He stiffened. So often, when he had felt that oppression, it had come companied by the hissing of great serpents. He stiffened, and Manetho guessed his thoughts.
“There are no serpents,” his guide assured him. “The Black Naacals will not let us suffer from the creatures of the desert: They reserve their cattle for themselves.”
He looked shrewdly at Quintus in the starlight. “This is not, the Light knows, a fate you would have chosen or a site for a battle. But we have taken these ruins and made them into our fortress, our redoubt…”
And now, yours too. The thought came very clearly, but Manetho did not put it into words. “You have the look,” he said instead, “of a man who has lost his home. I am sorry.”
“The walls are sound.” Quintus made himself reply to at least some of the other man’s words. And indeed, he thought a Legion’s engineers could work prodigies with them. But his thoughts were on more than fortifications.
Had Quintus pitied himself for his loss? For having to bow and scrape before fools like Lucilius? This man and the people he led had suffered far, far worse. They had endured a slavery more long-lasting and harder than the rulers who had lined the roads of Rome with crucified rebels.
Tears came to his eyes. He squeezed his eyelids shut on them and thinned his lips. So much Manetho and his people had endured, and now Manetho apologized to him? Had he, in truth, pitied himself? He must stand a little straighter now.
He had, he knew, lamented the deaths of the Legions at Carrhae, and he had mourned each one of his men who had fallen every day since then. At least, however, he had been free to work out his own fate, seek to retrieve the fortunes of his house or the honor of his Legion. The gladiators who had rebelled had no such choices. They were trained as beasts to kill other beasts in the sand of the arena and if they knew a month’s respite from the armor or net and trident it was a great deal. They had remembered, though, that they were men, had rebelled, and had died.
These castaways in time and place, shut away from the world in the heart of a desert so harsh that it made Trachonitis seem like Elysium, endured a slavery that jeopardized not just their bodies in the sands of an arena, but their souls on profaned altars.
Surely, the thought must have touched their minds many times during the hideous years. How easy it would be: agree, bow to the altars; grow stronger; escape. Canny slaves had agreed and had won comfort, perhaps even freedom, thus since the dawn of time. Yet Spartacus who might well have been one of the gladiators to survive to be freed had not done so.
“Why?” he asked.
“Why have we not surrendered? Sir, you have seen the handiwork of the Black Naacals, but we have lived with it. When they come to claim one of us for their … their rites, their expressions were—how shall I say it? Hungry. As if they cannot be content to snatch us away alive, but they must also drain dry all our fear, all our horror. Not just at that moment, but all that night.
“The air … the air grows thick, and we hear terrible thunder. We long for a storm’s fury to fill this basin; we even long for another great wave such as that which swamped our Motherland, to fill this basin, wash up and sweep over this place until the rock is clean once more; but it never happens. The air turns thicker and more foul; breathing it, you feel as if your lungs are coated with blood. I have seen an old man die of that alone. I think I must first have sensed that fear, that foulness, while still in my mother’s womb, on the night the Naacals snatched up my father.”
Quintus glanced away. “I too have lost a father. In battle, too.”
“Your father’s death was clean,” Manetho said. “Mine … I tell myself that death puts you beyond pain, beyond a world where you cannot go to sleep and be certain of waking up able to call your spirit your own. But do not think of us as stainless servants of the Light, not all of us. We have had our spies and traitors squatting among us, and we dared not even kill them. Always, they are someone’s son, someone’s mother, someone we have lived with, wept with, perhaps even loved. And besides, if we killed the spies we knew of, who knows whether we would lose more? So we turn our backs and, after a time, they die, too.” Manetho sighed. “It used to be our custom for closest kin to catch a dying man’s last breath in their own mouths: These spies’ breath is foul, and we no longer have that custom.”
Quintus shook his head. It would no longer be enough to escape, he and his people. Somehow, he must think of a way to save these castaways.
“You, at least,” said Manetho, “might have died. Fallen on that blade, or turned your face to the wall and starved. We … we could not. Not as long as we had a chance.”
Think, man, came Arjuna’s memories into his mind. If you believe you are reborn according to how you have lived, think of what these people fear they would be reborn as?
It was like the Eagle, Quintus thought. Even when it had been only the standard of his Legion, it could not be abandoned as a prisoner among barbarians, not as long as there was a Roman able to risk his life to retrieve it. And, once he realized that the Eagle was far more than just a standard, just as he had learned that his talisman was not just a funeral bronze found in an old tomb, some things became more important than death with honor. Like keeping such things safe. Or, at the worst, making sure that they did not fall into the possession of enemies who would use them to destroy soul and body, both.
“If we had died,” said Manetho, “the Dark Ones would only have found another fortress and other folk to be their slaves. We could not allow another people to endure our lives.” He looked out over the deep desert. “When this life is over, I shall pray to be reborn as the fattest and richest of merchants in a city by the sea. I shall have earned it.”
Quintus wanted to salute the other man as if he were a consul. The honor would have gone unseen: Manetho was staring far out into the desert. The moon had risen and, in its pale light, a whirl of sand danced about, then subsided. At the horizon, faint lights played: heat lightning. He listened for the thunder.
Thunder! What was it that Manetho had warned him about the thunder? Now it rumbled out sullenly, hollowly. The night wind blew, then ceased. And again, the thunder growled, closer this time. The air thickened. Quintus felt the urge to rip at his tunic, to hurl his heavy harness from him, to gasp for breath. He shuddered until he could get enough air to fill his chest.
A third time, the thunder grumbled out.
“Does it rain?” he asked, to forestall words that might have been fearful or hot with the anger born of fear.
“Blood, maybe,” said Manetho. “Never pure rain. We must get back, fast. I have felt this weight at heart before. It means that the Black Naacals have come among us.”
3O
Down they swung from the tower, Quintus ready to curse every time his feet, unfamiliar with the footholds, kicked loose a tile or chunk of masonry. Manetho moved fast and far more silently, a scout expert in his own terrain, aware of every hiding place.
How many Naacals, Quintus wondered, ventured out into the ruins and never returned to the black sanctums?
The air thickened still further. The night sky took on the color of onyx appearing to settle, inexorably, upon his shoulders as if he were being tortured, pressed beneath its weight. Heavier and heavier it grew, together with the sense that something was amiss, someone watched him as he might watch a snake before he struck its head off.
Confess and your punishment is less than if your crime is discovered, he had always been told. They lied, oh they lied. But the temptation to run from the path into bright lights and bargain for some shreds of a miserable life added to the oppression of his spirit.
“Quickly!” hissed Manetho.
You are not at risk, at least with me, Quintus thought, but dismissed that as ignoble. It might be that Manetho’s people needed him to put heart in them, the way a good leader must. Or it might be that he did not want to decrease their numbers by staying away, protecting himself if the Black Naacals claimed a victim by lot.