There were no bandits today. Those were said to be mostly Parthians, whose skill with horse and bow (Quintus winced) fitted them well for a guard's role. And he had seen none of the men native to this area—Hsiung-nu or Yueh-Chih. Ssu-ma Chao seemed to regard those tribesmen as a ferocious cross between barbarians and vermin, and at perpetual war with his Empire.
Quintus wondered if he would ever wish to see bandits, just to break the monotony. Now the world seemed to have fallen away from them. There was only desert. True, the North showed blue shadows that Arsaces swore were mountains. And Ssu-ma Chao had actually consented to speak of them, calling them heavenly, longing in his voice as he described the snow melting and round lakes hidden like treasure in silent valleys. After weeks in the desert, Quintus no longer believed in such possibilities. There was only desert: Where the desert stopped, chaos began—or perhaps those rivers of Hell that he remembered from his dream.
He no longer dreamed of the Tiber, and for that he was dimly glad. This was no land for dreams of home or that gentle spirit he remembered. Instead, sometimes, he woke, breathing hard, almost remembering the shadows he thought had impelled him forward the night they had fought those black-clad... creatures he could not name men. Demons, were they? He dared not say, and the merchants who prodded each other and muttered among themselves when he passed were not saying either.
However, if that battle had not won them the Eagle, it had won them Ssu-ma Chao's gratitude for as long as it might last. It had earned them their weapons back. A fine thing, that—for while even Ch'in soldiers valued fire as a weapon, Quintus never wanted again to order an advance armed only with torches.
In that night, they had gone from prisoners and slaves to honored hostages, almost guests and allies. There were camels to ride and carts to bear whatever burdens Rufus would permit them to: "Rome's pace, Rome's race" meant very little here.
And Quintus thanked all the gods for these concessions. It was hard enough to travel the waste as hostages; it would have been intolerable to march as slaves, bound and guarded, in the dust-choked tail of the caravans.
"Descend from Olympus, why don't you, oh lofty one? Lucilius's voice took on an edge. Ssu-ma Chao's favor extended to all the Romans. But he treated Quintus as their leader, and the equestrian tribune knew that rankled in what passed for the aristocrat's heart.
"Right now!"
He wished he didn't have to. Somehow, the chariot felt right—albeit toplofty. It would balance poorly in a fight. But then it was for a king or general, not a warrior. You wanted a lower chariot and a driver as close to you as your own heart to guard you while you drew arrow, your focus so intense that you saw not a man, not a limb, but only the spot to be pierced. He had been a charioteer, and he had been a warrior, driven by... Involuntarily, Quintus's hand sought out the bronze talisman.
What were these fancies? They were not his memories. The desert bred madness in a man. The drivers swore that a man who strode out at noon with an uncovered head would die, his brains seethed to mush in his skull. Most of the Legionaries carried their helms and wore instead woven hats. (Rufus had broken at least one vinestaff across the back of a fool who thought to lighten his load by discarding his helm. Rome's mules they were and would remain, even here as they marched on World's End.) Alexander, in the waste of Gedrosia, must have worn similar headgear. The thought brought him no comfort. Alexander had all but died in the waste, and his stars—unlike Quintus's own—were fortunate.
Nor did the stories that the camel drivers told in gleeful singsong around the fire, with sidelong looks to make certain that the strangers, the Romans, were sufficiently horrified as Arsaces translated them: storms bad enough to flense skin off bone and suck the water from a man's body, leaving it a husk as if the embalmers of Egypt had been at it; the demons of the waste that gibbered at noon or whenever a man was too tired to turn a deaf ear to them; the treacherous sands that could engulf a town as easily as a man, then spit it up the way the Maelstrom with one contemptuous swirl could hurl the shattered remnants of a ship onto shore.
Best come down to earth now, before the whispers started that he had sold his loyalty to the Ch'in.
Beware.
The gentle voice touched his mind as soothingly as oil on a parched skin. One last look, then.
What was that on the horizon? Not a cloud, surely. You needed moisture for clouds, and there was, all the gods knew, no moisture in this wilderness.
His temples throbbed as if the air itself squeezed at them. Not all clouds held rain, he remembered.
Balancing skillfully, he climbed down the tower, dismounted, and bowed to Ssu-ma Chao, where he rode nearby. Those memories, or fantasies of his were worth something. Of all the Romans, he was the most skilled with the Ch'in chariots. "... Easy enough when you remember that he rode in a farmer's wagon if his family had any oxen that weren't confiscated for debt...." He had heard Lucilius whisper spitefully.
Quintus shook the grit out of his clothing and armor. As bad as swamp bugs, the grit was. If you didn't watch, grit might give you bleeding sores that stuck to clothes and never healed.
"Well, did you see anything?" Quickly Lucilius asserted his right to demand information.
"Cloud from the east," the tribune said. "I don't like the looks of it."
