Clash of Eagles (25 page)

It didn’t happen. The prow of Marcellinus’s testudo ground into the palisade and flattened. The men at the back dropped onto their knees, deliberately this time; those at the front held their shields up higher, and the testudo became a triangle with its long edge up high against the palisade and a slanted roof. Rocks, pots, and grinding stones hailed down on them thick and fast, their clanging raising a racket over which he could not shout orders, but the First Cahokian had retained enough presence of mind to remember what they were supposed to do next.

Seven men and a woman with axes of steel and chert wormed their way forward under cover of the shields and subjected the wall in front of them to a barrage of blows. Wood chips and splinters flew, and for a heartening moment Marcellinus thought perhaps they were under more threat of injury from shards of wood than from the external danger.

Then the external danger changed with a loud splash. The Iroqua had hurled a cauldron of boiling water down over the testudo. Men screamed.

Marcellinus screamed, too. “Hold firm! Hold firm!”

A second giant splash sent scalding water across Marcellinus’s forearm. Above him, shields wavered. Akecheta drew his pugio and waved it, shouting and snarling. Marcellinus had no doubt that his centurion
was threatening to slay any man who let his shield drop. And in truth the boiling water was no threat to the formation; its value was more psychological. Battle in such cramped quarters was not to Cahokian taste. Under this wall of steel, his warriors had no idea what might be coming next.

And come it did. Heavier objects crashed down on the shields, bowing and buckling some of them even as the men held them high. But the First Cahokian stood firm.

Now came the hot flare of fire from the Cahokians themselves.

“Step left!” Marcellinus shouted. All he could do was point and bellow. “Left-left-left-left!”

They did it in some semblance of coordination just as the foremost Cahokians hurled liquid flame into the broken wood of the palisade and it exploded right in front of them. That made everyone else move to the left a lot more quickly, especially those men perilously close to the splash zone, but they still managed to keep the formation.

The wood burned. Hacking away the top surface of the palisade had removed whatever protection the Iroqua had applied. A whole band of wood twenty feet wide and a foot high caught fire in an instant.

Marcellinus had no real hope of breaking through the palisade. Wood took a long time to burn, and it was clear the testudo formation would survive only a few more moments. But now the psychology of the situation was reversed: the Mohawks’ protective wall was aflame, black smoke billowed upward, and they heard the bang and splash as the Iroqua diverted their panicked attention to deal with the new threat.

“First Cahokian, attack!”

“Attack!”

Either they would remember, understand, and follow him or they would not. He had no time left for doubts.

Marcellinus roared like an arena lion and raced out from under the protection of the massed Roman shields. He had to duck as the rear end of the formation was already dropping; still he caught his helmet a glancing clang as he exited.

After the cramped space in the testudo, to be out in the open air was almost a blessing. It was less of a blessing that he appeared to be alone. He caught the merest glimpse of the larger Cahokian force up on the hillside staring down at him in stupefaction.

Then Marcellinus spun, still bellowing his war cry, and ran up the shields.

The Roman shields formed an inclined slope, an embankment that stopped four feet shy of the top of the palisade. A dozen Iroqua faces painted in purple and red ocher gaped over it at him, showing pink mouths and white teeth. The shields bobbed under Marcellinus’s sandals, but he kept his balance, did not need to drop a hand to stay upright. Gladius in hand, he surged up toward the foe.

He was no longer alone. Akecheta ran up the shields next to him, and behind Akecheta came four other warriors of the First Cahokian, the tallest and fiercest, the best fighters in the best armor, the ones most likely to survive a frontal assault on the enemy position. Mahkah was one of them, howling like a berserker.

Marcellinus shoved his gladius into a Mohawk mouth and through the neck beyond, snatched it out again as the man fell, and whirled the edge of its blade into the shoulder of the enemy warrior next to him. By his side Akecheta’s studded club crunched down, making a broken egg of an Iroqua skull.

Marcellinus teetered at the very top of the inclined testudo. Over the palisade he saw that the ground of the city within was swarming with Iroqua. They ran between houses, bunched up into units. Every man was armed, and every woman as well, and there were far too many of them.

