…In Virata’s court, he had been useless. Worse than that, he had been a laughingstock, and his brother the king, the hapless player of dice, had been a gambler who couldn’t lose. But he, Arjuna, the champion of that Yuga or any other age, had been a dancing master. No, worse: dressed as a woman, cossetted by the royal ladies, and consulted about brocades and paints as well as the placement of hands and feet in the ancient dances. He had not been able to shield Draupadi then either….
He ran toward his own kit, propelling the woman and the old man before him. Shouldering into his gear with the ease of long practice, he jogged toward where the others had formed up. Even Lucilius was ready, his gambler’s eyes glistening with appreciation of the danger.
“They’re screaming down there,” someone remarked. “The wind brings up the sound.”
“You think there’s enough of us to take them?” Lucilius asked.
Quintus’s eyes flickered from the Romans to the Ch’in soldiers. Were they all ready? Could they finally move, please all the gods? Damn all, why not abandon that stupid chariot!
Because it is like an Eagle to the Ch’in, the answer came swiftly to his mind.
Those of the Legion were ready. Rufus had barely had to use his vinestaff. The Ch’in, though … Ssu-ma Chao, heedless of his dignity, was harnessing his own beasts. His eyes swept over the Romans and his sallow face sagged.
Easy enough for those now to abandon the Ch’in. Lighter armed, lighter equipped, they could flee, leaving the men they had marched with to whatever hazards the mountains threatened as the earth threatened to burst asunder. Maybe they could double back later and, if the Ch’in were not already dead, prepare an ambush….
“Let’s move,” Lucilius muttered, his fingers tapping against his sword.
“We wait for our comrades.”
Rufus swore under his breath, but he had been swearing steadily since the first tremors: Quintus ignored him.
“We are ready,” came Draupadi’s voice. Ganesha, steadier than the rock that still upheld them, eyed the Romans and the Ch’in.
If he was deciding with whom to cast his lot, Quintus thought, he might die right there from the betrayal.
He caught just such a speculative gleam in Lucilius’s face. The Romans were ready; let them claim their Eagle and flee west. Assuming the mountains did not rise and crush them for their betrayal—as well as their cowardice in surviving Carrhae. And the abandonment of their Eagle.
For an instant, Quintus felt the weight of an Eagle against arm and shoulder. Go without winning that, and they were no Legion—but a rabble of defeated men. True, it wasn’t as if the Ch’in really were federates, allies. They had bought them, imprisoned them, and Ssu-ma Chao was taking them as captives to his Emperor as if they were strange beasts intended to deck a Triumph—if they lived that long.
But the Easterner had treated them as comrades, had returned some of their battered dignity to them with their weapons. He had let them—let Quintus—redeem some of the honor he felt he had forfeited by their defeat.
“The Eagle ahead—where—we cannot get it!” Lucilius whispered it, intent as he had been moments before on the pursuit of Draupadi. His hands flexed and cupped as if closing on a woman’s breast.
“Are we men or runaway slaves?” Quintus spat.
Lucilius spared him a twisted grin.
Surely, he wanted the Eagle, yes, and his freedom. Well, Quintus wanted his freedom, even if he wasted it in a vain bid to return to Rome.
But not at the cost of betrayal. Not after he himself had been betrayed so many times. The Eagle itself would lift from its bronze perch above the SPQR and stoop to rend a man guilty of that disloyalty.
“Help them! We go together or no one moves at all!”
Ssu-ma Chao’s weary face lit with a relief that had nothing to do with temporary freedom from the racking earth tremors. Rufus headed toward the plunging beasts. Sweat from their fear lathered them despite the cold and the high altitudes and the swearing men attempting to manhandle the chariot down the side of a shaky hill. But he paused to clap Quintus on the shoulder—a liberty Quintus took as an honor. Ganesha, before gliding down the path with more composure than any of the younger men showed, nodded gravely in tribute.
The horse Ssu-ma Chao had saddled plunged and reared. Quintus moved to reassure it with words and actions he had used a thousand times on his farm. This decision would cut him off once again from his home, his grandfather’s bones, and everything he had dreamed of winning back.
Except himself. He felt warm despite the heights, sure despite the fear of the earth tremors and whatever damnable slaughter was going on far below. He had seldom felt such confidence, except of course the rare times his grandsire had praised him.
He and the Ch’in officer slammed a packsaddle onto the last beast, trying simultaneously to soothe and subdue it. Once more, the earth shook. Rocks shivered loose from the peaks and rained down among them as if shot from some Titan’s catapult. Two men screamed, but their screams were cut sharply as rock blotted them from sight.
“Forgive, forgive this turtle’s pace…. They are dying down there and I fail them, I fail my brothers….” Ssu-ma Chao would be weeping in a moment, and then there really would be Charon to pay.
All day they stood in the hot sun with no water. The lucky ones were those who had died early, a Parthian arrow in their eyes or hearts.
But now they were ready. Perhaps they could stop this slaughter.
“MARCH!” Rufus shouted, a cracked shout that surely cost him lung pain in these heights. Roman and Ch’in picked their way down the trembling path. The mountain labored, as that old Greek slave had said, and gave birth to a mouse. But not here. Not here. For what prodigy did this rumbling serve as the midwife?
Probably Orcus himself, Quintus thought. They would all be cast down into Hades without coin enough to pay the ferryman. At least, with the rocks tumbling about, they would not have to worry about burial.
Do not speak to me of death, a voice whispered in his head. It hissed like wind across sand. They are dead on the road below. You may come there if you can. You may bury their bodies, if you choose, just as you have the choice to waste your lives…. These are not your people … not your land … not your battle…. Why do you fear a brutish death when you face life as a slave? In Roma the slaves themselves rebelled against their lives.
Lick my sandals, Lucilius had added.
Watch that boulder…. Quintus sought safer footing, guided a man’s hand to a more secure handhold. His grandsire had bent his back and slashed his pride, scraping like a client, but he had never faltered.
He nearly stumbled. A stupid fall would be fine, wouldn’t it? Tell Minos and Rhadamanthus at the Judgment below, I fell. I was feeling sorry for myself. It would be Tartarus for certain; not that Romans truly believed in such places, but after what he had seen in dreams and in exile, best not risk it.
Quiet, he told the voices that battled in his skull. They seemed to echo in his helmet. Gravel rattled against it, and dust rose until his eyes squinted tears. The lucky men were the ones who died.
You would never get the old man to bend. You will not get me to bend either.
Step by step, battling the very rock and earth of their passage, they struggled down the slope. Depending on how you looked at it, the gods were either favoring them or wishing to punish them further, because most of them survived to reach the valley floor.
The wailing they had heard as the earth began to shake had died away. No one could remember at what point the rumbling under the ground had ceased. No one could remember when the screams borne up to them by the winds and mists had been put to silence.
A few last rocks fell and stuttered into quiet as the Romans and Ch’in staggered to a halt on the plains. None of them fell to their knees in relief, and Quintus felt the warmth of pride. Even the wind that swiftly dried the sweat from their heaving bodies had fallen silent. Mist licked them around and brought a thick silence.
Grayish-white, that mist writhed up to billow against them. Moving through it was like scouting through a ruin, not so much festooned with cobwebs but barriered with them. Soft as the mist was, the brush of it on gaunt faces and bleeding hands was something subtly vile. Lucilius grimaced as if touching carrion.