by Alan Smale
The battlefield was empty. Ominous dark patches littered the soil and sand, but the acres of dead had vanished. Marcellinus was surprised and impressed at how much the Cahokians had managed to achieve while he had been unconscious. Had he perhaps been out of action for two days instead of one?
As it turned out, there was equally little to see at the graves. The Cahokians had made excellent use of the time Marcellinus had spent in his exhausted slumber, and a two-foot layer of soil already covered the trench grave of the Cahokian warriors. A desultory stream of men walked in from the other direction carrying baskets of soil that they dumped out onto the rising mound, glowering at Marcellinus. It might be weeks before they built a full mound at that rate, though perhaps it was work that need not be hurried. Overseeing them was a stocky older man wearing a feather cloak and copper earrings. Delicate, complex tattoos adorned his wrinkled skin; tassels, amulets, and a wooden mask with a long nose hung from his belt. When he caught sight of Marcellinus, the man backed up and raised what appeared to be a flyswatter in defense against him.
A shaman if Marcellinus had ever seen one. He knocked on his arm again and pointed at the man. The shaman flinched, and Tahtay said “Youtin” in a tone that did not seem unduly reverent.
“Youtin,” Marcellinus repeated. Perhaps a man worth watching.
The earth carriers and Youtin resented his presence, as well they might, and Marcellinus did not linger. He walked on, turning down the path that would lead him to where his legion lay. Too, it seemed that the last Roman corpses had been dragged to their own charnel pit; unable to shake his young honor guard, Marcellinus did not walk right up to it, but the smell of smoke and burning had drowned its previous aroma of death and decay. A plume of greasy smoke still arose into the heavy sky, but a bank of soil had already been piled up ready to bury the site forever once the embers of his legionaries had cooled.
Very well. His dead were in their final resting place. No work remained for Marcellinus. It was done.
He nodded and tried to turn away from the grave but failed. The draw of his perished cohorts was too strong. Even as he stood in the bright early afternoon, the familiar darkness welled up in Marcellinus’s soul; his breathing became ragged, and he swayed. How far was it to the damned wagons from here? Would the wine still be there?
“So many gone,” he said. “Aelfric. Pollius Scapax.”
Marcellinus had no rites to perform. No prayers to offer up to chilly Cybele, no penitence to offer the austere and forbidding Christ-Risen, and if Jupiter Imperator had been a real god and not merely the symbol of Roman Imperium, he surely would have stopped the breath in Marcellinus’s throat already. Marcellinus stood by the ashes of his men with no gods to comfort him, with guilt and isolation his earthly punishment.
Now would be a fitting time for it to end. Perhaps he should take his own life, right now. Fall here once and for all and write the last line on the history of the Fighting 33rd.
For a moment he was very aware of the pugio inside his tunic, its blade warm against his stomach.
He looked back. Tahtay frowned into the trees, his hands over Enopay’s eyes and nose. Enopay stood, suffering it calmly, his head bowed.
“I’m sorry,” Marcellinus said. “Gods, what am I thinking? Why would they let me bring you here? Is everyone in this tribe of barbarians insane?” His voice faltered.
“Hand-talk,” Tahtay said gruffly.
This was intolerable. Marcellinus had to find a way out. Of Cahokia or, if necessary, of his life.
Gaius walk to river, he signed. He strode away with the blood pounding in his ears, and a few moments later the boys ran past him like the wind, boldly, back to the plaza, and waited there for him to catch up.
As the boys guided Marcellinus westward through a seemingly endless suburb of the fine white houses, all crested with yellow reed thatch, his pulse raced. He had almost expected not to be allowed in this direction, would not have been surprised if a passing brave had halted him and forced him back the other way. For the river meant potential escape. And also …
Once past the Great Mound, Marcellinus looked back and inspected its broad slope. From here he could see the north face of the earthen pyramid that had been at the reverse as his army had marched into the city from the south. From the north side, the Cahokiani had launched their nimble Catanwakuwa and mighty Wakinyan to rain death and destruction on the 33rd Hesperian Legion. Before he died, Marcellinus wanted to know how that was done.
