by Alan Smale
They had walked past the last of the leatherworkers and were approaching a single house standing apart from the others, close to a low ridge mound. A small figure had seen them coming and was waiting outside.
Wachiwi and Hanska hugged. It was odd to see, the tall and muscular clasping the petite and shapely.
Wachiwi made no move to greet Marcellinus but regarded him neutrally, her arm still around Hanska’s waist. He cleared his throat. “Hello, Wachiwi.”
“It is all right?” Hanska said to Wachiwi in the tenderest tone he had ever heard from her.
Wachiwi nodded.
“Then I go. Wanageeska. Sir. If there is other help you need, come to me and Mikasi. Yes?”
Once more, breathing was hard. “Thank you, Hanska.”
As she released Wachiwi, Marcellinus added, “In fact, Hanska? Rather soon I might need someone to watch my back.”
“Again?” she said wryly, and strode away.
Wachiwi folded her arms around herself. She had been crying, Marcellinus now saw. “You are really all right? Not hurt?”
“Not hurt by Iroqua,” she said.
“You have lost family?”
“What family? I have none. But many warriors I knew, men who were kind to me; they are dead now, from war. And others, too, who were not warriors.”
“People who are not warriors should not die in war,” Marcellinus said.
She gestured at the blanket that lay against the side of her hut, and, gratefully, he sat. Her hair was loose in mourning. He was used to seeing it like that only after lovemaking. It was appealing, and it distracted him.
“Gaius. Some say that all the death is your fault. But I do not think so.”
Marcellinus grimaced. The unexpected support of Hanska and Wachiwi was almost as difficult to bear as the scorn of Enopay, Kangee, and Great Sun Man had been.
Wachiwi touched his arm. “Your Cahokian is very good.”
“Thank you.” It certainly felt odd to speak to her directly in Cahokian. The last time Marcellinus had seen her, his Cahokian had been rudimentary and they had communicated using simple Latin phrases, gestures, and touch.
She assessed him. “I will spend one night with you, Gaius. For comfort. But not more.”
“That is not what I want.” Sensitized by his clumsy words to Hanska, not wanting to give offense, he added, “You are beautiful, and I thank you. But that is not why I came.”
“Then what?”
“I came to talk. I want us to be friends, Wachiwi.”
“You have so few friends?” she said, unconvinced.
“Few now. And…” He took a deep breath. “You still speak Iroqua? You know of Iroqua things? Then I need your help.”
Wachiwi put her hands up to her temples. “What?”
“Once you were Onida.”
“I am of Cahokia!”
“But once—”
She shook her head violently. “The Onida are not my people.”
“But still you can speak that tongue?”
She hand-talked: No. No.
“Wachiwi?”
“Look at this,” she said. Her sweeping gesture encompassed the whole of Cahokia. “All of our hurt and death. That was Iroqua, all the Peoples of the Longhouse. Caiuga and Onondaga and Mohawk and Seneca…and Onida, Gaius. I remember their words, of course. But to speak them? I would die. The words would choke me.”
“You don’t know why I am asking,” he said gently. “I need to understand. There are many things I need to know about…” He had been on the verge of saying “your people,” but he let his words trail away.
“I do not care.” Wachiwi was shaking. “They have hurt us and killed so many. Do not make me even speak of them, Wanageeska. You will not ask me.”
Even in denial, her arms opened to him for comfort. He pulled her close, kissed her forehead, rubbed her shoulders. “All right, Wachiwi. Shhh.”
“Do not ask me,” she said. “I would die.”
He had thought to get Wachiwi to help him interrogate the Iroqua captives to gain more recent intelligence of their customs, their language, their lands. He needed to understand. But the germ of the plan that had been forming in his mind was hopeless, anyway. It would probably never work, and he would just get more people killed.
Marcellinus gave it up and cared for Wachiwi instead.
The autumn was a season of healing, a time for rebuilding burned houses and mourning the Cahokians who had died in battle. But it was also a time to replace the fallen Wakinyan and improve the Eagles, develop better throwing engines, and belatedly finish the palisade that enclosed the inner part of the city. Make more weapons. Teach more men and women to fight.
