by Alan Smale
—
“If I could possibly have told you, I would.” Was that true? Perhaps.
Sintikala pondered it. “And so you sent Pezi to the Iroqua?”
“He was easy to convince. Pezi is Iroqua.”
That stopped her in her tracks. “Yes?”
“Yes. Oh, he speaks Cahokian like a native, but he learned it from captives. He has never been to Etowah as he claimed. He grew up Onondaga.”
Hatred flooded her face. Sintikala finally understood. “You knew he could get a message to the Haudenosaunee because he has done it before.”
He nodded. “Pezi was one of the spies who betrayed Cahokia to the Iroqua. He sent information back to them with the traders. Probably even the whereabouts of our clan chiefs’ houses. Including yours.”
Prowling back and forth, rage shimmering from her, Sintikala almost shouted, “And still you let him live?”
“I told you. I am done with killing in cold blood. Whatever the reason.”
“That was not your decision to make!”
“I think it was.”
She blew out a long breath, trying to calm herself, but her expression was still grim. “You forgive easily.”
“No. It’s the hardest—” The words stuck in his throat, and he turned away suddenly. “Don’t ever talk to me about forgiveness being easy.”
“But you forgive often.”
“I’ve had a lot of practice. And Sisika? Once I spared a woman from certain death to send her on an errand no less foolish.”
She snorted. “And so you think the Iroqua know you are coming?”
“Yes, with luck.”
“And that is why you walk without hiding.”
“Yes.”
“And Great Sun Man knows as well?”
Marcellinus put his sandal on and stood. The repair had stretched the leather tight across his foot, but it would ease up with a few miles of walking.
“Great Sun Man sent you?” she persisted.
“No.”
Sintikala looked unconvinced. “You would not do this without asking your chief. It is not who you are.”
Always Marcellinus had been the Imperator’s man. But he was impressed that she realized this. She had not even needed to look into his eyes.
“Gaius. Do not play games. Great Sun Man knows you are here.”
“That,” said Marcellinus carefully, “might depend on who asked him.”
—
Once again Marcellinus had stormed the Master Mound, this time with Anapetu and Kanuna flanking him to get him past the guards at the great gate in the palisade. He had climbed up the mound to its crest, and there, in shock, he had halted.
The new Longhouse of the Sun had grown even larger. Its resemblance to the longhouse on Ocatan’s Temple Mound was now unmistakable. And as it was heavily guarded by Wolf Warriors, it had taken Anapetu and Marcellinus half an hour just to persuade them to take a message to Great Sun Man.
After that, though, Great Sun Man had come out immediately. Galena dots sparkled on his robe, and shell beads clattered as he walked. He wore feathers of eagle and falcon and ear spools of bright copper and was every inch a chieftain. Nonetheless, he listened to them.
Great Sun Man, I beg you. This war must stop. For Cahokia’s sons. Its daughters.
It can never be stopped.
The war chief’s expression was bleak. Marcellinus looked away, at the wood smoke rising over Cahokia, the canoes on the river, the clouds lining the horizon. And if it could?
It cannot.
But…if it could?
—
“If I succeed, Great Sun Man will accept the peace. If I fail, he knows nothing of my plan.”
But Sintikala’s mind had moved on already. “Anapetu knows of this, too? Anapetu?”
“Anapetu is my clan chief. I had to—”
“And Kanuna?”
“We tried to talk to you, Sintikala. I had not yet talked of this to Kanuna the night we came to your hut, but—”
“And Great Sun Man, too, but still you did not think to tell me?”
She was shouting again. Marcellinus eased himself a little farther away. “I did not know that I could trust you.”
“Trust?” she said in disbelief. “Trust, Gaius?”
“How could I know? Perhaps I would have come to you saying, ‘Sintikala, I would make peace with the Iroqua,’ and you would say, ‘They killed my husband and destroyed my city, and there will never be peace,’ and then where would I be?”
“Dead,” she said. “Or still in Cahokia. But I would not have said that thing. Never.”
