Clash of Eagles (51 page)

Marcellinus set off down the back of the Mound of the Flowers at a run.

He had misjudged the range of the Iroqua bows. Several arrows flew by his legs or thwocked into the ground at his feet as he danced across
the hundred yards that separated him from the First Cahokian. He should have brought a shield. Fortunately, Akecheta saw him coming and commanded a wave of covering fire. Cahokian arrows flew over Marcellinus’s head, and for a startling moment he thought he was being attacked from both sides.

As he made it to the First Cahokian, he stumbled and fell. It was Mikasi, Hanska’s husband, who grabbed him and stood him upright.

“Thanks,” Marcellinus said. “Akecheta!”

Nobody seemed more relieved than Akecheta to have him back in command. His centurion raised his spear to the skies in salute.

Dustu’s face was calm, strong, and determined. Tahtay’s eyes were wide, but he seemed no more distracted or panic-stricken than anyone else. Neither carried bows; indeed, only half the front rank did. Those who did, however, had arrows nocked.

Marcellinus glanced upward. The sun was a little past the meridian. His men had been fighting for more than half a day already. “Shit,” he said again, almost an involuntary tic at this point.

No time to rest now, though. The Iroqua were coming. And Great Sun Man’s son was under his protection.

“First Cahokian, fire! First Cahokian, trade!”

His second rank of archers stepped through to take their turn. Mercifully, Tahtay and Dustu passed back into the rear of the cohort, vanishing from Marcellinus’s sight.

At last, an army that did exactly what it was told.

“Second rank, fire!”

Another wave of sleek arrows sped across the short distance that separated them from the Iroqua. Dozens of Iroqua warriors fell.

A Wakinyan soared overhead. Turning, it commenced a strafing run along the river.

“First Cahokian, spears!”

From behind, someone pushed a spear into Marcellinus’s hand. Fair enough. He was, after all, now standing in the front rank.

The Iroqua advanced not at a charge but at a steady walk, keeping their wind, keeping eye contact with the Cahokians. Outnumbering the
First Cahokian three or four to one, they brandished spears, clubs, and axes and looked absolutely deadly.

It was time to get his gladius bloody again.

“First Cahokian,” Gaius Publius Marcellinus roared. “Forward! Take scalps!”

The two lines joined, Iroqua facing Cahokians over a bristling forest of spears. The momentum was with the invaders, and the Cahokian battle line swayed. “Steady!” Marcellinus shouted. “Rear ranks, hold us!”

The men at the back hurled themselves forward to support their comrades. Irresistible forces collided. It became a shoving match. With blades.

Axes flew. The Iroqua were
throwing
them, a move Marcellinus had not seen since the Romans’ first incursion onto Nova Hesperian soil, when the Powhatani had tried it. The Powhatani axes—tomahawks—had not deterred the Romans in the slightest, but the Iroqua ax blades were of iron rather than stone and carried a keen edge, and the center of the Cahokian line wavered.

Marcellinus shouted in frustration, dangerously distracting the men closest to him.

The hacking began. Iroqua pulled at the spears of their enemy and hauled themselves up to swing at the Cahokians with swords and clubs. Three braves in the center of the Cahokian line—who were they? who?—had gone down under the Iroqua axes, and the warriors in the Iroqua front line surged forward while their second rank fired arrows from a distance of a few feet, in between their own men, into the Cahokians. It was an insane tactic—the odds were high that they would shoot their own comrades in the back—but it worked. The center line of the Cahokians folded, and the First Cahokian became two halves.

Marcellinus glimpsed this only peripherally. The Iroqua were right up against his own line, and he was yanking and thrusting with his pilum along with the Cahokians on either side of him.

A Huron giant powered himself up onto the spear wall. His face and arms were bright red with war paint, his head bald aside from a roach of porcupine hair, and his eyes looked manic. The vivid scarifications on
his flesh were only partially obscured by the wooden matting chest armor he wore. His ax swung down and cleaved the skull of the Cahokian two steps to Marcellinus’s right, passing clear through into the man’s shoulder.

