Clash of Eagles (37 page)

Kimimela’s voice floated across to him. “Gaius? Good?”

“Spectacular. Incredible. Very, very good.” His tone would have to convey the less familiar words. There could be no hand-talk up here.

The Wakinyan banked, continuing its graceful turn. Marcellinus was chagrined to see how small the Big Warm House looked from this height. For a moment he had trouble picking out the kilns and his foundry, but when the Thunderbird passed over them, there was no mistaking its upward lurch as the bird rode the rising thermals from his early attempts at industry.

If Marcellinus could only build enough foundries, a Thunderbird might stay aloft over Cahokia forever. But today, in the cool of springtime, they had already suffered a considerable loss of height in just a single arc over the city.

With this, Marcellinus began to pay more attention to the other pilots and to imitate their actions and body positioning more closely. After all, he was up here to learn.

The lower the Wakinyan descended, the more precarious his position seemed. At altitude Marcellinus had felt invulnerable, as if he were gazing out of the window of an impossibly high tower. Swooping lower over the houses of Cahokia, back toward the plaza, brought home to him how fast the bird was traveling and how exposed they were, dangling beneath it like grapes on a vine. The slightest miscalculation would smear them across the ground.

Just how
did
one of these colossal Thunderbirds land, anyway?

It happened fast and totally beyond his control. The Thunderbird roared over the last houses of the city, their thatched roofs blurring, and
the ground leaped up to meet them. A fast heartbeat before Marcellinus was convinced they were all dead, the nose of the craft bobbed upward. He saw a flash of blue sky right in front of his face, and the giant wing flopped down onto the ground with an abrupt hip-cracking bang.

As they skidded to a halt over the grass and gravel, Marcellinus tried desperately to keep his face off the ground. He heard a very bad word in Latin that he had never taught Kimimela, followed by an almost hysterical giggle that broadened out into a belly laugh.

The laughter came from the other pilots, and he was the source of their hilarity. Marcellinus opened his eyes to discover that the braves were all standing comfortably on the ground.

Ah. Apparently, on landing, Marcellinus should have kicked his feet free of the wooden rod that had held his legs up and his body prone. He could then have swung upright and helped absorb the impact of the landing with his legs. But with Kimimela’s legs being too short and Marcellinus’s being still up in the wing, the whole right side of the Wakinyan had rammed into the dirt, with them in it.

Kimimela was fine, hanging beside him comfortably and giggling fit to burst. Being on the outside, Marcellinus had of course acquired several new cuts and bruises.

“Well,” he said. “You might have told me …”

“No broken, no hurt,” said Sintikala, walking alongside the Wakinyan as Marcellinus and the others carried it back toward the Longhouse of the Thunderbirds, Kimimela trotting with her.

“If you say so.” Marcellinus had to admit that the bleeding had stopped quickly. These days he was always bruised somewhere or another.

“You like fly?”

“I be falcon warrior like Sintikala!” Kimimela said, skipping. “Good fast high clever Hawk!”

“Huh.” Sintikala ruffled her daughter’s hair. “We talk. You, Gaius, you like fly?”

“Like” was too insubstantial a word for what Marcellinus had experienced today. His life had been changed forever. Again.

“Yes. I like fly. Yes, a thousand. A thousand-thousand.”

She grinned. “Cahokia big clever?”

“Yes,” he said. “Cahokia big clever. Sisika? Thank you.”

She shrugged, choosing to ignore the incorrect name. “All right. Now go make better launch arm, better rail, better all-things, fly better. Yes?”

Marcellinus had served the Aquila of the Imperium for his entire life, and in his own way he served it still. But everything else had changed.

For two decades he had led armies. Here in Cahokia, he had friends. He had seen his new world from the skies, and now he was back on terra firma on his own two feet and bleeding only a little.

And when he looked down at Sintikala and Kimimela, he felt something move in his soul that he had thought was long dead.

Perhaps he wasn’t so old, after all.

“Definitely,” Marcellinus said. “And I already know where to begin.”

