Clash of Eagles (4 page)

Corbulo tutted. “A wasted opportunity to raise morale, Gaius. It’ll be trouble, and we need no more of that.”

“One woman,” said the Praetor.

“Still bad tactics with the troops as fractious as they are.”

“Discipline’s a problem,” added Gnaeus Fabius, who rarely passed up an opportunity to state the obvious, or suck up to Corbulo.

“An even worse problem if the redskins keep picking us off.” Marcellinus looked around him. “I did not request a discussion on this topic, gentlemen.”

“God knows what we’d all have caught off her,” Aelfric said loudly, glancing around at the other tribunes. “I doubt these people ever bathe. A good commander safeguards his men’s health as well as his own.”

“And the men bless you for it, sir,” Leogild said to Marcellinus, straight-faced.

Marcellinus grimaced. “Don’t we have a convenient festival coming up? Where do we stand on wine?”

“We’ll be out of corn and cheese first,” said the quartermaster. “Wine’s not yet an issue.”

The other officers looked at one another. None of them had any clearer idea of the date than Marcellinus did. His adjutants would be keeping track, but they weren’t here. And Marcellinus had raised the issue of supplies again, and that was something none of them wanted to think about.

“Let’s call it Easter,” said Aelfric. “That’s a movable feast anyway.”

“Tomorrow, not today,” warned Corbulo. “Let them walk off this disappointment first.”

“Of course,” said Marcellinus, who’d had no intention of inciting his legionaries with extra liquor this night. “All right. Get out there and make it known that she was a chieftain’s daughter whom I sent out to calm the way ahead and that I’m not setting any new precedents with this. And then remind them that tomorrow’s Easter.”

“Most of them won’t know what that is,” said Fabius.

“Or care,” said Marcus Tullius, scratching under his helmet.

“Tell ’em it’s the Christ-Risen feast of double wine rations,” said Aelfric. “They’ll understand
that.
”

“Dismissed,” said Marcellinus, and Leogild and most of his tribunes—Corbulo, Fabius, Tullius—saluted and set off through the camp in various directions to brief their centurions.

Naturally, Aelfric dallied. “So, Praetor. Even when you were younger. Would you have spoiled her?” He raised his hands. “Nothing implied. I’m just making conversation.”

Marcellinus looked at him. It was an impertinent question, but that was Aelfric’s way. Britons were very direct. “You don’t have daughters, do you, Aelfric?”

“No.”

“Ask me again when you do.”

Much like the Britons, the Norse were a smart people who understood the advantages of being important to the Imperium and the terrible costs of being an irritant. But every race contained its bad apples, and so the Imperator Hadrianus had issued an edict allowing no quarter to Norse pirates, those renegade few who refused to come to heel.

Two years earlier, a Roman navy warship had intercepted a Norse longship approaching the north coast of Hibernia. An innocent Norse vessel sailing home from the recently discovered Vinlandia had naught to fear from a Roman inspection; this longship had tried to use its greater maneuverability to escape and, when that failed, had tried to bluff the Roman captain, badly.

After a brief but fierce engagement the Romans boarded the vessel to find it stuffed with gold plate, jewelry, and bizarre statues from an as yet unknown culture, along with large quantities of turquoise and lapis lazuli and a few bags of spice. Alas, Roman efficiency had slammed into Viking berserker battle ardor with such completeness that there was nobody left alive on the longship capable of testifying about where they had acquired such a lucrative cargo.

Despite this inconvenience, Hadrianus was badly in need of revenue and not one to pass up such an opportunity. It was at that point that he had raised the priority of the conquest of the continent beyond Vinlandia.

There was no reason to suspect that the equatorial regions of the Evening Continent should be any richer than those of famine-stricken Aethiopia. Logically, then, the gold must have originated around the same latitude as Roma.

Hadrianus sent scouting parties into Nova Hesperia. Those who returned brought back tales of a large city of mounds, longhouses, and at least ten thousand people in the plains far beyond the mountains. Admittedly they hadn’t brought any gold back with them, but then again, the locals hadn’t allowed them within the boundaries of the city.

Very well; Hadrianus could spare a legion to throw at a high-risk, high-return venture. All he needed was the right Praetor to lead it.

By dawn the next day the legionaries had folded tents and were on the trail again, heading west in as straight a line as they could manage. Which, being Romans, was pretty damned straight.

For a while, Marcellinus’s tactic seemed to be working. The harassing actions the Iroqua had been running against the Legion’s advanced corps of engineers and its flanks and stragglers stopped. Freeing one woman had apparently earned the Fighting 33rd a clear path all the way to the mountains. Even the grumpy Domitius Corbulo had to agree it was well done. The miles fell away under the military sandals of the Legion. Day by day they left the sea farther behind, and the interior of the giant land opened up around them. They covered two hundred miles without a single death, and the march became so routine that the centurions grumbled that the men were getting soft and added daily weapons drills.

True to his word, Marcellinus left the villages unscathed. Usually the inhabitants deserted them and hid out in the wilds till the army had passed; sometimes they sat sullenly outside their scrappy, insect-ridden hovels with their heads bowed.
Good enough,
thought Marcellinus.
They may be untouched by civilization, but at least they comprehend a threat when they hear it.

