Clash of Eagles (53 page)

Sintikala pushed back. “Gaius? Stand up.”

“Let me die.”

“Do not be stupid. Come. You must rest.”

He stood upright, his hand on her shoulder. Once again Chumanee, Youtin, and Nipekala had their attention focused on Tahtay. Only Huyana watched Marcellinus and Sintikala as they stepped back off the plateau onto the endless stairs.

I
n the morning light, Enopay walked in the wreckage with his bark and his charcoal, a child amid devastation.

Not so long ago Tahtay had held his hands over Enopay’s eyes to shield him from the horrors of war. Now Tahtay lay on the Mound of the Sun, struggling to live, while Enopay walked the battlefield and wrote down the names of the dead.

This time no one had come to bring Marcellinus food in the dawn, but once again he had felt compelled to return to the killing fields. He had not known what to expect. He certainly had not expected a small boy to be performing a census of the slain.

He made a forlorn figure, walking alone among the fallen. Marcellinus’s heart came a little closer to breaking. “Enopay.”

The boy turned away and made another note on his bark.

“Enopay. Who said you must do this?”

“Nobody,” Enopay said. “Leave me alone.”

Within arm’s reach, Marcellinus stopped, his hands by his sides. “I will help you, Enopay. Or I will do this instead. You should—”

“Do not tell me. Do not speak at all. Why are you still here?”

“I want to help,” Marcellinus said. “I want to make this right.”

“Giving orders, you are a big man. When there is work to be done burying the dead, where are you? Nowhere. Always you fall down.”

The breeze felt cool on Marcellinus’s forehead and neck.

“Go away,” Enopay said. “Go away and make another clever new thing we do not need in Cahokia, so more of us can die.”

Bitter phlegm rose in Marcellinus’s throat. He could not speak, could not move. Enopay walked on, looking about him and scribbling on his bark.

“I will make this right,” Marcellinus said again, more to himself than to the boy.

As the sun set the next day, Great Sun Man addressed his people from the top of the Master Mound. From where he stood alone, several hundred yards away on the edge of the Great Plaza, Marcellinus could barely see the paramount chief, but through luck or good design he could hear the man’s words clearly.

Understanding was harder to come by. In his polemic, Great Sun Man invoked gods and mythologies with which Marcellinus had only a glancing familiarity. The chief told his people how boldly they had fought against the Iroqua, and drew parallels with a story about the folk hero, Red Horn, that Marcellinus did not know, at which point everyone cheered so loudly that he had to look off to the side to watch the hand-talkers who were relaying the chief’s words back through the crowd. He supposed it was the equivalent of a Roman Imperator giving a speech to the legions assembled in the Campus Martius before a campaign, invoking the battles of Julius Caesar and Trajan.

Great Sun Man came back to reality, and Marcellinus paid attention again. He knew enough about oration to know that the climax of the speech was coming. Besides, the rays of the sun were falling obliquely across the sand of the Great Plaza, the shadows enormous, and Marcellinus knew that Great Sun Man’s speech would end exactly at sunset.

“The Iroqua have gone home for the winter to eat their corn and get fat and rest. The Iroqua think they have dealt us a heavy blow, but we will rise to our feet again. The Iroqua think they have won, but they have not won. Because after the winter, in the Grass Moon or the Planting Moon, Cahokia will take the Mourning War back to the Iroqua,
and this time their rivers will run with blood and their mountains will wail. This time the Iroqua will be the people who mourn.”

Marcellinus had barely slept the previous night, and his headaches continued unabated. If he slept as poorly tonight, he might as well volunteer to serve as a sentry. At least that way he would put his wakefulness to good use.

“Our Hawks patrol the lands to the north and east, mapping the land, learning where the Iroqua gather. We will send the stealthiest of our scouts deep into Iroqua territory. Soon I will send some of our great warriors down the Mizipi to demand that other mound-builder towns and villages ready their warriors in the springtime, in our time of need, to help us wipe away the stain of the Haudenosaunee from our lands and let us live in peace forever.”

The small figure of Enopay stood on the Master Mound with Great Sun Man’s shamans and battle chiefs. Akecheta was there, and Wahchintonka, and other strong men of the Wolf Warriors.

Sintikala was not there. She was leading the air patrols.

The shadows lengthened, and the golden rays of the setting sun sparkled like fire off the thatched roofs that remained unburned. Great Sun Man’s rhetoric was coming to an end, and spread out before him the Cahokians rallied and cheered.

“We will take the Mourning War back to the Iroqua, and we will destroy them. We will come upon them from the air, and the rivers, and the land. We will burn them and scalp them; we will place our feet on their necks and drown them in their own Great Lakes. Once before, long ago, we pushed the Iroqua back from the Oyo. Now we must push them farther yet. This wide land cannot hold Cahokia and also the snakes of the Iroqua. I have spoken.”

This was not the Great Sun Man Marcellinus had come to know. The battle had changed the chieftain. They were in new territory now.

“By the bones of my dead fathers and the broken bones of my living son, I promise to do this.”

Marcellinus wondered how Tahtay felt about such a pledge.

But perhaps it was not so different from the speech he had made
himself to the Fighting 33rd the evening they had discovered the burned and mutilated body of Thorkell Sigurdsson. In that speech Marcellinus had promised to “grind the redskins’ bones to powder,” and he might have invoked the memory of a long-ago Germanic slaughter or two to make his words resonate.