T
he braided rope of hemp and sinew creaked under the strain of considerable torsion. Gingerly, Cahokian warriors settled a rock into the cup at the end of the onager’s arm.

“Loaded, sir,” Akecheta said.

“Back,” said Marcellinus. “Really, all of you. Back farther.”

Braves shuffled away from the machine.

“Fire!” Marcellinus ordered.

Akecheta struck the lever with a hammer and stepped away smartly. The long arm of the onager flew upward, slamming against its wooden top support more quickly than an eye blink. The onager bucked, and the rear of the siege engine’s rough-hewn oak frame leaped a good three feet off the ground. Each of the ten-man firing crew jumped backward. Two of them fell over.

High in the air, a rock the size of a man’s torso shrank into the distance with almost comical swiftness. Akecheta squinted, shielding his eyes. “Eight hundreds,” he said, though Marcellinus and the other men had lost sight of the large stone some time earlier and could not confirm where it had crashed back down to earth.

“So far?” Marcellinus asked skeptically.

Akecheta shrugged. “Cornfield.”

A Catanwakuwa whizzed over them, trailing ribbons. Sintikala
swooped upward in a tight arc, peering after the rock, then flipped the wing around to avoid a stall and flew back over the onager. “Seven hundred,” she called down in passing, and straightened out into a smooth landing run.

Marcellinus swallowed. Her casual stunts in the air almost stopped his heart, but he was determined not to let either her or the men in his siege engine crew see how petrified he was. “Seven hundred, eight hundred, no matter. It throws straight and true every time and much farther than I’d hoped.”

“We put Sintikala in it now?” Akecheta said hopefully.

This was the ultimate goal. Although it was nice to be able to pitch a rock into the distance, Marcellinus’s dream was to be able to throw a Catanwakuwa to a useful fighting altitude without needing a mound to launch it from. That way they could harry any encroaching Iroqua war parties more effectively and perhaps even serve as an early deterrent to a future Roman legion.

He clapped the man on the shoulder. “Maybe next week.”

In truth Marcellinus had no idea whether a Hawk wing could survive the stress of an onager launch without ripping or even whether a human could take a body punch of that severity and still be able to unfurl the wing and fly. But he had confided to the elders his ambition to develop a mobile Catanwakuwa launcher, and now everyone in the city knew it.

He’d build up to it gradually. Start off with the rope at low torsion, maybe lob people gently into the Mizipi on a hot summer’s day. The Cahokians would enjoy that. They’d probably line up to try it and beg him to crank it up tighter.

Originally he had thought to throw liquid flame from the onager, but that was impossible. The bags flew unevenly or burst as they were being launched, and with the best will in the world Marcellinus could not make a covered fuse work reliably. Using an onager to launch the incendiary was simply too difficult and dangerous.

Marcellinus had done his level best to learn the secret of the Cahokian Greek fire, but only the shamans knew it, and they weren’t telling.
It was not made in the city, and for obvious reasons; they mixed it in a carefully guarded location somewhere to the south and east and brought it into Cahokia in jars. One day he had broken open a small pot and poked at it with his fingers—very carefully—and it seemed to be made from a thick oil, like pitch only more gelatinous. From the way it smelled and the brightness of the flame when it was lit, Marcellinus suspected the deadly recipe might also include sulfur and quicklime. But that was as far as he had gotten.

“Once more,” Marcellinus said. “Let’s land the next rock right on top of the last one.” The siege engine crew began to spin the windlass to pull the long bar of steel and wood back down into place and add strain to the rope.

Sintikala strolled up to them. With her wings still strapped to her shoulders she looked like a very broad-winged bat. Bending, she inspected the cup where the rock would lay. “All look good. I should try.”

“Maybe next moon,” Marcellinus told her.

She glanced up at him. “Walk.”

The engine would not be ready to fire again for several more minutes. The rope was hardly creaking at all yet. Marcellinus stepped away.

