by Alan Smale
“Be open,” Kimimela said. “Open to everything about the land. Perhaps you can never truly be one of us. Our rites and journeys may not be for you. But be open, just in case. Do not step back and become fully Roman again.”
He thought about it. “No. That is not what I want, to become fully Roman again.”
“And what do you want?”
“To have fewer names,” he said slowly, and looked down at her. “To be your father. Sintikala’s husband. And a friend to Tahtay and Enopay. In a Cahokia without Roma.”
Now she grinned. “And that is what we all want, too. So do not be killed by Mongols, Gaius.” It was an echo of what a much younger Kimimela had once begged him long before: Do not be killed by Iroqua, Gaius.
He saw Sintikala in her face and in her eyes. She had her mother’s fierceness, stubbornness, and strength. Yet Kimimela was very much her own person, with a playfulness and wicked humor that Sintikala rarely achieved.
Marcellinus loved Sintikala with an intensity that dwarfed any battle ardor he had ever experienced. His love for Kimimela was gentler and more protective but just as intense. He would die for either one of them.
He had no doubt that Kimimela loved him just as strongly. After all, she had almost died for him. The thought still chilled him to his core, and to compensate he pretended to brush off her fear for him with humor. “Oh, very well. If you insist, I shall attempt to survive.”
“Be sure you do.”
“And when did you become so wise?”
Airily she said, “Oh, I was born wise. And strong. But I needed you and Sintikala to help me step into it and know it.”
She moved away from him and touched the surface of the ground with the palms of both hands. From her sudden absorption, Marcellinus knew he should not disturb her.
Then she stood up and turned to him, her face serious again. “Gaius Marcellinus. I will always be with you. Sometimes in the air. Sometimes not. But always standing behind you, whispering: Live.”
He nodded. She rested one hand on his shoulder for a moment, then her lip turned upward in that Sintikala-like quick grin and she walked away, down the steps of the mound.
Well. His daughter was growing up.
He had been so close to death, so often. Never had he been in such danger of dying within the month.
Never had he wanted so much to live.
But he did not think the answer to that lay with the gods, whether Roman or Cahokian. He needed no Roman gods, no lares. Even more, he needed no vision quest in the Hesperian style. That was for the Cahokians, and regardless of what Kimimela might say, their culture was not truly his. Marcellinus needed no animal of the spirit to guide him unless it was the eagle, by which he again meant the Aquila of Roma just as surely as the eagles of Hesperia.
For Marcellinus it was enough to have family, true family at last, after all these years. Yet…
“I will try to live, Kimi.” Marcellinus paused and thought and spoke aloud the words that were on his lips and in his heart despite all their inherent contradictions. “By the gods of your people and mine, I will try very hard indeed.”
Forward Camp was a complete mess: organized chaos in a dozen different languages.
A few hundred miles to the west and north of Forward Camp the terrain creased up into bluffs and crags, gorges and canyons, but the landscape around the camp itself consisted of tallgrass prairies and gentle rolling hills with almost no trees: easy country to march or canter through with long sight lines from the hillcrests. In planning a war it was advisable to have as few topographical challenges as possible and be able to see your enemy approach from as far away as you could.
The Braided River meandered in from the west, a hundred feet across at its widest point and considerably narrower in most other places, dotted with islands and mudflats but barely deep enough to be navigable by anything larger than a canoe. The Wemissori ran almost north-south here; it was much wider, four or five hundred feet across, and flowed with much more purpose. The Braided River dribbled into it as if with reluctance.
Three years earlier, when Marcellinus had met the Hidatsa and ultimately found Tahtay living among the Blackfoot, he had been much farther up the Wemissori, through gorges and around a great curve until the river eventually had flowed out of the west. Such was the Braided River’s lack of drama that Marcellinus did not even recall seeing it join the Wemissori.
The Braided River was easy to bridge, and two wide Roman pontoon bridges now spanned it fifty feet apart. Crossing the bigger river was less straightforward and required boats, but in addition to the quinqueremes and drekars, the legions now had dozens of wide rafts available.
