Eagle in Exile

by Alan Smale

  With his military background, Marcellinus might have felt more at home in this more orderly environment. He did not.

  Nonetheless, few danger signs presented themselves. The Cahokians were soon at their ease and swapping stories with their local counterparts, who apparently did speak a dialect similar to Cahokian, after all. The elders who were talking with Marcellinus now, marveling how far he had come across ocean and land and river over the years to be with them today, also spoke heavily accented Cahokian. The only person who did not was the war chief, and that gave Marcellinus the confidence to ask him about it.

  “I speak,” the chief responded in Cahokian. “Not well. I—” He waved his hands. “—shamed at poor Cahokia speak.”

  “I, too,” Marcellinus said with a smile. “And the language you do speak?”

  “Caddo.” The chief pointed south and a little west. “Those words.”

  Very helpful. But how could a native speaker of a southern tongue become paramount chief of Shappa Ta’atan? No answer was forthcoming, and it seemed impertinent to probe further. Marcellinus smiled and nodded and allowed himself to be guided deeper into the city.

  He was startled to encounter another stockade even taller and stouter than the first. Above it he could see the upper part of a giant mound of black clay, small in area compared with the Master Mound at Cahokia but still a good seventy feet high and broad enough to have required many years of effort to construct. The longhouse that crowned the mound had a curious appearance. As he attended to the small talk of his hosts, it took Marcellinus a moment to notice that the longhouse was fortified. It had ramparts, with warriors patrolling them.

  “ ‘Here-inside is our Sacred Center,’ ” said the girl who was translating. “ ‘Our place of good and of chiefs.’ ”

  “Your place of medicine, of your fathers and many-fathers?” Marcellinus prompted.

  She seemed surprised that Marcellinus knew those words. “Yes, it is so.”

  “Here, too, the walls of Shappa Ta’atan are great,” Marcellinus said. He looked around casually for Sintikala, but she had been swallowed by a gaggle of admiring women; as for Chumanee, from the way she and the younger women were passing flowers and tied bunches of greenery back and forth, it looked as if an impromptu herbalists’ market had broken out.

  The paramount chief spoke. “ ‘Now we will show you the houses where you will rest before the feast,’ ” said the translator.

  The chief said something else and then signed, Feast, great, sunset.

  “We are honored, and you are most generous,” Marcellinus said.

  The chief bowed. Then he and most of the elders of Shappa Ta’atan left them, striding off into the city. The remaining elders and the translator guided Marcellinus and the others to a small plaza bounded by large round houses that were neatly kept up and without the usual millstones outside their doors for grinding corn or lean-to gardens against their walls. These were obviously the guest quarters.

  Around him the Cahokians were already exploring their accommodations. Marcellinus surveyed the area for a few moments more. Beyond the guest complex the ordinary folk of Shappa Ta’atan went about their daily errands, but Marcellinus suspected that an attempt to walk over and strike up a conversation might be frowned upon. He ducked into his hut and stripped off his tunic, digging into his travel pouch for something a little fresher.

  Bare-chested, he stood in his hut’s doorway and looked out. Before him was the plaza that separated their accommodations from the organized rows of houses where the people of Shappa Ta’atan lived. From where he stood, he was overlooked by several rectangular platform mounds, many with houses and even small palisades of their own. Behind his house was the stockade that surrounded their Sacred Center, fully fifteen feet tall. He had seen no gates into the inner compound other than the heavily guarded entryway.

  A couple of hundred yards away two women were showing Sintikala and Kimimela into their hut at a discreet distance from the rest of the group. This, too, was not unprecedented, though Marcellinus often found the separation inconvenient. Before Sintikala entered her hut, she straightened and caught sight of him. She was too far away for him to see her expression, but her posture was relaxed enough, and her quickly hand-talked gesture of All is well seemed genuine.

  And truth be told, these days Cahokia itself might present a forbidding face to a visiting stranger with its size and military bearing, the increasing number of brick buildings, and the gouts of black smoke from the brickworks and foundry. But in the pit of Marcellinus’s stomach his instincts were cautioning him to stay alert here in a way they never had in the other towns and villages along the way.