Alas, he could see almost nothing. A pair of long wooden rails braced by struts extended up the side of the mound to its flat top and extended another twenty feet farther up into the air from there. However, his view of the foot of the rails was obscured by the tall stockade that encircled the mound and the area near its base. There must be a mechanism of considerable power that he could not see, but it was either hidden behind the wooden wall or dismantled and packed away to keep it safe from the elements until the next time they needed to deploy it. Any substantial wooden apparatus would, after all, eventually warp in the damp heat of the Hesperian bottomlands.
Some kind of giant ballista or onager, Marcellinus was betting. Either tension power or torsion. But in truth, the launching mechanism was not so much a marvel as the controlled flight of the wings once hurled into the sky and their pilots’ uncanny ability to ride the air currents and maintain their height.
From within Cahokia it was hard for Marcellinus to deduce the layout of the city. He knew that it was bounded just north of the Master Mound by the winding Cahokia Creek, with only a crescent-shaped lake and a few homesteads and fields beyond that. From his moments on top of the Master Mound he also knew that the city sprawled off farther in a westerly direction, toward the mighty river, than it did to the south and east. But it was only now that he noticed that the Master Mound, the Great Plaza, and the subsidiary plazas and platform mounds that flanked them were all oriented along a north-south or east-west axis. The longhouse on low stilts that they passed as they headed toward the river—a storehouse for grain, with the wooden blocks keeping the floor raised against damp and rodents—was similarly aligned north-south. The common houses that surrounded the mounds and communal spaces, however, were not, apparently scattered with more care given to social convenience than to the cardinal points.
As he went by those houses, Marcellinus kept his eyes averted, for clearly he was not beloved by their occupants. Some spit as he passed, though fortunately behind him into his footprints. Others called out comments in Cahokian that Tahtay and Enopay chose not to translate. Children gaped, frozen in place by his proximity until their parents or elder siblings ran to pull them out of Marcellinus’s path, generally hurling harsh-sounding words at him even though he had made no hostile move. Even their dogs barked at him.
Tahtay and Enopay remained calm. Their faces showed no shame or embarrassment, though their pride at their assignment seemed muted in the face of such Cahokian enmity.
Half a mile past a midsize plaza to the west of the Great Mound, the boys guided him around a large clearing. Here five or six dozen tall poles defined a circle measuring perhaps four hundred feet across. The poles, of the ubiquitous red cedar, were of a uniform height and had carvings on them and other items tied to them that Marcellinus could not identify. A central pole well over a hundred feet tall towered over them all, and from here the motif of its carving was easy to recognize: the human-size carved figure atop the pole was a birdman, a falcon warrior with wings extended.
“Nice,” Marcellinus said, and pointed. Enopay opened his eyes wider and gestured No, urging him past the wooden monument into the next area of houses. Indeed, a few nearby warriors had perked up their attention visibly at Marcellinus’s interest in the cedar circle. Clearly this was a sacred space for the Cahokians, and nobody would be happy to see him trespass on it.
He remembered how the aquiliferi honor guard had reacted when Sisika had shown interest in the Roman Aquila of the 33rd. Some mysteries were best not meddled wi
th.
From here the journey to the river was a long flat slog through even more houses arranged around a succession of small plazas each centered with its own cedar pole and studded with conical mounds and the occasional ridge mound. At one point they detoured around a broad lake with a suspiciously even shoreline that Marcellinus took for a flooded borrow pit. All the soil that formed the giant mounds of Cahokia had to have come from somewhere.
As they walked, the sinuous curve of the Cahokia Creek swung down to meet them, and the boys steered him leftward, to the southwest. Here there were only a few houses, and much of the land was given over to agriculture, mostly the broad Cahokian corn and what looked like herbs and even flowers. Ahead of them, the western complex of Cahokia seemed almost a separate town to Marcellinus, subordinate to the main city in the size of its mounds, granaries, and houses.
