But he took that decorative, deceitful hand and drew Draupadi gently to her feet, holding her close against him. “I’ve come to take you out of here,” he said.
“There is only here,” she said. She shook her head, and her dark hair poured loose over those slender shoulders. He remembered the feel of that flow of hair in his hands. “Look about you,” she told him and smiled.
Lights. Water. As he watched, the light shifted, and now he stood on a spit of land he remembered well. So often in his childhood, he had used this place for a retreat. From it you could see the entire valley. Now Draupadi had found it to share with him forever.
Her eyes fixed on his, and, he could find no other word for it, drew him in. Her hands went to his chest, his shoulders, seeking to pull him down to rest on the carpets. The smell of her hair and flesh made him giddy. Sit and talk, he thought. What harm … talk? He doubted it. Never had they lain together. This might be their last chance. She would cast a veil of darkness over them, and together they would dream their last dream: that they were alone together.
But it would all be a lie. The Black Naacals would stand witness and be ready to expose them to what remained of Quintus’s legions: a last betrayal as their officer abandoned them to lie in the arms of the woman who had bespelled them.
“It is time to go, Draupadi,” he said gently. She shook her head.
“We will get Ganesha and we will go.” The dark eyes flashed. Fear began to flicker in their depths, fear for her teacher? Then part of her was awake, part of her was fighting the influence of the drug.
“You have wandered far, Draupadi.” He could make a song of her name to lure her back. “Too far. Now, come back!”
He put a snap in his voice, hoping to shock her awake.
“Why should we leave?” she asked, still drowsy. “Here is quiet. Here is peace. Here is all we shall ever need.”
“Here is death,” Quintus said. “Have you forgotten? You are in the keeping of the Black Naacals, and so is the Eagle. If they learn to use it, they will let the seas flow out to cover half the earth, then rule over the other half. Do you remember the time before, when that happened? Do you remember?”
She shook her head, fearful and reluctant.
“Draupadi, you remember. I know you do.” He turned her face up forcibly to meet his eye to eye. “Do you want it to happen again?”
“No … oh no…” Tears spilled down her cheeks.
“Then you must come with me.”
She was faltering, weakening. He began to pull her toward the “water” that lay beyond her carpets.
The gong and horns rang out. Just let him get her back, and the Dark Ones could raise all the alarms they cared to. Almost, they drowned out a death shriek. Not Ganesha, please all the gods. Rufus, make them hold the line.
As if the man’s death fueled the illusions that the Black Naacals wanted Draupadi to cast, the images became stronger, fragmenting into a confusion of light, sound, and color. It was getting hard to breathe, let alone walk. Draupadi gasped and almost collapsed. If he had to carry her, how could he fight? He thought of the dagger he wore. Had she lived long enough among Romans to prefer their way out to surviving in any way that she might?
“I am not your enemy, Draupadi,” he muttered. “They are. Fight them.”
He pulled her along, expecting any moment a blow, screams of rage, perhaps, or some attack of the spirit that might leave him flat. Instead, she burst into tears. “I can’t!” she wept. “I am old. I am hideous. If I leave this place, I will die and crumble into dust.”
He had seen crying women before. Tears must mean she was weakening. He tugged this one past the bounds set by her illusions and her fears. She was clinging to him, her face close to his.
“Is that what you want, Quintus, mea anima?” Sarcastically, she brought out the Latin endearment. “This, for all time? Kiss me!” Her face, so close to his, shifted, the smooth tanned flesh shrinking from the bone, wrinkling almost into peeling strips. Her dark eyes glistened furiously in all-but-naked eyesockets, and her lips drew back from yellowed teeth. Her breath smelled not of cardamom, but carrion.
“This flesh you want—already, it rots and dies. Is my death what you want? Is this?” She tugged at her garments with one hand. Her breasts were no more than leathery flaps,
“Cover yourself,” he ordered. He tightened his hand upon her wrist, hating how the fragile bones felt as his fingers pressed against them. She screamed, high, anguished, and hopeless like a victim of sacrifice. If she were mad or permanently twisted—better dead. And better that she meet her fate with a clear mind.
What would his men say if they saw him dragging a skeleton across the floor and calling it by her name? They’d think he had run mad, and they would kill him.
Mistress of illusion, he told himself. And her illusions are twisted now.
Gods only grant she wake. He pushed her through a patch of light that showed her ravaged face far too clearly. For an instant, his feet “splashed” in illusion. Then he was walking on “dry land” once more, well away from where she had been set to ensnare him.
She collapsed, weeping without tears, a dry, tearing sound that subsided gradually into mourning without madness.
If he turned her around, would he see the lady or the hag?
“Tribune…”
Perhaps only Rufus’s voice could have forced him to that duty, the most merciless of any in his service. He bent, dagger in hand, over her. She lay, her eyes tightly shut in rejection, on her side now. Though she was less warm and beautiful than the illusion she had cast, she was still lovely.
“Mea anima, mea vita,” he whispered. “My soul, my life, awake. Look at me.”
The eyes remained stubbornly shut.
Who knew what voices were speaking to her within the confusion of her mind? Quintus thought. He had suffered such barrages himself. He shook her roughly, but she turned her face away again. Forgive me, he thought, and slapped her face. Her eyes flew open in rage—and to the sight of her face, reflected in his eyes and the blade he showed her.
“See yourself,” Quintus ordered. “You know the difference between truth and illusion. You are not a hag! And I will kill you myself before I let you be a traitor. You are Draupadi, and we need you. Now do you understand?”
“Alone,” she stammered, “…the water rises, the earth shakes … all alone, and death all around…” Her face began to shimmer, to decompose again, and she looked longingly at the stage set for her illusions.
Quintus bent his head and kissed her, hard and fast. “Never alone. Do you understand?”
She clung to him for one blessed instant, then pushed free.
“Ganesha,” she said, fear mounting. “And Lucilius tricked me.”
“We are ready to fight,” he told her. “Your part is over. Go back where you will be safe.”
“My part?” She was keeping pace with him as they hastened back to the waiting soldiers. “And there is no safety here.”
They reached the soldiers. She took up a position on one side of him, and the standard-bearer stood on the other.
Rufus barked the order to advance.
33
“Wait!” Quintus flung up a hand. For the first time, he countermanded one of the senior centurion’s orders. Despite their peril, the expression on Rufus’s face made him grin.
“Sir, they’ve killed one man already. They’re stronger, don’t you feel it?” For the first time, the senior centurion questioned an order. And it was a good question.
The lights under the huge dome were fading to the sullenness of a dying oil lamp, and with a smell even more foul. The darkness was gathering in the form of mists, a black dampness that raised hackles and a cold sweat. The eyes of the Legionaries showed white and shining against it. Some of the slaves had begun to tremble. One or two tried to drop to their knees, but the Romans at their sides held them up. They were used to discipline. Quintus hoped they would not try to bolt; it was too cruel to blame and kill men for a cowardice they had never been taught to withstand.
Now the clangor of the gong seemed to shed ripples of darkness, too. They gathered and flooded upward, as if to touch the Eagle. The bronze, which had blazed so brightly before its captivity, appeared to tarnish before the Romans’ very eyes: a bird in molt; a bird badly needing freedom from its confinement.