by Alan Smale
There was no ceremony, no proclamation from the high stage. So far the assembly had been quiet and calm, almost patient. Now a slow murmur began from the massed crowd and built until it became a steady roar. Everywhere he saw mouths moving, shouting at him. Abuse was hurled that he could not understand. Still Marcellinus stood at the mouth of the gauntlet.
On the stage, a central figure who had to be the Tadodaho had risen to his feet. Raising his hands, he tried to calm the crowd, but this had passed beyond his control.
The warriors in the gauntlet bounced up and down on the balls of their feet, waving their clubs, menacing him with the rocks they held. Taunting him. Daring him to make his run. The men farther away were challenging him to make it even that far.
Marcellinus, too, raised his hands and then presented them palm first. The Iroqua mob howled.
To hell with them all.
He looked at his hands and saw not the faintest tremor in them. Good.
Marcellinus undid the straps of his helmet again and cast it aside. He pulled the greaves from his shoulders and then unbuckled the heavy chest plate and left it lying on the ground with the rest of his armor.
Wearing only his Roman tunic, belt, and sandals, Marcellinus stepped into the howling gauntlet.
Spittle landed on him from the left and right. The deafening roar continued unabated, but Marcellinus no longer heard it. He took another step.
A rock grazed his forehead and pounded into the dirt in front of his feet. Marcellinus tried not to flinch. He stepped over the rock and kept going.
A whirled club cracked into his right calf. The pain was sudden, immediate, and deadening. His leg gave way, and he dropped heavily onto his knee.
Breathing was difficult. He closed his eyes for a moment and felt the thrum of another missile pass inches from his head. Someone kicked him in the ribs on his left side; he flailed his arms to keep his balance and managed not to fall. More wetness on his head and cheeks; saliva carried on voices of rage.
Still he waited for the blow to his skull that would end it all. His temples throbbed in anticipation. He sucked in another breath and felt a wheeze begin in his chest. His right foot felt dead from the blow to his shin.
Marcellinus stood. Raising his head, he looked around him.
The raucous noise continued, but it no longer came from the warriors to his immediate right and left. Instead they watched him keenly as if he were a new breed of animal.
“Kill me or let me walk.” His voice was gravelly, but still it carried. Nobody understood him. “I am Gaius Publius Marcellinus. Kill me or let me walk!” He took another step.
Someone shoved the backs of his knees, and he stumbled forward again. This time his hands touched the ground. He ducked his head forward. No blow came.
“Gods’ sakes,” said Marcellinus.
Again he stood. Iroqua warriors studied him. Some glanced back and forth between him and the stage. Screwing up his eyes Marcellinus peered up at the high platform, but nobody was giving any orders from up there. The Tadodaho watched, arms folded. The rest of the chieftains sat as calmly as if they were watching a dance.
Resisting the dizzy urge to wave, Marcellinus took another step.
He was on the ground again before he knew what had hit him. He felt no pain, just dizziness and a nonspecific ache in his spine. A blow to his shoulders or the back of his neck? He had no idea, but he still was not dead, could still move.
He shoved himself back up onto his feet. He had walked maybe twenty feet into the hundred-yard gauntlet of warriors.
Setting aside his armor had been his attempt to hasten the final blow. Marcellinus wanted nothing more than a quick end to this: a sudden dazzling strike, the bright final explosion. In the Iroqua assault on Cahokia he had experienced serious injury and did not wish that on himself again. Better death than mutilation, much better.
Hence he had relinquished all protection and was walking. No sense in making a futile run when he would merely be tripped and smashed to the ground in seconds. Instead, he would die with dignitas.
He raised his head high. How much of a target did he need to make it?
But the men in the gauntlet were stepping back. No club was raised against him. No pots or rocks flew by his head. Nothing smashed sickeningly into his skull or his back or his legs.
Marcellinus took ten more paces and then stopped, bemused. He saw stones raised again, clubs brought up, but they were only readying to defend themselves should he attack them. Their bloodlust had drained away into the ground. The Roman welcomed death? Nobody here was going to grant it to him. The Roman did not fight? Then nobody here was going to cast a blow. Where was the honor in that?