Marcellinus held up his hand. He badly needed to rest. Over the last three days he had endured a battle, the grueling cleanup that had followed, and a day of complete inactivity, and his muscles were complaining. Discreetly, he examined his wounds to check for blood or other leakage, but the stitches and salve were holding up well.
So, ten thousand people or more in the main urbs of Cahokia plus another three or four thousand in the smaller suburbs that lay ahead. Hundreds or even thousands more spread around in the more sparsely populated areas of the floodplains out to the river bluffs, and then who knew how many more in the rural populations in the hilly uplands and spread out in homesteads to north, east, and south, tending to the huge Cahokian fields.
It added up quickly. All told, he must indeed be sitting in a metropolis of twenty thousand people. Larger than many of the principal cities of the Roman Imperium, though meaner in architecture aside from those mighty earthen pyramids. Many months ago on the shores of the Chesapica, hearing tell of a “great city,” Marcellinus had not imagined anything like this.
The boys were fidgeting. “Onward,” Marcellinus said.
As they entered western Cahokia, a warrior stepped forward brandishing a spear. His body was a mass of tattoos from his waist to his eyes, and a shell gorget hung around his neck, bouncing on his chest. With a derisive laugh the warrior pointed at the top of Marcellinus’s head and then his own, and then at his waist.
Hanging from the warrior’s loose belt were three fresh scalps, presumably Roman.
Tahtay spoke sharply, wagging a finger at the much taller Cahokian who confronted them and then reaching back to point at the Great Mound, now perhaps five miles behind. The warrior laughed again and surged forward.
Enopay, of all people, stepped into the warrior’s path in Marcellinus’s defense.
“Come back!” Marcellinus cried. “Enopay, no!” But the warrior had already backed up and now turned to stalk off between the houses, still calling out in a mocking tone. A few seconds later he was gone, but the men and women he had left behind him still stared at Marcellinus, not blinking.
Marcellinus said to Tahtay: “My life wouldn’t be worth a bent straw if not for the speech your chief made on the mound, would it?”
“What?” Tahtay said. “Hotah walk to river,” and they set off again.
No other Cahokians challenged them, and Marcellinus redoubled his efforts not to make eye contact with people or look at what they were doing. Eventually they passed through the last lanes of the western city and approached the river’s muddy shore.
Getting to the river had required a much longer walk than Marcellinus had expected given the view from the top of the Great Mound, and the reason was easy to deduce: the river was the biggest he had yet seen in Nova Hesperia, much broader than the rivers they had forded or floated across on makeshift rafts on their epic journey through the Appalachia and then through the never-ending forests and plains.
“Mizipi,” Tahtay said proudly.
“Frumen,” Enopay added, equally proud of knowing the Latin equivalent.
“Flumen,” Marcellinus corrected him absently.
It was over half a mile across, broader than the Tiber and muddier as well. On the river’s far shore were a few dozen small mounds and a smattering of houses; certainly several hundred people lived over there, but for all intents and purposes Cahokia stopped on this side of the river and at a safe enough distance from the shoreline that nobody’s home would be inundated when the river burst its banks. Marcellinus gazed dolefully at the water. A tough swim and not much to look forward to on the other side.
Its current also disappointed him. The Mizipi was broad and well established, and its waters did not move swiftly. Its shoreline wound sinuously off into the southern distance, with few trees in sight. His thoughts of stealing a canoe and rushing downstream to make landfall and disappear into the wild were clearly unrealistic. The Mizipi was too slow, and its banks too well populated. Any flight downstream would be so ponderous as to be comical, and it would be a simple matter for a couple of braves downstream to paddle a few hundred feet out from the bank and intercept him.
Compounding the difficulty, the unattended canoes he could see on the riverbank did not have paddles in them. Canoes and dugouts of various sizes were abroad on the river, some drifting on the current while their owners cast a line for fish, others riding up- or downstream laden with corn and beans. As they stood and watched, he saw two other cargoes. A team of four men staggering under the weight of bundles of Roman armor and swords finished loading a broad canoe and headed northward in it, making impressive time against the current for a craft so laden. Coming in the opposite direction, a lone man floated downstream in a large canoe half full of furs, a trader perhaps. Seeing Marcellinus, the man paddled a little closer to shore and eyed him with his mouth open wide. The Roman’s tunic and skin tone marked him as a foreigner, and the merchant clearly did not know what to make of him. Nor did he wait around to find out, applying more effort to the tempo of his paddling until he was safely past.