  Marcellinus finished his ablutions. He slid his pugio up under his tunic, held in by his belt where it could not be seen. Then he went to talk to the others.

  —

  Aelfric and Isleifur were as disconcerted as Marcellinus, but Akecheta shared few of their forebodings; though impressed by the fortifications, he had received no unfavorable impression at their first meeting with the Shappa Ta’atani. Marcellinus’s own misgivings faded over the next few days as they were feasted and feted by their hosts.

  The paramount chief, Son of the Sun, certainly had not exaggerated about the food. Out on the river the Cahokians had eaten sparingly from their provisions, supplemented with what they could forage as they traveled. Most of the towns they had passed through had provided sustenance no grander than their daily fare back home, mostly corn, beans, squash, and fish. Here in Shappa Ta’atan they dined well every night on waterfowl or fish rich with aromatic spices with which even Chumanee was unfamiliar.

  Their conversations with the local elders and warriors established to Marcellinus’s satisfaction that although Shappa Ta’atan was still keen to be considered an ally of Cahokia, they were even more keen to share in the peace with the Iroqua that Marcellinus and Sintikala had brokered. Even so far south, Shappa Ta’atan had suffered Iroqua incursions and predations from the east on a regular basis; the previous year nearby homesteads had been raided, many men slain, women purloined. Marcellinus sat grim-faced at the news, which was conveyed to him by Son of the Sun with a calm matter-of-factness that he could not imagine from Great Sun Man. But if the Iroqua would keep the peace, Shappa Ta’atan would do likewise.

  And indeed, the people of Shappa Ta’atan were eager to learn from Marcellinus, especially about iron and steel. He was cheered to discover that they already smelted iron in aboveground furnaces and so were one step ahead of where the Cahokians had been on his arrival. He spent many happy days with their metalsmiths, discussing the colors of superheated metal and the exact moments to quench, and picked up a trick or two in return about techniques for heating and hammering iron that he hoped to experiment with someday.

  Nowhere, however, did they see any gold.

  —

  “Ceremonial dress?” Marcellinus repeated. A little worried, he looked over at Sintikala.

  “Wear your helmet?” Kimimela said. “Breastplate, Roman-soldier clothes?”

  His envy obvious, Akecheta said, “It is a great honor they give you, to be invited to feast in the Sacred Center with the chiefs. This is a corn ceremony of the air as well as the soil. The priestesses of Shappa Ta’atan will fly for you.”

  “I’ve already feasted out here.” Marcellinus patted his growing stomach. He badly needed more exercise beyond the few minutes of swordplay he insisted on each morning before breakfast with Akecheta, Hanska, and Mahkah. And for the last two days, during the Green Corn Ceremony, he had not managed even that.

  The Green Corn Ceremony was held once the corn out in the fields was ripe enough to fill its husk but still retain its green hue. This generally happened late in the Thunder Moon. Before the ceremony, nobody was permitted even to taste the corn; during the festival, everybody did.

  In Cahokia the Green Corn Ceremony was largely a family celebration. On the first day at noon all the fires would be extinguished and then relit, and then
the first corn would be cooked: boiled into soup or roasted on the cob. The aroma of burned corn wafted over Cahokia like a benediction, and families and clans gathered for private thanksgivings in their own individual ways. Inevitably drumming and dancing would break out in the evening, but Great Sun Man gave no speeches and the shamans gave no blessings. The full harvest, the final gathering in of the corn, was the real celebration.

  In Shappa Ta’atan, they celebrated the early harvest much more emphatically with a four-day festival. The previous day they had snuffed all their fires at noon all at once, and a respectful silence had fallen over the entire city as the last smoke drained away into the skies. Shamans had intoned long prayers of thanksgiving for the bounty of the sun, the Son of the Sun, and the Corn Mother (in that order, as far as Marcellinus could tell). With a crackle of flint and tinder the fires were relit, and a citywide party broke out immediately.

