Clash of Eagles (35 page)

Nine winters. “All right.”

“I was not there. I could not go.” She touched her stomach. “I had Kimimela, ready to be born.”

“And you should have been with your man. Fighting beside him.”

She looked at him oddly. “Beside?”

“… Above.” Watching over him, thought Marcellinus, and felt an odd, painful stab of jealousy.

“I was not there because I was here,” she said, as if lecturing a child.

“You could not be everywhere.”

“I had never thought to be a mother. I tried for two winters to be …” She stopped. “I could not. I am not a mother. I am a warrior.”

And that, at last, Marcellinus could understand.

Again she skewered him with her eyes. “You do not speak.”

“Because you are right,” he said sadly. “I did the same. I went where my duty took me. Thank you for telling me this.”

Sintikala nodded. “And now, you and me.”

“Us?”

“We have made crimes. You make crime on me. I make crime on you.” She was using the Latin word for “crime.” She must have asked Kimimela for it.

Sintikala went on. “Iroqua make war on Cahokia. Each Iroqua crime, we hurt Iroqua more. Each Cahokia crime, Iroqua hurt us more. And again-again. Yes?”

Escalation. It was the definition of the Mourning War, a long, slow vendetta of blood between two nations, each side forcing the other side to mourn its dead again and again. Marcellinus had spent a long time talking with Tahtay, coming to understand it.

Sintikala stopped and faced him. “Iroqua, Cahokia … will not stop now. Mourning War always. I wish it was not so. But Gaius, Sintikala? Yesterday-and-yesterday …” She made a sound very much like a raspberry. “End. Finish. Behind. Yesterday. All-done.”
Question: Agree?

She had reverted to a combination of simple Cahokian, Latin, and hand-talk, but Marcellinus thought he understood. The two great Hesperian nations had come too far in hatred ever to make peace. He and Sintikala had not.

“We make treaty,” she said.

It was more than he had anticipated. More than he had any right to expect from her. Marcellinus was moved. “I would like that.”

She frowned at him, unsure of his words, and made the hand-talk again for
Question.

“Yes,” he said firmly. “Treaty.”

They walked again. Snowflakes began to drift from the clouds, alighting on the fur of Sintikala’s hood and the tip of Marcellinus’s nose.

“Yesterday, I think you are Roman enemy chief. Yesterday-and-yesterday, here”—in her heart—“to me, you are … as Iroqua. You understand? But today-here I think you are not that man. Not the same.”

“I will always be Roman. But no longer an enemy, today or tomorrow. Never an enemy to Cahokia. Never an enemy to, uh, Sintikala. I have spoken.”

She halted again. They had not yet reached the mound of the Cahokian dead. “Good. We turn now, go back. Yes?”

He shivered. “Yes.”

They said nothing more until the row of three mounds came back into view. Marcellinus had a hundred questions, but he kept himself in
check. This was the first time he had walked with her in peace and friendship, the first time they had been together without antagonism and distrust spilling over. He did not want any new misunderstandings to damage the moment.

“Wachiwi is your woman?”

Marcellinus flinched. “No. For a while, a moon ago or more, yes. Today-now: no.”

She frowned. “Wachiwi make good wife for Gaius.”

Marcellinus was at the same time startled that Sintikala had accepted him enough to urge a Cahokian wife upon him and alarmed at having his life so quickly mapped out for him. And she had called him Gaius.

“I think Wachiwi may not think so,” he said carefully.

The Hawk clan chief twitch-smiled again. “I think Gaius is good chieftain of men. Of children. But no-good chieftain of women.”

That was undisputable. He was silent.

“I will speak to Wachiwi,” Sintikala said.

He hand-talked
No.
“Wachiwi should choose her own husband.”

“Yes. But I will speak to her.”

“Sisika—Sintikala—I do not hurry to take a wife. Wachiwi is not right for me. If I take a wife, I will wait … make the right choice.”

They had reached the foot of the mound where she lived. Now she stopped and reached up for his chin with cool fingers, pulling his face around and down so she could see his eyes. Not for the first time, Marcellinus felt her gazing past his flesh and bone and straight into his soul.

