by Alan Smale
Only those on deck were affected. The flutes had fallen silent now, but the hortatory calls could be heard loud and clear, the drums still beat, and the oarsmen rowed steadily. Eventually Marcellinus stood and looked around him. Eyes were streaming, men were still coughing uncontrollably, and a few of the unluckiest even had blisters forming on their faces and arms where the gas had been densest, but the trebuchets were now behind them.
Ahead, most Mongol battle junks were striking their sails and turning to their oars. In battle they would have no time for the intricacies of steering under sail. The center of the Mongol formation bulged as the enemy fleet formed a triangular shape similar to a Roman cuneus, reaching out to strike. A handful of Tlingit canoes and Maya longboats scurried ahead of them, eager to engage the Roman forces.
Likewise, it was as if the Fortuna and the Triumphus were racing to be first into battle. The Fortuna was slightly in front, and it seemed that the flagship would plow into the enemy ships first, but then the two onagers on its main deck released their loads. Giant boulders flew, and the Fortuna rocked and yawed in reaction. The Triumphus leaped ahead.
Hanska was shaking her head. “Fucking Shappa Ta’atani. Fuck.”
Marcellinus glanced at Taianita.
“I am not Shappan,” Taianita spit in a low tone. “I am not Shappan.”
The birch-bark canoes of the Shappa Ta’atani now vied with those of the Tlingit and Maya, surging out ahead of the battle junks in their determination to meet the enemy. It was clear to them all that the Shappa Ta’atani had changed sides once again and allied with the Mongols. “They already betrayed their own Mizipian people to fight with the Romans against Ocatan,” he said. “What else would you expect of Son of the Sun?”
Taianita scowled. “Really? You ask me that?”
Marcellinus grinned tightly. “They think they’ve chosen the winning side. Time to prove them wrong.”
The Roman fleet was approaching the blockade at alarming speed. The junks that had appeared to form a solid line across the Great River had resolved into a swarm of individual ships. There must be more than thirty junks, after all—Marcellinus thought perhaps three dozen—but if the Roman vessels could smash through them and keep going, perhaps the Sixth could carry the day without losing too many more men…
Roman horns sounded again, and the two warships at the front of the Roman column separated. The two dragon ships immediately in their wake followed suit. “Ah.” Marcellinus nodded.
“What?” said Taianita. “Why do they—”
“Carving a path. The galleys will punch through the Mongol line, and then any Mongol big canoes caught in between them will be trapped between the Roman lines.”
“The Mongol ships are lighter.” Enopay frowned, his forehead lined far beyond his years. “The quinqueremes are…clubs. Blunt clubs. They can break through the line, trap the junks in between, which can then be destroyed by the other Roman vessels that come behind. That is what Verus wants. It may not be so easy.”
Marcellinus felt a perverse need to defend his Roman commanding officer. “Not easy but a good strategy nonetheless. And we will enfilade as we go.”
Hanska hefted her club. “I hope it is not too easy.”
“Never fear, Hanska. We will find you Mongols to kill.”
Hanska nodded, her eyes bleak. For a moment her expression was as fixed as it had been during the dark days along the Kicka River. Enopay glanced up in concern and leaned against her. Absently, Hanska touched Enopay’s shoulder with the hand that was not holding her club.
No cheers came from below now. The oarsmen were too busy putting their backs into their rowing. On the upper deck the centurions brought their men to order. The artillerymen at the bulwarks were checking their scorpios, cranking the crossbows back, putting bolts in place. In the longships and knarrs the crews took up their bows and spears. The gunwales of their boats were close to water level, making them prime targets for the Tlingit and Shappan canoes.
“Stay close to me,” Marcellinus said to Enopay. “Unless I’m in a melee. Then stay away.”
Enopay gave him a quick glance. His expression spoke volumes.
As the enemy fleets came within range, the swell of noise was immediate, the din of the scorpios firing their bolts into the sails, men, and hulls of the Mongol battle junks. No Mongol arrows yet reached the Providentia, but they would soon enough.