Great Sun Man would do what he must to save his people. As Marcellinus had tried to do for his legion and then for Cahokia, only to fail both times.

But while Marcellinus still breathed, he would keep fighting. For Enopay. For Kimimela and Tahtay, and all the Cahokians who had just died trying to protect their city, and those who wept for them.

It would not be easy. Marcellinus was no longer a leader. He was once again a man without a job, a foreign interloper in a giant metropolis, potentially as invisible as any cobbler or tanner or message runner on the streets of Subura. But he would think of something. He would do whatever it took.

Great Sun Man was a worthy chief, a man of immense strength and power. Marcellinus was sure Great Sun Man would work night and day to lead the Cahokians to victory the next year. He just hoped it would be enough.

T
he afternoon Great Sun Man and Enopay returned from Ocatan, Marcellinus was helping a party of Wolf Warriors raze a fire-gutted granary in Cahokia-across-the-water.

Oddly, in all the time Marcellinus had lived in the Great City he had never paddled across the Mizipi to visit the third Cahokia. By all accounts it had been a pleasant little township, a quiet colony of the larger and more rambunctious city. It had its own mounds, its own more human-scaled central plaza, even its own Big Warm House.

Cahokia-across-the-water had possessed a calm rhythm and an air of quiet contentment. People from central Cahokia had poked good-natured fun at their country cousins on the far bank in the same way they joked about the bumpkins of the upland villages. But nobody was laughing now.

Now Cahokia-across-the-water was a ghost town, wrecked and burned. Carrying away the bodies of the dead to the base of a new mound, pulling down the charred huts, destroying what remained of the town in order to rebuild it: this was hard, dirty, and thankless work, and it was where Marcellinus needed to be. Cahokia proper was regaining its spirit and determination; people had begun to smile again, if a little grimly. Humanity was returning. Hope and confidence were building. But Cahokia-across-the-water was a mortuary.

The canoes that had escorted the war chief home from Ocatan had peeled off for the east bank, but Great Sun Man, Wahchintonka and six other warriors, and Enopay had already pulled their canoe ashore and were striding toward them, Enopay as usual having to take an additional skipping step to keep up.

Marcellinus stood in silence. Great Sun Man passed him with a curt nod and went to clap the other men on the back, thanking them for their efforts. Enopay stopped and looked up at Marcellinus unblinking.

Tahtay still could not travel, could barely stand. Marcellinus wondered what he thought of his father taking Enopay on a weeklong journey downriver. “Hello, Enopay.”

“Eyanosa. Why are you here?”

“There is work to be done, burying the dead,” Marcellinus said with a straight face.

Enopay grimaced. “I am sorry for what I said.”

“But you were right.”

“You should rest your head. It is bleeding again.”

Marcellinus did not reach up to touch his wound. His hands were filthy and blistered, caked in charcoal and ash. “I know.”

The silence grew. To fill it, Marcellinus asked, “And how was Ocatan?”

“Hot. Even hotter than here.” Enopay paused. “But not damaged. Not burned. Their women do not weep. In Ocatan, we could pretend this had not happened.”

The massive army of the Iroqua had shot a few waves of arrows into Ocatan from their longships, lobbed liquid flame at its gate, and then passed it by. Cahokia had been their target, and they had barely broken step to swat at the smaller town.

So much for the fortress the Cahokians had designed to guard their southern reaches, where the rivers met.

“They will send us food, and wood, and strong men and women to help us rebuild. To feel less guilty.”

Marcellinus grunted. He hoped that worked out better for the Ocatani than it was working for him.

“And when we avenge ourselves on the Iroqua, they will march by our side.”

Great Sun Man had completed his tour of the workers, had cast an unhappy eye over the silent blackened remains of the town, and was heading back toward his canoe. Enopay shuffled his feet. “Also, I have something you wanted.”

All Marcellinus wanted was peace and an end to his infernal headaches. “Oh?”

The boy dug into his pouch and held out a small copper figurine. It was a birdman amulet of a type sometimes worn by shamans, a flat plate the size of Marcellinus’s thumb bearing the incised image of a winged Hawk warrior, complete with sharp-beaked mask.

“What of it?” Marcellinus rarely associated with shamans. He took it from Enopay and almost dropped it.

The amulet was not copper. Its weight left no doubt.

Marcellinus blinked and felt an emptiness yawn beneath his feet. Today was a day determined to roll back the calendar, strip away the years, and send his thoughts back to their roots.

Gold. The main reason he’d been sent to Nova Hesperia in the first place.

For gold, Marcellinus had marched a legion over a thousand miles into one of the deadliest wildernesses on earth. His first conversation with Sintikala had been about gold. In a way, Marcellinus had given his life for gold. His old life, anyway.

He had never found any. But Enopay had.

“Where?”

“I traded a sword and two shields for it in Ocatan. But it came up from the south, not long ago. From Shappa Ta’atan, maybe, or farther down the Mizipi.”

Marcellinus had a sudden urge to throw it as hard as he could and watch it sink into the muddy waters of the Mizipi.

Enopay looked disappointed. “You are not happy?”

“There is gold in Nova Hesperia, after all,” he said.

Shivers radiated up his spine. Somehow this golden amulet’s very
existence convinced Marcellinus that the Romans would return in force to pillage Nova Hesperia again, and soon.

The Romans would die for gold. And they would kill for it. They would stop at nothing to possess it.

He wondered how long he would have to wait.