“Do you fear serpents, that you walk so clumsily, you who pride yourselves on always marching?” Arsaces jibed. “Now, if you wore proper…”
A hiss silenced him, though it came from man, not serpent.
The shouts of the camp grew louder as the firelight brightened. Quintus found himself struggling to set each foot down without testing his footing: Lucilius’s nightmare recollection of Trachonitis reminded him that he had strayed far from the lands most Romans knew into lands such as only men like Xenophon or Alexander had seen. You would probably die in them; but the last thing you might see was a creature out of legend, as it reared up out of the sand or plunged from the sky to kill you.
What rose up to block their way, though, was no monster out of the desert, but two long, very deadly spears held by two very determined Ch’in warriors.
The warrior shouted. The moment it took to understand the guard’s disastrously accented Parthian was almost their last.
A Ch’in guard’s spear pricked at Quintus’s throat.
6
Luciilus had come this way with barely a check, Quintus thought. Was this betrayal?
A second fear struck him.
Was this betrayal again?
Behind him, though, he could hear how the other Romans’ boots scraped still, the rasp of nervous breathing. Carefully, he raised his jaw. The spearpoint pressed fractionally closer. Though the desert wind was cool, a warm trickle ran down his neck.
Arsaces, standing next to him, started to protest and took a blow from the butt of a spear. He went down and stayed down, with more prudence than Quintus would have credited him with.
The noise of the camp seemed to drop away from his consciousness. Even Lucilius’s news seemed of far less importance than the tiniest noise that a Ch’in guard might make shifting position, or the faint twitch of muscles or gaze that might herald life or death. The wind scooped up coarse sand and flung it in a sort of serpentine swirl, to land with a hiss. Quintus shuddered. Even one serpent, crawling, slithering around their feet—he did not think he could stand unmoved, nor could he expect that from any of the men.
The hissing grew. He shut his eyes. He told himself that serpents were as often sacred as accursed. A serpent hallowed the shrine at Delphi. Farmers needed serpents if their land was to thrive. Snakes killed rats. But cold sweat trickled down his sides, nevertheless. If there were serpents, someone was bound to break, and then they would all be dead. He could hear his men’s breathing grow harsh, rapid.
It might be crawling among them even now. Who knew if his next step … if he would have a next step…. He met the Ch’in guard’s eyes. They too held fear, but the hands on his spear never wavered. He was all the more dangerous for being afraid.
Quintus forced his breath to steady and to subside even as fear of the serpents he could only imagine threatened to choke him. Someone must get them past the guards. He must try.
Again, the wind blew. This time it didn’t stop. Sand rustled and hissed around them, rising in coils as the wind rose. It was at their knees now; it was wreathing them about…. It was getting harder to breathe. A cloud seemed to cover the moon, like a face hidden beneath a cloak.
A shout made the Ch’in guardsman’s head snap around. With another shout, he lowered his spear. A heavily armed man, accompanied by guards of his own, marched up. With a kind of furious impatience, the leading newcomer knocked away the spear. The wind subsided. Once again, the moon emerged from clouds, red-tinged now.
Arsaces scrambled to his knees and bowed from them, almost as if the Ch’in officer were the King of Kings. Quintus looked at the man: He had seen him before at The Surena’s right hand. The enemy. The captor. The man who had taken his Eagle and his weapons. Who was taking him and his men deep into the great trap of Asia, from which they would never emerge.
“He says this … turtle … has made a mistake,” Arsaces said. His cynical tone was back in place. The officer’s Parthian was better than his man’s. Quintus could almost understand it. He promised himself that if he were spared, he would learn more.
“Thank him for correcting that thought, will you?” he asked.
“On my head be it,” said the Persian and spoke rapidly.
The officer barked laughter.
His man collapsed to his knees and groveled in the coarse sand. When he raised his head, he looked up. Tiny as his eyes were, Quintus could see how they bulged with terror.
“He says he truly knows not what happened, that he just saw enemies….”
The officer kicked at him and swore.
“Orders are that the prisoners from Ta-Chin are not to be harmed. He is reminding this fellow… Wait, he asks why you do not bow.”
Rufus snorted. “Like that cringing fool?”
“We are Romans, tell him,” Quintus said. “It is not our custom.” He remembered how it had all but killed his grandfather even to bow to a patron he came close to respecting: What the old man would have thought of the scrapings and loutings of the East, he had only too good an idea. He had bowed as a client himself. He swore never to fawn like that again even if it cost him his life. Compared with his honor, what was his life? From Carrhae on, it had been like borrowed money—no telling when the loan might be recalled and at what interest rate.
Lucilius might be willing to live that way, had indeed lived that way and thus made his way from Rome to the desert. Quintus hoped he could show rather more courage. The desert wind hissed derisively at him.
“He says he is Ssu-ma Chao. It is,” Arsaces added, “a name known to me. A noble name.”
So was Lucilius’s. Whatever else happened, at least he had seen the young patrician meet a man who was more than his match for arrogance about his rank.
“Tell him, it is not our nature to abase ourselves before mere men,” he added.
The officer barked laughter and spoke rapidly.
“He says, ‘You have stiff necks, you Romans, as long as your heads still wag on them.’ We have not seen this type of courage before. Others, but not this. Thus, he says, and therefore, you fare east with him. You—and the Eagle.”
It would have been easy in that moment to rush upon the officer and die. Too easy. Somewhere in this camp were arms and the Eagle. They must try to find them; then, they would show these people what stuff Romans had in them.
His anger and his intention must have shown on his face as Ssu-ma Chao stared into his eyes. Then, in turn, he looked narrowly at each of the Romans, pausing to slap Lucilius on the arm. What agreement had that one made already? Quintus wondered. No doubt it would come out in the worst possible moment.
Ssu-ma Chao still laughed and waved them past, away from the desert and in toward the fires.
It was beneath Quintus’s dignity as a Roman and an officer to glance back, but he could listen, and he did. The Ch’in noble’s heavy felted boots crunched behind them. And behind him blew the wind. Listen as Quintus might, he no longer heard the hissing and rustling he had heard before. He might have longed for silence. It did not reassure him. He suspected that for the rest of his life, he would listen always for drums and bronze bells—sounds that had meant death since The Surena’s horsemen broke the square at Carrhae.
The centurion’s presence at Quintus’s shoulder, in case he staggered, was welcome. (He vowed he would not stagger.) For once, he was even grateful for Lucilius, who, typically, knew every man of substance in the caravan and had managed, somehow, to identify the newcomers. For once, that subtlety of Lucilius’s was helpful as, imperceptibly, he guided the other Romans toward the men who had come in that night from the king of Armenia’s court.
It was a mixed troop, as caravans went. By now, even Quintus could distinguish the dark brows and proudly hooked noses of the Armenians from, say, the sleekness of the Persians, or the quicksilver intensity of the pure Hellenes. Others there were whom he could not identify—they were not Ch’in, nor Saka, or even the Hsiung-nu who were accursed as marauders much further east. And yet they looked familiar…. How?
“We may as well move on,” Lucilius muttered. “Asking this lot for anything is like prying bad oysters out of their shells.”
So these were the merchants who included women in their numbers? That fined-down look might appeal to a patrician: It made him think of … well, of his grandfather’s patrons.