by Alan Smale
Hadrianus nodded. “I see you are not entirely lost to us.”
In speaking of Roma, Marcellinus had used the word “we.” He blinked. He might not be lost to Roma, perhaps, but he was temporarily lost for words.
Regaining his composure, he said, “When you do tell them, you should address a full council of the elders and chiefs of Cahokia. They should hear it directly from you, not Tahtay.”
The Imperator barely glanced at him. “Perhaps. If we’re still at peace by then.”
The ghost of a smile flitted across Agrippa’s face. Marcellinus paused, then nodded.
So there it was. The minutes-old agreement between Roma and Cahokia was the most fragile of treaties. One that Hadrianus clearly would not hesitate to break the first moment it was in Roma’s interests to do so.
The Romans were the wolf at the door, and for better or worse, Cahokia had invited them in.
“May I come up?”
In Roman armor, Marcellinus stood at the base of Sintikala’s mound. He knew she was there. He had seen her hearth fire from the first plateau of the Great Mound, where he had just been talking with Tahtay and Enopay.
Perhaps she had not heard him. He looked uncertainly at the cedar steps.
“Gaius?” Kimimela appeared at the mound’s edge.
“Kimimela?”
“Sintikala says you may come up, but not as a Roman. Leave your shiny armor behind.” Kimimela shook her head. “I do not like it either.”
“I cannot,” Marcellinus said.
“Cannot?”
“Sabinus and Agrippa are in the city. And Aelfric, with another tribune and the quartermaster of the Third Parthica, talking with Tahtay and Enopay about grain. I am not completely trusted, and I must not be seen putting aside my Roman armor for Cahokian clothing.”
“Aelfric is a Roman again, too?”
“He is on probation with Decinius Sabinus.” Marcellinus did not mention that Sabinus hoped to use the Briton one day to command Cahokian auxiliaries.
Kimimela swallowed. “Come, then.”
Marcellinus ascended the stairs slowly, aware of the clink of steel at his shoulders and hips, the gladius that hung from his belt, the weight of the helmet on his head. That, at least, he could forgo. He undid the straps and pulled it off, then thrust it under his arm.
“Come no farther, Praetor.”
He halted at the mound’s edge. Sintikala walked forward from the gate of the low palisade around her house. She wore a simple tunic, and her hair was loose.
By her expression, Marcellinus knew that this time Sintikala’s hair was loose in mourning.
She stopped in front of him. “From the very first moment of the very first day, I knew that if we spared you, you would one day go back to Roma and stand against us.”
“I do not stand against you,” he said. “And I have not gone back to Roma.”
“But you stand with Hadrianus.”
Carefully, he said, “Cahokia must help Roma in this or there can be no peace between us.”
“And you?”
“I best serve Hesperia by serving Roma. If this is to work at all, I have to stand with them.”
“They are forcing him to do this,” Kimimela said to Sintikala. “Aren’t they, Gaius?”
Sintikala raised her eyebrows.
“They do not force me,” Marcellinus said slowly.
“Then why?”
Marcellinus had sworn an oath. And it was only by his keeping that oath that Roma could hold its tenuous peace with Cahokia.
All their fates hung on a knife edge. Any wrong step imperiled him, imperiled Cahokia. Imperiled Sintikala and Kimimela.
Imperiled his family.
“I have no choice, Kimimela. I cannot tell you why.”
Sintikala regarded him. “Cannot or will not?”
“Cannot.”
Kimimela shook her head. “I do not understand you.”
“One day, you will.”
She gazed at him for a long, bleak minute. “And maybe one day you will understand what you have done.”
“I know already.”
“I do not think you do,” Kimimela said. “I cannot have a Roman father.”
A yawning emptiness opened up beneath him. His voice caught. “Kimi, I was always Roman.”
“Not like this.”
He swallowed.
“And so you are no longer my father.” Her back straight, she turned and strode away.