In addition the Romans had chained both rivers, a technique Marcellinus had heard of in Europa and Asia but had never before seen. Heavy iron chains reached from one riverbank to another, supported by floating log booms. Such chain-and-boom systems formed an impenetrable obstacle to any craft that tried to pass upriver or down and would prevent Mongol vessels from passing by or Mongol fire ships from being driven downstream into the Roman pontoon bridges. The chain booms could be opened to allow quinqueremes to pass, but the unfortunate Hesperian traders who also used the river as a thoroughfare had no choice but to unload their boats, carry them around on land, and reload them on the other side of the massive chains.
A substantial contingent of the 27th Legion—four cohorts—was camped on the eastern side of the Wemissori to defend its bank, guard the chain boom, and resist any flanking assault. The larger part of Forward Camp lay in the immense, mostly flat area between the two rivers, north of the Braided and west of the Wemissori. The square castra in the center of Forward Camp held the Third and the rest of the 27th. The broad sprawl that surrounded that nucleus held the Sixth Ferrata, the troopers of the cavalry alae and the cohortes equitatae, most of the three Cahokian cohorts, and many hundreds of horses. The plains upriver of Forward Camp on the west bank of the Wemissori hosted further hundreds of Cahokian and Iroqua warriors, and the land downriver of the convergence was home to what seemed like a thousand-thousand mules. Four-legs were constantly on the move; the grass around Forward Camp was already overgrazed and torn up, and keeping them fed required trips off into the Grass in all directions.
Looming over this giant camp was the first of the six Wakinyan launch towers, 150 feet tall, the wood and steel scaffolding of its buttresses extending a similar length to the right and left to stabilize it. Marcellinus’s old joke notwithstanding, it really did look a little as if the Cahokians had brought their Master Mound with them in a crude and skeletal form. Two of the Wakinyan had been brought ashore and assembled inside a hastily built longhouse. The rest had been left safe aboard the Fides to ensure that they would not get damaged in the confusion.
Alongside the Wakinyan launcher stood three Hawk launchers and three Eagle launchers, railed up and ready to go, their arrangement adding to the odd similarity of Forward Camp to the Great Plaza at Cahokia. Around them, lying like immense fallen beasts, were the unassembled pieces of the remaining towers.
On the river side of the camp Pahin, Chogan, and the other Ravens had set up four steep wooden ramps to launch the Sky Lanterns. Today a single Lantern floated eight hundred feet above the camp, crewed with Cahokian and Roman lookouts. Here in the Grass, the army would keep a constant watch on the horizon.
The Imperator’s Praetorium tent was at the exact center of the castra, and Sabinus and Agrippa had quarters on either side of it. Marcellinus, always the contrarian, slept on hard ground in the outer camp with his mixed Cahokian and Roman forces. Tahtay and his Blackfoot, the Wolf Warriors under Wahchintonka, the People of the Hand, and the Tadodaho and his Iroqua were billeted in various areas in the outer camp. As Marcellinus had anticipated, the Cahokian summons to the Shappa Ta’atani had been rebuffed, and no warriors had come north in the springtime to join them. All the rumors they heard suggested that the Shappans had returned to their alliance with the Mongols.
The central castra w
as as well organized as any Roman encampment, but in the outer area Marcellinus quickly became dependent on his adjutants and Unega’s Cherokee guides to find his way around. Forward Camp had been only lightly occupied during the winter months, and most of the troops and warriors inhabiting it now had been there only a couple of weeks or, in the Sixth’s case, four days. That meant that nobody knew where anything or anybody else was, and people spent much of their days either lost or falling over one another. Although even Enopay threw up his hands at the prospect of attempting an accurate count amid all this activity and confusion, it was conceivable that the Hesperians now formed the majority of the allied forces.