Marcellinus played his small part. He helped rebuild the brickworks and bring it up to full production again. When he could, he helped the steelworkers, but by now they were vastly more experienced than he was at forging metal.
The First Cahokian Cohort drilled without him under the command of Akecheta and sometimes directly under Great Sun Man. The Hawk craft of the Catanwakuwa clan trained almost constantly, flying up from the steel launching rail behind the Great Mound to loop and soar over the city.
Marcellinus was allowed to consult on the new, lighter siege engines. The Cahokians were building them two at a time, ballistas that threw huge bolts, like crossbows on wheels, as well as the more ungainly and unpredictable onagers. One afternoon he helped a special team strip a siege engine into its component parts, each of which could be carried by just one or two men, run the pieces up the Mound of the Flowers, and then rebuild it, using it to launch the Hawk warrior Demothi into the air over the great Mizipi River as an encore.
Marcellinus had lit a spark that would never be snuffed out.
The Cahokians were becoming a modern army before his eyes.
Great Sun Man no longer invited Marcellinus to the sweat lodge of the elders, although he was sometimes invited by Kanuna or Howahkan when Great Sun Man was not there. The war chief did not, however, exclude him from councils with the clan chiefs. There Marcellinus had learned that Sintikala and her Hawks were working at a feverish pace to bring back intelligence, map out the Iroqua lands, and help plan for the retaliatory strike the next year. Cahokian confidence was building.
The sick headaches from his terrible wounding in the battle persisted long into the fall and died away only gradually. Eventually Marcellinus could turn his head quickly without feeling dizzy, could even break into a trot without suffering an instant sick pain in his forehead and the back of his neck. There were still days when thinking was difficult and he lived in a fog and even had occasional black depressions that took until evening to shift. On those days he would walk endlessly around Cahokia, across Cahokia Creek to the northern farmlands, or paddle a dugout across the Mizipi and hike west into the grass, growing stronger in his body while he waited for his mind to clear.
His rekindled friendship with Wachiwi grew. He never pressed her to talk about her Onida childhood, but some evenings she brought it up herself. Once begun, her stories dredged up further memories. Some were pleasant recollections of her earliest years, others ugly, jagged images of the fighting between the Onida and the mound builders, the vivid terror of her abduction by Cahokian warriors, her first sight of the great city on the Mizipi, and the subsequent kindnesses of the Cahokian women in her adopted family. Her forced marriage to a Cahokian warrior and her abandonment once it became obvious that she could bear him no children.
It was a tale almost as distressing for Marcellinus to hear as for Wachiwi to tell. Many times he begged her to stop, but spilling her pent-up memories appeared to give her comfort. He, in turn, shared some of the horrors of his own past and his unease for the future, and obtained a measure of relief from that.
His three translator children, his first friends in Cahokia, he saw only rarely.
Enopay, the budding civil servant, had been absorbed into Great Sun Man’s entourage. From what Marcellinus gathered from Kanuna, Great Sun Man had c
ome to rely on the boy for accurate counts of the city’s population, weapons, and food supply.
Now a full member of the Hawk clan, Kimimela was training intensively with Sintikala, Demothi, and the other pilots. She spent most days in the air or walking her wing home from some distant landing, and most evenings she was exhausted. As clan leaderships followed the maternal line, if all went well and she continued to grow in confidence and strength, Kimimela could expect to lead the Hawk clan one day.
As for Tahtay, the youth spent most of his time hiding from Dustu and Hurit and his shame, and limping on his twisted leg, using a stick as a crutch. One day Marcellinus saw him struggling up the steps of the tall Mound of the Sun, where Great Sun Man used to live before he moved back up onto the Master Mound, and hurried to talk to him.
“Oh, you,” Tahtay said on seeing him.
At the boy’s hostility, Marcellinus hesitated. “Can I help? Is there something I can fetch?”
“No.”
They reached the first plateau. Marcellinus was breathing heavily. His head injury had left him unable to train properly, and despite the long walks, his physical fitness had ebbed away.
