Eagle and Empire by Alan Smale

Author:Alan Smale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

The Second Cahokian galloped across the grass with Mahkah out in front and Gaius Marcellinus trying to stay alongside them without risking serious physical injury. He was sitting forward in the saddle as far as he dared, leaning into the movement, but such a gallop would always feel precarious to him, especially with snow still on the ground.

Then the Wakinyan roared over them. His horse’s head jerked back, eyes wide, and for a terrifying moment Marcellinus thought his mount might lose its mind and bolt.

Now Hanska and the Third galloped in, converging from the right to form a single column. As the lines came together, Hanska kicked her horse forward, and she, too, began to pull away from him.

At this speed it was all Marcellinus could do to stay on his horse. It was galling to have to admit that Mahkah and Hanska were already better riders than he was.

Ahead, Mahkah’s arm came up, and the two companies slowed to a canter and then a trot. As best he could, Marcellinus tried to line himself up with the Cahokian warriors on either side of him to form an organized rank.

He was panting almost as much as his horse. Shit.

Another Wakinyan came over and released Cahokian liquid flame in a long thin stream two hundred feet in front of them.

In principle, the horses could take this in stride. The mounted companies had spent weeks trying to accustom them to incendiaries. If the cavalry all went to hell at the first whiff of black powder and the first spark of flame, the war was already lost.

In practice, the horses still spooked badly. Troopers split off to the right and left. Some horses bolted altogether, and others stopped dead. Horses bumped into other horses. To Marcellinus’s relief his own steed took the flame rather calmly, perhaps because this time its view was proscribed by its blinders and by the two horses in front.

“Gods,” Marcellinus said at last to the brave riding next to him when they got all their mounts under control and Mahkah signaled a return to the Mizipi, some four miles away. “This is…hard work.”

The warrior might have answered, but he was too busy quivering and trying to wipe the sweat out of his eyes.

Enopay was right after all. These animals were a menace. Time to switch to something safer.

—

It had been another hard winter. The Mizipi had frozen again, all the way across, and the Polovtsian auxiliaries had exercised out on its icy surface with frost nails in their horses’ shoes to prevent them from slipping. Most Roman cavalry alae would exercise carefully in snow but drew the line at ice. But the peoples of central Asia habitually treated rivers as roads in the winter months and, if anything, seemed more comfortable exercising when the temperatures were below freezing than they did in the heat and haze of the summer.

Marcellinus was perpetually cold, but the buffalo robe he had been gifted by the Hidatsa after the hunt helped. And often he was rushing from place to place with such vigor that he generated his own warmth.

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