Clash of Eagles (19 page)

Bowing was not a normal action for Cahokians. They were using his own gestures to honor him. Marcellinus felt embarrassed at the mimicry; he hardly deserved such respect from them. “Um. Wait. Stay there.”

At least he knew the hand-talk for “pee” now. As he hobbled away to take care of business, they stayed exactly where they were and patiently awaited his return.

Even as Marcellinus limped back to them, he knew it was hopeless. He could barely stand, and walking was a trial. His bitter aches at calf, thigh, stomach, ribs, back, shoulder, and head vied with one another in intensity even as he walked. He could not lift anything larger than a pugio without opening his stitches; a sword or a shield would be hopeless. Even if he could communicate effectively, drilling them would be all but impossible.

And he was glad of it. Flattered as Marcellinus was that a few Cahokian warriors would seek his training in methods of fighting with Roman weapons, he was queasily uncertain about providing it. It might be fair enough to arm them against their local enemies and keep Cahokia strong—clearly the mound builders and the Iroqua shared no love for each other. Should the rest of the world stay absent, his personal distaste for the Iroqua might just be enough for Marcellinus to throw in his lot with the Cahokians. But when another Roman force arrived in Nova Hesperia next year or the year after to face not only bombardment from the air but Hesperians with Roman weaponry, trained in Roman tactics?

Where Nova Hesperia was concerned, Roma’s earliest and worst mistake had been in killing the Norse and losing the vital information they had held in their heads. On the trek inland, aside from trusting Corbulo too much and Aelfric too little, Marcellinus’s biggest blunder had been murdering Fuscus. Had he kept the scrawny Powhatani alive, he might have been able to talk to the local Cahokians during the days of the final approach to their city, perhaps even make some kind of treaty before his hand was forced. Fuscus was a coward and an opportunist, but just maybe, keeping him around might have made all the difference. If Marcellinus had kept his temper, perhaps he would even now be awakening each day to a different world, a world in which his 33rd Legion still lived.

But that was a big what-if, and Marcellinus would never know the answer to it.

Meanwhile, the Cahokiani had not made the same basic error. Marcellinus was alive, and it looked like he might stay that way. Why? Well, that was becoming increasingly obvious.

Despite the Romans’ tragic showing in the attack on Cahokia, the 33rd Legion had owned sophisticated weaponry and displayed a military discipline the Hesperians had not seen before. Marcellinus had things he might teach them about warfare. He probably was being kept alive for just that purpose, just as Marcellinus himself had vowed before the battle to preserve some of the Cahokiani pilots to teach him about the wings and the liquid flame. In which case it might be Marcellinus’s duty not to play into their hands.

It was a conundrum, and Marcellinus was loath to try to solve it on three or four hours’ sleep after the most traumatic week of his life.

Here he stood, in front of a group of Cahokian warriors. Their faces showed him that they had not grasped the full magnitude of his wounds until now. The leading brave stood and held out a sword to him anyway, hilt first, more in hope than in expectation.

Marcellinus did not reach for it. He took his hand from his ribs with some difficulty and signed,
Today, No. Cut. Wound.

He shrugged and looked sad. The brave signed something back, but
it was too fast with too many gestures, and Marcellinus didn’t catch it. He shook his head and limped on to lean against the doorway of his hut.

Enopay ran across the plaza, sobbing his heart out, and sat down at Marcellinus’s feet with a bump. The warriors looked at one another, embarrassed.

“Um.” With some effort Marcellinus crouched. “Enopay? I’m all right. See?” He raised his arms, which made him wince in pain; unfortunately, it was a poor demonstration of his robustness.

Enopay’s large eyes swam in tears. He jabbed at the Roman’s good shoulder, perhaps intending it as a petulant blow for putting himself at risk.

Marcellinus signed,
Gaius good,
and wiped the boy’s eyes and nose with the corner of his tunic. Other than that, he was at a loss. He really should have spent more time with Vestilia when she was young.

Another small figure was marching toward him with her chin up, displaying much more dignitas than should have been possible for a child of eight winters. On arrival Kimimela made a shooing motion at Marcellinus, ordering him into his hut, and started to lecture the braves rather imperiously; their eyebrows went up, and several of them tried hard to stifle their grins. The leading brave, however, listened to her gravely, signing
Yes, yes
as she spoke and holding her gaze as if she were a great chief.

