"No!" Draupadi ran forward across ground that Quintus still feared might liquefy or gape open at any moment. Her dirty robe, almost dry now, flared out behind her with a fleeting ghost of her old grace. Men drew aside to let her pass.
With a motion like a wave breaking into a gentle foam as it touches shore, she knelt by the afflicted man, took his face in one hand, and, with the other, peeled up his eyelid. His eyes rolled back in his head.
"His spirit has retreated," she told Ssu-ma Chao. "If we can bear him and his comrades to a place where the light is familiar and the earth does not gape open and ancient dangers do not emerge, he may wake and obey you once more. But you do wrong to kill him for what is not his fault."
The officer glared at her.
"No, you do not lose face," she insisted. All the care she had taken, as long as Quintus had known her, to speak demurely before the Ch'in, to defer, to work through Ganesha, was gone; her voice bore the authority of a sybil.
"He sees visions from his past, and he cannot bear them. Have you not discovered yet that which will break even you? Fortunate man. Let me know when you do, and I shall keep the others from executing you."
Another soldier began to laugh, a high note ending up in a cry of near madness.
"We have to get out of here, or we'll be awash in lunatics," Lucilius muttered.
Well, that much was true.
"No sad words for your comrade?" Quintus gibed, and then was sorry. Bent as he was, the patrician tribune was wary; and they would need his wits too since so many others' wits seemed to have gone wandering.
Quintus studied the Legionaries. Restored to what order they might manage, they assembled in formation. Their eyes were shadowed; they were tired, bruised, and afraid. But they were all, thank the gods, sane.
Their formation looked blessedly normal. He went over to stand before the line in his proper place. The men straightened as he neared them bearing the Eagle; they saluted, fists to chests, as proudly and precisely as if they prepared to enter the newly surrendered capital of a great empire.
Quintus smiled. "Brothers," he spoke very gently, "we have our Eagle and our Legion's honor back." No one moved, but the sun-blackened faces glowed. He struggled for words to express his pride and his desire to reassure these men, then, as his throat closed, for any words at all. He knew his grandsire would have told him not to babble. The memory gave him the words he needed. "Once again, we may call ourselves Romans."
They had always been Romans, but captives, only half themselves, stripped of their Eagle and their pride, marching at other soldiers' commands. Now, once again, even in a strange place, they led. The formation, small as it was, seemed to draw strength from the bronze Eagle.
Quintus made the decision he had been pondering.
"Break ranks," he told them. "I want each of you to aid them—" he gestured to the Ch'in, who had begun to fight their own way back into some semblance of order. "They are our comrades. Help them now as if they bore the Legion's brand."
"They will slow us," Lucilius hissed.
"Ssu-ma Chao held our lives and honor in the palm of his hand," Quintus snapped. "And returned them to us. Shall we betray him too?"
To abandon the men who had marched with them so long—Quintus's outrage mounted until he realized that it was not just his anger, but the memory of that other life in which he had sought a weapon, wooed a princess, and fought a battle against illusions and evil images. Just as he fought now.
For an instant, the ground trembled underfoot again, as if he balanced on the floor of a great chariot, a chariot such as Arjuna had owned and Krishna had driven. He had no such chariot now, but he remembered that battle,. feeling lost, feeling fear and indecision that paralyzed him just as it did the Ch'in soldiers whom he now watched being tied to the groaning packbeasts. As Arjuna, he had known fear and indecision. As Quintus, he would not permit other men to suffer for what he had known.
He had crouched in the center of the battlefield, all eyes upon him. Krishna seemed to have stopped time somehow; and he—Arjuna—knelt at its crux, the hub of the Yuga, or cycle, of this world. Go forward? Go back? Conquer or flee—he had the sense of being transfixed by a hundred fates, all of which clamored, Choose me, choose me! Self-disgust hit him hard. He was Arjuna, and he had less spirit than a dancing master—less spirit than the eunuch he had been. He dared not look. Everyone he loved had assembled. His brothers were at his back. The men he must kill—his enemy, a man who had cherished him like a father, and even the ancient who had taught him the art of war—they were all arrayed against him.
The dancing figure heated against his tunic. All his life, it had been Quintus's talisman; now—with his free hand he reached for it and drew it out. It shimmered under his bleary gaze: trove from a tomb in Latium, image of enigmatic Krishna, dancing in grief and joy, urging him to fare forward.
He rose from his knees, staring at the bronze talisman as it lay reassuringly on his hand. Draupadi was waiting for him. Once again, she waited for him to win the battle she was part cause for.
Unwilling to resign the Eagle to a standard-bearer hand, Quintus mounted, still holding it. Well, he thought, here we are. Wherever here is. Where shall we go? In what direction? "Fare forward," thank you very much, was little aid when the sun lay hidden. For all he knew—and he suspected that the Black Naacals intended this—they could wander in circles until the camels collapsed and they all died.
The bronze standard warmed in his hand. He looked up at the Eagle. The diffused light that was all he could see struck it, picking out the fine details that some craftsman had put into shaping its feathers or the sleek, deadly line of its beak. It was a sign, a weapon—and a guardian of their honor. Would it guide them now?
