Ssu-ma Chao bowed agreement. Then he gestured” at his men. “If I fall,” said the Ch’in officer, “take care of them.”
17
Down to Su-le and the garrison at Kashgar they headed, finally—as Arsaces said—into the true desert. It was bleaker than even the wastes Quintus had seen, and likely to be bleaker yet. “Enter here and never emerge.” That was the desert’s name, they said all along the caravan routes and made signs against ill omen. How Arsaces chuckled when he saw the Romans, from half the world away, making similar signs.
“Enter here and never emerge,” was not ill omen at all, Quintus thought, but stark truth. From where he stood, the desert, ringed by mountains whose snowy peaks were but inadequate substitutes for clouds, stretched out like an amphitheatre in which all men entering it were gladiators. It was a wasteland of gravel and dunes, broken by the glint of salt flats, whitened occasionally by bones. Pray all the gods they did not add their own.
A few dead tamarisks jutted from the grit. There were almost no living plants and no living creatures that they could see by daylight. As for the unliving—Draupadi and Ganesha stood watch with the Legionaries; for still the most highly strung of the men screamed in the night, declaring that they felt eyes upon them.
From time to time, Quintus saw Ganesha look about him. Not as if he marveled at him or stood aghast, as any man might, but as if he remembered it in other days.
“A terrible stage,” he said finally, “on which the fate of the world and all our lives, past and future, must play themselves out.” Those were not words that Quintus, particularly, wanted to hear.
At least, there were no raiders. Wise in the tales of Modun and others of the Hsiung-nu and Yueh-chih from the Ch’in stories (told, Quintus was certain, more to affright than to inform), the Romans were somewhat relieved until their days’ marches and their nights’ marches made them realize that the waste held no other life at all. After that, they would have welcomed bandits to drive off as evidence that the curse upon this place was not the one that took the caravan by Stone Tower.
Draupadi, mistress of illusions though she was, had no such hopes. She grew pale despite that amber skin of hers. At her request, ultimately, they tied her to the camel with the gentlest gait. She has depopulated your world, you know, whispered the sinister voice that was Quintus’s constant tempter. What if she dies? Clearly, she has already run mad—a kindness, perhaps, to kill her swiftly. The people you see now—cherish them, boy, for theirs will be the last faces you see in the world.
Unless, of course, he succumbed. He took a twisted satisfaction in the fact that the voice had given up trying to offer him rewards.
He tried not to listen and failed. Then he tried not to debate and did little better. He would run mad if he allowed himself to listen freely. Or, if he did not run mad, he could wither from inside, a blight of the spirit destroying him just as surely as the Black Naacals had sucked the life from those merchants whose husks he had watched shrivel under his touch. Then they would all die, yes, and their bones would bleach here in the waste, if the demon storms did not splinter them first. And the last man left alive would curse the fate that allowed him to watch his brothers escape.
His brothers.
Something in Quintus stopped at that thought. Used to the discipline of the Legions, though, he did not break stride—for they were walking now, to spare their exhausted beasts. They were all his brothers—the surviving men of Rome, the Ch’in soldiers, who, if not as far from their homes as his Legionaries, shared their exile and fear. Even Lucilius: for they sprang from the same earth.
But Ganesha, for all his wisdom, and Draupadi? How could he claim “brotherhood” with beings that far removed from him and his nation? As he glanced at Ganesha, did the ancient scholar momentarily shift form so that an elephant’s head topped his bowed shoulders? A trick of the light, or the heat, or Quintus’s own weary mind, no doubt: his eyes dazzled from the sunlight on the salt flats.
And Draupadi—for an instant, Quintus thought of the legend of Tithonus. Beloved of the dawn, Aurora had promised him whatever gift he might ask of her. He had chosen immortality, and it was granted. But granted without a gift of eternal youth. And after a time, Tithonus gummed his bread and his voice rose shrilly into the air; ultimately, when he was transformed from grandsire to grasshopper, his voice rose higher yet, like a string too tightly plucked. She is mistress of illusions. But if illusions fail, you might find yourself kissing a skull.
Birth and rebirth, she had told him. He could either believe that was true—or else the illusions had been spun for so long that they had become real.
So down to Su-le they plodded. Rome’s pace. Rome’s race. The beasts were rested—at least as rested as they were ever going to be—but they were Romans and they preferred to march.
“As stubborn as one of Marius’s mules!” Lucilius called, riding just as Quintus might have expected. He might sound lighthearted, but his lips were as chapped, his body as worn as the rest, and the jeer was softened by the use of the old name. They were all Marius’s mules, soldiers of a Rome they would not see again, following a captive Eagle.
One foot before the other, the nails of his sadly worn boots rasping in the grit. March. Sunlight flashed and glared off the grit and gypsum that formed the desert here: gravel and salt flat. Ganesha had seen all this when it was seabed. Seabed. Hard to believe this had all been an inland sea like the Middle Sea itself. So much water, Quintus thought. His mind reeled at the thought of such luxury; already, he found it hard enough to imagine the hidden pool by which he had found Draupadi so long ago, seated in the luxury of silken cushions, sandalwood, and amber lights. There was, she had told him, another such place, deep in the desert’s heart. If such a desert could be said to have a heart. If they could survive, heart and sinew and soul, long enough to reach it … and if their allies did not kill them first.
One foot before the other, steady, firmly planted. March, Roman. He heard his grandsire’s voice now, strong as it had been in Quintus’s boyhood, urging him forward. At first he had protested, but had been shamed into carrying on. Later, he had learned to persevere, even if the old man’s demands outstripped his body’s strength. Now, as he marched, he remembered the tough, fierce old face, and he blessed it.
Now the bronze talisman he bore near his heart neither heated nor jabbed his flesh. It was as if, somehow, it had achieved a truce with the genius loci of this place.
That thought staggered him for a moment. Keep marching. For a heartbeat longer, the marching stride, men coughing at the parched dust cast up by feet and hooves, and the cloudless sky stretching from overhead to an unreachable horizon made him reel. They were not a company, he thought of his men and his allies, but a coffle of slaves. He reeled again and flung out a hand.
“Careful, sir,” came a mutter. There was a grin and a good-natured attempt to steady him on his feet. His hand touched the hide of a pack animal. It was dry, scaly: The sun had leached all the sweat from it as soon as it formed.
“Arjuna?” The sibyl’s voice was soft and concerned. Sibylla. Now there was a good Latin concept for you. And he wanted badly to be Roman, to be only Quintus, his father’s son and his grandsire’s heir: not, please gods, this spiritual shuffling, as it seemed, among lives and deaths, all of them violent.
He swerved to tell Draupadi precisely that, but the remnants of her beauty, the dark eyes shadowed not by kohl but by exhaustion, the amber skin parched and dirty, the glorious long hair dried out and straggling, silenced him.
Meeting his eyes, Draupadi’s eyes filled, first with anxiety and then with tears. “You always were more than one being,” she told him. “When we met, you even swore to share me with your brothers. Yet, Arjuna, I have no complaints … but you have always been many men in one. Just as you are now. You are the heart of all of these men … and the luck of the men from the Realm of Gold.”
He shook his head like a man who has staggered up after a beating.