Clash of Eagles (8 page)

Of course, if he had to turn around and slink back to the Chesapica
without having found gold or achieved substantial military success conquering new territory for the Imperium, Marcellinus would have wasted the year. Hadrianus would not view that favorably.

He really had no choice. None at all.

They had to go on.

“I’m not wrong,” the scout said.

Hating himself, Marcellinus clutched at a further straw. “If you’ve not been in, how can you be sure there’s no gold?”

“I suppose they might have a bit, if it was well hidden.” The Norseman leaned forward. “But these people have more than that, Praetor. They know this land, and they know the air above it. The air! Gods’ sakes! And they don’t think the way we do. I can’t really explain it, because I only speak a few words of their lingo. But there are virtues to them. There are virtues.

“You’ve seen it yourself, I know; I heard you trying to persuade your tribune back there by Thorkell’s corpse. The Cahokiani husband the land even more so than the Iroqua; they live almost
inside
the land. And that’s how they fly, you know. They’ve tamed the air because they have an understanding of it that we lack.”

Marcellinus drained his cup. “Tell me something I can use, Isleifur Bjarnason.”

“You’ve only seen the small wings,” said the Viking. “Wait till you see the larger. In their language, they call them Thunderbirds. If the little birds are like sparrows, the Thunderbirds are like … well, eagles.”

“Eagles.”

“Flying through the air, quick as ballista bolts.”

Larger wings. Marcellinus’s pulse quickened, but he remained resolute. “The bigger they are, the larger the hole they’ll make in the ground when we shoot them down. They’re a gimmick. There’s little strategic value to them.”

“Well,” said the Norseman. “That may be so, and it may be not.”

“You do realize that I should arrest you?” Marcellinus said bluntly. “Fraternizing with the enemy, pleading their case with me, breaking in here by night.”

Bjarnason grinned. “I’m at my Praetor’s disposal.”

“Yes, till you turn renegade on me. I haven’t forgotten what good pirates you people make.”

Bjarnason looked pained. “Damn it, now … sir. That’s the Danes. The Danes were never anything but trouble, just like the Britons. I’m a Geat, one of the true Scands. We’re just like you, always were.”

“Just like us?” Marcellinus murmured.

“Aye. Romans and Norse, we’re solid stock, hard dreamers with a vision and the guts to make it stick. Both out to claim the world for ourselves. Oh, the Norse bow to the stronger,” he said, ducking his head in deference, “but if it wasn’t you Romans, it’d be us out there, carving an empire.”

“You’re something of a freethinker,” Marcellinus said drily.

“It’s true. If Roma had fallen to the Visigoths and Vandals and all—and that was a closer-run thing than people like to suppose—you can wager it’d have been we Norse sweeping up and building an Imperium now. Who’d have gainsaid us? The bloody Mongols, eventually. But certainly not the Gauls or the Parthians or the Britons. Stay-at-homes with mud on their faces, the lot of ’em, no soldiers. No sailors, either.”

Marcellinus grinned. Despite Bjarnason’s impertinence, he liked the man. “Very well. I withdraw the accusation of piracy.”

“Right, then.” The Norseman shuffled backward, wriggled through a tiny gap between the tent canvas and the ground, and was gone.

“Anyone else like to put in an appearance?” Marcellinus said to the goatskin walls of his Praetorium, but if any further spies were present, they remained mute.

Marcellinus went to bed then, but he did not sleep well.

T
he Iroqua war party hit them two days later in the early afternoon, rising like ghosts from the long grasses to fling their spears and fire their arrows into the side of Fabius’s Seventh Cohort, howling like banshees all the while. Though they had been on the march for six hours without a break, the Seventh responded instantly, bursting out of its marching line to hammer the braves with Roman steel. The assault turned into a running battle amid the trees of hickory and beech, and if the Iroqua were surprised at the turn of speed a fully armored legionary could attain, their surprise generally did not last long.

