He should have expected that.
Seeing him search for weapons, Rufus went expressionless. It was worse than rage.
“They disarmed us, of course. Not that they think they need to worry. Just leave troublemakers and mutineers behind, and the desert will even save you the trouble of a burial party.”
“How long have I been out?” Quintus whispered it because he was afraid to ask. He held up a hand and was surprised at how it trembled—and that it did not hold the marks of great age.
“Long enough.”
It was not an answer.
“Why didn’t they…?”
Rufus looked grim. “We have lost enough Romans. We convinced these…”
Quintus stared at the centurion till the older man looked away. “We carried you ourselves. We tended you ourselves.”
“And they let you?”
“Drink this—no, slowly if you want to keep it down. Don’t spill any.”
The watered vinegar stung in his throat on the way down and brought tears to eyes made sore by the desert heat. Yet it tasted sweeter than the Lethe-water he had refused to accept from the treacherous creature who had posed as his own genius loci.
He felt strong enough to press the matter.
“They let you?” he repeated. “I want an answer, Centurion.”
“We were granted that much grace,” said Rufus. “I … convinced them.” The Roman’s powerful hand clasped and unclasped on the skin canteen he held.
Quintus glanced around the circle of Romans. They looked down. He must have begged. It would be poor thanks for his life to press the issue. Glancing up at the huge stars, he sought to change the subject.
“Is this the deep desert?” He had to ask it.
“This trifle of sand and stone? Hardly. The Ch’in tell me that we’ll be climbing into mountains that make the Alps look like meadows,” Lucilius’s light, cultivated voice came from across the tiny fire, like a surgeon’s fingers searching out a wound. “Then, the desert gets really bad. Like the stories of Trachonitis. Didn’t you ever learn about that from your tutors?”
Quintus could all but see the young patrician’s eyebrow arch up in disdain. However, they were now heading into a land where patrician, equestrian, and plebeian, or even officer and soldier, made less difference than the distinction between Roman and outsider—or between quick and dead. Even so, Lucilius couldn’t let go of his ingrained superiority.
Maybe it’s all he has. That voice in Quintus’s ears again. Was it the woman—Draupadi—he had dreamed of, or had he actually gained some wisdom in that nightmare vision of Hades?
“No? Where did you grow … well, not to make a short story longer than need be, Trachonitis is serpent and basilisk country. They say it is so bare that if the shadow of a bird falls across it, the bird falls dead.
“We owe you, though, Quintus. If it weren’t for those very convincing fits you threw, we’d have stopped in Merv. Forever.”
“With … the others?” He was glad for the darkness, which hid his blush at how hard it was to ask. “What happened to…”
Rufus hung his head. “Slaves, gods help them. Leastways, they’ve got skills, maybe they can buy themselves out….”
“If these barbarians follow decent laws,” Lucilius cut in.
“They’ve got the Eagles too. All but the one you almost got brained with. That’s the personal property of this Ssu-ma Chao, who wants to take it back with him to Ch’in to his Emperor. And us with it. He’s decided we’re auspicious for him, or some such thing. Strange fellows, these yellow barbarians, thinking defeated Romans a good omen. But it’s not for me to turn down a chance of not putting my head under the yoke.
“So we’re making the trip Alexander didn’t live long enough to complete. From Nisibis past Merv, upcountry to Marakanda and into the hills. Then down into the real desert that would have fried any Macedonian born. Dis take me, how do they pronounce these names?”
“Takla Makan Shamo,” Arsaces said. For once the mockery, an unwelcome twin to Lucilius’s scorn, was missing from his voice. That shook Quintus worse than a warning.
“It means, ‘If you go in here, you don’t come out.’ I have seen this desert. When I was young, I ventured across some small corner of it as a caravan guard. It is terrible, littered with the bleached bones of man, beast, and town. Truly, they also call it the Realm of Fire, but this fire is far from sacred.”
He watched the Romans with a mischief that had just better not turn to malice. “I would not swear this or take haoma to prove its truth, but this I will tell you.” He glanced about, as if searching for eavesdroppers. “Some say the desert is full of demons.”
Did the eavesdroppers for whom he sought have bodies at all? Arsaces gestured, a warding-off sign Quintus had seen before, though not from the usually skeptical Persian.
“Desert’s bad enough without you filling it with demons, man,” Rufus growled. His fingers went to his throat though he wore no amulet.
So. Disregarding Arsaces’s gabble about demons and bleached bones, Quintus looked out at the desert. If he judged by the number of riding animals alone, this was a smaller, faster caravan with which Quintus and the survivors closest to him rode. Traveling faster than the survivors of Crassus’s Legions, but by far on a longer journey.
He would never see his farm again.
He had not expected to. But then, he had not expected to live this long, either. Quintus glanced out beyond the flicker of tiny fires, the kneeling bulks of camels, into the desert. The night wind, cooling now, sent swirls of sand dancing up the dunes. In the firelight, the sand looked saffron, the color of a veil that a lady—or a spirit—might wear.
Far overhead, a star shot down through the heavens toward the eastern horizon. Quintus might have been a boy again, walking in the hills with his father or grandfather. Involuntarily, he smiled. His jaws ached, unfamiliar as the exercise was to them. It had fallen to the right: a favorable omen, thank all the gods.
He stared across the fire at the men who had kept by his side the most closely: Rufus, Arsaces, even Lucilius, and beyond them, other survivors of his Legion. Already, many had wrapped their heads in cloth, a trick borrowed from the caravan routes. Their eyes and teeth—almost all he could see for the swathings of coarse cloth—gleamed red in the firelight as they watched. He could see it now: If they wished to live, they would take on the ways of the desert until they ceased to look like Romans. Gradually, they would cease to be Romans, too. And then what would they be?
Subject people? People without a City or a name? You could not un-name Romans; you could only kill them. His father had died for that truth.
Best not think of it. He was alive. These were his men. They needed each other.
The wind danced down from the dunes he had mistaken for hills. So, he would never see his farm again, never buy it back and purify its altars. But what would he see? A new excitement flashed across his consciousness like the shooting star of a few instants back. It had looked like an eagle, returning in victory to its lofty nest.
Only imagine. He would see Marakanda, he thought. Who would have dreamed his path would cross Alexander’s? For a moment, joy blazed up in him. He suppressed it. It was unworthy, he told himself, to feel anticipation in the face of disgrace and defeat.
“Make no doubt about it,” Lucilius said. “We’re slaves too. Not fancy ones, the sort you show off at banquets. Gladiators, maybe.” He spoke as though he hated Quintus for smiling even briefly and all of them for continuing to exist.
He got up and wandered from the small fire.
Gladiators. Crassus, who had wreaked such vengeance when the gladiators revolted, had failed miserably against barbarians; Lucilius was never going to forget it. No wonder he didn’t seem as burdened by the loss of weapons as the rest of the veterans.
“Who needs a gladius when he’s got a tongue like that?” Rufus asked. His mouth worked as if he wanted to spit, but he forebore, as if oppressed by the dryness all around him.
In the darkness, a darker bulk rose. They could see a campfire shine as this new man moved away from it. The silhouette of helmet, padded armor, and spear was unfamiliar. By that, Quintus assumed the man must be a warrior of Ch’in, who had been watching his Roman captives. Lucilius pointed at the fire, then at a larger fire at the center of the camp. The man nodded. “No doubt he’s already started bargaining with the Ch’in,” Quintus murmured to the centurion. Rufus nodded, not bothering to look shocked as he might have done when they were all still an army and the distinction between patrician/officer and everyone else was still good for some power.