Truth be told, Marcellinus felt sorry for them. He hadn’t asked to be sent here, and these folks hadn’t asked to have a Roman legion trampling their pastoral quiet. The Hesperians had so little to begin with. Roma’s ancient ancestors might have been painted men very much like these, long before all the marble buildings and the metalsmithing and the lawmaking. They were less than farmers, and their tiny patches of sickly corn were so pitiful that even Leogild didn’t think them worth requisitioning; as far as Marcellinus could tell, the inland peoples survived by trapping coneys and picking berries. Marcellinus could be ruthless when necessary, but there was no glory in waging war against beggars. The true enemy lay ahead, in the Great City that the Norse scouts had reported and Sisika had confirmed.

Soon enough, the terrain creased around them and rose up into a series of rolling ridges and craggy mountains that Fuscus, in his broken tongue, called Appalachia. The peaks were neither as classically sculpted as the Alps of Europa nor as grand as the ranges of the Himalaya, but they had a hazy comeliness to them that reminded Marcellinus of parts of northern Italia. Despite the rigors of getting the Legion through such a trackless wilderness, Marcellinus thought it a land of some charm. Then again, he got to ride a horse up the interminable hills.

They had only a couple of dozen horses, and only the Praetor and his tribunes, scouts, and dispatch riders rode them. They were much too valuable to put to work hauling the supply wagons, and besides, they had slaves for that; to their surprise the Hesperian shores had proved to be devoid of beasts of burden. Aside from the Powhatani themselves, that is.

Marcellinus felt the odd twinge of guilt about resting easy in the saddle, but he genuinely needed to conserve his strength. At night in castra his men might drink their watered wine and gossip over games of knucklebones with no further cares, but Marcellinus spent those hours meeting with his quartermaster about the ever-present question of supplies, his tribunes and armorers about their battle readiness, his centurions on matters of discipline, and doing a hundred and one other things. There was never a lazy evening for a Praetor. Technically he might have left some of these details to others, but with his authority over the Legion as precarious as it now seemed, it behooved him to stay involved with all aspects of legionary logistics. If Marcellinus could be everywhere at once, no one could talk about him behind his back.

The men noted his diligence and didn’t seem to begrudge him the ride. Their job was the hike; his was to look after his men and keep them as comfortable as possible, not waste the sweat they were donating to the enterprise, and be trusted not to squander their lives when the crunch came.

Around noon one day Marcellinus found himself riding near Marcus Tullius, who hailed from Etruria. “What d’you think, Tully? Long views
and enough land for anyone once we get rid of some of these damned trees.”

Tullius made a sour face. “Over that whore of an ocean? It’s too far from Roma. Nobody is going to want to come and farm this crap.”

It was true enough. Romans were not natural sailors, and the trans-Atlanticus voyage had been a puking nightmare the way the big troop transports rolled on a heavy swell.

“Some men might prize a bit of separation from the capital. Independent sorts, regulation-weary?”

“Ex-convicts, maybe. But they won’t be growing olives or grapes on these slopes. Bad soil, worse sun. You’ve seen what passes for corn here? Even the Norse can’t make a go of it, and they can farm Graenlandia.”

“Well, only with sheep and a few cattle,” said Marcellinus. “They don’t grow crops there.”

“Either way. No, if the redskins have gold, we want it; if not, we just kill the bastards off. Hack ourselves a bloody road right across the continent and use it to go and stab the slant eyes in the back.”

Marcellinus winced. “That might be quite a distance,” he murmured, and didn’t raise the issue of natural beauty again.

Whatever their scenic glory, the Legion found the high ridges heavy going, and their average daily march dropped from twenty-two miles to nearer twelve. On one frustrating day when they had to ford several streams and backtrack twice in search of a route the baggage carts could negotiate, they advanced only seven. Finding areas broad and flat enough to host a full castra added to the challenge, and Marcellinus sorely missed the guidance of Thorkell Sigurdsson and his other Norse scouts, still conspicuous by their absence.

His men grumbled, and even Leogild’s sunny Visigoth humor began to cloud over. Each day took them farther from the coast and stretched their provisions even thinner. Battle was ahead, a city to be sacked, spoils to be had—but how far? It was the conversation on every tongue, the thought in everyone’s mind.

Arguments broke out over the Legion’s campfires on a nightly basis. Best to go on to death or glory, risk everything on a single throw of the
dice? Or eventually beat a prudent retreat to the coast, winter up, and next spring surge back along the path they had already carved?

They could go on, but once winter came, the march would be over. The Legion would have to build a fortress and hunker down within it, unable to travel again until the thaw. And then what would they eat?

Marcellinus heard the discontent and shared it, but all he could do was show a resolute face and push on.

Then came the ambush, and everything changed.

T
he Legion marched down a long valley that was narrow and high-sided. Below them the plains opened up; they had conquered the Appalachia, and an enemy might suppose that high spirits would make them careless. But the Fighting 33rd were career soldiers to a man, and this was such an obvious site for an ambush that there really had to be one.

They had been sighting Iroqua all day: a fleeting glimpse of a warrior behind a tree here, a feather seen over a rock there. Once the trend was clear, Marcellinus passed the order down through his tribunes and centurions that the men were to ignore the natives until actively engaged. That way, the natives might assume they’d gone unnoticed. Even as the Iroqua tried to lull the Romans into a false sense of security, Marcellinus was sanguine that he had instead tricked them into overconfidence.