by Alan Smale
These days Tahtay was more often with Marcellinus than with his own father. Marcellinus’s military cadre had shrunk to a mere handful: Mahkah, Takoda, Hanska, Mikasi, and Tahtay. Sometimes Kimimela would come to visit; it was she—over all his protests—who kept his tunics and moccasins wearable, for Marcellinus was the master of a sword but a complete dunce with a needle, whether of bone or steel. Kimimela claimed she needed the practice, as it was part of her duties to sew and repair the fabric of the wings she flew daily, and he welcomed her company and her endless stories of flying. She was growing like a beanpole and her arm muscles were becoming substantial, but she still giggled like a little girl when she got carried away with the simple joys of her tales.
Sintikala, Marcellinus saw rarely. How she could fly so high or so far in winter and early springtime with so little assistance from heat rising off the ground was a mystery to him. Certainly no other Hawk could match her in the air. Kimimela—lightly, as if it were a joke—claimed that her mother was kept aloft by rage. And when Sintikala was not flying, she was in the Longhouse of the Sun in consultation with Great Sun Man or on the mound tops training other Hawk pilots.
All in all, Marcellinus was growing increasingly irrelevant. He had infected Cahokia with his ideas, and now the contagion was spreading by itself. He suspected that if he died tomorrow, it would make little difference to the eventual course of the war.
Unless…
He folded the thought away. After all these months, it was still barely a plan. If he mentioned it to anyone else, they would think it either treachery or lunacy and suspect he had not truly recovered from his blow to the head.
So be it.
Marcellinus went to look for Wachiwi—and beer.
—
In the fading days of the Grass Moon hundreds of warriors from Shappa Ta’atan and the other downriver towns and villages arrived to help Cahokia in its war. Rather than enter the strong palisade that now surrounded Cahokia, they were shown straight to the castra. This had moved around by several hundred yards in each direction as the Cahokian warriors practiced striking and rebuilding it but was now situated largely where it first had been erected, surrounded by high earthen embankments and with firing platforms at each corner.
As Marcellinus watched glumly from the Northgate of the castra, a voice came from behind him. “Ah, you are here.”
Marcellinus turned and stood up straighter. “Great Sun Man.”
The war chief wore his customary kilt and feathered cloak, copper gorget and beads, but had left the heavy mace of office behind. He looked somber, and his hands hung by his sides. “Wanageeska. How are you?”
“I am recovering. My head aches more rarely. And you?”
Great Sun Man shrugged and looked past him at the Shappa Ta’atani exploring the tents. “War.”
“Yes.”
The chief waved at the camp. “This is good, Wanageeska. Easier to protect from Iroqua attack.” He glanced sideways at Marcellinus. “Castra is why we could not slay you by night as you marched with your legion.”
Marcellinus grinned. “Well, then. A good thing we always had one.”
Great Sun Man examined the sky, looked behind him, and seemed to come to a decision. “Wanageeska, what you did on the mound…”
Marcellinus shook his head. “Which mound?”
“With my son. With Tahtay. Killing for him instead of letting him kill. And then afterward, much after, with the sword. I have been told of that.” Great Sun Man looked uncomfortable. “And so I must say to you: after the battle, on the Mound of the Sun, my words to you may have been…raw. Angry. Not just.”
Marcellinus swallowed, not trusting himself to speak.
“Wanageeska. Thank you for bringing my son back to life.”
Marcellinus looked away. “You are most welcome, Great Sun Man.”
“Welcome?”
“I mean, I thank you.”
“Good. And so you will come to war with us?”
“To war? With the Iroqua?”
“Of course.”
The trees were budding. New green decorated the crowns; new white blossoms were on the dogwoods. And once again it was time for war.
“I don’t know,” Marcellinus said. “You told me I would not command.”
“I said that. Now I unsay it. I will give you back the First Cahokian.” Great Sun Man peered at him, perhaps trying to read his expression. “The hundred-and-hundred warriors who still trust you and can do clever tricks other warriors cannot.”
