Lick my sandals, Lucilius had added.
Watch that boulder.... Quintus sought safer footing, guided a man's hand to a more secure handhold. His grandsire had bent his back and slashed his pride, scraping like a client, but he had never faltered.
He nearly stumbled. A stupid fall would be fine, wouldn't it? Tell Minos and Rhadamanthus at the Judgment below, I fell. I was feeling sorry for myself. It would be Tartarus for certain; not that Romans truly believed in such places, but after what he had seen in dreams and in exile, best not risk it.
Quiet, he told the voices that battled in his skull. They seemed to echo in his helmet. Gravel rattled against it, and dust rose until his eyes squinted tears. The lucky men were the ones who died.
You would never get the old man to bend. You will not get me to bend either.
Step by step, battling the very rock and earth of their passage, they struggled down the slope. Depending on how you looked at it, the gods were either favoring them or wishing to punish them further, because most of them survived to reach the valley floor.
The wailing they had heard as the earth began to shake had died away. No one could remember at what point the rumbling under the ground had ceased. No one could remember when the screams borne up to them by the winds and mists had been put to silence.
A few last rocks fell and stuttered into quiet as the Romans and Ch'in staggered to a halt on the plains. None of them fell to their knees in relief, and Quintus felt the warmth of pride. Even the wind that swiftly dried the sweat from their heaving bodies had fallen silent. Mist licked them around and brought a thick silence.
Grayish-white, that mist writhed up to billow against them. Moving through it was like scouting through a ruin, not so much festooned with cobwebs but barriered with them. Soft as the mist was, the brush of it on gaunt faces and bleeding hands was something subtly vile. Lucilius grimaced as if touching carrion.
"Ugh!"
"Quiet there!" grumbled Rufus.
Draupadi wrapped a grimy saffron fold of her garments over her face. Quintus found himself breathing thinly as if still on the heights, unwilling to draw any more of this mist-laden, unwholesome air into his lungs. The mist will breed in you, came the unwelcome voice in his head. The webs will ensnare you, and you will gasp and cough until blood spurts from your mouth, staining the webs. Thus shall you leave your bones here, where corpses of mighty cities have vanished without a trace.
Working through that smell of must, of something old, salty, and spoiled like rotten shellfish were the desert smells. That made it somehow worse.
"Steady, boy, steady," came Rufus's voice as a horse panted and struggled. The mount lacked the strength to put up a convincing fight: It was too tired and too afraid to panic. Up and down the line of march, eyes showed white rimmed in fear. The men sagged, exhausted with more than their mad plunge in the path of the earthquake to the desert floor.
"Mists are getting thicker, sir," someone muttered.
Cocooned in mists the way a spider entraps a fly, would they encounter worse the further they moved into the true desert?
Draupadi was a mistress of illusion, came the thought. Surely, she...
"Domina?" Gently, Quintus addressed the sorceress as if she were a great lady of his own race.
"In this mist," he told her, "we will wander lost until we die."
Her eyes met his, then fell. "Later would be better," she admitted. "They watch, or something does. Already, I make shields...." She put out a hand that trembled. "I promise."
Abruptly, even an instant longer spent in those mists seemed about an age too long. Thicker and thicker they grew, as if they drew strength from the men trapped to wander in them. The stink of something messily dead grew stronger.
"I would spare you what you will see," she said.
For the first time since Quintus had known her, Draupadi seemed unsure of herself. "You are on the proper trail, I beg you to believe me," she said. Briefly, she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, she flinched as if she gazed upon horrors hidden to the others.
None of them shared her sight—if true sight she had. In the silence, a horse stumbled, and Quintus heard a bone snap. A moment later, the coppery scent of blood filled the air as a Ch'in armsman ended the creature's thrashing pain. Trying to see where the horse had fallen, Quintus set his foot down awry, and nearly measured his length in the grit. He saved himself, but at the cost of the skin on one palm and knee and a sharp pain in his chest like unto the Legions' brand touching him once more. He did not like to think of the way the mist seemed to lick at the blood that oozed from his scratches.
The image of a slender figure, torches held aloft in its hands, kindled in Quintus's thoughts. "Krishna," he whispered to himself. His bronze talisman, the last link between his home and this gods-forsaken place, the guardian that had always warned him of danger.
As it warned him now against the lure of protection from piercing the mists that wreathed them about.
Quintus strode toward the sybil from Hind. "Can you end this spell?" he demanded in a voice he never had used to her before. "Never mind what we may or may not wish to see. We don't—none of us—wish to be here anyhow, let alone with our legs and necks broken from falls."
Draupadi studied his face through the mists as if finding in it something she had loved and had missed for a long, long time. As her voice rose in a chant, she raised her hands in slow gestures. Her, eyes rolled in her head. Drained from the effort of lifting whatever illusion she fought against, she sagged, and he caught her just in time. The fragrance of sandalwood and musk, the salt of her sweat, were the most wholesome things he had smelled for weeks.
