by Alan Smale
He stood and took up the body once more. Again the Cahokian struck him down. Marcellinus tasted blood: fresh blood here where there was already so much. He thought of bearing his breast to the man. Thought of goading him, fighting back just enough to force his own death.
The brave pointed to the tattoos on his chest and arms, spit on the ground, pointed at the dead men around them, the jabs of his fingers rough and accusatory.
The sun blinked. Another brave had leaped over Marcellinus and seized the screaming warrior by the shoulders. More men arrived, shouting and gesturing, shoving at one another, some pointing at Marcellinus and snarling, others pointing toward the Great Mound. Marcellinus sat up and wiped his mouth, put his head in his hands, and waited for the argument over his fate to be resolved.
… And still they didn’t kill him.
Morning gave way to afternoon. Marcellinus took no break, stopped for no rest, accepting only a bowl of water a woman halfheartedly held out to him around noon.
The charnel pit was a long walk off to the east, a shallow rectangular grave that already contained several hundred Cahokian bodies. At first Marcellinus wanted to protest, although he had no words to speak that they would comprehend: the grave was not deep enough, the dead would be defiled, the Cahokians’ dogs and other wild animals would dig up the corpses, human bones would proliferate through the area, disease would spread.
Then he looked around, and the answer became obvious. A mound would be built here over the valiant Cahokian dead, a permanent memorial to their sacrifice.
He nodded, spit the flies out of his mouth, and trudged back to the battlefield to hoist another corpse onto his shoulders.
But now, logical thought having restarted in his brain, he had another idea. He walked out beyond the plaza, back the way the Roman army had come, until he came to the carts they had hauled across the continent. The baggage train was still loaded just as he had last seen it; the Cahokiani had no use for Roman tents, and they needed none of the Romans’ dwindling supply of corn, hard cheese, and wine. There was no sign of the slaves who had hauled the carts across Nova Hesperia. Even the horses had disappeared. Whether the beasts had been freed by the Cahokians, escaped by themselves, or been slaughtered for their meat was beyond his power to guess.
Marcellinus had thought that the carts could be unloaded and pressed into service to ferry the dead to their final resting place, but once again he could not make himself understood. Unsurprisingly, the few braves nearby ignored all his gestures, and unloading a wagon and hauling it to the battlefield was quite beyond the efforts of one man.
He took a long drink of wine, unwatered. Its brackish, sour taste helped cut the gummy residue in his mouth and throat but sent a cloud of dizziness over him again. He clutched the tall wheel of the cart until it passed, took a second swig, and went back to work.
As a professional soldier, Marcellinus found it a little galling that so few of the dead bodies on the battlefield were Cahokian. As a human being, he felt oddly comforted.
For his dead Roman legionaries, there would be no memorial mound. The charnel pit dug for the Romans was a converted borrow pit out in the marshland, and their bodies were burned in batches once they had been stripped of weaponry and armor. Marcellinus was dourly content. They were just empty husks now, broken forms that his valiant men had no further need of. Better that they be burned and have their essence rise into the Hesperian air than rot in the damp earth. Their memorial would be in his mind, where it would loom greater than any grass-covered mound.
More upsetting than the burning of the corpses was the scalping. As Sisika had promised months before, the Cahokians often cut off the Romans’ hair, carving it whole off the skull beneath. Many of the legionaries Marcellinus doggedly ferried to the Roman charnel pit had the characteristic red band hacked out of their heads, in some cases blackened and stale, in others still weeping blood. It was also clear that many of the Romans had been strangled.
Aside from Marcellinus, the Cahokians had not spared the wounded.
By midafternoon all the Roman corpses on the battlefield had been stripped of their helmets and breastplates. At least Marcellinus did not need to perform that task. He did, however, find a pugio the Cahokians had missed, ground into the blood-soaked dirt beneath the body of a Hispanic auxiliary from Fabius’s Seventh Cohort. The soldier had been so comprehensively butchered that Marcellinus had almost left him where he lay for someone else to deal with, but perhaps the dead Roman’s blade was his reward for gritting his teeth and honoring the man’s sacrifice. Marcellinus slid the grimy dagger inside his tunic before dragging the auxiliary to his final resting place.
