by Alan Smale
Hurit shook her head. “How can you know that?”
“The Sixth can’t take Cahokia by themselves. They want Ocatan, where the rivers meet. They will wait here at the confluence to join up with the legions from the east and the rest of the Sixth Ferrata from the south. This confluence is their strategic target for today. Whoever rules the rivers rules Nova Hesperia.”
“The Mizipi is our river.”
“Not anymore. Hurit, it’s the territory they want. This position. Slaughter is not their primary goal, though they’ll do it if they have to. Which is why you all need to scatter into the countryside, and quickly.”
“And you will not come?”
“No. I will stay here.”
Trumpets sounded. The legionaries roared, and with a mighty crash the battering ram struck the gates.
Hurit put her hands up to her ears. Marcellinus saw panic moving behind her eyes, shock beginning to creep in. He had to get her moving.
Hating himself, he shoved her. “Hurit! Are you a coward or a warrior? Snap out of it. Now. Come on.”
—
They hurried past the Temple Mound, north through the streets of the town. The word was spreading, and Ocatan was organizing. On their right Dowanhowee and four other women were gathering people from outside their houses and chivvying them north. Anapetu walked twenty feet to their left doing the same thing, the arrow shaft still protruding obscenely from her shoulder. No time now to pull it out and dress the wound.
The north gate was ajar. Some men, women, and families were already escaping. Fleeing the town was hardly an original idea. But too many people still stood around confused or in shock, waiting for friends or family, waiting to be told what to do, or just terrified of leaving the protection of the palisade.
That protection was illusory. Even here on the far side of the small town they could hear the battering rams slamming against the gates. It was a testament to the Ocatani skill with wood that the gates still stood, but they could last only a matter of minutes.
“Go, Hurit. Lead those who will follow. Those who won’t, leave them behind. Save who you can.”
“Shit, Gaius…shit…”
Marcellinus put his hand on her shoulder and looked calmly into her eyes. “Hush, Hurit. You can do this. I trust you. Go.”
Hurit nodded, smiled weakly, then turned away and raised her voice to a shout. “Come, all of you! We have to go, run toward Cahokia. By the river, near the mud. Follow me! Come!”
She hurried out of the gate. People followed. Marcellinus and Anapetu shooed others after her: families, women, elders. Dowanhowee gathered her children, pushing them on, nodded briefly at Marcellinus, and disappeared out the gate.
Marcellinus looked at Anapetu. “You too, clan chief.”
Anapetu eyed him tautly. “Not while I breathe.”
He almost laughed. “You’ll flee once you’re dead?”
A huge splintering crash. A roar. The tumult of steel against steel. The Romans were through the gates of Ocatan.
Anapetu put her head on one side, still birdlike. The scar on her cheek pulsed. “I do not see you running either, Gaius Wanageeska.”
“No…” Marcellinus gave it up. “Come on, then.”
—
As they came back around the Temple Mound, they entered Hades.
The mighty gates of Ocatan were broken off their hinges and flat on the ground, along with the left firing platform and the complete fifty-foot section of wall between that and the next platform. The section of palisade on the right side of the gate was in flames, smoke billowing west toward the Mizipi.
The First Ocatani stood firm, still in triple formation, fighting two cohorts of the Sixth Ferrata with swords and axes. In some places the warring armies were pressed together, the shields of the 33rd in Ocatani hands locked firm against the shields of the Sixth. Men pushed and shoved and had fallen on both sides, soldiers of the Sixth as well as warriors of Ocatan. Elsewhere in the lines there was some separation, with the freedom to swing weapons.
It was the only struggle in the plaza that looked even, and it couldn’t last long. Everywhere else was melee, legionary against Hesperian warrior, steel against stone and wood and iron, and above them all two dozen circling Hawks of Ocatan picking out their targets.
If nothing else, Ocatan was not making it easy for Roma.
“Help the wounded onto the Temple Mound,” Marcellinus said, and looked down at Anapetu. “The other wounded. Don’t take risks.”
“No risks?” she said wryly, and was gone from his side, running to the left. Again her cloak billowed.