No time to fear. No time even to think. A Mohawk club was swinging toward his head. He decapitated the Mohawk who wielded it with a roundhouse swing of his gladius and vaulted over the palisade. On its inner side and four feet down, a narrow walkway lined the wall. Marcellinus landed well, took an arrow on the chest plate, and raised a steel-greaved arm in case a second arrow was winging toward his face.

Akecheta landed with him, and another Cahokian beyond the centurion. Nobody came over on Marcellinus’s left side; a Cahokian warrior tried to make the leap but tumbled off into space with a squawk. Another man replaced him, almost falling the other way six feet onto the ground inside the Iroqua-held city. It was Mahkah, eyes wide and teeth bared; Marcellinus grabbed and steadied the youth, then spun him around and pushed him unceremoniously toward the Iroqua who was running at them along the walkway. Mahkah met him ax to ax with a howl of sheer hatred, and his second blow drew an arc of scarlet blood from the Iroqua’s neck.

The women inside the city were armed, but they were not Iroqua. Taking their chance to rebel against their captors, they assaulted the Mohawks right and left with adzes, pots, even grinding stones. They were able to snatch up only the occasional ax or club, but the confusion they created in the Iroqua ranks was immense.

Marcellinus swayed. Directly beneath him were three Iroqua braves. It was a toss-up whether he would get his knees cracked with a club before or after he was hamstrung with a bronze ax.
Bronze,
he thought.
Where on earth did they mine the tin?
Then he ran the eight short feet that separated him from Mahkah and flung himself past the young brave into space, rolling to his feet on the ground inside the city and slashing, parrying, kicking, killing.

The Iroqua outnumbered the Cahokians perhaps two to one, though the several dozen scrappy Woshakean women helped even the score. More important was the suddenness of it all: within two hours the Cahokians had arrived, neutralized the squad of archers in the copse, gained the high ground, set the palisade ablaze, and come over the top of it whirling weapons of steel, using a stratagem never before seen in Nova Hesperia.

Up the shields and over the wall after Marcellinus had come twenty more Cahokian warriors. After that it had become more difficult, and the embankment of shields collapsed a minute or two later. The men left outside then formed a human pyramid, one man standing on two
other men’s shoulders and helping to pull warriors up and over him, over the palisade. At the same time, Great Sun Man’s warriors raced down the slopes and hurled themselves into the fray. Then someone opened the gates—probably one of the Woshakean women or children, since none of the Cahokian warriors bragged about it afterward. That was the beginning of the end for the Iroqua.

Just seven Cahokians had died, and none of them were members of Marcellinus’s First Cahokian Cohort. Marcellinus had led a charge over an enemy parapet and lost nobody, although four of his men had received deep flesh wounds, another man had a dislocated shoulder, and most of the rest had earned the usual gashes, bangs and burns, broken fingers, and broken noses. Many had twisted ankles from falling off the palisade on one side or the other. But Akecheta, Mahkah, Takoda, and Hanska were almost unscathed. For this low injury rate, Marcellinus was deeply and profoundly grateful to whichever set of gods had taken an interest in this frantic scramble for control of a minor city—by any civilized standard, really a rather small town—on the banks of a nondescript river in the middle of nowhere.

Ninety-five Iroqua were dead in battle. The vast majority of the rest, including the Iroqua war chief, had claimed discretion as the better part of valor and escaped out of the eastern gate. Several dozen Cahokians and more than a few of the women had run after them, roaring and screaming, but terror had given the Iroqua wings, though not of any useful variety. They were quickly gone. Another score or so Mohawk warriors had been beaten unconscious or maimed in the fray; those men were summarily scalped and strangled where they lay by the women of Woshakee, eschewing the even more vicious and drawn-out retribution that was their right, and their bodies were thrown out of the town gate to be burned on the morrow.

“Are you now glad that we brought the shields?” Marcellinus asked half an hour later.

Great Sun Man grinned and shook his head. “Too heavy!” he said. “Much too heavy!”

“Then maybe next time we’ll carry you home on one,” Marcellinus
said. He knew the joke wouldn’t translate, but some days just making himself laugh was enough.

More than enough.

The bulk of the Woshakee houses were intact. It turned out that most of the Woshakee women and children were alive and unharmed. The Iroqua hadn’t butchered them, hadn’t even violated them.