The Fortuna and the Triumphus thundered into the Mongol line. Each had aimed to ram a Mongol junk, and the Fortuna hit hers fair and square. Her beaklike ramming prow caught the junk astern and crunched through its hull. Even as the junk’s poop deck rose and splintered, the Mongol warriors aboard it were loosing their arrows to rake the Fortuna’s decks.
The junk the Triumphus had aimed for managed to skim past its lethal ram at the last second. It swung wide to avoid getting tangled in the oars of the quinquereme, and then its striking arm crashed down. This was a hinged pole fifty feet long tipped with a heavy slab of iron the shape of a hammerhead, similar to the Roman corvus but much longer. The corvus was essentially a broad gangplank designed to slam into an enemy ship’s deck and hold it close enough for legionaries to board across it, but Marcellinus could see that the Mongol striking arms had a different function: their goal was to hold the ships apart, keep the enemy at a distance so that they could be bombarded. In light of their advantage with the black powder bombs and their excellent bowmanship, the Mongols favored bombardment over boarding; that matched their tactics on land of not engaging in hand-to-hand fighting unless forced to.
The striking arm of a second Mongol junk thumped into the deck of the Triumphus on its starboard side. A moment later came the boom of an explosion as a thunder crash bomb ignited. The Triumphus swayed ponderously from the impact. A cloud of black smoke drifted upward, and an acrid smell tinged the air.
As the Fortuna and Triumphus slowed as a result of their impacts, the two dragon ships steered into the gap between them. The drekar to starboard rammed a Mongol junk and came to an almost immediate halt in the river, its stern rising clear of the water. With a roar, Roman soldiers stepped up onto the longship’s gunwale and leaped onto the foredeck of the junk. Mongols hurried to defend against them, and steel rang against steel. As for the left drekar, two Tlingit canoes barely any shorter were pulling alongside, arrows flying, and behind them several eight-man canoes of the Shappa Ta’atani.
Enemy ships swarmed the Providentia now, junks coming in from each side at an angle, Tlingit canoes passing behind, ready to assault them from the stern. Aboard the nearest junk Marcellinus saw the spark of fire. A slow flame smoldered, ready to ignite a thunder crash bomb. “Shoot that man!” Marcellinus shouted. The nearest legionary artilleryman saw the threat and swung his scorpio around, his bolt already loaded and ready.
The Jin warrior died with a scream, impaled against the hull of his boat, and his thunder crash bomb rolled away into the scuppers of the battle junk. Its fuse sparked and hissed. “Down!” Marcellinus shouted, but the next moment the bomb went off, strafing the crews of both ships with hot metal and ceramic shards. The battle junk took the worst of it, and water immediately gushed in through its hull.
Alongside the Providentia, the Fides arrowed away at a diagonal. Its way was blocked by four junks. Trying to plow through them would be suicide, and her ship’s master was aiming to breach the line where it was weaker. Unfortunately, three of the four junks the Fides had avoided now changed course to converge on the Providentia.
Marcellinus had a brief mental image of a horse being taken down and mauled to death by a pack of dogs. He stepped up beside his ship’s master. “We can’t let them divide us like this. We must get alongside Verus in the Fortuna. Fight one battle, not many. Can we—”
“Fuck off,” Titus Otho said tersely. “I’m busy.”
It was too late anyway. The dragon ships ahead of them had been boarded, their crews in a melee with the almost naked but ferocious warriors of the Tlingit and Shappa Ta’atani. T
he Providentia could not thread the needle between the two drekars, and if they changed course too dramatically, they risked being rammed by their own ships coming up from behind, as the Minerva and the Clementia had split to flank the battle.
Besides, the Providentia had its own problems. In all, six battle junks were converging on Marcellinus’s quinquereme. A bolt from the Minerva’s ballista slammed into the hull of the leading junk just below where the Mongol helmsman stood, splintering the wood. To the helmsman’s credit, the wake of his junk barely wavered. In a few moments they would be within striking-arm range.
The master of the Providentia was indeed busy shouting orders to his own helmsman. Vibius Caecina, tribune of the Eighth and Ninth Cohorts, was standing amidships directing the ballistarii, the catapult crew.