Marcellinus stared at the ranks of Roman and Cahokian tents.
“Wanageeska? Gaius?”
“All right,” he said. “Thank you.”
It was all Marcellinus could say. He had to agree to be useful to Cahokia so that he would be allowed to stay.
“You are…welcome,” said the war chief.
But after Great Sun Man walked into the castra and Marcellinus stood a few moments longer, he realized that he had already made his decision.
He would not be going to war. And he would not be living in Cahokia much longer.
—
“Ohanzee will be here soon,” Marcellinus said, and the three Raven clan braves nodded. Above him the Sky Lantern bag swelled and billowed like a living thing, struggling to rise off its ramp. The young Cahokian maintaining the second launching fire goosed it with a small pot of liquid flame, and despite himself Marcellinus jumped at the controlled explosion. The glow warmed his cheeks in the breezy chill of the dawn.
He tied his bag onto the wooden slat and loosened the cords on his deerskin cloak. Chogan, the warrior preparing the fire jar, looked disdainfully at the fur lining; spring was well advanced, and most braves had put their furs away. “Yes, yes, I’m getting old,” Marcellinus grumbled. “You sit up there in the wind for half the day dressed as you are now and then we’ll talk.”
The Lantern bag soon stood vertical, an undulating tower of cotton. The wooden frame stirred and scraped a few feet across the ground before the tether halted it. Smoke bloomed out of the top of the fire jar. Marcellinus walked around the Lantern, scrutinizing it professionally, and Chogan did the same thing. The others were looking around for Ohanzee. It was not like him to oversleep.
Marcellinus took his place on the Sky Lantern frame next to his bag and tested the balance. Much of the wood and charcoal and the ranked pots of liquid flame were to his right and left. He got off the frame again to adjust the position of one of the piles of wood and then climbed back aboard. Better.
Chogan pointed to the young brave tending the second launching fire. The brave muttered and went to get his bag and buckskin. If Ohanzee did not show up, he was the one doomed to spend most of the day in the air above Cahokia with Marcellinus, staring out over the fields and grasslands at nothing. Without exception the men loved free flying and hated the tethered sentry duty. Once the original excitement of being high in the air with Cahokia spread out beneath them had worn off, it was drudgery at best, cold and dangerous at worst; that was why they were happy for Marcellinus to go up so often in their stead.
That left two braves with Marcellinus. The Lantern strained, more than ready to be off.
“I’m sorry,” Marcellinus said.
“What?” said Chogan.
“Tell Great Sun Man that Wanageeska did this of his own will.”
The men looked at each other.
“Tell him I am loyal to Cahokia. But tell him we must have peace.” Marcellinus grinned. “And tell Ohanzee I am sorry I misled him about who would fly today.”
Realization dawned. Chogan darted forward, but it was too late. Marcellinus had released the iron bolt that held the tether to the frame.
Already straining at the leash, which was weighted for two passengers but carrying just one, the Sky Lantern used its buoyancy to hurl itself aloft. As it surged out of the lee of the Master Mound, the wind caught it, knocking the bag sideways at a steep angle and spinning the frame. Marcellinus clung on for dear life.
H
e had never been aboard a Sky Lantern in free flight. His excursions had been limited to tame controlled ascents for guard duty, with the tether being paid out gradually until the Lantern swung at its sentry altitude of about a thousand feet. Now it was only moments before his Lantern surpassed that height and kept on going up, up, up. People on the ground soon became almost invisible, and the Great Mound and Great Plaza shrank to the size of a pebble and a small square of cloth. Never had Marcellinus been this high, not in Lantern or Hawk, Thunderbird or Eagle.
Peering far behind, he saw a Hawk leap up from the Master Mound but quickly lost sight of it. It could never catch him. Perhaps even Sintikala could not fly at the height he was now approaching, and still he was rising. And Sintikala and Kimimela were away from Cahokia today. That, along with the wind strength and direction, had been his necessary condition for making his escape.
