Free Clash of Eagles by Alan Smale Page B

this land was all flat, anyway. Aside from the mounds there was no high ground for thesavages to launch their wings from and few natural features aside from the stands of trees and the occasional creek. Little opportunity for a trap or an ambush.
    Unless the braves planned to retreat right through their own city and out the other side, they would eventually have to stop dancing backward and form a battle line. Then, with their metal swords and armor and professional discipline, the Romans would march right over them and massacre them without breaking step, and irrigate the Cahokiani fields with their blood.
    Marcellinus checked the sun. It was a little more than an hour after noon and mercy of mercies, the wind was picking up after their many days of marching through stagnant air. A wise general might call a halt now to build a formidable castra for the night, stepping up to battle fresh in the dawn. But the rank and file would never stand for that. He could feel their turbulent energy, pent up over these long weeks of marching. Calming it would be impossible.
    So be it. They’d marched only twelve miles today. Still enough freshness in those hard Roman legs to carry them up and over a half-naked foe armed with sticks. They might even sleep in the Great City tonight.
    Another stand of tall hickory trees stood in their path, and Tribune Corbulo, riding ahead of him in the vanguard, steered the Legion around it in a broad rightward curve. A series of long huts with thatched roofs now bordered the Hesperian road; the troops stayed wary, shields at the ready in case of a sudden fusillade of arrows, but none came. Corbulo sent in his incendiary-men to fire the huts, which went up in a fast popping blaze.
    Now a corresponding crackle of excitement flooded the Legion, the men in the lead raising a ruckus, shouting “Roma!” and fanning out efficiently into battle formation. Marcellinus spurred his mount forward and was soon by Corbulo’s side, where he took in the scene with a broad sweeping glance.
    He looked out across a plain studded with hundreds of sculpted earthworks: cones, ridge mounds, and square-sided platform mounds arranged in well-ordered lines. Set around them in a more haphazardpattern was a swarm of long huts with walls of reed matting and thatched roofs, along with larger wooden structures that must be granaries and lodges. The Cahokiani obviously did not believe in urban planning or a grid pattern or even in streets. But a mile or more away, across what looked like a giant plaza, Marcellinus saw a stockade fifteen feet tall, built of giant logs, extending hundreds of yards in each direction. And within the stockade …
    “Juno!” Marcellinus swore. “Hold! Hold!”
    Within the stockade sat an immense two-level platform mound constructed entirely of earth. Its four sides angled up steeply like a pyramid to a first plateau with a thatched hut on one corner and then up again to a final flat crest. The mound was topped with a huge wooden structure that must have been eighty feet long and two or three stories high.
    “What?” Corbulo paused, contemptuous. “It’s a lump. We’ll slaughter ’em, then kick it down.”
    “It’s farther away than you think,” Marcellinus said. “
Look
at it. It must be over a hundred feet high and a thousand feet across the base of it.”
    How long must it have taken to construct such a massive pyramid, even using slave labor? The legion dug a six-foot earthen ridge around the castra each night, but that was the work of thousands of tough men at the peak of fitness. This thing had to be fifteen acres in area and as tall as the Palatine Hill in Roma. They must have spent lifetimes building it up to its current height and girth. And on wet foundations such an earthwork had to be hell’s own job to stabilize. How could one even engineer it?
    This was no scaled-up version of a fishing camp or nomads’ village. This truly was a Great City, complete with suburbs, urbs, and