Throughout the Legion, Roman discipline prevailed. The cohorts behind and in front of the Seventh came to order, the nearer groups dashing into the fray while the centuries farther out hunkered down in defense. Sure enough, two more Iroqua bands burst out from behind the trees, one assaulting Marcellinus and the Roman standards at the head of the Legion and the other aiming to destroy the baggage train and perhaps capture the Romans’ slaves for their own use.

Neither attempt succeeded. The elite troops of Pollius Scapax mowed down the forward band of Iroqua with surgical skill and utter ruthlessness, and Marcellinus bloodied his gladius in combat for the first time on this campaign, cutting down four braves and crippling another. Meanwhile, in the rear the terrified Powhatani and other Algon-Quian
slaves circled the wagons and aided the stragglers of the Sixth in holding off the ululating Iroqua until the massed line of the Fourth slammed into the warriors, slaughtering them to a man.

Other smaller bands of painted Hesperians appeared helter-skelter amid the trees, and the Fifth and Second were the next to engage in a running fight in the meadows. This ended with the remains of the war parties encircled by Romans. Some twenty of the Iroqua tried to escape by climbing into a tree; the Romans set the tree ablaze and made them choose between death by fire and death by steel. Dozens of others, trapped on the ground, threw aside their slings and bows.

If by surrendering they expected to be spared to join their eastern brethren in the slave line, the Iroqua were sorely disappointed. The Legion needed no more slaves, and Marcellinus would not have trusted a warrior in the role as readily as a fisherman. Slavery was an economic contract between thinking beings, but Marcellinus knew these Iroqua to be feral creatures who would never knuckle under.

After mourning Thorkell Sigurdsson so recently, the men were not inclined to award their captives easy deaths, and Marcellinus would hardly insist on such a thing. Several more of his legionaries were dead and others still thrashed on the ground with poisoned flesh wounds, and he had no sympathy for an enemy that adopted such foul tactics as the Iroqua. He withdrew to secure the front of the legionary line and left his troops to their revenge. The screams of the braves troubled him little enough. He hoped the gruesome sounds would travel far enough to deter any further Hesperian foolishness.

They had marched sixteen miles that day, and it would have to be enough. Marcellinus sent in his tribunes and Scapax to declare a halt to the festivities, and his men cheerfully yielded and threw up the castra then and there in the clearing. Camp had never been set up so quickly.

“I see you’ve put the Briton in his place,” Corbulo said, dismounting to walk beside him. “A worthy decision.”

Gaius Publius Marcellinus was leading his horse, allowing it to walk unencumbered for a while. For his own part, it felt good to shake the
stiffness out of his legs, and the brisk exercise was helping to shift the fog from his thoughts.

He missed Aelfric’s easy companionship but was not about to confess it. “You were right,” he said shortly. “It’s easy for a man to grow careless.”

The views in Appalachia had often been stunning. Here in the lowlands, often surrounded once more by forest, the tedium of marching had taken over again. By now Marcellinus heartily endorsed Tully’s conviction that no Roman would want to farm here. The land had become ungodly flat. His eyes ached for want of a hill or even a hummock. He had never seen such a terrain. Like all learned men, Marcellinus knew that the earth was round like a ball, but even for him it was easy to imagine the world petering off into an increasingly featureless desert as they marched out of reality altogether.

“Killing Fuscus,” said his tribune. “Another worthy simplification. Easier not to hear his lying tongue at all than risk being misled by it.”

With uncanny precision Corbulo had just congratulated Marcellinus on the second matter that was troubling him. He could not dispel the knowledge that cutting down the word slave in cold blood had been shameful, despite the provocation, and was possibly as bad an error as that of the Roman captain who had slaughtered the Norse pirates. Information was always valuable. And in the Praetor’s personal experience, his acting in anger had rarely produced laudable results.

