Clash of Eagles

by Alan Smale

  Marcellinus dropped his arm. His sword rent the air. Trumpets sounded. With a roar the Legion surged forward, but tightly, masterfully, and in control.

  Across the plaza the amassed braves raised their bows, their axes, their hoes. Marcellinus was sure they roared just as loudly as his own men, but thankfully he could not hear them.

  The Legion had methodically advanced a quarter of the distance separating them from the Cahokiani when the nearest houses burst into flame. Marcellinus had given the order to fire them in passing so that the enemy could not use them as cover, but these ignitions were not Roman doing. The thatched houses went up in a series of giant whumphs, burning with an intense red-white flare. What had the savages put in them to make them blaze so fiercely?

  Yet no real explosion came, no scattering of burning debris. Not a single Roman was harmed by the incendiaries. Nor were they accompanied by an ambush: no Hesperians tumbled out from behind a mound or inside a hut. The Legion marched forward steadily, its front line replenishing itself, inexorably closing the distance to the foe that waited on the other side of the Cahokiani plaza.

  The locals adopted no formation except the simple line, and still Marcellinus saw no leaders, no orders given. They seemed content to watch the Romans closing in.

  Up the Roman line to the north, Marcellinus saw the front ranks of the Fourth drop to one knee. Auxiliaries less encumbered by shields and armor and with fewer huts and mounds to navigate around, the Fourth had advanced more swiftly than the other cohorts and was now within arrow range.

  His attention was pulled back by cries of surprise from the men close by him. He followed their gaze and pointing fingers, and his eyes widened.

  From the summit of the Master Mound, the Cahokiani were shooting bodies into the air.

  Clearly a ballista or onager of considerable power ran up the far side of the giant mound. Marcellinus’s first thought—that they were lobbing diseased cattle carcasses as one might heft over a city wall to break a siege—was wrong; these were living humans that were being catapulted aloft with incredible heft and force. At the greatest altitude of their arc they unfurled broad wings in a sudden stroke to become the now familiar fixed-wing flying craft. In minutes, the air was alive with them.

  They dived low and fast over the cohorts like winged demons, each pilot feathered and bird masked and with an arrow nocked. They flew barely thirty feet above the Roman helmets but were so swift and agile that it would take a lucky pilum indeed to bring one down. Legionaries flung themselves right and left, breaking formation to avoid the flight paths of the wings, but even as Marcellinus drew breath to bellow a harsh command, he heard his centurions’ voices booming across the battlefield: “Raise up your shields!” “Maintain formation!” “Stand firm, damn you!”

  Discipline reestablished, the Legion lunged forward again. The front lines of the Fourth and Sixth Auxiliaries discharged a volley of arrows into the enemy line, advanced a dozen paces, and dropped to one knee; the men behind marched through to become the new front rank, firing their own swath of arrows into the massed bodies of the savages. A wave of Cahokiani stumbled and fell, the Roman arrows scraping off the whole front layer of the opposing army.

  Now Marcellinus saw the real purpose of the brightly burning huts. As the wings flew overhead, loosing many an arrow into a Roman breastplate, their paths inevitably took them over the burning houses, where their pilots expertly rode the hot, rising air up into the skies to recover their altitude. Again and again Marcellinus watched the human moths pass above the white fire and arc up into the sky, their skill even more dazzling than the flames. Three of the wings crossed paths a thousand feet above him, an incredible height with no strategic value, surely just an exhilarating distraction. But as Marcellinus watched them, he experienced another dizzying mental leap: the pilots were using their very patterns of flight to signal to their comrades. From their aerial vantage point the battle was laid out beneath them like a map. The wings were the ultimate surveillance tools: scouts in the sky.

  Something had become abundantly clear to Praetor Gaius Marcellinus: these people were not neophytes at war. The Cahokiani were a tribe—a nation—that had faced large-scale armed assault before, from the savage Iroqua, perhaps, or from even fiercer tribes that the Romans had not yet encountered.

  The aviators were not all men. Here came a woman, circling over him. She was alone and unarmed, ribbons streaming out behind her in the air; her job was surely to find the Praetor and loop over his position, perhaps marking him out for attack.

