"Get the wagons!"
By all the gods, how much had the merchants paid Lucilius, that he took care for the wagons?
"No! They'll protect us from arrows, maybe!" Rufus drew on his years of experience as the senior centurion of a Legion. "All right, sloggers, we're moving out. Follow the tribune...."
One of the men swore horribly at the wind. Once again, it shrieked up into a gale. "We're marching into that?"
"You want them drinking wine out of your skull?"
Carts creaked, beasts brayed or neighed in protest or fear. Someone shouted in outrage as a camel bit him. Incongruously, another driver laughed. And the Yueh-chih kept coming.
"Wait for the next gust!" Quintus screamed before he knew the words were out of his mouth.
He had no weather wisdom here, but he knew storms. The worst wind and rain storms to beat his valley often struck once, tempted people and animals out of shelter into a brief, sunlit calm, then hit again with renewed fury. This storm, after a brief lull, was building up again.
Only this time, it might be their friend.
Now!
The gust he was hoping for struck, and he bowed beneath it, letting it pass by.
"Move!" he shrieked, wild as the Yueh-chih himself.
Beasts and carts struggled forward. He had the sense of struggling forward down a corridor formed of blowing sand. Shadows formed, and he heard roaring, as if the river of lamentation he had once heard in his dreams flowed outside the "walls."
No sand stung his face. He put up a hand. No grit, flying by, cut into it. The only sand, in fact, that he saw formed the walls of the passage that engulfed them. Outside, the triumphant screams of the Yueh-chih died. How long before they realized they had been balked of their prey?
Go while you can.
He gestured and shouted, his order seconded from among the clutter of carts along the battered line of march, and what beasts still survived.
The carts creaked. The beasts moaned resentment at having to move directly into what they must surely fear as wind and pain. Whips cracked; the bells on the harnesses of horses and camels rang; and the remnants of the caravan lurched forward.
"To the cross with it! I can't see a damned thing!"
Lucilius's voice, from high overhead. By all the gods, the shifty bastard had gotten Ssu-ma Chao's chariot moving, had climbed its tower, and was getting a free ride.
If you laugh now, you won't be able to stop. Rufus will punch you out, and they'll load you on the wagons. And what will you do then?
A high giggle broke through, but he suppressed the gales of laughter that would have unmanned him.
They plowed onward through the sand. They had been marching for hours. They had never done anything else but march. Their service in the Legions before Syria, the destruction of their fellows at Carrhae and their proconsul, their betrayal, their enslavement—all that seemed far away. The world had narrowed—from the desert to this corridor of still air in the midst of the worst storm Quintus had ever dreamed of.
Was he dreaming of this? Dreaming men did not thirst or hunger as he did: He was sure of that.
He marched, the ground-eating steady Legions' pace. After awhile, Rufus barked the first words of a marching song. His cracked voice made a horrible hash of the tune, but he sang it through to the end, and some of the men echoed him. Damn, was a hobnail working through Quintus's boot into his foot? It felt that way.
Equally barbarous to the ear was the babble of chants and frantic prayers to what had to be at least three separate barbarian pantheons. At a signal from Ssu-ma Chao, Ch'in soldiers fell back, lest the merchants panic and try to break away, perhaps through the wall, thus betraying all of them to the Yueh-chih.
That was prudent. But Quintus thought it was misplaced precaution. Already they had marched for hours and come—how far? Farther than could be guessed in that time, he imagined... and he felt as worn as if he had marched for a full day at a cavalry pace again.
Nearby, Ssu-ma Chao's huge chariot rattled and creaked. Long ago, the senior officer had abandoned it, to walk or ride alongside his men. Lucilius, though, remained in its tower. For what advantage his presence as a lookout might provide, Quintus forebore to protest.
"Do you see anything now?" From time to time, he would call up to Lucilius. The answers grew lurid, then puzzled. Then Lucilius fell silent.
Arsaces joined Quintus as he marched. He led a horse, he who never willingly walked when he could ride. He paused, and Quintus, perforce, had to pause also. "The horses are tiring. If we don't rest them, they'll drop where they are."
"When you know where we are, we can rest," Quintus snapped. He was sorry he had stopped. The brief pause had freed his body from a merciful numbness in which leaden arms and legs performed their duty. Now his back was afire from the weight of his kit, and his limbs prickled as if he had been staked out on an anthill.
Arsaces's bloodshot eyes would have flashed with anger if he had had the strength.
"Some deva has us in his hand," he muttered. "May he set us down soon."
The march dragged out. No one bothered now to question or to speak. They were all too weary. Bona dea, Quintus longed for sunlight, for water, even for a chance to drop to the sand and sleep.
Come. This way.
He shouted, wordlessly. All along the line of march, people cried out in surprise and spurred camels and horses to new effort. Their last effort, Quintus felt certain.
This had better be quick, he told... whatever. Who do I think I'm talking to? We are all dreaming, and soon we are all going to be dead, wandering in the desert after a storm and a battle.
