Clash of Eagles (43 page)

The process of inflating the bag had already begun. With the boys’ help, Anapetu had redirected some of the hot air from the furnace into a new trench that led out from the side of the house. Above the trench Leotie and Nashota were using sticks to hold up the very top part of the gray bag so that the hot air could blow into it. Nearby, Dowanhowee and two other women stoked a separate fire inside a feast-day cooking jar almost as tall as themselves.

The warm air was certainly building up inside the bag, but seeing how much cotton still lay on the ground, Marcellinus doubted it would rise much farther. He hoped his clan chief was not about to be embarrassed.

He murmured, “You’re very confident.”

“Confident is bad?”

“You didn’t think of making a smaller one first to try it out?”

Anapetu smiled. “You think we did not make a smaller one first?”

He gave up and let her concentrate.

As the bag rose higher, apparently by magic, Anapetu walked among the brickworks boys and gave more quiet instructions, lending a hand to hold up the fabric. The bag now swayed thirty feet above Marcellinus’s head, but it was starting to sag. “Huh,” said Tahtay.

“Bring fire here,” Anapetu said, her voice at last betraying her tenseness. Her sisters manhandled the giant jar closer to the bag.

Marcellinus could now see the opening at the bottom of the bag. Tahtay, Dustu, and the others held the opening up, though the part of the bag between there and the inflated portion still lay on the ground, frustratingly limp.

Marcellinus held his breath. He knew what could happen to cotton that came too close to a naked flame. At any moment the giant bag might catch fire.

“Anapetu …” he said, not quite loudly enough.

A large crowd was gathering. Sintikala and five Hawk warriors arrived, keeping out of the way and looking on impassively.

The wind caught the bag and sheared it sideways. Hot air spilled out and washed over them. The bag sagged further.

“More fire,” Anapetu said, and winked at Dowanhowee, who produced a small pot and tossed it into the jar.

With a roar, liquid flame erupted from the jar’s neck. Leotie and Nashota tossed whole logs in. Through the small holes that had been drilled into the jar’s sides, the fire was no longer orange-red but an almost incandescent purple-white.

All at once, the tall bag puffed out. Somehow the cotton still had not caught aflame. Dark smoke billowed into the now-huge body of the bag … and gushed out of its peak.

Marcellinus couldn’t help himself. “There’s a hole, Anapetu. The bag has a hole in the top!”

“Of course!” Anapetu called back. “It needs one!”

Then Marcellinus and the others watching ran forward, because the bag was fully inflated and bucking to be free. The weight of the log-filled jar was not enough to hold it down.

“Wait!” Anapetu said. “Wait! Hold on …”

They held it, straining. The boys had already rolled the rock into a strong canvas sling. Now they hooked the sling over the struts that held the jar in place under the mighty swaying Sky Lantern.

“Let go!” Anapetu shouted. “All!”

Everyone jumped back. The hot-air bag lurched upward away from them. It tugged at the sling that held the ball and bobbed ponderously back down. Several people shrieked in alarm.

Hurit ran around the lantern, knocking at people’s arms, afraid someone would still be clutching on to the thing, but everyone was safely clear.

Because the bag had risen again, and was rising still. Despite the mass of the jar and the rock ball, despite the bulk of the cotton fabric, which must itself weigh several hundred pounds, the lantern was going up with alarming speed.

The crowd fell silent as it rose to fifty feet, a hundred, with the onager ball still swaying beneath it. The bag was higher than the mound now, and the wind was carrying the whole thing off in that direction, over the mound and north across Cahokia Creek.

It was Sintikala who started the applause then, and soon the shouts and stamping of the crowd became deafening.

Anapetu was oblivious to the din. She stared intently at the Sky Lantern.

The liquid flame was burning out. The lantern had passed over the creek but was losing height, almost imperceptibly at first, but it was certainly coming down.

Anapetu grimaced, and her forehead creased. “All right. Hurit, Dustu, Tahtay, Nashota? Let us go and get it.”

The Sky Lantern’s first flight had been an unbelievable success. Marcellinus couldn’t believe that Anapetu was downcast.

“Too quick.” She shook her head. “Only a hundred feet up? Only to the creek? No.”