He hurtled northeast with the wind, past the ridge mound that marked the edge of the city. Already he was much higher than the river bluffs that bounded Cahokia to the east. As he crossed them, the land changed color and became fields.
He was cold. His hands were already losing feeling. Forcing himself to release his hold on the Lantern frame, he shuffled leftward to throw a large chunk of wood into the fire jar, then a second piece. The third piece gave him a splinter so tenacious that it plucked blood from his thumb, the red drop flying into space and disappearing. “Futete.”
As he was flying with the wind, the air around him had become misleadingly calm. Below him was only farmland, the scattered homesteads almost imperceptible.
With no warning—he was looking down, not up—he flew into a cloud. He shouted aloud as white wetness shrouded him. How would the cloud affect the Lantern? Not at all, it appeared; he quickly popped out above it, its diffuse puffy white top replacing the ground beneath him.
So high, so out of control. To distract himself Marcellinus threw in more wood, rationalizing that the more fuel he burned, the faster and farther the Lantern would go, the lighter the platform would be…and then he stopped. If he went too high, he might freeze to death despite the extra clothing he had brought. And although it might be his imagination, it already seemed harder to breathe, as it had on some of the high mountain passes he had led a legion over in the Himalaya ten winters before.
He settled for burying his face in his furs and clinging on like grim death.
Time went by. He soared through more clouds. Between them he could see that he was over forests. Breathing had become easier, which meant that he was losing height. He threw in layers of wood and charcoal and eventually refreshed the fire jar with two small pots of liquid flame. The second pot sent a stabbing jet of flame upward into the cotton bag, and Marcellinus held his breath. If he had not seen Ohanzee and others do the same thing, he might have succumbed to panic. But the bag did not catch fire, and the Sky Lantern again soared up through the clouds.
His next problem was that the frame was becoming seriously unbalanced. On taking off, Marcellinus’s side of the platform had been heavier; on a normal day the weight of Ohanzee across from him would have balanced it. Throwing in wood had restored the balance and more. Now Marcellinus sat on the upper side, facing slightly downward and with his back to the direction in which the Lantern was flying. Soon he would have to work his way around to the other side of the frame and throw in fuel from that side.
But not yet. To rest his cramping fingers, he looped his arms around the frame and clasped his wrists instead. Once more he closed his eyes.
—
To his astonishment, he slept and had no idea for how long. He jolted awake in alarm, convinced he was falling. He was not. The sun was well past the meridian, and by his best guess he was still being swept to the northeast. The Sky Lantern was back down below the clouds; he flew over a small river and a few scrubby hand-cultivated fields. From the style of the homesteads and the continued presence of small earthworks he knew he was still over mound-builder territory.
Somehow, his dozing had alleviated his fear. Brazenly Marcellinus shuffled around the frame, careless of the way it rocked beneath him. Into the fire jar went wood and charcoal, in went the liquid flame. But the Lantern was dropping, and all the fuel he could toss into the fire jar merely limited his losses instead of throwing him higher into the sky.
He looked at the bag. Was something wrong with it? No. It appeared to be some quality of the air itself.
Ah. He was much warmer now. Sky Lanterns had the most lift in winter or at dawn, when the contrast between the heat of the air in the bag and the heat of the air outside was at its maximum. He was losing out to daylight. It was the exact reverse of the situation with the Hawk wings, which flew better in the heat of the day.
Nonetheless, he must already be many weeks’ walk from Cahokia.
He threw in fuel with abandon, to coax as many more miles out of the Lantern as possible, and then another thought struck him.
Landing. Never his strong point.
Marcellinus peered at the terrain below. Ideally, as he came down to his inevitable reacquaintance with the ground, he would avoid rivers, trees, and, above all, mountains.
Well, at least there were no mountains.
He allowed the Sky Lantern to sink to within a thousand feet of the ground. Beneath him were trees and clearings. It looked very much like the landscape of endless forest and meadow that his 33rd Legion had marched through for weeks on end.