Light struck the Eagle's head, enveloping the entire standard in a glow that blinded, then moderated. A beam shot from it before him. Taking that as an omen—please all the gods it serve him as a beacon and not a snare—he gestured the soldiers forward.
A horse whinnied in fear. Quintus slowed. Gods only knew what it thought it saw. One man, marching, cried out and looked down at his foot. Rufus gestured the tribune forward. He would see to the soldier; let Quintus lead.
The camel seemed to pad through puddles of water. Its huge feet made sucking sounds as it lifted each one free.
"Illusion," Draupadi repeated. "We are fortunate. Thus far, they have not mustered even more strength."
The desert floor shuddered even as she spoke, and a dune began slowly to collapse. Why that particular dune? If the Black Naacals' plan succeeded, they would distrust their very shadows and, at the end, turn on one another.
What might lie buried in that dune, dead as the sea monster whose bones they had seen—or perhaps horror that was not dead?
Behind him, someone muttered, and Quintus heard the thwack of a vinestaff. Ssu-ma Chao began to protest, then fell silent, as if ashamed of his own reluctance to proceed. If any of them might know this land, it was the Ch'in frontier officer.
"Forward!" Quintus shouted and gestured with the Eagle. The flawed sunlight ran down the shaft and into his eyes. Once again, he felt strong, perhaps even somewhat rested. He could ride for ever, if he must, to achieve his goals.
The light glanced down over his camel. It bawled a protest but lurched forward into the swaying movement that it could keep up for hours upon hours.
They would follow the path of the Eagle. Not even the gods themselves could demand more than that. The caravan gathered what speed it might. The Eagle's presence kept it from feeling as if it fled.
24
THE SUN NEVER rose in the desert sky—only that faint, diffused glow that continued to pool into glory when it rested on the Eagle showed the difference between night and day, if not between morning and noon. For that, they had only the heat as their guide. When the sun made even the strongest of their camels droop as if they inched along the fiery banks of Acheron, Quintus guessed that it was noon and called a halt. Not even the evident desire of
some of the Ch'in to flee across the desert until, please their ancestors, they encountered another caravan kept the Romans from obeying orders and enforcing an obedience of their own on would-be stragglers.
Quintus's eyes ached as if hot gold had been poured into them. Still, when they made camp, he forced himself to make a circuit of the paltry space with the Eagle.
Think of green. Think of water. Think of home. But his memories of his Tiber valley were long faded now.
Halfway about the camp, he greeted Ssu-ma Chao. "Your men?" he asked.
"Two still must be tended like babies," the officer reported. "This one implores that they not be abandoned...."
Quintus felt rage at the suggestion leap from his eyes.
"We leave no one alive in this place," the Roman answered. "If it were possible I would bear even our dead along, lest the Black Naacals work mischief with their corpses."
Ssu-ma Chao nodded. His face was sallow, not the burnished gold it had been in Parthia, which now seemed like a world of safety and comfort away. "This one should not dare to seek to live, for he has fled a battlefield...." He looked as if he might drop to his knees or, worse yet, his belly.
"It is no shame to retreat," Quintus attempted to rally the other officer's courage. "Or even to be vanquished." That sounded hollow, and he knew it.
"You say that now," Ssu-ma Chao gestured at the standard. "When I saw you at..."
"It would have been enough to die. As you see, we live. I live, and I had taken such injuries that I might well have slipped away." He had had the choice, he remembered; and he had chosen to return to life and defeat rather than leave his men without a leader, even into exile.
"You live, and now you..." Abruptly, Ssu-ma Chao let out a gust of laughter that brought men's heads up all over the camp. "You prosper? How can you say that anything prospers in this waste?"
Bless Ssu-ma Chao for that laugh. The entire camp was the better for it. He could hear Rufus remarking to someone, "Laughs at misfortune, does he? I'm not saying that that is a Roman thing to do, but it takes a Roman will to look at the Fates and laugh."
Ssu-ma Chao nodded at the centurion. "He knows no fear."
"No," Quintus said. "None. He fears only for his honor; and he is perfect in that."
"Honor—this one's honor is fled. This one would redeem his wretched self." He struggled with the idea, then replaced it with another. "Without the direction finder, we have only your Eagle to guide us. Is that not so?"
Sunlight on bronze—if you called that guidance.
"We do not know that it will bring us out along the caravan routes again. We are in the hands of Fortune," Quintus answered with the truth as he saw it.
"But surely your god..."
"It is not a god."
"Can you deny, Roman, that it is a thing of power? Could it not discern other power?"
"You begin to interest me extremely," Quintus said. "Come to my camp, brother, and sit down."
The Ch'in officer's head went up at a word he might once have rejected, and he followed Quintus to the flaps of felt set in the shadow of a reclining camel that Quintus called his camp. They had come down a great way in the world from the meticulous castra of his training—but he was grateful for the rest and the shade, and even more grateful for the presence of Draupadi, who greeted him with water and a gentle touch to his shoulder.
