He reached over and took her hand. When it came his turn to die, he wanted to die clasping it, looking up into her eyes. And then, he thought, when we are all dead, she and Ganesha will go on. As they did before.
She moved her fingers across the callus on his palm. “No. No. For us this is real—too real this time. If you die, we die. Maybe we have had many years, but I am not ready yet to give up!”
Her voice gained strength, then subsided. Could she and the old priest have taken life somehow and gone on—as the Black Naacals had done at Stone Tower? He would have shaken his head, but he found that his brains were already addled enough from the sun without shaking them up further.
Not in all these years. The dancing figure was warming over his heart. Even when they had tossed away everything that might conceivably have held them back, he had refused to part with the tiny bronze. Not the dancer, and not the Eagle, which was borne each day by a different packbeast.
Draupadi pressed his hand. “I wanted reality, not dreams,” she said. “This is real. You are real.”
Quintus raised her hand with his ring on it to his cracked lips. “And so is this.”
They rode on, very calm. Time was when “drifting” was a serious crime. Now, they sought to drift, to go on as painlessly as possible. They drifted between night and day, under unfamiliar star patterns and a sun whose rising and setting brought them no real understanding of where they were. They might as well have been children, turned and spun until they could barely stand, much less find their fellows.
“We are so weak,” Quintus rasped to Draupadi when one precious sip of water let him speak. “Why do they not come for us?”
She glanced at the hot chimeras that rose from the desert floor to a cloudless sky. Even the white-fanged mountains so far away were a torment since the whiteness of those peaks meant snow. Precious moisture: for others. Never for them.
“The Black Naacals?” Her lips formed the words as if sound might summon them. “It suits them to torment us and to watch. And even now, I think, they find us.” Dismay sharpened her too-thin features beneath the grimy veils.
“You and Ganesha?”
“You knew how long ago we were here,” she whispered. “It was you who wandered in the waste, seeking Pasupata. You. Quintus—Arjuna—can you truly not remember?”
Then Ssu-ma Chao croaked out the command to mount, to march, to press on—in whatever direction seemed less useless. It was his turn to march, and they were separated, less by distance on the road than by memories.
Think, he told himself. Think. He was marching. It was his turn to march, which was true. But also, he preferred now to march, to feel again the undeviating rhythm of a Legion’s pace behind its Eagle and, in that rhythm of so many thousand paces a day under constant discipline, to lose himself.
His arms swung just as they might have done if he formed part of a column marching down a paved road somewhere in Italy. It was, he thought, much like a galley, its oars beating in unison at the commands of the hortator. But what beat the rhythm here in his mind was not a great drum but the pounding of the blood in temples and heart. Rome had discovered what rhythms would spare mind and heart as long as possible: Pound too long, too fast, or too hard, and the man died.
But not, please all the gods, before he achieved forgetfulness. I am a Roman, his pace said. Left, right; left, right; boots pounding the grit into fine dust. It was all salt here, and he could almost believe in Ganesha’s sea stories. Never mind his tales of a sea. You will never see the Middle Sea again. Believe in what lets you march on, he told himself. Left, right.
He was seeking to achieve forgetfulness—but to forget Rome? He had given up family, land, hope of return, even his honor. Now, when he had offered sword to his enemies, must he give up even his patria?
His solution, as Draupadi told him, lay in himself.
But not in Quintus: rather, in the man she named Arjuna, this ancient warrior-prince whose soul, as the wizard priests of Egypt taught, had transmigrated into stubborn Roman flesh. Mule-stubborn. Mule-strong. Left, right; left, right. The sun’s hammer clanged down upon his skull—far more drum than he needed.
Forget.
Remember.
The air shimmered. His mind spun. He was Quintus—no, he bore a bow; he had a chariot to drive, and a dancing god to drive him; he was … a man fell out along the line of march and was packed onto a camel by men too weak to waste their strength on swearing.
The air hurt his chest, and he put his hand up to ease it. His fingers caught as the talisman beneath his garments grew warm again.
Out he drew the tiny image of dancing Krishna, a god old before some artisan who had lived in Italy before his own people made this to be laid in some tomb. How the coins of light had flashed out from it before they flew upward, dazzling man and horse so that the direction finder was lost?
Krishna himself—he had danced with light, mourning and rejoicing with the same movements. Quintus— no, Arjuna—now he remembered that. The god had danced with torches. The one he had been had bent and touched Krishna’s feet and asked for the god himself, not his armies. And Krishna had made a pact to drive him.
The one he had been possessed a great weapon. He had sat in a ring of fire to trap power. Now, trapped in another life, he remembered the ultimate weapon he had thus won. But what had it been? That he could not remember, not if he marched until the bones of his feet rubbed away into powder as white as the salt flats on which he stood.
It was net power that he had to seek. It was life. He had sought life before, at the ruin by the pool.
Ah yes. His feet moved now without direct control of his body. He was on the right track. Think of a pool. Think of a river. Draupadi’s retreat; his river valley. So far away now—but there had been a tale once, a tale he had heard once under an outcropping of the Roof of the World, where men had huddled together: that in the heart of the desert, found only by men at the extremity of need, there bubbled a spring of clear, pure water. But where it was, no man could say for certain.
An oasis, such as they had in Egypt or Judaea or Syria, perhaps? Or was it something more.
They were lost. They could not be more lost or more desperate. All was failing. Perhaps…?
He had heard of such places, so sacred that animals who were each other’s mortal enemies might crouch beside each other and fill their throats with pure water, rather than one another’s life blood.
Did that water truce apply to Black Naacals as well? Somehow Quintus doubted that. No, that was not his thought; that had to have been the thought of Arjuna … he was far from the discipline he had learned at home. Left, right; left, right.
He was not aware that he had quickened his pace, that gradually he outstripped the other Romans, and was drawing even with the Ch’in. Some still rode, masking mouths and noses against the dust. Some were slung across their saddles. Some marched poorly.
Does the Eagle know? Will it see us? It must. Arjuna’s thinking again, perhaps? But one didn’t have to be a warrior prince, but just a farm lad to know that birds always knew where there was water. A pity there were no birds in the Takla Makan.
Now he pulled level with the Ch’in soldiers. Ssu-ma Chao, judging the temper of some of his allies, had guards posted to prevent someone from killing Wang Tou-fan.
A pack camel stumbled, then stood swaying. Then, it collapsed; the men and beasts behind it swerved just in time to keep from walking into it.
Quintus too halted. It took an act of genuine will to keep himself out of the line of march.
Up ahead, Ssu-ma Chao signaled orders to unload the dead beast’s packs. Odd. Why not leave them where they lay? It hardly seemed as if they could use its burden themselves. Then Quintus’s bleary eyes flamed.
The beast had borne the Eagle. Even as he watched, Wang Tou-fan and Ssu-ma Chao came forward. Both men jockeyed for position, worn as they were. Finally, with two or three imperious words and gestures, Wang Tou-fan won the skirmish. He was in command of this. He was. No one else. And he reinforced that by a hand on his sword, waving away even Lucilius, who eyed the Eagle with some of the same longing that the other Romans—those who had stayed faithful—displayed.