“Kimimela!” He surged after her, but Sintikala stepped into his path with her hand raised. “Hold,” she said, and Marcellinus backed away and lowered his head.
Sintikala gestured after her daughter as she walked down the north side of the mound and disappeared. “See? Another thing broken.”
Marcellinus had come prepared for Sintikala’s venom. He had not expected her sorrow.
“Not everything is broken. I still keep my oaths.”
“Do you? Do you even remember them?”
“Sintikala, the oath I swore to you, I will never break. But I have sworn an oath to Roma, and I must keep that, too.”
Her gaze burned him, and his heart weakened and melted. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t explain, not completely, but this is very important. If it were not—”
She reached up and placed her fingers on his lips, stilling him. “Gaius, I believe you.”
He kissed her fingertips. Her eyes widened, and she lifted her hand away.
“You see it in my eyes?” he said.
“In your eyes I see only what I already know.”
As so often happened, Marcellinus was lost in her presence. His thoughts stumbled. “How?”
“Gaius, by now I know what you are capable of and what you are not. And if that were not enough, I would have seen it in your face as you watched your daughter walk away.”
Kimimela. The hand of despair still clutched at his heart. “Can you explain it to her? Help her understand?”
“I do not think so. Kimimela is her father’s daughter.”
“Her Iroqua father?”
“Her new father.”
Tears pricked him, and he looked away. “I should go.”
“Stay,” she said softly.
The entreaty in her voice almost broke him. He shook his head. “I must leave Cahokia before dark.”
“Why?”
“All the Imperator’s men must be gone by then.”
“But you—” She stopped and nodded. “You are a Roman again, forever, now?”
“For as long as Roma behaves honorably toward Cahokia.”
She looked up at him. “And so now I do not know what to wish for.”
Her hands came up, and she reached for him.
Marcellinus leaned away. “We may be being watched.”
“I do not care what they see,” Sintikala said, and the next moment they were in each other’s arms.
She filled his senses and his soul. Her strong beauty overwhelmed him.
“I love you, Sisika. And I love Kimimela.”
She slumped against him, and he felt her shaking her head against his chest. “And now you tell me this? Now?”
“You knew before. That, too, you have known for a long time.”
Gently she pushed him back. Now she would not meet his eye but closed a fist and knocked lightly on the breastplate over his heart. “Go and serve Roma, Praetor. Roma…and the land.”
“I will.” Marcellinus thought about it, looked down at her again, and said it more emphatically. “I will.”
“And remember…”
“What?”
“That Cahokian blood beats in you, too.” She lifted her arm, and he raised his, and they pressed their skin together where she had cut into them both and mingled their blood.
“I have never forgotten,” he said. “I never will.”
Sintikala looked up at the Great Mound and to the left toward the city and seemed to come to a decision.
“I love you,” she said very slowly and seriousl
y. “I love you, Gaius Marcellinus.”
The world stopped around him. A great warmth filled him. His forearm began to shake where it touched hers, and he put his other hand up to her cheek. “Thank you. And thank the gods.”
She smiled. “Which ones?”
“Any. All. Sisika—”
Once again she put her fingers on his lips.
Once again he kissed them.
Their forearms slid apart. She glanced up at the mound again, and her lips quirked. “And in the end…you got your Hesperian League.”
“I did,” he said ironically. “Exactly as I intended.”
“And sunset is coming.”
“Yes.”
“I…” Sintikala hesitated, then looked up at him, deep into his eyes and into his soul. “Gaius, we have lived through so much, and I wish you could stay here. Tonight. With me.”
Suddenly Marcellinus was having difficulty breathing. “I wish that, too. One day…perhaps I can.”
And then he added, because he had to: “On a day when there are no longer any secrets between us.”
Because now this was much bigger than all of them.
To the east and south were the Romans. But far off in the west of Nova Hesperia the Mongol Horde was gathering under Chinggis Khan.
And that was something Marcellinus could tell no one in Cahokia. Not even Sisika.
