Draupadi raised her hand and made a tiny motion. An instant later, Wang Tou-fan stopped, as if struck by something … something about the size of a small rock that clicked off his arm and onto the desert floor.
Draupadi sagged, and Quintus caught her. With her spell-casting and her sudden move to protect the border officer, she had come to the limits of her strength, as he had seen her do before.
“You spin powerful illusions, lady,” he whispered against that silky hair that, even in the desert, never lost its scent of sandalwood.
“You do not understand,” she said. “I had no pebble in my hand when I began. This was not illusion, but true creation.”
He embraced her very gently. In the midst of treachery, she had achieved the victory she had sought for so many years.
Lucilius joined Wang Tou-fan. The Ch’in aristocrat was muttering to himself.
“Old men. Always old men. Send me out here where I am slighted. Make your future, they say. Make us proud. How, in the names of my ancestors? Here is just a prison of swords. So I seek power and, should I succeed, not even the Dragon Throne itself would be barred to me. It means power to those who stand with me, and all the gold in the Realm of Gold. Are you with me?”
Lucilius’s hand shot out. Had Wang Tou-fan been a Roman, the gesture would have been finished in a clasp of arms or shoulders. “Make a future? So they would keep you short of silver and gold; sit on power till they die.”
Wang Tou-fan laughed, softly, almost a hiss of amusement. “Old men. All old men and the younger fools—like those two—who serve them. But men die. Oh yes, they can die. And their power … it shall be mine. It will be mine.”
Decide, Lucilius, Quintus thought. Make your soul whole, or sell it. Be a Roman or a traitor, but choose. It required only for him to take the poisoned blade or not.
The patrician held out his hand for the blade. It glinted in the night, and the poison on its tip seemed the color of rotted wood or of Charon’s wharf in Hades.
“Lost,” Quintus whispered. The man was his enemy, but his eyes filled with tears. “He is lost. I ought to kill him, but—oh gods, he was a man and a Roman and now—”
“In my old life,” Draupadi whispered, “I swore not to wash my hair until I could wash it in my enemy’s blood. I understand. There, my heart.” She laid her hands on Quintus’s arms. “There.”
The two conspirators wandered off, too casually, in different directions. The wind blew sand about them until it veiled the vast, uncaring sky.
21
They had been marching forever in a waste that made the Dead Sea, where it rippled sullenly in the depths of Judaea, seem as hospitable as the Tiber Valley in spring.
No merchants now rode with them because Wang Tou-fan, eager to return to the bright center of the Middle Kingdom, had selected a route so risky that no sane merchant would dare it. Ordinarily, caravans turned north at Kashgar to Aksu, Kucha, and Turpan, nestled in the shadows of the distant Heavenly Hills, or south to Khotan, into Hind past the lower lip of the devouring Takla Makan Shamo. By contrast, Wang Tou-fan planned to cut across the desert—across the tongue, as it were, of its mouth—to Miran, ordinarily a stop along the southern route. And then? Quintus had seen a map, and he was troubled. What need of treachery in a wasteland such as that?
Madness, the merchants had shouted in return. Arsaces’s shade, Quintus thought, must be shaking with rage for the stupidity and the waste of the beasts he had tended.
They were all correct. After months of marching and of surviving the deserts, Quintus had thought himself inured to it. But all of the wastelands he had traversed had possessed some life: Here, there was none. The broken-backed ridges of dunes looked like the bones of some immense kraken, cast up on an intolerable shore. Pale, splintering wood projected from the settlements buried as deep in the sand as the tombs of Egypt to impale the careless or those who traveled by night. And when the wind blew, sometimes, they saw leathery and dried-out huddles that had been man or beast once, before the wind blew and their luck changed.
Long ago “Rome’s race, Rome’s pace” had given way. Rufus, gasping and almost fatally red in the face, now swayed—under Quintus’s orders—upon a camel’s back. Others took it in turn to ride or march, while the Ch’in officers had horses and chariots. The only pride was in endurance.
Swaying with the rhythm of his own beast, Quintus edged forward past the other Romans. Lucilius rode his horse with his back as straight as if he were on parade, disdaining what he called a show of weakness and what seemed like common sense to Quintus. Well enough, he had thought as they left Kashgar. Keep him tired and off-guard; sap his strength; whittle away his defenses. If it preserved his life or Rufus’s, Lucilius might be as arrogant as he wished. When Rufus had collapsed gasping in the heat, he and Draupadi had examined him minutely for wounds: The clammy skin and stertorous breathing were much like the onset of some poisons.
Now Rufus rode past a maniple or so of Legionaries whose turn it was to march, and none dared to comment that he had a soft ride. They had all lightened their packs as much as they dared—and were permitted. Now they carried only food and water—and their arms. Draupadi rode, of course, swaying in the padded saddle, wrapped in the veils that reduced her face to a mere shadow of beauty, the only fair thing in this desolation. Ganesha rode close beside her, seemingly almost asleep.
Quintus passed several of the Ch’in guard. He called out a hoarse greeting. Turning in his saddle, Ssu-ma Chao nodded permission to Quintus to approach. He lowered the cloth with which he protected his face against the sun and stinging grit, and croaked a question at the officer. They would all drink later, when the desert cooled that night and they dared a few slightly less fearsome hours of travel by starlight.
Moisture was too precious to waste on speech. Still, it had to be said.
“Madness,” Ssu-ma Chao husked. “I could almost pray for more deaths—of men or beasts. It would stretch out our water supplies.”
It was quite possible for a caravan to founder of its own weight, with more men and beasts along the line of march than the pack animals could provide for. The men and weaker horses would die first, though many of these horses were bred to the heat and grit. Then the camels would start to die. If those perished, all would die, and the great drifts would cover them—until the wind cast them up again, husks to frighten the next travelers rash enough to venture here.
“Miran,” Quintus faltered on the unfamiliar name that had become the object of his desire. “Will we really reach Miran?”
“If the ancestors wish,” Ssu-ma Chao said. “And they send no storms…”
Which, of course, was no answer at all. Desert storms could force them to lie up, sweltering in the heavy felt wrappings that would shield them from the storm-borne sharp pebbles and grit that could scour flesh from bone. Such storms could delay them until their water ran out, and they could only bleed their beasts for fluid for so long.
“Say we reach Miran. And then?”
“The caves…” mouthed the Ch’in officer. He was the one who had dared show Quintus the map. The Roman valued him for this, for being unwilling to allow a man he still considered ally, rather than prisoner, to venture into the unknown devastation without some knowledge.
For devastation it was. Once well outside of Kashgar, Draupadi had taken one look and recoiled in horror. Ganesha’s wise, sleepy eyes had widened. “So many years for the seabed to dry out and change so,” he had mused before talk grew too painful to be much indulged in. “Waves. Capped with white spray, birds soaring on great strong wings like unto the sails of our ships, stroking us forward, as above, so below….”
It was punishment even to think of a galley, cutting through the waters of the Middle Sea—all that blue water. The thoughts of coolness, of wetness, the ability to drink, not to satiation, but to drink at all, could drive a man mad.
For now, at least, there had been no storms. For which mercy they must thank the gods or the ancestors. But there were no birds this deep in the desert. Quintus saw that as a loss.
“An oasis?” he whispered. Shadow, he thought. Shade. Coolness. And, please the gods, a bubbling spring. Draupadi unveiling and freeing that dark wave of hair, her eyes gleaming in fire and starlight—if the sun did not burn out his eyes before he beheld her thus.