Eagle in Exile

by Alan Smale

  “And when you reveal yourself to Demothi or Kanuna, the news will spread like wildfire.”

  “Demothi would never risk my life. Or Kanuna. Anyone I would speak to and show myself to, any of them would die for me.”

  Kimimela broke in impatiently. “But why must you do this at all?”

  Sintikala stared at her. “In Shappa Ta’atan we saw a glimpse of what Cahokia will become under Avenaka. You want that?”

  Enopay reached over to touch Kimimela’s arm. “I know many who will gladly take Sintikala. Hide her, help her, feed her.”

  “But, the longship?” said Aelfric. “If someone notices it going by, Avenaka will be on the lookout for any of us.”

  “I will be in Cahokia long before you,” Sintikala said.

  Marcellinus laughed in disbelief. “Your new Hawk is not complete yet, and the new throwing engine still does not throw straight. And even if they were ready, you would fly to Cahokia and expect to remain unnoticed?”

  Sintikala looked up into the air above them. “I will finish my new Hawk soon. At this time of year I will be lucky to make it halfway. Even for that, the day will have to be warm and the winds helpful. But once I land I can still run.”

  That, Marcellinus knew. Sintikala ran every day they were ashore.

  “I will arrive in Cahokia on foot and quietly. And after Cahokia, I will fly to the Iroqua or send a runner, a man we trust. The Iroqua must slow down the Romans, harry them, buy us time. Blockade the rivers they must cross. Attack the supply train. Be always ahead of Roma and always behind them.”

  Marcellinus nodded. “But before that, start a rumor in Cahokia. Have it spoken around the campfires that we are all dead, the Concordia burned and sunk.” He thought a little more. “Not by the Romans. That’s too complicated. The Caddo?”

  “The Tuscarora,” Enopay said. “The Wolf Warriors will be happy to spread a story of you being killed by allies of the Iroqua.”

  “No, that plays into Avenaka’s hands. Many Cahokians who are friends to the crew will then hate the Iroqua more.”

  “Why say anything?” Kimimela demanded. “Why make our friends grieve?”

  “So that Avenaka will lower his guard. We still have to sneak the Concordia past Cahokia to get to the Wemissori.”

  “Oh. Yes. The Caddo, then.”

  Sintikala half smiled. She obviously had understood right away. “Enopay must go back to Cahokia as soon as he can. Avenaka believes he is in Ocatan, but we do not want him to grow suspicious. Enopay must be back in Cahokia by the time the river floods so that people do not know he went so far from home. Isleifur and Mahkah, will you take him?”

  Mahkah looked almost relieved. “By canoe? I would be happy.”

  Enopay frowned. “You do not like my longship?”

  “I love the longship,” Mahkah said quickly. “With all my heart.”

  “We’ll take you,” Isleifur said.

  Enopay ran his fingers over the thwarts and the shield next to him on the shield rack. “Well, I will miss the Concordia even if none of you do.”

  “Enopay…” Unexpectedly, Marcellinus’s breath caught in his throat. “Be very careful. Do not let Avenaka know the game you are playing.”

  “Oh, I am not playing a game,” Enopay said. “I have not been so serious my whole life.”

  Marcellinus believed him.

  “And I must go and look for Tahtay?” Kimimela shook her head and gave out a long, deep sigh.

  “No, you have to come and stop me from getting into trouble,” Marcellinus said.

  The look she gave him was priceless. For once, even Kimimela was lost for words.

  —

  A mere two weeks later the spring meltwater was flowing down the Mizipi in earnest. It was as if the greasy river were conspiring with Avenaka and the shamans, constantly pushing them away. Already Marcellinus felt as if they had been on the river for years rather than months. The Great River was a long nightmare, and now it wasn’t even going to end at Cahokia.

  Because he had to go past it and up another river he knew even less about. He had to find Tahtay.

  They were a quiet, somber boat. Like Marcellinus, they all had thought they were going home to Cahokia, but now they were not; they were going up the Wemissori. And upriver was very similar to uphill: long, hard drudgery day after day.

