“Hold!”
Ssu-ma Chao’s shout and the sting of Quintus’s bronze talisman came simultaneously.
And in the next minute, he heard the measured boom of drums and the ringing of bells and gongs.
“Yueh-chih!” The cry went up.
Of all the dwellers in this waste, they were the most feared, for they lived as if it held no dread for them. They had no fixed villages, only tents; and they rode where they would. Wise in the ways of storms, they attacked just as a caravan—even one as well-armed as this—began to dig itself out of a dying storm. And they had been at feud with the Ch’in, fighting back and forth across the desert, for more years than anyone but a Ch’in historian could count.
The Yueh-chih rode shrieking as if the buran had renewed itself. Nearby, someone screamed, then gurgled as a long lance transfixed him. Two Romans leapt from the sand and hacked at the barbarian with their swords. Hoarse voices shouted in Ch’in…. All around the camp, soldiers fought to raise the spears that might give them some defense against a mounted force. The Yueh-chih were counting on speed and confusion, on striking as the caravan struggled out of the sand before its guards, exhausted from simply enduring the buran, won back to full strength. It was as good a strategy in its way as the testudo, and no doubt as well practiced.
Quintus found himself in a line with the Legionaries, blood drying on his sword from lucky blows at shadows that had turned out to be Yueh-chih. The line was holding. He knew a moment’s pride, which faded as he remembered: The Yueh-chih, like all the nomads of the waste, were master archers. Let the wind die, and those of his men whom Parthian arrows had not slain might fall to this new enemy.
As it was, there were too many Yueh-chih. Kill one, or unhorse two, and more hoofbeats pounded out of the swirls of sand and dust. Their screams arched up, savage with hate. They must have known that this caravan was bound for the heartland of Ch’in and was guarded by soldiers in service to its Emperor.
Roman bones as well as Ch’in would litter the salt wastes of the Takla Makan. The drums and the gongs and the wind and the screaming struck like a head blow. Quintus was reeling….
A scream far overhead pierced the fog in which he stumbled. For one precious moment, the warring gusts of wind allowed a patch of clear sky to be seen. It was the violent blue that he had seen once or twice in the desert, broken by a streak of gold, winging to the east. It paused directly overhead and gave that shrill cry again—the call of an eagle.
Then battling wind gusts blotted out the sky once more. But Quintus’s head felt clearer than it had for months.
Will you believe me?
Speak. He greeted the voice erupting in his thoughts calmly. So many times he had heard it. So many times he had thought himself mad, unfit. He was about to die. There was no point in fighting it any longer. He was only sorry he could not see the spirit who had been first his genius loci and then the exotic who called herself Draupadi one last time.
They are too many.
He would have laughed, had his throat not been parched.
You must flee.
Another reason to laugh.
Where would we go?
Follow me.
He might as well fall on his sword now, saving the Yueh-chih or his own men the trouble of killing him as he broke his own battle line to listen to a demon.
I am no demon!
Not a demon? In the kuraburan, he had heard demons, giggling, threatening, hinting as this voice did not. And the bronze figure he bore had not grown hot. He thought that if he followed a demon’s advice, it might heat so that it would burn out his heart.
Show me, then.
There is a way. Follow. I will guide you.
“We can’t stay here!” he shouted.
Rufus’s eyes bulged in amazement.
“You want to be ridden down? The storm can’t last forever, and the instant it stops…”
Ssu-ma Chao, behind his guards and his shields, eyed him. The time Quintus had saved his life, he thought madness had inspired him. Now he was glad. The Ch’in officer might believe that he acted under some sort of inspiration. “Is this another of your omens?”
The gods bless him, even if he were their captor!
“Yes! Follow me!”
“Get the wagons!”
By all the gods, how much had the merchants paid Lucilius, that he took care for the wagons?
“No! They’ll protect us from arrows, maybe!” Rufus drew on his years of experience as the senior centurion of a Legion. “All right, sloggers, we’re moving out. Follow the tribune….”
One of the men swore horribly at the wind. Once again, it shrieked up into a gale. “We’re marching into that?”
“You want them drinking wine out of your skull?”
Carts creaked, beasts brayed or neighed in protest or fear. Someone shouted in outrage as a camel bit him. Incongruously, another driver laughed. And the Yueh-chih kept coming.
“Wait for the next gust!” Quintus screamed before he knew the words were out of his mouth.
He had no weather wisdom here, but he knew storms. The worst wind and rain storms to beat his valley often struck once, tempted people and animals out of shelter into a brief, sunlit calm, then hit again with renewed fury. This storm, after a brief lull, was building up again.
Only this time, it might be their friend.
Now!
The gust he was hoping for struck, and he bowed beneath it, letting it pass by.
“Move!” he shrieked, wild as the Yueh-chih himself.
Beasts and carts struggled forward. He had the sense of struggling forward down a corridor formed of blowing sand. Shadows formed, and he heard roaring, as if the river of lamentation he had once heard in his dreams flowed outside the “walls.”
No sand stung his face. He put up a hand. No grit, flying by, cut into it. The only sand, in fact, that he saw formed the walls of the passage that engulfed them. Outside, the triumphant screams of the Yueh-chih died. How long before they realized they had been balked of their prey?
Go while you can.
He gestured and shouted, his order seconded from among the clutter of carts along the battered line of march, and what beasts still survived.
The carts creaked. The beasts moaned resentment at having to move directly into what they must surely fear as wind and pain. Whips cracked; the bells on the harnesses of horses and camels rang; and the remnants of the caravan lurched forward.
“To the cross with it! I can’t see a damned thing!”
Lucilius’s voice, from high overhead. By all the gods, the shifty bastard had gotten Ssu-ma Chao’s chariot moving, had climbed its tower, and was getting a free ride.
If you laugh now, you won’t be able to stop. Rufus will punch you out, and they’ll load you on the wagons. And what will you do then?
A high giggle broke through, but he suppressed the gales of laughter that would have unmanned him.
They plowed onward through the sand. They had been marching for hours. They had never done anything else but march. Their service in the Legions before Syria, the destruction of their fellows at Carrhae and their proconsul, their betrayal, their enslavement—all that seemed far away. The world had narrowed—from the desert to this corridor of still air in the midst of the worst storm Quintus had ever dreamed of.
Was he dreaming of this? Dreaming men did not thirst or hunger as he did: He was sure of that.
He marched, the ground-eating steady Legions’ pace. After awhile, Rufus barked the first words of a marching song. His cracked voice made a horrible hash of the tune, but he sang it through to the end, and some of the men echoed him. Damn, was a hobnail working through Quintus’s boot into his foot? It felt that way.
Equally barbarous to the ear was the babble of chants and frantic prayers to what had to be at least three separate barbarian pantheons. At a signal from Ssu-ma Chao, Ch’in soldiers fell back, lest the merchants panic and try to break away, perhaps through the wall, thus betraying all of them to the Yueh-chih.
That was prudent. But Quintus thought it was misplaced precaution. Already they had marched for hours and come—how far? Farther than could be guessed in that time, he imagined… and he felt as worn as if he had marched for a full day at a cavalry pace again.
Nearby, Ssu-ma Chao’s huge chariot rattled and creaked. Long ago, the senior officer had abandoned it, to walk or ride alongside his men. Lucilius, though, remained in its tower. For what advantage his presence as a lookout might provide, Quintus forebore to protest.