There was no point, good common sense told Quintus, in edging forward. He would not get even so much of a glimpse of the Eagle, and his presence might just make a bad situation worse. Still, he found himself heading toward the standard, his feet kicking up clouds of fine grit. It rose, coating him. When he licked his lips, he tasted salt; and he had not had so much water that his body could sweat that much.
As Quintus reached the dead camel, Wang Tou-fan had laid a hand upon the Eagle. He himself, he declared in words Quintus could not understand—and gestures that he could—would strap the prize to his own pack-saddle.
Quintus gestured to Ganesha. Interpret. Please.
“Well enough,” Quintus said, Ganesha repeating his words in the language of Ch’in. “Why not take it out and set it up? Let it shine over the place where we lie down to die.”
The man glared at Quintus. “You are leading us to death,” the Roman spoke, finding words somewhere. “To die is nothing to us. We all owe Rome a death: time we were paying it. But you—have you not a life and a future?”
Lucilius’s head came up, sensing a bargain.
“You do not order this one,” Wang Tou-fan said through the interpreter.
“No,” said Quintus. “But what about them?” Suddenly, he remembered how, in another life, his brother the king had wagered all and lost all. Having nothing, though, he had nothing to lose. Except his life; and he had reckoned that as a dead loss for years.
“Perhaps you can lead,” he conceded. “But can you endure? We can teach you that. And they—perhaps they can guide you.”
“And what would you demand for this service?” Too wise, despite Ganesha’s earlier attempt to soften the sting of Wang Tou-fan’s lies.
“The Eagle,” Quintus said bluntly. “Then, if we die, we die in possession of our standard.” He shrugged. “You may yet outlast us, and then it would be your possession once more.” Much against his better judgment, he glared at Lucilius. “As it is now.”
The patrician glared in return but said nothing.
“Well?” Bluff. Pretend you are in a position of strength. It hardly seemed, he realized, like the Roman Quintus, sober, dull, who was about to gamble with life and honor both. He warned himself not to look weak. For the strong do as they will, while the weak suffer what they must. He had been weak for too long.
“And,” he added craftily, “a garrison may come and put paid to our agreement after all. What have you to lose?”
Ssu-ma Chao turned away, as if expressing—what? Laughter? Gods, he had spirit. He should have been a Roman.
There was one problem, Quintus thought. If Ssu-ma Chao assented, he would be on the cross before he clasped arms with him like a brother.
“Have you any idea of where we are?”
Help me, Quintus wished of Ganesha and Draupadi with all his might.
“Before the stars changed,” Ganesha said promptly, “all this basin was a great Inland Sea. I have seen the charts. In it were islands at which ships might land and…”he allowed himself to look wistful. “They had springs of sweet water, trees bearing fruit. They cannot all have perished wholly; for they were at the very heart of the sea. We might well find water at such a place. But we would need to go into the very bowels of the desert. Have you the courage for it?”
“Say we reach this water. What then?”
“We will have the strength,” Quintus said, “to try again for Miran. Or send out a fast scouting party—as we should have done.” Had you been a true officer instead of a wastrel and a traitor. He fixed his eyes on Lucilius, willing the patrician tribune to shift his loyalties.
“We have no better choice.” Lucilius forced the words out as if under torture. As perhaps he was: He suffered more from the heat than some of the others.
Wang Tou-fan stood irresolute. Clearly, he was afraid; clearly he was thinking rapidly as threat, fear, and exhaustion worked in him. Cunning flashed across his features. Try again. Betray the men who helped you. All of them, especially that stiff-necked oaf who rules an outpost and gives himself the airs of the Son of Heaven. It might not even be necessary to share with the traitor—after all, are they not all barbarians, and the men of the western deserts only slightly better?
“Done!” he said, forgetting nobility and sounding like one of the merchants who had predicted nothing but destruction for this caravan.
Trying not to let his hands shake with eagerness; Quintus nodded gravely, and held out his arms to receive the Eagle.
And, although the sky looked as if not enough water to form even the tiniest of clouds had ever touched it, thunder rumbled and lightning danced across the horizon.
22
THE STANDARD eased into Quintus’s hand, and the sun swooped down upon it, picking out each detail of the bird’s bronze plumage. It felt right in his hand, fitting like the hilt of a veteran’s sword. He shut his eyes against the dazzle of the sun on the Eagle’s wings and his own tears.
The first time he had held it, only for a moment, in The Surena’s camp, it had been before a blow to his head had nearly driven wits and life from him. He remembered, how he remembered, the reek of blood, sweat, and metal that had been one of the last things he had sensed. But with the fear and the pain had come the realization that he had come, at last, to the right place and done the right thing.
Perhaps he had defended a leader not worthy of his service, but Crassus had been a proconsul of Rome; and that was worth, he thought, any price he might pay. And here, far from Rome, was its very sign. Whether or not any word of his life and service ever reached the patres conscripti who were as much an object of his grandsire’s veneration as the family altar, or that turbulent, brawling people who had transformed the lands around the Tiber, once again, he had that sense of purpose.
Grounding the standard, as he had in that enemy city not so far in the past, Quintus surveyed the shrunken force. His own renewal of spirit had inspired the others— and it had been a long, long time since he had thought of them as “his men.” In the presence of their Eagle, they stood ready, falling perhaps by instinct into the familiar pattern.
Quintus felt himself aglow with a light that did not fade. It fed upon him, yet it returned a new strength in exchange. Using him as a focus, that inner strength reached out to his men, uniting them into not just a fighting force but one spirit.
That dazzle was gone, leaving Quintus with the sense that something profound had been accomplished—but just what, he couldn’t find a name for.
Draupadi approached, eyeing the Eagle warily. “That is no less your weapon,” she said, “than the sword you bear.”
The sword he bore had been Arjuna’s. Quintus stared upward—would that proud bronze bird now take wing?
In his grasp, the standard quivered as if the Eagle surmounting it indeed mantled its wings, ready for flight. But that was only the way of eagles in the heights. Aloft in their own place, they swooped down, arcing, and circling, borne by the winds from the peaks. Here were no mountains.
A glow from the Eagle reached to gild the sky. There, the color was deepening and turning sullen. Quintus tore his eyes from the Eagle to look to Ssu-ma Chao. Before any of the buran, the great desert storms, the sky turned brazen. Then, as the storm struck, it darkened with wind, thickened and made visible with grit and sand.
A prudent traveler—and Ssu-ma Chao was the best they had—would be alert to such changes and would order out the protective felts in time. Thus, Ssu-ma Chao opened his mouth to shout, scrabbling for his own protective coverings. And then the Easterner paused, as if at a loss. All along the line of march, the camels stood motionless, not complaining the way they did when sensing a storm.
Yet that sky, like a brass bowl overturned above them, was now the color that heralded the worst of storms. Only there was no wind, no stir of sand. The very air itself might now be as dead as the land.
The camels began to crowd together, as if in rebellion against a too-weighty burden. There was a heaviness pressing down upon all until Quintus was certain that even the long dunes would be flattened—even without a wind.
Draupadi whirled about, scanned the horizon, then turned to Ganesha.
“All about us—we are ringed in.”
The old man turned to face outward as if confronting a still-invisible enemy.