The mist dissipated. As the last tendrils vanished, the muffled clangor of harness bells was heard, subdued and strangely echoing, as one of the caravan beasts bearing them appeared in sight.
With a cry that was half oath, half laughter, one of the Romans dropped his hand from his pilum. No sense killing a beast they might need.
The reek of terror and of ancient seabeds evaporated with the mists. Someone caught the wandering pack beast and silenced its bells. In this waste, their release from fear seemed almost obscene.
The beast coughed once and toppled, as if only the sound of its bells had kept it alive that long. With the mists gone, they could indeed see clearly. All along their path, camels and horses were lying as if whatever had shaken the earth had stolen their lives from them.
Near them, all about, were their masters—untidy bundles of travel-worn robes. And all of them were dead too.
15
A FINAL WISP of mist faded, taking with it the incongruous reek of brine. Desert wind tugged Quintus forward. For a moment, he inhaled the scents of this dry place as if they were fine incense: dry stone, salt, and the sweat of fearful men and laboring beasts. Then, as the wind urged him forward, his talisman jolted. No stench of plague or rot, but death was there. Fare forward.
Quintus strode into a field of corpses.
Bells tinkled on the harnesses of dead horses and camels as the wind tugged at saddle cloths and the robes of the dead merchants and guards. For the caravan was dead, the little world made up of Parthians, Syrians, Jews, Persians, men of the Ch'in, and guides from the perimeters of the desert blotted out. The journey had leached color and texture from those robes: Display and finery were for towns. But even beyond the drabness of the old robes that men might wear in the waste, these bodies seemed drained of natural color.
Ssu-ma Chao gestured. "Within bow-shot of the Stone Tower," he muttered.
It would have to be a very long bow-shot, nevertheless.
"That would take quite an archer," Lucilius shot out with a barbed tongue. Predictable that he would be the one to point that out.
A soldier laughed at the retort. Other laughter rose in the ranks. Hysteria of a sort, born of relief, could be as deadly a thing as panic, Quintus knew.
"Quiet!" A crack of Rufus's vinestaff reinforced the order, bringing the laughter to a qu
ick stop.
"That will not work, sir," said Ganesha. He had picked his way over to the man who had laughed.
"You show no respect to the dead, younger brother," he spoke softly. "Or to yourself or your comrades."
"Burial detail, sir?" Rufus asked as crisply as if organizing camp for a night.
However, Quintus truly was not commander here— had the centurion forgotten? It was Ssu-ma Chao who ruled, little as the man looked as if he were in any shape to give orders. The line of march had broken. Men were leading beasts to the rear, lest they panic and bolt with what remained of their supplies.
Reason? Quintus knew his men better than that— hard-headed peasant stock. They did have discipline: they had loyalty; they had customs—customs that had been violated at Carrhae, when the Romans had fled, leaving the dead and wounded untended behind them. But they were Romans, not a rabble, and if they had cheated death once again, well and good. If not, they each owed a death, and it were better to die as Romans.
Grandsire, do you see? Be proud of me. The familiar appeal echoed in Quintus's heart. Always before it had brought him only doubt. This time, the doubt was gone. He might walk a grim path, but he walked it as a Roman and a man of whom his grandsire could be proud.
Rufus sketched a tactful salute to Lucilius, then gestured for the men nearest him to unpack their shovels and start digging. "Come on, lads. Respect the dead. We can at least cover their faces, see they've got coins for the Boatman. You'd want someone to do that for you...."
We may yet need it.
Every impulse in Quintus's body urged him to fly. He looked over at Ssu-ma Chao, who stood motionless. Then he compelled himself to step toward the bodies. He stooped to tug the headcloth of the nearest man decently over his face. He had been a merchant of some standing, judging by the excellent quality of his robes, even if they were battered by rough travel. The leather of his weapons harness was finely tooled, while his ornaments and the hilt of his sword... no sword? It had been taken.
The merchant did not look as if he had died in pain— but he looked old, far older than any man had a right to be if he chose to take these caravan routes. Old and drained, as if the sun had leached him dry for months, instead of just the time Quintus knew it had taken for the entire caravan to die. At his touch, the corpse seemed to shiver in on itself. Quintus would not have been surprised if it had turned to dust. He shuddered and turned over the next body.
"It does not matter," Arsaces cut in. "Soon enough, the sand will come and bury these men, as it has buried countless caravans and towns." He tried to sound offhand, but one hand fumbled for the blue amulet he wore beneath his robes.
What was this death that left a caravan stark in the sand, stole its weapons, but did not touch its wares—and what was that?
"This one's unarmed!" Quintus shouted. "Check to see if the others..."
"All the weapons are gone. Even broken arrows," Rufus was first to obey.