Despite the large number of nations clustered together in crowded conditions, there was little infighting among the allies. They were kept too busy by their generals and chiefs. Every day was a solid round of construction work, army drills, and exercises out in the Grass. But that might not last. A significant fraction of the League’s forces was still not convinced of the seriousness of the Mongol incursion. Hardly any of the Cahokians or Iroqua had seen the depredations of the Mongols with their own eyes. Because of the tales brought by his Blackfoot brothers, Tahtay believed in the threat completely, and most other Hesperians took the view that any enemy that worried the Romans, Blackfoot, and People of the Hand was worth taking seriously. However, a growing minority suspected the Mongol threat was either dramatically exaggerated or nonexistent. The outer area of Forward Camp was as volatile as Jin salt and might explode into violence at any moment.
Just as he had right at the beginning of his Hesperian adventure, Marcellinus made it his duty to be anywhere and everywhere. He walked the camp by day and by night, sometimes with Tahtay, Enopay, Sintikala, or the Tadodaho of the Haudenosaunee, sometimes with Sabinus, Aelfric, Dizala, Gallus, or his quartermaster and adjutants, talking in quick Latin about logistics, supplies, injuries.
Military action was rarely a clean and well-organized affair. Cohorts and alae, and the corresponding units of enemy infantry and cavalry, were not merely pieces on a game board. War on this scale was messy and contingent, and once the battles began, the generals would be lucky if they could even keep track of what was going on right in front of them in their own theaters. But with luck, at least they could prevent their armies from destroying themselves before they took the field.
Slowly but surely, the great Mongol armies were approaching. On the basis of the intelligence brought by the Norse scouts and the Hesperian merchants, they had a month at most before the armies of the Khan came within range. And a month was not long at all where an army of this size was concerned.
—
“We must dig channels,” Enopay said obstinately. “Canals for crap. Our soldiers spend too much time carrying merda around in reeking carts. And half the Iroqua won’t use the latrines anyway.”
Marcellinus increased his pace. If he could not leave his youngest adjutant behind, perhaps he could at least make the boy short of breath. “Juno, Enopay, I know all that.”
Enopay did a hop and skip to keep up. “How can you be a Roman and not believe in being clean? Is Roma a sewer? The men say no. Then why must Forward Camp be one?”
Marcellinus had missed his chance to go on an early-morning mounted exercise with Hanska and the Third Cahokian because his quartermaster of the Sixth Ferrata had been haranguing him about corn shipments from Cahokia and his chief blacksmith had been complaining that the current batch of steel was too brittle to mend the wagon wheels that had bent on the journey here. Now he wanted to perform a surprise inspection of the Ninth Cohort’s tent area and see if there was any truth to Manius Ifer’s quiet reports of dealings in contraband tabaco among Caecina’s men, but Enopay was pursuing him through the streets ranting about shit. He stopped and turned on the boy. “This is an army camp. We’ll be here perhaps one more month, and then we’ll either be rotting here in the dirt ourselves or marching home to the Mizipi.”
“And in the meantime—”
“Look, Enopay, sewers don’t sluice themselves. We’d need running water. Pumps and pipes. A whole system. Or your channels of shit would just clog solid and we’d have a network of merda spanning the entire camp.”
Marcellinus strode on. The boy broke into a trot. “It can’t be that hard.”
“No, not once we’ve built the aqueduct,” Marcellinus said testily.
“All right, but at least—”
From the Sky Lantern far above them a horn sounded, and Marcellinus came to an abrupt halt, almost skidding in the mud.
“What?” Enopay looked around. The nearby legionaries also had stopped, suddenly alert.
They were too far from the edge of the sprawling camp, and that edge was half a mile from the nearest hill. “Tower,” said Marcellinus, and ran toward the Wakinyan launch gantry. Jumping up, he started to climb the ladder.
“Futete.” Below him, Enopay stood wide-eyed. “What? What’s happening?”
“Come on up, Enopay. I need your eyes.”
The Praetor reapplied himself to the climb, pulling himself up the ladder hand over hand. Enopay would follow or he wouldn’t, but Marcellinus couldn’t wait. He felt a new vibration through the tower and glanced back. Taianita and Manius Ifer had appeared and were coming, too, one on each side of the ladder, racing up after him, and yes, Enopay was gingerly pulling himself up and trying not to look down.
Marcellinus stepped onto the platform just below the tower’s peak. A few feet above his head was the steel launching rail. Marcellinus glanced at it out of habit. It looked solid, ready to go if they needed it.
