by Alan Smale
Marcellinus looked at the Praetor in open disbelief. “What?”
“We will hammer them. We must pass through their blockade to rejoin our comrades in the north, but we must also do as much damage to the Khan’s bastards as possible.”
“Those are two different military objectives,” Marcellinus said. “Which is our primary goal? To pass through or to defeat the Mongol fleet so that Roma regains control of the Mizipi?”
“They’re one and the same.” Verus inspected him. “And as for you, man, how on earth did you manage to escape from the Khan’s clutches?”
“We did not escape,” Marcellinus said. “We were released. The Khan slew the soldiers but spared the commanders, as he has done many times in the Asian theater. Freed us so that we could bring stories of his ruthless victories to the Imperator. He hopes to damage morale.”
Verus looked back to the Norse dragon ship, which was falling astern. “Well, at least he’s a gentleman in that regard. Yet I also see Cahokians among the ranks of the saved.”
“Yes. Hanska’s valor saved her. She impressed the Khan with her bravery and strength. And Pezi is lost to us, enslaved by the Khan, but his words helped save the other translators.” Marcellinus paused, but honesty forced him to admit it. “Without Pezi, things may have gone even worse. Your faith in him was not misplaced.”
The Praetor smiled. “I pride myself on being a good judge of character. I suspected you would find him satisfactory. For a barbarian, Pezi has some fine qualities. Trapped with the Khan’s forces now? I regret that and wish him well.”
“Indeed, sir. And as for you, in the gulf…Forgive me, but how many legionaries did you lose in that action?”
Verus shrugged. “Two thousand? We have been rather too busy to count. But come: to be frank, you seem in need of a drink, and by Jove, it’s long past the time I usually start. The Mongols may have robbed me of my fortress and a few galleys, but I did ensure I salvaged my best Falernian wines. Please, come below to my cabin and let us talk further over a cup or two.”
All of a sudden, Marcellinus could bear it no longer. “Praetor Verus, I regret that there is another matter that I must first bring to your attention.”
“About your expedition to the southwest?”
“No, sir. It concerns your old friend Lucius Domitius Corbulo. I find myself unable to keep you in the dark any longer.”
Calidius Verus had become very still. “Pray continue, sir.”
Marcellinus paused, but there was really nothing for it: the truth must be spoken.
“Corbulo mutinied against my command. It happened upon our arrival in Cahokia, before the battle in which the 33rd was defeated. And I believe he conspired to have me murdered before that by Magyar auxiliaries while we trekked westward from the Mare Chesapica. Certainly such auxiliaries were by his side when he attempted to slay me.”
Verus said nothing but examined Marcellinus carefully, as if seeing him for the first time.
Marcellinus took a deep breath. “I regret to inform you that in the fight that broke out subsequent to his attempt to depose me from Praetorship of the 33rd, Lucius Domitius Corbulo died at my hands.”
Verus took a step back. His hand dropped to the hilt of his gladius. “Are you mad, sir?”
“Never more sane,” Marcellinus said steadily. “And I exhort you, sir, to leave your sword where it is. I am in no mood for…unpleasantness.”
The moment expanded. Marcellinus became aware that the chatter of conversation from the soldiers on the top deck had become muted but did not take his eye off Praetor Verus. Marcellinus’s only weapon was a pugio, and it was under his tunic. He would have no time to draw it if Verus attacked him; unless he could quickly disarm Verus with a kick to his wrist, his only sane course of action would be to run and leap bodily off the Fortuna into the Mizipi.
Calidius Verus leaned forward. “You are a traitor, a fratricide, and a redskin lover. If you did not have the trust of the Imperator, I would slay you here and now, sir. I would indeed.”
Fratricide? Marcellinus let it lie. “I understand.”
“You will leave my flagship immediately. We shall not speak again.”
“Glad to, sir.”
Marcellinus backed away slowly and went to talk to the master of the Fortuna to signal the dragon ship.
He was very sure he was not a traitor to Roma. But as for “redskin lover,” Marcellinus would feel infinitely better once he was away from the loathsome Verus and back in the company of his friends.
—
The fleet proceeded north.