  Marcellinus ate moderately, drank almost nothing, and certainly did not sing or dance, but by the end of the evening he was exhausted. The din of the hourlong event known as the Stomp Dance was particularly wearing.

  The party went on without him for most of the night, with the howling of flutes and the banging of the drums keeping him awake till almost dawn.

  According to Mahkah’s weary but cheerful report the next day, it had been quite a night. The second morning had been quiet, but once the sun reached the zenith, gods help them all, exactly the same thing began again—the death of all the fires, followed by an excess of reverent prayer and the birth of the new flames, and out came the green corncobs and the corn soup and the corn beer, and the thump and tootle of the musicians, and the games of chunkey and the southern ball game, which was almost a war, played with long sticks with nets mounted on the end, where the players practically murdered one another for custody of a small ball of deerskin stuffed with corn silk. By late afternoon of this festive onslaught even Mahkah was forced to beat a retreat and rest his head, leaving Marcellinus and Sintikala and Aelfric and the others to watch from the sidelines, bemused. Would this really go on for another two and a half days?

  “Food for the chiefs in the Sacred Center, much better,” said the Shappan runner who had just brought word of the invitation.

  “Sintikala is not invited? Akecheta?”

  “She is not a man, and he is not a chief. Just Son of the Sun, the chiefs, and you.” The messenger pointed at the sky, his arm at an angle. “Be ready when the sun is there.”

  Marcellinus surveyed the stockade that surrounded the Sacred Center. Alone behind that, separated from his crew? He certainly would wear all the “ceremonial” armor he could.

  At his expression, the messenger looked worried. “You must go. You cannot refuse. No harm will come to you.”

  Across the table Akecheta nodded in agreement. Marcellinus eyed the runner sourly. “I am not concerned about harm.”

  “Flying priestesses?” Sintikala said sardonically. “I am surprised that you hesitate.”

  She switched to her shaky Latin. “Not be foolish. They honor you. Boy is right. You cannot say no. They will not kill you in there.” She cocked an eye at him. “At least, the men will not.”

  “Sisika…”

  Across the courtyard the women elders beckoned and giggled. Sintikala sighed. “In truth? Women here may be the death of me, too. They talk and talk. And talk. And talk.”

  “They honor you,” Marcellinus said straight-faced. “You cannot refuse.”

  Sintikala flashed an entirely unconvincing smile at the women and stood. “Feast well. Make sure your breastplate is shiny.”

  “Tell Son of the Sun I will be honored,” Marcellinus said to the messenger. As the boy sprinted away, Marcellinus grinned wryly at Kimimela. “All right. Time to eat, drink, make merry. Whether we like it or not.”

  —

  Marcellinus had not expected a procession, never having seen one in Cahokia. Now he and Son of the Sun walked together at the head of a column of chiefs. Drummers drummed and flautists trilled as they marched through a corridor of smiling townsfolk who all looked so clean and well appointed that Marcellinus suspected they had been chosen specially.

  Son of the Sun was decked out in his full regalia of kilt and headdress, augmented with a copper gorget, armbands and ankle bands, and the heavy earrings of the Long-Nosed God. Only his chert mace of office had been left behind. Marcellinus wore steel shoulder greaves as well as his helmet and breastplate and the apron of metal strips that protected his groin in battle; tonight he looked more of a Roman soldier than he had since walking to the Haudenosaunee powwow, an association of ideas he did not find comforting.

  As they approached the gate to the Sacred Center, the faux-adoring crowd dropped away. Only the chiefs marched now, along with the cordon of tough-looking braves that flanked them. Marcellinus swallowed, trying to control his disquiet.

  Like the main city gateway, this entranceway was L-shaped, with tall log gates at either end and bastions to the left and right. Warrior guards looked down on them from the battlements. None of the Shappa Ta’atani chiefs appeared to find this alarming.

  The outer gate closed behind them. The inner gate in front of them had not opened yet. Marcellinus looked around, playing the tourist but alert to his surroundings, and only now noticed a tall painted gourd, a set of carved shell drinking cups, and a wide trench in the corner of the L.

