had been dropping down to ground level so they could head around to their launch area at the base of the Master Mound.

Walking out into the cold air, Marcellinus found himself at the top of the long parallel wooden rails that rested on the northern side of the mound. The rails glistened; the single finger he brushed against the smooth rail came away coated with some kind of oil.

“Steel will make a better rail,” he said. “Stronger and straighter and less friction, uh, smoother. And narrower. The oil is what?”

“Flower like sun,” Tahtay said. The sunflowers, then, that grew by many of the Cahokian huts and out in the fields. Their oil was useful for more than cooking.

Below him now, within the mound’s palisade, he could see this launch area and also a huge low building that he had not been able to see from the outside that must be the hangar for the great Thunderbirds of Cahokia.

They would be kept at ground level because they needed to be launched from there. A Wakinyan was launched rigid, already in its flying position, rather than being tossed into the air like a rock as the Catanwakuwa were. As he had just realized, the falcon warriors needed to warm up before their dangerous launching by jumping off the mound top; that would hardly be possible for the Wakinyan pilots, even if they could have hauled or carried their cumbersome craft up the steep Master Mound.

They walked down the mound, trying not to slip and slide. Here on the north side the steps rarely saw the sun and were more slippery, with only the greasy rails to grab on to. Had Marcellinus been unobserved, he might have scooted down the slope on his rear end as Tahtay was doing, but that would have lacked dignitas in front of his adult hosts. He was, however, gratified to see that Sintikala and Great Sun Man skated and stumbled on the icy ground just as often as he did.

Despite the wintry cover, the long trenches at the foot of the mound where the launching machinery was usually installed were very obvious. The footprint of the mechanism was broader than it was long, but there
was no sign of where it attached to the runners. Tension or torsion? With the Nova Hesperian emphasis on bows and arrows, Marcellinus was betting it would be a tension-based apparatus.

There was also a large open space at the base of the mound. Obviously a Thunderbird itself would take up a lot of room, but the length of the open area seemed excessive. Either they lined up the Wakinyan there in a row waiting for takeoff or … surely they didn’t use human power to assist with the launching.

“Men run here, to pull the birds up?”

Yes.
“Men run, and also …” Great Sun Man gestured at the indentations where the machinery had lain. So, human power allied with some kind of mechanical power.

Safely down off the mound, they entered the Longhouse of the Thunderbirds, and here Marcellinus found he had been wrong in one regard. Directly inside a wide door that looked like it could be taken out in a single piece, he found a long, narrow winchlike arrangement. It was a torsion device after all, a complex-looking skein of hemp and hair and what might be catgut, currently not under tension but capable of being twisted with a system of levers to a high degree of strain. It was the same principle that made an onager kick a stone into the air but substantially larger.

“How many braves, to move this?”

Great Sun Man waved his arms, hand-counting:
Fifty.

“And you say you have no use for the wheel,” Marcellinus said.

“Wheel push back when launch,” Tahtay said, effectively miming recoil.

“Not if … well, let me think about it,” said Marcellinus. “Anyway, we can do better than this, twisted rope, we can do better.”

“Twisted rope
and
braves,” Great Sun Man said.

“Better would be a giant frame and counterweight,” said Marcellinus. “Uh, big heavy thing that falls, using gravity to pull … Maybe even springs … but we’ll need to be able to cast iron first, and steel would be better. I will work more with iron, and then later, when the Grass Moon comes, maybe I show you.”

“You big clever,” Sintikala said. “More clever than Cahokian.” Her voice carried an edge.