They hiked in silence. Marcellinus recognized that an olive branch was being offered, a bid to return to their former camaraderie, but could not find the words to respond. Corbulo’s moment of failure still hung in the air, surely the cause of the remaining awkwardness between them.
Everything’s all right, Lucius,
he wanted to say,
and I think no worse of you.
But that would admit the possibility that another man might have. Corbulo had ambition, and a persistent rumor about him panicking on the battlefield could be deadly to his career, sinking his chances of one day getting his own legion or advancing in politics. Somehow the thing must be dealt with without being acknowledged.

Unexpectedly, Corbulo raised the topic. He turned to Marcellinus
and said: “I apologize for my dithering back at the ambush. Thank you for plucking me upright. It was well done.”

Marcellinus recovered quickly from his surprise and waved his hand dismissively. “We were all startled.” He leaned over. “I hope my sandal print in your ribs is not causing you too much anguish.”

Corbulo laughed. “Always better to be beaten up by a friend.”

“I would never mention it to another soul, you know.”

“And I thank you for that,” was all Corbulo said, but Marcellinus felt the man’s spirits lift.

If only Marcellinus’s mood could be elevated so easily.

“I responded to murder with murder,” he said abruptly.

“What?’

Marcellinus bit his tongue and walked on, facing straight ahead.

“What choice did you have?” Corbulo asked. “You did what you had to. I’d have done the same.”

“Would you?”

“Of course.”

Marcellinus looked at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Very well, then. I should ride again.”

“We each have times when we doubt,” said his First Tribune quietly. “But we just need to stick together and get the job done. Whether or not there’s gold here, we can make this work for Hadrianus, you and I. In the conquest and annexation of such a vast area we can cover ourselves in glory. You can retire in comfort. I can move on to higher things. Let us not be enemies, Gaius. And let us not forget who rules this world.”

“I never shall,” said Marcellinus. “Count on it.”

As the month of Julius gave way to Augustus, the heat soared. The sky became white with humidity, and the air felt like a damp sponge against their skin. The shade of the few remaining stands of trees offered little relief. The moisture invaded the fabric of the tents and wouldn’t come out; by night the castra stank like a barnyard.

The occasional downpours just made it worse. The rain came down
in giant sheets of water that did not freshen the air but merely sat rancid overnight and then boiled off the soil in the morning sun in great mists.

Marcellinus had not known the air could hold so much liquid. Beneath his armor his tunic was permanently wet and would not dry out at night. His crotch felt like a fouled bird’s nest.

Bengal had sometimes been like this. But at least they’d had a cooling monsoon every afternoon and drier air by night. Here in Nova Hesperia, so far from the sea, the wind had forgotten how to blow. The soldiers were surly, and the horses spooked at nothing, their ears flat back against their heads.

The Hesperians were still out there. Another nine of his legionaries died, picked off and mutilated gruesomely while collecting firewood or stalking the white-tailed deer. With supplies this short, forbidding the men to hunt was futile, yet all too often they themselves became the prey.

By now everyone knew that they were going on, that there could be no return to the Chesapica before winter, that once the weather turned cold they would be building a fortress and staying put out here in the wilderness.

The heat and damp and uncertainty played with men’s tempers. Marcellinus lost an additional seven soldiers to violence when a brawl turned murderous and he had to execute the culprits. Once more he cursed the ill mix of the men given him to command: raw Nubians, Magyar mercenaries, veteran Teutons, and even some patrician Romans, a mixed bag of races and languages that turned his centurions into diplomats who spent as much time coaxing their men not to kill one another as they did in maintaining their battle readiness.

His feelings of isolation grew. Urbs Roma became a marbled dream. And just as his legion eroded further into squalor and ill temper, the barbarians around them seemed to grow ever more civilized.

Though they saw few natives, they passed plenty of evidence of their activities. The tents and lean-tos of the east had given way to firmer structures of wood and wattle and daub. In some areas the remains of broad tree stumps showed that the locals had torn down the forests for
farmland. Though Marcellinus was no lover of trees for trees’ sake, he was surprised at how much of an effect this had on him.