Clash of Eagles (54 page)

I’m sure all readers and writers of alternate history are aware of how key events in their own lives could have gone very, very differently. And so …

Huge, world-spanning gratitude to Dario Ciriello, who took a chance on my original novella,
A Clash of Eagles,
and published it in the
Panverse Two
anthology, which led to its winning the 2010 Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Sincere thanks to the Sidewise Award panel of Stephen Baxter, Evelyn Leeper, Kurt Sidaway, Jim Rittenhouse, Stuart Shiffman, and Steven H Silver, who paid me the awesome compliment of that award and helped to enable the next steps.

Sincere and devout thanks to the beta readers who soldiered heroically through the novel-length
Clash of Eagles
manuscript in its various incarnations and provided detailed and perceptive critiques. Karen Smale, Chris Cevasco, Peter Charron, Fiona Lehn, Galen Dara, Wendy Wagner, Darrin McGraw, Duncan Kuehn, Lisa May, Stephen Blount, Ed Rosick, Jim Strickland, and Carole Ann Moleti: you all went above and beyond the call of duty. I was lucky to have each and every one of you.

For feedback on the opening chapters I’d like to thank the members of Taos Toolbox 2011 not already named above: Christie Yant, Jeff Petersen, Jeff Duntemann, Sean Eret, Scott Hawkins, Lisa Morton, and instructors Walter Jon Williams and Nancy Kress. Go Dieselbears!

I am forever indebted to my agent, Caitlin Blasdell of Liza Dawson
Associates, for taking me on in the first place, for astute editing suggestions and business acumen, and for continuing sane guidance as I march forward on this epic trek.

My deepest gratitude also goes to my editor Mike Braff at Del Rey/Penguin Random House for his enthusiasm and good cheer, dedication, and keen story instincts.

Finally, my wife, Karen Smale, has served as first reader, proofreader, travel companion, angst wrangler, and my most essential cheerleader, and I can’t thank her enough.

Of course, despite the earnest efforts of everyone named above to keep me flying straight, the responsibility for any errors or outright peculiarities that remain in
Clash of Eagles
rests solely with me.

Many people are familiar with the Aztecs and the Maya and the other great civilizations of Mesoamerica. Far fewer seem to know of the thriving and extensive cultures of North America in the centuries before the arrival of European ships.

For over five hundred years the Mississippian civilization dominated the river valleys of eastern North America, building thousands of towns and villages along the Mississippi, the Ohio, and many other rivers. Like the Adena and Hopewell cultures before them, they built mounds by the tens of thousands: conical mounds, ridge mounds, and the distinctive square-sided, flat-topped platform mounds. In all likelihood the founding events of Mississippian culture took place in Cahokia and then radiated out across the continent.

In its heyday Cahokia was a huge city covering over five square miles, occupied by about 20,000 people and containing at least 120 mounds of packed earth and silty clay, many of them colossal. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries Cahokia was larger than London, and no city in northern America would be larger until the 1800s. Cahokia’s skyline was dominated by the gigantic mound known today as Monks Mound, a thousand feet square at the base and a hundred feet high. Monks Mound had four terraces, and archeological data reveal that it was topped with a large wooden structure 105 feet long and 48 feet wide. This great earthwork and longhouse overlooked a Grand Plaza nearly fifty acres in area, meticulously positioned and leveled with sandy loam
fill a foot deep. Cahokia’s central 205 acres were protected by a bastioned palisade two miles long and constructed of some 20,000 logs, enclosing the Great Mound and Great Plaza and eighteen other mounds. The downtown area was surrounded by perhaps a dozen residential neighborhoods, some of which had their own plazas. Cahokia was bounded several miles to the west by the Mississippi and to the east by river bluffs of limestone and sandstone, and was surrounded by the floodplains of the American Bottom that allowed the cultivation of maize in vast fields to feed its population.

Much of Cahokia was built in a flurry of dedicated activity around A.D. 1050, but to this day nobody knows why or by whom. The city and its immense mounds are not claimed by any existing tribe or tradition, and no tales about the city’s foundation or dissolution have been passed down through oral history. The Illini who lived in the area when white settlers arrived appeared to know little about the mounds and did not claim them or show much interest in them. However, archeologists and ethnographers are reasonably confident that the ancient Cahokians were Siouan-speaking, and I have gone along with that assumption in the Hesperian Trilogy.

We can, however, be certain that the original residents of the Great City did not call it Cahokia. “Cahokia” is actually the name of an Algonquian-speaking tribe that probably did not come to the area until several hundred years after the fall of the city. Nor did the Iroquois call themselves by that name. “Iroquois” is probably a French transliteration of an insulting Huron word for the Haudenosaunee. However, in this case and some others I have used familiar terms to avoid needless obscurity. For the river names, I may be on firmer ground (so to speak). The Mississippi and Missouri rivers are named from the French renderings of the original Algonquian or Siouan words, and the Ohio River was indeed “Oyo” to the Iroquois. “Chesapeake” and “Appalachia” have their roots in Algonquian words.