Every Iroqua warrior in the gauntlet was standing down.
As he hobbled painfully but with head raised high and defiant, easing his weight onto and off his damaged right shin, it seemed to take Marcellinus the other half of the morning to complete his walk the length of the Iroqua gauntlet.
At its very end a Mohawk warrior blocked his way. From the man’s feathered headdress and beaded tunic Marcellinus guessed he must be a man of high standing, perhaps even one of the sachems. The Mohawk held a mace in his hand.
Marcellinus halted, regarding the warrior without rancor. “Now, then? Are you to be my executioner?”
The Mohawk shook his head in incomprehension. From the platform came Pezi’s voice as he translated.
Time stood still for a moment. Above him on the stage he heard voices talking, speaking over one another, interrupting. Then one voice rang out from the others, and all fell silent.
Marcellinus swallowed. “Well?”
The Mohawk chief spoke a single word. It was an Iroqua word that even Marcellinus understood.
“Come.”
—
No steps led up onto the broad wooden platform. A crude ladder of extended cross-posts jutted from the side, and the Mohawk climbed it quickly, hand over hand.
Marcellinus could hardly feel his right foot, and his breath still wheezed. “No,” he said in Iroqua, and they ushered him around the long way, to where the natural slope of the hill made it simple to step across onto the boards. He tried not to look up at the torture frames, where three new bodies hung, bloody and torn.
The Mohawk chief waited for him at the platform’s edge. Marcellinus glanced at the sun and understood. The platform was oriented northeast to southwest, and he would step onto it at its eastward end. The Mohawks were the Keepers of the Eastern Door; thus, their chief must consent to allow him passage.
Marcellinus bowed. The Mohawk let him pass.
There they sat, the sachems of the Haudenosaunee, young and old, broad and lean, all in their finest regalia for powwow. All had gained their status through being great fighters, and every face and chest was adorned with finely crafted geometric tattoos. Each wore a headdress, some of deer antlers or eagle feathers, others of wolfskin or bearskin or the pelt of a panther. Armbands and ankle bands of fur were common. Their raiment was much more vivid than the ceremonial garb of the Mizipians. Beneath the furs Marcellinus saw breeches of red as well as brown and even a lemon-yellow color brighter than the light tan of the Cahokian hand-woven cloth that was dyed with white oak galls and goldenrod.
The fifty chiefs of the Haudenosaunee viewed him curiously in return, eyeing him up and down the way a Roman farmer might study a horse. And a fine sight Marcellinus made in the simple ragged tunic he had worn under his armor. He still limped from the blow to his calf; glancing down, he saw blood, and the black of bruising had already spread. He was lucky the bone had not been smashed.
His ribs ached. Breathing required effort.
He looked up again, and Sintikala was there, at the far end of the platform beyond the sachems. She was bound at the wrists and flanked by two Seneca of the Western Door. Her face was bruised and her tunic was dirty, but she was not bleeding and did not seem to be in pain. She looked very alive and very annoyed.
Marcellinus’s heart leaped. W
hile they both lived, there was hope. He glanced at Pezi and was gratified that the boy looked as startled to see Sintikala as he was himself.
At a word from the Tadodaho, the braves cut the sinews that bound her and pushed her forward.
The crowd murmured as Sintikala walked over to Marcellinus. She pulled a cloth from her pouch; briskly, in front of the massed Haudenosaunee, she rubbed it across his head and shoulders. Marcellinus remembered the spitting of the warriors in the gauntlet and was grateful. He had not planned to face the Council of the Haudenosaunee battered, bruised, and soiled. He tried to stand erect and compose his features while the chief of the Hawk clan smoothed sweat, dirt, and worse from him.
“You screamed,” he said. “What did they do to you?”
Her lips pursed. “Nothing. An Iroqua ritual to test my courage. I shouted out only so that you would hear and know that I still lived.”
“Sisika, what did they do?”
“I told you. Nothing.”
He eyed her uncertainly, but she was walking and talking and did not seem harmed. “They did not torture you?”
“Torture? Let them try.”