By the best estimates of Titus Otho, ship’s master of the Providentia, Shappa Ta’atan was five days away at a normal rowing speed. However, they were not proceeding apace; the legionaries, sailors, and marines were preparing for battle, and a key part of those preparations was to ensure that the men were rested and ready. To break a blockade and fight a naval engagement, the oarsmen might need to row at top speed for extended intervals. Such an effort would require them to be in peak condition.
Marcellinus was not briefed on the plan of attack. He had not spoken to Verus since being dismissed from the Fortuna, and for all his politeness and apparent respect, Titus Otho chose not to share his orders with Marcellinus. The limit of Marcellinus’s own preparation was to ensure that he and all his Hesperians were armed with the best weapons available and that Hanska was provided with twice as many as she could reasonably use.
The oarsmen and marines on board were fleet soldiers, not slaves or freedmen, and the sailors were specialists from the Roman navy. Marcellinus saw sailors on these ships from Sardinia, Pannonia, and Illyria-Dalmatia, distinctive as always in their thick wool tunics of iron gray, the seaman’s color, with blue scarves, Phrygian caps, and cloth sash belts. Despite Verus’s allegations that they were untrained, to Marcellinus they appeared quite competent.
“So how many Roman troops in all?”
Enopay was doing his best to wash the sweat off his face and arms, using a pail of muddy water he had just hauled up from the Mizipi at the end of a long rope. He would end up dirtier than he had started, albeit cooler. A gladius and small shield lay by his side. To the amusement of the legionaries on the top deck of the Providentia, he had just been sparring with Hanska, who was now leaning on the bulwark staring morosely upriver, having barely broken a sweat during their training.
Unlike the legionaries, Marcellinus did not mock Enopay and would never laugh at anyone trying to better himself. But he hoped beyond hope that Enopay would never face an enemy in close combat. The boy had little coordination, and a short reach. He moved quickly and had a ready store of dirty tricks absorbed from Taianita and Hanska, but any Mongol warrior would make short work of him.
Of course, there was no guarantee any of them would survive this. From the best guess of the sailors aboard the Providentia who had fought the Mongol fleet in the gulf, they faced a force of some thirty Mongol and Jin battle junks, with help from as many as twenty large wooden canoes of the northwestern Tlingit tribe and an unknown number of longboats of the Yokot’an Maya. Although smaller than the Roman quinqueremes, the Mongol junks would be swift and maneuverable and would surely carry full complements of black powder weapons.
“How many of us?” Enopay shook his arms, and water droplets scattered across the deck in front of him. “I have not seen into every Roman vessel. But with six quinqueremes each loaded with five hundred troops, two triremes, four dragon ships, and the men we have seen in the five knarrs, we probably have three and a half thousands.” He rubbed his face and grimaced at the taste of the Mizipi water on his lips. “But we will be going upriver and will need all the speed we can muster. Most of our troops will be rowing like fuck, not fighting.”
Marcellinus winced. “Enopay, just because you are surrounded by Romans does not mean you should curse like one.”
“Sorry. Anyway, at most only fifteen hundreds of us will be free to fight.”
“And the Mongol fleet?”
“Can I see
around bends in the Mizipi? I cannot. But the men say the battle junks have crews of perhaps fifty apiece, and there may be thirty of them in all. If the long canoes of the Tlingit each have sixty men and there are twenty canoes and”—he shrugged—“say, eight longboats of the Sun, they will have a little over three thousands of men in total. Given that the Mongols have the advantage of the current, the battle may be very close.”
“We should get you ashore beforehand,” Marcellinus said. “You, the Chitimachan, Taianita.”
“You would have us walk to Cahokia from here? If Roma breaks the blockade, we will get to Cahokia quicker with you than on foot. If not, we would still have an army between us and the Great City. And…” Enopay shook his head.
“What?”
“And if you are gone as well as my grandfather, perhaps I do not want to return to Cahokia anyway.”
Marcellinus opened his mouth, closed it again.
“However much you might try, I do not think you can protect me from this war,” Enopay said matter-of-factly. “Shall we eat again? We are both still very thin.”