This was hardly Marcellinus’s theater of war, but he could not help himself. He strode forward along the port line of artillerymen at their scorpios. “Target any Mongol readying a bomb, target anyone with a flame or a fuse, and after them the helmsmen—”
The Providentia rocked as two Mongol striking arms came down simultaneously into its starboard deck, one close to the prow and one barely thirty feet from where Marcellinus stood.
“Cut it! Guard them!”
The Roman marines around him acted instantly, some leaping forward with axes to try to cut the nearer striking arm away while others provided covering fire with scorpio bolts, arrows, and spears, or sheltered their axmen behind tall shields.
“Thunder crash!” Enopay shouted, and hit the deck.
It came arcing through the air from the first of the junks to port. The bomb exploded well above the Providentia, its fuse too short, but again came that unearthly crackling explosion of black powder. Shards of hot metal strafed the legionaries in front of Marcellinus. The blast threw many men through the air to slam into the decks, broken and still.
“Shit, shit…” Marcellinus spun and checked his people. Enopay was uninjured, but Hanska was staring with vicious hatred at a deep laceration in her right forearm. “Hanska?”
She raised her gaze and stared at the Mongol junk just a few dozen feet away across the water with a baleful expression. She wasn’t seriously hurt.
The Romans had hacked away the tip of the rearmost striking arm. The harpax fired with an astonishingly loud twang, followed by the sound of scraping cable. The harpoon buried itself in the hull of the battle junk just below its poop deck. Men hauled. The Mongols on the junk dropped their oars, grabbed weapons, and swarmed the deck, ready for combat.
At Titus Otho’s shouted command the helmsman put the Providentia hard to starboard. It swung toward the closest junk. From behind, the Minerva came around them to tackle the line of junks on the Providentia’s port side.
The battle junk crunched up against the Providentia. “Let them come to us! Get ready! Formation! Prepare to be boarded!” Marcellinus shouted.
The quinqueremes’ upper decks were a dozen feet above the waterline, the junks’ only slightly less. The two bands of warriors met on almost equal terms. The Romans braced, and the Mongols poured aboard.
With a bloodcurdling scream of rage Hanska was off and running, straight into the midst of the Mongols, her ax held high.
“Enopay, back, hide.” Marcellinus scanned the deck briefly: two junks to starboard disgorging Mongol warriors, another two at striking-arm length, with a shooting war going on between Romans behind shields and Mongols behind the bulwark of their ship. Three more farther away, being rowed in curved paths, looking for an opening. The legionaries on the fighting towers alternately strafing the Mongols on the Providentia’s deck and holding off the other battle junks. A dedicated couple of centuries guarded the Providentia’s single onager, which was still firing regularly over their heads at the junks attempting to close with the Fides.
From behind Marcellinus came two almost simultaneous explosions. One was from close by, and the Providentia juddered hard, and the second explosion came from farther away, setting fire to the fighting tower on the Minerva.
Marcellinus was trained for command but had no troops at his disposal. For the moment he was just a soldier, and he could delay no longer. He realized that Enopay was still by his side. “Juno, Enopay! Find Romans and hide behind them!” Drawing his gladius, he sprinted toward the nearest fray, where Mongols and Romans were fighting for control of the rear starboard bulwark of the Providentia.
As he saw his first Mongol faces close up in this battle, Marcellinus’s anger finally took hold of him. The massacre of the unarmed Romans and People of the Hand at Yupkoyvi, the brutality of the forced march across the desert, the Khan’s murder of Mikasi and enslavement of Pezi: his fury at all of this suddenly erupted and propelled him. His gladius sank into a Mongol arm until it crunched on the bone. He snatched it back and swung at an unprotected neck, kicked a warrior overboard. Parried as a warrior with Jin features stabbed low at his already injured calf and slashed the man viciously across his stomach. Blood not his own splashed across Marcellinus’s chest and arm, and he pushed forward to reach Hanska’s side.
Hanska fought like a woman possessed, shoving her way into the mass of Mongol sailors to stab and slay. She screamed as she did so, the raw sound visibly terrifying the men around her. Marcellinus stayed well to her left—in her berserker rage she might not recognize him until after she had disemboweled him—and ensured that no Mongol could flank her.
