"Loyal," she pronounced. "Well enough. You are here. And they are here. And the talismans. Look you!"
She snapped one of the fragile shells from the bracelet on her slender wrist. "I break this cowrie shell. And I scatter its pieces... oh, here... and here... and here...." She dropped gleaming fragments on the amber and crimson carpet. "But then the need comes for such a shell. A need such as the world has never seen since the stars danced in different patterns in the heavens. So the pieces gather in one place, where the hand that knows them—" her own fingers with their almond-shaped nails were busy collecting the shards, "—and then, they are joined once more. Sol"
She raised her hand, and the shell was whole.
"More shadow-play?"
Ganesha shook his head. "That was true transformation. You have grown, Draupadi."
"I wish to grow beyond illusions into truth. I can spin shadows into pleasing forms. And I can spin them into shapes that can save a man's life. A little, I can take the fabric of the world and change it in truth. But I cannot do more, not without help."
"I have heard," Quintus said, "that those of Hind are great magicians." His voice was very dry. The cup at his feet beckoned, but he did not dare drink it.
"It would protect you from wounds," Draupadi said, "and make you all but immortal. If you spurn that, drink from the pool."
"We are not from Hind," Ganesha said. "Oh, in latter days, before the stars changed once again and we were driven out once more, we lived there... in that palace Maya built at your... at Arjuna's... command. But this was our home before, and we must hope will be so once again."
Quintus paced about the platform. By rights, he ought to call his men or Ssu-ma Chao to restrain the lunatics. But, he recalled, perhaps they were oracles. And those sybils who were holiest seemed the maddest. He thought of the woman before him seated by a tripod, a serpent twined round its legs, as fumes rose from a fissure in the earth and dreams erupted from her lips.
"You cast your nets wide, if you draw in such as we."
"Nets! Now you begin to understand," Ganesha nodded approval. "Long ago, this was a plain, rich with water, fertile fields, forests, and lakes. A great city rose not far from here, the home of a race that had journeyed far from the East, from the Motherland known as Mu. From there, they spread out. Here, to the city of the Uighurs. And beyond it to the island in the sea, now sunken...."
Quintus's palms were wet. That much Plato he remembered. "Atlantis, lost when the earth split, sunk beneath the waves."
"We cast our nets wide, as you say. Wide as the waves that overwhelmed our cities." Ganesha's voice was grave. A tear ran down Draupadi's cheek. "On a night of the blackest evil, waves were sent raging down onto the plain that the Uighurs had made into a worthy daughter of the Motherland. Huge rocks shattered the pillars of the temples and palaces and theatres we had built. Those of us who could, those of us with the training of the Naacals, the caste of priests, fled.
"And when we looked back, we saw only desolation. Boulders had scoured the soil, bare to the very bones of the world. The land dried, and sand came, to bury the ruins of Uighur glory.
"Weeping, we made our way overmountain to Hind, those of us who did not despair, or plunge off the great peaks, or die for lack of breath. But we made our way down into rich fields that reminded us of the land we had lost.
"The people greeted us there beside rivers they called holy. When we named ourselves and spoke of our loss, they bowed and touched our feet. They heaped our necks with wreaths and scarves of honor. For 'Naacal,' they heard 'Naga'—a holy people of their own. And indeed, it had been that those 'Nagas' were loyal daughters of the Motherland and Hind had been the jewel on her brow—as much as Mu. Even the symbol was the same. Draupadi?"
The woman gestured. The air around the nearest brazier shimmered, melded with the sparks, and formed the image of the seven-headed serpent that Quintus had convinced himself he had not seen on the cliff walls.
"Serpents," she said. "It is the nature of man to fear them, and that is wise. But like fire, there is no need to hate. Do not your own priests venerate the serpent?"
Despite himself, Quintus smiled, remembering as a child how he had laid down a saucer of milk for the garden snake that coiled near the household shrine.
Still it was hard, hard to think of the desert through which he had passed in such pain and peril as a seabed— but his eyes had flinched from the noon glare on slick white patches uncovered by the wind, and when he had touched some of this strange sand to his lips, he had tasted salt.
You could still be in the desert. They could serve your head as they served the proconsul's—hurling it into an entertainment to delight barbarians. Or your head could be curing in some Yueh-chih tent, ready for some unwashed carver to make into a drinking cup.
So he owed these people at least a hearing. And it was hard to look away from the woman, who spoke with a voice near that of his own genius loci.
Her eyes were upon him. "I told you, we cast our nets of illusion wide—and our nets of vision even wider."
He looked down at the statue of Krishna.
"You have pipes—flutes, music, dancing—in your own land," she was continuing. "There can be no pipes without his presence, somehow."
There's Pan or Silenus. It seemed useless to say so, however.