“Well, then,” she said. “I hope that day will come soon.”
Marcellinus nodded. “And…Sintikala?”
She noted his change of tone. “Yes, Wanageeska?”
He took another breath and lowered his voice still further. “Do not let the Romans have the Cahokian liquid flame. Guard it well. Hide the villages where it is made. Protect the secret.”
She nodded. “I understand. And Wanageeska? Do not tell the Romans where the Blackfoot buffalo jump is.”
He blinked, surprised. They frowned at each other, and both exhaled at the same moment.
Marcellinus steeled himself and stepped back. “I understand. And so good night, Sintikala, Hawk chief, daughter of chieftain.”
She smiled sadly. “Good night, Gaius, Praetor of Roma.”
One last time he looked deeply into her eyes and she into his. Then Marcellinus turned and walked away, down the cedar steps of the mound, through the Great Plaza, past the Mound of the Chiefs where Great Sun Man lay in death, and south out of the Great City toward the Roman castra beyond.
APPENDIXES
* * *
APPENDIX I: CAHOKIA AND THE MISSISSIPPIAN CULTURE
Many people are familiar with the Aztecs and the Maya and the other great civilizations of Mesoamerica. Far fewer seem to know of the thriving and extensive cultures of North America in the centuries before the arrival of European ships.
For over five hundred years the Mississippian civilization dominated the river valleys of eastern North America, building thousands of towns and villages along the Mississippi, the Ohio, and many other rivers. Like the Adena and Hopewell cultures before them, they built mounds by the tens of thousands: conical mounds, ridge mounds, and the distinctive square-sided, flat-topped platform mounds. In all likelihood the founding events of Mississippian culture took place in Cahokia and then radiated out across the continent.
In its heyday Cahokia was a huge city covering over five square miles, occupied by about 20,000 people and containing at least 120 mounds of packed earth and silty clay, many of them colossal. In the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries Cahokia was larger than London, and no city in northern America would be larger until the 1800s. Cahokia’s skyline was dominated by the gigantic mound known today as Monks Mound, a thousand feet square at the base and a hundred feet high. Monks Mound had four terraces, and archeological data reveal that it was topped with a large wooden structure 105 feet long and 48 feet wide. This great earthwork and longhouse overlooked a Grand Plaza nearly fifty acres in area, meticulously positioned and leveled with sandy loam fill a foot deep. Cahokia’s central 205 acres were protected by a bastioned palisade two miles long and constructed of some 20,000 logs, enclosing the Great Mound and Great Plaza and eighteen other mounds. The downtown area was surrounded by perhaps a dozen residential neighborhoods, some of which had their own plazas. Cahokia was bounded several miles to the west by the Mississippi and to the east by river bluffs of limestone and sandstone, and was surrounded by the floodplains of the American Bottom that allowed the cultivation of maize in vast fields to feed its population.
Much of Cahokia was built in a flurry of dedicated activity around A.D. 1050, but to this day nobody knows why or by whom. The city and its immense mounds are not claimed by any existing tribe or tradition, and no tales about the city’s foundation or dissolution have been passed down through oral history. The Illini who lived in the area when white settlers arrived appeared to know little about the mounds and did not claim them or show much interest in them. However, archeologists and ethnographers are reasonably confident that the ancient Cahokians were Siouan-speaking, and I have gone along with that assumption in the Clash of Eagles Trilogy.
We can, however, be certain that the original residents of the Great City did not call it Cahokia. “Cahokia” is actually the name of an Algonquian-speaking tribe that probably did not come to the area until several hundred years after the fall of the city. Nor did the Iroquois call themselves by that name. “Iroquois” is probably a French transliteration of an insulting Huron word for the Haudenosaunee. However, in this case and some others I have used familiar terms to avoid needless obscurity. For the river names, I may be on firmer ground (so to speak). The Mississippi and Missouri rivers are named from the French renderings of the original Algonquian or Siouan words, and the Ohio River was indeed “Oyo” to the Iroquois. “Chesapeake” and “Appalachia” have their roots in Algonquian words.