—
The last time Marcellinus had seen the Legio VI Ferrata surge into battle, he had been on the receiving end of it, surrounded by the unfortunate populace of Ocatan as it was assaulted by seven quinqueremes of the Ironclads. Now he stood aboard one of the same quinqueremes with a Roman helmet strapped to his head and a scutum bearing the thunderbolt insignia of the VI Ferrata on his left arm. Once again, though, he was flanked by Hesperians: around him were Hanska, Taianita, the Chitimachan, and Enopay, all clutching Roman weapons with varying degrees of confidence.
The Roman fleet was powering upriver in formation. Leading the pack were the Fortuna and the Triumphus, rowing side by side, separated by fifty yards. Both quinqueremes had onagers on their middecks primed and ready for action. Both also had their fighting towers erected fore and aft and a battery of scorpios lining their bulwarks. A scorpio was a one-man ballista, a torsion-sprung crossbow seven feet across mounted on a post five feet high, which fired stout bolts of iron and wood five feet long. Similar but slightly larger was the harpax, a ballista that shot a combination of a harpoon and a grappling iron on a cable, enabling the quinquereme to spear and reel in an enemy ship for boarding. Each quinquereme possessed two of the harpax ballistae, at bow and stern.
Following the lead quinqueremes were two dragon ships each a hundred feet long. After them came another pair of quinqueremes, the Providentia, on which Marcellinus and his friends now stood, and the Fides, both also bristling with legionaries at arms and with their fighting turrets set for battle. In their wake came the cargo vessel known as the Annona, the two triremes, four smaller drekars, and five knarrs.
Bringing up the rear were the older quinqueremes, Minerva and Clementia. The Minerva had been in splendid condition when it had taken Marcellinus and the others downriver the previous year but was now substantially damaged from the Mongol attack. The scorch marks on its bow and all down its port side made it appear that the ship had taken a vicious black eye. The Clementia was in better shape, with only minimal damage and a freshly painted bow, but was serving as the fleet’s hospital ship. Every Roman naval vessel had a medicus or two aboard, but the Clementia held a dedicated sick bay to care for those seriously wounded in the earlier battle. The galley was thus short of fighting men, and might need additional defense if any could be spared.
“Sir?”
“Yes, Hanska?”
“Good luck.”
He nodded. “And to you, warrior.”
She cocked an eye at him. “Oh, and sir? Don’t force me to jump in and save your life again. That would just be embarrassing for both of us.”
Marcellinus grinned. “Noted. But should the opportunity arise, please feel free to save Enopay’s.”
“I’ll do that, sir.”
Across the fifty yards that separated him from the Fides, Marcellinus could see the centurion Manius Ifer standing next to the Fides’s master with his hands clasped behind his back in a pose of complete calm and confidence. Marcellinus had learned recently that Ifer had been promoted to tribune pro tem of the Tenth Cohort. The appointment did not surprise him.
Marcellinus could not see Calidius Verus in the Fortuna from this far behind, but he certainly hoped the Praetor owned a bearing as calm as Manius Ifer’s. For now they were rounding the last bend in the river that separated them from Shappa Ta’atan. A deafening blast of horns from the Fortuna was taken up quickly by the Triumphus. From belowdecks on the Providentia they heard a smattering of cheers from the three ranks of oarsmen beneath their feet. The drums that set the time for the rowers, however, did not increase their tempo, and the hortator who commanded them was swearing at the crew to maintain their current rhythm. “Not yet, you sons of whores, not yet…”
The ranks of marines and legionaries on the top deck in front of Marcellinus stood stolid, saving their breath, waiting for the fray. But Marcellinus could sense their energy and determination building. As they propelled themselves upriver into the dragon’s maw, anticipation was rising.
And there was the enemy fleet, stretched across the river ahead of them.
The Mizipi was two thousand feet across at Shappa Ta’atan, and at first glance the ships that faced them seemed to span its entire width.