“Wachiwi is still not your woman,” Sintikala said.

He sighed. “Sisika, it’s none of your business.”

“Business?”

“It is Gaius’s worry, not Sisika’s worry.”

“Throwing engine is your worry,” she said.

“Yes, that, too.”

She stared into his eyes, putting his heart under considerable torsion. He could almost hear it creaking. Perhaps because he was so much older than she was yet still behaving like a moonstruck calf.

Sintikala
was
strength. She was, quite simply, the most magnificent woman he had ever known.

Women could wield power in Roma. They could lead dynasties, rule great households, sometimes even manipulate the entire Imperium from behind the scenes. Yet none were warriors the way Cahokian women were, and of the warrior women, none was as competent and
impressive as Sintikala. She was fast and aggressive, tough, and a little haughty. She captivated and intrigued him.

His wife, Julia, had been her own woman, with that element of deviousness that women in Roman society often cultivated in order to succeed. But Sintikala was not devious. Where Julia had been manipulative, Sintikala was straightforward and brutally honest.

She was also the mistress of a strange new domain—the air. A creature of the world above, she soared over his head, unattainable, strangely magical.

He loved the smell of her sweat. Even her wings seemed normal to him now.

She shook her head. “Gaius …”

He knew what came next. “Don’t say it again,” he said roughly.

“I do not need to. And my name is Sintikala.”

She turned to walk away.

“Maybe you should try riding in the throwing engine sooner,” he said with just a touch of spite. “Perhaps tomorrow?”

She almost grinned. “Next week.”

“But we must have Midsummer Feast,” Great Sun Man was saying in the open space outside Marcellinus’s hut. “We must!”

“Not unless you will feed them grass,” Enopay said rudely. He waved a large piece of bark at the war chief. “Here! Here! Look!”

Great Sun Man could neither read nor cipher Roman numerals and did not take well to being lectured by a child. He stepped forward with his hand raised.

Marcellinus had only recently solved the mystery of Enopay. His mother had died in childbirth, and his father had been killed in the Mourning War two years before the Romans had come to Nova Hesperia. And so Enopay lived with his grandfather, Kanuna, a Cahokian elder and second cousin to Great Sun Man.

Marcellinus inserted himself between them. Family squabbles were none of his concern, but nobody should strike a quartermaster for speaking the truth, not even the leader of a city, not even—or perhaps
especially—when the quartermaster was young enough to be out playing chunkey with the other urchins. “Wait, sir. Enopay is right.”

The chief’s face set. “People have corn in houses. Always there is more corn than you know. And young beans on the stalk, berries in the woods.”

“Yes, of course.” Every Cahokian house had its small storage pit under the floor, and everyone hoarded a little; it was human nature. But the burning of the granaries the previous winter had put a dent in the supplies of even careful folk like Nahimana. “The numbers on Enopay’s bark take account of that. He makes a fair estimate of what we have in the granaries and what we can expect people to supply from their homes. We might get through the feast but then would have little to keep us till the harvest and would be short going into the winter.”

“Fish! Berries! Duck! Deer!”

Enopay sighed and pointed to a charcoal scratching low down on the bark.

Great Sun Man eyed the bark venomously and glanced at Marcellinus’s smoldering fire pit. Enopay hastily backed away, clutching his primitive ledger with both hands.

“Then?” demanded the chief of Marcellinus.

In more abundant years, Cahokia traded its excess corn for copper, seashells, and other exotic items. To Great Sun Man, his low corn reserve was a serious blow to his prestige. But facts were facts. “Sir, I understand that you wish to provide for your people and show bounty to all. But Cahokia understands that the Iroqua have destroyed much of their corn.”

Great Sun Man moved closer to Marcellinus. “Do you remember when I told you of Ituha, the mighty chief and my grandfather-uncle? He who brought all three parts of Cahokia to be one? But ten winters after that, when hunger came, when he ask for help with food from the towns up and down the Mizipi, the people tell him he is no longer chief. Ituha! The father of Cahokia!”