Even for names that are unambiguously Native American, it is sometimes not clear when those names started to be used. The individual names of the Five Nations of the Iroquois may not have been in wide use before A.D. 1500, although the ancestral Iroquois certainly had a strong cultural tradition by the 1200s and were building longhouses long before that. I also may have anticipated the foundation of the Haudenosaunee League by a few hundred years. Other aspects of the longhouse culture, along with their clothing and weaponry styles, are taken from the historical and archeological record. As far as the “hand-talk” is concerned, the Plains Sign Language did indeed become something of a lingua franca, though perhaps not as early or universally as I have postulated.
Otherwise, in writing the Clash of Eagles series I have tried my best to remain accurate to geographical and archeological ground truth. The size and layout of Cahokia are accurate for the period to such an extent that the geography of the city and its environs has often not so subtly driven the plot. Every mound featured in the book exists, and I placed the Big Warm House and the brickworks and steelworks in open areas where there were no known mounds or buildings. The Circle of the Cedars corresponds to a monumental circle of up to sixty tall cedar marker posts designed as an early calendar, based on seasonal celestial alignments. The established large-scale agriculture and fishing, available natural resources, food types and weaponry, pottery and basketry, and so forth, are as accurate as I can make them. Granaries, houses, hearths, storage pits, and so on, all match current archeological findings. Chunkey was a real game. The clothing depicted is true to the times, including details of Great Sun Man’s regalia and his copper ear spools of the Long-Nosed God; much of what later would become stereotypical Native American clothing, including large feather war bonnets and extensive beadwork, probably originated centuries after Cahokia.
We have much less detailed knowledge of the social structure of ancient Cahokia, and extrapolation can be dangerous. Although Hernando de Soto found strongly hierarchical chiefdoms with a complex caste system in his 1539–1543 expedition to southeastern areas at the tail end of the Mississippian era, it does not follow that those social systems were universal. In
fact, in Cahokia’s case the evidence may point the other way—to a heterarchy of diverse organizations within the city. I have assumed a pragmatic, rather nonhierarchical structure for Cahokia rather than the superstitious and ritual-bound structures that some postulate for such societies.
Clearly, I have given the Hesperians credit for a few additional technological achievements. Native flying machines are unsupported by the archeological record, although because they are made of sticks, skins, and sinew and wrecked Catanwakuwa and Wakinyan are ceremonially dismantled and often burned, we might not find their remains even if they had existed. However, birds and flying were highly revered in the cultures of the Americas before the European invasion. Hawks, falcons, and thunderbirds were venerated and are central motifs observed throughout ancient American cultures. There is evidence for a falcon warrior ideology in Cahokia and also strong suggestions that the birdman cult originated in Cahokia before spreading across the Mississippian world. Feathered capes, birdmen, and falconoid symbolism abounded. Bird eyes, wings, and tails are extremely common iconography on pots, chunkey stones, and other items. In many Native American traditional stories, key figures are able to fly.
Catanwakuwa and Wakinyan may be a stretch, but oddly, I may be on slightly safer ground with the Sky Lanterns. Although this is speculative, it has been suggested that balloons may have been feasible for peoples of a Mississippian technology level. Julian Nott, a prominent figure in the modern ballooning movement, has pointed out that the people who created the Nazca lines in pre-Inca Peru had all the necessary technologies and materials to create balloons. To prove his point he has constructed and flown a hot air balloon with a bag consisting of 600 pounds of cotton fabric made in the pre-Columbian style, launched and powered by burning logs, with a gondola constructed of wood and reeds. For the Cahokians, the cotton would have been the key. Cotton grows only weakly in Illinois north of the Ohio River and can be wiped out easily by frost, so realistically their cotton would have to be imported from the south. But since the Cahokian trading network extended to the Gulf of Mexico, this would have been at least possible.
