“Steady, man!” Rufus clapped him on the shoulder. “The tribune says we’re going in there to fight, so we’re going in there to fight. You like living this way? You’d rather die on the altar or like that poor fool who got his throat slit? At least now you can die like a soldier.”
There were women, children in the ruins. They would die, too; but they would die in any case, whether the Black Naacals took them or by the half-understood powers they hoped to unleash overwhelmed this oasis. Families had died, too, Quintus knew, in the rising of Spartacus. And Ganesha and Draupadi would die, too. Poor Draupadi, trapped at the end in the illusions she spun so well. Perhaps the drug would wear off, and her mind would be clear at the last to remember he loved her—if that were not the last cruelty of all.
Manetho straightened. “You’re going to fight. Even if you have no hope. We have never had any hope. So we will fight at your sides. Perhaps your gods will look more kindly upon us than our own have done.”
“Good man,” Rufus said, his voice oddly gentle. “Tribune…?”
“Let’s go,” Quintus duly ordered.
He followed the centurion to a darkened room in which Legionaries crouched, armed and waiting. At the sight of their officer, the Romans lined up, ready to move.
Manetho gestured, and slaves seemed to pour from every crack, every comer of the ruined walls. Moonlight spun a frail light through a broken wall, then faded as clouds scudded across the disk. When the wind blew them past, the moon was darker, as if moving into eclipse. The slaves flinched from the bloody light. It would be good to see the sun again. Quintus did not expect to.
Manetho guided them deeper within the Temple complex, where the great walls rose about them like the broken teeth of a slain Titan, dead in battle. The slaves he led seemed young and thin to Quintus, too young for real battle.
“Pass the word,” he told Rufus. “Each of the men is to take one of our friends in charge. Under his shield.”
Don’t let them die alone in the dark with no decent example to follow, he was going to say, but his throat tightened.
Empty-handed, a man who had served long ago as standard-bearer came to his side. A pity they did not have the Eagle. At the worst, they could have used it to blast this entire place. Now, the best they could hope for was to destroy it too.
There was no one here to see these last of Crassus’s Legionaries victorious or once again disgraced—no one except the gods and, maybe, the manes of those who had cared for them. And near them stood their allies, the men of Ch’in, led by Ssu-ma Chao. He nodded at Quintus as the Roman approached. He too preferred to stand by his own forces.
They had Draupadi, poor, drugged girl, set up as a guard. He knew she would give the alarm, and he was equally certain he could not kill her.
As the gong rang out once more, the slaves crept closer. A cloud slid once again across the cracked face of the moon, then vanished, almost as if it had been eaten. Under the tainted moonlight, Manetho’s men blended into the Roman ranks. The battle lines shifted to receive them; for a moment, Quintus’s heart was gladdened to see how much stronger they looked.
Again and again, gong and drums sounded, until the vibrations could be felt through their sadly worn-out boots. The Dark Ones must know that they were coming. Lucilius would have warned them. If the gods were kind, perhaps Quintus could at least kill him.
The air thickened. For a moment, his consciousness seemed to lurch sideways. By now, Quintus was used to that shock of displaced time. In just such a space apart, he had marched through a tunnel of wind and blowing sand to the oasis where they had found water and, seated by a fountain, Draupadi herself.
The way out from the arch would be closed now— even if they had Draupadi and Ganesha to break through the Black Naacals’ magics. If they succeeded now, even if they won, their victory would be like that of Pyrrhus: another such, and they were lost.
The entrance to the shrine gaped wide before them. Once, great doors perhaps two or three spear lengths high must have swung to awe worshippers. Those doors were long gone: broken through and carried away, to be harvested by slaves for their metal over many years.
Despite the terror that seemed to settle from the air above, the battle lines moved steadily. Rome’s pace. Rome’s race. The standard-bearer stood as firmly as if he still held the Eagle. They would see it once more before they died. Quintus drew a bleak comfort from that.
The inner shrine was shielded by a vast dome. Through narrow lancets torn out of its massive walls, the moonlight poured in. Between each window rose a bronze stand, wrought in the semblance of a great serpent; smoking torches jutted from their fanged jaws. Patches of light and darkness appeared to float in the dome, so high that one sensed rather than saw them clearly. The gong rang out, and the entire space quivered. The darkness seeped out, encompassing the light.
A reddish glow pulsed from about the altar on which a body gleamed pallidly. With a shock of horror, Quintus recognized Ganesha, stripped of his robes.
Fury replaced horror as Quintus recognized Lucilius, standing by the Black Naacals, his harness gleaming as if he stood in attendance on a proconsul. Guarded as carefully as Lucilius himself and placed at some small distance from him gleamed the Eagle.
Again, the clamor of the gong, followed by the thunder of huge drums and the braying of horns carved out of bones the length of a man’s thigh. Those patches of light and darkness floating overhead shifted, clouds of illusion to twist the senses. When they cleared away, Quintus saw Draupadi.
32
Time and place shifted once more. Amber light, tiny flames flickering in brass bowls floating in a pool, the splash of falling waters turning their light into a dancing shimmer, and, gleaming in the light, Draupadi, reclining on cushions the way Quintus had first seen her.
They had given her a new gown of the clinging saffron cotton she favored. Her long hair had been combed out and gleamed on her shoulders, and her face appeared washed clean of the exhaustion and fear graven in it by month upon month of hardship. A ruby line marked the part of her hair and a bloody hand ornament dangled between dark eyebrows. Her eyes had been elongated by some cosmetic, and there was absolutely no recognition in them.
And no way to reach the enemy or the Eagle except to pass by her.
The fires’ glow shifted, to create on the stone floor the illusion of a pool. It was all illusion, Quintus thought, cast by a woman lost within her own creation.
She had been wary, the first time they had met. And Ganesha had challenged him to a deadly game. How had he ever dared to play? Well, this was the final round.
Quintus gestured, and some of the men fanned out. He himself must be the one to approach her, and they would have to guard him. He forced himself to stare beyond Draupadi: He saw no archers, but that did not mean that the Black Naacals did not have such posted. He would just have to risk it: There was no way to the inmost part of the shrine but to pass Draupadi.
“Guard me,” he whispered and started forward.
Quintus’s first impulse was to go around the water. What water? he reminded himself. They had drugged her, he knew. But drugs could wear off. He only hoped that, to protect Ganesha, she had not consented in some fastness of her being, to serve as guard: If so, she too had been lied to, for Ganesha lay bound as a sacrifice upon the altar.
Remember—illusion, he told himself. Gesturing to the force at his back to stay behind, he strode out, setting foot onto the shimmering area that looked so like water. A corner of his mind expected to sink, but his boots scraped on rock until he reached the carpets on which Draupadi reclined.
She held out a hand to him. Once before, she had held out a hand thus, seeking to delude him—but that had been not Draupadi, but a simulacrum. The real woman had intervened to protect him.
As he had before, Quintus grasped the outstretched hand. The skin pressed by his callused hand had been smoothed with oil, and it smelled faintly of sandalwood. The nails were shaped and gleaming, the fingers henna-tipped. And none of that was right. Draupadi’s hand was shapely, true enough, but callused nearly as much as his own from helping with the pack animals, roughened by grit-filled water, burnt from when she cooked over a dung fire. And the ring that he had given her was gone.