On the ground beyond the circle of light still cut by the Eagle, even in this harsh dawn, long shadows fell like bats shrilling to each other at the uttermost edge of a man’s hearing, more felt than heard. Shadows like unto the flow and sweep of long, black cloaks, darkening still further as the sun rose.
Draupadi clapped her hands. The shadows remained. She raised her voice in a chant. The words faltered and came out hoarsely. The shadows flickered. She drew breath and sang the more strongly, clapped her hands once again, and they finally withdrew. She almost sagged with weariness, but caught herself.
Ganesha came up behind her. She spoke to him quickly in a language Quintus did not know, dismay in her voice.
“Yes,” Ganesha answered her in Parthian. “They get stronger. And will continue to do so the closer we come to them.”
“Do they think we are children or fools?” Ssu-ma Chao asked.
“Very likely,” said the old magician. He laid his hands on Draupadi’s shoulders. “They know we are with you. If it were I, I would seek to drain the two of us, leaving this, our army, without protection.”
“Army?” Ssu-ma Chao’s bark of laughter sounded almost like a sob. “At every dawn, we become fewer and fewer. Come and see.”
It was one of the Ch’in soldiers who had collapsed during the time when the earth shook and time past and time present blurred, seeking to blot out mind and body alike. The man’s face was set in what would have been a mask for the theatre signifying panic. For if ever that god had laid his grip upon a man to steal sanity and breath, it was now.
Lucilius muttered something along the lines of “loading up,” and “the line of march.” Ganesha smoothly interposed his bulk between him and the Ch’in officer, lest Lucilius hear.
“We could send men out to scout, see if those Black Cloaks are anywhere in sight. Or smell,” Rufus offered, oddly indecisive.
“No!” Quintus and Lucilius shouted it together. They could not afford to lose more men, soul as well as the mind.
“He was only a common soldier,” said the Ch’in officer. “But he served faithfully.”
“He served you well even in the manner of his dying,” Draupadi told the officer. “For whatever reason, he was—how shall we say it—aware? sensitive? vulnerable, ” she brought out the word with the air of one struggling to express sophisticated concepts in a language more akin to a child’s speech, “to the influence sent among us by the Black Naacals. Who knows what they might have done had he not screamed and waked us? Until the end, he was faithful; in the end, he gave up his life for his fellows. His ancestors can look down upon him and be proud.”
Even the Ch’in officer’s narrow eyes widened in respect. He heaved himself off his knees and saluted the dead armsman as men wrapped him in his cloak and covered him in a shallow, hastily dug grave.
“And now?” he asked. His eyes went to Quintus. Lucilius glared as he always did when Quintus was deferred to as leader.
But it was Ganesha who answered. “We go forward. Always forward.”
He gestured at the Eagle, which glinted in the coppery rays of the risen sun. Light welled out from it. “We will be guided—but the path will not be easy.”
Day melted into day, and the dunes through which they passed loomed higher and higher. For some time, as many as possible who could ride, did. Then, as their beasts tired, they walked, leading them.
Rufus muttered, “It’s like looking up from the bottom of a well. What sort of pit are we dropping into?”
Of course, no one had any answer for that. Day by day, they were descending, perhaps into what would have been the deepest part of the seabed. Day by day, the shadows ranged alongside them. At first, they paused if you looked at them dead-on. And the higher the sun rose in the sky, the smaller they were, vanishing at noon.
Later on, though, later on, it took Draupadi’s or Ganesha’s knowledge to disperse them. Closer and closer they ranged, not fading even at noon. Even for these men, the strongest who had set out so many months ago, it was hard to rest at noon when no shadows should mark the trail, and see these shadows, as it seemed, in a midday camp of their own, just watching—or ranging out in the late afternoon when all shadows lengthened. Quintus had a private nightmare that, one day, they would curve around one of the larger dunes and find an army of faceless shadow-soldiers between them and their goal.
On the fifth day after the first madman died, a Roman recovered from the stupor into which he had fallen. He recognized his thankful comrades, vowed himself strong enough to march—and disappeared late in the afternoon. The man nearest him had heard his companion shout and run out into the waste, arms outspread in welcome. He had started after the straggler, but two of his fellows had toppled him and sat on him.
“We grow fewer,” Ganesha observed again.
As the water grew scarce, they dreamed shallowly, and always of water. When it seemed as if they could descend no further without losing sight of the night sky, Lucilius woke screaming about a well of water. Thirst had made him slow on his feet, or he too might have fled. He would have to ride, even when others walked, until he recovered from the shock. If he recovered.
“No loss,” Rufus muttered, despite Quintus’s glare. Every man incapacitated and needing to be carried weakened them even more than a death. Impossible to abandon a brother-in-arms—even if to do so would not put them on the moral level of the ones they fought.
As their throats grew more parched, Quintus had no more dreams of the sea. Odd: He would have thought he would have dreamed more of water, rather than less. His sleep was shallow. Too often, he woke in a cold sweat that wasted water he could ill afford to replace. He dreamt of sliding down the face of immense dunes. He woke shaking. And then he thought of water.
So far they had come, so far: If this had been a futile chase, they must now begin to resign themselves to having lost their way. It was too late now to retrace their steps. Perhaps they had all been befooled, betrayed. Perhaps the real Black Naacals marched beside them, a fat man and a slender woman, lithe and careworn, wrapped in tattered veils.
And that thought was worse than any possible dreams that Quintus might have.
The fifth horse died at noon. It had simply collapsed and refused to rise. Lucilius dispatched it by cutting its throat, surprising tears drying on his cheeks. The copper stench of blood seemed even hotter than the sun.
One of the Legionaries began to unstrap what the horse bore.
“Leave it,” Quintus ordered. The man obeyed.
Do you really think, lad, we are going to need what the poor brute carried? The man might have been Quintus’s own age, maybe even a bit older: At this point, they were all “lad” to him. Lucky men, who had someone to shoulder the burden of regret for all the lost lives.
Even if it had been gold or jewels, he would have ordered the pack left. Only food, water, and weapons were of value enough to be borne along—and blankets against the chill of the night.
The blowing grit stung their faces until they bled. They wrapped in the felts designed for storms until, from a distance, they might well have seemed to be a straggling column of mummies, bandages peeling, staggering and lurching from their inquiet sleep. “Look at us,” Rufus muttered. “Maybe we’ll scare those shadows.”
That raised a laugh from the men that would have brought tears of pride to Quintus’s eyes if they weren’t so dry—and if the men didn’t waste breath by laughing.
Then, late one afternoon, he looked up. An immense slide was beginning along the slope of a dune not all that far ahead. His heart sank: He had dreamed of an attack, but usually it took the form of the Black Naacals’ shades arrayed in a triplex acies against them.
Nevertheless, he told himself. Nevertheless, we fight.
He grasped the Eagle firmly. “Let me go first.” He had heard sweeter tones from a crow. There were no crows here: too dry.
The shadow marched ahead of him. The Eagle showed no soldiers waiting for him, and the tiny bronze dancing Krishna he bore still rested quiescent against his heart.
Something marched alongside his shadow. He chuckled hoarsely, and it all but turned into a sob. The shadow he watched and feared so had been his own—his and the Eagle’s. They had reached the depths and were climbing once more.