Perhaps that kind of venomous, systematic violence against women was a thing only civilized armies did.

The men of Woshakee were all dead or had fled. The capture of the city had taken place in such turmoil that nobody knew whether some of them might still be hiding in the forests somewhere. Everyone hoped so.

“And how did Tahtay like it, being a warrior?”

The boy gave him a complicated look and didn’t reply.

They walked through the narrow streets. Marcellinus was interested to see that here in Woshakee, where space was tight, the houses had been built in rows as neat and orderly as any castra or Roman town. It was a way of getting as many houses as possible inside the small compound defined by the palisade perimeter. Yet even here the central platform mound had its plaza in front of it, sufficient for the whole town to congregate. Smaller mounds flanked the plaza, only ten feet tall but still conferring status on the houses that topped them. Every house had its little plot for corn and beans, squash and sunflowers, now fallow.

Compared with Cahokia, Woshakee felt cramped and provincial. Marcellinus was glad he lived in the bigger city.

“Tahtay?”

The boy averted his eyes as they passed a scalpless corpse not yet disposed of, his hand drifting up to cover his nose. “I did not fight. Mostly watched. Or not.”

“I know. But you were here, risking as much as anyone.”

“Yes.” Tahtay sighed. “Being a warrior is good. Seeing here, what Iroqua did. That is not good.”

“Worse than what Romans did?” Marcellinus asked quietly.

“Much worse.”

A woman walked by them carrying a grinding stone and hmmphed when she saw the corpse. Forthrightly enough, the Woshakee women were trying to put their city back in order, and the Cahokians were helping. Shortly, Marcellinus would return to helping, too.

“You should have killed more of them,” Tahtay said vehemently. “Next time I will help you. Tahtay will learn how to kill.”

Marcellinus wondered how Great Sun Man would have responded to this. But Great Sun Man was busy managing the refortification of Woshakee, talking to the clan chiefs, making sure the injured were cared for, and organizing squads of his men to evict the Iroqua dead, bring the canoes into the city, help prepare an evening meal, and set watches. Straightforward enough work, but Marcellinus knew from experience how any administrative task could take many times longer than it should, especially when half the men were wounded and everyone was dazed and inattentive after a fight.

Tahtay looked up at him sharply. Marcellinus had not yet answered. But Tahtay’s future was not in doubt. “You will be a mighty warrior,” the Roman reassured him. “You are tall and strong, and your father before you is mighty—wait, what is this?”

Two stout Woshakee women hauled a boy out of a house, one of them on each arm. The boy was squirming and crying for help in what sounded like a combination of Iroqua and Cahokian. He jammed his heels into the ground, and when that failed, he kicked the older woman in the thigh. The woman slammed her elbow into his head, and the boy went down.

The younger woman put her knee on the boy’s back and looped a length of deer sinew around his neck.

Beside Marcellinus, Tahtay watched with a sick fascination. With his last breath, the boy begged for mercy in fluent Cahokian. The woman tightened the sinew, and the boy’s cry became a gurgle.

Marcellinus strode forward. “Wait. Wait!”

The young woman’s eyes widened at the sight of Marcellinus. The boy gasped as she loosened the cord, then howled again as she put all her weight on him to hold him down.

The older woman shouted at Marcellinus, hands on hips, her words tumbling out more quickly than he could follow. He took a prudent step back. “Tahtay?”

“This boy, he was hiding under the floor in their grain store. He had a knife. He is Iroqua.”

“Is he? He sounds Cahokian. Did he try to hurt them?”

Tahtay and the woman babbled at each other, and Marcellinus knelt. The boy studied him through narrowed eyes and then said some words in an oddly inflected speech that was neither Iroqua nor Cahokian.

“Now what did he say?”

The boy switched back to Cahokian. “I ask where you come from. You are different.”

“I am from the east, across the big water,” said Marcellinus, and the boy looked startled.

He was tall and skinny but barely a single winter older than Tahtay. “Do we kill boys now?” Marcellinus said to the younger woman. “Do we?”

“He came with the Iroqua as a speaker of words,” said Tahtay. “He stood by and laughed with the Iroqua as Woshakee men died. He did not fight, and he had no weapon. But he hid like a snake in the floor, and who knows what he would have done if he had not been found?”