by Alan Smale
Marcellinus blew out a long breath. “Those two will be the death of each other. Maybe Tahtay should watch his own back.” He turned to find the boy already leafing calmly through his books. “Enopay?”
“Do not worry. Kimimela must do that. Much better for Tahtay to be angry than go back to moping, unhappy.”
“She’s provoking him deliberately?”
“Of course. She cares for Tahtay, and he for her. If they did not, they would not shout at each other so much.”
Marcellinus looked at the boy uncertainly. “You say so?”
Enopay shrugged. “Or maybe she is just doing it because she is her mother’s daughter and a pain in everyone’s side. Did you really want to become her father?”
“Yes,” said Marcellinus, “more than anything,” and then bit his tongue. Enopay, he remembered belatedly, had no father and no mother either.
Enopay tucked his books into his pouch and stood. “Do not worry. I need no father. It is enough that you are my friend. Come, we should walk. Cahokia must get used to seeing you walking around. Once they get used to you again, they will forget they are supposed to be angry with you.”
—
They crossed the Great Plaza. Marcellinus did not have to look around to know that Hanska and Mikasi were coincidentally strolling in a similar direction and that others of the First Cahokian loitered nearby. He shook his head.
“And so you did not take me to see the Iroqua,” said Enopay.
“You’re joking. Aren’t you?”
“Of course. They would just have stolen me and tried to make me a warrior. I did not want to go there with you. But I did not want you to go there either.”
“Someone had to go. It couldn’t be Great Sun Man.”
“And now Great Sun Man plays a dangerous game,” Enopay said. “He plays chunkey with himself as the rolling target when everyone else holds spears. He hopes that Cahokia’s desire for peace and life, and the trust the people have in him, will be stronger than our need for revenge.”
“And is it?”
“It cannot be,” Enopay said soberly. “For it is the fiercest warriors and the most stupid and violent of our people who are against him, and the peaceful men and women who like to make their pots and grind their corn and bounce their babies on their laps who are for him.”
“Oh,” said Marcellinus. It was well put.
“Great Sun Man can only win by being stronger and more forceful than the most warlike of his warriors, while also talking of peace. That is a hard thing to do, even for Great Sun Man.”
“But there can be no army unless Great Sun Man says so.”
Enopay nodded.
“How many soldiers did we have, Enopay?”
“Which we? Cahokia?”
“Mound-builder warriors. Friends from Shappa Ta’atan and other cities along the river. When you began to march to war against the Iroqua, how many were there?”
“How would I know?”
Marcellinus pointed at Enopay’s satchel. “Don’t mess around, Enopay. You know how many to the man.”
Enopay nodded. “Four thousands and six hundreds and a few more who spoke tall but would probably have found an excuse to drop out before we got there. But some of them should not have gone. They were not good enough fighters, and they would have died when the first axes fell.” Enopay shook his head. “Some olds would have been lucky just to survive the walk.”
“Juno.” Marcellinus was impressed. He had deliberately avoided learning how big the Cahokian army was to be or any other useful information that the Iroqua could have tortured out of him.
The number was higher than he had expected, although from what he had seen at the powwow, the Cahokians still would have been outnumbered by the Iroqua.
“How many Romans were in your legion?”
“My legion was understrength,” Marcellinus told him. “It had only eight cohorts, where most legions have ten. Each cohort is six centuries. And my centuries had only seventy men. The goal is a hundred per century, although some have only eighty.”
“So you had three thousands and, oh, nearly four hundreds. But other legions can have five thousands or even six?”
Marcellinus looked at the boy sideways. “If you were any sharper, you’d cut yourself.”
Enopay frowned. “Praise? Insult?”
“Both.”
“So my numbers were right?”
“No, you miscalculated.”
The boy grinned. “I did not.”
“And how many died when Cahokia fell to the Iroqua?”
Enopay’s smile vanished.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know that, either, Enopay.”
Enopay looked out over the shimmering streets of Cahokia, at the men and women carrying jars of water back from the creek. Above them Sintikala and Demothi were no longer visible. Either they had landed while Marcellinus had not been looking or they were above the clouds.
