There was silence for a long moment as a blood-tinged moon rose higher in the sky. Despite the hiss and moan of wind and sand, the desert itself was very still, as if waiting, listening. Even the bells of the camels’ harness—for not all of them had been unloaded yet—ceased their clanging.
“You are here,” Quintus said to the Armenian. “And we are here. We must cross this desert together if any of us are to live. Now you see us deprived of our arms, leashed. But do not mistake me: The dog can still bite. Do you understand me?”
The merchant nodded and edged back from the fire, secreting the Roman coins in some hidden fold in his robes.
“Well played!” came the strongly accented voice of Ssu-ma Chao.
Enough laughter, already! Quintus swung around to face the Ch’in officer. But that laughter did not come from the Ch’in officer. It was hard to see his face in the darkness, lit only by flickering torches, and harder yet to read his narrow, slanting eyes. One hand going to his sword—I am unarmed! Quintus regretted once again— Ssu-ma Chao jerked his head about, glaring in a way that betokened ill to any of his men who broke discipline.
Rough-voiced laughter rose again. This time, both Romans and Ch’in faced each other, confused and angry, but not yet ready to attack.
“Keep your hands where they can see them,” Quintus heard Rufus pass the order to the remnant of Rome’s Legions. “But be ready to grab any weapon you can.”
More laughter, from a different direction yet. More wind. A gust blew out half the torches. The remaining ones flickered as men hastened to shield them.
Ssu-ma Chao held out his own hands. It was a gesture of fighting man to fighting man. This servant to an unknown king had had enough respect for the Romans to disarm them, but Quintus believed that for all the other’s respect, he was going to take no risks.
You didn’t have to be a philosopher to guess the stranger was just as confused as Quintus—and just as worried. For a soldier, the unexpected was as much the enemy as the men he must face.
Gesturing to Arsaces, Quintus started forward. Clearly it was time, and past time, to talk to the commander of this caravan.
Harsh sand stung his cheeks like a contemptuous slap.
The wind rose to a derisive howl. Beneath its jeering laughter, Quintus heard the fatal clamor of bells, drums, and gongs.
7
No sword, no shield! Might as well tie them down and leave them to die in the sand. Quintus, wasted but a bitter, fleeting thought on that, then wheeled his men.
“Form up!” he shouted over the clamor. Other orders rang out—the Ch’in officer, for one, and steady as the hills of Rome, Rufus’s trained bellow.
And form they did, a diminished, unarmed square. They showed no fear, and Quintus’s heart swelled with pride.
Abruptly, the ground shuddered. Quintus fell, floundering onto his knees. His head spun. Around him, horses screamed, and camels, roused from stolid sleep, bellowed outrage. Not far away, two tents swayed—collapsed, one of the torches propped before them falling onto the crumpled stuff of their walls and setting them ablaze.
“Romans!” Rufus again. “Form up!”
Some of his men must be still standing, fighting fear before whatever enemy out of the desert struck. Quintus found his feet. He had to get to his men. He had to try, even if the earth opened before him and swallowed him in the next instant—or of what use were all his fine thoughts on honor?
From all across the desert, echoing in the vastness of sand and sky, wild laughter shrieked up. Sand whirled down from the hooded crests of great dunes, hissing like a plague of serpents.
A burning stick rolled clear of the tents. Quintus scooped it up, then grabbed as many other sticks and torches as he could span with two hands. Fire was a weapon, not just against men, but against the dark. Let his men have weapons of fire, and it would not be long before they could win others. Unless there were archers, and he did not think archers could aim true in this wind.
The gongs, drums, and bells made his head ache. Around him, the sky whirled even as the earth rocked under his nailed boots. The never-to-be-forgotten clash of swords on shields, the screams of dying men rose again: The Ch’in were under attack.
His men could do nothing without arms, and it was he who must arm them. Mindful of his footing on this treacherous ground, Quintus could not carry enough, and if he fell, he could well become a torch himself.
“Torches! Get torches!” he shouted.
The hissing rose. “Serpents! Dis take them, snakes!” A man screamed in panic, then fell silent. Quintus hoped he had not died, either by snakebite or as a bad example. Briefly, he envied the Persian horseman his boots. Then, he had staggered within reach of the pitifully small Roman square and pressed torches into the hands of the men in the front ranks.
Hard to fight without the Eagles gleaming overhead, a reflection of a Legion’s honor. But Rufus was at his shoulder, the aristocratic tribune nearby.
“Let’s make a break for it!” Quintus heard one of them urging. They were prisoners; they were Romans, bred to war, in the midst of clients and barbarians. In the confusion that was battle, how difficult would it be to overpower a merchant train, compelling wagons and beasts to take them where they wanted to go?
And where was that? Without a guide, into a painful death by thirst in the waste. And without their Legion’s Eagle, having no honor to return with, they might as well be dead. Assuming they survived the earth tremors, the snakes that even now men were screaming about, and whatever bandits who now attacked Ssu-ma Chao and his men.
“Don’t be an ass!” By all the gods, Lucilius, talking of courage for once. “All these damned merchants have guards, anyhow.”
Quintus had not forgotten that either. Ssu-ma Chao’s curiosity had saved their lives … with such honor as might be in these queer lands. He gestured Rufus to order the men forward.
When the order came for a testudo, he had to choke back laughter that threatened to unman him. How could men lacking shields form that tortoise that so often let Romans advance under a hail of sword strokes and arrows?
“Use your torches! One man guards, one picks up swords or shields, one passes them on!”
It was some slight hope. If the men used the torch as they might use the gladius, then they might even have some slight chance to take an enemy’s weapons.
So Rufus too must be counting on the high winds to discourage archers. No archers? Quintus could not see past the blowing sand. The laughter that rode it haunted him. In the instant it cleared, would he see again the sight that robbed them of hope at Carrhae? Thousands upon thousands of riders, and The Surena himself, his face like a mask of Pluto with its too-large dark eyes? With every hiss of the wind, every beat of the drums or peal of bells, he thought of the death of Legions and fought despair.
In front of him, shields were going up—of no design he was familiar with, but shields nonetheless. Bearing almost the first of them, a Legionary stepped before him, guarding him. Now they were marching over twisted bodies.
Blood seeping from the dead men’s wounds should have turned the sand into slippery muck. But no blood had flowed. And after their first, initial panic, no Romans screamed of snakes, even though the sounds of hissing and huge, thick bodies cutting through the sand made each waking thought a victory against horror.
Sand and sound enveloped them. This was like fighting in a fog—like the foul mist in the swamp they’d hidden in after the massacre. Quintus’s throat was dry from fear and from screaming orders, constant shouting so his men would know he still lived.
Again, the ground shook. A rumbling and a sort of pouring sound reminded Quintus of stories he had heard of the mountains beyond Gallia Transalpina, how snow slid in vast waves down their slopes, breaking and burying men and towns unfortunate enough to be engulfed. This would be a dry death, burial by sand—though burial it was.
A crack formed in the earth, and he jerked one of his men back before he stumbled into that dark crevasse. If this kept on, the earth itself might snap them up. On they moved with the purpose that long discipline had fixed in them, ready to fight with what arms they could pick up from those bodies on the ground. Mysteriously dead; or were they? After all, a man could die of fear.
His grandfather would have scoffed at that. But the old man would have scoffed too at the dreams Quintus had had, dreams that had proven to aid him. And he certainly would have made Quintus throw away as a folly the little Etruscan dancer that had already saved his life so many times.