Clash of Eagles (47 page)

“Soon.” Sintikala pointed at the sky to indicate where the sun would be.

They had an hour or less. “What of the throwing engines? Where should we send them?”

“Four to the river,” Sintikala said crisply. “Set them on the Mound of the Flowers or mounds farther downstream if there is time for us to set up a line there. The other four throwing engines stay here on the Great Mound. But the throwing engine that is also the Catanwakuwa launcher: send that one to the river, first and fastest.”

Marcellinus blinked and looked at Great Sun Man. “As she says,” the war chief said impatiently.

“Yes, sir. Where will you be?”

The war chief pointed upward. “There is wild talk about the Iroqua. I must see for myself, from the air. And then I will go to lead the warriors in western Cahokia.”

“Really?” Marcellinus asked skeptically. Sintikala’s intelligence could hardly be wild talk. “But in that case—”

Sintikala cut him off. “Gaius. You have your task. Begin it.”

“We have spoken,” Great Sun Man said.

At their curt tones of command Marcellinus automatically saluted, Roman-style. The Cahokians flinched. “I understand,” he said to clarify. “I will begin.”

Sintikala and Great Sun Man sprinted along the plateau. They turned the corner and were gone.

Marcellinus again surveyed the city and the lands beyond. He still saw no signs of Iroqua, but his sense of foreboding grew.

The other Cahokian chiefs had not moved either, and Marcellinus realized they were looking to him. They, too, were discomfited by what they had heard from Great Sun Man.

And with such hazy orders, perhaps there was no obligation for Marcellinus to do exactly as he was told.

Marcellinus looked to Anapetu. Now she nodded.

He took a deep breath. “Elders, chiefs, hear me. We already know the trickery and deceit of the Iroqua, and perhaps even Sintikala does not clearly see all there is to be seen. Great Sun Man is wise, but Iroqua warriors from the southeast and southwest in plain sight may distract us from yet more warriors coming in stealth from the east. Such a force could cut off the First Cahokian from the city. Our warriors must not be stretched too thinly. We must stand together. Most of you must go to western Cahokia. But some must help us to establish a battle line across the south
and
east of the city. We must not lose Cahokia.”

The chiefs eyed one another as Tahtay crisply clarified some of Marcellinus’s more difficult phrases. Several chiefs nodded. Others did not.

“This is not the same as what Great Sun Man said,” Howahkan said.

“Of course it is. Great Sun Man told me that I lead the First Cahokian and that I must not let our forces be flanked.”

“But we are not First Cahokian, and nor are our warriors,” said Kanuna.

Marcellinus eyed him steadily. “Would you like to be?”

Under Akecheta’s bellowed commands, the First Cahokian was already falling in as one of the prototype Eagle craft roared off the Great Mound.

Marcellinus glanced up, and his heart leaped into his mouth as the triangular wing unfurled above him. Beneath it hung Sintikala and another woman pilot of her clan, side by side in the lead positions … and hanging prone in the third harness, Great Sun Man. Marcellinus had never seen the Cahokian war chief in the air before, had not even known Great Sun Man was a pilot. And perhaps he was not, because the Eagle craft wobbled precariously and slewed sideways in the sky before recovering and banking toward the Mizipi.

Marcellinus shook his head. How terrible would it be if one of his own contributions to Cahokian flight got the Great City’s most important chiefs killed just before a critical battle?

No time to worry about it. He had a cohort to lead.

Marcellinus called out quick instructions, and they were off and marching; the central core of his First Cahokian, the men who had trained with him for nearly two years, were leading a much larger and more amorphous group of warriors who now made up his impromptu auxiliary. As they passed, other Cahokian men and women donned armor of wood or steel and either joined them or hurried west to the other battle line in no kind of order. The lack of discipline bothered Marcellinus to distraction: in a crisis everyone should know where he was going and with whom, and who was in charge. With the exception of the four hundred trained warriors who marched in step with him toward the south, the Cahokians were still a rabble, and he had seen just hours earlier that the Iroqua now understood the virtues of careful organization.

Two Hawk wings sprinted by above them, heading south. This morning the skies were almost as busy as the land.

Marcellinus was still thinking it through. A frontal assault, by daylight? Surely the Iroqua knew better than that. Cahokia’s defenses were strong, and its Wakinyan were deadly to a large force. So the Iroqua must be taking these things into account. They must have a plan.