“It was brilliant,” he said. “Spectacular. Not forgettable.”

“Too heavy.” She sighed. “I don’t know.”

“It didn’t catch fire,” Marcellinus pointed out. “I mean, the cotton didn’t burn.”

“That is the clever part. All the rest is just great big hard work. But we had to make many careful fires under the fabric, let special smoke rise through it. The smoke, um, blocks up the tiny holes in the cotton.”

Whatever Anapetu had burned, the smoke had sealed the cotton fabric, making it less flammable and much less porous. “Very good.”

“Much more work to do.”

“Always. Of course. But not a failure. Right?”

Only then did Anapetu smile. “Right! And fun to see it fly!”

The very next week, they threw a Hawk into the air by using an onager. The honor of being the first falcon warrior to be launched went not to Sintikala but to a young warrior of the Hawk clan; this prodigy was skilled enough to unfurl his wings and fly stably from the regular rail launch almost as soon as he cleared the top of the Master Mound, not having to wait for the apex of his trajectory like Sintikala and the rest of the clan. As they were still not in perfect control of the onager during launch, such fast reactions were essential for success. They did indeed fire the warrior out over the Mizipi so that he would splash down into the water if the launch failed, but the precaution was not necessary: the onager fired, the “ball” that was the boy and his wing arced up over the river, and then the youth was flying, banking around over them a couple of hundred feet from the ground and hooting triumphant war cries.

By Marcellinus’s side, Sintikala nodded in satisfaction. “Next, me.”

“Now?”

She grinned. “Not now. When everyone has gone away. I practice quietly.”

As the young Hawk warrior streaked past them again and flared out for his landing, Great Sun Man walked up to them. “So, for Catanwakuwa, very good. How big engine you need to throw Wakinyan?” He laughed.

“Wakinyan are different,” Marcellinus said. “For launching Wakinyan, we take the Great Mound with us when we march on the Iroqua.”

The war chief smiled again and clapped him on the arm.

“Perhaps not,” Marcellinus said. “I will think about it. But Great Sun Man, Sintikala? A Hawk is light and nimble, for one warrior. A Thunderbird is mighty, for twelve warriors. My question for you: How big might an Eagle be?”

Great Sun Man frowned and shook his head, but Sintikala was nodding. “Large enough for two, three? I have thought of such a thing, too. But now … small enough for a throwing engine?”

“Perhaps,” said Marcellinus. “Eventually. Let us talk more about this.”

The weather quickly turned foul. Torrential rains gave way to deep snow and to a pervasive chill that kept that snow on the ground for many weeks, growing dirtier day by day. Cahokia Creek iced over and did not thaw. By the time of the Midwinter Feast the Mizipi had also frozen, though not reliably enough for the children to run and slide on it the way they wanted.

Food was short. Marcellinus’s second winter in Cahokia was much more brutal than the first. Nonetheless, it was the happiest time of his life.

The Cahokia steelworks had entered full production, and every afternoon Marcellinus made the long hike over there. However vile the weather, he could rely on finding a large proportion of his budding force of forty or fifty steelworkers, blacksmiths, and engineers in training. In fact, the colder it got, the more people he found there, stoking the crucibles and blast furnaces. They were now turning out wheel rims by the dozen, long segments of rail to be welded onto the existing Wakinyan launcher, the parts for ever bigger and better siege engines, and two or three new swords a week.

Marcellinus was working on a light metal frame that might hang beneath one of the Raven clan’s Sky Lanterns; this would provide a safer structure for the fire jar that generated the hot air that kept the lanterns aloft and support a secure wooden platform for a person to sit on once Anapetu could be convinced that they were safe enough to carry people.

The brickworks was going full bore, with Dustu and its other leading lights experimenting with different clays and with adding small amounts of iron, chalk, and lime to the mix for strength and color. Whenever the weather permitted, Cahokian masons were hard at work adding rooms to the Big Warm House. Two more such houses were under construction, one in the plaza of adjacent western Cahokia and another in the burgeoning township of Cahokia-across-the-water—one for each of the three traditional centers of Cahokia.