At day’s end they were still not done. Marcellinus trooped off to the broad and winding creek that ran just north of the city with the rest of the Cahokian workers and dipped his aching body into the water to sluice off the worst of the dried blood and muck. By now he received little more than dull, resentful stares from the Cahokians.
It seemed that outside the heat of battle none of them would even stoop to murder him. So be it.
Marcellinus stumbled and fell on his knees from exhaustion several times on his way back into the city. Today’s heavy exercise had reopened his wounds, and scabs of new blood now caked them. His stomach hurt, a hard knot of pain and emptiness at its center, but he could not have faced food even if any had been offered. He walked through the palisade gates of the Great Mound and curled up on the bare ground where he had awoken that morning, at the base of the pole they had bound him to. He was sound asleep well before sunset.
He awoke to the same old woman shaking him by the shoulder. Her gray braids tickled his chest. The sun was already well above the trees and river bluffs to the east as she guided him, hobbling badly, to her hut.
This time the young mother and her baby had already made themselves scarce. Marcellinus splashed his face with water; swallowed sour tea and some corn gruel, this time supplemented with beans and a pulpy yellow vegetable he could not identify; then pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.
He meant to bow to his benefactor to express his thanks the only way he knew how, but once he bent forward at the waist, he lost his balance and kept going, toppling to the ground. He was dimly aware that she rushed to his side, shaking him, but he had no strength left to tell her to stop, that he was not worth the trouble, that it would not make any difference, anyway.
He lost consciousness with her worried babble filling his ears and did not awaken all that day or all the night that followed.
Marcellinus opened his eyes. He was lying on a straw pallet in a Cahokian hut. Three children stood in the doorway.
Disoriented, he sat up. Pain lanced through his forehead, and the walls shimmered. He squinted through it. The inside of the hut was bare, and so was he, almost; he was wearing a breechcloth that only just preserved his modesty.
His tunic lay at the foot of his bed, neatly folded. It had been rinsed out after a fashion but was still brown in patches, streaked with his blood and the blood of countless others. Also on the bed were a clean Cahokian-style deerskin tunic and the small golden lares that had been tied into the pocket of his tunic for luck and safekeeping. He was most surprised to see the pugio he had stolen from the battlefield, its blade and hilt scrubbed clean of the gore that had caked them.
The oldest boy said something in a clear piping voice. The girl added a few words in a strained tone but then smiled nervously. Marcellinus realized that it was the sound of her voice that had awoken him several seconds earlier.
Their words did not sound like the Algon-Quian that Fuscus and the other Powhatani had spoken. Another belated realization, something else Marcellinus had been aware of without consciously articulating: the Cahokian language was different from that of the Powhatani. That meant, he supposed, that Sisika must speak both tongues.
The boy took a step down into the hut and raised his hand, said something else. The smallest child, who had not yet spoken, gasped in fear and tugged at the t
aller boy’s arm until he reluctantly stepped safely back outside the doorway.
“Give me a moment,” Marcellinus said. He swung his legs off the bed. They felt rubbery, and once again the walls danced around him. “Uh, wait outside. Go away.” He made shooing motions, but not unkindly, and the children retreated into the bright world outside his door and let the animal skin that covered it fall back into place.
The hut was smaller in area than his Praetorium tent but, oddly, taller. It had no windows. Rafters supported a peaked roof of rushes and prairie grass, and light came in through a broad hole in the roof’s center, directly over what looked like a fire pit with a hearth of rough stones. The walls were of wooden struts covered with reed mats. The sleeping pallet and its mattress were the only furniture.
There was no chamber pot. What was he supposed to do? He stood and took a few experimental steps. When he touched his face, his hands did not come away bloody. In fact, it looked as if somebody had smeared a paste or salve of some kind over his wounds.
