Clash of Eagles (22 page)

Marcellinus looked around for Tahtay or Kimimela. By now he knew a few hundred basic conversational and combat words in Cahokian and could sign and understand much more complicated gestural sentences, but Great Sun Man knew no Latin and rarely deigned to use hand-talk with him. This conversation might quickly exceed Marcellinus’s language skills.

“Joke? Ha-ha?”

“Not joke.” The war chief eyed him suspiciously and then looked around at the First Cahokian. “Fight.”

“So we fight? Where?”

“Sunrise.” Great Sun Man pointed east in the Cahokian style by turning to face the sun so that his left side was aligned eastward. “Mizipi, then Oyo, and then,” he gestured, “Iroqua long camp.”

“What?”

“Iroqua build winter? No-no. We fight. Kill Iroqua.”

Marcellinus couldn’t follow this. “Uh, wait, sorry, where’s your son?”

Tahtay’s excitement at the news was infectious. “Cahokia scouts have found Iroqua war camp, past Snake Mound along Oyo River, long-way. They, Iroqua warriors, build up camp there for winter. A place called Woshakee. We cannot let them stay so close. We go now, destroy Iroqua long camp before winter, kill much Iroqua.”

“We all?” He turned to Great Sun Man. “Tahtay come, too, Iroqua battle-fight?”

Great Sun Man said something Marcellinus didn’t understand, then, seeing the Roman’s baffled expression, simplified his words. “Yes. Tomorrow before dawn, we go. Many warriors. You and your—” He gestured at the men around them a little quizzically. “—fighters. We see what you do. And Tahtay, for words, my son Tahtay, for man, for battle. I have spoken.”

The war chief walked off abruptly; the conversation was always at an end after “I have spoken.” Marcellinus shook his head and turned to Tahtay. “What did Great Sun Man say?”

He hardly needed to ask. Tahtay was grinning from ear to ear. “Great Sun Man say time for Tahtay to come to war, time for Tahtay to become a man!”

“Really?” Marcellinus was appalled. A boy of only eleven winters? Even his signiferi in the 33rd Legion had been several winters—several years—older than
that.

“Eat well today,” the boy advised him with the air of a seasoned professional. “Food on warpath very bad, hard meat and berries.”

He meant dried deer meat pressed into small cakes, tough and unappetizing. Marcellinus had seen it before. “Yes. I will eat well.”

Tahtay ran off, skipping in a most unwarriorlike way, and it was only then that the true import of Great Sun Man’s words sank in.

Marcellinus was going to war against the Iroqua. With the Cahokians.
Leading
Cahokians by the sound of it, or at least his own small unit of them.

After a long and sometimes frustrating convalescence, Marcellinus was certainly ready to see some action. But the First Cahokian? His efforts with them to be tested so soon?

The consequences of failure might be huge. Fatal, even if he survived the Iroqua. Marcellinus was under no illusions: he was still very much on probation with the Cahokian war chief.

“Great Juno …”

He looked up at the sun. It was midafternoon. There was still time.

“Akecheta!” He ran back toward his men. “Akecheta! Centurion! Warriors, fall in!”

R
ather than build a winter camp, the Iroqua had stolen one.

“These, Mohawk Iroqua,” said Great Sun Man as they paddled down the Mizipi. The war chief took his turn at the oar just as often as any of his men. Marcellinus had been quickly exempted from rowing duties; he could not match the power and precision of the Cahokians, and the repetitive nature of the paddling put strain on his shoulder, his ribs, and even the wound in his stomach. So, much to his humiliation, he got to loll around in the war canoe for hours on end while the other warriors propelled them vigorously down the Mizipi. Even Tahtay got to paddle from time to time.

At least it kept them warm. The chill had long ago crept into Marcellinus’s bones. Along with being hotter than Roma in the summer, apparently this Hesperian latitude was all set to be colder in the autumn and winter as well.

“Mohawks.” Marcellinus nodded. “And long camp?”

