The dancing figure heated against his tunic. All his life, it had been Quintus’s talisman; now—with his free hand he reached for it and drew it out. It shimmered under his bleary gaze: trove from a tomb in Latium, image of enigmatic Krishna, dancing in grief and joy, urging him to fare forward.
He rose from his knees, staring at the bronze talisman as it lay reassuringly on his hand. Draupadi was waiting for him. Once again, she waited for him to win the battle she was part cause for.
Unwilling to resign the Eagle to a standard-bearer hand, Quintus mounted, still holding it. Well, he thought, here we are. Wherever here is. Where shall we go? In what direction? “Fare forward,” thank you very much, was little aid when the sun lay hidden. For all he knew—and he suspected that the Black Naacals intended this—they could wander in circles until the camels collapsed and they all died.
The bronze standard warmed in his hand. He looked up at the Eagle. The diffused light that was all he could see struck it, picking out the fine details that some craftsman had put into shaping its feathers or the sleek, deadly line of its beak. It was a sign, a weapon—and a guardian of their honor. Would it guide them now?
Light struck the Eagle’s head, enveloping the entire standard in a glow that blinded, then moderated. A beam shot from it before him. Taking that as an omen—please all the gods it serve him as a beacon and not a snare—he gestured the soldiers forward.
A horse whinnied in fear. Quintus slowed. Gods only knew what it thought it saw. One man, marching, cried out and looked down at his foot. Rufus gestured the tribune forward. He would see to the soldier; let Quintus lead.
The camel seemed to pad through puddles of water. Its huge feet made sucking sounds as it lifted each one free.
“Illusion,” Draupadi repeated. “We are fortunate. Thus far, they have not mustered even more strength.”
The desert floor shuddered even as she spoke, and a dune began slowly to collapse. Why that particular dune? If the Black Naacals’ plan succeeded, they would distrust their very shadows and, at the end, turn on one another.
What might lie buried in that dune, dead as the sea monster whose bones they had seen—or perhaps horror that was not dead?
Behind him, someone muttered, and Quintus heard the thwack of a vinestaff. Ssu-ma Chao began to protest, then fell silent, as if ashamed of his own reluctance to proceed. If any of them might know this land, it was the Ch’in frontier officer.
“Forward!” Quintus shouted and gestured with the Eagle. The flawed sunlight ran down the shaft and into his eyes. Once again, he felt strong, perhaps even somewhat rested. He could ride for ever, if he must, to achieve his goals.
The light glanced down over his camel. It bawled a protest but lurched forward into the swaying movement that it could keep up for hours upon hours.
They would follow the path of the Eagle. Not even the gods themselves could demand more than that. The caravan gathered what speed it might. The Eagle’s presence kept it from feeling as if it fled.
24
The sun never rose in the desert sky—only that faint, diffused glow that continued to pool into glory when it rested on the Eagle showed the difference between night and day, if not between morning and noon. For that, they had only the heat as their guide. When the sun made even the strongest of their camels droop as if they inched along the fiery banks of Acheron, Quintus guessed that it was noon and called a halt. Not even the evident desire of some of the Ch’in to flee across the desert until, please their ancestors, they encountered another caravan kept the Romans from obeying orders and enforcing an obedience of their own on would-be stragglers.
Quintus’s eyes ached as if hot gold had been poured into them. Still, when they made camp, he forced himself to make a circuit of the paltry space with the Eagle.
Think of green. Think of water. Think of home. But his memories of his Tiber valley were long faded now.
Halfway about the camp, he greeted Ssu-ma Chao. “Your men?” he asked.
“Two still must be tended like babies,” the officer reported. “This one implores that they not be abandoned….”
Quintus felt rage at the suggestion leap from his eyes.
“We leave no one alive in this place,” the Roman answered. “If it were possible I would bear even our dead along, lest the Black Naacals work mischief with their corpses.”
Ssu-ma Chao nodded. His face was sallow, not the burnished gold it had been in Parthia, which now seemed like a world of safety and comfort away. “This one should not dare to seek to live, for he has fled a battlefield….” He looked as if he might drop to his knees or, worse yet, his belly.
“It is no shame to retreat,” Quintus attempted to rally the other officer’s courage. “Or even to be vanquished.” That sounded hollow, and he knew it.
“You say that now,” Ssu-ma Chao gestured at the standard. “When I saw you at…”
“It would have been enough to die. As you see, we live. I live, and I had taken such injuries that I might well have slipped away.” He had had the choice, he remembered; and he had chosen to return to life and defeat rather than leave his men without a leader, even into exile.
“You live, and now you…” Abruptly, Ssu-ma Chao let out a gust of laughter that brought men’s heads up all over the camp. “You prosper? How can you say that anything prospers in this waste?”
Bless Ssu-ma Chao for that laugh. The entire camp was the better for it. He could hear Rufus remarking to someone, “Laughs at misfortune, does he? I’m not saying that that is a Roman thing to do, but it takes a Roman will to look at the Fates and laugh.”
Ssu-ma Chao nodded at the centurion. “He knows no fear.”
“No,” Quintus said. “None. He fears only for his honor; and he is perfect in that.”
“Honor—this one’s honor is fled. This one would redeem his wretched self.” He struggled with the idea, then replaced it with another. “Without the direction finder, we have only your Eagle to guide us. Is that not so?”
Sunlight on bronze—if you called that guidance.
“We do not know that it will bring us out along the caravan routes again. We are in the hands of Fortune,” Quintus answered with the truth as he saw it.
“But surely your god…”
“It is not a god.”
“Can you deny, Roman, that it is a thing of power? Could it not discern other power?”
“You begin to interest me extremely,” Quintus said. “Come to my camp, brother, and sit down.”
The Ch’in officer’s head went up at a word he might once have rejected, and he followed Quintus to the flaps of felt set in the shadow of a reclining camel that Quintus called his camp. They had come down a great way in the world from the meticulous castra of his training—but he was grateful for the rest and the shade, and even more grateful for the presence of Draupadi, who greeted him with water and a gentle touch to his shoulder.
She would have withdrawn, but Quintus forestalled her. This was no time for her to mimic a Ch’in lady’s manners. She and Ganesha had been scholars alongside the Black Naacals before the world changed: They would best know how their enemies used their power.
Gradually, others joined them: Rufus, Lucilius (there was no keeping him away), Ganesha—the men Quintus most trusted and the man against whom he had most reason to guard himself.
“Speak for this humble one,” Ssu-ma Chao appealed to Ganesha. That much the Roman could follow. Then his voice broke, and the spate of rapid-fire Ch’in that followed made even Ganesha blink.
“Slowly, slowly,” he said, holding up a hand that even now retained some of its former plumpness. “I am a tired old man.”
Ancient, he might be. Even now, Quintus hated to consider how old because, if he calculated Ganesha’s years, he must also think of Draupadi’s. She looked thin and strained; Ganesha was showing his age. His dark eyes in their pouches of flesh were as reddened and strained by their journey as though he belonged to one of the younger races with whom he companied. But they still gleamed with an alertness a scout might have envied and a relentless intelligence honed by the years, however many.
“I feared,” Ganesha translated for Ssu-ma Chao. His own voice quavered. So, did even he fear? “And then I resigned power and sought only to flee from a place of the unquiet dead. But I still digress. So now, it seems to me that I must never return to Ch’ang-an and pollute its precincts with my cowardice. Indeed, I must blot it out. In my blood, if need be; in the blood of my kin, if my sins are discovered. But I would prefer to avenge myself in the blood of those who brought me to this pass. I shall go forward.”