“Ugh!”
“Quiet there!” grumbled Rufus.
Draupadi wrapped a grimy saffron fold of her garments over her face. Quintus found himself breathing thinly as if still on the heights, unwilling to draw any more of this mist-laden, unwholesome air into his lungs. The mist will breed in you, came the unwelcome voice in his head. The webs will ensnare you, and you will gasp and cough until blood spurts from your mouth, staining the webs. Thus shall you leave your bones here, where corpses of mighty cities have vanished without a trace.
Working through that smell of must, of something old, salty, and spoiled like rotten shellfish were the desert smells. That made it somehow worse.
“Steady, boy, steady,” came Rufus’s voice as a horse panted and struggled. The mount lacked the strength to put up a convincing fight: It was too tired and too afraid to panic. Up and down the line of march, eyes showed white rimmed in fear. The men sagged, exhausted with more than their mad plunge in the path of the earthquake to the desert floor.
“Mists are getting thicker, sir,” someone muttered.
Cocooned in mists the way a spider entraps a fly, would they encounter worse the further they moved into the true desert?
Draupadi was a mistress of illusion, came the thought. Surely, she…
“Domina?” Gently, Quintus addressed the sorceress as if she were a great lady of his own race.
“In this mist,” he told her, “we will wander lost until we die.”
Her eyes met his, then fell. “Later would be better,” she admitted. “They watch, or something does. Already, I make shields….” She put out a hand that trembled. “I promise.”
Abruptly, even an instant longer spent in those mists seemed about an age too long. Thicker and thicker they grew, as if they drew strength from the men trapped to wander in them. The stink of something messily dead grew stronger.
“I would spare you what you will see,” she said.
For the first time since Quintus had known her, Draupadi seemed unsure of herself. “You are on the proper trail, I beg you to believe me,” she said. Briefly, she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, she flinched as if she gazed upon horrors hidden to the others.
None of them shared her sight—if true sight she had. In the silence, a horse stumbled, and Quintus heard a bone snap. A moment later, the coppery scent of blood filled the air as a Ch’in armsman ended the creature’s thrashing pain. Trying to see where the horse had fallen, Quintus set his foot down awry, and nearly measured his length in the grit. He saved himself, but at the cost of the skin on one palm and knee and a sharp pain in his chest like unto the Legions’ brand touching him once more. He did not like to think of the way the mist seemed to lick at the blood that oozed from his scratches.
The image of a slender figure, torches held aloft in its hands, kindled in Quintus’s thoughts. “Krishna,” he whispered to himself. His bronze talisman, the last link between his home and this gods-forsaken place, the guardian that had always warned him of danger.
As it warned him now against the lure of protection from piercing the mists that wreathed them about.
Quintus strode toward the sybil from Hind. “Can you end this spell?” he demanded in a voice he never had used to her before. “Never mind what we may or may not wish to see. We don’t—none of us—wish to be here anyhow, let alone with our legs and necks broken from falls.”
Draupadi studied his face through the mists as if finding in it something she had loved and had missed for a long, long time. As her voice rose in a chant, she raised her hands in slow gestures. Her, eyes rolled in her head. Drained from the effort of lifting whatever illusion she fought against, she sagged, and he caught her just in time. The fragrance of sandalwood and musk, the salt of her sweat, were the most wholesome things he had smelled for weeks.
The mist dissipated. As the last tendrils vanished, the muffled clangor of harness bells was heard, subdued and strangely echoing, as one of the caravan beasts bearing them appeared in sight.
With a cry that was half oath, half laughter, one of the Romans dropped his hand from his pilum. No sense killing a beast they might need.
The reek of terror and of ancient seabeds evaporated with the mists. Someone caught the wandering pack beast and silenced its bells. In this waste, their release from fear seemed almost obscene.
The beast coughed once and toppled, as if only the sound of its bells had kept it alive that long. With the mists gone, they could indeed see clearly. All along their path, camels and horses were lying as if whatever had shaken the earth had stolen their lives from them.
Near them, all about, were their masters—untidy bundles of travel-worn robes. And all of them were dead too.
15
A final wisp of mist faded, taking with it the incongruous reek of brine. Desert wind tugged Quintus forward. For a moment, he inhaled the scents of this dry place as if they were fine incense: dry stone, salt, and the sweat of fearful men and laboring beasts. Then, as the wind urged him forward, his talisman jolted. No stench of plague or rot, but death was there. Fare forward.
Quintus strode into a field of corpses.
Bells tinkled on the harnesses of dead horses and camels as the wind tugged at saddle cloths and the robes of the dead merchants and guards. For the caravan was dead, the little world made up of Parthians, Syrians, Jews, Persians, men of the Ch’in, and guides from the perimeters of the desert blotted out. The journey had leached color and texture from those robes: Display and finery were for towns. But even beyond the drabness of the old robes that men might wear in the waste, these bodies seemed drained of natural color.
Ssu-ma Chao gestured. “Within bow-shot of the Stone Tower,” he muttered.
It would have to be a very long bow-shot, nevertheless.
“That would take quite an archer,” Lucilius shot out with a barbed tongue. Predictable that he would be the one to point that out.
A soldier laughed at the retort. Other laughter rose in the ranks. Hysteria of a sort, born of relief, could be as deadly a thing as panic, Quintus knew.
“Quiet!” A crack of Rufus’s vinestaff reinforced the order, bringing the laughter to a quick stop.
“That will not work, sir,” said Ganesha. He had picked his way over to the man who had laughed.
“You show no respect to the dead, younger brother,” he spoke softly. “Or to yourself or your comrades.”
“Burial detail, sir?” Rufus asked as crisply as if organizing camp for a night.
However, Quintus truly was not commander here— had the centurion forgotten? It was Ssu-ma Chao who ruled, little as the man looked as if he were in any shape to give orders. The line of march had broken. Men were leading beasts to the rear, lest they panic and bolt with what remained of their supplies.
Reason? Quintus knew his men better than that— hard-headed peasant stock. They did have discipline: they had loyalty; they had customs—customs that had been violated at Carrhae, when the Romans had fled, leaving the dead and wounded untended behind them. But they were Romans, not a rabble, and if they had cheated death once again, well and good. If not, they each owed a death, and it were better to die as Romans.
Grandsire, do you see? Be proud of me. The familiar appeal echoed in Quintus’s heart. Always before it had brought him only doubt. This time, the doubt was gone. He might walk a grim path, but he walked it as a Roman and a man of whom his grandsire could be proud.
Rufus sketched a tactful salute to Lucilius, then gestured for the men nearest him to unpack their shovels and start digging. “Come on, lads. Respect the dead. We can at least cover their faces, see they’ve got coins for the Boatman. You’d want someone to do that for you….”
We may yet need it.
Every impulse in Quintus’s body urged him to fly. He looked over at Ssu-ma Chao, who stood motionless. Then he compelled himself to step toward the bodies. He stooped to tug the headcloth of the nearest man decently over his face. He had been a merchant of some standing, judging by the excellent quality of his robes, even if they were battered by rough travel. The leather of his weapons harness was finely tooled, while his ornaments and the hilt of his sword … no sword? It had been taken.
The merchant did not look as if he had died in pain— but he looked old, far older than any man had a right to be if he chose to take these caravan routes. Old and drained, as if the sun had leached him dry for months, instead of just the time Quintus knew it had taken for the entire caravan to die. At his touch, the corpse seemed to shiver in on itself. Quintus would not have been surprised if it had turned to dust. He shuddered and turned over the next body.