“I didn’t know that.”
Sintikala frowned. “What else do I not know? Why do you think they will listen to you? What will you say to the Iroqua?”
Marcellinus shrugged.
“I think you know,” she said. “But you will not tell me because you are still afraid I will kill you.”
She stopped. Marcellinus walked on. The skin on his back prickled. It could come at any moment. He did not think Sintikala would stab him from behind. But even now, how little he knew her…
“Gaius. In my hut, before I showed you the map, you told me I was the one person in Cahokia who had always been honest with you.”
Now he turned. “And I’ll never lie to you again, Sisika. But I have no more to say.”
Their eyes met. Quickly he looked away, but the damage was done. Sintikala’s jaw dropped, and now she spoke so quietly that he could barely hear. “So you have told me everything. You have no plan yet. You do not know what you will say to the Iroqua.”
“Some. Not all. It depends what manner of men they are.” Wryly, Marcellinus added, “And we still have a long way to walk. Plenty of time to think.”
She rubbed her temples and stepped forward. “All right, Gaius. I will come with you. But the instant you do anything that is against Cahokia, I will kill you with my bare hands. The same instant. Be ready.”
—
Sintikala alone might have gotten farther before being noticed. Plenty of lone women and men walked the trail they now traveled, wearing much the same clothing as she. By herself, Sintikala might have made it all the way to the powwow without being detected as one of the hated mound builders.
Marcellinus was a different story. Even if he was garbed like a Hesperian, his skin color would have marked him out. His olive Mediterranean complexion differed from the tawnier hue of the Haudenosaunee, and even at a distance his very short hair marked him as an interloper. In Roman armor and helmet, he was unmistakably alien and recognizable. As they walked up through the mountains, Iroqua stared openmouthed and Iroqua Hawks circled overhead, but no one tried to detain him.
The terrain was hard, but Marcellinus welcomed the exercise of the harsh slopes. He was steadily regaining his fitness. As for his head, despite the uncertainty that lay before him, it did not ache at all.
—
Sintikala had left him in the night; when Marcellinus awoke under a sprawling oak tree, she was not there. The nearby brook chuckled at his unease.
He waited by the brook for a while, but she did not reappear, and so he waded across it and kept walking, head down into the wilderness, waiting for his legs and tunic to dry and for something to happen.
“They are here,” she said.
Her voice came from his left, away in the bushes. He could not see her. “Who?”
Closer than he had imagined, Sintikala stood. “Iroqua warriors are all around us.”
An invisible hand clutched at his heart. Suddenly Marcellinus was deathly afraid. Not for himself but for Sintikala. He wished by all the gods she had not come. “You should have gone back.”
“I go where you go.” She walked out of the undergrowth to stand by his side.
Marcellinus turned in a slow circle, studying the bushes, and spoke out loud and clear: “Haudenosaunee, step forward. I am Gaius Publius Marcellinus of Roma and Cahokia, and I claim safe conduct. I have come to powwow.”
&nb
sp; Sintikala gasped, for Marcellinus had spoken the words in the Iroqua tongue.
They came out of the bushes, two war parties of six apiece, Caiuga and Seneca. The Haudenosaunee warriors carried tomahawks and clubs studded with stone; it was not Cahokian chert but a blacker, more sinister-looking rock. Their heads were shaved aside from their long war braids.
Sintikala stood absolutely still with her arms by her sides. “You speak Iroqua now? Yet more truth you did not tell me?”
“Go, Sintikala. Back to Cahokia. Maybe they will let you leave. It’s me they came for.”
“I do not need your protection.” She said some words to the Caiuga leader, and he nodded.
“Sisika,” Marcellinus said slowly.
“What?”
“You just told him your name was Sisika.”
“Why do you think that I do not like you to call me that?” Sintikala hissed bitterly. “It is because that is what they call me!”
Of course the Iroqua knew of her: she was the Cahokian clan chief who had warned them about the Romans and told them to let the invaders through. Marcellinus felt a huge relief. Sintikala might be safer in Iroqua hands than he was.