“Enopay?”
“That number I will not tell you.”
“Why?”
“Because I do not want you to know,” Enopay said. “Because you will add that number to the three thousands and four hundreds of your men, and carry them in the ledger in your heart as the people whose deaths you are responsible for. And I will not help you hurt yourself.”
Marcellinus stopped walking. Thirty feet behind them, Hanska and Mikasi stopped, too.
Enopay turned to face him. “You cannot do arithmetic with people. You are not to blame for everything. Just stop.”
“What do you suggest I do instead?” Marcellinus asked. “Gardening?”
“ ‘Gardening’ is making a garden, growing corn and askutasquash by your hut? No, not that. That would be a waste of you as well.”
Marcellinus took a long look around him. Ahead of him were the Mounds of the Chiefs and Hawks, marking the southern boundary of the Great Plaza. Ambling around within a hundred yards were even more of the First than he had expected. And beyond them, sitting outside their houses or walking in the streets, were other men. Wolf Warriors. As aware of Marcellinus as he was of them.
“This is absurd,” he said.
“What is?”
“My very presence in Cahokia serves as a colossal irritant, doesn’t it?”
“What? An irritant is an itch?”
Some still blamed him for the sack of Cahokia by the Iroqua. Others for the peace. Marcellinus had done his best, but he would forever be alien here. He did not have the power to make them love him.
“I should leave,” he said.
Enopay paused. “Go? Leave Cahokia again? You have only just returned.”
“Yes.”
The boy looked away. “Very well. But this time do not forget to tell us when you walk away.”
Marcellinus stared, taken aback at the edge in Enopay’s voice. “I did not just walk away to the Iroqua, and I would not just be walking away now.”
He had said nothing yet to Enopay of his plan for a Hesperian League, of building a confederation of Hesperian allies to stand against Roma. Here in the bright open air of Cahokia’s main square it might sound like a fever dream. And of all the people in Cahokia, Enopay’s scorn might be the hardest to bear.
Marcellinus temporized and said what was also true: “By being here I make things harder for Great Sun Man. Cahokia needs time to accept the peace. Perhaps it will take less time if I am not here.”
Enopay nodded. “The Wanageeska. The outsider. The man Great Sun Man listens to instead of listening to his own elders.”
“People really say that? Ordinary people, not just Matoshka and Avenaka?”
“Of course.”
Marcellinus blew out a long breath. Again he looked around the plaza.
He had spent most of his life traveling. And just last year he had ached to break away from Cahokia and explore, see more of the Mizipi. See the Wemissori, and the lands of grass that went on forever, and the great buffalo herds.
Right at this moment, all he wanted
was to stay in Cahokia and live in peace.
But such peace was an illusion with the Wolf Warriors glowering at him from the shadows, Cahokia racked with discontent, and the eternal shadow of Roma looming just over the horizon.
Cahokia’s chances of peace were greater if Marcellinus was not in it. And Nova Hesperia’s only hope of peace was a strong confederation against Roma.
Marcellinus had a great deal more to do before he could rest. “Damn it.”
Enopay was studying him closely. “Eyanosa? You have really decided? To be not-here?”
“Yes, Enopay.”
Unexpectedly, the boy’s lips quirked into a smile. “Then how about building a boat?”
—
Marcellinus took a cautious step closer to the crumbling edge of the riverbank and peered again into the hull of the Viking—Iroqua—longship. It was a hundred feet long, twelve feet wide at its widest point, yet only three or four feet deep. Marcellinus had always been perturbed by the shallow draft of the Norse longships; they had never seemed deep enough to him, especially in a heavy ocean swell. It was, of course, the keel beneath that kept it stable. The keel that was in this case rammed hard into the river mud below the bank.
In addition, the longship was mired in a cat’s cradle of branches and bore the dark scorch marks at the starboard bow where it had been seared by Cahokian liquid flame. But the thwarts and gunwales seemed sound enough. The tall prow, carved into a serpent’s body with a gaping mouth, still reached imperiously above the wooden tangle that held the boat firm.