Marcellinus spent little time at either the brickworks or the building sites. Tahtay, Dustu, and the others ran the brickworks with little adult supervision and had achieved a more uniform brick-baking temperature and an almost perfect success rate. With many months of experience, the Cahokian foremen by now understood the mechanics of building walls, roofs, pools, and hypocausts better than Marcellinus did. This freed him up for more interesting projects elsewhere, although he sorely missed Tahtay’s company.

With the test flights of the new three-person Eagle wing under way, Marcellinus had necessarily been spending more time with Sintikala. To be in her company meant also to be in the company of the ten pilots and fifteen or twenty carpenters, tanners, and other artisans involved in developing the Eagles, and most of their conversation was technical and businesslike; nonetheless, he thoroughly enjoyed working with her.

As a direct result, the days leading up to the Midwinter Feast also held the most nerve-racking event of Marcellinus’s winter: his first solo Hawk flight.

Marcellinus stood at the top of the Master Mound. The weight of the Hawk wing felt like pig iron across his shoulders. People flew wearing just this? Even now, it was hard for him to believe. He felt that he was two steps away from diving straight into the earth.

And maybe he was.

Behind him stood Sintikala. “It’s easy,” she said with the note of casual disdain that was as close as she got to encouragement. “You did it before. Just the same now.”

He had. As the winter had progressed, Marcellinus had begun at ten feet up the mound and then twenty, each time running downhill till the wing tugged him upward, kicking his heels impotently as he drifted down to skid on the snow at the mound’s base.

And then he had run from thirty feet up and had remained airborne for a dozen quick heartbeats, keeping the frame of the wing as rigid as possible before the ground came up to meet him. Although he had been convinced that his heart might stall with fear throughout the flight.

That very same day, Sintikala had pushed him into running into space from the first plateau of the Master Mound, forty feet above the level of the Great Plaza. On this flight Marcellinus had attempted a slow turn to the right, had almost lost control of the Hawk wing, and had twisted his ankle landing at a crazy angle, going much faster than he should have been.

Before his nerve could fail, the relentless Sintikala had insisted he jump off the mound yet again, damaged ankle notwithstanding. He had learned how to bank to the right and even to the left before his next, much tamer landing.

And today she demanded that he take the big leap from the very top of the Master Mound.

“No more play,” she said. “Be a man.”

“I can’t believe I ever
wanted
to do this,” Marcellinus muttered.

“Don’t think about it,” she said helpfully.

A cold breeze flowed from the south. Marcellinus knew that the wind would help him rise and fly even as the frigid conditions would push him toward the ground and keep the flight short. He also knew that the chilly weather was helping to keep the audience minuscule; down at the foot of the mound Demothi and two other men of the Hawk clan eyed him, with Kimimela bundled up beside them in so many furs that she looked spherical and only a scattering of other curiosity seekers on their way to the latrine or the creek or the Big Warm House pausing in hopes of seeing the Wanageeska topple out of the sky.

About as few spectators as he could possibly hope for. Though whatever happened, the story would flow around the city like magic.

He really had no choice. Honor was at stake. And he would rather die than earn any more of Sintikala’s scorn.

“All right,” he said. “I’m going.”

And he did.

Oddly, it was easier from higher up. He took a long run-up, wings bumping on his back. As soon as his feet left the plateau and the earth dropped vertiginously away, Marcellinus swung his legs back and managed
to loop his left foot over the bar that held him up horizontally in the prone position.

He was flying the wing, not just hanging beneath it like a child. Presenting a flatter shape to the air around him made his slow banks right and left much smoother and more controlled. It was almost as if he knew what he was doing. And it was only when he pushed up the nose of the Hawk and his feet slid in the icy muck that covered the plaza, skating gracelessly to a halt back on terra firma, that Marcellinus realized he’d been cursing in a mixture of Latin and Cahokian for the entire flight.

His arms and legs quivered as if he had palsy. At the same time he experienced almost more terror than he had felt at the top of the mound, a disbelief at what he had just risked, and a strong sense of peace and rightness.

“Futete!” he said, ending his stream of invective.

Sintikala flitted down to land alongside him. Her Hawk wing rested on her shoulders as if it were part of her. She barely even skidded in the snow. “See?”