Clash of Eagles (38 page)

“Great Sun Man, you face no challenge over this. No other man in this city wants to be war chief. And none of the clan chiefs would support such a challenge against you.”

“We must have feast,” Great Sun Man said doggedly. “I have spoken.”

Enopay stepped in again. “We
will
have feast. Invite all, freely, as always. But tell them to bring food with them.”

Great Sun Man’s eyebrows shot up.

“Everyone from outside must bring something,” Enopay said. “A rabbit, a fish, a basket of berries, acorn flour, ash cakes. Anything. But something. You and the elders ask them this, people will bring.”

“Tribute?”
Great Sun Man laughed bitterly. “No, no.
Tribute
is for stupid leaders, men of pride. That is the old way. People come here because Cahokia provides! It is the biggest city, the center of the world!”

“Do not call it tribute. Call it sharing with big Cahokian family. The peoples from the upland villages and the plains are all farmers first. They know about family. Here you protect them, and all will be proud to be seen as good farmers and good family. Only this way, you can have feast.”

Great Sun Man did not look at Enopay. “Cahokia provides. Cahokia always provides.”

“Not this year,” the boy said. “I have spoken.”

A brittle moment stretched out across several heartbeats. Then, without a further word, Great Sun Man stalked away across the plaza.

“Great Juno,” Marcellinus said. “You have balls. You are well named, Enopay the Bold.”

“Gaius take this,” Enopay said, thrusting the bark ledger at him. “I go away and play now like a silly little boy.”

Tears had sprung into his eyes, but his sarcasm was painful. Marcellinus had not seen him play since he had learned to read. “Enopay? Men are measured by their wisdom, and look at you, already winning arguments with chiefs.”

“I won nothing. He will probably cut my throat in the night.”

Marcellinus laughed. “I do not think so. And why did you win, Enopay? Because your numbers were right.”

“Great Sun Man cannot read numbers.”

“I will make you a wager, Enopay. I will bet you that Great Sun Man
will do exactly as you suggest. And I will also bet you that by the time the sun comes up the day after the Midsummer Feast, Great Sun Man will be able to read numbers.”

Enopay scoffed and slouched off to lick his wounds in private, still bruised and shamed.

Marcellinus won both bets.

By midsummer, Cahokia looked very different from above. The Big Warm House had expanded to become a full set of Roman-style baths, with hot and warm pools heated by the brickworks, its floors lined with hypocausts, and a cold splash pool. Once not so particular about hygiene, the Cahokians were now so avid for hot water that the clan chiefs had imposed time limits and no warrior thought it effete to spend time there after battle training.

Now that the mining of iron ore in the hills to the south had been established, the steel foundry had been moved out of the city into a marshy field to the east, there to sprawl untidily over the floodplain, belching heavy smoke. Catanwakuwa pilots who liked to ride the thermals from the steelworks came down coughing, their wings and skin smudged with soot, until Sintikala forbade them to cruise above it.

Through exhaustive trial and error Marcellinus had finally gotten the knack of steel. Ironically, he had found it easier to make using the raw iron ore rather than the fittings from the Roman wagons even though it had now become a three-stage process of roasting the ore in charcoal, hammering it like crazy to force the liquid slag out of the wrought iron, and then heating it again with charcoal to add strength.

All his effort had paid off, though. Respectable human-scale wheelbarrows had largely replaced Cahokian woven baskets for heavy work, and that sped up the spring recovering and reshaping of the Master Mound and the other platform mounds. Steel or bronze human-drawn plows turned the soil in the cornfields. All the little lean-to gardens were bigger this year. The granaries were supported well up off the ground on columns of brick rather than wood, and most now had brick walls as well.

As predicted, Iroqua attacks had begun anew. The mound builders fought three more battles against marauding Iroqua bands in the springtime and won each one tidily. Two were melee actions in which Roman pila, gladii, and armor proved decisive. The third was another Iroqua assault upon a sister mound-builder city along the Oyo River where the residents had marched out in ranks carrying Roman shields to protect themselves against Mohawk arrows and slaughtered the Iroqua with wave after wave of steel-tipped arrows of their own. Marcellinus had been nowhere near this latter action and until he heard the news had no inkling that other nearby cities were adopting the Roman military tactics that he was teaching his First Cahokian Cohort.