  A flaming arrow hit a hut that so far had remained unexploded, and it lit up like a torch. Greek fire, thought Marcellinus; these people had independently discovered Greek fire hundreds of years after the secret was lost on the Roman side of the Atlanticus. He made a note to keep some of their apothecaries and armorers—or perhaps their priests—alive at the end of this day, in addition to a handful of the pilots.

  The infantry at Marcellinus’s end of the line was now within bow range of the enemy. This time the Cahokians loosed a salvo of arrows first, a ragged torrent of sticks that scattered harmlessly off the tall Roman shields. The men of the First and Third cohorts jeered, drew, and sent a focused wave of metal-tipped death into the midst of the Cahokiani …

  But then, with a titanic roar the world changed again.

  Marcellinus’s gaze was wrenched skyward once more, and all of a sudden he became aware of his own labored breathing and the sweat that trickled down his forehead, the smell of thousands of men in armor, the screams of the wounded, the strong breeze from the west. And the massive, incredible shape that soared unsupported through the low skies toward them, spreading the broadest of shadows across the Roman army.

  “Jove!” he shouted, though he was a man who seldom cursed, and then, more reverently: “Thunderbird.” Because now everything made sense.

  Above them loomed a startling creation of sticks and skins, as if the longest of the Cahokiani longhouses had unfurled itself and taken flight. It did not flap like a bird but rocked on the breeze like a gull hovering over a cliff top. Mesmerized, Marcellinus noted how the Thunderbird swung steadily on the very air, how the dozen fliers who hung beneath it steered it with concerted leans and pulls and heavy shoves against the rudder bars they clutched, steering the giant craft in a smooth arc. The aerial leviathan flew south of him and then turned, the flying men using the warm air from the farthest of the burning huts to raise the craft’s nose.

  And here came a second Thunderbird, rising from behind the Master Mound in a thrumming whoosh that surely was caused by the passage of the air over the giant wing and the vibrating of the skins stretched between the wooden poles.

  Bitter laughter bubbled in Marcellinus’s throat at the audacity of it. This was why the Cahokiani had built their giant mounds. It was not merely a conceit to put themselves closer to their gods or for their privileged classes to look down upon their people from on high. It was to train their pilots. Why go to the trouble of building a mound in the featureless flatness of the bottomlands if not to throw yourself off it? Lining the far side of the mound must be the ballista to end all ballistas, used both to fling the insanely courageous braves in their tiny single-man wings to suicidal heights and to launch these behemoths of the air.

  These beasts had not been fabricated purely for the joy of riding the winds. Marcellinus saw the row of sacks hanging beneath the wings of the first Thunderbird even as the braves began releasing them to fall into the infantry of his First and Second Cohorts.

  A burning thunderclap rippled toward the Praetor, blowing him backward. The screams of his men merged into a single agonized wail as the liquid fire of Nova Hesperia rained down across entire centuries of his men. Those not directly smitten by the deadly flaring liquid fell to the ground once they trod in it with their sandaled feet, there to roll in torment. Through the bright afterimages that dazzled his eyes, Marcellinus saw the red flaming weals on his soldiers’ bodies as they frantically tugged their armor aw
ay, smelled their seared flesh. Men who splashed water from their canteens onto their burning skin howled anew, as the water did not quench the fire but only spread it further.

  The second Thunderbird lumbered over them, directed and shepherded by the smaller wings, sparrows looping around eagles. Marcellinus viewed its trajectory carefully, but the crew of this bird was saving its firebombs for cohorts farther up the line; as he watched, it shed Greek fire into the square formations of the Fourth and Fifth Cohorts. By then his centurions had called their infantry into the defensive testudo formation, their solid metal shields interlocked above them in the tortoiselike structure that gave the formation its name. But huge and terrifying gouts of liquid poured over them, the fire splashed and dripped between the shields, and the shell of the tortoise splintered quickly as the soldiers flung their bodies back and forth in the same terrible dance as their comrades in the First and Second.