At the very least, Marcellinus should expect the Iroqua not to bunch up into ranks as his own First Cahokian would, but remain diffuse. Small nimble groups of warriors with the advantage of mobility to skip and dodge away from the paths of the Thunderbirds to limit their losses. The Wakinyan might not prove decisive in this battle, but their presence would certainly shape the enemy’s tactics.

Behind him, by the smoldering brickworks, a Sky Lantern leaped up with two braves clinging precariously to the shallow wooden frame that swayed beneath it. Close to their heads was the deeper framework that carried the fire jar. Even as the lantern rocked at the end of the stout cable that kept it tethered to the ground, one of the braves spared a hand to feed the flames.

Marcellinus shook his head. The risks young Cahokian men would take in search of honor still amazed him.

The lantern continued to rise as the men on the ground paid out the cable from the winch. The wind urged the lantern eastward, pulling the cable into a long draped arc. Well out of earshot at that altitude, its pilots signaled to the men on the ground by using long paddles made of matting.

Marcellinus didn’t want to know what the view might be like from up there, out of range of an arrow from the ground, but he hoped the braves had eyes like hawks. Also, he hoped that none of the real Hawk wings flew into the cable. Ribbons had been attached to the cable at intervals to make it more visible, but the Catanwakuwa flew at high speed and their pilots could not look everywhere at once.

A Hawk flew over him, several hundred feet up. From the dexterity of the flight and the compact, powerful body of the pilot Marcellinus knew it was Demothi, Sintikala’s second in command. The Hawk swung left, waggled its wings, and then banked back toward Cahokia.

“The Iroqua are to our southeast,” Marcellinus called. “Akecheta! Turn them farther left! Stay in formation.”

They passed the marks on the ground that indicated where the new palisade would eventually stand. Still being built, the palisade currently protected only the northern and eastern sides of the central city precinct. Marcellinus smiled without humor: too little, too late.

And there were the Iroqua, boiling across the floodplain, thousands of them spread over ten acres or more. As expected, the Haudenosaunee warriors had no formation. Their numbers sent a dark war thrill down Marcellinus’s spine.

From the west came the dull thud of an explosion. A hot breeze swept through the city. Far beyond the houses to his right, probably by the Mizipi, a Thunderbird had dropped a load of liquid flame.

This was only one of the two battlefronts. Whoever prevailed today, the Cahokians would need a huge new burial mound to honor their dead.

He looked back, but Demothi had already relayed his message. Half a mile behind him another Thunderbird soared upward, heading their way.

“Halt!” Marcellinus cried, and “Halt!” the message went out through Akecheta to the First Cahokian and via the signalmen to the farthest reaches of the auxiliaries. No sense in engaging the enemy before the Wakinyan had a chance to wreak havoc here as well. He would hold and let the Iroqua come to him.

“First rank, prepare arrows! Third rank, set pila!”

The Cahokians readied for battle in three deep rows, the front rank kneeling with bows in hand and arrows nocked while the line behind stood ready to step past and take its turn at the front. The third rank took several steps back and set pila in open order, each man three feet from the men to his left and right. Their pila were pointed safely at the sky; once the Iroqua warriors approached to within melee distance, the first two ranks of archers would duck back through the third rank and the pila would be lowered.

Marcellinus almost hoped the Wakinyan and the arrows left enough Iroqua alive to fight at close quarters. His bloody soul would sing to see
Mohawks and Onida and Seneca hurling themselves onto the massed spears of the Cahokians.

On the faces of his men he saw the same determination. If the Haudenosaunee night attack had been intended to shatter the Cahokian resolve, it had failed utterly. His warriors boiled with energy. He had never seen an army more primed to maim and slaughter.

“Steady!” he called, walking behind the ranks. At his heels three braves wheeled his war cart, really a chariot pulled by men. He wished he could order them away; the wheeled conveyance seemed ignoble to him. It smacked of cowardice to have a vehicle ready to whisk him away from the front. But this had been one of Great Sun Man’s few direct orders, and there was nothing Marcellinus could do about it.

The Wakinyan flew over their right flank and banked for its strafing run across the Iroqua line. An invisible hand squeezed Marcellinus’s heart. If he lived to a hundred winters, the traumatic memories would never fade.