With a stubbornness he thought his grandfather would have approved of, for once, Quintus brought up what seemed to him the most telling argument against this madness. "Lady, you broke that shell. Then you reassembled it—I do not know how. But you knew where all its pieces were and why you did what you did."
"Excellent!" Ganesha said, clapping plump hands together. "Look up!"
Quintus gazed up into the sky. Once again, the stars bloomed, even more brightly than in the deep desert.
"You see the patterns in the stars?"
Ganesha pointed out the ones Quintus had been taught as a boy. "When I was your age, there was no Hunter, no great or lesser Bear. We had the Naga, the Crown... ah, they are all passed. But the patterns shift in the sky. And when certain patterns emerge, then it is time for change in the world. As above, so below. It is a crucial time, and past time. Does it not seem to you that there is no order, no justice in the world, that all is confusion?"
His father dead afar, his pretty, vigorous mother withering, his grandfather dying, rigid in his bed, their lands lost. Betrayal in the desert, the slithering in the sand of serpents he could not hear, the vanishing of carts from the illusions that should have saved them.
What if you were not mad, but right, to sense that all was amiss?
He sat back down and used the scarf of honor to dab at his brow.
"Have you ever seen," Draupadi asked, "men and women who resemble Ganesha and I? Who look like us, but with whom you would never sit, much less listen to unless you came armed and protected by strong amulets?"
Her hand moved over the water of the pool, and faces formed. "Have you seen any who look like this?"
Dark hair; eyes kept lidded, but dark and with fire in their cores; narrow-lipped mouths; a high-bred look, but one that seemed to raise his hackles the way the rustling of unseen serpents had outside Merv.
Twin to Draupadi, perhaps, but a twin as devoted to darkness as she seemed to the light.
"Those are the Black Naacals," Draupadi told him. "For as the stars moved into their appointed patterns, they stirred. And we have been drawn from our long contemplations, and you from your proper life to stand against them."
He was insane. In the morning, they would miss him. They would seek him out. And they would find him, his face twisted in a madman's grimace, his hair torn out— that is, if they did not count him fled.
"Draupadi!"
Both of the creatures who called themselves Naacals stiffened as if scenting the air. It quivered, seemingly thickening, and from as far off as the cliff walls ringing the valley, Quintus heard the rustle of giant coils. Descending by night, seeking out the warmth of the camp, th
e lives of his men...
"No!"
"Hold!"
Ganesha picked up his scroll. Draupadi opened her hands in the gestures that Quintus had seen summon her illusions. For a moment longer, the air thickened and the rustling drew closer. Quintus drew his sword.
"You cannot slay the serpent with a sword," Ganesha told him. "You need a bow—Gandiva, which only Arjuna might draw."
"You do not need me," Quintus told them. "My men do. Let me go to them."
"The serpent has been contained, illusion banished with illusion. But I am no warrior, nor is Ganesha. For the serpent of the Black Naacals to be slain, we must have a man of war. You. And you must have weapons. It seems to me that, just as a bird flies, with the serpent that it has caught dangling from its beak, your Eagle plays a role in what we must do. And it may even be that you, like Arjuna, must seek out weapons that could wreck the earth. But better at your hands, should you err, than at those of the Black Naacals."
From far across the lake, Quintus heard someone call out. The watch? Had the guards found someone slain, or discovered him missing? He glanced up. Banners began to fly at the horizon—crimsons and purples and golds— as the night sky dimmed, hiding the stars that he had heard signaled such war for the world. It was all but dawn, and he had never known.
He had passed the entire night in conversation with these Naacals or spirits—whatever they were, they were beings at least as strange as the genius loci of his childhood.
"It is time," Ganesha said. He picked up the huge shell and blew into it, producing a cry that any trumpeter would have praised.
"You've given away your location," Quintus pointed out.
"They do not seek us, but you," Draupadi said. "And they bring news that you must hear."
11
"SIR! TRIBUNE!"
As if he had fallen asleep for a moment, his consciousness shifted. When he returned to awareness, he saw only barren rock: no carpets, no cushions, no old man with an elephant's head and supple hands: only two priests or prophets in clean but threadbare robes, gazing at the sun as they performed morning prayers. Threads of incense spiraled up from sticks driven into the cracks in the stone slab on which they sat. Carpets and cushions were gone, and the lights in the water had winked out as if pulled beneath the ripples.
"Tribune! Where are you?" Quintus knew that familiar rasp, knew the pause that meant that Rufus was hand-signaling for scouts to flank the place on shore and a detachment to rush it.
Three men pounded through the passageway. Their swords were out, and their boots struck sparks from the stone.
"Hold!"
The Romans stood, gazing in amazement at the falls, the pools, and the priest and priestess seated placidly, their heels turned up in their laps, opposite one of their own officers.
The Legionaries firmed their grips on their swords. Ssu-ma Chao and his guards, spears at the ready, appeared behind them. The morning sun glinted on Lucilius's fair hair.
