Once again, he met the woman’s eyes. Deep as the Mediterranean, they caught the fires that encircled them. Shapes formed in the fires: his brothers the Pandavas, the eldest, his king with golden eyes, who lost Draupadi in a game of dice and plunged them into war; his enemy, who possessed arms that made him invincible—unless he … Arjuna … could find weapons to set them at naught.
“This wreath is twin to the one I brought my husband. That was Arjuna, under a vow to share all he won with his brothers. And so, I married five brothers. You are…” She paused as if drawing the name from his thoughts, “… named Quintus. That is five, is it not? Take the wreath!”
She had it in her slender hands. In an instant, she would have it about his neck, and he would be as bound, he knew, as if he slipped his head beneath a conqueror’s yoke. The wreath brushed his hair.
He pushed up onto his feet so fast that his bronze statue of the dancer fell onto the carpets.
“Krishna!” the scribe cried. “You and he have been great friends since … tell me you remember….”
“The tree…” Quintus shook his head. Again, memories not his own overlay his thoughts. An ironic, enigmatic figure whose gentle humor hid a mind as vast as all heaven. A being who was devoted to … to him? Not to him, certainly. To Arjuna, this hero out of some wild collection of Hind stories.
He had been offered a choice—armies or simply Krishna to serve as his charioteer—and he had chosen Krishna. He. Arjuna. He shook his head, trying to separate his thoughts from the spell of these other stories.
He did not want Arjuna’s memories. But the tiny dancer was precious to him, and he scooped it up. Mocking flute music rang in his ears.
“This is magic!” he accused them. “All illusion. Even, I would wager, my sword breaking.”
He reached to the leather and brass sheath and drew. The blade shone in the firelight, then shimmered … the metal length drawing out, blue patterns quivering along it. Even the hilt felt strange. He glanced down: It was decorated with frogs.
“Arjuna’s own blade,” Ganesha told him. He made a meticulous note in his scroll.
Then the blade shifted form again. Roman issue, the finest in the world. Or so he had always thought.
“Illusions,” he whispered. “Is it all illusion?” Abruptly, he was chill with fear. “Is this a dream, too?” Would he wake screaming and find himself bleeding to death from a Yueh-chih arrow? Or would he wake too parched to rave, his tongue swollen in his head as he died of thirst, having led his men to ultimate defeat?
“Illusion?” Draupadi caught up his words.
“You know illusion,” she told him. “Do you remember? Maya, god of illusion, made namaste, touching your brother’s feet. He proclaimed himself a great artist, eager to create. And you asked him for a palace that no one could imitate.”
Ganesha unrolled his scroll. “Yes! He found on a mountain slope flat posts shining like a god’s face, bordered with gold and set with golden flowers gleaming with jewels. Ages ago, Krishna had set them on the northern slope of the Mother of the World.”
“Who lived there?” Quintus found himself asking.
“You—I mean, Arjuna.” Ganesha nodded. “We all did, for a long time. It was your home where you found love and grief, happiness and death. And you remember nothing at all. Well, the wheel turns for all of us. You will.
“Maya built his palace. By the front door he put a tree of lights, its leaves cut from thin sheets of emerald, with gold veins. It sang in the wind. He carried full-grown trees and made parks; he brought songbirds and filled the trees; he made ponds and pools and filled them with fish and flowers. And when he was finished…”
“Is this Maya’s palace?”
“One such, perhaps,” Draupadi said. “All is illusion.” Her eyes turned sorrowful.
“Then am I dead?”
“Illusion can be as powerful as truth,” she told him. “We brought you here. The horsemen who would have slain you were real. The storm you endured was real. The use we made of it, to encompass you as you sped upon the circles of the world, that was illusion. And so is the guise of your sword.”
“It was illusion that it broke.”
“No; indeed, it shattered on that rock, for it is of Maya’s building. You carry Arjuna’s sword, disguised now so you can return to your people and bring them to our aid.”
Slowly, Quintus folded his arms on his chest. The white scarf and wreath brushed his knee. He started to push them away, then forebore.
“If you are powerful enough to call the desert itself to your aid, you need no help from me or mine. We are prisoners, permitted arms only because the desert holds worse fears than Romans far from their home.”
“Then why not turn aside?” Draupadi asked. “Some did.”
Ganesha looked down at his scroll as if it were a map.
“They hold our Eagle.” It came out sounding flat. How could he explain to these dwellers in illusion what the Eagle meant in terms of loyalty and blood? They looked to be of Hind. Perhaps he could explain it in terms of Alexander, who had journeyed that far. But his mouth went dry. He had never been a scholar, never had much time to study or a good tutor. Even Lucilius would tell the tale better than he.
“Loyal,” she pronounced. “Well enough. You are here. And they are here. And the talismans. Look you!”
She snapped one of the fragile shells from the bracelet on her slender wrist. “I break this cowrie shell. And I scatter its pieces … oh, here . . . and here . . . and here….” She dropped gleaming fragments on the amber and crimson carpet. “But then the need comes for such a shell. A need such as the world has never seen since the stars danced in different patterns in the heavens. So the pieces gather in one place, where the hand that knows them—” her own fingers with their almond-shaped nails were busy collecting the shards, “—and then, they are joined once more. Sol”
She raised her hand, and the shell was whole.
“More shadow-play?”
Ganesha shook his head. “That was true transformation. You have grown, Draupadi.”
“I wish to grow beyond illusions into truth. I can spin shadows into pleasing forms. And I can spin them into shapes that can save a man’s life. A little, I can take the fabric of the world and change it in truth. But I cannot do more, not without help.”
“I have heard,” Quintus said, “that those of Hind are great magicians.” His voice was very dry. The cup at his feet beckoned, but he did not dare drink it.
“It would protect you from wounds,” Draupadi said, “and make you all but immortal. If you spurn that, drink from the pool.”
“We are not from Hind,” Ganesha said. “Oh, in latter days, before the stars changed once again and we were driven out once more, we lived there … in that palace Maya built at your … at Arjuna’s … command. But this was our home before, and we must hope will be so once again.”
Quintus paced about the platform. By rights, he ought to call his men or Ssu-ma Chao to restrain the lunatics. But, he recalled, perhaps they were oracles. And those sybils who were holiest seemed the maddest. He thought of the woman before him seated by a tripod, a serpent twined round its legs, as fumes rose from a fissure in the earth and dreams erupted from her lips.
“You cast your nets wide, if you draw in such as we.”
“Nets! Now you begin to understand,” Ganesha nodded approval. “Long ago, this was a plain, rich with water, fertile fields, forests, and lakes. A great city rose not far from here, the home of a race that had journeyed far from the East, from the Motherland known as Mu. From there, they spread out. Here, to the city of the Uighurs. And beyond it to the island in the sea, now sunken….”
Quintus’s palms were wet. That much Plato he remembered. “Atlantis, lost when the earth split, sunk beneath the waves.”
“We cast our nets wide, as you say. Wide as the waves that overwhelmed our cities.” Ganesha’s voice was grave. A tear ran down Draupadi’s cheek. “On a night of the blackest evil, waves were sent raging down onto the plain that the Uighurs had made into a worthy daughter of the Motherland. Huge rocks shattered the pillars of the temples and palaces and theatres we had built. Those of us who could, those of us with the training of the Naacals, the caste of priests, fled.