Marcellinus stood under the chimney hole and inspected his legs and arm. Sure enough, a white substance had been plastered over the gashes. Flexing his leg, he realized that his wound had been stitched up while he slept, before the salve had been applied. The paste smelled fresh and natural. Beneath it, of course, Marcellinus stank, but at least he stank of good honest sweat and not of pus or gangrenous infection. He would be keeping all his limbs.
He pulled on his stained Roman tunic, leaving the alternative Cahokian garment where it lay, After a moment of thought he slipped the clean pugio inside his tunic; if he was allowed to own it, presumably he was allowed to carry it. His Roman sandals were nowhere to be seen, leaving him little choice but to slip on the moccasins at the foot of his bed. He went to the door. Its doorway was to the south, with the sun cutting through it obliquely. It must be morning, then. The floor level in the hut was a good nine inches lower than the ground level outside, perhaps to help keep the hut cool in summer and preserve its heat in winter. Clumsily, he stepped up and out.
He was well away from where he’d lost consciousness, on the opposite side of the plaza from the old woman’s hut. Beyond the plaza rose the Great Mound, solid and imposing in the early sunshine. By its palisade, immense stacks of Roman armor and weapons glinted a burnished silver. The skies were filled with puffy clouds, and some of the humidity had dissipated. At any other time Marcellinus might have called it a lovely day.
The three children sat on the ground to the left of the door. On seeing him, they rose bashfully. The youngest child was a boy, he saw now; it had been difficult to tell earlier, as his hair was just as long as the girl’s.
“Uh, bathroom?” Marcellinus said. “Latrina? A pot to piss in? Um?”
The eldest boy raised his right hand, palm out, as if he were telling Marcellinus to stop, but the next moment the other two children did it, too. A greeting, then. The boy pointed to his own chest. “Tahtay,” he said, self-importantly.
“Yeah,” said Marcellinus, looking around. The nearest stand of trees was some distance away.
The girl pointed at herself. “Kimimela.”
“Gaius,” Marcellinus said. “Look, wait here a moment.” They padded after him regardless. “No! No. Stop. Sit down. Stay right there. Stay!”
“Tahtay!” said the boy, aggrieved.
“Yes, yes, Tahtay. Gaius.” Oh, hell. He mimed inexpertly what he needed to do, and the girl spun away with a blush and a screech. The boys cackled, and the smaller one pointed at a hut set apart from the others, a couple of hundred feet away.
“Uh, sorry,” Marcellinus said. “Look … I’ll be right back.”
Marcellinus had no particular affinity for children; he had stopped talking to them at roughly the time he had stopped being one himself. He had treated his own daughter, Vestilia, like an adult from the time she was six.
The tallest boy was eleven winters old, and his name was indeed Tahtay, which when mimed meant “the storm” or perhaps just “the wind.” Kimimela’s name meant “butterfly” based on the shape she drew in the dirt and the way she fluttered her arms, and she was eight winters old. The smallest of the three was called Enopay, which meant “bold” or “brave” or “defiant” or some other idea synonymous with standing up straight and strutting around with his fists up, and none of the three knew how old Enopay might be.
They were disappointed that his name, Gaius Marcellinus, didn’t mean anything and couldn’t be mimed, and they seemed dubious about the number of winters he claimed. They addressed him as “Gaiss” to his face but referred to him as “Hotah” or “Wanageeska” or “Eyanosa” when they discussed him among themselves. When Marcellinus, with some trepidation, tried to inquire what those words meant, they—predictably—just pointed at him and grinned.
They had obviously been sent to learn his language, and Tahtay, above all, took his task very seriously. As soon as Marcellinus had walked back to them from the latrine, Tahtay had pointed to his legs and said a word, then pointed for Marcellinus to sit, then said another word. Jumping to his feet and walking, Tahtay repeated the first word, whereupon Marcellinus said “Tahtay ambulas,” and Kimimela clapped her hands in delight and made a sign with both hands that had to mean the same thing: walking.
After that the work began in earnest, with Tahtay miming an action or an idea, saying a word, and then inviting Marcellinus to say the word in his own tongue. Their young brains soaked up his Latin like sponges.