This longship was a drekar, one of the three dragon ships that had assaulted Cahokia on the day of the Iroqua invasion. For a moment Marcellinus felt a chill at the memory of his first sight of them sailing up the Great River: their blood-red sails, the swarms of Iroqua on their decks, the ballistas that had fired on Great Sun Man’s position atop the Mound of the Flowers and punched a Thunderbird out of the sky.
“So what do you say?” Enopay asked a little anxiously. “What do you say, Eyanosa?”
Marcellinus said nothing, because he was counting the circular holes for the oars that ran in a line under the shield rack. He counted thirty on each side, yet there were only half a dozen long oars strewn in the bottom of the hull. He wondered if any more remained in the storage area under the pine decking.
Originally the ship had had an iron anchor larger than Enopay and considerably heavier, but it was nowhere to be seen. The bailer and buckets were gone. The copper cauldron that had served as a water cask had been ripped from the hull, with the harsh splinters of torn wood still visible. Marcellinus had seen the glint from such a cauldron in at least one of the drekars as the Iroqua had sailed upriver during the sack of Cahokia, and so he knew they had not removed them. Some enterprising Cahokians undoubtedly had performed some salvage of their own.
Yet the oaken rudder was still there, attached to the starboard side by a tough pleated leather band, and the Norse shields still lined the gunwales in their pine batten racks.
The mast was gone, splintered into shreds about a man’s height above the deck. The linen sail, probably one of the few immediately useful things in the boat, presumably also had been carried away and cut into pieces for clothes or bags. Mounted toward the rear of the boat was a horizontal cylinder with a handle; Marcellinus blinked at it for a few moments, thinking vaguely of a wringer for laundry, before realizing it must be a windlass to help raise the yard and sail…unless it was for raising the anchor.
He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about rigging, Enopay. I mean the ropes that used to hoist the sails.” Stays, shrouds; Marcellinus had heard the words but had no real idea how a ship worked, how sailing was achieved.
“The holes for the ropes are still there. If the Iroqua can make it work, we can, too.”
Marcellinus experienced another moment of disorientation and nostalgia. Once this bold vessel had been crewed by Vikings. On the long voyage across the Atlanticus, while Marcellinus had occupied a master’s cabin aboard one of the mighty troop vessels, this dragon ship had traveled either ahead of or behind him. It had sailed past Graenlandia, down the coast of Nova Hesperia to Vinlandia, and on to the Chesapica.
Then, after all that, an Iroqua crew had captured it and presumably taken it up the great river that flowed into the Chesapica. Somewhere in Iroqua territory they had portaged the boat across the hills and into the Oyo River watershed. They had crewed it and sailed it down the Oyo and up the Mizipi to attack Cahokia, where Marcellinus and Great Sun Man’s army had surrounded it with burning trees and done their level best to sink it.
Abandoned by the Iroqua, the longship had beached on a sandbar. Then, when the Mizipi had burst its banks the next spring, the drekar had been swept farther downstream to be dumped ignominiously here in the mud. And here it lay, some ten miles south of Cahokia.
Quite the saga, and a sad end for a craft born in the forests and fjords of Scand that had come a quarter of the way around the world.
If, indeed, this was the end.
“Eyanosa? Gaius?” Enopay shook his head, not understanding Marcellinus’s silence. Farther back on the bank stood Akecheta and Mahkah, Mikasi and Hanska, and a dozen other warriors of the First. Few of them looked particularly impressed with the longship; most, in fact, were scanning the river and the copses of trees on the land.
Guarding Marcellinus. And not from Iroqua but from angry Cahokians who might want to pick a fight with him.
“Once you wanted to see the Mizipi,” Enopay said. “And the Wemissori, the great plains, the grass and the buffalo. I want to see them, too. Perhaps we can go in this.”
“It would take a huge effort to make it riverworthy again. And once mended, a lot of rowing to get it anywhere.”
“Rowing?”
“Paddling. While facing backward.”
“Why backward?” Enopay shook his head. “Anyway. If the Iroqua have these, Cahokia should have them, too.”
“We’re at peace with the Iroqua, Enopay.”
