“What dangers here?” he husked.
“Storms,” Ssu-ma Chao muttered. “Or straying off the path.”
Wang Tou-fan had, Quintus knew, an instrument that showed true north. He himself had sought—and failed to find—Polaris, though whether that was his weakness or some shift in the very zodiac itself, he could not tell. He was a simple man and no philosopher. Always before, he had been glad for that to be so.
But now? Quintus wished he had Ganesha’s wisdom, his understanding of what they faced, his experience of endurance. Or Draupadi’s vision. She had passed this way before, it held no unfamiliar terrors for her. Now, as they traveled toward eternal exile, she still hunted for her enemies in her own way.
Ssu-ma Chao covered his face, veiling his features as had some of the Nabataeans who had betrayed Rome so long ago on the march toward Carrhae. His beast plodded on, complaining as Quintus would have liked to do.
With talk as closely rationed as the water, Quintus fell back on the discomfort of his own thoughts. The desert, it seemed, provoked reflection.
You are a Roman. True. You must endure. Unfortunately true. You are of the Legions. That was true, too. Your trade is war. Ah, that it never had been, fight though he had had to. He had asked no more than his family’s lands, so richly watered—oh Dis, don’t think of the Tiber now, with your mouth as parched as the land around you.
His trade had never been war. But was that still true? Here in the desert, a lie could mean your life. When he shut his eyes, sometimes, images of the deep desert replaced the lands he once knew as well as his own heart. He had become a man whose trade was hardship. Whose trade was war, too, if it came to that. And if Quintus, worn out, rode or plodded through an unspeakable present to an incomprehensible future and dreamed only of lying down and dying along the road, it was the warrior spirit—the elements in him Draupadi identified and cherished as Arjuna—that kept him going and even exulted in the chase that brought him closer and closer to his enemy.
For traces of the Black Naacals were all about them. It was only fools and madmen who spoke of the hissing that he heard. They called the sand ming sha, or singing sand. But Quintus heard it as the sound of great serpents, surviving even in this desolation. Never again, he knew, would he see a serpent—from the wise snakes at Delphi to the most humble farm or house snake—without an inward shiver or without reaching for a weapon.
He felt such a shiver as Wang Tou-fan turned to stare at him—flat, ophidian hostility. The man swung away and, from his breast, took out the instrument with which he studied the sky. He held it up, pondered, observed again, and paused. The sun was not yet at zenith—the deadly noontide when neither man nor beast dared stir, but, rather, lay flat, trying to sleep and, in sleep, evade fearsome dreams. Now Wang Tou-fan signaled a halt That was folly, but Quintus was too tired to feel anything but relief. It meant a chance to lie in whatever shadow might be contrived, to rest, and—best of all—to sip some few mouthfuls of water, tasting of the leathern bottles in which it had been carried. It would be the last water he would drink before sunset.
He brushed the pale dust of dried sweat from his brow and turned about. He wanted to be near Draupadi, to aid her from her camel, and for that moment when he lifted her, to be a man rather than a captive wandering through a land of torment.
As he anticipated, she slid willingly down into his hands. Hot as the sun was, closeness to her made Quintus feel as if they lingered beneath green trees by a pool of sweet water.
Lucilius rode by, and the moment shattered as if they had looked into a pool, seen their faces reflected, then recoiled as a rock splashed nearby, destroying their image.
“I should kill him,” Quintus muttered.
“And would that be worse than what he has done to himself? Drink, and tell me now if that is what you desire,” she rebuked him gently.
He took a sip of the warm, strong-smelling water. Grit wormed its way into water and mouth alike. The water tasted like the ashen fruit that Legionaries too long in Judaea swore grew by the Dead Sea. He started after Lucilius’s back, stubbornly upright even after he dismounted and could safely rest.
Gods keep him; he is dead already. Or worse, as if a lamia had him in thrall.
Draupadi inclined her head. “It is not only blood and strength they take, as they did at Stone Tower.”
Too soon, the order came to remount. Quintus saw Draupadi settled in her veils on her saddle, her camel complaining as it swayed to his feet, before he himself mounted. Then he went to check on his men.
His beast rose, moaning like an old slave who wasn’t sure he could survive another beating. Quintus had heard that song before; the beast would bear him down the line of march. He must review his men. He must check on their mounts and pack animals—especially the stubborn old camel bearing the Eagle.
Day after day, they rode, and Quintus found one prayer answered. He did not want to see his men divide into those who faltered and suffered in the sun but pressed on until they fell, always facing east, and those who fined down, whose skin blackened and whose eyes grew hidden in the wrinkles caused by squinting against the sun, but who adapted to the desert as if they had been bred there. They must all adapt. Or die.
Their sleep was shallow, dream-filled. It was not a Golden Age that haunted Quintus’s rest; it was a Green Age. His home now struck him as unreal as Elysium, more a paradise than the gardens Arsaces had spoken of—and the gods send that the Persian’s crafty spirit wandered in such places now. One day, Draupadi mentioned the deodars of the high hills in Hind, and he dreamed of them, too—places he had never seen with his own eyes, but that now seemed as familiar to him as his soul.
Ganesha, learned, enduring, dreamt, he said, of water when he dreamt at all. Inconceivable, what he had said: that all this waste had once lain at the bottom of a great sea.
“Miran?” It was all Quintus had strength to hope for now, as he lifted a packsaddle and fastened it on the protesting beast. The Bactrian’s two humps showed still, like the dugs of a woman nursing in a famine—full, for now. They would wither. The water would be consumed; the camels would falter; and they all would begin to die—soon, if they did not reach Miran.
The desert turned cold at night, a deadly blessing against which they built fires of dung and the wood uncovered by the winds. Alternately, they froze and they baked….
…To wake when dawn rose like a fireball from some hellish catapult in the east, the direction in which they must go. The camels groaned when shifted to their feet. The men had no strength to waste complaining. Each day, they settled in their saddles or marched, if it were their turn to struggle on foot. Perhaps water might be found today. That was hope enough.
Wang Tou-fan rode by, Lucilius at his horse’s heels, ignoring the grit kicked up. The sunrise cast a molten glory over both of them. They were like brothers these days, intent on whatever enterprise they planned in Ch’ang-an. Quintus remembered The Surena. He had seen a similar gloss of hatred and violence and treachery upon him.
Do not resist. Endure.
Quintus started, saving himself from a slide forward that might have unseated him and hurled him into the path of those riding behind him. Where had that voice come from? A long-absent, familiar prickle over his heart: Yes, his talisman, the bronze dancer, had waked from the long sleep that it seemed to have entered when they reached the deep desert. Or perhaps there was no sufficient danger up till now. And that idea was frightening.
He took the dancer out and regarded it: delicate, ancient, surprisingly strong. Its upraised hands caught and held the last explosions of the sunrise, diminishing now to what was almost bearable splendor. A faint wind stirred the grit, setting swirls arise in an updraft, above the ungainly knees of the camel ahead of his own, veiling him in a world by himself.
Rays of light seemed to erupt from the dancing figure, spooking Wang Tou-fan’s horse. It reared, screaming through a throat parched even for a desert beast. It danced on its hind legs, hurling the Ch’in aristocrat forward. He clung to its neck for a moment, then flew off, dust, grit, and small stones scattering about him. The Roman swerved his camel to avoid trampling the officer. A shining arc pierced the veils of dust as the bronze direction finder flew from Wang Tou-fan’s hands.