Clash of Eagles (50 page)

At last Marcellinus understood. Cahokia-across-the-water had fallen. Great Sun Man could not risk western Cahokia as well. And if they were forced back beyond western Cahokia, the sacred Circle of the Cedars would come within range of the Iroqua throwing engines. Any damage to that would be a further blow to Cahokian morale.

Marcellinus looked around, reassessing.

The second of the drekars rocked in the water as the warriors on board fired their siege engine. The bolt flew almost too quickly to be seen, but the swath of destruction it carved in the Cahokian line was clear. The braves on the first drekar were still struggling to load their throwing engine, their oarsmen swinging the boat to bring it to bear on the Cahokians, but Marcellinus knew their position on the Mound of the Flowers could soon come under fire. Nothing he could do about that; a ballista bolt would fly at them too quickly to be dodged.

Meanwhile, half a dozen Cahokian war canoes were racing across the water to engage the first three longships. He pointed. “Great Sun Man, order them back. Longships are too hard a target. We cannot throw away brave warriors like that.”

Great Sun Man looked as if he wanted to push Marcellinus off the mound. “What? We must harry them. They are like a palisade. How else? Testudo?”

Suddenly, Marcellinus had the solution.

“No. Not testudo. Something even better. Instead of spending our warriors attacking their palisade, we’ll bring Cahokia’s palisade to them.”

Marcellinus’s face cracked into a ferocious grin.

The nine longships sailed upriver, floating forts that dealt death in surge after surge of burning arrows and ballista bolts. The Iroqua archers’ bows were able to fire farther and harder than the Cahokian bows, but the Cahokians were partially protected with Roman armor and, for some, Roman shields.

Bolts from both drekars had come winging toward the Mound of the Flowers—one had even flown over it—but the moving, swaying longships proved to be a difficult platform from which to aim. Marcellinus thought it would be a lucky strike indeed if the Iroqua got their range.

Disregarding them, he looked along the ranks of the Cahokian army below him, which seethed and thirsted for battle. He and Great Sun Man had to keep order. If Cahokian discipline crumbled in the face of the Iroqua onslaught, the day was over and Cahokia would fall.

At long last the Cahokian siege engines arrived. The Catanwakuwa launcher remained behind the mound while a mob of Cahokians quickly manhandled an onager and a ballista alongside the Mound of the Flowers and a second ballista toward the Mound of the River. Ideally the throwing engines would have been brought to the crests of the mounds to enable a better view of the battlefield and longer range, but it was too late for that now.

Below Marcellinus, the nearer of the Cahokian throwing engines bucked. Almost without stopping to position it, its crew had fired the first rock. Through sheer luck it plunged into the river only a dozen feet away from the prow of the foremost Iroqua longship, and a cheer went up. Soon afterward, the second siege engine threw its bolt, which sailed high over the lead drekar’s mast and plunged into the river a good hundred feet beyond.

Marcellinus ran down to assist them as they hurled rocks and bolts at the parade of longships. But these men were not Akecheta’s crew, and the range of the longships proved difficult to get. Missile after missile flew over the Viking vessels or fell short. At least the giant
splashes were regularly dousing the Iroqua archers with muddy river water.

Naturally, as soon as the throwing engines were in place, the Iroqua ground forces consolidated into a thrust to assault them. Most were beaten back by the massed Cahokians, but several hundred broke through to threaten their position.

Marcellinus was fighting alongside men he did not know, and the situation was too fluid to wait for instructions from Great Sun Man high on the mound above. He appointed centurions on the spot and divided men into ranks. His voice quickly became hoarse from shouting orders, but soon he had a solid wall of warriors in Roman armor four deep in front of the throwing engines to protect them, drumming their pila against their shields to deter the enemy, and an array of more lightly armored skirmishers with bows and Cahokian spears out to each side in support.

