Clash of Eagles Read Free

nearly fell out of his hair.
    “Not
you,
” said Marcellinus, exasperated. “You’re here to translate. Tell
her
that.”
    The Powhatani word slave—they called him Fuscus because he was brown—only now saw the woman sitting on the blanket on the floor of the Praetor’s tent headquarters. Fuscus eyed her warily but didn’t seem upset on her behalf. Why would he be? She wasn’t of his tribe.
    He babbled at her, and she replied rather haughtily for one of her smallness and unpromising situation. Compared with the mellifluous flow of patrician Latin, their primitive Algon-Quian tongue sounded like baby talk and twigs snapping. Fuscus gestured as he spoke, and the gestures were not hard to interpret.
    Her eyes narrowed. The expression she turned on Marcellinus was contemptuous.
    Perhaps she had misunderstood. Algon-Quian had an ungodly wide range of dialects. Marcellinus turned to the word slave. “She understands? She is my prisoner. I should brutalize—use?—use her, then give her to my men. Custom demands it. But I shall not do that. I show her mercy. Yes?” Here he knew he was on safe ground; “mercy” was one of the first words Fuscus had learned. He repeated it often.
    The woman spit out a couple of words, steel in her sneer. Marcellinus sighed. “Now you’re supposed to tell me what she said.”
    Fuscus cleared his throat nervously. “She say, ‘Disgust.’ And that Roman are like wild dog.” Alert to Marcellinus’s irritation, he took a step back. “
She
say it, sir. Not me.”
    “Ask her what she was doing in the road in front of my army,” the Praetor said.
    Such was the height of the 33rd Legion’s superstition that it had taken just one lone woman to bring them to a halt. Faced with twenty braves, or a thousand, his soldiers would have charged and hacked them into bloody meat. But at the sight of a solitary woman standing calmlyin their path with flames leaping up from a fire behind her, they’d slowed to a ragged stand-easy and looked back over their shoulders for orders. Marcellinus would have to thicken their spines somehow before they reached the lands of the mound builders and their—Norse-alleged—city of gold.
    “She from west farther, sir. Over hills-and-hills. Hear tell of Roman, come to see. She chieftain, daughter of chieftain. She ask you, go home where you come.”
    “I see,” said Marcellinus.
    The woman struggled to her feet. The two guards who stood in the doorway of the Praetorium tent looked at Marcellinus hopefully, but he shook his head at them, allowing her impertinence.
    The woman gestured.
    “She ask what you want.”
    Marcellinus looked at her. “We want your land. Your country. Your gold and spices. Whatever you have is now ours.”
    She glanced blankly at Fuscus and spoke. Fuscus translated, “She say you cannot take the ground. Cannot take sky. It here always.”
    Marcellinus stepped closer. Well nourished compared with these people, he towered over her. The woman’s eyes widened, but she stood as tall as she could. Given that the Romans in their metal armor and red-plumed helmets must have appeared utterly alien to her, her courage was considerable.
    Her forehead was flat and her hair muddy, but her cheekbones were set higher than those of the coastal tribes and her bronze skin seemed better cared for. Most telling of all, she stood straight and calm, with a dignity their local captives lacked. She was the dusk, the evening star; she was Nova Hesperia, the giant unopened continent of it. And he, Marcellinus, was a bully and past his prime. Worse, he knew it.
    He made his decision. “What is her name?”
    “She calls her Sisika,” said the brave.
    “Well, if Sisika really is ‘daughter of chieftain,’ the tribes to the west will know her. Yes?”
    “Yes,” Fuscus said.
    “Then say this to her: ‘Sisika, I set you free. You will run ahead of my army and tell all the tribes of the Iroqua, tell whoever else might lie in our path that the Romans are