If it was tricky figuring out how far above the treetops he was flying, assessing his rate of descent was almost impossible. He flung in more wood, trying to avoid the crowns of the tall oaks and come down in a clearing, then sailed on right over the clearing at which he had aimed. Obviously he was still much higher than he had thought. The Raven clan had developed a method of deflecting the hot air from the neck of the jar so that less of it flowed into the bag; he had watched Ohanzee do it many times to help bring them gently to ground. But Marcellinus was afraid to try it. If he got it wrong and the Lantern dropped like a stone, he could easily break his legs or his back when he crashed down to earth. Or worse.
Back over a shimmering carpet of trees, he threw in one of the last pots of liquid flame. The whomph of its ignition made only a small difference; just minutes later the first twig scraped the base of the fire jar, which was the lowest-hanging part of the Sky Lantern assembly. Instead, Marcellinus cut all the remaining wood adrift and watched it fall into the trees. Freed of its weight, the Lantern carried him over a stand of hemlock and a small stream, but then he drifted down again. The treetops were above him now. He was coming down fast. He scooted across the frame to his right. “Shit, shit, shit…”
He hit, but not the ground. A gust of freshening wind blew the Lantern into a tall oak. The corner of the frame opposite Marcellinus slammed into the oak’s trunk first, skipped, and seemed to try to dodge around its girth. But above him, a branch snagged the bag. The Sky Lantern skewed sideways, curtsyed, spun dizzily, and dropped again.
It came down on another branch from above, knocking the fire jar to one side. Ashes and hot embers cascaded into space, dusting the trunk of the oak. The platform took another hit, and Marcellinus threw his weight to the side, hoping to swing the frame around between him and the tree trunk.
The loss of so much ash and wood carried the Sky Lantern up a few feet, just enough to free it from the grasp of the oak, but its buoyancy was at an end. Snapping through some tree limbs and bouncing off others, the Lantern slumped toward the forest floor, arrested only when the bag got irretrievably hooked over a broad limb.
Marcellinus dangled on a splintered plank of what little remained of the Lantern’s frame. Punctured and torn, the bag gave up the last of its hot air. The fire jar bonked into the tree trunk. The wrecked assembly finally came to rest with Marcellinus about twenty feet above the ground.
In the circumstances, he counted that as a success.
Sky Lanterns were equipped with extra lengths of hempen rope that people on the ground could pull
on to bring it down. Marcellinus dropped a coil over the side. Watching it spiral down to the forest floor, he revised his estimate; all right, he was thirty feet up.
He untied his bag of food and clothes and hooked it over his shoulder. Hand over hand, he climbed down the rope.
His feet were on the earth again. He was jolted and aching but had no broken bones. It felt like he’d been flying for a week, but in reality it was not even far into the afternoon. Not knowing how strongly the winds had been blowing at altitude made it impossible to know how far he had come. But that hardly mattered, since even with perfect knowledge of his journey so far, he still could not know how many miles lay ahead.
Hoisting his pack onto his back, Marcellinus set off to walk.
—
He slept under a tree when night fell, and the next morning he was up before the dawn. He was walking through an endless forest that did not appear to be maintained. Nobody had burned away the brush, and several times he startled a deer close by, but he had no bow and arrow. He ate berries from the bushes and pemmican cakes and nuts from his pack. He made tea when his legs were so weary that he could go no farther, despite the smoke that drifted up through the trees. Not caring who saw him gave him a reckless feeling of freedom. He walked on through the trees alone.
In three days of hiking he saw nothing and nobody. He had discovered a true no-man’s-land. That evening he killed a browsing rabbit with his sling and ate well, with enough left over for the next day.
The following noon Marcellinus stood up from his lunch and stretched his weary limbs, getting ready to throw earth over his small fire. Then instinct kicked in, and he dropped back down into a crouch without knowing why.
He looked up and around. His hand was on the hilt of his gladius, but he did not draw it because of the sound it would make or the light that might glint off it. Either would draw attention to his position.