Many more Hawks soared into the air now, launching in quick succession from just a hundred yards behind him. Sintikala sped across the river a few hundred feet up, her Hawk skittering back and forth as she hurled pots of liquid flame into the trio of leading longships. Demothi and other birdmen swirled around her, less adept, firing arrows and throwing bombs and then dropping back to be launched again. Despite their altitude the arrows were coming dangerously close.

At last, there came a pair of Wakinyan, thundering downriver barely two hundred feet above the greasy water. Beneath each swung a full complement of twelve Cahokians and sacks full of incendiary. The leading three longships did their best to scatter, but the third was caught in a deluge of liquid flame from the leading Wakinyan.

The second bird disgorged its stream of liquid torment over the first of the drekars, but in a concerted effort the warriors on board had raised a wide swath of fabric over their heads to protect themselves. Marcellinus swore. More evidence of Iroqua intelligence and innovation: they were using the spare Viking sails, tough and fireproof, to protect themselves.

From the second drekar came a ballista bolt in an almost leisurely arc
to punch a ragged hole through the right wing of the rearmost Thunderbird. The wing crumpled, and the Wakinyan went into a spinning cartwheel, plunging into the Mizipi moments later.

The Iroqua had clearly practiced this, their set piece and surely the prime reason for developing their own ballista: negating the Cahokian air advantage by blowing the Wakinyan out of the sky.

Again came that almost supernatural pause in the battle, and then the clamor of Iroqua chants struck up again and the enemy surged over the Cahokians with renewed vigor. In front of Marcellinus, the protective line cracked.

“Back!” His crew was struggling to roll another rock into the cup of the onager, but they would have no time to launch it. “Fall in! To me! To me! Close order!”

Seneca and Onondaga rushed toward them. Marcellinus bellowed and took three steps back onto the lowest slopes of the Mound of the Flowers. Around him, Cahokians nocked quick arrows and let them fly.

“Spears! Pila!”

They were not the First Cahokian, but they were quick enough in their own defense. The warriors formed a close line, shoulder to shoulder, spears and axes at the ready. Several paces backward up the mound gave them the advantage of height. “Second rank! Arrows!” They were doing it already, of course; Marcellinus was surrounded by men who knew how to fight, who had watched the First Cahokian and the Wolf Warriors for years and well knew the advantage of dropping into a tight formation under pressure.

They had lost the siege engines—the Iroqua now clambered over them and hacked at the throwing mechanisms to disable them. But they had not lost their lives. From halfway up the mound the Cahokians hurled spears and shot arrows, and from above them came further covering fire.

An onager ball thudded into the mound not twenty feet from him. Startled, Marcellinus glanced out over the river. The two drekars had turned broadside, and both were rocking back and forth in reaction to the firing of the Iroqua siege engines on their decks.

In the water there was no sign of the crew of the crashed Wakinyan. Marcellinus had no idea whether the other one had retained sufficient height or determination to make it back to the plaza in western Cahokia.

Looking closer, his heart sank. The Mound of the Flowers was almost completely surrounded, and a hundred yards away the Mound of the River had already been overrun by the Iroqua. Downriver, the third drekar was making for the bank unopposed; despite their size, the dragon ships were shallow draft, well capable of beaching.

At the foot of the mound below him, the Iroqua bayed like wolves. Presumably Great Sun Man still stood at the mound’s crest.

The Iroqua were within arm’s reach of capturing the paramount chief of Cahokia and Marcellinus himself.

Given Akecheta and the First Cahokian, Marcellinus might have consolidated the warriors on the mound into a dense column in close rank and attempted an eruptio, a sudden sortie to break out through the surrounding Iroqua and regroup with the main Cahokian force, which was pinned down several hundred yards away. As it was, all he could think to do was retreat to the highest ground—the mound top—and defend it for as long as possible.

“Stop shooting! No arrows! Don’t throw your spears! Save them! No shoot!”

Gathering his wits, alert to every surge and ebb in the Iroqua line, Marcellinus did his best to manage their upward retreat.