Between the innovations and the military victories, all resistance to Marcellinus’s ideas had collapsed. The Cahokians’ enthusiasm for the creature comforts afforded by brick, iron, and steel had powered them into an immense appetite for novelty. At this dizzying pace, by the time the next wave of Romans crossed the Atlanticus, they might find a civilized province ready and waiting for them.

Marcellinus had not achieved all this alone. The Cahokians had taken his ideas and run with them so quickly that he had difficulty keeping up. Truth be told, he might have liked to spend more time over some of the changes; the siting of the foundry was a prime example, given the evil stench that washed over the plazas whenever the wind blew from the east. But the Cahokians seemed immune to the downsides of their newfound civilization.

The victories against the Iroqua had not made Marcellinus complacent. Around the two hundred acres that marked the central precinct of Cahokia, the new stockade was growing. With their new bronze and steel axes the Cahokians could fell trees at an astonishing rate and had already demolished one of the larger copses Marcellinus had hiked through on the night he had tried to abandon Cahokia and met an Iroqua war band coming the other way.

With some difficulty Marcellinus had persuaded the elders to send the squads of Cahokian lumberjacks north for their trees, to chop them down far from home and float the trunks down the river to Cahokia
and so preserve the forests closer to home that sheltered their deer and could be farmed for nuts and forest fruits.

At least, he thought he’d persuaded them. Time would tell.

His Cahokian language skills were now quite functional. At his age he would never be fluent, but with his spoken Cahokian augmented with hand-talk he could make himself understood. For their part, Tahtay, Kimimela, and Enopay spoke excellent Latin, and Enopay could write and figure in Latin better than most quartermasters Marcellinus had known during his twenty-five years in the Roman army. Nahimana’s Latin was pidgin but passable, and Latin words were even weaseling their way into Cahokian, with the native tongue having no equivalents for the military, metallurgical, and diplomatic terms that were becoming current. In fact, the First Cahokian Cohort responded to orders given in Latin more readily than they did to those given in Cahokian.

It was, of course, not mere vanity that made Marcellinus drill Latin words into as many Cahokian heads as possible. When Romans came again to the shores of Nova Hesperia, the more Cahokians that could speak to them, the better.

The worst-case scenario—all-out war between a new Roman army and a Cahokia formidably equipped with Roman steel as well as native air power—had to be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of Marcellinus’s life and liberty.

And to achieve that, he needed to start his preparations in earnest.

“Sintikala, something is not right.”

Twenty feet above him in the Longhouse of the Wings, Sintikala sat cross-legged on a narrow rafter with what looked like a bone needle and sinew, mending a tear in the fabric of one of the Hawk wings. “And,” he added, “if it would help, I could make you a steel needle much thinner than that.”

She squinted down past the wing. “What is not right?”

“You. And the way we first met, when I was still a Roman Praetor.”

Sintikala grinned tautly. “All of that was not right. Perhaps if I had killed you then?”

Marcellinus did not rise to the bait. In fact, he did the reverse, which was to pull up one of the trestles and sit. “My guards would have killed you first. And even if you had managed it, Lucius Domitius Corbulo would just have taken charge. The war between Cahokians and Romans would still have happened.”

“Oh, well.”

“But tell me this: Back then, when we first met, how did you get to my army so quickly? Where did you really go afterward?”

“Only today you think of this?”

“You asked me to help you make the wings better. I have done a little, but I can’t do any more till I know how good the wings are now.”

Sintikala tied off her sewing and pulled a Roman pugio from her belt to trim the end of the sinew. Without using her hands, she swiveled on the narrow rafter. She was uncannily comfortable with heights.

“The Catanwakuwa are very good. Light. Smooth. It is the Wakinyan that,” she said with a gesture, “pull on the air, come down fast. You help us now with Wakinyan.”

She was changing the subject, and both of them knew it.

Bluntly, Marcellinus said, “One day, more Romans will come. Another legion. We must plan what we will do when that happens.”

“We?” Their eyes met.

“Sintikala, how far can you fly?”