Down the line, Arsaces rummaged in the beasts' packs. One toppled, spilling wrappings of cloth. The Persian recoiled. Running from pack animal to pack animal, he tore open the saddlebags reserved for the costliest goods, spilling spices and glass onto the sands as he went. A waste: They dared not burden themselves with such luxuries.
"By the flame, nothing's been touched!" the Persian exclaimed. His voice shook. Not to loot when there was a chance...
"This one isn't armed either!" Lucilius shouted, which reassured Quintus not at all. The tribune turned from one prone figure to another, who had died, seemingly, when his horse fell and now lay half-hidden beneath it. A caravan was a small army. Merchants needed men able and willing to fight. Edepol, had this been a caravan of old men?
"They might carry gems on their persons," Arsaces's battered boots cracked through the salt crust upon the grit. He seemed as reluctant as Quintus felt to investigate. "An entire caravan struck dead, no signs of plague or bandits or even blood and—Mithras aid us!"
As Arsaces spoke, the tribune knelt by the dead merchant's body. Be a man. Battlefield loot—no, this was no true battlefield, and these were not the enemy. He compelled himself to touch the body but not to rob. Under his fingers the corpse seemed to collapse in on itself, like a wineskin that has been drained, but has retained its fullness until a careless hand brushes it.
Oaths and prayers rose as others of the Romans and the Ch'in made the same gruesome discovery almost all at once. This caravan of the dead seemed to be a caravan in which all had died at once—seemingly of old age. Even the bodies dressed as young men dress—apprentices, guards, slim forms that might have been favored sons making their first desert crossings—looked as ancient as some mummy cast up out of a dune.
And when they were touched, they crumpled.
From behind the Romans rose commands screamed out in Ch'in. Ssu-ma Chao's voice cracked up toward hysteria. Arsaces laid a hand on Quintus's arm.
"He wants us to leave now. It is a day's march to the Stone Tower and..."
Quintus squinted toward the sun. Already it had sunk low in the direction that he dearly wished to go, as if a fire barred the Romans from their home. So, was this the prelude to Carrhae all over again—the brutal forced march to a field of slaughter, followed by other, equally harsh demands?
The Ch'in commander's voice rose to a scream. The best thing for that one, Quintus thought, would be silence. For him; for the Ch'in soldiers; and for the Romans especially. Ssu-ma Chao had eased the terms of the Romans' captivity. He had ordered their arms returned. They owed him—more than somewhat. But they still had the Eagle to regain if they could. What he gave with one hand, he could take back with the other—aye, and their lives with their privileges, should he meet up with others of his race.
It was one thing to die on a battlefield. To die here, among corpses drained by—Quintus shuddered, remembering childhood nightmares haunted by tales of the Lamia.
"By all the gods, there's riches here," Lucilius muttered. "Play for time, would you? We can't leave yet. Not when—"
In a moment, he would start rummaging in each dead man's robes. It was one thing to search the dead for what might sustain the living, another to strip them for gain, here in this wasteland where extra treasure might mean extra burden to all. Quintus would have bet any coin he happened to have about him that Lucilius had already robbed some of the nearest bodies.
Draupadi drew near and spoke to him since the earth had begun to shake. "You need to see what Ganesha has found."
"I also need to obey that man." Quintus pointed at Ssu-ma Chao. "It is only by his grace we are not slaves." Let him crack, and they might be slaves again, Draupadi with them.
"Arjuna—" she began to protest.
"Will you stop that!" All Quintus's fear, all his anger, and even the sense of self-respect he had gained this day went into that demand. "I am Quintus, only myself; yet you load me with the baggage of five princes, one of them a hero. Don't you understand? I am not he!"
Her eyes grew enormous, hurt, and he hated himself for that hurt—and the pain he caused himself. Let her know the truth. Let her turn from him now, before it grew any harder to lose her. But the sight of her pain grieved him, and he added in a gentler tone, "If I am he, I truly do not know it. I am sorry."
Now the Ch'in soldiers were closing in, encircling their former allies. Some of them were drawing their weapons. If even one Roman drew sword or fingered spear... perhaps the Ch'in could wipe out their small force. They would have to. Very likely, Ch'in and Roman would be the death of each other.
And with all that, he had to contend with a weeping princess! "Do you truly not know me?" Her hand touched his chest precisely where the bronze statuette of Krishna lay. It warmed under those delicate-seeming, capable fingers. "I thought you did."
"Perhaps," Quintus said. "But perhaps, too, we must take care that this is not illusion."
She nodded sorrowfully. "I wish for only the truth to lie between us. To give you—"
In that moment, he longed to
gather her into his arms; and let the Ch'in skewer him.
"But you do not believe..."
"Do you believe it?" he demanded.
"Believe it? I know it. I remember."
"I remember that I have men to get to safety before he—" a gesture at Ssu-ma Chao and his warriors alerted her to their danger, "—attacks."
"You are all... you call it 'Roman' in this life, are you not?" All duty, she meant. All discipline. Damn.
But he nodded as he must. "Aye, Domina."