Marcellinus glanced accusingly at Pezi. “He lied to me. Tried to bluff me, to find out where the Cahokian army was.”
“Huh. I told them already. Why not? The sooner we go to war, the less far the Cahokians have to walk.” She tugged his tunic straight, centered his belt. “You look very bad.”
“Thanks.”
From his other side Pezi spoke, translating their words to the Iroqua chiefs so that there could be no deceit.
Marcellinus’s helmet landed at his feet, lobbed up by one of the Iroqua warriors. A moment later his steel breastplate sailed up onto the platform with a clang. His greaves and metal apron followed in short order. The steel no longer gleamed, and the high red plume of the helmet looked distinctly battered.
“Leave all that,” said Sintikala.
She was right. His sorry armor would not help him. Any sense of presence or authority would have to come from Marcellinus himself.
Everyone was waiting. Marcellinus pulled himself together. “I may address the Tadodaho now? The council?”
Sintikala shook her head. “Not the council, Gaius.”
The Mohawk chief barked a command. Sintikala nodded formally to Marcellinus, the Tadodaho, and the council, and stepped away.
Marcellinus bowed to the Tadodaho, who continued to regard him without discernible emotion.
The Mohawk escorted Marcellinus and Sintikala to the center of the tall platform. The Tadodaho spoke, indicating Pezi. Marcellinus looked back and forth between them, but the boy shuffled his feet and did not translate.
The Onondaga chief grunted and hand-talked instead. The boy. He is yours?
Marcellinus hand-talked back. I save his life, at Woshakee. Send him here, tell you I come here.
Boy is good with speak. Iroqua, Cahokia.
He speaks good. But he hates me. May not speak true, Marcellinus signed, blocking his hand-talk with his body so that Pezi could not see. But the massed crowds could, and a smattering of laughter came from the men and women nearest the stage.
Marcellinus looked back over his shoulder. “Pezi, speak my words faithfully or I will come back to haunt you at night and you will never sleep again.”
“I will follow his words as best I can,” Sintikala said. “Others here, too, speak some words in both tongues and can watch for treachery.” Piercing Pezi with her glare, she said something contemptuous in Iroqua, and now many of the chiefs smiled.
The Mohawk nodded to Marcellinus and walked back to take his seat with the other Older Brothers at the Eastern Door.
The Tadodaho said something.
“ ‘Speak,’ ” Pezi translated. “ ‘Speak, Wanageeska, to the people of the Haudenosaunee.’ ”
“The people?”
“ ‘We are Haudenosaunee. This is powwow. Here the people decide.’ ”
Marcellinus looked out over a vast sea of faces. The Five Tribes spread out before him, almost silent, their expressions stark.
The people? These people? Then it was as good as over. He might as well have died in the gauntlet.
“Merda,” Marcellinus said under his breath.
He had traveled all this way hoping to speak with a few key war chiefs. A back-and-forth discussion like the councils of Great Sun Man in Cahokia. Instead, the Council of the Haudenosaunee was half a hundred men, and he would give a speech to thousands.
If he had known this would happen, he might have spent more time rehearsing what to say.
His golden Roman lares were still in their small pouch at his belt, along with the Hesperian birdman amulet. Marcellinus touched the small, heavy lump once and then let his hands drop down by his sides.
Marcellinus straightened his back, relaxed his shoulders, and began to address the Iroqua nations.
“My name is Gaius Publius Marcellinus. I come from the Roman Imperium, a great nation across the sea. Three winters ago I came to this land as the war chief of an army of mighty warriors, men of the Eagle clan, the greatest fighters of Roma.”
Only those who sat within a few hundred feet could hear his words as translated by Pezi. The braves beyond followed along with the hand-talk that was passed back through the crowd, all the way down to the lakeshore. The reactions spread in a slow wave. It was distracting.
“When the Eagle clan came ashore onto the land of the Powhatani at Chesapica, we brought great suffering and death. When we passed through Iroqua lands, we fought many battles with you. And then at last we came to Cahokia, to the peoples who build their mounds along the banks of the Mizipi. There my Roman army was destroyed by the Cahokians and by the Catanwakuwa of Sintikala and the enormous Wakinyan that flew above us and blocked out the sun, dropping fire and death among us. That day the Cahokians destroyed my clan, the great army of Roma.”
