I must help her, Quintus thought, but he lacked the breath to tell her he was coming. If he could get to the Eagle, he would have a weapon better than any sword, but he had laid it aside.
His ribs felt as if lead weights were laid about them. He could see Draupadi’s face, but it was growing smaller and fainter as if he saw it through a mist of blood…. He started to fall but was upheld by the very thing that was attacking him.
Draupadi stepped forward, a tiny knife in her hand. A stab at the serpent’s “middle” and the pain in his chest eased. The creature seemed to fall as if poisoned, and Quintus had hard work not to collapse, too.
Dust swirled up from the desert floor, as if some immense creature lashed it up with its tail in its death throes.
Fire seemed to burn in Quintus’s chest. The talisman’s heat subsided; now the fire was his fight to draw in enough air so he could breathe without gasping.
They would send more serpents, Quintus knew. Sooner or later, everyone would see them, and Draupadi could not fight them all off.
He forced himself to move, then doubled over, almost retching from the pain as if he had run a race and must now collapse. Chairete, nikomen, he remembered after Marathon. Rejoice, we have conquered, said the runner. And collapsed and died. You can’t die yet. You haven’t conquered, he admonished himself. No Lethe for you.
Ganesha’s eyes begged him. Choose. Choose now. He could see the old man fighting his own battle—to urge rather than to coerce. Perhaps that was a battle he knew. Perhaps he had seen the Black Naacals fight it and lose it too.
Perhaps that was even how it started, a desire to do good, to protect, to lead—and then the desire grew to overpower all opposition, even to the wrecking of the world.
Ganesha was an ally. Quintus must aid him, just as he had aided Draupadi.
They were out of their reckoning? Well, Ssu-ma Chao’s fountain of pure water was as good a goal in this world of illusion as any.
“We ride!” he ordered. He didn’t see who came up to lead—or carry—him to his horse because his eyes were fixed on Lucilius. Once again, the patrician had started toward the Eagle.
“No need to trouble yourself with that,” Quintus rasped at Lucilius. “Get me over there,” he ordered his bearer. He picked up the Eagle before the other man could try.
Quintus’s horse screamed and plunged. Desert-bred as they were, even they had a horror of serpents. Did this one sense the illusion serpents? It must be so. A wind began to rise, stirring the sand and grit into swirls that looked like more coils—best not think like that, lest exhaustion and fear and memory of the serpent’s coils cause them to manifest once more. Venomous or not, those coils were deadly.
Rufus had bent over, was sprinkling dust over the faces of the two men who had died. Draupadi mounted, chanting as she moved.
“Mount up and take her reins!” Quintus shouted at Rufus. She would need both hands for her work.
“Forward!” he shouted. He had not meant to gesture with the standard as if it were a sword—it had been Arjuna’s blade, but that had snapped. However, the Eagle felt right in his hands, like a sweetly balanced weapon. Once again, light flared from the proudly held bird’s head into a crown of glory, lighting sky and ground alike.
Once more he heard hissing, this time in front of them. If they turned to flee, he would wager all that the serpents’ hiss would sound again.
Gods help us, he thought. The image of dancing Krishna seemed to stir against his chest.
Again, Quintus raised the Eagle. As the light struck the ground ahead of him and the wind blew, a figure gleaming like the Eagle seemed to gather itself up from the desert floor and leap to its feet. It moved forward, dancing as it went; light gleamed off its raised hands, as if it held torches.
Light from Eagle and dancer intensified until they filled Quintus’s consciousness. Tears ran down his face, and he had to look aside. Tears were a waste; he would need that moisture as they rode deeper into the desert.
When the brightness subsided enough to allow him and the others to open their eyes, sand and sky were as they always had been. They stood in a basin in the greater depression. It was only a waste now, not the’ abode of monsters. It was a marvel to stand thus and look about the cloudless sky, realizing that what looked like clouds were actually far-off mountains to the north and east: a marvel indeed to have north and east again.
Confidence touched Quintus, as it had every time the Eagle manifested its power. No doubt they might cut across a caravan route and reach a town before they consumed the last of their supplies.
They might well, indeed. But instead of counting on that, he turned his mount’s head and guided his people deeper into the waste, following a dancing figure that flickered and gleamed ahead of him like sparks from a fire at harvest time.
The sparks brightened and spread out, solidifying into a track of light upon the eternal drabness of the desert. On and on it stretched, inviting them to travel along it.
Some of the men turned away. One screamed, then fell, lying with his face against the grit.
“We have a path,” Quintus said. Try not to hurt at this most recent death, he told himself. He held aloft the Eagle as he would hold a torch up as he entered a cave. The signum’s brightness gleamed as if it were molten metal, a beacon not just of power, of the might, of the Senate and the Roman people, but a sign or a promise that here at least, in the wild where madness stalked behind the noonday sun, the Eagle’s wings spread out over all who cared to shelter beneath them.
It might not protect them: Romans and Ch’in alike, they were soldiers who must go where they were ordered and, perhaps, die there.
But this was a chance; and more than that, it was uniquely theirs, a memory of governance, land, and homes that existed, even if they never saw them again. Judging by the light in Ssu-ma Chao’s eyes, Quintus thought that the Eagle—or as he called it, the Phoenix, meant much the same for him: authority, guidance, loyalty—his ancestors themselves, looking down on him and nodding approval.
Quintus led the Romans and the Ch’in out onto the blazing track.
25
Up ahead, the dancing figure flung up its torches. They blazed brightly as they rose, then exploded into even greater radiance.
“But if that light goes out…” came a whisper, followed by the crack of the vinestaff. You followed where you were led. If you were led well, you lived, you received land and a mule, and you retired to enjoy them. If not, you died. But always, you obeyed.
None of them, Quintus knew, had reason to understand this enemy. What had they thought of? Death in battle or even by thirst were things they understood: not this. But they followed him.
Why do you tarry? the tiny figure seemed to ask as it danced. After so long lost, with such a path ahead of them, they might have been riding or marching down a Roman road toward a fate that, for the first time since he was a boy, he was convinced held glory.
He grinned at Ganesha. “Fare forward, just as he told me last time.”
“I remember,” said the magician. “But fare faster.” Ganesha knew. He remembered and had chronicled how Arjuna had ridden out in his chariot, riding behind Krishna to a battle that would shake the foundations of the world. He had his usual weapons—and he had Pasupata, the ultimate weapon for which he had searched the waste. He, too.
There was no question of it now, Quintus thought, exulting. Faster and faster they traveled, and the ming sha, the singing sand, rose up to obscure their passage as if they marched into a place of turned up sand and light where their enemies might not harm them.
The sun sank and set, yet the light persisted. It was too good to lose: Tired though they were, they plodded on. Those who were mounted, marched; those who had marched, rode, resting as they might. There would be time to cease, to camp when the light faded. The hot wind blew. Quintus was very happy.
As the hours passed, the moon rose, climbing high overhead.
Beneath the beacon of the moon, the Eagle glowed not like bronze but the electrum of Egypt. Under that dome cast by its light, Quintus saw the desert transformed— softened by the light and by the ming sha itself, as if a veil rested gently over its worst aspects, hinting at the beauty that had once been in this place.