The Seneca and Caiuga braves watched them with interest. The tension that crackled between Marcellinus and Sintikala must be apparent even if they were not able to understand the Cahokian they spoke to each other.
“Then I’m happy to have your company,” Marcellinus said with just a trace of irony.
“Perhaps I will kill Wachiwi,” Sintikala said.
“You will not. But why?”
“It is Wachiwi who teaches you Iroqua tongue.”
“Yes. The words I would need. Just enough to keep me alive.” He grinned at her sideways. “Maybe.”
“Even Wachiwi knew you planned to come here?”
“Yes,” he said.
She shook her head, stunned. The Iroqua formed an escort around them, and they set off again into the mountains of the east.
—
They walked for days. Nova Hesperia was a large land. Marcellinus and Sintikala set the pace, and their Iroqua honor guard set the direction. The Caiuga point man walked thirty feet ahead, guiding them along paths in the woods that were almost invisible to Marcellinus. The rest of the Caiuga and Seneca braves walked in a loose group surrounding them, sometimes so far off to the left and right that they disappeared into the brush, with the leader bringing up the rear. At night they slept in the same ring around Marcellinus and Sintikala, waited for them to be ready to leave in the morning, then again fell into position guiding, flanking, and guarding.
The Iroqua rarely spoke, rarely even came within speaking distance. Marcellinus’s questions about how much farther they had to march went unanswered. Sintikala they treated with quiet deference, allowing her privacy for her ablutions but not answering her questions, either.
Every day on the trail they saw more of the Iroqua people going in the same direction: warriors, women, families, even war bands that scowled when they saw Marcellinus’s Roman steel and Sintikala’s tattoos. Their honor guard grouped around them even more closely at such times, keeping the curious away.
—
“And so,” she said, “you decided it was time to go and talk with the Iroqua.”
“Yes.”
“Why? Really?”
Marcellinus took a deep breath. “I asked Wachiwi where she lived when she was taken from the Onida as a child. She told me that she grew up on the banks of the Oyo River. The Onida lived on the Oyo then, Sintikala. Closer to Cahokia than Woshakee is now.”
“Yes, until my father drove them back. What of it?”
“Exactly.”
Baffled, she said, “ ‘Exactly’ what?”
“Sintikala, when the Cahokians went to war on the Oyo a life and a half ago, were you with them?”
She looked offended. “Of course not. I was perhaps ten winters. I am only five winters older than Wachiwi.”
“What do you know of it?”
“That the Iroqua had been spreading down the Oyo for many lives. That they were raiding Cahokian villages and homesteads. That my father led war parties against them on land and by canoe. That it was the last big fight between the Iroqua and Cahokia until now.”
“And also war parties by air. Your father’s war party carried Hawks and Thunderbirds and launched them from the hills and river bluffs. The Cahokians had built the first Wakinyan only recently. It was the first time they were used against the Iroqua.”
“I know,” she said impatiently.
“Hundreds of Iroqua died,” he said. “Brutally. In the dawn. With no warning.”
Sintikala was mute, her eyes large.
Marcellinus swallowed, picturing it: Wakinyan drifting down silently from the hilltops in the half-light, unloading liquid flame onto the unsuspecting villages of the Onida and Onondaga. The screams, the fiery devastation. And then the Cahokian warriors racing down the hillside into the river villages to finish the job of slaughter. “They burned them and slew those who remained. Nobody was spared except for the girls and boys they stole to adopt. Then they hiked up the Oyo to the next Iroqua village, and they did it again, and again.”
Sintikala cleared her throat. “Wachiwi told you this?”
“Yes.”
“She was just a child then, Gaius. And what a child remembers is not—”
“Kanuna was there,” he said. “Matoshka. Howahkan. They do not like to tell of it. It takes a lot of really good beer to loosen their tongues.”
She paused. “If it was done, then it had to be done. My father was a good man.”