“Today? Yesterday? Winter? Summer?”

“My legion landed on the shores of the Mare Chesapica. Made castra. Figured out what we were about. We got ready, and we left. And in that time, less than a moon, word of our coming got all the way here to Cahokia, and then you got almost all the way across to the Chesapica.

“And later, here on the mound, you told me that the Romans are gone, all dead. Which means that once again you went to Chesapica and came back here in what, a few weeks? I am not a fool, Sintikala.”

She smiled. “But slow in the head.”

“Perhaps.”

“I will show you. We go outside? I draw it for you. Then sometime, I show you much better.”

And making Marcellinus leap half out of his skin, Sintikala dropped out of the rafters to the floor in front of him, a fall that might have at least twisted the ankle of a normal person.

“Yes,” he said, a little breathless. “All right.”

It had rained that morning, which helped. Sintikala’s fingers moved adeptly in the mud, drawing a long, thin snake. She placed a stone by the side of the serpent. “This, Mizipi. The stone is this mound, here in Cahokia.”

She leaned toward him and scribbled in the mud, another long line roughly parallel to the Mizipi, with a small flat loop in it. “This is the big water, and here is Chesapica. Where you sit, this is east, the direction of the sun in the morning. You and your army walk here.” She sculpted a mountain chain in the mud that ran from northeast to southwest. “Over Appalachia—but see up here? It is easier to cross the mountains here than where you walked. Anyway. Your army came to us this way, across flat, to river flood lands.” She scrawled another serpent. “Here is Oyo River, which you cross here, in thinner place.”

She drew more, filling out the map. “Much far down here, there is also big water. Market, where Mizipi goes out into big wide water.” And farther up. “Here are Great Lakes. All this is Iroqua, to here and to here. If you march souther, you hit Oyo where it is wider, or walk along it. If you march norther, you find more Iroqua.”

“And so?”

“Iroqua told us your army come.”

Marcellinus had not expected that.
“Iroqua?”

“Of course. Why not?”

“Oh, perhaps because you’re slaughtering each other in the Mourning War?”

“But also we trade. Furs, hoes, copper, shells. Gaius, it is their land, it is our land. It is not your land. Of course they tell us. Iroqua runners come under pipe of peace, tell us of you.”

“All right.”

“And then I go to see your army.”

“By Mizipi and Oyo,” Marcellinus said, taunting her.

She snorted. “Water is for ducks.”

“And so you flew.”

“Yes,” she said. “I flew there.”

In spring and summer, the sun heated the ground and made the air rise. The wings could ride higher up into the sky on the heated air. This, of course, was old news; even on the battlefield Marcellinus had seen the Hawk wings soar up from the burning huts, and now he watched them daily, spiraling for height by using the hot invisible column from the brick kilns and, when Sintikala wasn’t looking, the steelworks. However, he had never imagined that a Hawk could rise so high and stay up so long using just the heat from the ground.

“Only on some days,” Sintikala said. “Days of good, with little white sky fluff?”

“Clouds.”

“Yes. And good winds that go where I want to go.”

Sintikala had waited more than a week for conditions to be right, and then she had launched in early morning and flown east. By late afternoon she had made it almost all the way to her goal, the Black Mountain in Appalachia, but had lost too much height and came to ground. Two days later, after carrying her wing halfway up the Black Mountain, she launched again; with the wind blowing onto the face of the mountain, she had risen up through the air, looping around and around, spiraling higher. She had followed the Appalachia north, using only the lift from the ridge, and had then found another set of thermal upwellings that had carried her a few dozen miles farther eastward. There her luck had run out a second time, but she had landed just a few days’ march west of Marcellinus’s army. After she dismantled and hid the Hawk wing, all she had to do was move into the Legion’s path and wait.

“So far?” he said, still shocked. “To Appalachia in just one day?”

“Of course,” she said. “One other day last year, I never come down until sunset. Only up. Some day is good, others not.”

“But still …”

“Gaius, I fly. It is all I do. I am clan chief. And so was my mother. All my life I do this. In this one thing, Sintikala is big clever. Other Hawks not as much. I fly higher. No one flies more far than me.”