With a scream, a man hurtled out of the sky to smash into the ground almost at Marcellinus’s feet, instantly silenced by his harsh communion with terra firma. Marcellinus looked up. Only four warriors remained alive on the Sky Lantern, and one of them was no longer shooting arrows; he clutched his neck with one hand and hung grimly to the steel frame with the other.
Iniwa and his men were in the main fray. Off to the left on the Mound of the Cedars, a squad of Ocatani archers stood methodically loosing arrows, many of which were finding their mark. For a fleeting moment Marcellinus thought that perhaps the Ocatani could hold the Romans back, that this battle was not a foregone conclusion, after all, and then two things happened almost simultaneously.
Soldiers of Roma had secured the area around the gate. Now in came the Cohors Equitate, the horsemen of the Fourth Gallorum. They rode in a paired formation, two by two, their swords held in front of them, ready to cut down barbarians from the saddle. Once through the gate, they wheeled to the left as one. Some of the braver Ocatani ran at the horsemen howling their war cries, only to be mercilessly slashed down. The cavalry came on, curving in an arc to the right through the plaza, and Marcellinus saw that they would soon flank the First Ocatani and attack them from the rear.
Just moments later the Shappa Ta’atani came over the broken stockade to the left of the gates. To Marcellinus’s experienced eye the Shappans looked completely different from the Ocatani in their clothing as well as the harsh tattoos and jagged scarifications that marked their faces, in contrast to the more subtle markings and quickly applied war paint of the more northerly Mizipians. However, to ensure that the Romans did not inadvertently slay their allies in the heat of battle, the Shappans also—bizarrely—wore lengths of red ribbon twisted into their hair roaches or the shoulders of their tunics.
The Shappa Ta’atani forces parted in the middle. The leftmost column made a beeline for the Mound of the Cedars, cutting down all the Ocatani in their way, while the warriors on the right attempted to hack a clear path toward the Temple Mound. Son of the Sun obviously had been given his orders: neutralize the archers of Ocatan, take and hold the high ground.
Even now, Marcellinus balked at fighting Romans. But he would happily shed Shappan blood.
As he ran for the Mound of the Cedars, he passed two Ocatani hacking scalps from Roman heads. “Leave that now!” he shouted. “Come with me!”
Marcellinus was about to snatch up a discarded Roman helmet when two legionaries burst out of the fray and rushed toward him. He glimpsed a gladius in midswing and jerked up his wooden shield instinctively. The gladius hacked right through the cedar wood, sending the top third of the shield spinning away through the air. Rather than fall back, Marcellinus lunged forward and thrust the remains of the splintered shield into the legionary’s face. The man parried it and stabbed forward again, but Marcellinus slashed at the soldier’s thigh just above his leg greave. The wound gushed blood, the legionary went down, and Marcellinus jumped over him. Meanwhile, one of the two Ocatani buried his ax in the neck of the second soldier and yanked it free as the man fell.
Marcellinus had just spilled Roman blood. Perhaps not a killing stroke, but—
He shoved the thought out of his mind. He would probably be dead in moments, anyway.
He ran on, two dozen more Ocatani braves pounding in his wake. Shouting “Ocatan!” they ran up onto the Mound of the
Cedars.
The Shappa Ta’atani whirled to meet them. Marcellinus swung, ducked, and slashed again, and a warrior with spiral whorls etched into both cheeks and a red ribbon at his throat went down with blood spilling from his gut. Marcellinus grabbed the brave’s shield and jammed it into the face of another warrior of Shappa Ta’atan.
The bloodlust was filling him now, the warrior fury that he needed. It had been a long time since the battle rage had consumed him with such force, and he bellowed with a kind of crazed laughter. Two Shappan warriors jumped at him; he dodged the stone mace of the first and drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, thrust upward with the gladius right through the reed armor, swung the shield at another ribboned enemy.
More Ocatan warriors were coming to him now, many from the First Ocatani. In his brief glances at the battlefield Marcellinus could see that Ocatan was losing the fight badly. These were the survivors of the combat, fleeing the horses, falling back to the high ground. He saw no sign of Coosan. The Ocatani centurion must have fallen.