  In a single pass the two Thunderbirds had rendered a thousand Romans ineffective.

  All the formations Marcellinus could see had fallen apart. And clearly audible above the screams of the Romans came the battle cries of the Cahokiani as they sprinted across the hundred short yards that separated the armies, their clubs and hoes raised high above their heads.

  Marcellinus bellowed, ripping his voice hoarse with commands to the troops around him to fall in and regain fighting formation. He ordered his Romans to set pila and march forward and his Teutons and Scythians to ready axes and gladii for the melee, but his words were swept away in the din.

  The two armies crashed together. Marcellinus felt the visceral shock as Roman met Hesperian. The exultation of combat filled him, and the surge of simple ecstasy threatened to explode his heart. With battle joined, no doubts remained, no fears of fiery torture or flint-tipped death, no visions of his lost family or regrets at the man he had become; even the memory of his tribunes’ treachery was swept aside. Marcellinus had dedicated his life to moments like these. It was time to fight.

  In his nose was the smell of battle, the blood and mud and dust; in his ears, the warrior roars, the din of steel on wood, flint on steel, the screams of the wounded, and the pounding of his pulse. The frenzy around him became a series of sharp images: a Cahokiani brave baying as he held aloft a curly-haired Roman scalp, the sickening crunch as a pilum cleaved a path between ribs into a living heart, a Roman sandal skidding in blood, a plumed helmet banged aside by an ax head, the skull beneath smashed open in the backswing. The people of the Great City of Nova Hesperia showed themselves no simple brawlers after all but true warriors, less armored and drilled than the soldiers of the Imperium but with a berserker strength equal to that of any Roman.

  Marcellinus dispatched a tattooed dervish armed only with a hoe who seemed nonetheless to be moving with preternatural speed. He took a fearful blow to his shield and at the same time planted his gladius into the man’s face and saw him fall, cheek and throat gashed to the bone. With a fluid motion Marcellinus tugged the sword free and spun to meet the next threat, then froze in midswing. For it was a woman who attacked him now, fierce and howling yet large-breasted and unarmored, ridiculously vulnerable. As he paused, her club struck him full on the helmet; he dropped to a knee to absorb the pain, his ears ringing, and sliced through the woman’s thigh. As she fell, he threw himself forward, his shield grinding her head into the muck.

  She stopped moving. Marcellinus spared himself not a moment to wonder whether she was dead or merely unconscious but hurled himself at the next of them. Knowing that that one short moment of hesitation could have been his last added even more vigor to his arm.

  For a while it seemed that Marcellinus fought alone, a single man against the ferocious horde. Then soldiers bearing the signum of the Fourth Century of the First Cohort found him and began to group around him in a rough phalanx. Pollius Scapax was there, dispatching barbarians with ruthless and narrow-eyed efficiency while still finding the breath to bark orders to the other Roman troops nearby, gathering them around their Praetor.

  A Thunderbird roared over them, and Marcellinus leaped up, gladius outstretched, as if he could actually have slashed it from the sky.

  They had to stop this. They had to destroy the launching system that threw the giant wings aloft. If it wasn’t already too late.

  Whirling, Marcellinus got his bearings.

  “Scapax! The mound!”

  His First Centurion nodded and bellowed orders. His soldiers closed up and surged forward, crashing once more into the thinned battle line, fifty men with swords and shields in a wedge-shaped cuneus formation with Marcellinus and Scapax fighting side by side at its tip.

  Fury and pain drenched the air, and for a while it all became a blur again. Then, miraculously, the Roman squad was running unassailed through corpses. Beside and behind them the melee still raged, yet only a short stretch of mud separated them from the palisade of the Cahokiani. They had punched their way through the barbarian army and out the other side.

  A quarter mile north, the new Thunderbird disgorged its bellyful of fire. Close by, yet another bird creaked in the air, flying in the opposite direction.

  Marcellinus cast his shield aside and ran, the thud of each sandal fall sending a bang of pain up his spine and into his head. Beside him ran Scapax, and behind them the remains of the First Cohort.