  Son of the Sun spoke, and some of the chiefs laughed. The younger men looked apprehensive. Marcellinus caught the eye of one—the chief of the Beaver clan, judging by the tails that swung at his belt—and raised his eyebrows. “Asi,” said the man as the cups were passed around. Black drink, he signed, and when Son of the Sun was not looking, he made a face.

  It was the vilest concoction Marcellinus had ever swallowed. At the first sip, his stomach roiled. Around him the chiefs were gulping it down as if in self-defense. Marcellinus stared in shock at the beautiful conch that he was drinking this abhorrent liquid out of and tried again. The second swallow seared his throat. As he began to panic, his only rational thought was, This is no drink, and it’s not even black.

  Nausea rose in him, and he staggered, desperately trying to keep the liquid down. Son of the Sun took another long draft out of the fine conch he held and smiled at Marcellinus. Then the paramount chief of Shappa Ta’atan bent over the trough.

  Marcellinus’s stomach convulsed, and his body took over. Folding at the waist, he gave himself over to nature. Around him the other chiefs were vomiting, too.

  Eventually the purging abated. Marcellinus sat on the ground, his eyes streaming, his breastplate and tunic befouled. He had spun away from the other men and hurled his conch cup at the wall; it now lay on the ground in a dozen pieces.

  The Shappa Ta’atani were getting to their feet. Son of the Sun stood serenely over the trough surrounded by the wreckage of his chiefs. Mercifully, Marcellinus was not the only one to have disgraced himself in the purification ritual; the Beaver chief was still facedown and groaning.

  The second jar held water. The youngest chief, of the Snake clan, served it out to them in wooden cups. His hands still shook.

  Marcellinus flushed out his mouth but still could not swallow. His throat was too raw. His head pounded, his stomach ached. Now he was supposed to feast?

  The inner gate swung wide. Around him, the chiefs began to disrobe.

  —

  Naked, they walked into the Sacred Center. Women had already taken their stained ceremonial clothing away to be cleaned, including Marcellinus’s breastplate and helmet. So much for his plan to spend the evening armored.

  Son of the Sun’s chest was surprisingly muscular, his torso and legs lined with scarifications and battle tattoos. He was almost as impressive unclothed as he was when garbed as a paramount chief. By contrast Marcellinus’s skin seemed clean and almost babyish even to himself, though the younger chiefs nodded in respect at his many scars.

  The Sacred Center was not larger in area than the Great Plaza in C
ahokia but was so empty that it appeared enormous. It was bounded by the tall stockade and carpeted with a flat expanse of pure green grass, a lawn the likes of which Marcellinus had not seen since leaving Roma. Clearly, few were permitted to walk on it.

  Throughout the space Marcellinus saw several elegant platform mounds with what he knew must be mausoleums or charnel houses at their crests, along with low conical mounds apparently scattered at random. At the exact center rose the Temple Mound of Shappa Ta’atan. It dwarfed all others in its height and area, and the longhouse that spanned its peak put the others to shame.

  People began to spill from some of the doorways of the “mausoleums,” men from some, women from others. Not charnel houses, then; every assumption Marcellinus made here seemed doomed to be shattered. These must be the priests and priestesses, and the houses on the low mounds were where they lived.

  As they hurried across the grass toward him, Marcellinus controlled a heavy sigh. The women were beautiful, and the men were eunuchs. Some things were the same the world over.

  Here came an oaken chair for Son of the Sun so finely carved that it looked gilded, suspended between two long carrying poles. Behind it was a series of less ornate yoked litters for the chiefs. Marcellinus, who had been forced to endure a litter only once before in his life, at the behest of his least favorite Imperator, Vespasianus II, gritted his teeth and climbed aboard. Four eunuchs shouldered the wooden poles to hoist him high, and off they went across the massive lawn of the Sacred Center.

  Giant moths fluttered at the edges of his vision. While Marcellinus had been boarding his litter, the air above him had filled with wings. He looked up at the Temple Mound, and this time he registered the audible twang as a winged priestess was shot into the air above it, quickly followed by another.