He used precious energy to jog forward to where Ssu-ma Chao rode. Behind him, the predictable murmurs started. Jupiter Optimus Maximus, he knew you could engrave what he knew about deserts on the pommel of his sword and still have room to list what else he didn't know. But he had lived on the land too long not to know when the weather was changing, and he had heard too many fireside terrors not to respect desert storms.
He didn't need to feel the way the air pressured his temples to know that weather threatened any more than a farmer or a sailor did. Interesting... the glare winking up from the sand seemed slightly less harsh, as if the sunlight were somehow diminished. He signaled the Ch'in leaders and pushed forward with a burst of wasteful speed. He was sweating, but the sweat dried as rapidly as it formed, forming a white, salty powder on his skin.
Hmmm... that was curious. The sand... beneath the endless yellowish-gray grit and pebbles, he saw patches of white. Quickly, he bent. Scooping up a pinch of it, he brought it to nose arid lips. Salty. He glanced out. Now that he looked, he could see the desert as flatness interrupted by huge dunes, each one of them like an immense tide.
He had heard that in Judaea there did exist a sea so filled with salt that a man could lie in it and never sink. Easy to believe that such a sea had once existed here and had dried totally. Easy to believe? Nothing was easy here.
But imagine it—water, sluicing down from the mountains like the Flood Jupiter had once sent, filling this desert like a basin, sinking all that was in it, letting the earth roil until all was buried as deep as Atlantis. Once he had spoken of this—no more, surely, than a fireside fancy and Lucilius had arched a pale eyebrow in derision that a bumpkin had read Plato.
Shouts broke his musings.
"Buran! Kuraburan!"
Buran, he knew, meant storm. And kuraburan—black storm? Demon storm? All of the now-vanished tribunes who had been Lucilius's companions had been pleased to dismiss them as tales told to scare newcomers to this barbarian land.
All along the line of march, camels were moaning, lowering their heads to the sand, dropping ponderously to their ungainly knees. Horsemen galloped the length of the caravans. Carts ground to a stop. From carpets and from gaudy woven bags (now much dimmed with the sand), men pulled swathings of thick flannel the color of the desert itself.
Arsaces tossed a wad of felt at Quintus. It tumbled out of his arms to his feet.
"There's a storm coming up. The camels always know. Wrap up! This sand could carve the flesh from your bones."
Ssu-ma Chao rode toward him. Already he was muffled in the heavy fabric until only his eyes showed. They were bright, alert as if he sensed danger.
"Bandits strike under cover of these sto
rms," he said. "Will your men fight with mine?"
He barely needed Arsaces's translations now. In the weeks of march past Merv, the caravan had evolved its own tongue—part Parthian, part Persian, and, inevitably, even part Latin and Ch'in. And in all of them, everyone knew the words for "bandits" and "storms."
"We will justify your faith in us," he declared. "Rufus!"
The centurion came on the double, gesturing for the maniples to form up.
"This one's officers will show you where to take your stations." Already, some of them were drawing weapons—the huge, cumbersome swords and wicked long spears of the Ch'in soldier. Were they for defense against the bandits—Saka, Yueh-chih, or Parthians—whom the desert might cast up against them, or against the Romans themselves?
A camel groaned, horses screamed, and a soldier who should have had better control yelped in surprise as the gritty sand whipped up to sting at unexposed flesh.
"Keep your heads down. You've seen sandstorms before!" Rufus shouted, then was interrupted by coughing.
The sky turned an evil yellow-gray. Then the air seemed to congeal and whirl about them, and the full fury of the storm struck.
Quintus sank his head on his breast. He had to see— he had to, yet some bits of the flying sand could have put out an eye. He felt as if he stood lost in a fog, but a fog that bit shrewdly, burrowing into every fold of the felt that stifled and protected him. A drop of sweat ran down his forehead, blissfully cool in the instant before it dried, leaving an itching salt trail. He was very thirsty.
Dis have mercy, if the grit got into the waterskins, they were all doomed! Someone ought to check....
A hand pulled him down again. "In storms like these, you can wander ten paces from your camp and never be found again!" His companion, no, his rescuer, writhed lips about the words so their shape would convince him, for he could hear nothing but the roaring of the storm.
He would have to wait it out. He had waited out storms before.
Gradually, his ears grew accustomed to the storm— the howl of each new gust, the shriek of a particularly rapid one, the crack as something they would probably need later broke under pressure, and the whine of sand and gravel that sped by like arrows. He had never been as thirsty, not even in the square at Carrhae, and no sun shone here, in the belly of the storm.
Quintus stiffened. Other sounds began to pierce the storm's rage: giggles and whispers and threats. Come out, come out before the grit buries you. Come, here is sweet water, here are grapes, here is rest. Lie down and take your ease. He risked raising his head long enough to see one or two of his men shake their heads, then duck them back down against their chests. Hard-headed, Rome's mules: If it didn't present itself before their faces, the Legionaries would dismiss it. He knew his grandfather would have.
You will go mad out here, you know. The sun will bake your brains, and you will babble until they knock you on the head in pity. You never really thought you wire fit, did you? All these years, hiding it... you're weak, and you're going to lead these men to their deaths in a savage land....