“The Mizipi is our river,” Enopay said obstinately. “We must have these. And we must make more.”
Marcellinus laughed. “A longship is not like a siege engine. Building a boat like this is a skill that takes generations to master, passed down from man to boy, father to son.” A man had to practice for years even to split a plank with an ax and wedges competently. Marcellinus himself had always been poor at it.
“The pole in the middle will be easy. Cahokian and Ocatani woodmen make such poles all the time. And to make paddles like these will be easy, too.”
That, at least, was true, if they could persuade the local woodturners to have any interest in the project. “Say ‘mast’ for the pole in the middle. ‘Oars’ for those.”
“Great Sun Man will want us to do this,” Enopay said. “He will. And the people of Cahokia will want to see that there is nothing the Iroqua have that we do not have.”
Cahokia had cotton to make a sail. Cahokian ropes could be pressed into service. But…“Enopay, honestly, I have no idea how to sail a ship like this. I’m a complete landlubber. And we don’t have any Norsemen.”
On the bank, Mahkah scratched himself. “How much longer here, Hotah? There are many bugs.”
Enopay persisted. “Let us at least find men to help us cut the branches away and take it back to Cahokia and out of the water so it does not rot away into nothing.”
Hanska stepped down beside Marcellinus. “The boy is right. We should try. We can make a Longhouse of the Big Canoe near the creek to put it in, and you can hide in there away from the warriors of Avenaka who want to kill you.”
Enopay nodded. “When your Iroqua friends arrive in their longship to smoke the pipe of peace with Great Sun Man, it would be a nice gesture if we had one, too.”
“A nice gesture,” said Hanska, at the same time making a crass hand-talk sign. Enopay laughed. Marcellinus winced.
He couldn’t resist a jibe at Enopay. “Isn’t this another ‘clever new thing w
e do not need in Cahokia’?”
“Yes, but this one looks like fun and will not get anyone killed.”
“You hope.”
But Enopay was right. Cahokia had an army. No reason why they couldn’t have a navy as well. And the dragon ship was still a thing of beauty.
Marcellinus gave in. “All right, Enopay. If you can persuade Great Sun Man to be interested, we’ll cut it out of the bank and see what we can do with it.”
—
Marcellinus hated his new house. He rattled around in it. It was bigger than his Praetorium tent of the 33rd had been yet had almost no furniture. He was embarrassed by its size, embarrassed that he—the outlander who had brought so much grief to Cahokia—now lived in accommodations intended for a chief or an elder, and embarrassed above all to be constantly guarded.
Whenever he walked out of his front door, someone’s head turned. Whether it was Kanuna or one of his warrior friends who just happened to be visiting on the mound south of him; Sintikala, Kimimela, and other Hawks on the mound to the north; Great Sun Man’s sentries on the peak of the Great Mound that loomed over him to the west and cut off the sun in the early evening; or even two warriors in a Sky Lantern far above him, there was always someone.
Marcellinus never called for an escort—would never have done such a thing—but somehow it was rare for him to walk across the Great Plaza without seeing Takoda, Mahkah, and others of his First Cahokian in the area and rare for him to approach Wachiwi’s hut without seeing Hanska or Mikasi in the vicinity, and he never once headed off across the broad empty space between the Great Mound and the new Longhouse of the Ship without several of his woodturners and warriors arriving at his side to walk him the rest of the way to Cahokia Creek.
He complained to Great Sun Man and Sintikala. Both denied having him watched, and perhaps it was true; Marcellinus was more inclined to blame Kanuna, Akecheta, or Hanska. Or perhaps it was just one of those spontaneous acts of organization that happened from time to time in Cahokia.
Anyway, as the heat of summer gave way to the fall and the leaves turned golden, the threat appeared to recede. Many in Cahokia embraced the peace. The rest, still being whipped up by Avenaka and the shamans, had become convinced that all they needed to do was wait until springtime, when their eternal enemies would break the treaty of their own accord and start raiding again. Then even Great Sun Man would have to accept that all deals were off, and Cahokia again could storm forth and take Iroqua scalps.