He looked out over Forward Camp and the grasslands beyond. Behind him the Roman castra was orderly enough, on the standard grid pattern; in front of him the outer camp was a sprawling mass of humanity, its tents and lodges arrayed in halfhearted lanes that gave way to impromptu stabling areas. The horsemen of his Cohors IX Thracum Syriaca were half mounted and almost ready to go out into the Grass to forage. Beyond, a muddle of Hesperians walked around them, and mules dotted the low hills.
From the height of a Sky Lantern Marcellinus could have seen farther, but even from here he saw enough: a line of maybe half a dozen horsemen on a hill in the middle distance. They were a couple of miles away, but even with Marcellinus’s fuzzy eyesight, at such a distance their appearance and demeanor set them apart from Roman or Hesperian riders. The shape of their armor, the odd glimpses of color, the additional horses that each rider led behind him; none were typical of Roma or its allies.
Taianita arrived by his side, breathing hard. “Five of them,” she said. “Each with three extra mounts.”
“Light cavalry. Scouts.” Manius Ifer paused on the ladder just below the platform to grab Enopay’s wrist and haul him up. The boy clambered painfully onto the platform in a crouched, crabbed posture more reminiscent of a man fifty years older, fear knotting his limbs. He seized the wooden rail in front of him. “Mongols?”
“No, fur merchants,” Taianita said sarcastically.
Well, they were wearing furs; of that Marcellinus was sure.
“Should we try to parley with them?”
“They’re scouts, not envoys.” Manius Ifer now stood on Enopay’s far side. “Envoys would be advancing toward us with purpose. These are wary. Seeing where we are, and how many.”
“We should kill them or chase them off. Why do we not send out soldiers after them?” Taianita was breathing more heavily than the climb up the tower warranted. Marcellinus could hardly blame her. If not for Pezi’s bravery and sacrifice, Taianita might have spent the last year as a prisoner of the Mongols. No surprise that the mere sight of their scouts provoked a strong emotion in her.
“We want them to know where we are,” Marcellinus said. “In a land this huge, opposing armies need scouts to bring them together. How else would we find each other to fight?”
Taianita shook her head, baffled, but Marcellinus was in no mood to explain any further. “Just these men? Do you see others, farther out?”
“There.” Ifer was pointing toward the river. “And there. Less than ten in each group.” Marcellinus could see nothing but muddy water and green hills. How Ifer could pick out anything at that distance was a mystery to him.
The five scouts on the nearby hill had halted. Obviously their facial expressions could not be seen at that distance, but their calm immobility seemed threatening. “They want us to know they’re watching.”
“We should be watching them,” Taianita said.
“And we are.” Marcellinus controlled his impatience with difficulty. “We have fifteen scouting parties along the rivers and in the Grass.” Dawn and dusk were the scouts’ hours to approach an enemy with the least risk of riding straight into foraging or exercising units. Even now, far from here, a small row of Roma’s Norse or Gallic scouts might be giving the encamped army of Chinggis Khan a similarly cold inspection. Other Roman scouts would be on their way back toward the legions after surveillance on previous days to provide updated information about the Mongol armies’ strengths and distances.
“I still think sending their heads back to the Khan would be a worthy message,” Enopay said. “They want to demoralize us? Let us kill every Mongol who walks away from their army. Let them be scared to step away from their fellows.”
Such piecemeal harassment of enemy forces was the Hesperian way. Marcellinus knew that from bitter experience. He turned to Ifer. “Back in Asia, how far ahead of the main army did Mongol scouts typically patrol?”
“Anything from a hundred miles ahead to a thousand. Generally around two hundred. But here, who knows?”
“Could they be closer than we think? Making better time than our scouts are telling us? Even outpacing our scouts?”
“With a baggage train it’ll be hard for them to do better than fifteen, twenty miles a day. Most of the tales of Mongol lightning strikes in Europa were based on misdirection or lies.”
Marcellinus was unconvinced. “We need exercises in deployment, right away, with the whole army. Battle lines. Damn it.”