Quiet! he commanded, trying to make his thoughts loud, the way Rufus might bellow at careless recruits.
Shadows that he could make out from the billows of sand only by their darkness capered outside the camp. Surely, that wasn't thunder overhead or the flashes of lightning he remembered from lost humid summer evenings—storms without rain?
You will never see them again.
I know that, he snapped, then regretted it. It was as pointless to argue with whatever rode these winds as to quarrel with a street beggar. And no street beggar sought to draw him out to his death in the waste.
He bent his head and slipped fingers chilled despite the stifling heat within his breast to touch the bronze statue. Its solidity consoled him.
Ah, so wise, he thinks he is.... Laughter replaced the whispers, rising and growing shrill until it mingled with the howl of the demon storm's breath.
Sand had blotted out the sky: No sun set, no moon rose, and no stars shone overhead. How much time had passed? Hours? Days? He would have felt hungrier if it had been that long, he thought.
Gradually, the shrieks of the wind grew weaker and less frequent, the gulps of a child making itself sick by a bout of furious crying. From time to time, he could even see beyond the space of a footstep or two. The whispers and giggling seemed to die away entirely. Then, after time he could not measure, came an instant when all was blissfully silent. Men began to rise and shake themselves free of the sand that had turned them into individual tiny hillocks.
"Hold!"
Ssu-ma Chao's shout and the sting of Quintus's bronze talisman came simultaneously.
And in the next minute, he heard the measured boom of drums and the ringing of bells and gongs.
"Yueh-chih!" The cry went up.
Of all the dwellers in this waste, they were the most feared, for they lived as if it held no dread for them. They had no fixed villages, only tents; and they rode where they would. Wise in the ways of storms, they attacked just as a caravan—even one as well-armed as this—began to dig itself out of a dying storm. And they had been at feud with the Ch'in, fighting back and forth across the desert, for more years than anyone but a Ch'in historian could count.
The Yueh-chih rode shrieking as if the buran had renewed itself. Nearby, someone screamed, then gurgled as a long lance transfixed him. Two Romans leapt from the sand and hacked at the barbarian with their swords. Hoarse voices shouted in Ch'in.... All around the camp, soldiers fought to raise the spears that might give them some defense against a mounted force. The Yueh-chih were counting on speed and confusion, on striking as the caravan struggled out of the sand before its guards, exhausted from simply enduring the buran, won back to full strength. It was as good a strategy in its way as the testudo, and no doubt as well practiced.
Quintus found himself in a line with the Legionaries, blood drying on his sword from lucky blows at shadows that had turned out to be Yueh-chih. The line was holding. He knew a moment's pride, which faded as he remembered: The Yueh-chih, like all the nomads of the waste, were master archers. Let the wind die, and those of his men whom Parthian arrows had not slain might fall to this new enemy.
As it was, there were too many Yueh-chih. Kill one, or unhorse two, and more hoofbeats pounded out of the swirls of sand and dust. Their screams arched up, savage with hate. They must have known that this caravan was bound for the heartland of Ch'in and was guarded by soldiers in service to its Emperor.
Roman bones as well as Ch'in would litter the salt wastes of the Takla Makan. The drums and the gongs and the wind and the screaming struck like a head blow. Quintus was reeling....
A scream far overhead pierced the fog in which he stumbled. For one precious moment, the warring gusts of wind allowed a patch of clear sky to be seen. It was the violent blue that he had seen once or twice in the desert, broken by a streak of gold, winging to the east. It paused directly overhead and gave that shrill cry again—the call of an eagle.
Then battling wind gusts blotted out the sky once more. But Quintus's head felt clearer than it had for months.
Will you believe me?
Speak. He greeted the voice erupting in his thoughts calmly. So many times he had heard it. So many times he had thought himself mad, unfit. He was about to die. There was no point in fighting it any longer. He was only sorry he could not see the spirit who had been first his genius loci and then the exotic who called herself Draupadi one last time.
They are too many.
He would have laughed, had his throat not been parched.
You must flee.
Another reason to laugh.
Where would we go?
Follow me.
He might as well fall on his sword now, saving the Yueh-chih or his own men the trouble of killing him as he broke his own battle line to listen to a demon.
I am no demon!
Not a demon? In the kuraburan, he had heard demons, giggling, threatening, hintin
g as this voice did not. And the bronze figure he bore had not grown hot. He thought that if he followed a demon's advice, it might heat so that it would burn out his heart.
Show me, then.
There is a way. Follow. I will guide you.
"We can't stay here!" he shouted.
Rufus's eyes bulged in amazement.
"You want to be ridden down? The storm can't last forever, and the instant it stops..."
Ssu-ma Chao, behind his guards and his shields, eyed him. The time Quintus had saved his life, he thought madness had inspired him. Now he was glad. The Ch'in officer might believe that he acted under some sort of inspiration. "Is this another of your omens?"
The gods bless him, even if he were their captor!
"Yes! Follow me!"