As they regained the plateau of the Mound of the Flowers, Great Sun Man’s Wolf Warrior general pointed. “Here it comes.”

It had taken time, but it was worth waiting for.

From afar it appeared that a giant raft was adrift on the Great River, a floating island of wood several hundred yards wide, like the beard of an ancient god. Branches not yet shorn from the trunks jutted up, pointing toward the sky. A wooden wave sweeping toward the invading ships.

From the natural harbor north of Cahokia a thousand logs floated
downriver, herded and guided by some braves in dugouts and others who walked fearlessly from tree to tree with wooden poles in their hands. An almost stately progression of tall oaks, pine, and hemlock swept inexorably toward the Iroqua fleet. The Cahokian palisade had arrived.

From their elevation on the high mound, Marcellinus and the other Cahokians saw it long before the enemy did. Then the Iroqua aboard the leading ships called the alarm, and pandemonium ensued.

The vanguard of the floating forest kissed the prow of the first longship. The tree trunks twisted and parted, spreading out on either side of the great Norse vessel as if daunted by the frown of the dragon at its prow. Logs flanked the ship, knocking the vessel askew and interfering with the efforts of the Iroqua oarsmen. The Cahokian log drivers and carpenters steering the trees ran back along the trunks, dived into the river, and swam to shore.

The full force of the barrage hit. Tall trees longer than the longships banged into them. The foremost ship listed to port, the cries of its warrior crew drifting clear across the water.

The Iroqua on the drekars had been slow to see the danger, as their view had been blocked by the ships ahead and their attention devoted to firing on the Cahokians onshore. Now they broke off the attack, their oarsmen jamming their oars desperately into the water to spin their vessels and flee from the incapacitating wood. Snared by the tree trunks, they would be immobilized at best, destroyed at worst. The smaller longships behind them veered toward the far bank of the Mizipi in an attempt to escape the path of the giant trees.

Now the true genius of the riverborne assault became evident: not just the relentless momentum of the wood but the traps hidden within it. For the Cahokians had jury-rigged their palisade with a few surprises for the Iroqua. Dugout canoes and birch-bark war canoes still floated amid the pristine trunks, and all carried cargos of Cahokian liquid fire.

Hawks flew overhead. With a succession of flame-tipped arrows, Sintikala and her clan sprang the trap. Gouts of fire shot up, exploding
almost as high as the longships’ masts, and quickly spread across the surface of the raft.

The blaze reached the first of the Norse longships. An explosion rocked both the leading longship and the one that came second. Even on the Mound of the Flowers, Marcellinus felt its warmth on his face.

In the time it took the Mizipi to flow a thousand feet, the threat of the Iroqua longships had been neutralized.

Below Marcellinus, the Iroqua land army faltered. Around him, warriors cheered. Great Sun Man stood nodding quietly.

Off in the Cahokian front line the war-party leaders shouted directions and spread orders by warrior-sign. Freed from the pinning fire from the boats, the main Cahokian army surged south toward the Mound of the Flowers. The Iroqua were falling back from the foot of the mound to regroup with their main force. Marcellinus allowed himself a single long exhalation.

“More warriors come.”

Great Sun Man was right. Cahokian warriors marched in formation from the east; it was the First Cahokian under Akecheta. Even from here Marcellinus could see the tall figure of Mahkah in the second line, Takoda on the end of the third.

He squinted again at his First Cahokian warriors. Some of them appeared to have shrunk.

Tahtay and Dustu marched in the front line.

“Shit, shit.” Marcellinus swallowed. “Sir? Great Sun Man?”

The war chief looked again and became very still.

“Sir. May I go and take command of the First Cahokian?”

“Yes.” Great Sun Man’s face was ashen as he looked down at the small marching figure of his son. He glanced quickly to the left and right. The Iroqua had dropped back and fallen in quickly, and already were advancing to engage the Cahokians. “Yes, quickly. Go now.”