Rufus glared, not at the priests, but at his officer. For going missing, for leaving him with another tribune whose orders he did not rely on. Quintus could only thank the gods he was an officer and not one of the men under the senior centurion's authority. But there was more to his anger than that.
"These people are unarmed. Friends," Quintus snapped. "What's your report?"
The centurion ushered two men forward.
"Gaius, Decimus, tell the tribune what you told me." And it better be the same story, if you know what's good for you, was the accompanying threat.
Draupadi and Ganesha ceased their prayers and sat watching, serenely interested and unafraid, despite the intrusion of so many armed men into their shrine. The sun beat down on their heads. Even if they were surrounded by water falling into a pool, and growing things, it would be a hot day. It was hard to remain on guard in such a place. The very sound of water falling over ancient rocks promised rest and peace.
But they were adepts in illusion, Quintus reminded himself.
"Sir, the centurion set us to guard the wagons that camped outside the causeway."
Very properly done, of course. Quintus had not liked the look of those particular wagons or the way they had struggled halfway down the slope into the valley, then turned around.
Seeing no apparent danger from a priest and priestess in shabby robes, Rufus sheathed his short sword. Despite the sunlight, he wore his metal helm. Lovingly, he tapped his vinestaff against his palm.
"Sleeping on duty..."
"Sir, by all the gods, I swear it, we never took our eyes off them. They camped; they built a fire; they drew from their own stores...." Gaius, a man young in the Legions and with the stocky build of the Italian provincial, all but stammered.
Behind him, Arsaces struggled to translate his words into Parthian for Ssu-ma Chao and his soldiers, who shifted from foot to foot, not in impatience but with increasing suspicion. Ganesha gestured with his hand, and the Persian looked up, astonished. Ssu-ma Chao barked laughter once, then fell silent too.
"Didn't you find it strange that they would use their stores when they had a chance at fresh water and grazing?"
Both Legionaries had to fight from shrugging. They had never lived so long and so closely with strangers from so many nations. To them, anything any of these people did was strange. "Then, the wind started to blow. A cloud covered the moon. And we heard hissing...."
"We heard that before, the night you woke up, sir."
Outside Merv, when the fear of giant serpents had struck the entire camp. Quintus didn't need to know that Draupadi and Ganesha were leaning forward, as intent on the Legionaries' story as their officers.
"And so they ran, didn't they?" Lucilius drawled. He slipped past the first rank of armed men to run his eyes over Quintus's companions. They lit appreciatively at the sight of Draupadi. She caught his glance and looked aside.
"No, sir!" The denial came too fast, and, despite the differences in rank and status between them and a patrician tribune, too hotly.
"So you heard... what? What you thought were serpents? So you went quiet, with your swords ready, in case they got closer?"
Gaius had one hand on his breast, as if he reached for the comfort of some amulet. Lad, Quintus thought at the Legionary, who was not all that much younger than he, I know just how you feel. The man had begun to sweat, and whites showed all around the pupils of his eyes.
"The rustling... I'm from Arpinum, sir, and I've grown up around fields, and I've been in the desert, but this was worse... I mean louder than I have ever heard. It came between us and the... the merchants. I could see light... oh, a black light, if you see what I mean. And we could not move."
"I thought we were done for," Decimus interrupted. "Like a bird, staring at a big snake. Couldn't even shout for help, not that we'd have done so."
"It was like everything went away. Then the light went away, too. The rustling died, and the moon came out from behind the clouds. And they were gone, the wagons were. Not even cart tracks to show the path they'd taken."
Draupadi rose to her knees and bent over the water. She stretched out her hands to the right and left; and the water was still.
"Are these the ones whom you have lost?"
Figures moved in the shining depths, so clear that more than one man looked over his shoulder. Even Quintus, who had seen her illusions before, was tempted. Surely, those carts, those beasts, those lean merchants with the faces of traitors—but so like in feature to the priest and priestess before him—had to be reflections of something.
She raised her head commandingly, gazing at the two guards. They nodded and looked away from her.
"We lost more of them," Quintus said. "When you brought us here..."
Murmurs rose at his back.
"...Some of their party were missing. We thought the Yueh-chih had slain them, or they had taken their own way, betraying even their comrades."
"Ahhhhh, tribune, betrayal is ever the way of the Black Naacal."
Ganesha chuc
kled richly. "Do not fear here, warriors. This place is protected. When we came here, fleeing over-mountain, we expended our last strength in warding it. You saw the Naga, the snake with seven heads, as you approached."
"They could not pass," Ssu-ma Chao muttered. For an instant Quintus heard the nasal tones of Ch'in speech before the cultivated Latin of a noble officer replaced them. "They dared not. You are—what? Wizards, alchemists—or are you witches?"
Ssu-ma Chao drew steel on Ganesha and advanced, holding the tip of his blade at the man's throat.