Great Sun Man spoke to Tahtay for what felt like several minutes. Marcellinus looked at the flotilla of war canoes that followed in their wake. Great Sun Man’s canoe had been the last to push off from the riverbank at Cahokia but by now had passed through the formation to take the lead.

With so few leaves on the trees, the conspicuousness of their passage
was making Marcellinus nervous. They were sitting ducks out there, and the breastplate he was wearing against arrows would drag him deep into the water if their canoe capsized in an attack. Even though the Cahokians assured him they had many days’ travel ahead before they encountered the Mohawks, Marcellinus felt ridiculously unprepared. He wanted all the details of what they were up against.

“The Mohawk take a city,” Tahtay said. “Small city, fives-of-hundred mans and womans. City of our people.”

“Cahokians?”

“From Cahokia, no, but our people. People of the Mounds, most along the Mizipi but also the near rivers. Mohawk take that city, Woshakee, by creep, by sneak. They kill the warriors, take the womans and children. In the Mourning War they need children to replace braves they lose, need womans to make more children.”

“Very nice,” said Marcellinus. “So, this city?”

“City has palis …?”

“Tall tree logs around it, like a wall? ‘Palisade.’ Or ‘stockade.’ ”

“Yes, palisade, to stop attack. But Mohawks big clever and walk in with traders, then kill by night. So now they have a town close to Cahokia, with corn and many womans, and they can grow fat over winter and then rise and raid us, kill us quick when the first thaw come.”

“But we will kill them quick instead. Now.”

“Yes.”

Marcellinus was going with a couple of hundred Cahokian warriors to besiege a walled city. He wondered what their chances were. “This happen before, Iroqua steal a city?”

“No. This new.”

“Do your enemies build stockades around their cities, too? Cahokians have attacked cities with stockades before?”

“No. This new, too.”

Marcellinus grimaced. “It would have been good to know this before we left Cahokia, Tahtay. We could have prepared, made special weapons and practiced drills for this. If we have to beat our way through a palisade, we need battering rams or borers. Did we bring liquid flame?”

“Yes,” Tahtay said. “We have liquid flame in clay pots. Some. On canoes, not safe bring much.”

“And do Iroqua have liquid flame?”

Tahtay had been translating over his shoulder so his father would hear the conversation, too. Great Sun Man responded. “Yes. Iroqua use it before. Iroqua liquid flame not good as Cahokian liquid flame.”

Well, of course not. “And I suppose a couple of score of good siege ladders would be too much to hope for? Even some picks and crowbars?”

At least they had brought shields. Against Great Sun Man’s protests that they would weigh down the canoes and slow them down, Marcellinus had managed to bring four dozen of the tall rectangular shields for those of his men whom he’d trained in their use late in the afternoon before they left. That last-minute training looked even more fortuitous now.

“Yes, they have the flame, too,” Tahtay added superfluously. “But why we need break stockade? Mohawk will come out and fight us. Why not?”

With a perfectly good fort around them? Marcellinus doubted it. Iroqua honor and Cahokian honor were two very different animals. “We’ll see. Tell me more about city, about land around it. How far from river? There are trees, hills, what?”

Tahtay asked Great Sun Man, who seemed impatient at the question. “No. He never go. I never go.”

Marcellinus stared. “Has
anyone
in this canoe been to the city we’re going to relieve?”

Tahtay inquired, but Marcellinus could interpret the brief head gestures and grunts of the other fifteen warriors in the canoe for himself.

“Juno, protect us all,” he said.

“Change paddle men,” Great Sun Man said. “Change!”

And they did, with great nimbleness, walking up and down the canoe in midstream as if they were on land, nobody falling in the water or even needing to grab on to anything for support. That, at least, was impressive.

“You people could teach the Norsemen a thing or two.”

“ ‘Norsemen’ is what?” Tahtay asked.

“Never mind.”

It took them twelve days to travel to the vicinity of the captured city, Woshakee. For the first three days they paddled down the Mizipi, going with the current. During that time they passed several Cahokian-style villages and towns positioned up against the river, their reed-thatched roofs surrounding mounds of various sizes. The larger towns were protected by full palisades, but without firing platforms, and the villages had only low fences that looked like they would fall to a strong sneeze. Tahtay told Marcellinus that those fences were made by weaving branches together and then painting them with mud; as in some areas in northern Europa, they were fit only for keeping cattle in … if these people had had any cattle.