On his other side Roman legionaries fought with him shoulder to shoulder. Mongols had the advantage at distance fighting, but in hand-to-hand combat Romans had the edge. In equal numbers, the Romans’ discipline and better steel would prevail.
Whether their numbers were truly equal, Marcellinus could not tell. Fighting was taking place in concentrated knots all across the deck of the warship. Behind and around him came the occasional flare and explosion of black powder, and sometimes the deck shifted beneath his feet, but he fought on: hacking, slashing, slaying.
By the time they cleared the deck of the Providentia the air around the ships was rank with smoke. Marcellinus had never been on a battlefield so obscured, and wished the wind would pick up and blow it clear.
Toward the end he had become separated from Hanska. She had leaped into one of the Mongol junks to help the Romans slaughter the surviving Mongols and Jin. Marcellinus had run forward to take control of the Second Century of the Fourth Cohort, who were defending the ship’s onager upon the death of their centurion. Caecina, who had formerly been standing there, had vanished completely. Now Marcellinus looked around him and realized that for the moment, the battle here was won.
“Wait!” He ran back to Titus Otho, who was still commanding from the poop deck. “Don’t cut the junks loose until we commandeer their black powder or any bombs they may have aboard them.”
About to curse him again, the ship’s master now thought better of it. He swung to give the order, while at the same time shouting to the hortator to get the oarsmen benched and ready to row again as soon as possible.
Men leaped aboard the junks. Legionaries…and a Cahokian boy. “Enopay!”
Not every Mongol aboard the ship was dead; many were wounded, dazed, still moving. Enopay did not respond but disappeared down a stairway into the sinking rear of the vessel.
Marcellinus ran, jumped up, and leaped across to the Mongol ship, his momentum almost carrying him head over heels. Legionaries came up empty-handed from beneath the foredeck, with other men grabbing Mongol weapons or spitefully stabbing their downed foes. Enopay reappeared, staggering up the rear stairway out of the sinking stern of the junk under the weight of a round metal ball. “Thunder crash bomb.”
“Juno, Enopay…”
“I may not fight well, but I can carry. Help me get this onto the Providentia.”
They clambered back aboard the quinquereme and cut the junk free. Hanska and the Chitimachan were helping the legionaries throw Mongol corpses off the Providentia’s deck into the river. Enopay stowed the thunder crash bomb amidships. Mar
cellinus ran back to stand beside Titus Otho, peering forward through the smoke. “What of the Fortuna and Triumphus?”
“Braced together in the thick of it,” Titus Otho said. “We go to them now.”
“Where’s the Fides?”
“With us.”
Marcellinus scanned the deck. “And where the hell is Vibius Caecina?”
“The most useless tribune in the Ironclads? Dead, we can only hope.” For the first time, the ship’s master grinned at him.
It was a ridiculous breach of discipline, but Marcellinus didn’t care. “Let’s get this ship to where the real battle is.”
“Yeah.” Otho peered through the smoke. “Fuck all this housekeeping and deck swabbing. I’m already bored.”
“Tell me about the other tribunes. If Verus has his hands full, who’s next in command? Who’s worth the candle?”
Otho grinned again. “Figuring out who you need to assassinate to take command?”
This was a little close to the bone. Otho’s flippant irreverence was proving trying. Marcellinus bit his tongue. “Hardly.”
“Well, remember me for some advancement when you do.”
“Just tell me, Otho. And which ships they’re on.”
“Verus himself commands the First Cohort. His First Tribune is Aurelius Dizala.” Titus Otho nodded. “That one, Dizala, he’s all right. If you could get him on your side, you’d be golden. Pun intended. But you won’t. He’s Verus’s man through and through. So he commands the Second and Third Cohorts, and he’ll be on the Triumphus. Cohorts Four and Five are on the Minerva, under Statius Paulinus. He’s competent enough but young. Overwhelms easily once the spears fly. Probably taking orders from his own centurions by now. Flavius Urbicus, Sixth and Seventh Cohorts, is on the Clementia. Good man. You already know about Caecina, who you’ll find anywhere except actually commanding the Eighth and Ninth. And Ifer over there on the Fides is keeping the Tenth straight for the time being, and hopefully forever, since he actually has a brain in his head.”
