Overhead the eagle screamed. Lethe and land wavered. Well enough: They had been deceits. But the woman—Draupadi—also wavered. With a final cry, the eagle flew overhead, effortlessly fleeing Erebus for the freedom of the outer air. Quintus raised his head to follow it. Sunlight broke through the light that had shone upon Lethe before, making it a sham and a counterfeit. He was aware of thirst again, but not for this draught of illusions and forgetfulness.
“What must I do?” he asked Draupadi.
“What you did before, without knowing. You must follow the eagle to where the water rises in the desert, where the rock gapes open, and where serpents grow from the stone. You must seek me and my guide. You will be commanded to bow to gods not your own and wield weapons unlike any you have ever known. Do you think you have suffered? In our last battles, we commanded armies. Now, we have only what we can win.
“My dearest, we need you, but I do not beg. Once, I begged not to be stripped before a court. They did not listen, so I never begged again. The only assurance I can give you is of pain worse than any you have known. Choose carefully. If you persevere, there, beyond the circles of the world, we may find triumph.”
She stood challenging him like a statue of Roma Dea herself. “Or you can kneel and drink here, and she will have you in charge. It is pleasure,” she said with faint disdain, “if not life or duty. But you will think you have your farm and your contentment. You may even enjoy it for as long as anything lasts. Which may not be long at all.”
The fires at her feet flared, and smoke rose up from them to cover her. When it reached her head, he knew, she would be gone. The high sweet music of flutes and drumbeats grew shrill, but even more compelling. Draupadi hurled her veil over head and face.
“Or you can face trial and judgment in one,” she murmured. “Follow me and follow the eagle—or remain here, for as long as ‘here’ remains.”
She leaned forward and touched her lips to his. Even through the saffron veil, he sensed their warmth and sweetness.
The smoke wreathed up and snatched her from his sight.
“Lady! Draupadi, don’t go!” he cried, reaching forward into the smoke. He brought his hands away scented with sandalwood—but empty. It seemed to him that he had spent his life with his hands empty of all but trouble. And now that seemed a grief intolerable to him.
“Come back,” he whispered again. His voice broke, and this time the tears did fall upon the asphodels. They melted at his feet. He was blinded, as if the incense fires that swept Draupadi from his sight now enveloped him.
His whisper echoed, distorted by illusion. Once again, the eagle cried from high overhead.
Come back? That was no wisdom for a man, a Roman.
“I will follow you,” he whispered with more fervor than he had sworn when the Legion’s brand was set into his flesh.
“Well judged!” Three voices so closely linked that they might have come from one throat rang out. “You have passed sentence on yourself.
“You will be removed from Erebus and restored straightaway to the upper air. So let it be set down.”
The eagle shrieked. And he was sinking from his knees onto his face lest he see his judges before his death. Flute music and drums went up again, and he lay in darkness. Beneath him, the land shook. He tried to grasp a rock, a root, then anything at all, but it was all illusion.
He cried out once, wildly, as the earth cracked and gaped open, and metal flamed far, far below in the rock that underlay desert deeper than he had ever seen. Then he was falling, falling through it … past a blessed glimpse of clear water running over rock onto a woman whose cascade of night-black hair flowed over her wet body and hid it. Just as well, he thought, with other eyes glowing in the night, watching her, watching him. As he fell past them, too, he realized that others were watching them, and the eyes—the lambent hostile eyes—that spied upon the watchers themselves were even farther from being human than they were from being friends. Even the touch of those eyes was intolerable pain. He shouted once, and then the speed of his fall snatched thought and breath from him.
5
His helmet had fallen across his eyes: He was blind, and he was down. Hands pinned Quintus to the ground. Better to die than be taken prisoner by Parthians! He struggled wildly, but in silence. He was no match for the man he fought.
“Dis take you, man, what do you think I’m doing?” came a harsh voice. “Help me hold him. I don’t want to put him out again. He might never wake up. Sir, sir, will you stop it! You’re among friends!”
The big hands tightened on Quintus’s shoulders, shaking him until his ears rung and he lost the will to struggle. He sank back, panting against the rough comfort of rolled cloaks. Raising one hand to his head, he brought it away damp, and a cloth fell to his lap.
Surrounding him, looking more like cutpurses than Legionaries, was a circle of soldiers. It was Rufus, the senior centurion, who had subdued him. There was a bruise starting near his mouth.
Quintus flung up a hand, as if he had taken a telling blow in training.
“Ah! that’s better now.”
Grins flashed, as if the Legionaries really cared that their tribune had waked. That surprised him. He had heard mutterings about some of the young officers— Lucilius, for example—being arrogant know-nothings, more trouble than they were worth to honest soldiers. He had heard muttering about him, that he had about as much life as a deathmask and couldn’t take a joke if he found it in his pack.
But his men were relieved that he had wakened. Quintus found himself almost teary-eyed at that thought. He couldn’t let them see it, so he forced himself to look around, as if inspecting them.
Squatting a little behind them was Arsaces, the Persian, his eyes and teeth flashing in the light of a tiny fire. Quintus squinted at it, then sniffed, remembering the sandalwood and frankincense of Draupadi’s incense.
No such luck. Surrounding him were the smells not of a Roman force correctly dug in for the night, but of the confusion that passed among the easterners for camps: dung, smoke, sweat, and beasts. The fire hurt his eyes. Looking away Quintus saw the bulk of camels out beyond the tents and bedrolls of … was this a caravan?
Where were they? It felt strange, almost naked, to lie around a fire like a boy, camping out on the hillside, rather than in the orderly security of a proper castra.
Everything had changed. He looked up into the sky, searching for some sort of permanence—Orion hunting his Bear, perhaps. Here in the deep desert, the stars too looked different. Orion might still hunt somewhere, for all Quintus knew, but the stars were not the familiar twinkles of Tiber valley, blurred by the mists from the water or even the aloof gleams of the sky above the drylands of Syria. Above this land, enormous fires burned in the clear blackness. Daunted, his gaze slipped to the crest of a hill. The night wind blew, and pale swirls rose from the crest, dancing down the ridge like dust from the coils of a huge serpent. Was this the deep desert? He had thought Syria had been barren. He had never imagined such desolation. And he feared worse was to come.
But there was another question he must ask first.
“The men?” he whispered. “Our Eagle?”
Rufus brought a fist down slowly onto the blankets in which Quintus was wrapped.
“You saw the proconsul.” The senior centurion didn’t ask a question, but stated fact.
They all bent their heads, nodded. No point in asking about the Eagle, then, and making Rufus drag it out of the silences in which he buried dishonor.
“Died like a Roman, at the last. He got his honor back. Protecting the Eagles. That was when you fell. Trying to guard him.
“Aren’t many of us left. We started out with—what? Some twenty-eight thousand of us and four thousand cavalry? Maybe ten thousand made it out. Most of them—they’re sending them on to Merv along with the standards.”
Yes. Quintus remembered. The Eagles would tarnish on the altars of whatever gods the Parthians worshipped.
The young man gestured vaguely. He didn’t see ten thousand captive Romans, much less hear them or smell the wounds or sickness that must inevitably accompany so great a throng of prisoners. He thought he remembered…. He dropped his hand to his waist. No belt. His fingers groped at his side for the weapons he had been trained to keep ready to hand. Nothing.