His heart lurched. Too late, he tried to look away.

“Oh,” she said.

He cleared his throat. Sintikala had seen what Marcellinus still hardly dared to admit to himself: his growing attraction to her. He felt absurd, and his face flushed in humiliation.

“I am not for you,” Sintikala said. “Take Wachiwi.”

“No,” he said obstinately. “Not Wachiwi.”

She sighed. “Gaius, my husband is dead. I want no more husband. I am broken.”

“You are not broken. You are a warrior.”

“Many warriors are broken.”

That was true enough. She looked up at her house. It was snowing quite hard now.

“I will wait,” Marcellinus said.

“You go,” Sintikala said, pointing at the snow falling around them. “I go. I make food. Kimimela eats here tonight.”

“What?” Marcellinus said. “Really?”

“I am still not a mother. But I know how to train warriors.”

Their eyes met again, and for once Marcellinus read the message in hers. He smiled and nodded. “Kimimela will make a fine warrior.”

“Yes, she will. I have spoken,” she said, and began to climb. Although the slope of the mound was gentle, the new snow had made the wooden steps slick, and she had to climb with her hands as well as her feet. It lacked dignity, and Sintikala must have been aware of it, for she turned a third of the way up and waved him away with a shooing hand motion. “You go!” she said, and he grinned and turned away.

“Take Wachiwi!” she called after him, but Marcellinus walked on as if he had not heard.

The snow was falling thickly by the time he got back to his hut. All around him Cahokians were scurrying for home, pulling their door skins closed. Trails of smoke arose from Cahokian smoke holes near and far.

A large piece of fresh bark rested at the foot of his bed. He tutted; the children were supposed to keep their charcoal smearings on the schoolhouse table he had so laboriously constructed. He picked it up. On it, in the looped sprawl he recognized as Kimimela’s handwriting, it said, “Kimi thank Gaius.”

Marcellinus sat in his doorway for a while, watching the other huts appear and disappear in the swirling snow. Then he got up, put Kimimela’s piece of bark onto the shrine with his lares, and set about laying a fire for the long, quiet evening ahead.

T
he Mizipi burst its banks in the Grass Moon, flooding the low-lying plain that surrounded Cahokia. Briefly the Mound of the Flowers and the Mound of the River became islands in the muddy flow, forlorn and oddly rectangular. On warm days children Enopay’s age swam out to the Mound of the Flowers and scaled it, running or rolling down its shallow slopes to splash into the waters at its base.

Not Enopay himself, of course. Enopay was busy at his studies, writing and figuring.

Meanwhile, many of the adults were busy stripping and rebuilding their homes. The Cahokian huts lasted about ten winters at most before they grew rotten and drafty. Tearing down houses and building them up again was a communal activity that appeared to happen randomly to Marcellinus’s eye. Randomly but efficiently.

After the rebuilding came the renewal ceremonies and ritual purifications. For several days, Cahokia was alive with prayers and tabaco smoke as well as the happy shouts of children.

Having dealt with the homes that needed repair, the Cahokians turned next to their mounds and the Great Houses that sat upon some of them. Using a combination of mud and finer clays, they built up the tops of the Master Mound, the Mound of the Sun, the Mound of the
Smoke, and many others. It was, as Great Sun Man had promised, a “big time of building and making new.”

The wheelbarrows helped with that, of course.

“If Iroqua have no city, if Iroqua are not mound builders, then Iroqua have no Wakinyan.”

The elders nodded as if Marcellinus had said a very wise thing, which meant they were humoring him.

“Only Cahokia has Wakinyan,” said Matoshka. In the damp heat of the sweat lodge, sitting right next to him, Marcellinus could smell the rancid bear fat that the old warrior smeared into his hair. He took a long pull of the tabaco pipe, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs. It burned a little as it went down and it still made him cough, but after every puff his mind sang. It seemed that the more of it he smoked, the better he understood Cahokian and the less the other odors of the sweat lodge perturbed him.