  The Master Mound grew before their eyes. The gates of the palisade were open. The Cahokiani guards at the gates backed up and made no move to prevent them from running on through. Marcellinus heard a new cacophony in his ears and realized it was his own voice screaming out the names of Roma and Titus Augustus; in addition to his country, he was invoking the name of an Imperator long dead.

  Now Marcellinus was on the mound, and he pounded up it with all the energy and determination he could muster. It wasn’t enough. The earthwork was enormous, and after the travails of battle, a sprint to the top of it was beyond him.

  At the first plateau, where the steep incline leveled out, Marcellinus bent over, panting. Sweat poured into his eyes, and the hot fire of combat had drained from his blood. Far above at the mound’s crest he could see the top of the giant unmarked wooden building. A palace? Temple? Marshaling yard for the wings? Below them was the palisade, and beyond that the battlefield they had left behind.

  Beside him Scapax roared orders at the tattered remnants of the cuneus, bringing them together and back into close order for the last stand. From the top of the mound and around its sides came the Cahokiani, long spears at the ready.

  The end was brief and bloody. The braves overwhelmed them, bowling the Romans over and back down the side of the mound and then leaping after them to rain blows upon them. Marcellinus saw Scapax go down, three of the Cahokiani beating him with clubs and finishing him with a spear thrust, just before his own gladius was knocked out of his hand and he was barged off his feet and onto his back. Two Cahokiani sat on Marcellinus’s legs and arms, and another pulled off his plumed helmet, leaving him bareheaded and unprotected, almost steaming.

  He was pinned ignominiously, trapped against the soil of the Master Mound. He struggled, desisting only when his own pugio was jabbed at his face, perilously close to his eye. Around him Cahokians screeched, gleeful.

  It was over. Marcellinus panted, staring at the sky, waiting to be speared or bludgeoned or scalped, waiting for the end.

  It did not come.

  He heard no command, but his captors got off him, rising to their feet and looking around them and down to the plaza below. Cautiously, Marcellinus sat up to see where they were looking. The savages did not stop him, but the two who flanked him kept a watchful eye on him.

  Down in the plaza some areas of fighting still raged, a last desperate effort by the few remaining Roman centuries to take as many barbarians to hell with them as they could. One of the fiercest pockets of resistance marked the distant area where the Fourth Cohort had been; Marcellinus hoped Aelfric was still fighting and would die well. Such pockets aside, the battlefield was a morass
of downed Romans, charred leather, and blackened steel doused in blood. From this elevation it was clear beyond doubt that Marcellinus’s army was no more.

  The 33rd Hesperian Legion had been utterly destroyed in a matter of minutes.

  From the fringes of the killing ground, some Romans fled eastward. Marcellinus did not begrudge them their escape. For him there could be no future that way. Even if he could escape from the mound and catch up with the fragments of his Legion, they’d probably kill him. And then on the terrible march back to the Chesapica, the Iroqua would kill them.

  Two Thunderbirds had landed, one in a cornfield far distant and the other at the northern edge of the Urbs Cahokiani. The nearer bird was being carried back into the palisade by its pilots; from Marcellinus’s vantage point it looked like an enormous crawling insect. In the distant sky two other aerial bombers turned in formation and flew back toward the mound, their giant wings flexing in the invisible air currents. And in the air far above him, fliers wearing the individual wings still danced like dragonflies, wheeling and swooping in victory.

  One of the small wings separated itself from the throng and spiraled down. It shot over his head at speed and looped around. Its pilot pushed up her craft’s nose to spill air and landed running along the plateau toward Marcellinus. Ribbons fluttered behind the wing.

  The pilot shrugged out of her wing harness and laid the wing carefully against the slope of the mound. Marcellinus’s captors drew back to let her pass.

  Sisika wore a light leather tunic that was haphazardly cut. Her falcon mask hung around her neck. In her hair she wore a band studded with eagle feathers. Her face was painted with swirling marks, a forked pattern around her eyes making her look even more hawklike. Back east she had not worn such marks, perhaps adapting to local customs. That had been bravery, he now realized: to come all that way just to see the Romans for herself.