Even as more came, Marcellinus and the Ocatani warriors around him pushed the Shappans back, slaying them right and left. The men of Ocatan were on their home turf, and their battle spirit was greater than that of the southern braves.
Always Marcellinus looked for Son of the Sun. The Caddoan war chief must be there, surely. He was a huge man who had made his reputation from war, and so it was unthinkable that he would not be leading his men, but Marcellinus could not see him.
Once more, his Hesperian shield was smashed to splinters. He dropped it and grabbed an ax with his left hand, slamming it into the head of a strong Shappan woman who had just cut an Ocatani to the ground in front of him. She went down, still jabbing at his legs; he kicked her, and another brave of the First Ocatani thrust a gladius into her kidney before she could get up again. Marcellinus hamstrung yet another warrior with his blade, parried, and dropped a red-ribboned and insanely grimacing warrior who had appeared from nowhere above him on the slope of the mound, then swung again, panting.
There were no more. The few remaining Shappans were running down the mound. Arrows whizzed past Marcellinus’s head. The Ocatani archers at the mound’s crest were still doing their deadly work.
Marcellinus achieved the plateau and took stock. He was covered in blood and felt the dull ache of bruises and the sharp bite of cuts from half a score of places on his body, but he had all his limbs and—a mercy—nobody had landed a blow on his unprotected head.
He was surrounded by sixty or seventy men and women of Ocatan, the vast majority of them warriors with weapons.
The plaza was strewn with dead Mizipians and a much smaller number of dead Romans, many of whom were already being carried out of the town and back to their legionary medici on the ships.
Elsewhere, the fighting had paused. The crest of the Temple Mound was held by several hundred Ocatani. A third of the way between the Temple Mound and the gates, a mob of Shappa Ta’atani stood waiting. The few dozen warriors of the First Ocatani who were not either dead or on one of the mounds had been herded together by a century of the Sixth Ferrata to stand against the still-sound palisade wall on the western side of the town, along with the few women and children who had not escaped or climbed the Temple Mound or perhaps remained hidden in their huts. The Roman legionaries had withdrawn to the town’s edge to rest before the final push; safely beyond bow range, they sauntered around and chatted like men at the baths or a public park.
No Hawks flew now. Marcellinus could not see the rear of the Temple Mound, where Ocatan’s Longhouse of the Hawks sat at the mound’s base, but it was obviously in Roman hands by then. Similarly, the Sky Lantern no longer floated above him; he hoped the surviving warriors had pulled the bolts to free themselves and let the winds blow them to safety.
From the height of the Mound of the Cedars and with the gates demolished and a large section of the palisade smashed or burned, Marcellinus could see clear down to the river. All seven of the Roman quinqueremes were now beached. Rolled-up tents and sacks of grain were being unloaded onto the shore.
The mopping up was yet to be completed, but as far as the Romans were concerned, the battle was already won.
The cavalry was gone. Sometime during Marcellinus’s fight to rescue the Ocatani archers from the treacherous Shappa Ta’atani, the Cohors IV Gallorum Equitata had finished its work of annihilating the First Ocatani and had left the town. Marcellinus felt cold.
Then Son of the Sun walked out from the mass of Shappa Ta’atani in the plaza and stared up at them, his legs apart and his hands on his hips. He was not wearing the regalia of a Mizipi chieftain, of course, but his size and stance were unmistakable.
Marcellinus’s blood boiled again.
His survey of the battleground had taken only moments. The braves around him were beginning to slump, staring bleakly out at the smoking remains of their town, their battle ardor draining. “Up, up!” he said. “Is that all you have? Are you all-done?”
Two of them raised their axes instinctively, and a third stepped forward, his fists clenched.
Marcellinus met his eye, not blinking. “Warriors, hear me. If we do not get ourselves to the Temple Mound, we will die here in minutes. Those Shappa bastards will attack in force. So let’s go. Up, up!”
The Shappa Ta’atani outnumbered them five to one. Better to unite with the much larger group of Ocatani on the Temple Mound.
The warriors measured the distance with their eyes. “We will just die there instead of here,” said the brave who had confronted Marcellinus. “Perhaps before we even—”
“Then we will sell our lives dearly.”