The Huron’s ferocious gaze turned to Marcellinus, and he raised his ax again. Relinquishing his hold on his spear, Marcellinus leaned back and tugged at his gladius, and an Iroqua arrow plinked off the side of his helmet. “Shit!”

The Huron’s ax came down, and Marcellinus only just managed to get his sword over his head in time to deflect the killing blow. As best he could, jammed as he was between Cahokian warriors, Marcellinus stabbed at his attacker. The Huron knocked the blade aside with contemptuous ease and was gone, almost falling into a new gap in the line beyond Marcellinus’s reach. The Cahokian warrior the Huron had just killed was still standing, held in place by the crush of bodies. Blood sprayed over Marcellinus’s breastplate.

Cahokians shoved forward. Marcellinus snatched another glance along the line of melee. Would the line hold? Where the hell was Tahtay?

There he was, forty feet away and still alive, and his gladius was up and stabbing. The crush of the melee eased. But now two more Iroqua sighted Marcellinus and threw themselves at him, screaming their war cries.

“Hotah, left!” came Mahkah’s shout from behind him, and Marcellinus gratefully lashed out at the leftmost of his two attackers. Mahkah’s spear parried the ax carried by the Iroqua to the right, and then Marcellinus was fighting for his life at close quarters with a Caiuga brave.

Fury swept him, that welcome battle fury that cast all fears from his mind. All distractions melted away. It was time to kill, and kill he did.

The Caiuga fell. Another took his place. Marcellinus hacked and twisted and hacked again. The red haze of battle surrounded him.

Panting, he saw that Mahkah had won his battle, too. “Come!” Marcellinus shouted, but he did not wait to see whether the tall warrior would follow.

He pressed on. His world was axes and limbs and spears. Blood
dripped from his arms, none of it yet his own. The gladius had been knocked from his hand long before, and he had grabbed up an ax, then that ax had lodged in an Iroqua rib cage, and he had stumbled forward and plucked another sword from the hand of a dead Cahokian and swept it up and moved to the side again, still facing his foes. The swarm of Iroqua kept coming and coming, but always Marcellinus moved the same way, crabbing leftward across the line of battle with the sun in his face, toward where he had last glimpsed Tahtay.

Then conscious thought returned, because Tahtay was in front of him, now fighting bizarrely with a spear in each hand, using them to stab and shove and hold Iroqua at bay. It would not have worked for a full-grown man, but the Iroqua mostly swerved around and past the boy because of his extreme youth, a mercy even in the desperate heat of battle that Marcellinus understood. The Iroqua had boys fighting in their ranks, too, and mostly the Cahokians were striking them with the flats of their blades.

“Give me your back,” Marcellinus gasped; he had been out of breath for an hour, it seemed. Iroqua warriors surrounded them, and Tahtay did not respond, simply dropped one of the pila and seized a sword from the ground, and Marcellinus swung his gladius, and man and boy stood in battle back to back, fighting, panting.

Suddenly the pressure behind Marcellinus vanished as Tahtay was plucked away. Tahtay
leaped
four feet in the air as if he were taking wing, but no; he had been scooped up, swept into the air by a titanic blow to his thigh. It was the giant Huron whom Marcellinus had last seen at the far end of the line, now wielding a heavy club. Through the battle haze and bloodlust Marcellinus realized the Huron had been following him, hunting him down. He had been set the task of killing Marcellinus or had taken it upon himself, and it was this man who had just smashed Tahtay out of the way without a second thought.

Tahtay was down, knocked flying and crashed back down to earth, screaming and writhing. The Huron stepped over him and came for Marcellinus.

Gladius in one hand, ax in the other, Marcellinus lunged. His ax met
the Huron’s club, and the heavier man prevailed. Marcellinus stumbled back.

Here came Hanska, hacking her way toward them, screaming at the top of her lungs not because she was in pain or distress but because it daunted her foes and gave her an edge. And from behind him Mahkah’s cry came again. “Hotah, right!”

