As a bribe, a reward? For good behavior?
“It is this miserable one’s hope,” Arsaces continued, “that you men of Ta-Chin will assist us as we journey into the deepest desert. And that you will beg whatever. spirits that you—sir, I think he probably is calling us barbarians, but doesn’t realize that it gives insult—bow to keep us safe, not only from bandits, but from the demons and their storms that haunt the Takla Makan.”
The Ch’in general approached Quintus. Lucilius, the other surviving tribune—who came from a noble family—must stand aside. It was to Quintus that Ssu-ma Chao bowed.
“Tribune!”
Rufus’ voice went hollow. Astonishing: Not even the cracking earth or hissing as of giant serpents frightened him. As one man, Quintus and Ssu-ma Chao pivoted to look where the centurion was staring.
They had a glimpse of yellow-white bone, as the bodies dissolved before their eyes, then those bones themselves became dust, to mingle with the grit.
Even Quintus found his fingers moving in a gesture that the countryfolk along Tiber bank used against demon ills.
The evil laughter had died away along with the clangor of drums, bells, and gongs. No serpents writhed through their minds. Only a slight wind blew, scattering the dust that had been their mysterious enemy.
Quintus rested a hand on the centurion’s shoulder. It twitched once, then firmed as Rufus regained his calm.
“Saves us the trouble of burying them. Or burning them.” The centurion might never have cried out in alarm. He turned away, as if the entire matter were of little interest to him.
Quintus, following him and Ssu-ma Chao, spared a glance back. Etched into the sand were the shapes of their enemies. Then the wind hissed over them, and even that trace of them disappeared into the desert.
8
“Do you see anything new from that perch of yours?” Lucilius shouted up at Quintus.
He shook his head, then realized that the patrician couldn’t see the gesture.
Desert. Always desert. And to think he had found Syria dry. He had never imagined how many shades of gray and dirty yellow a desert might hold. The Takla Makan was so dry that he couldn’t even test out if Lucilius had been right in comparing it to Trachonitis, where birds fell dead when a serpent crossed their shadows. There were no birds. Here even carrion eaters could not beat the desert sun and sand to their prey.
From his perch on Ssu-ma Chao’s chariot, with its high wheels that made it impressive, if foolish, for desert travel, its built-up body, and its crow’s nest of a tower that let a battle commander observe beyond the fog of grit and dust that accompanied battle or the passage of its spoked wheels, all Quintus could see was desert. Dunes coiled like the skeletons of sea-serpents preserved beneath the immense, distant bowl of the cloudless sky. One day, you saw another one writhing on the horizon. An hour, a day’s march, you thought, and you would pass it by. Three days later, camels, carts, horses, and weary men trudged by it, antlike against its immensity. And if it chose, at that moment, to fall…
To drown in sand. Best not to think of it; such ideas dried the mouth, and it was not yet time to drink.
By all the gods, even the scummiest puddle left in a Tiberside backwash would taste like wine. And the most priceless of the drivers’ hopes was the least likely: that somewhere in the midst of the Takla Makan, in the deepest, most cruel heart of the waste lay an oasis in which a crystal spring bubbled forever. Visions were not for Romans, of course; but Quintus would not need to be a soothsayer to think of men dying in the sand, dragging themselves forward in the hope of reaching such a place or calling for it with their last breath.
It would be easy, in that monotony, to drift away from the caravan, away from the path that must be seared into the eldest drivers’ memories. It would be easy, in a wilderness in which all sounds were strange and it was impossible to tell what was near from what was afar, to miss the onset of bandits from behind some dune and to leave one’s bones along the line of march beside those other sand-etched skeletons of heedless men and their beasts. They had already passed too many such.
The Ch’in general’s chariot might be an old-fashioned, cumbrous thing, but its tower provided a vantage point from which a canny leader might spot raiders and save his men’s lives … until the next peril.
There were no bandits today. Those were said to be mostly Parthians, whose skill with horse and bow (Quintus winced) fitted them well for a guard’s role. And he had seen none of the men native to this area—Hsiung-nu or Yueh-Chih. Ssu-ma Chao seemed to regard those tribesmen as a ferocious cross between barbarians and vermin, and at perpetual war with his Empire.
Quintus wondered if he would ever wish to see bandits, just to break the monotony. Now the world seemed to have fallen away from them. There was only desert. True, the North showed blue shadows that Arsaces swore were mountains. And Ssu-ma Chao had actually consented to speak of them, calling them heavenly, longing in his voice as he described the snow melting and round lakes hidden like treasure in silent valleys. After weeks in the desert, Quintus no longer believed in such possibilities. There was only desert: Where the desert stopped, chaos began—or perhaps those rivers of Hell that he remembered from his dream.
He no longer dreamed of the Tiber, and for that he was dimly glad. This was no land for dreams of home or that gentle spirit he remembered. Instead, sometimes, he woke, breathing hard, almost remembering the shadows he thought had impelled him forward the night they had fought those black-clad … creatures he could not name men. Demons, were they? He dared not say, and the merchants who prodded each other and muttered among themselves when he passed were not saying either.
However, if that battle had not won them the Eagle, it had won them Ssu-ma Chao’s gratitude for as long as it might last. It had earned them their weapons back. A fine thing, that—for while even Ch’in soldiers valued fire as a weapon, Quintus never wanted again to order an advance armed only with torches.
In that night, they had gone from prisoners and slaves to honored hostages, almost guests and allies. There were camels to ride and carts to bear whatever burdens Rufus would permit them to: “Rome’s pace, Rome’s race” meant very little here.
And Quintus thanked all the gods for these concessions. It was hard enough to travel the waste as hostages; it would have been intolerable to march as slaves, bound and guarded, in the dust-choked tail of the caravans.
“Descend from Olympus, why don’t you, oh lofty one? Lucilius’s voice took on an edge. Ssu-ma Chao’s favor extended to all the Romans. But he treated Quintus as their leader, and the equestrian tribune knew that rankled in what passed for the aristocrat’s heart.
“Right now!”
He wished he didn’t have to. Somehow, the chariot felt right—albeit toplofty. It would balance poorly in a fight. But then it was for a king or general, not a warrior. You wanted a lower chariot and a driver as close to you as your own heart to guard you while you drew arrow, your focus so intense that you saw not a man, not a limb, but only the spot to be pierced. He had been a charioteer, and he had been a warrior, driven by … Involuntarily, Quintus’s hand sought out the bronze talisman.
What were these fancies? They were not his memories. The desert bred madness in a man. The drivers swore that a man who strode out at noon with an uncovered head would die, his brains seethed to mush in his skull. Most of the Legionaries carried their helms and wore instead woven hats. (Rufus had broken at least one vinestaff across the back of a fool who thought to lighten his load by discarding his helm. Rome’s mules they were and would remain, even here as they marched on World’s End.) Alexander, in the waste of Gedrosia, must have worn similar headgear. The thought brought him no comfort. Alexander had all but died in the waste, and his stars—unlike Quintus’s own—were fortunate.
Nor did the stories that the camel drivers told in gleeful singsong around the fire, with sidelong looks to make certain that the strangers, the Romans, were sufficiently horrified as Arsaces translated them: storms bad enough to flense skin off bone and suck the water from a man’s body, leaving it a husk as if the embalmers of Egypt had been at it; the demons of the waste that gibbered at noon or whenever a man was too tired to turn a deaf ear to them; the treacherous sands that could engulf a town as easily as a man, then spit it up the way the Maelstrom with one contemptuous swirl could hurl the shattered remnants of a ship onto shore.