  Eventually Sintikala was ready. Marcellinus was not. “You really want us to throw you in an untested wing?”

  Even as they talked, Sintikala was still sewing the front peak of the wing with sinew, doubling its strength. “You know that I make and adjust my own Hawk wings in Cahokia. That I do this always.”

  “Yes, but you test those by jumping off the mound.”

  “Then I must be thrown on the rail. And the wing must unfold. That is much worse than being tossed into the air over a river.”

  Marcellinus looked at Kimimela. His daughter nodded. “But still. Would it not be better to take you to a hill and use the springy material from the market? Isn’t that why you bought it?”

  Sintikala just pointed west. The hills on the horizon were several days’ walk away. “That will take too long. I will fly to the hills.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Yes, perhaps, and perhaps not.” She lay down inside the Hawk wing, and Kimimela folded it around her. “Hmm. Open.” Kimimela let her out, and she set to work easing the tension on one of the sinews on the right wing. “The wind is strong and in a good direction. It is warmer than last week. I can make it to the hills and then…” She gestured spiraling upward, soaring on the updraft from the hills. “Or, if you are right, I will land short. Then I will either walk to the hills and try, or walk back to the boat and try again, and you will be right and I will be wrong. Now, the throwing engine?”

  Marcellinus looked at Kimimela helplessly. She grinned back and stood. “Akecheta, Wapi! Have your men prepare the throwing engine. Isleifur! We will need to steer into the wind when we throw her. Dustu and Hurit, can you clear that rope out of the way so we can move the engine forward? Chumanee, can you pack her some food? Nuts, cakes. All small and light.”

  Aelfric looked amused. Kimimela’s growing confidence with ordering people about was also new, and he was obviously enjoying Marcellinus’s discomfort.

  Sintikala opened the sea chest where she kept her flying tunic and pulled it down over her head and shoulders. She took out her falcon mask and stared at it a moment.

  Marcellinus went to stand with her, feeling helpless. “Be careful. Very careful.”

  She smiled briefly. “Look after our daughter. Do not worry about me.”

  “Impossible,” he said. “I mean the not worrying. I will certainly look after Kimimela.”

  She put her hand on his. He looked down, surprised, and then up at her face as she said, “I will be careful, Gaius. And you, be wary of the Blackfoot. They are not an easy tribe. The People of the Grass you have met in Cahokia are gentle and quiet; they are traders. The Blackfoot are not like this. They are loud and bold and ruthless, more like the Iroqua.”

  “Great.”

  “Gaius, stay safe. Stay alive.”

  “I will.” His eyes roamed her face, drinking in her strength and beauty while he still could. “I have every reason to.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Every reason.”

  They had often launched Sintikala from such a throwing engine, but that had been many moons in the past. Today it took Akecheta’s men an hour or more to move the engine forward into a position where it could be fired, check it thoroughly, do a test firing, and then crank the throwing arm back again.

  When they threw Sintikala, the longship rocked so hard that several men grabbed the gunwale. The Hawk veered sideways as it opened, and even Kimimela gasped as Sintikala yanked it back on course. Then the wind caught her, and she ducked and looped and somehow gained height from that, and then she was weaving upward, and farther upward, and steering west across the grasslands.

  “I don’t know how the hell she doe
s that,” Marcellinus said once he regained the power of speech.

  “It looked easy enough,” said Kimimela, and then, “Hey!” as Marcellinus poked her.

  Sintikala was streaking toward the hills at uncanny speed. Marcellinus knew that she was on her way and that in all likelihood he would not see her again for many months.

  If, that was, they both survived their coming ordeals.

  His heart ached already.

  “Well,” said Aelfric, “it was a damned sight easier coming down this river, and no mistake.”

  Even with their extensive experience fighting the Mizipi, the strength of the Wemissori current had come as a shock. At the confluence of the rivers the Wemissori flowed out with such force that it spewed mud halfway across the Mizipi. And the farther they got up the Wemissori, the more the landscape folded and grew around them, its rocky valleys channeling the waters against them.