On the second day the Mizipi narrowed to flow through a rocky bottleneck. Here the Cahokians stopped for a few minutes to pay tribute to an immense rock that sat in the water near the riverbank. The rock was covered with petroglyphs: spirals, painted eyes, and falcon glyphs and figures of men, and weaving through them all the sinuous form of a snake that extended all the way from the crown of the rock down into the water and, presumably, beyond. The rock must have weighed a dozen tons, and the glyphs looked older than anything Marcellinus had seen in Cahokia, which meant older than anything he’d yet seen in Nova Hesperia.

Kiche, the shaman acolyte, climbed onto the rock and lit six fire bowls, dedicating them to north and south, east and west, above and below, while the canoes maintained their station in the current with some difficulty. The other warriors, at least the ones not paddling, bowed their heads in reverence and chanted briefly.

“Sky,” Tahtay said, pointing upward, and “Land under,” pointing down, far down by the way he was emphasizing it.

“Yes,” said Marcellinus. He had moved to the stern of their canoe half out of respect for the Cahokians’ traditions and half out of embarrassment
at their superstition; even now it was hard for him to square the pragmatic and down-to-earth everyday aspect of the Cahokians with the more superstitious and pagan side that came alive during their nighttime ceremonies and the occasional daytime rituals like this.

“Is Rock of Thunderbird and River Snake,” Takoda said with a reproving air as the men moved back to their positions in the canoes and prepared to go on.

“So I see,” said Marcellinus.

“Water and air join here with the earth, and we thank them.”

“I’m glad.” Marcellinus was aware he was failing a test, but he didn’t believe it was a critical one, and he really had no choice. He could not pretend to an animist faith his own people had mostly left behind centuries ago. What he wanted most of all was not the blessing of the air and the underworld but to make faster progress across the water.

On the fourth day, after looping through a series of long oxbows flanked by lush woodlands, they came to the confluence of the Mizipi and Oyo rivers. The river junction was guarded heavily on both sides by stockades manned by scores of dour-looking warriors dressed like Cahokians but with less elaborate tattoos and little distinctive finery—no copper ear spools and only a few shell necklaces—and the weapons they carried were mostly chert-studded clubs and plain spears.

“Ocatan, this,” said Tahtay. “Fort, yes? On the water.”

At Ocatan they picked up another ten canoes’ worth of warriors, their boats riding out to join the Cahokian force and slotting neatly into the formation as it paddled by. All somehow prearranged.

Once they made the turn, the going got harder. The Oyo was a much broader river than the Mizipi and with bluer waters, and they were now paddling against the current rather than with it.

“How much farther?” Marcellinus asked, pointing behind them, much to Tahtay’s confusion. “What I mean is Oyo and Mizipi join here to make one river. How far is the mare, the big water, south down the Mizipi, that way?”

Tahtay didn’t know. He asked Great Sun Man, who replied, “One moon.”

To Marcellinus the riverbank had appeared to be rushing by as their
shallow-draft canoes were paddled vigorously by a dozen men at a time. “No. A month? Thirty days paddling from here?”

“Maybe longer, maybe farther.”

Even now, Marcellinus was daunted by the scale of Nova Hesperia. “And how far upriver?”

Great Sun Man shrugged and spoke to Tahtay, who reported, “Another moon. Until cold. And then, forever.”

The evening before they reached Woshakee, the canoes pulled in to the shore at dusk. By this time Marcellinus was weary just from watching other men work.

It would be futile for Marcellinus to warn them against setting a fire. They wouldn’t listen to him anyway, and at this time of year they could hardly survive the night without one. With careful selection of fallen wood the Cahokians kept the amount of smoke that rose above the trees to a minimum, and they did not cook over it to avoid flavoring the wind with the scents of their food. Nonetheless, Marcellinus was sure that the Mohawks would know they were coming.