They looked blank. The individual words were right, but the phrase made no sense in Cahokian. Marcellinus tried again. “Why wait here for death? Let us die well, shoulder to shoulder with our friends, on the sacred mound.”
He hoped Anapetu had survived long enough to make it to the Temple Mound. He tried not to think about Hurit.
Or about Sintikala and Kimimela and all the others he would never see again.
Suddenly he remembered the thunder and lightning of Sintikala’s dream. The blood and the steel.
And the feel of her strong body, warm in his arms. Probably the last time he would ever hold her close…
He gritted his teeth. “Choose, Ocatani. Come with me to the Temple Mound or die here like dogs.”
He bent forward at the waist and sprinted down the Mound of the Cedars.
The Temple Mound was perhaps two hundred feet away. The Shappa Ta’atani were three hundred feet to the side, but they reacted immediately, leaping up and nocking arrows. Marcellinus saw Son of the Sun turn, imagined the man’s contemptuous glare.
Son of the Sun would have to wait. First Marcellinus had to get to the Temple Mound.
The Ocatani braves pounded along behind him, whooping. At least Marcellinus would not die alone.
An arrow flew past him. And then Son of the Sun raised his hand in command, and no more arrows came.
Many of the Ocatani, younger and fitter than Marcellinus, passed him on the level ground. They ran ten feet up the Temple Mound and slowed and turned, waiting for their brothers.
“Now!” came the shouted command of Son of the Sun, and the arrows flew.
Marcellinus saw them for an instant, the wave of death looming in his vision. He tried to react, to hit the ground, but there was no time.
An arrow struck him in the thigh, spinning him. Instants later another ripped a gobbet of flesh out of his upper arm.
Around him, Ocatani stumbled and fell. Marcellinus took the weight on his uninjured leg, the left leg, and tried to hold up one of the other men. He failed, and they both collapsed together.
Son of the Sun’s arm was up again. The Shappans stopped shooting and watched them with interest.
At least ten of the Ocatani around Marcellinus were dead, pierced with arrows. Six more were down and screaming and would not be moving much farther in this life. Marcellinus could do
nothing for them. He stood, tested his leg, and began to hobble up the Temple Mound as best he could, waiting for the arrow in the back that would end it.
The Temple Mound was only two-thirds as high as the Great Mound of Cahokia, but it looked infinite to him in that moment.
He heard a new bubbling scream beneath him and looked down. The Shappa Ta’atani had shot the rearmost Ocatani brave, the man lowest on the mound. He clearly heard Son of the Sun say, “The next,” and half a dozen arrows slammed into the next warrior up. That man toppled and died without a sound.
Marcellinus understood.
So did all the men around him. Their nerves cracked, and it became a deadly race, men scrambling up the steep slope of the platform mound, Marcellinus only just managing to stay ahead of the last of them. Blood was pouring from his leg now.
Two more men died, arrows appearing to bloom from their bodies. Again it was the men lowest on the mound, the men losing the race.
Laughter, cruel laughter from below them in the plaza.
Iniwa’s voice boomed from way above Marcellinus, and a wave of arrows flew in the opposite direction. Covering fire…The Shappa Ta’atani were forced back, farther from the mound’s base.
Arrows thudded into the mound around Marcellinus now but barely pricked the soil. Some even slid in the grass. He was high enough, out of range.
His breath painful in his chest, his leg on fire, Marcellinus achieved the crest of the Temple Mound, the last to arrive of perhaps thirty surviving men he had brought across from the Mound of the Cedars. His vision clouded, and he slumped to the ground.
Somebody poked him. “Gaius Wanageeska,” came an urgent voice he knew. “You must see this. Can you walk? Come.”
—
Anapetu had pulled the arrow from her shoulder. She held a dirty cloth over the wound at the front; at the back, she let it bleed freely.
As for Marcellinus, the wound in his thigh was closing around the shaft of the Shappan arrow, but the much shallower gash on his arm was still dribbling blood. A woman of Ocatan, perhaps a healer, tried to staunch and bind it while he hobbled painfully the remaining fifty feet to the western edge of the Temple Mound. From this height they could see past the burning houses and over the palisade to the north and west, out toward the Mizipi.