Nodding ruefully at Marcellinus, the squad piled their Roman weapons against the outside wall of Marcellinus’s hut and made to depart.

From his other side came another female voice, lower in timbre but just as insistent. Marcellinus turned his head with injudicious speed, winced, and swayed.

Grabbing his arm, Chumanee hustled him into his hut, and Kimimela followed them in.

Marcellinus sighed. A fig for his dignity and warrior reputation: today it was his destiny to be bossed around by women and children.

And it wasn’t over yet. Chumanee had barely gotten him settled on his mattress before the old woman, whose name he now learned was Nahimana,
arrived with a bowl of corn, beans, and vegetables for the invalid. Her price for supplying this bounty was the opportunity to tut-tut and fuss over him, poking at each of his wounds in admonishment and disbelief that he had managed to damage himself even further. Her demeanor suggested that she thought Marcellinus must be very, very clumsy.

Marcellinus rested the bowl on his lap. Rather desperately he signed:
Thank you. Gaius eat. Gaius sleep.

Then, knowing that the women would not understand, he said quietly to Kimimela in Latin: “Gaius eat, then three children come back, hand-talk hand-talk hand-talk.”

His stomach was growling as if he hadn’t eaten for a month. He needed the food and maybe several times as much of it as Nahimana had brought. But after he had taken care of that, what Marcellinus needed most was not rest but information.

Not for the first time, he had a lot of work to do.

For the next two weeks Marcellinus rarely stirred farther than twenty paces from his hut. But over that time he made huge progress.

Improving his ability to communicate was his first priority. Without bridging the language divide, Marcellinus could not effectively teach anyone to fight or even to bring him food he liked. Without being able to teach, he could help neither the Cahokian people nor himself. Without being able to navigate the social etiquette of Cahokian society or understand the political situation in the region, he was powerless.

Fortunately, “his” children had an inexhaustible enthusiasm for Latin. The first week was an avalanche of words, ideas, and gestures interrupted only by his exhaustion and by Chumanee’s frequent visits to check up on his wounds and scold him. In the second week Marcellinus started to rein in the children and concentrate on sentences and the flow of ideas; nuance and accuracy of expression became more significant than the sheer volume of vocabulary. The children still used the infinitive verb form for everything—Marcellinus was not about to force young Hesperians to conjugate Latin verbs—but it mattered little when their store of words was so great.

Unlike the children, however, it did not take long for Marcellinus to saturate on language. A couple of hours and his brain was full; he could no longer retain any but the most basic hand-talk signs, and he could pick up only two dozen words of spoken Cahokian in a day.

But Tahtay, Kimimela, and Enopay were unstoppable. Even when Marcellinus could stand it no more and drove them away so he could rest, he heard them outside drilling one another and reviewing vocabulary. After the first week they talked exclusively in Latin among themselves. Even when the boys played chunkey, a game that seemed to involve rolling a stone disk along the ground and then throwing spears at it, they shouted their scores and argued the points in Latin. Marcellinus even taught them some boyish Latin insults to make it more interesting.

“And all in Cahokia use hand-talk?”

“All use hand-talk. All, everywhere.”

“Everywhere?”

“Yes. Cahokia, Algon-Quian, Iroqua, People of the Grass, People of the Hand. All peoples hand-talk.”

He asked them who their parents were and where, but they just shook their heads. Marcellinus persisted, but after a while it felt pointless; they weren’t going to tell him, and that was that. Orphans, perhaps? Had Marcellinus been mobile enough, he might have tried to follow them home. But he wasn’t, and in a way he was content not to know.

For the first few days of his convalescence he was as weak as a kitten and despaired of ever regaining his strength. When Nahimana brought him what was obviously intended to be a chamber pot, he swallowed his pride, thanked her, and then used it regularly. But with the old woman’s cooking and Chumanee’s visits, his health gradually improved.