  Now, far to the northwest of the Great City, they had left the forests behind. Plains of endless grass surrounded them, hilly grasslands that stretched far into the distance. From atop one of those hills Marcellinus at last had seen his first herd of living buffalo, an immense swarm of giant beasts that covered the land like a stain. The bellow of their mating carried clear across the plains and made the girls giggle. And at the other end of the size scale, the mosquitoes had grown so fierce that many members of the crew were a mass of welts.

  Aelfric leaned forward. “Am I talking to myself?”

  Marcellinus grunted, distracted. “The Romans are marching toward Cahokia, and we’re going in the opposite direction. That’s marvelous.”

  “Seems entirely sane to me.”

  “But it’s taking too long.” Marcellinus studied him. “After we find Tahtay, you’re leaving us, aren’t you? Staying here or going on?”

  Aelfric grinned. “You’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you?”

  “But you’ve decided?”

  “No, I haven’t. And that’s a fact.” Aelfric looked at him askance. “You Romans, you plan ahead obsessively. Not all of us are like that.”

  Marcellinus chose to say nothing.

  The Concordia limped upriver, clumsily tacking, making slow headway. They could have made faster progress using the oars, but everyone was weary and aching from rowing.

  On the bank Kimimela and Akecheta were having little difficulty keeping up with the boat’s progress at a casual stroll, even stopping now and then to look at a rock or a plant. Kimi’s occasional laughter was not improving Marcellinus’s mood.

  Happily, passing Cahokia had been anticlimactic. Mahkah and Isleifur Bjarnason had rejoined them just south of Ocatan with the news that Sintikala and Enopay were safe and well in Cahokia. Enopay was working openly with Avenaka once again, and Sintikala was lying low in the houses of Demothi, Anapetu, and other Cahokians loyal to the memory of Great Sun Man and opposed to Avenaka’s leadership. The power of the shamans was growing more oppressive, and doubts were growing about the ease with which Cahokia might win its impending wars.

  The Concordia had rowed quietly past Ocatan by night. The next few days were jittery for the crew as they traveled between Ocatan and Cahokia, moving mostly after dark and hiding beneath the undergrowth along the shores or in tributaries as best they could by day. They had passed Cahokia two hours before dawn on the fourth morning, at a time when the sentries on watch had been hand selected from the Raven clan by Anapetu for their loyalty to both her and Marcellinus, their clan brother. They had muffled the oars of the longship with hides, had passed by close to the western bank with almost half a mile of river between them and Cahokia proper, and by sheer luck had chosen a foggy night. They had passed Cahokia in a matter of minutes and then rowed hard for the Wemissori.

  For the whole next day the mood on the boat had been surly. Aside from Aelfric and Isleifur, everyone aboard was homesick for Cahokia and worried about friends and family.

  As for Marcellinus, his need to see Sintikala again had grown unbearable. He still fretted that a careless word might expose her, but there was nothing he could do about that. And Kimimela had curled up in the bottom of the boat and refused even to look toward Cahokia as they rowed by, and was curt and snappy with everyone for a week afterward.

  Marcellinus suspected that Kimimela thought this trip up the Wemissori was a forlorn hope. The land was huge, the Wemissori was long, and oddly, the people among the crew who knew it best were not the Hesperians but Aelfric and Isleifur.

  —

  “So you love my mother.”

  Marcellinus laughed. It was now his turn to accompany his daughter along the bank. Ahead of them on the river the Cahokians rowed relatively easily; the Wemissori mercifully had broadened for a while, and they had to keep up a stiff pace to avoid being left behind. It felt good to exercise his legs for a change.

  Kimimela peered up at him mischievously. “So you do not love my mother?”

  “Your mother does not love me, so it hardly matters.”

  “Have you told her you love her?”

  Despite her bantering tone, Marcellinus knew she was serious. “Not in those words. But she can see my eyes, and I have told her that I think that we are…the good match.”

