Light overhead … was it a trick of the dawn that made its shadow resemble a great winged creature? It swooped, it neared them, and it dropped like a raptor, snatching up the chain of the direction finder as if an eagle spied a serpent and caught it, to fly off, prey in its mouth, to its eyrie.
No, Quintus told himself. It was another trick of this soul-destroying desert. He could not, most assuredly not have heard a shriek of triumph. No bird of prey would shriek so close to its prey and, thereafter, it must keep its beak firmly clasped around it.
He would have sworn, though, by all the lares and penates of his vanished home that he had seen an eagle swoop down to steal Wang Tou-fan’s bronze device. But why would an eagle—the Romans’ symbol—have chosen precisely the instrument on which all their lives depended?
They would never see Miran; they would die in the desert! Quintus hurled himself off his mount toward the Ch’in officer and Lucilius, who had begun frantically to burrow in the dust and grit. Blood welled from cuts in their hands, drying quickly on their sleeves and in the thirsty desert floor.
“That won’t help.” Rufus’s hoarse voice held them all—officers, nobles, horsemen, soldiers—in their place. “All of you pile into one spot and start kicking up sand … rock … whatever … and what you’re looking for will never turn up. You want to do this orderly-like.”
He was in there then, bringing order out of panic with his raspy-voice commands and occasional blows from a very battered vinestaff. Roman-fashion, the ground was cleared and quartered; the officers helped up, patched up, and brushed to some semblance of order—but no direction finder turned up. Quintus had not expected that it would.
Remounted, Quintus met Draupadi’s and Ganesha’s eyes as if the three of them studied the wreckage of their futures with the assurance of complete despair.
However, sun, sky, and desert had turned themselves into the usual noontime smelter before the others were able to concede that the bronze direction finder was gone for good. Some hurled themselves, gasping and red-faced despite their weathering, upon the grit in rage. A Ch’in soldier reached for a waterskin.
“Hold!” Rufus was there, his staff striking the man’s hand away from the precious water. One of the Ch’in’s fellows began to draw on him, and he raised his vinestaff again.
You have stumbled into deep water, old friend, Quintus thought and moved in to back him. The Ch’in soldiers’ mood was ugly and could turn uglier. They could not mutiny, but they must blame something for their loss of hope. There could easily be more blood on the sand before long.
“Listen to me, man,” Rufus spoke Latin, and there was no way the man-at-arms would understand him. Still, the force of his years of command, the assurance his knowledge of soldiers gave him kept the Ch’in soldiers’ swords in their sheaths. “Listen. We knew this trip was going to be terrible even when His Excellency or whatever had that little … what-do-you-call-it … You know it. Now, with the way finder gone, we are going to have to go forward and find water. But it is going to take us much longer, don’t you think?”
The wind had gone dead. Ganesha did not bother to raise his voice, but it rang out anyhow, translating Rufus’s words. To Quintus’s surprise, Lucilius flung up his hands on which the blood had dried.
“Do you think we will ever last till Miran?” Quintus asked Ganesha in an undertone.
“There is sun. There are stars. We can travel as sailors do.” The old priest recited precisely the words they needed to hearten them. Though sailors preferred not to journey out of sight of land, Ganesha had sailed upon some very strange seas. What he said could be relied on—at least to enable them to survive through today.
All might yet be well. Quintus had a sudden vision of Draupadi in her place by the pool, water slicking her hair back, molding her saffron robe to her amber skin. He was hot with more than the sun—useless dream for a man who never would see Miran. All would not be well, and they would die in the desert. Wind and sand would cover them, hiding them in a necropolis as vast as Egypt.
He remembered striking men away from the brackish water in the marsh outside Carrhae. That water would be nectar now. Yet it had not been time then to lie down and die. It was not time now. Quintus entered the quarrel between Ch’in and Rome, urging quiet, urging rest, urging travel at night. The setting sun showed them the direction west (and how he wished he were heading that way): They must head opposite to it.
He expected a sneer from Lucilius, but the man was sitting propped against a packsaddle. The sun glinted off his hair, bright as the coins he had never ceased to covet. Draupadi had veiled against the sun. She stood beside him, a hand on his brow. This was no time for even a traitor to be struck down by the sun.
“No birds,” he muttered. His lips were pale. “No birds in this Orcus-be-damned waste. But I saw one. I saw an eagle. It came down and snatched our lives away….”
Treason was punishable by death. In Rome, traitors were hurled from the Tarpeian rock, or slain in other, slower ways. When Spartacus and the rebel slaves had been put down, the roads had been lined with crosses. A long death if the man was strong and a painful one.
Was it as painful as dying of thirst?
But why condemn the whole Legion—and those of the Ch’in force who were guiltless? And why condemn … fragments from the poetry Quintus had had to learn edged into his mind, all wrapped about the image of Draupadi in that bridal saffron of hers.
“I do not believe that,” Quintus said. He was glad he had thought of the fields, of the world of green things, and water hah” a world away. There was still hope.
Rufus, he saw, was gesturing and shouting at a Ch’in soldier who looked as tough as he. Ssu-ma Chao was translating, a wry smile of perfect hopelessness on his face.
The voices floated in the still air. “Who can we trust? We trust them!” Rufus jerked a thumb at Draupadi and Ganesha. “Let the water be under their care. And, for all the gods’ sake, let us do something before we drink it all!”
They rode or marched because the idea of lying down and dying, ultimately, parched skin chafed raw against the grit, seemed even more loathsome. Better to move until one’s tongue blackened and a merciful madness blurred consciousness, until one’s heart burst.
That had happened to at least five people since the direction finder had been lost. It was impossible to tell from the husks covered over with blankets whether they had been Ch’in or Roman. And that meant there were five fewer men—the weakest at that—to share the water and food that Draupadi guarded.
They had been wandering for days. By now, surely, they might have found at least the ruins of an outpost. There had been no storms to cover the bodies of a patrol with the ever-present dust and grit; and there should have been patrols out. As for scouts of their own—to send a man alone and on a weak mount was a waste of man, mount, and water supply. And the idea of sending a man out without water was hateful: more merciful to cut his throat on the spot.
Quintus remembered when he knew they were lost. One moment they had struggled to the crest of an enormous dune. For that instant of achievement, the desert had been somewhat less hateful. There had even been a night wind, blessedly cool. A delicate spray of dust had spun near their hands.
And then, even when they looked up again, the stars’ patterns had appeared to change, to shift. Oh, somewhere, Orion must surely hunt the Bears, lesser and greater; and Cassiopeia still fled her amorous god, or whatever fables the Ch’in made up about the heavens as they saw them. It was only that now, the patterns did not make sense.
“We are at sea here,” he had mouthed to Ganesha.
“Once I saw a ship sail down a wave and plunge into the next. I never saw that ship again,” the old man said.
It hurt to talk. Quintus just nodded. It didn’t do to think of that much water, either. The younger man cast a look at Draupadi. He was not the only man to send longing glances in her direction, but the others had eyes only for the waterskins she kept close at hand.
She shook her head. “Even power of illusion is gone,” she whispered. Her lovely voice was gone too. “I cannot even provide the dream of water in your throat.”