The Thunderbird opened up. In their attack on the Romans, the birds had released the liquid flame in large torrents designed to maximize the damage to his tightly packed legion. Here, the fire came out in a steady, broad spray over a wide area.

It was a rolling tide of agony. The Iroqua were so widely spread that only two warriors of every five were doused with the incendiary. Nonetheless, the front of the wave was easy to see. Iroqua fell screaming, and not in the clean drop of men struck by arrows or spears but an untidy flail. Panic-stricken, they tried to wipe the burning oil away, but just as with the 33rd Hesperian, their efforts only spread the incendiary over larger areas of their skin. The Iroqua thrashed like crazy men, and the Wakinyan flew on, still showering horror upon them.

Their fellow Iroqua braves came on, swerving around the fallen. Their blood-chilling battle cries never wavered.

Marcellinus could see the faces of the front-running Iroqua braves now, their eyes wide in fury. His own men shuffled their feet, straining at the leash as they waited for the order. But his First Cahokian would not expend their energy in running across a field. They would stand
firm and not be winded, and they would slay their enemies with precision and icy rigor.

“First Cahokian, prepare arms!”

His front rank of archers raised their bows, pulled back the bowstrings.

“First Cahokian, fire!”

A black cloud of arrows hurtled across the narrow space that separated the Cahokians from the howling mob of Iroqua.

“Fire!” came Akecheta’s distant call from much farther down the battle line. A second wave of arrows sped across the field.

Marcellinus stepped back a dozen paces. Despite his almost overwhelming urge to kill Iroqua, the melee that was about to break was not for him. In his last major battle it had been different; in fighting with the Romans against Cahokia, his forces had been overwhelmed. Here he must keep a clear head and direct the battle as a commander should in the hope that at least some of his orders might be obeyed.

Half a mile away in the flanks of his army, unrestrained by the cool discipline of the First Cahokian, the auxiliaries were rushing forward to meet the Iroqua charge. Hand-to-hand fighting had begun there, and the dust that they kicked up made it hard to see past them. But in the murk beyond the Cahokian line Marcellinus was sure he could see the shadowy forms of more Iroqua war parties moving eastward.

The First Cahokian would be flanked after all, but whether the Iroqua would attack his forces from the side or run on past to spread death in the city, Marcellinus could not tell. That would have to wait.

A dozen Catanwakuwa flew over him, some firing arrows into the Iroqua horde and others tossing pots of liquid flame to break up the charge. They looped back quickly—no pilot would risk coming to ground behind enemy lines and being carved into bloody meat a moment later—but behind them came another wave of Hawks. High above them all, four Catanwakuwa wheeled and fluttered, sending aerial intelligence down to the Hawk clan members who stood behind Marcellinus, ready to brief him on significant developments. If there was any time for that. At present, there was not.

“Third rank, step forward. Second rank: set pila, fill in!”

The line of men with spears stepped in front of their comrades. A wall of spears dropped into place in close order in front of the rushing Iroqua warriors, many of whom were now hurling spears of their own. Even at a run their aim was sure, and many a Cahokian fell, his place in the rank immediately taken by the man or woman behind. But their Roman breastplates and greaves had mostly kept them safe. So far, Cahokian losses were minimal.

“Well,” said Marcellinus, startled. For the Iroqua were not attempting to engage the Cahokian spear wall. Instead, they swung away after flinging their spears and ran back to regroup.

On the edges of his army, auxiliaries were going down. There the Iroqua front line was pushing back the Cahokians. The battle line was bending.

“Merda.” His right flank was about to break. Marcellinus signaled to the message keepers behind him. They in turn signaled up to the Hawks wheeling in the air above, one of which broke off and streaked back toward Cahokia. And so the message was sent back: another Wakinyan assault—now—to the right.

The first Thunderbird had reached the farthest extent of its run, off to the east of the battlefield. Marcellinus watched it turn, guessing it had enough height for only a short pass along the Iroqua battle line before it would have to steer back over Cahokian territory. Probably it would not make it even as far as Marcellinus. That would have to be good enough. Perhaps it could still sow enough confusion in the eastern Iroqua flank to Marcellinus’s left that the Cahokian auxiliaries could do something about the Iroqua who were now past them and racing into the city.