“Mizipi,” Tahtay repeated.
Marcellinus was tired, depressed, and hungry. A large but backward city. A greasy river. Only children to talk to. Even in the best case, in which they did not flay him alive at their next feast day and he did not die of malnutrition or infection or some terrible disease, his future was bleak.
He signed Gaius walk house, and they started the long journey back.
As the Master Mound came back into sight over the thatched Cahokian roofs, a thought came to him. He waved Question. “Sisika?”
Tahtay and Enopay looked at him, waiting for a mime or a gesture. Tahtay knocked on his arm, inviting a definition. Marcellinus pointed at the mound and tried again. “Sisika?” He tried the sign of the hawk wing. “Catanwakuwa, woman?”
Tahtay shrugged, baffled. “Yes? No?”
As yet, they had not established the word for “chief,” and doing so proved to be more difficult than Marcellinus had anticipated. For the next mile of the walk he was sure the boys did not understand him, but they finally established to everyone’s satisfaction that yes, “Great Sun Man” really did mean “chief.”
All right, then. He gestured Question, said “Sisika,” and followed it with the gestures for “Great,” “Sun,” and “Woman.”
“No,” they both said, still baffled, perhaps even offended, and then they reached the plaza.
Marcellinus had not seen Sisika since the evening of the battle and did not really know why he was inquiring after her; she had shown him only hostility, and he could have expected nothing else. But it felt important.
The boys had lost interest. Enopay yawned, and Tahtay bopped the smaller boy on the head. Campfires were being lit outside houses all around the plaza, and his interpreters abruptly ran off in different directions with a wave, leaving him alone.
Marcellinus set off again, then stopped and scratched his head, confused. In the end he had to go back to the Great Mound and then outward again to locate the hut in which he had woken up.
On finding it, he did not enter. He could not. He just stood there, time spilling a
round him, lost in thought, until someone walked up and tugged at his arm.
It was the young warrior he had first seen at the palisade gate and at the old woman’s hut. Marcellinus followed him blindly, and then the old woman was offering him a bowl of beans and some of the odd yellow and green vegetables these people ate that were all skin on the outside and only seeds and air within. Just as before, the younger woman sat outside the hut feeding her baby until Marcellinus appeared and then stormed inside.
He ate in silence, hating himself for having to subsist on handouts like any indigent living off the grain dole in Roma. Afterward he stood, offered thanks in mime, and hiked back to the Roman wagons. No one stopped him, and the wagons looked untouched when he arrived, their supplies still intact. He climbed up one of the wheels—how astonishing that these people, this whole civilization, did not use the wheel!—and sat on top of a wagon as the sun drifted slowly down toward the western river bluffs.
Somewhere on one of these two hundred wagons was a kit bag with his name on it, containing his spare clothes and the other limited possessions he had brought with him to Nova Hesperia. He had no idea which wagon it would be on. That was what his adjutants had been for, and they were all dead. It might take weeks to uncover it, and really none of its contents were relevant anymore. His old life was over.
Eventually he opened a wineskin and swallowed about a pint of the wine as night fell and turned the trees and the other wagons into silent silhouettes.
He trudged back into town past the house they had provided for his use and through the gates of the palisade. The pole they had tied him to had been removed, but he obstinately curled up there on the grass anyway.
The ground was too hard, and Marcellinus was not tired enough. The wine he had drunk hindered sleep rather than helping. He shivered.
He rolled onto his back and gazed upward. The skies had thickened with cloud, but it was not truly dark; the moon must be illuminating them from behind. By him rose the tall wooden stakes of the stockade. Tilting his head away from them, he could look up the long slope of the Great Mound.