  Kimimela snorted. “The good match? That was how you tried to win Sintikala?”

  Marcellinus was out of his depth. “It was not an easy conversation. And I don’t believe anyone could actually win your mother.”

  “And she said what to ‘the good match’?”

  “Kimimela, that is between me and Sintikala.”

  She studied him with that penetrating expression that was common to mother and daughter. “Obviously she did not say yes. But now I think she did not say no, either.”

  Marcellinus kept walking. Kimimela stepped into his path and put her hand on his chest. “Gaius, what did she say?”

  He looked down at her hand. “That’s exactly how Sintikala stopped me when we were walking in the Iroqua forests. But in her case she was threatening to kill me.”

  “And you think I am not? Gaius, this matters as much to me as to you.”

  From her eyes he saw it was true. “You want Sintikala and me to be together.”

  “More than anything,” she said.

  Marcellinus blinked and stared.

  “Gaius, I know it is hard for you to trust people, but you can trust me always, forever. Tell me what my mother said to you.”

  “You think I don’t trust people?”

  Kimimela drew her dagger. Her eyes twinkled as she held it up to his neck. “Is this what she did?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Never mind. Tell me right now or you are dead, dead, dead.”

  “You’re certainly your mother’s daughter—”

  Very gently, she poked the end of the dagger into the skin at his collarbone and smiled. “Then you understand your life hangs in the balance. Now, think of her as Sisika and not Sintikala and tell me.”

  He grinned back at her and took a deep breath. “She said…she said: ‘Not yet.’ ”

  “Aha.” Kimimela took the knife away from his throat.

  “But that was on the way back from the Haudenosaunee powwow. Since then—”

  “Yes, I know what has happened since then.”

  “I think that now, perhaps…too much has happened. She and I, we are too…”

  “Similar.” Kimimela nodded.

  “Different. We are too different, Kimi.”

  “Well. I will see what I can do.” She pursed her lips. “Once we have found Tahtay and taken him back Cahokia, of course.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Marcellinus.

  “In the meantime,” she said, idly playing with her hair, “Since my mother is not here, perhaps you could do something for me.”

  —

  They tried to launch Kimimela with the springy material from the Market of the Mud, but it was too hard to control, and even she declared it too unpredictable and dangerous. Next they tried to fly her like a kite, attaching
a rope to the cleat on the front of her wing and running along the bank, but even in a brisk wind that proved ineffective. Kimimela managed to glide a few feet above the ground, but she quickly came down again once they released the rope. Eventually even Marcellinus was forced to agree that the throwing engine was the only way to get her airborne.

  The first time they tossed Kimimela from the throwing engine it was at half tension, and she barely had time to open the wing before splashing into the muddy river. It was an ignominious plunge, and Marcellinus expected his daughter’s temper to erupt, but she took the embarrassment in stride. Perhaps she was not quite as blasé about this as she pretended. Later her confidence grew, as did Marcellinus’s faith that she would not kill herself, and by the fifth launch they were hurling her into the air with the full torsion power of the engine and she was staying aloft for several minutes and making controlled landings back on the bank.

  She still could not attain sufficient height to scout ahead and return on the wing effectively, but it would have been remarkable if she had. Sintikala’s skills had taken a lifetime of learning, and even with such dedication there was still something uncanny about the Hawk chief’s ability that could never be taught or learned, something innate, perhaps magical. But Kimimela showed utter dedication and good cheer, and the crew was happy to help her.

  Launching Kimimela was a welcome distraction. Overall, the Wemissori River was even harder going than the Mizipi. On the days they were blessed with a strong following wind, they could make headway against the current and make some miles. Other days, when they had to row, were less easy. The Wemissori currents were capricious, and often they would be making good progress only to be caught by a freshening of the current as the river shallowed beneath them, and the Concordia might be slewed sideways or even shoved backward as if by a firm hand. Isleifur, who had learned to handle the longship on the Mizipi with some skill, claimed he had to relearn everything for the Wemissori.