"Ho!"
Lucilius's voice, arching up, and cracking as he called out.
"What... you see?" Rufus grunted, not waiting for a tribune to ask.
"Up ahead," he called. "The clouds are breaking up!" His voice cracked once again, this time not from thirst. "By the breasts of Venus, I can see the sun!"
9
"FASTER," SSU-MA CHAO muttered. His chariot rumbled forward, the tower to which Lucilius climbed creaking as the wheels bumped over the rock-strewn sand. "The sun...."
The Ch'in soldiers urged men and beasts to greater efforts. A packhorse tried to hurl its head up and scream defiance as if it were a warhorse, but its heart broke, its knees buckled, and it sank dead in its traces. Too desperate to unload it, the merchants pushed on by. After a moment, the driving yellow sand behind them hid it.
And still the Ch'in officer pushed for greater speed.
Bleary-eyed, Quintus looked along the plodding line of Legionaries. Could they even complete this day's march—whatever you called a day in this no-place of driving sand—let alone quicken their pace? Their faces were gray with exhaustion and grit, but their eyes blazed.
"At the cavalry's pace," he ordered. He remembered how they had marched, hours upon hours in the hot Syrian sun, with those Nabataean and Armenian traitors jeering and the proconsul thinking only of his precious son and his horses. His heart would burst, and he would lie beneath the sand, like that packhorse. They all would, except maybe Lucilius. He wanted him to come down from his perch and march like a Roman, but...
"Sun. And sky! It's blue. By all the gods, it's a beautiful day!" Lucilius shouted.
A weak cheer rose from the Legionaries.
"All right now, none of that," Rufus ordered. "On the double, now!"
Ahead of them, a ray of sun broke through the opaque walls that had encompassed them for so long. One ray, then another, then seven, brushing across their foreheads with the touch of a mother on a fevered child's brow.
Ssu-ma Chao tripped and measured his length. Instead of struggling to his knees and glaring at anyone who had seen him lose his dignity, he knocked his head against the sand as if the light were his Emperor. That was not sweat that ran down a nearby soldier's drawn face, leaving a clean streak in the mask of sand and dried sweat that coated it. It was not sweat that ran down Quintus's face, either.
With
the sunlight came fresh breaths of air. He would have thought he'd had enough winds for a lifetime—the howls, the screams, the battering gusts. This came as a reminder of green hills and hidden valleys, of the blue mists and shadows of his lost home. It soothed his parched skin as if he ducked his head into a mountain stream. And, despite its gentleness, where it brushed against the walls that had been their protection and their trap the rush of sand and gravel thinned and the thin shriek of the wind that kept it blowing about them grew fainter than the highest notes of a flute, rising past a man's hearing to the level of a night flyer's hunting song. Now the sunlight filtered through it, kindling the ugly ochres and gray into rich saffrons and golds. And ahead of them, they could see the glowing blue of a tranquil sky.
Behind the Romans, wailing prayers of thanks rose up, almost as hideous as the wind. Quintus could imagine how the barbarians were kneeling and rubbing their faces on the rock. Not so much as one Roman broke ranks: They stood, waiting for orders. And Lucilius dropped with more speed than Quintus would have thought he had left from the chariot's tower to stand with his fellows.
"You put heart into us for this last dash," Quintus said.
For once, there was no mockery in the patrician's gaze.
"Last dash to where?" he asked.
Perhaps he had earned the right to that much irony.
With a final sigh, the last of the sand fell. And the lost caravan stood forth on land that was not covered with grit and gobi, but honest rock. Ahead of them stretched a narrow course sloping down past tall poplars and gleaming rhododendrons into a valley guarded by rock cliffs that jutted up like columns carved and melded together in the morning of the world. The pathway—wide enough for six men to walk abreast or a wagon to traverse carefully—wound past a rock spire. Some cut in the rock caught the sunlight, which pooled there, forming a globe of light from which rays issued.
The light brightened past bearing, then faded. Beyond that rock spire, as much as they could see, stretched a green field tippled with gold and red wildflowers. Willows swayed gently by the deep blue curve of a mountain lake. Beyond, more cliffs rose, sheltering the valley.
The quiet all but sang in their ears. No screams, no hoofbeats or drums, and no whine of Yueh-chih arrows, thank all the gods. Without need of orders, Roman and Ch'in soldiers wheeled to guard the rest of the caravan as it coiled about the entrance to the valley. One by one, they stripped themselves of the heavy felts they no longer needed to wear.
Were they dead? Quintus saw no asphodel on the valley floor. Nothing dead could be as thirsty as Quintus, or as tired. "We are far off my reckoning," Ssu-ma Chao murmured. "I have never heard of this place, and no one I know has ever seen it. I see no mountains, or I would swear we had passed over the desert into the Heavenly Mountains of the North."
He clapped his hands. Merchants, horsemen, and camel drivers attended him while restraining their eager beasts, but their eyes constantly wandered to feast on the green and blue that stretched out below them.