Toward the end of the first week he managed to get outside again. His first complete circuit of the local neighborhood felt like a milestone, and even that became a learning experience; on the lee side of every Cahokian house was a tiny garden that grew corn, with beans and the strange vegetables they called askutasquash all jumbled up, with the
beanstalks climbing the corn and the vegetables growing close to the ground in their shade. Most of the Cahokians’ produce came from the huge fields, and corn was doled out freely, but each family’s garden helped and seemed to be a source of pride. In addition, they grew flowers on the sunny sides of their houses; particularly commonplace was a tall plant with a broad yellow flower that burst into bloom during Marcellinus’s recovery that Kimimela, appropriately enough, called “sunflower.”

Still he saw no visible signs of leadership, no elite, no government or ruling class. He never saw anyone giving orders, and the old shaman, Youtin, seemed almost invisible in the community. As far as Marcellinus could tell, the organization of Cahokia proceeded by group consensus. The children talked of Cahokian elders, but they surely must operate with a light touch. Events somehow gained their own momentum from within. Marcellinus had never seen anything like it.

And still nobody recognized Sisika’s name. Marcellinus began to wonder if he had imagined her.

If the power structure of Cahokia was obscure to him, at least the clan system was transparent enough. The families of Cahokia were broken down into hereditary clans in a way roughly analogous to the gens of Roman society.

Over dinner one night—his first with real meat—he learned that Nahimana and her warrior son Takoda were of the Bear clan. Takoda’s young wife, who once had spit on Marcellinus and still wouldn’t speak to him, was Kangee of the Turtle clan. Other clans among the menagerie included Wolf, Deer, Raven, Duck, Beaver, Hare, Chipmunk, and Fox. To his surprise, all the clan chiefs were women. Clan membership was a point of pride and cheerful rivalries, and young men and women were expected to marry outside their own clans.

The most prestigious clans in Cahokia were those that flew, the Hawk and Thunderbird clans, but these were neither rigid nor hereditary, as they regularly accepted new members. Marcellinus privately reasoned that their mortality rate was probably so high that they had little alternative but to recruit; they were really more like guilds than clans.

Now that he had established that, Marcellinus’s interests turned further afield to their enemies, and here he once again had to bring Nahimana into the conversation. As they sat eating outside Nahimana’s hut one night, with Tahtay oiling the wheels of conversation, they revealed to Marcellinus that the hated Iroqua were not the monolithic enemy force he had supposed but a confederation of five tribes: Seneca, Caiuga, Onondaga, Onida, and Mohawk.

It amused Marcellinus no end that one of these tribes apparently owned the same name as one of Roma’s most famous philosophers and orators. It amused him rather less to discover that the Iroqua raids were continuing. During his convalescence, sneak raids by Iroqua war parties had plagued the outer reaches of Cahokia. The first war party obviously had been sent to reconnoiter deep into the heart of Cahokia, perhaps to report back on the extent of the death and destruction wrought by the Roman army. Subsequent parties were less ambitious and did not attempt to penetrate so close to the Great Plaza, but hardly a day went by without a vicious Iroqua raid on an upland village or a Cahokian outpost farther upstream or downstream on the Mizipi. Farming families from outlying areas began to migrate into the city for their own protection or move across the Mizipi to the emptier and relatively safer farmlands there.

It was growing clear to the Cahokians that having already driven a wedge deep into the lands formerly under the control of the various scattered Algon-Quian tribes, the Iroqua next sought to expand into the territory of the mound builders. They did not have this all their own way; sometimes the skirmishes went against them and squads of Cahokian braves descended upon them and hacked off as many Seneca and Caiuga scalps as they could. But that only brought an even more savage response from the Iroqua. Marcellinus learned that this series of running battles between the two nations even had its own name: the Mourning War.

Meanwhile, the torturous heat of summer had finally broken. The days were growing cooler. Autumn was just around the corner.

Marcellinus’s rib was still his most serious problem, but it had
transitioned gradually from the sharp stabbing pain into a dull ache he could mostly ignore. He could raise his arms over his head now and even swing his arms around. He could walk to the gates of the palisade that led to the Great Mound and back again across the entire thousand-foot length of the plaza without feeling that he needed to crawl into a hole and sleep for a week afterward. It was time to take the next step.