Great Sun Man had given the order to use the same combination of Thunderbirds and liquid flame to slaughter thousands of Romans of the Fighting 33rd. Marcellinus had turned a blind eye to the slaughter of Iroqua captives by the same Romans. And to many other things over his long military career.
“I do not judge your father,” he said quietly.
Others might. Marcellinus could not.
With steel in her voice, Sintikala persisted. “My father won a great victory for Cahokia!”
“Yes, he did. And then, beaten back to the Great Lakes, the five Iroqua tribes that used to fight one another as often as they fought the mound builders came together to form the Haudenosaunee League. They raided and stole Cahokian Hawks and learned to make flying craft of their own—”
“Not like Cahokia’s.”
“And licked their wounds and bided their time and grew strong.” Marcellinus shook his head. “And when I brought the throwing engines to Cahokia, the Iroqua took that idea, too.”
“We’re at war!” she said. “At war.”
“So what comes next? A greater slaughter of Iroqua, to be avenged in the next lifetime, and around and again forever?”
She struck him on the chest, eyes blazing, bringing him to a halt. “You pity the Iroqua?”
Marcellinus eyed her steadily. “I pity anyone who is burned by fire from a Wakinyan.”
“The Oyo did not belong to the Iroqua! Did the drunken, tearful old men in the smoke lodge also tell you of the wars before my father’s war? The killings by the Iroqua?”
“Yes, a little—”
“Of Ituha uniting the three Cahokias into one city, ending the bloodshed between mound builders? And of how the Iroqua fell upon us and slaughtered us while we were weak after those battles with ourselves, and put our heads on poles, and stole our women?”
“Great Sun Man told me long ago.”
“Because of that, Cahokia was weak! It was because of that that the Iroqua thought the Oyo was theirs!”
Marcellinus felt very tired. “Yes. And why did the Iroqua fall upon Cahokia back then?”
“How should I know?”
“Perhaps because two hundred winters ago, Cahokia did not even exist as the Great City it is now? I think that it was when Cahokia was founded that the Iroqua were first pushed back. I think that the Oyo was originally Iroqua.”
“You cannot
know that!” she said derisively. “You, who have been here just a few winters.”
That was true enough. For this idea Marcellinus had only Pezi’s intimations, and the boy could hardly be trusted on history. But the point remained. “And that is why it has to stop, Sisika. Because you don’t know and nobody else remembers, either, not Ojinjintka, not Ogleesha, not Kanuna. No one. It’s lost. The hatred lives on. What really happened all those years ago, nobody knows.”
“Things that happened so long ago do not matter,” she said. “What matters is now!”
Marcellinus looked at her.
“What?” she demanded.
“At last we agree.”
But of course they did not. Sintikala spit on the ground at his feet. “And you think that if you talk to the Iroqua of this, they will stop fighting? You will tell them your long, sad tales of the past, and because of that they will bury the ax and we will have peace?”
“Someone must try.”
“Wanageeska, when you looked at the map in my old house and saw where the Iroqua were, you were the one who said we must push them back even farther. That even where they live now, the Iroqua are too close to us!”
“I did say that. But I was wrong. And I also told you a thing that I had only just then realized, that the Iroqua see Cahokia as the giant destabilizing threat. And about that I was right.”
He had lapsed into Latin for “giant destabilizing threat,” but it hardly mattered. Sintikala had already pulled her knife from its sheath.
“You will not kill me today,” Marcellinus said.
“You say so? You order me?”
“Yes.”
Marcellinus kept walking, his eyes on the almost invisible trail ahead. The Caiuga and Seneca braves watched with interest, none moving to interfere. Sintikala stood staring after him, the knife still in her hand.
—
Perhaps an hour later she appeared beside him again.
Marcellinus had hoped she had gone for good, had finally decided to go back to Cahokia. “Still can’t shake you, can I?”
She grabbed his arm and pulled him to a standstill. “Enough. Gaius? Are you really ready to die? When this long walk ends, at powwow?”
Her sudden intensity took him aback. “Of course I am.”
“And if they kill you, do you know how you will die? Wachiwi told you that?”