Marcellinus paused and swallowed while Pezi caught up. There was no lump in his throat, but his mouth was dry. He felt calm and unemotional, but the people before him were not. Many men looked somber. Women had their hands to their mouths. Whether they knew of the Cahokian Thunderbirds from firsthand experience and had suffered losses to their own families and clans from their fiery aerial bombardment, Marcellinus could not tell. All he knew was that perhaps they felt a moment of sympathy for him for losing his entire clan at a stroke.
Either way, it was of no importance as long as they kept listening. For Marcellinus’s own sufferings were not the point, not at all.
“But Haudenosaunee, hear me. The Roman army I brought with me is but one among many. My army’s name was the 33rd Legion. That is thirty-three. This many,” and he hand-talked the number so that there could be no mistake.
“Some of you saw the 33rd Legion. Perhaps some of you even fought against it. So think upon this: for every warrior in my army, Roma has forty more in the armies that have not yet come here.”
A murmur spread through the crowd. He waited for it to propagate out before he spoke anew. Not all would come to Nova Hesperia, of course, but this was not the time for semantics. “Hear this: one day another Roman army will arrive on your shores.
“Roma will come. Tomorrow, next moon, or five winters from today; I cannot say. But I do know that they will come.”
He swallowed again. He was about to step beyond the pale. In this moment, Gaius Publius Marcellinus willingly walked into that gray area between being a faithful servant of the Imperator and being a traitor to Roma.
It had to be done. After all, Hesperian blood beat in his veins now, too.
“And when the army of the Imperium comes, the Haudenosaunee League must not be weak.”
Sintikala twitched. Her hands closed into fists and opened again.
The Iroqua had fallen utterly silent. A feeling of unreality threatened to unbalance him.
“On the day the Romans arrive, you must not be worn down by years of war with the mound builders. The best of your warriors must no
t lie in charnel houses or burial mounds. You must not be turned inward, fighting among yourselves. And you must not be far from home. You must be here, in your homelands, and ready to stand with your brothers. Your brothers, the Cahokians.”
In an instant, that uncanny quiet dissolved into deafening fury.
Braves stood and shouted at him. Thus encouraged, others stood to add their voices. Men and women from farther back stood also, reacting late to the delayed hand-talk. All Marcellinus heard was a broad bellowing in a language he did not speak. He waited.
Pezi shrank back at the din, trying to make himself as small as possible. Marcellinus’s head began to pound. “Stand up, coward,” he snarled at Pezi. “Must all translators be craven?”
The fifty chiefs of the Haudenosaunee League were on their feet, hand-talking to their tribes in broad gestures, calling for calm. The Tadodaho raised his hands high, but the hubbub continued. He sat back down for a few moments and then stood and raised his hands once more. This time the din of the crowd faded. The council sat.
Again Marcellinus faced the thousands-strong crowd. His heart beat faster, in time with the throbbing in his head. He had lost his focus. What had he been saying?
As if sleepwalking, Sintikala came toward him. Her expression was severe, and for a moment he thought she might strike him. Then she turned outward to face the crowd. She was so close that her arm almost touched his. He could feel her heat and her immense calm, and she anchored him.
“ ‘Be ready to stand with your brothers,’ Gaius,” she said quietly. “ ‘Your brothers, the Cahokians.’ ”
“I thought you were coming to kill me.”
“I still might. I do not know what you are doing.”
“You wanted me to think of something. All I could think of was to tell the truth.”
Because Sintikala had been right. The past was dead. All that mattered now was the future.
The Five Tribes of the Haudenosaunee were waiting. Marcellinus raised his voice and spoke again to the crowd. “I do not know what will happen when the Romans arrive. That will depend on the war chiefs who stand at the head of those mighty legions of the Eagle. But this I swear to you in blood, today and for all days: I swear to you that I will powwow with the Romans, and powwow with the Haudenosaunee, and powwow with the Cahokians, and I will do my best to prevent another war. For I am tired of war, and you, too, should be tired of war.”