“No other mound-builder cities have them?”

“No other. We make them here. We keep them here.”

“Good,” said Marcellinus. “Good. But
why
do Iroqua have no city? Why?”

He looked around him. Two of the elders were nodding off, but the rest were all with him. “Kanuna?”

In his late fifties, Kanuna was the youngest man there after Great Sun Man and Marcellinus himself. Respect for the more senior elders often muted Kanuna, but his brain was sharp and he had traveled farther up and down the Mizipi than most Cahokians. Kanuna rubbed his ear and said, “Those are the wrong words.”

“Why wrong?”

“Iroqua villages are small, and they move them often,” Howahkan interrupted. “Clear land often. Twenty winters, long time for Iroqua village. They are north, and their corn does not grow in big fields like here.”

“They move when their land grows …” Great Sun Man hand-talked a gesture that literally meant “old bread,” which Marcellinus took to mean “stale” or “bad.”

“But you do not,” he said.

“We have the river mud,” Kanuna said. “And we move the crops from field to field. Today corn, and next spring sunflowers. Then maybe tabaco. And some years, nothing in the field, for the earth to rest.”

“Cahokians are wise with the land,” said Great Sun Man.

More important, Cahokia also had a river that burst its banks every spring and spread a rich and fertile silty soil across the whole bottomlands area. Marcellinus resisted the urge to tell them about the Nile in Aegyptus and the Indus in Sindh and the early flush of the civilizations that grew up around those rivers. It was the Iroqua’s loss that their land did not include such a river.

“And that is why your words are wrong,” Kanuna explained. “The right words are, ‘Why does Cahokia have a city?’ ” He raised his eyebrows and smiled.

“All right,” said Marcellinus, eager to avoid getting into a long discussion of the wisdom of their fathers’ fathers or, worse, off into some irrelevant creation myth, either of which could easily happen when the old men got to sweating and smoking. Their forefathers had chosen to build Cahokia here for a reason, and they obviously had executed their plans with precision; the mounds and plazas must all have been laid out at the same time to be so regularly aligned. Cahokia was a planned city. “Good, good. But if Iroqua have no cities, how do they talk? They are one nation; they are Haudenosaunee. A league, a treaty. Five tribes, all agreeing?”

“Yes,” Kanuna said. Howahkan shrugged. Matoshka blew a gout of smoke over their heads, passed the pipe, and cleared his throat.

They didn’t get it. Marcellinus leaned forward. “What do you do when you want to talk to your neighbors down the Mizipi?”

“We visit them. Or they come here and feast. Cahokia provides to all.”

“Yes, yes. So my words are these: to make a league between five tribes—five!—the Iroqua must meet and talk and smoke. And afterward they must feast.”

“Yes.”

“So where do they feast?”

“Ah,” said Great Sun Man, but Kanuna had figured it out ahead of him and was already saying, “Powwow.”

Ogleesha was offering him the pipe. Marcellinus took it but did not put it to his lips. “Yes, yes? What is powwow?”

A big meeting, they told him.

“All the tribes, in one place?”

“Of course.”

Like the folkmoots of the Germanics and the Celts. Marcellinus sat back.

“But, but …” Great Sun Man poured water over the hearthstones, which sent up a sizzling gout of steam. Boiling water splashed Marcellinus’s forearm, but he managed to keep still. He didn’t want to flinch in front of these grand old men of Cahokia. “But Haudenosaunee powwow is deep inside Iroqua land. No Cahokian army could go so far.”

“An army can march a very long way. If it’s the right army.” Marcellinus grinned at them narrowly. Some things he would be proud of to his dying day, and even the Cahokians could not take that away from him.

But Great Sun Man was right. It would be impossible for a Cahokian army to march deep into enemy territory, living off the land and building a castra every night. They could not make roads as they went and would not enslave men to haul the giant wagons such a trip would take. To do all that, not only would Marcellinus have to teach them Roman methods, they would have to
become
Roman. That wasn’t going to happen in anyone’s lifetime.