Grimly, Tahtay turned and began the long walk back down. Marcellinus watched for a moment, confused, then hurried to catch up with the boy.
“I do not need another shadow,” Tahtay said. “The one I already have hurts me enough.”
Marcellinus glanced left. It was true; Tahtay’s long shadow magnified the ungainliness of his halting progress. It looked more like the shadow of Howahkan or Ojinjintka.
“All right. But now that I am here, I must go down, too. Will you sit with me at the bottom? I can get us tea or a pipe.”
“A pipe?” Tahtay laughed bitterly. “You say so? I am not a man.”
“You are a man, and one day you will be a great man.” But as Tahtay’s shadow hobbled beside them, Marcellinus faltered.
“Yes. I will be.”
Even with the stick, Tahtay surely was putting too much strain on his injured leg. How could Marcellinus tell him that?
“I will walk again like a man. I will be a warrior again.”
“Perhaps. But for that you must rest and heal.”
“I am the son of Great Sun Man,” Tahtay said.
Tahtay would never be able to earn the paramount chiefdom of Cahokia. “Of course you are,” said Marcellinus.
“And I will walk again.”
“Tahtay, you are walking now.”
“No. I am not.”
“Let us sit and talk.”
“I will not sit. You can be no help to me. Go and make things for Cahokia. Kill Iroqua. But let me be.”
“Tahtay. You were my first friend here, and you will always be my friend.”
The boy stopped and leaned on his stick. “Please, Hotah. No more talk. I must walk alone.”
“Tahtay…”
“Go away.”
Marcellinus stepped past Tahtay and went home.
—
Smoke swirled above the sacrificial fires to the north, south, east, and west, and up high on the mound tops. It was midafternoon in the Great Plaza, and Cahokia had gathered for the rededication of the Mound of the Chiefs and the adjacent Mound of the Hawks that bounded the south side of the plaza. The ceremonial charnel houses at the peak of each mound had been rebuilt in crisp new wood and straw and shone golden in the sunlight.
Tonight would be a new moon again, meaning it was a full four months since the Night of Knives. To Marcellinus it felt like only days. His sense of time was still faulty; he would occasionally raise his head from what seemed a profound concentration and be unsure whether it was morning or evening around him and how much time had elapsed since he had last moved. His headaches had gone, but the confusion remained. He could only hope that he would eventually make a complete recovery with more rest, more quiet, more tea.
Here at the rededication of the mounds there was drumming and flute playing and many songs in the archaic version of the mound-builder tongue that Marcellinus generally heard only at festivals and feast days. Though the sun shone bright, this was the time of the shamans and the storytellers. Marcellinus’s mind wandered.
Then the Wolf Warriors marched in the last of the Iroqua prisoners.
A season of hunger and deprivation had wrought havoc on the fearsome fighters of the Haudenosaunee. The light of life no longer glowed in their eyes. These were hopeless men, their hands bound with lengths of sinew. Blood leaked from their arms and legs, torsos and eyes, where battle wounds had long gone untreated. Nor had they even been permitted to bathe; a strong reek emanated from them, the stench of the latrine mingling with the sickly sweet aroma of gangrene.
Yet again, but as startling as if it were a new thought, Marcellinus realized how easily he could have ended his life like one of these unfortunates if Great Sun Man had not spared him. Marcellinus had been a novelty. He had owned value by virtue of his peculiarity, his incomprehensibility, the odd habits of the fighting force he led, his potential for providing information.
How well that had all worked out.
Time shuffled forward again, like a broken captive. Elders had stepped up and now stood by the Iroqua with knotted cords in their hands, waiting to dispatch the men. The prisoners were lined up in front of a deep trench in the Mound of the Chiefs, where they would be buried to serve Cahokia’s former chiefs in the afterlife. Their blood would fertilize the new grass, and the Cahokian honored dead would sleep more easily in their burial mounds.
Marcellinus was among barbarians. He rubbed his eyes.
An Iroqua screamed briefly before the strangling cord choked off his last breath and he sagged. The prisoner was so light and weak after so many days of starvation that even Howahkan, the elder who held the cord in his hands, could support his weight. Leaning down, the elder sliced open the veins of the dying captive with an obsidian blade. Iroqua blood spilled.