She would have withdrawn, but Quintus forestalled her. This was no time for her to mimic a Ch'in lady's manners. She and Ganesha had been scholars alongside the Black Naacals before the world changed: They would best know how their enemies used their power.
Gradually, others joined them: Rufus, Lucilius (there was no keeping him away), Ganesha—the men Quintus most trusted and the man against whom he had most reason to guard himself.
"Speak for this humble one," Ssu-ma Chao appealed to Ganesha. That much the Roman could follow. Then his voice broke, and the spate of rapid-fire Ch'in that followed made even Ganesha blink.
"Slowly, slowly," he said, holding up a hand that even now retained some of its former plumpness. "I am a tired old man."
Ancient, he might be. Even now, Quintus hated to consider how old because, if he calculated Ganesha's years, he must also think of Draupadi's. She looked thin and strained; Ganesha was showing his age. His dark eyes in their pouches of flesh were as reddened and strained by their journey as though he belonged to one of the younger races with whom he companied. But they still gleamed with an alertness a scout might have envied and a relentless intelligence honed by the years, however many.
"I feared," Ganesha translated for Ssu-ma Chao. His own voice quavered. So, did even he fear? "And then I resigned power and sought only to flee from a place of the unquiet dead. But I still digress. So now, it seems to me that I must never return to Ch'ang-an and pollute its precincts with my cowardice. Indeed, I must blot it out. In my blood, if need be; in the blood of my kin, if my sins are discovered. But I would prefer to avenge myself in the blood of those who brought me to this pass. I shall go forward."
Ganesha broke off, one hand upraised in the storyteller's graceful demand for attention. But his hand trembled slightly. "He asks me to ask you whether your Eagle can guide us to our enemies."
Draupadi clasped her hands in her lap so tightly that the delicate bones showed white beneath the skin. She looked down at them, and Quintus spied what an effort it took for her not to look at Ganesha. The old man also looked down now, as if unwilling to influence any of the others.
"They're the ones who want to steal it—"
"How do you know—"
Rufus and Lucilius broke into the silence at the same moment. At Lucilius's glare, the centurion broke off, muttering to himself. "The day I agree with... maybe the sun hasn't ridden or it's made me crazy.... Oh, to the crows with it."
"Ask them!" Lucilius snapped. "How do you know they haven't maneuvered us into just this decision?"
Ssu-ma Chao looked inquiringly at him. Then he retreated into impassivity.
"They want to know," Draupadi spoke slowly in Parthian, "whether you in truth suggest going up against the Black Naacals or whether these are words that Ganesha put into your mouth."
"He wants to know," said the Ch'in officer. "Who would have betrayed us all. Yes, those were my words, not the man who translates for me. Who is to say that other caravans may not fall prey—may not be engulfed by these evil men?" His eyes were frenzied with memory of the Stone Tower.
"Do you truly believe," Draupadi's voice was consciously sweet, "that I would lead you to your deaths, your tribune with you?" She unclasped her hands and held out the one that bore Quintus's ring.
They were desperate, but Rufus took a moment to grin and thump Quintus on the shoulder.
"I believe in my orders," the tribune said. He would have liked to savor that moment, but every moment was precious now. "I believe—or believed!—" he shot that at Lucilius, "—in my elders. And betters, as they insisted they were to me. But now I believe in the Eagle."
Rufus turned again to the young officer. "You are Roma for now, son. You decide what is right to do; I'll do it. Aye, and drive the men to fight past the gods of Hades. Say the word, sir."
Lucilius rose to his feet. His eyes were wild. He all but quivered with anger, not unmixed with a tinge of fear.
And why should he not fear? We are all afraid.
All the Romans feared death, feared the worse-than-death they had seen. And he feared losing what had become precious to him. But Lucilius—he feared making the decision to which he had been pushed and which he could no longer put off.
"Why?" Quintus asked Draupadi and Ganesha.
They fought against the Black Naacals, who had been of their own blood and faith. But why did they require allies, when, surely, they had powers of their own?
Draupadi reached over to touch the Eagle. She could, Quintus thought, and the sight reassured him even before her words.
"We are guests in this age, this Yuga of the world, Quintus," she to
ld him. "It is no longer ours. It falls to you now, to the younger races and nations that sprang up after the Motherland sank beneath the waves. I believe— Ganesha and I believe—that we survive only to finish what we began: the overwhelming of this darkness, so your peoples may attain what fates are destined for them."
And why me? My return home is lost.... He remembered those saddest of Achilles's words. Lost in any case, came a thought—his or his enemy's. He did not know: In either case, it was true.
And so, there remained only one question: What the proper course was for a Roman to take. The Eagle gleamed overhead, the only bright thing in a desert of grays and ochres. Decide. Decide, fool, it seemed to say.
The ground trembled, and a salt smell rose from the desert. Rufus thrust out a large hand as he overbalanced, and Ganesha shook his head. "The island we passed that night, Draupadi.... Do you recollect it?"