“And when we looked back, we saw only desolation. Boulders had scoured the soil, bare to the very bones of the world. The land dried, and sand came, to bury the ruins of Uighur glory.
“Weeping, we made our way overmountain to Hind, those of us who did not despair, or plunge off the great peaks, or die for lack of breath. But we made our way down into rich fields that reminded us of the land we had lost.
“The people greeted us there beside rivers they called holy. When we named ourselves and spoke of our loss, they bowed and touched our feet. They heaped our necks with wreaths and scarves of honor. For ‘Naacal,’ they heard ‘Naga’—a holy people of their own. And indeed, it had been that those ‘Nagas’ were loyal daughters of the Motherland and Hind had been the jewel on her brow—as much as Mu. Even the symbol was the same. Draupadi?”
The woman gestured. The air around the nearest brazier shimmered, melded with the sparks, and formed the image of the seven-headed serpent that Quintus had convinced himself he had not seen on the cliff walls.
“Serpents,” she said. “It is the nature of man to fear them, and that is wise. But like fire, there is no need to hate. Do not your own priests venerate the serpent?”
Despite himself, Quintus smiled, remembering as a child how he had laid down a saucer of milk for the garden snake that coiled near the household shrine.
Still it was hard, hard to think of the desert through which he had passed in such pain and peril as a seabed— but his eyes had flinched from the noon glare on slick white patches uncovered by the wind, and when he had touched some of this strange sand to his lips, he had tasted salt.
You could still be in the desert. They could serve your head as they served the proconsul’s—hurling it into an entertainment to delight barbarians. Or your head could be curing in some Yueh-chih tent, ready for some unwashed carver to make into a drinking cup.
So he owed these people at least a hearing. And it was hard to look away from the woman, who spoke with a voice near that of his own genius loci.
Her eyes were upon him. “I told you, we cast our nets of illusion wide—and our nets of vision even wider.”
He looked down at the statue of Krishna.
“You have pipes—flutes, music, dancing—in your own land,” she was continuing. “There can be no pipes without his presence, somehow.”
There’s Pan or Silenus. It seemed useless to say so, however.
With a stubbornness he thought his grandfather would have approved of, for once, Quintus brought up what seemed to him the most telling argument against this madness. “Lady, you broke that shell. Then you reassembled it—I do not know how. But you knew where all its pieces were and why you did what you did.”
“Excellent!” Ganesha said, clapping plump hands together. “Look up!”
Quintus gazed up into the sky. Once again, the stars bloomed, even more brightly than in the deep desert.
“You see the patterns in the stars?”
Ganesha pointed out the ones Quintus had been taught as a boy. “When I was your age, there was no Hunter, no great or lesser Bear. We had the Naga, the Crown … ah, they are all passed. But the patterns shift in the sky. And when certain patterns emerge, then it is time for change in the world. As above, so below. It is a crucial time, and past time. Does it not seem to you that there is no order, no justice in the world, that all is confusion?”
His father dead afar, his pretty, vigorous mother withering, his grandfather dying, rigid in his bed, their lands lost. Betrayal in the desert, the slithering in the sand of serpents he could not hear, the vanishing of carts from the illusions that should have saved them.
What if you were not mad, but right, to sense that all was amiss?
He sat back down and used the scarf of honor to dab at his brow.
“Have you ever seen,” Draupadi asked, “men and women who resemble Ganesha and I? Who look like us, but with whom you would never sit, much less listen to unless you came armed and protected by strong amulets?”
Her hand moved over the water of the pool, and faces formed. “Have you seen any who look like this?”
Dark hair; eyes kept lidded, but dark and with fire in their cores; narrow-lipped mouths; a high-bred look, but one that seemed to raise his hackles the way the rustling of unseen serpents had outside Merv.
Twin to Draupadi, perhaps, but a twin as devoted to darkness as she seemed to the light.
“Those are the Black Naacals,” Draupadi told him. “For as the stars moved into their appointed patterns, they stirred. And we have been drawn from our long contemplations, and you from your proper life to stand against them.”
He was insane. In the morning, they would miss him. They would seek him out. And they would find him, his face twisted in a madman’s grimace, his hair torn out— that is, if they did not count him fled.
“Draupadi!”
Both of the creatures who called themselves Naacals stiffened as if scenting the air. It quivered, seemingly thickening, and from as far off as the cliff walls ringing the valley, Quintus heard the rustle of giant coils. Descending by night, seeking out the warmth of the camp, the lives of his men…
“No!”
“Hold!”
Ganesha picked up his scroll. Draupadi opened her hands in the gestures that Quintus had seen summon her illusions. For a moment longer, the air thickened and the rustling drew closer. Quintus drew his sword.
“You cannot slay the serpent with a sword,” Ganesha told him. “You need a bow—Gandiva, which only Arjuna might draw.”
“You do not need me,” Quintus told them. “My men do. Let me go to them.”
“The serpent has been contained, illusion banished with illusion. But I am no warrior, nor is Ganesha. For the serpent of the Black Naacals to be slain, we must have a man of war. You. And you must have weapons. It seems to me that, just as a bird flies, with the serpent that it has caught dangling from its beak, your Eagle plays a role in what we must do. And it may even be that you, like Arjuna, must seek out weapons that could wreck the earth. But better at your hands, should you err, than at those of the Black Naacals.”
From far across the lake, Quintus heard someone call out. The watch? Had the guards found someone slain, or discovered him missing? He glanced up. Banners began to fly at the horizon—crimsons and purples and golds— as the night sky dimmed, hiding the stars that he had heard signaled such war for the world. It was all but dawn, and he had never known.
He had passed the entire night in conversation with these Naacals or spirits—whatever they were, they were beings at least as strange as the genius loci of his childhood.
“It is time,” Ganesha said. He picked up the huge shell and blew into it, producing a cry that any trumpeter would have praised.
“You’ve given away your location,” Quintus pointed out.
“They do not seek us, but you,” Draupadi said. “And they bring news that you must hear.”
11
“Sir! Tribune!”
As if he had fallen asleep for a moment, his consciousness shifted. When he returned to awareness, he saw only barren rock: no carpets, no cushions, no old man with an elephant’s head and supple hands: only two priests or prophets in clean but threadbare robes, gazing at the sun as they performed morning prayers. Threads of incense spiraled up from sticks driven into the cracks in the stone slab on which they sat. Carpets and cushions were gone, and the lights in the water had winked out as if pulled beneath the ripples.
“Tribune! Where are you?” Quintus knew that familiar rasp, knew the pause that meant that Rufus was hand-signaling for scouts to flank the place on shore and a detachment to rush it.
Three men pounded through the passageway. Their swords were out, and their boots struck sparks from the stone.
“Hold!”
The Romans stood, gazing in amazement at the falls, the pools, and the priest and priestess seated placidly, their heels turned up in their laps, opposite one of their own officers.
The Legionaries firmed their grips on their swords. Ssu-ma Chao and his guards, spears at the ready, appeared behind them. The morning sun glinted on Lucilius’s fair hair.
Rufus glared, not at the priests, but at his officer. For going missing, for leaving him with another tribune whose orders he did not rely on. Quintus could only thank the gods he was an officer and not one of the men under the senior centurion’s authority. But there was more to his anger than that.