“Do you see anything now?” From time to time, he would call up to Lucilius. The answers grew lurid, then puzzled. Then Lucilius fell silent.
Arsaces joined Quintus as he marched. He led a horse, he who never willingly walked when he could ride. He paused, and Quintus, perforce, had to pause also. “The horses are tiring. If we don’t rest them, they’ll drop where they are.”
“When you know where we are, we can rest,” Quintus snapped. He was sorry he had stopped. The brief pause had freed his body from a merciful numbness in which leaden arms and legs performed their duty. Now his back was afire from the weight of his kit, and his limbs prickled as if he had been staked out on an anthill.
Arsaces’s bloodshot eyes would have flashed with anger if he had had the strength.
“Some deva has us in his hand,” he muttered. “May he set us down soon.”
The march dragged out. No one bothered now to question or to speak. They were all too weary. Bona dea, Quintus longed for sunlight, for water, even for a chance to drop to the sand and sleep.
Come. This way.
He shouted, wordlessly. All along the line of march, people cried out in surprise and spurred camels and horses to new effort. Their last effort, Quintus felt certain.
This had better be quick, he told … whatever. Who do I think I’m talking to? We are all dreaming, and soon we are all going to be dead, wandering in the desert after a storm and a battle.
“Ho!”
Lucilius’s voice, arching up, and cracking as he called out.
“What… you see?” Rufus grunted, not waiting for a tribune to ask.
“Up ahead,” he called. “The clouds are breaking up!” His voice cracked once again, this time not from thirst. “By the breasts of Venus, I can see the sun!”
9
“Faster,” Ssu-ma Chao muttered. His chariot rumbled forward, the tower to which Lucilius climbed creaking as the wheels bumped over the rock-strewn sand. “The sun….”
The Ch’in soldiers urged men and beasts to greater efforts. A packhorse tried to hurl its head up and scream defiance as if it were a warhorse, but its heart broke, its knees buckled, and it sank dead in its traces. Too desperate to unload it, the merchants pushed on by. After a moment, the driving yellow sand behind them hid it.
And still the Ch’in officer pushed for greater speed.
Bleary-eyed, Quintus looked along the plodding line of Legionaries. Could they even complete this day’s march—whatever you called a day in this no-place of driving sand—let alone quicken their pace? Their faces were gray with exhaustion and grit, but their eyes blazed.
“At the cavalry’s pace,” he ordered. He remembered how they had marched, hours upon hours in the hot Syrian sun, with those Nabataean and Armenian traitors jeering and the proconsul thinking only of his precious son and his horses. His heart would burst, and he would lie beneath the sand, like that packhorse. They all would, except maybe Lucilius. He wanted him to come down from his perch and march like a Roman, but…
“Sun. And sky! It’s blue. By all the gods, it’s a beautiful day!” Lucilius shouted.
A weak cheer rose from the Legionaries.
“All right now, none of that,” Rufus ordered. “On the double, now!”
Ahead of them, a ray of sun broke through the opaque walls that had encompassed them for so long. One ray, then another, then seven, brushing across their foreheads with the touch of a mother on a fevered child’s brow.
Ssu-ma Chao tripped and measured his length. Instead of struggling to his knees and glaring at anyone who had seen him lose his dignity, he knocked his head against the sand as if the light were his Emperor. That was not sweat that ran down a nearby soldier’s drawn face, leaving a clean streak in the mask of sand and dried sweat that coated it. It was not sweat that ran down Quintus’s face, either.
With the sunlight came fresh breaths of air. He would have thought he’d had enough winds for a lifetime—the howls, the screams, the battering gusts. This came as a reminder of green hills and hidden valleys, of the blue mists and shadows of his lost home. It soothed his parched skin as if he ducked his head into a mountain stream. And, despite its gentleness, where it brushed against the walls that had been their protection and their trap the rush of sand and gravel thinned and the thin shriek of the wind that kept it blowing about them grew fainter than the highest notes of a flute, rising past a man’s hearing to the level of a night flyer’s hunting song. Now the sunlight filtered through it, kindling the ugly ochres and gray into rich saffrons and golds. And ahead of them, they could see the glowing blue of a tranquil sky.
Behind the Romans, wailing prayers of thanks rose up, almost as hideous as the wind. Quintus could imagine how the barbarians were kneeling and rubbing their faces on the rock. Not so much as one Roman broke ranks: They stood, waiting for orders. And Lucilius dropped with more speed than Quintus would have thought he had left from the chariot’s tower to stand with his fellows.
“You put heart into us for this last dash,” Quintus said.
For once, there was no mockery in the patrician’s gaze.
“Last dash to where?” he asked.
Perhaps he had earned the right to that much irony.
With a final sigh, the last of the sand fell. And the lost caravan stood forth on land that was not covered with grit and gobi, but honest rock. Ahead of them stretched a narrow course sloping down past tall poplars and gleaming rhododendrons into a valley guarded by rock cliffs that jutted up like columns carved and melded together in the morning of the world. The pathway—wide enough for six men to walk abreast or a wagon to traverse carefully—wound past a rock spire. Some cut in the rock caught the sunlight, which pooled there, forming a globe of light from which rays issued.
The light brightened past bearing, then faded. Beyond that rock spire, as much as they could see, stretched a green field tippled with gold and red wildflowers. Willows swayed gently by the deep blue curve of a mountain lake. Beyond, more cliffs rose, sheltering the valley.
The quiet all but sang in their ears. No screams, no hoofbeats or drums, and no whine of Yueh-chih arrows, thank all the gods. Without need of orders, Roman and Ch’in soldiers wheeled to guard the rest of the caravan as it coiled about the entrance to the valley. One by one, they stripped themselves of the heavy felts they no longer needed to wear.
Were they dead? Quintus saw no asphodel on the valley floor. Nothing dead could be as thirsty as Quintus, or as tired. “We are far off my reckoning,” Ssu-ma Chao murmured. “I have never heard of this place, and no one I know has ever seen it. I see no mountains, or I would swear we had passed over the desert into the Heavenly Mountains of the North.”
He clapped his hands. Merchants, horsemen, and camel drivers attended him while restraining their eager beasts, but their eyes constantly wandered to feast on the green and blue that stretched out below them.
For all his cynicism, the horseman Arsaces swore by his many devas, then choked, “In the midst of the desert, a crystal fountain,” he whispered. “I would have taken haoma that it was but a tale told round a fire in the desert.”
Rufus cleared his throat, looked for a place to spit, then, obviously, thought better of it. “That looks like real water to me,” he said. “Are we going to just stand and admire it?”
Already scenting it, the horses had pressed forward. Even the camels moaned and quickened their gait. Saddles and packs hung low on their backs’: The humps in which they stored the precious fluid that made them such fine desert travelers were almost flat. A cart overturned as the beasts drawing it swerved too sharply in their eagerness to get to the water.
“All right, wait your turns!”
The wind blew, overpowering the stinks of frightened, sweaty men and animals with the temptations of water and growing things. The same longing that drove the beasts forward shone in the Romans’ eyes. Quintus wanted nothing as much as to stretch out full length by that blue pool and slake his thirst. He and his men joined the other soldiers and the caravan drivers in restraining the animals. After surviving a desert storm and the Yueh-chih, they should not fall victim to their own eagerness in sight of rest and water.
The air filled with noises as those beasts too weak to go any further in safety were unharnessed or relieved of packs and led down to the pool, where others would have to restrain them from drinking till they swelled from it. But the choking dust that rose in the desert was absent: Quintus watched the tally of soldiers, merchants, beasts, and carts.