Even for names that are unambiguously Native American, it is sometimes not clear when those names started to be used. The individual names of the Five Nations of the Iroquois may not have been in wide
use before A.D. 1500, although the ancestral Iroquois certainly had a strong cultural tradition by the 1200s and were building longhouses long before that. I also may have anticipated the foundation of the Haudenosaunee League by a few hundred years. Other aspects of the longhouse culture, along with their clothing and weaponry styles, are taken from the historical and archeological record. As far as the “hand-talk” is concerned, the Plains Sign Language did indeed become something of a lingua franca, though perhaps not as early or universally as I have postulated.

Otherwise, in writing
Clash of Eagles
I have tried my best to remain accurate to geographical and archeological ground truth. The size and layout of Cahokia are accurate for the period to the extent that the geography of the city and its environs has often not so subtly driven the plot. Every mound featured in the book exists, and I placed the Big Warm House and the brickworks and steelworks in open areas where there were no known mounds or buildings. The Circle of the Cedars corresponds to a monumental circle of up to sixty tall cedar marker posts designed as an early calendar, based on seasonal celestial alignments. The established large-scale agriculture and fishing, available natural resources, food types and weaponry, pottery and basketry, and so forth, are as accurate as I can make them. Granaries, houses, hearths, storage pits, and so on, all match current archeological findings. Chunkey was a real game. The clothing depicted is true to the times, including details of Great Sun Man’s regalia and his copper ear spools of the Long-Nosed God; much of what later would become stereotypical Native American clothing, including large feather war bonnets and extensive beadwork, probably originated centuries after Cahokia.

We have much less detailed knowledge of the social structure of ancient Cahokia, and extrapolation can be dangerous. Although Hernando de Soto found strongly hierarchical chiefdoms with a complex caste system in his 1539–1543 expedition to southeastern areas at the tail end of the Mississippian era, it does not follow that those social systems were universal. In fact, in Cahokia’s case the evidence may point the other way—to a heterarchy of diverse organizations within the city.
I have assumed a pragmatic, rather nonhierarchical structure for Cahokia rather than the superstitious and ritual-bound structures that some postulate for such societies.

Clearly, I have given the Hesperians credit for a few additional technological achievements. Native flying machines are unsupported by the archeological record, although because they are made of sticks, skins, and sinew and wrecked Catanwakuwa and Wakinyan are ceremonially dismantled and often burned, we might not find their remains even if they had existed. However, birds and flying were highly revered in the cultures of the Americas before the European invasion. Hawks, falcons, and thunderbirds were venerated and are central motifs observed throughout ancient American cultures. There is evidence for a falcon warrior ideology in Cahokia and also strong suggestions that the birdman cult originated in Cahokia before spreading across the Mississippian world. Feathered capes, birdmen, and falconoid symbolism abounded. Bird eyes, wings, and tails are extremely common iconography on pots, chunkey stones, and other items. In many Native American traditional stories, key figures are able to fly.

Catanwakuwa and Wakinyan may be a stretch, but oddly, I may be on slightly safer ground with the Sky Lanterns. Although this is speculative, it has been suggested that balloons may have been feasible for peoples of a Mississippian technology level. Julian Nott, a prominent figure in the modern ballooning movement, has pointed out that the people who created the Nazca lines in pre-Inca Peru had all the necessary technologies and materials to create balloons. To prove his point he has constructed and flown a hot air balloon with a bag consisting of 600 pounds of cotton fabric made in the pre-Columbian style, launched and powered by burning logs, with a gondola constructed of wood and reeds. For the Cahokians, the cotton would have been the key. Cotton grows only weakly in Illinois north of the Ohio River and can be wiped out easily by frost, so realistically their cotton would have to be imported from the south. But since the Cahokian trading network extended to the Gulf of Mexico, this would have been at least possible.

The Mourning War is an authentic idea, with many historical examples
of long-standing feuds and territorial disputes between native peoples of North America. Although there is no direct evidence of such a large-scale and pervasive feud between the Mississippian and Haudenosaunee nations, there is archeological support for an increase in the palisading of towns and villages from A.D. 1200 on in those cultures and also in Algonquian territory. Clearly, these peoples were not establishing such vigorous defenses just for fun. And although people nowadays tend to associate the practice of scalping with the colonial wars, it was in fact a form of violence frequently perpetrated long before the arrival of Europeans.

The Iroquois were noted for their competence in the lethal arts. However, there are no grounds for believing them responsible for the deaths of the Cahokian women buried in Mound 72 (the Mound of the Women), as Great Sun Man tells Marcellinus. In our world, those women probably perished as part of a home-grown ritualized killing. In reality the women may not even have been from Cahokia; their teeth and bones are more typical of people originating from the satellite towns and eating poorer diets.

Just in case there is any doubt, the People of the Hand include the ancestral Pueblo peoples at the tail end of the Great House culture centered in Chaco Canyon, and the People of the Sun are the postclassic Mayan culture. Both of these peoples—and others indigenous to the ancient Americas—will appear in future books.

Many of Cahokia’s mounds still remain, and walking among them inspires awe. The Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is just across the Mississippi from modern St. Louis, Missouri. It is well worth a visit and, failing that, can be investigated on the Web at
www.cahokiamounds.org
.

The approximate correspondence between the Julian calendar and the Cahokian moons and festivals is as follows: