Eagle and Empire

by Alan Smale

  Tahtay raised his arm in a slicing motion, the hand-talk for be silent. “Of course I understand. I am not an idiot. But now I must explain to my warriors that Romans have once again cut down people of the land.”

  “And that should make them hate the Mongols more,” said Enopay. “Not the Romans.”

  “Perhaps. It may not be that simple.”

  Only a score or so of the Mongols’ prisoners had survived. They had been herded into camp, bleeding and wailing in shock, sorrow, and understandable anger. They were men who had been pushed to their wits’ end on the Mongols’ leash and then had been almost hacked to death by Roma.

  Lucius Agrippa could contain himself no longer. “Yes, yes, but in the meantime, Chagatai’s army is here.”

  “Maybe,” Tahtay said.

  Agrippa eyed him balefully. “There is no maybe, war chief. We have flown Sky Lanterns. Sintikala has flown her Hawk. We see their camp, not ten miles distant, and their campfires as they warm themselves against the dawn chill. Their dust still hangs in the air. Somehow their entire army has crept in, undetected.”

  Tahtay looked at Sintikala. “Speak.”

  Sintikala pursed her lips and spoke reluctantly. “Not so many.”

  “Not so many as what?” Agrippa demanded.

  Sintikala frowned at his tone and for a moment did not reply. Then she answered in Cahokian, still eschewing speaking Latin in front of the Imperator, with Enopay deftly translating. “ ‘By night I saw them from the air. Hundreds of campfires, just ten miles from Forward Camp, which would mean that thousands of men had arrived by night. A whole army. You launched a Sky Lantern in the dawn, and your Roman sentries, pilots, they told you the same. But it is not so.’ ”

  “A ruse,” Marcellinus said.

  “ ‘Which they worked to conceal.’ ” Enopay heard more from Sintikala, then nodded. “ ‘An advance group of perhaps three or four jaghuns, just a few hundred men, must have ridden in at night, dragging branches behind them to throw dust into the air. Each man lit a fire. By night the camp has the appearance of the full army, but it is not so. When I flew again at dawn, the ruse became clear.’ ”

  “Yet more Mongol trickery.” The Imperator turned to Agrippa. “Has it worked? How is the mood in camp?”

  Agrippa looked frustrated. “Word has already spread throughout the armies. Naturally we all believed an entire Mongol army had closed to within striking distance without our knowing they were there. The legions are shaken, and the redskins are all aquiver that we have killed Hesperians in cold blood.”

  Hadrianus nodded. “Steps?”

  “We have closed the gate between the inner castra and the outer camp. I have told my centurions they are personally responsible for keeping their men calm. On pain of death.”

  “Our commanders and elders, too,” Tahtay said. “Akecheta, Mahkah, Wahchintonka, Matoshka, Chenoa. The Tadodaho and other chiefs of the Iroqua, Blackfoot, Cherokee. All walk the camp, speaking softly for calm.”

  Marcellinus spoke. “I will have the Sixth Ironclads build the rest of the launchers, bring in the other Hawks and Eagles, and put the outer camp to rights. I already sent out two centuries to tear down the Mongol trebuchets and…clean up after the slaughter. Bring the bodies in for burial.”

  After a short, morbid silence, Hadrianus shook his head. “Damn these Mongol bastards to Hades.”

  Marcellinus considered. “To get here these jaghuns must have come sixty or eighty miles a day for several days. We should launch an attack on them right away, while they’re still tired. Their warriors may sleep in the saddle, but when do their horses sleep? They will be fatigued; some may even be foundered. And we must show our troops and warriors that the Khan’s troops are not invincible.”

  The Imperator was nodding. “Decinius Sabinus already musters the Third for deployment.”

  “Surely you just have to tell the army what is really happening,” Enopay said. “And then we—”

  “Gods’ sakes, Gaius Marcellinus, shut your word slave up before I slit his annoying throat.” The Imperator turned on his heel and strode out of the room.

  Enopay stared after him, eyes wide. “What? What? I spoke the wrong words?”

  “You spoke words,” Agrippa said drily. “And that was quite enough.” He nodded to Marcellinus and followed his Imperator out of the tent.

  Sintikala put her hand on Enopay’s shoulder to comfort him but turned to Marcellinus. “And so now we attack the Mongols?”

  Marcellinus wanted nothing more than to sleep for a few hours. That obviously wasn’t going to happen. He gulped water again, stood. “Us? That’s up to the Imperator. Soon, Sabinus will march the Third Parthica. In the meantime we must ensure that the remaining launch towers are being constructed correctly. We do not have long. The rest of Chagatai’s army will not be far behind.”

  —

  By midmorning the Legio III Parthica had deployed from Forward Camp and marched due west. Heavily outnumbered, Chagatai’s Mongols chose not to engage them in battle. As soon as the legion came within a quarter mile, the jaghuns withdrew slowly ahead of them. Praetor Decinius Sabinus halted his men, whereupon the Mongol horsemen also stopped and dismounted. Sabinus commanded his troops forward once more, and again the few hundred Mongol light cavalry led their horses away.

  In the rear of the Third Legion its engineers set up a launching ramp, stoked a flame to inflate the bag, and sent a Sky Lantern aloft with a mixed crew of four legionaries and four members of the Raven clan. Tethered to a barbed pole driven deep into the ground, the Sky Lantern rose a thousand feet into the air, and its crew took stock of the land before them to ensure that they were not being led into an ambush or flanked by another Mongol force.

  What happened next was as visible to the rest of the army waiting at Forward Camp as it was to the crew of the Sky Lantern. Marcellinus saw it, too, from his perch atop the third Thunderbird launch tower where he stood with Chenoa supervising the installation of the steel launching rail.

  At first it was merely a smudge on the far horizon. Then the message was taken up, and just minutes later the signal tower ten miles south of Forward Camp showed its flame, the gouts of smoke it produced being artfully sculpted with a blanket to produce a series of small black clouds that drifted up into the blue skies.

  The signal fires had been lit. At long last, the Line of Hadrianus had served its purpose. Its message was clear. The second and much larger army, that of Chinggis Khan, was also on its way and only a few days distant.

  The Mongols had timed their approach to perfection, the twin punches of the armies of Chagatai and Chinggis artfully coordinated. Another wave of alarm spread through Forward Camp.

  Chinggis Khan had seized the initiative before he had even crossed the horizon. The Roman coalition had already been forced onto the defensive. The allies had to recapture their morale and momentum, and soon, or the war would be already half lost.

  —

  Two days later Marcellinus stepped up to take his place as part of a Wakinyan crew at the ground end of one of the giant rails. Around him the others in his crew all prepared themselves for launch in their own way, some stretching, others frowning at the sky and muttering in prayer. Chenoa’s eyes roved over the craft and the tower, searching for any signs of defect. Demothi walked back and forth underneath the Wakinyan Seven and touched each spar and rod, also obsessively checking for any weakness. Luyu and Taianita were already strapped under the craft, one on each side. Luyu had been one of the crew when the Thunderbirds of Tahtay had bombed the Roman fortresses on the Oyo, and so she wore a battle tattoo and a falcon mask. Taianita, less experienced, had no mask to hide her trepidation. She chewed her lip and stared at the ground. The two braves who completed the crew were not known to Marcellinus and said no word to him. They sang their preflight rituals, then gestured to him to step up so that they could lift him into position and strap him in place.

  The first Mongol army had appeared over the horizon to the no
rthwest the previous afternoon, a broad swath of armed horsemen advancing at a walk, grazing their mounts as they came. This was the army of Chagatai, second son of Chinggis Khan. It had crossed the Great Mountains to the north and proceeded along the Wemissori, destroying Shoshoni, Blackfoot, Hidatsa, and Mandan communities as it came. The advance strike force of Mongols responsible for the morale-sapping night attack had fallen back to join up with the main army.

  Chagatai’s army clearly felt under no pressure to hurry. Mongol control of the meadows ahead meant less grazing land for the Roman four-legs, requiring them to ferry the horses squadron by squadron back across the river to the prairies behind them. The Romans had already moved the mules far downriver to preserve the nearer grass for the horses.

  The larger army, led by Chinggis himself, was only a little farther away. As the Romans had long known, the Mongol Khan had brought his forces across the lower reaches of the Great Mountains, crossing them via a southern pass, and was now advancing eastward along the Braided River.

  The Norse scouts of the Third Parthica had penetrated close to the Mongol baggage train before being chased away. The Norsemen reported that the army of Chinggis Khan still maintained its appearance of being the most cheerful and colorful they had ever seen. Their enemies’ spirits were high. The carts appeared to contain trebuchets broken down into transportable parts and cargoes of metal tubing that were presumably fire lances. The largest and widest of the carts carried the Khan’s yurt, all in one piece, and that cart required twenty horses to pull it.

  The Norsemen had kept shaking their heads as they briefed the Praetors on what they had seen. The Mongol Horde was enough to daunt even a Viking.

  At that point the scouts had completed their useful work. They would not be allowed so close to the enemy forces again. Chagatai’s army now had squads of skirmishers riding out two miles ahead to clear the way and check for traps and ambushes and engage or drive away any Romans foolish enough to approach. Any Romans who tried to scout Chinggis’s army from now on risked being cut off from Forward Camp.

  Thus, to gain any further strategic information about the approaching armies, they would have to take to the air.

  This would be Marcellinus’s sixth flight aboard a Wakinyan Seven, but as Chenoa and Sintikala were even now continuing to experiment with the design, this craft bore only a superficial resemblance to those he had flown previously. This Seven had just over half the wingspan of one of the full twelve-man Thunderbirds and a much more swept-back wing shape, with the larger pilots carried toward the center. Demothi would be in the central lead position, and Chenoa would captain the craft from the outermost point of the left wing. To Demothi’s left would be Marcellinus, Taianita, and then Chenoa; to his right, the other two male pilots and then Luyu. The girl was so slight that she carried the lion’s share of the weaponry, mostly pots of liquid flame. Chenoa also carried some liquid flame and Demothi bore one of Marcellinus’s new slingshots, but Marcellinus and the others were unarmed.

  They carried no sacks of incendiary so that they would be lighter and more nimble in the air. This would be purely a reconnaissance flight. They planned to stay high, and to deter the possibility of an attack by a Mongol Firebird, their Wakinyan would be escorted by half a dozen Catanwakuwa piloted by Sintikala, Kimimela, and others of the Hawk clan.

  As always for Marcellinus, the launch consisted of what seemed like a half hour of agonized waiting, not daring to breathe while expecting each moment to be his last, followed by a swift punch to his spine that would have done credit to a mule and then a vertiginous floating-dropping sensation as the Thunderbird found its place in the air. If anything, watching the launch tower streak past his eyes was even more terrifying than rocketing off the Great Mound of Cahokia. The wooden tower that felt so solid when he was standing on it now seemed flimsy, as if it might buckle beneath them or simply blow away and cease to exist in the instants it took the Thunderbird to streak up the oiled steel rail and into the sky.

  The outer edges of the wings unfurled and locked, revealing the prone bodies of Chenoa and Luyu at the wingtips. Marcellinus heard an eerie keening sound over the hum of the wind in the cables of steel and sinew. Luyu was singing, of all things, in a tuneless girlish soprano.

  Marcellinus loosened his death grip on the rod in front of him and tried to focus on the land beneath. Experience had taught him that if he clutched it too tightly, his surge of terror when the ground came into clear view made him flinch and jerk the craft to one side. But until today his flights had all been over Cahokia, with its recognizable mounds, huts, longhouses, granaries, and borrow pits. From this altitude the prairie appeared featureless. He could see the horizon, a few indistinct curves of the Braided River to his left, and a smudge that might be the distant Wemissori off the right wingtip, but beneath him he could not identify hills, valleys, or even a copse of trees. As a result, he had no idea how high he was.

  Chenoa called out, laconic words of command that Marcellinus and the others instantly obeyed. The Seven banked to change its course by a few degrees.

  Somewhere nearby were the Hawks of Sintikala, Kimimela, and the others, but Marcellinus could not see them. The sky was lined with high cloud, gray rather than blue, and he saw no other wings. Perhaps they were above him, blocked from his view by the taut wing of the Thunderbird. Luyu mercifully fell silent, her song at an end. No one spoke. Marcellinus felt isolated, adrift in a gray world, and after a few minutes began to suffer from the odd illusion that they were suspended stationary in space and might be trapped up there, unable to come down.

  Then he realized that the ground below was no longer featureless. He made every effort not to wrench at his control bar in his shock.

  They had already reached the Mongol army of Chagatai. The Thunderbird was flying over the leading edge of a sea of warriors.

  The grass beneath him resembled nothing so much as a rug covered with ants. Chagatai’s forces were not riding in blocks like Roman cavalry but were spread out in small groups sparsely enough that they appeared to stretch to the horizon on both sides. They were grazing their horses as they walked and staying far enough apart that a full-sized Thunderbird with a cargo of liquid flame would do little damage.

  How the hell high was he? How could they have gained so much height? Was it a trick of the air?

  “Down,” Chenoa said calmly at just that moment. They inched the bars closer to their chests. The horizon tilted. The Thunderbird angled down toward the prairie. Now he could pick out the wagon train in the center of Chagatai’s army.

  A Hawk appeared less than fifty feet to his left. Beyond, another dropped into formation next to it. The Wakinyan was vibrating, its sinews thrumming in the air, and for a moment he could not tell who the Hawk pilots were.

  “South?” Demothi was asking Chenoa. “Along?”

  “Yes.” The Thunderbird banked again. Rather than travel farther behind the Mongol line, they were going to ride along it. “And lower.”

  Chagatai himself would be somewhere below them, a warrior chief in his early forties, already a leader of great renown in his own right. Marcellinus wondered if the Mongol general could see the Thunderbird above him, if he was aware he was being surveilled.

  As they dropped, Marcellinus made more sense of what he was seeing. The Mongol light cavalry were mostly dressed in leather, a gray-brown color that from altitude naturally merged into the green-gray of the prairie. But now they were flying over a block of Mongol heavy cavalry in darker leather and steel. Unlike the light horsemen, the heavies rode in ranks in a solid block. If the light cavalry seemed ephemeral from the air, the heavies looked substantial, square, steely, and ready for anything.

  Marcellinus could not count them or even estimate their numbers. He doubted that anyone else aboard the Thunderbird could either.

  “Canoes.” Taianita pointed without moving her hand far from her wooden control bar. The Wakinyan Sevens were light enough that even stretching out an arm had a noticeable effect.<
br />
  Marcellinus screwed up his eyes, but for him they were just dark blips on the Wemissori. “You’re sure?”

  “Of course. Large. Probably of wood rather than birch bark.”

  Tlingit, then, rather than the lightweight canoes of the lakes and eastern woodlands. They must have been portaged over the northern mountains, perhaps by Hesperian slave labor. The Tlingit were a coastal tribe and would prefer riverine travel to a long trek on land. Those vessels carried warriors and supplies.

  “Enough,” Chenoa said. “On.”

  Everyone but Marcellinus seemed to know immediately what “on” meant. The Thunderbird banked sharply left away from the river, heading southwest. Chenoa shared Sintikala’s uncanny reading of the skies; in changing direction she somehow nursed the unseen air currents and coaxed their craft higher. He supposed it was a trick akin to that of mariners who could read the color of the seas, the patterns of the wave tops, the almost imperceptible surface currents, and even the birds in the skies and the clouds and stars above them to steer the best course. Perhaps if you flew all your life, if you practically lived in the air, this was the kind of virtuosity you could aspire to.

  Was Marcellinus that good at anything? Had he gained any skill over his half century of life that was even remotely similar? Well, to a man or woman of peace his speed with a sword and his reading of his enemy’s movements might appear similarly uncanny…at least, he might hope so.

  Then his woolgathering was dispelled, because just a few miles from Chagatai’s forces he saw the even larger army of Chagatai’s father, Chinggis Khan, the scourge of Asia and the implacable, ruthless foe of Roma.

  —

  Marcellinus’s first hope was that he was mistaken, that they were really looking down upon one of the gigantic buffalo herds that might take a full day to pass by raft or horse. But the beasts below did not have the ungainly gait of buffalo. These were warriors on horseback, each leading several other horses, and there were carts sprinkled among them, too, tall-wheeled wagons similar to those the Romans and Hesperians had constructed for overland travel. This was an army of countless thousands of cavalry on the move. They were not organized into rigid units or even an established marching order like Roman cavalry. The Mongols were spread across the plains like a disease.