Marcellinus knew that the junks of the Jin that the Mongols had commandeered were two-masted and close to a hundred feet long, but he somehow had expected them to be delicate, perhaps paper-thin like the Jin and Song fans he had seen for sale long ago in markets along the Silk Road. The junks had, after all, been portaged across fifty miles of dry land. Instead he saw substantial wooden vessels, not open-hulled like Viking longships but with raised covered decks fore and aft. Their sails were tall, square, and flat; they looked to be strengthened with bamboo slats and hung from sturdy masts. Each junk was crammed with Mongol warriors.
Similarly, Marcellinus had known that the oceangoing canoes of the northwestern tribes were larger than the birch-bark canoes of the Cahokians and Haudenosaunee, but he had not expected them to be seventy feet long and as stout-sided as any Norse longship, though nowhere near as broad in the beam. As yet he was too far distant to see details, but their hulls seemed to be brightly painted with sharp, blocky images and martial patterns.
Finally, he had not anticipated the swarm of regular Mizipian canoes. “Futete.”
Staring forward with eyes wide, Enopay rather automatically said, “Just because you are surrounded by Romans does not mean you should swear like one.” He added: “Do not ask me to count the ships. They weave around too fast.”
Trumpets sounded, the flutes at the stern of each quinquereme shrilled, and the pace of the drumbeats quickened as Roma settled in for the charge. Across the quarter-mile divide that separated them from the enemy they could hear the Mongols’ war drums, the giant naccara drums as big as a man. On the junks the din they made must have been thunderous.
“Fuck,” Hanska said in reverence.
The Chitimachan’s head turned left and right as if she were looking for a hole to hide in. Taianita glanced at Marcellinus and then looked away quickly. Marcellinus tried to iron out the worried frown on his face and tightened his grip on his gladius.
In the past his battle fever would have been mounting at such a moment, excitement preparing him for the fight to come. But today all he felt was a nagging concern, a regret for opportunities missed, words left unsaid to people he loved and cared for. He took a deep breath and tried to marshal his thoughts.
At the same moment there came a single short blast from a cornu and the bellowed voice of the lookout. “Bombs!”
Marcellinus’s first instinct was to look down into the water. Had the Mongols laid mines? Could their black powder somehow be impervious to water; could they guess a fuse length with such accuracy? But no, the bombs were flying through the air, seeming to hang lazily in the skies as they reached the peaks of their long arcs.
Another call from t
he lookout. “Trebuchets!”
Marcellinus had been so intent on staring at the enemy fleet that he had failed to notice the activity on the Mizipi’s banks. The Jin trebuchets the Mongols were using were not powered by twisted rope and sinew like the Roman onagers Marcellinus had built for Cahokia. Instead, they were powered by men and ropes. To launch a missile, a team of warriors pulled horizontally with a titanic coordinated jerking motion, and their effort was translated by a pulley and multiplied by the lever action of a long throwing arm set on a high frame. The throwing arm acted as a sling, whipping around to fling its projectiles out over the river.
The legs of the trebuchets were sunk into the ground for stability, and from the large branches and other remains of fallen trees that lay around them it was clear that they had been built in place.
We could improve on those, Marcellinus thought. A counterweight would work much more effectively, and besides, they’ll miss us by several boat lengths. Then the first bomb hit the water ahead of them and exploded into a smoky, blinding fog.
The trebuchets were not throwing balls of stone or steel, but gas bombs with fuses of hemp.
“Lime!” came the cry from the legionaries up and down the quinquereme, and men covered their eyes and noses with their cloaks; others knelt and bowed their heads to limit the amount they breathed. Marcellinus and the others emulated them. At the same time they heard a slamming from beneath them as the louvers were closed to limit the amount of noxious gas getting through to the oarsmen.
Fortunately, the trebuchets on the land were having trouble getting the Roman ships’ range. The helmsman changed course to give the first clouds a wide berth, but then more bombs came. One or two fizzled without releasing their gas, but most ignited to spread their contents across the water’s surface. The freshening breeze was from the northwest and blew the clouds of gas right over the central section of the Roman fleet.
As the Providentia rowed through the cloud, the coughing and choking started as the lime smoke irritated the men’s throats. Despite the cloak Marcellinus held in front of his face, the lime gas made his eyes burn.
