“Do you want their swords?” Quintus strode forward. Spears leveled at his breast, and he ignored them. It was right, what he did: challenge this arrogant man by his own codes to deal with them justly. He could even defend the word of Ssu-ma Chao, who had treated them almost as if he were himself a Roman, and who had been disgraced for it before his soldiers.
Lucilius shot him a look that clearly indicated he had been out in the desert too long with his head uncovered: Yet, still, he held out his sword, defying the garrison commander to take it and thus confess fear not only of the Romans but of the Ch’in soldiers who had campaigned with them.
A gesture of rejection would have been useful. A word of respect should have been his—and would have been, were Quintus dealing with honorable Romans; but he was used enough to less. Li Liang-li simply turned his shoulder. He spoke to Ssu-ma Chao. “The Son of Heaven can be merciful. He has commanded his generals to be lenient to most faults, as long as general discipline is maintained.” A dismissive hand gesture showed what he thought of that mercy.
Ssu-ma Chao handed Quintus’s sword to a soldier, who took it to the tribune. He received it with as close to a Ch’in bow as he could muster. Again, under a patron’s yoke? Quintus had sworn never to bend his back like a client again—but he had his men to think of. He must be hostage to them. He might regret this, but he sheathed it in the instant before the officer turned back toward him.
“The Emperor, my master, has ordered all the people of the south to show their obedience. The heads of the disobedient are exposed at Ch’ang-an, in the sight of all the world. You—you must acknowledge him as sovereign.”
“He’s pressing his luck,” Lucilius muttered. To Quintus’s astonishment, he saw the young patrician and the Ch’in aristocrat exchange what could almost have been a wink. Quintus supposed, though, that he should be glad that he had Lucilius’s support for at least this much—but he could have done without that wink.
So, it was further exile and what might yet prove to be slavery? He thought of his days as a client as having been hard. He realized now that he had not even begun to test the meaning of the word “hardship” or of his own endurance. He had thought himself bereft to have lost father and grandsire and estates: Now, he had seen Legions raised for the majesty of Rome thrown away by noble fools. And he had survived that much. He had found farmwork and a warrior’s training arduous: Now, he had endured heights and deserts that could freeze the blood or make it boil, if demons did not drain it first.
Now, he foresaw his task would be to march even further east into the realms of a gold he would never partake of. We will show these strangers Romans! he wanted to shout to his men, to hear them cheer, to see them salute. Here, in Kashgar, or at the throne of the tyrant that ruled all Asia. Armed, or in chains. He would show these people Romans. He gestured for Rufus to dress the column. The Legionaries’ bodies cast long shadows. A fine drift of grit lined his face; dust, like a saffron veil, skimmed before his eyes, scouring the moisture from them even as it made him want to rub them clean.
The garrison commander shouted more commands. His riders formed up, some riding as exceedingly watchful guards behind the column of Romans. Down the last of the great rocks into the grit the combined forces marched, up the steep ridges of immense, winding dunes, not stopping even long enough for food. It was a deliberate test of their heart and their strength. Watch, you arrogant barbarian. These are Romans. Wherever the Eagle was stowed, they would march as proudly as if under its shadow.
The reddening sunlight glinted off the salt flats until they resembled the plain of Carrhae the sunset after the battle had been lost.
As they marched behind the garrison forces, torches sparked up, either to alert guards posted along the line of march or to signify from guardpost to guardpost that troops were approaching Kashgar.
19
Signals and the blaze of torches warned the guards posted on the walls of the city of the travelers’ approach. Even the fields were guarded by farmers who bore themselves like fighting men, Quintus saw the next day. Only sparse green showed in the dusty soil, somewhat darker near the channels that carried the thin streams of water that made any growth at all possible this close to desolation.
Kashgar, or Su-le as the Ch’in called it, was twice walled: by tall, thin poplars that cast columns of meager shadow on the marching, weary men, and by its actual fortifications—walls as high as forty feet. The walls were whitewashed, and glistened in the sun and they ended in guard platforms and square towers. Quintus could see the poles to which torches or signals could be attached. Knowing how such towers could be stocked, he began to count them. The sum was a city’s strength.
A flurry of lights winked from the walls. Scrapings and stampings of feet warned those outside that weapons had been trained on the approaching men. Notwithstanding that soldiers and officers of Su-le—including Li Liang-li—rode with them, the garrison had turned out. Quintus peered past the high, neat walls. He could see piles of wood—a rare treasure in these parts unless you counted brushwood. No doubt it was kept for night signals.
“Fully stocked, I’d wager,” Rufus muttered approvingly as they rode toward the gates. The place indeed looked as self-contained as any garrison city in which they had ever been stationed.
“Lucilius is the gambler, not me,” the tribune replied. “I wouldn’t throw my silver away on a sure thing— assuming we ever see a paymaster again.”
That subject touched too close to home. Ch’in was supposed to be the Land of Gold, but they had seen precious little gold, silver, copper, or even brass. Even a Roman slave usually had some coin about him. But prisoners … like slaves, prisoners were property: Their status may have shifted, but not by all that much.
“Rough land to farm,” the centurion commented, moving away from the sore subject. They had ridden past fields reclaimed from the waste with painstaking care and backbreaking labor, cultivated by strong men and women whose every move seemed as deliberate as it had been taught on the drill field. Wrest the food from the land, green from the ochre and ashen. Husband the water. Make the land—if it couldn’t be made to bloom— feed its people. Preserve it against raiders and enemies and whatever demons now stalked it. Even the eldest of the farmers bore himself like a soldier.
“Not where I’d choose to claim my land and mule,” Rufus said. “What about you, sir?”
The haze of the river valley Quintus had called home for too short a time rose in his imagination. Even when his family’s fortune was at its lowest, that land had held a wealth of water and soil that the sere fields of Kashgar could never hope to reach. This was poor land, but it was home to the soldierly men and sturdy women who worked it. They had land of their own and a future they could count on—a fortune far beyond the reach of the Romans.
Unless, of course, the Black Naacals conquered.
Hot wind fanned Quintus’s face. He started. That had felt as if he stood too close to a fire. He had been expecting the damp, Tuscan breezes. They might bear flux and fever, but at that moment, he would have welcomed the dampness against his parched skin and run the risk of illness. The hot winds here ruffled the trappings of his horse and flicked a glint or two from the matted gold of Lucilius’s hair, darkened almost to the color of less noble Romans. It was all the gold Lucilius could count on, he often said. Just as well he couldn’t gamble it away with older men, or he’d have been bald by now.
Once again, the patrician tribune rode as close as he could to the Ch’in officers. His eyes followed the young underofficer from the capital. Lucilius is a man for women, Quintus reminded himself. That one’s another like himself—another noble with his fortune to make by impressing bigger nobles.
He noted that Lucilius’s Parthian was improving. He wondered, however, if the young Ch’in aristocrat would risk a chance of impressing Li Liang-li long enough to speak to any of the Romans. Aha! Now Lucilius managed to meet his eye, nodded; but the other man turned his head away. Quintus suppressed a crack-lipped smile: That was as fine a snub as he had seen in all his days of clienthood. Lucilius flushed, that is, he flushed as much as you could tell from the clean patches in the pale mask of dust and grit that was his face.