He leaped forward and right, and Mahkah came around him to the left, and the two of them fought the Huron with Tahtay lying crumpled at their feet, trying to keep the boy alive for just a few moments more …

Marcellinus never saw the blow that felled him.

His feet left the ground, and the weapons flew from his hands. His head filled with the grating shriek of wood and stone against metal; his eyes were seared by an almighty red flash that might have been liquid flame or a granary exploding, and then his mouth was full of bitter earth.

Intense pain gripped him, agony that came from everywhere and nowhere. This was death. He had not saved Tahtay, and death had come for him …

He was kneeling with no recollection of how he had raised himself up even that far. Blackness assailed him. He clawed at his face, trying to pull off the helmet that crushed and burned, but his limbs were separate creatures that would not obey. If Marcellinus had been instantly dismembered and crudely shoved back into one piece by the gods, the pain could not have been worse, his disorientation more intense.

He screamed. Someone pushed him back down onto the ground.

Now he could not move at all.

Noise came down around him, a curtain of helpless terror.

All at once he could see again. Above him was the twisted mess of his helmet, and behind it Takoda’s face. The warrior had pulled the bent helmet off Marcellinus’s head, freeing his skull from the terrible pressure. Blood and torn flesh dripped from the Roman steel.

Another hand waved in front of his face. It was Marcellinus’s own. Terrified, he tried to turn from it, afraid his own body was attacking him.

The roaring abated, and the sounds of battle came flooding in. He was still gripped by intense pain, but his body was coming back under his control. Next to him lay Tahtay, now still, his legs oddly twisted. Above him stood three Cahokian warriors in a ring, facing outward: Takoda, Hanska, and Mahkah, fighting for their lives against the swarm of Iroqua that surrounded them.

Mahkah took a brutal blow to the shoulder from the massive Huron and fell onto one knee, half on top of Marcellinus and Tahtay, still fighting. Hanska lunged at the Huron with her gladius, and the warrior jumped back.

At last Marcellinus could move again. He rocked forward, braced himself on Mahkah’s shoulder, and shoved himself upright to take Mahkah’s place in the circle defending Tahtay.

Blood poured into the Roman’s eyes, but he could not even blink. Far above, even the sky was red. Nausea choked him, but he raised his sword to parry an Iroqua mace, then swung at the Caiuga who held it.

His vision blurred. Dancing and hacking and slashing, his Cahokian warriors were moving so quickly that he could no longer tell them apart.

And still, at his feet, Tahtay did not stir.

Rage filled Marcellinus. Where was the Huron? Where had the bastard gone? His head throbbed again in a wave of searing pain.

There. Coming in again from his left. Now that Marcellinus was up and fighting again, the Huron was cutting a swath toward him once more.

Despite his dizziness and pain, Marcellinus stepped forward to meet the Huron’s charge. Sword met club, but this time Marcellinus threw himself to the side so that his blade skidded down the club’s blood-slickened wooden haft to slice into the Huron’s wrist. At the same time, the warrior’s shoulder barged him, knocking him backward. Marcellinus stumbled and almost fell, slamming back into Takoda.

The Huron’s roar mingled in the air with Hanska’s battle scream as she came running in to defend them, gladius whirling. But Marcellinus was quicker as he thrust his sword deep into the Huron’s gut, twisted, and shoved again with all his might.

The Huron crashed to the ground, bleeding from his stomach and arm, but still he kicked out at Marcellinus, grabbing for his ax with his other hand. Marcellinus stepped aside, picked up the Huron’s club with both hands, and brought it down in a heavy blow on the man’s chest armor, crushing his ribs and driving splintered wood and bone deep into his heart. With agony contorting his face, the Huron died.

Marcellinus gulped air into his lungs and swayed. His own blood still flowed down his cheeks like tears. But around him was still the din of battle. He let the Huron’s club slip out of his fingers, picked up a gladius, and stepped back to stand over Tahtay and Mahkah, with Hanska to his left and Takoda to his right.

Then more Iroqua warriors surged forward toward them, and once again they were fighting for their lives.