“Are you hungry? Afraid? These our friends will protect you,” Ganesha promised.
Ask if they have water!
The old man, his back bent by rotten living and ever-present fear, began to tremble violently. His crutch fell from his now-strengthless arm, and he began to topple. Draupadi was there before he could abase himself. She raised him to his feet and supported him until a much younger but equally ragged man retrieved the crutch and handed it to him.
Draupadi, ignoring his protests, helped him adjust it. A strand of her black hair fell across his face, its dusty length suddenly sparkling as if a tear fell on it. When the old man could stand on his own, she pulled away. The Eagle’s light picked out the joy and those tears on the old man’s face, which filled the seams that age and fear had graven in his flesh. Worn he looked, and long abused. But beneath’ the ragged cloth that bound up his sparse shock of white hair, the man’s eyes glowed.
“Two Children of the Sun,” he whispered. He broke into a sob of incredulous joy. “At long last, and against all hope, they have come. To shield us from the dark!”
29
Soldiers and slaves alike huddled in a hollow that had surely been part of a palace or temple complex. Their feet scrabbled not just on grit but on stone and jagged tile, cracked from years of small, carefully nourished fires. Two fragments of what had been a high wall remained. Part of a once-splendid frieze adorned one of them—the serpent that was the Naacals’ god sign—and marching along the other, robed forms of priests approaching an altar.
Now that the slaves had realized that the newcomers were not Black Naacals, to demand immediate victims, the women among them had ventured forth too. A trick of the light made the priests’ faces seem very real—the tall fair sons and daughters of the Motherland itself, the shorter Uighurs with their thin eyes, concealed in merry folds, and the Southerners, so like Ganesha and Draupadi as to be closest kin. Below them were those unfortunate folk of the successor races who had been swept up in the Black Naacals’ nets—those of Ch’in, those of Hind, even one or two of the Hsiung-nu or their distant cousins, wrapped in felts or pelts. The Ch’in soldiers stared askance at them, but clearly, they felt themselves to be in their own place—if you could call this ruin anyone’s home.
With the air of one daring greatly, Ganesha leaned forward and placed a lock of hair upon the fire. It burned the more brightly, though without scent, and its smoke rose into the night sky.
“Will they not know we are here?” Quintus asked.
“They? How shall they not know anything?” asked a man with coloring like Ganesha. “How not? Some of us they actually begot—or our grandsires. Others … I thought I would die, my eyes staring straight up at the sun when our last camel died of thirst. But they took me up, me and all of those who otherwise would have perished. At first we thought we had found kindly rescuers and employers. And then…
“How long have you been here?” asked Ganesha. “Valmiki, you have years on you. Do you recall? Look up at the stars and tell me truthfully.”
The eldest of the men dwelling in this ruin levered himself up painfully to his feet. Ganesha offered him his arm. “Master, I must not dare.”
“Valmiki.” The older-seeming man submitted. Adjusting his pace to Valmiki’s, Ganesha led him outside to study the patterns of the stars.
“Do you remember the waste?” Draupadi asked a woman with the pure features of the Motherland.
“I remember,” she whispered. She was weeping. Her eyes reflected the firelight, but then went opaque with dread. “Oh, do not ask me to say it. The earth trembled. The sun itself seemed to wink out, and we could not see beyond the hill. Kinte’s son was born in that hour, and she died of it, without even a sight of the sky. And when we looked out again, the water had drained away, and the ground—which had been seabed—was cracked and already drying.”
“Kinte’s son?” Draupadi asked. “Is he here?”
“I beg you, do not make me remember!” the woman cried. “They took him!”
Lucilius pushed himself away from the fire. Even now, he was fastidious and hated the reek of burning dung—though he had been glad enough to warm himself. Quintus heard him greet Ganesha outside. For Valmiki he had no word.
“Is he not hungry? … There will be food….” another of the women said.
Draupadi shrugged, too intent on calming the weeping woman.
“You have been generous past praise already,” she said. “Sharing with us. Giving us water.”
“Watch him?” suggested one of the Romans. Rufus growled silence. Treacherous or not, he was still one of their tribunes. But that was not all that troubled Rufus. A paterfamilias could decide which of his children might live and which were unfit and must be abandoned. Could. How many did? Clearly, Rufus thought, too many. And the Black Naacals usurped those rights…. Pretty soon, Quintus thought, Rufus was going to want to fight them.
“Like those whoremasters in Carthage,” he muttered at the soldiers. One of them made a small, shocked sound: There was nothing worse, nothing more scandalous than a mystery cult turned sour; and the Tophet of Carthage combined the hatred of an enemy with the grisly fascination of such a place, its priests turned savage.
The woman who had begged not to be questioned clung to Draupadi’s shoulder. They murmured together, words clearly meant to be kept away from the men.
“She is of the North,” Draupadi said. “And she has been here very long, like Valmiki, since the world changed. She is almost my agemate,” the priestess added bleakly.
“And the others…” Quintus began. He glanced around. All the peoples of Asia seemed to be represented here, some drawn from a dying caravan, one or two lost in the waste, even a few bought in a bazaar—a cast-off concubine, perhaps, or a wounded horseman or just a traveler too old or weak to withstand a day’s journey in the deepest desert. Collected and left here.
In the darkness, eyes glowed. There were always different listeners, as men and women came and went on whatever errands they must do. Did the Black Naacals keep watch or revelry tonight? The Romans feared to ask. How many of these castaways survived? And how many served out of fear, not loyal awe? Quintus would have traded a year of his life to ask those questions, even though he realized that a year of his life here might be no valuable commodity.
“We would have fled. But where would we have gone?” the woman cried. “We had the holy writings. Some of us had the golden vestments—not all. Those few who survived and knew where everything was had purposefully clouded minds, lest they torture us and, in crying out, give away all our secrets.” She raised her head with bleak pride.
Quintus tightened his hands. Secrets of the Naacals— scrolls, tablets, the gods only knew what else—it was a trove that the Black Naacals would kill to possess. Even if it were useless, they would kill to prevent anyone else from possessing it.
Secrets. He could well imagine that these folk would have them. But was this all they could imagine to do with powers more awesome than any he could conceive of—to serve and to fear and to hate? They had consented to pass under the yoke, after all.
In the next moment, his mouth twisted. How much better had he prevailed? And found himself in just the same plight, forced to serve those he hated. But compared with the Black Naacals’ mastery, that service seemed like the most loving care.
“I know your thoughts, young lord.” The woman’s voice was bitter. Draupadi crooned something comforting, but the woman shook her head. “You look at us. You are a warrior and you look at us, and you think, ‘Why did they submit? Why did they not all flee?’
“Some of us tried. Hulagu actually made it out of here. He said he was a child of the deep desert: A star had led him to us, and another would whisk him away. He even returned with men of his clan. They had hoped for a fight against the dark. But even they, who made drinking cups out of enemies’ skulls, became as we are, the creatures of the Black Naacals.”
“After they took Kinte’s son—and her poor body for their altars—Rehu and Cho tried. They had all the water we could spare—” The woman held her fingers to her lips. At some point they had been badly broken and poorly set.
“But they came … they came by night… and they took them and staked them out beyond the arch. And when the sky and sun steadied once more, we saw them again. Or rather their bones. Then the times shifted once again and, when we could look again, nothing was left.”