Their efforts to teach him spoken Cahokian in return were an abject failure. Marcellinus could hold a Cahokian word in his mind only until Tahtay said something else, and then the first word slid out of his head as if it had never been there. He did much better with the gestural language, the hand-talk as Kimimela called it, because the gestures had their own logic; the sign for water involved pretending to drink from your cupped hand, sleep had him resting his cheek against his hands, and the sign for question—the most useful gesture of all and one he used constantly—required him to hold up his hand with his fingers open and waggle it at the wrist.
Even so, by noon Marcellinus was wearying of the effort, and the weight of his guilt was growing inside him once again. He swallowed the last of the chewy hazelnut cakes they had brought him, raised his hands in surrender, and stood.
“Hand-talk,” said Tahtay sternly in barely comprehensible Latin. “Sit, hand-talk hand-talk.”
Marcellinus swung his hand back and forth in the gesture for No and gestured Walk, graves.
“Walk to river,” Enopay counteroffered in Latin.
Walk graves, then walk river, signed Marcellinus.
Kimimela grimaced and gestured No. “Kimi hit food,” she said aloud.
“What?” Marcellinus said, and knocked twice on his right forearm with his left fist, which was the sign they had developed for when someone needed a definition.
Enopay mimed it. Kimimela, seeing what he was doing, mimed the same thing faster, as if competing or trying to catch up. “Huh,” said Tahtay, a grunt he had picked up from Marcellinus.
Marcellinus thought he understood. He pointed to Enopay’s arms. “Grind?” He pointed to the space beneath. “Corn?” He mimed eating to try to confirm it.
“Kimimela grind corn. No walk graves, grind corn,” said the girl.
“That’s quite a lot of Latin for one day,” Marcellinus said.
“Hand-talk!”
Marcellinus stood. The inactivity had rendered his leg muscles almost immobile. He tried not to let the children see how stiff and weary he was, wondering what the word for pride was. “Enopay,” probably.
He bowed solemnly to her. “Farewell, Kimimela.”
Kimimela laughed and ran, her pigtails bobbing.
Having gotten rid of the girl, Tahtay and Enopay were keen to enlarge their vocabularies still further, with the result that in short order Marcellinus had learned the Cahokian words for urine and feces. Oddly, they stuck in his mind much better than the other words. However, Tahtay�
��s next mimed question was even more vulgar, a bridge too far for one so young, and Marcellinus shook his head in embarrassment and took a step away. “Gaius walk graves.”
Obligingly, they jumped up to escort him.
Marcellinus wasn’t sure about taking the boys to the battlefield, but he couldn’t imagine how to parse a sentence complex enough to ask whether their parents would object. He hadn’t yet taught them father or mother and, put to the test, couldn’t think of a suitable mime for those words at that moment.
He gestured No. “Enopay, Tahtay. Sit. Gaius walk.” He took a few experimental steps, shooed them away.
It didn’t work. “Tahtay walk graves.”
He walked across the plaza with a boy on each side. Cahokians carrying pots or straw glanced curiously at them; the boys strode along, proud of their important task, and Marcellinus nodded as politely and solemnly as if they were promenading on the Capitoline Hill on a fine Roman afternoon.
The heat was building, and the air was growing fetid. Marcellinus would have given anything for a trip to a good honest bathhouse. It might take hours of sweating, oiling, and scraping to get all the muck and dirt out of his skin.
As they walked past a small mound with a house perched on its flat top, Marcellinus had a sudden thought.
“Tahtay?” Marcellinus knocked twice with his fist on his forearm and pointed upward to indicate the path of something flying up off the Great Mound. He gestured a small wing with his hand, then demonstrated the might of a full Thunderbird using his outstretched arms and pointed back at the Great Mound.
“Catanwakuwa,” said Tahtay for the smaller falcon craft and “Wakinyan” for the Thunderbird, and those words too burned themselves immediately into Marcellinus’s brain, never to be forgotten.