By the Roman’s count there were a dozen Iroqua sacrifices and only eight elders standing ready to slay them. Some of the grand old warriors of Cahokia would have to do double duty. He was grateful that Sintikala was not up there, or Anapetu or any of the other clan chiefs. Women as warriors, deadly and unforgiving in battle, Marcellinus had grown accustomed to. Women as executioners would be too much for him to bear, especially the calm, clever women he relied on to maintain his own precarious sense of reality.
The next prisoner was an Onondaga warrior who could not have been older than twenty winters. His braids were loose, and short hair had sprouted along the temples that previously had been shaved for battle. The fierce tattoos on his chest stood out in stark contrast to his weakened, abject state. He looked like he might throw up or faint at any moment.
No elder stood behind this prisoner. Great Sun Man strode along the line, a cord of death in his hand.
From the crowd, Tahtay hobbled forward onto the sacred mound.
Dead silence fell. Great Sun Man halted. Tahtay kept coming, climbing the Mound of the Chiefs with difficulty until he stood with the elders. The Onondaga brave on his knees squinted up at the boy.
Great Sun Man’s eyes were ashen. “Tahtay?”
“It is my right,” Tahtay said harshly, his voice carrying easily across the crowd. “I am still your son, son of chieftain. Will you tell me no?”
His people watched. Mute, Great Sun Man handed the hempen cord to his son and stood back.
“Me,” said Marcellinus. “I will tell you no.”
Tahtay’s head swiveled, and his mouth dropped open. Around Marcellinus, people gasped. A man he did not know reached for his arm in warning.
As he walked from the crowd and ascended the mound, Marcellinus held the boy’s eyes, not blinking. “I say no, not today.”
“You say?” Tahtay pointed down at his leg. “See? See? And why?” He waved at the people around them, who murmured. Marcellinus did not know what they were saying, did not know if he was shaming Tahtay or profaning their sacred ceremony by interrupting it in t
his way. He did not care anymore. He was not a savage, and Tahtay of all people did not need to be one, either.
“Yes, Tahtay, we see that you are wounded. You are broken, and you are healing. And yes, it is because you were struck by a cowardly Iroqua in war.”
Tahtay pointed at the Onondaga who knelt at the edge of the abyss. “And so his life is mine if I claim it. Why not? Because I am not deserving? Not my father’s son? Who are you to say so?”
“No, none of that. But Tahtay, your first kill should not be a man in defeat on his knees and almost dead already. Your first kill should be as a warrior in battle.”
“Huh.”
The leading shaman, Youtin, stared at Marcellinus. The crowd was silent. Great Sun Man glared but said nothing. No one knew what to do about this.
“Tahtay, hear me. You will remember your first kill. Make it a kill for Cahokia, a kill you will boast of in the sweat lodge when you are old.” Marcellinus raised his boot and shoved the Onondaga. The captive fell on his side, unresisting. “See? This man is already dead.”
“You do not understand, because you are from another place.” Tahtay raised his chin high. “This is the Mound of the Chiefs, and the death of this verpa makes it strong. This killing is good medicine, brave medicine for Cahokia.”
“Verpa?”
A Roman curse on a Cahokian mound. Rites Marcellinus would not understand if he lived to be a hundred.
Marcellinus bowed to Great Sun Man, to Tahtay, and to the crowd. “If I act wrongly, if I intrude here, I mean no disrespect to you or the elders or your great chiefs of the past.”
Great Sun Man nodded.
The Onondaga lay on the grass. Tahtay looked at the warrior and then up at Marcellinus, who held out his hand.
Tahtay laid the cord gently on his palm, but his tone was still rebellious. “Then why you?”
“Because I have killed many men. Because I have nothing left to lose.”
The prisoners would all die today in any case. Why should their blood not stain Marcellinus’s hands as well? As much as any man in Cahokia, Marcellinus deserved to share the task and the blame. Better even, quicker and more merciful to die at his experienced hands than at those which might be hesitant or ineffectual.