For all his cynicism, the horseman Arsaces swore by his many devas, then choked, "In the midst of the desert, a crystal fountain," he whispered. "I would have taken haoma that it was but a tale told round a fire in the desert."
Rufus cleared his throat, looked for a place to spit, then, obviously, thought better of it. "That looks like real water to me," he said. "Are we going to just stand and admire it?"
Already scenting it, the horses had pressed forward. Even the camels moaned and quickened their gait. Saddles and packs hung low on their backs': The humps in which they stored the precious fluid that made them such fine desert travelers were almost flat. A cart overturned as the beasts drawing it swerved too sharply in their eagerness to get to the water.
"All right, wait your turns!"
The wind blew, overpowering the stinks of frightened, sweaty men and animals with the temptations of water and growing things. The same longing that drove the beasts forward shone in the Romans' eyes. Quintus wanted nothing as much as to stretch out full length by that blue pool and slake his thirst. He and his men joined the other soldiers and the caravan drivers in restraining the animals. After surviving a desert storm and the Yueh-chih, they should not fall victim to their own eagerness in sight of rest and water.
The air filled with noises as those beasts too weak to go any further in safety were unharnessed or relieved of packs and led down to the pool, where others would have to restrain them from drinking till they swelled from it. But the choking dust that rose in the desert was absent: Quintus watched the tally of soldiers, merchants, beasts, and carts.
He had seen that horse collapse in the last rush from the blowing sand. Who else had been lost? Some, wounded, clung to carts, were loaded face-down across pack-animals or tied to their mounts.
"That one won't last the night," Arsaces pointed as a driver clung to one of his charges that was too weary to shy away from the blood scent. "At least he'll have enough water while he dies."
No one will die.
"What did you say?" Quintus started.
No one has died here for... the voice trailed off.
"Sir are you all right? Your eyes just rolled up...."
"I'm fine." Quintus waved off the concern with what he hoped could pass for irritation. The Romans owed what freedom they had to Ssu-ma Chao's belief they brought him fortune: no use frightening everyone else. Or, he thought, with a countryman's shrewdness, letting the rest of them know.
You are wise, though you are a warrior, not a priest. I have always thought so.
The tattered caravan staggered past him into safe haven. He started to ask if any others had been lost, but his words were lost in the clatter of warped cartwheels on rock. The men of Hind. The Persians. Even the wagons of that fat man who had been so afraid outside Merv, and the man himself, now not nearly so fat and moving the faster for it.
Then, leading their horses, heads down and shuddering, passed the merchants Quintus had seen the night he had emerged from long, long dreams. Seen and distrusted, with their high-bred faces, their hooded eyes, and their tightly held mouths. There had been—how many of them?
More, it was certain, than now passed under his gaze. And there had been women in their numbers, gone now, too. Had part of their train perished under the blades of the Yueh-chih? Or had they decided to take their own escape?
Last of all came the soldiers, limping down the path. Sunlight blazed out overhead, hiding them, for an instant. As the track wound around the spire of dark rock that blocked a full view of the lake below, they paused. Horses and camels balked, but the crack of whips and oaths in a tongue Quintus had never heard (and liked as little as he liked those who spoke it) forced them back up the slope.
"Our beasts... cannot make it downhill," said one of the merchants, his face still muffled in the wrappings that had protected him from the storm. "We camp here... outside."
He held up a hand, interrupting the instinctive protests of the soldiers at their charges' foolishness. "We have supplies."
If there had been any one group likelier to husband their own goods while all around them went in need, Quintus had yet to see it. Let them thirst in sight of a blue lake. Let their beasts eat stored fodder when fresh green stalks waited to be cropped—though it was a shame to treat honest animals that way.
"And we will pay—in gold—for water to be brought."
"Wouldn't you just know it?" Lucilius hissed. "You might as well let them go their own way. They will, anyhow."
"Merchants!" This time, Rufus did spit as he watched the strangers coil about the lip of the valley.
The eyes of tribune, centurion, and Ch'in officer met in perfect understanding: Tonight and all the nights thereafter, these travelers would be placed under watch.
Now that all the others had descended, they too could head for the water and rest their bodies craved. First, Quintus thought, water. Then, perhaps there would be fish or even waterfowl, feeding near the lake. In that moment, he might even have traded
his lost farm for rest—for him and all of the Romans who had lived.
Shadows began to deepen in the valley. The sky turned indigo, as it did in the hills, and a long sunbeam slanted down the track, pointing out the way.
He nodded to Rufus, who raised a battered vinestaff. "Let's show them how Romans do it, lads," he rasped.
They formed ranks and marched: Rome's pace, Rome's race, down the path toward safety. If the rock slabs underfoot were not the good roads of the Republic, at least they did not shift underfoot.
Another ray from the sun, heading like they themselves to its well-earned rest, struck the rock spire as they passed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but as it died, Quintus thought he saw etched into the rock a serpent, seven heads crowning its sinuous body. Wherever the light touched it, it was slow to fade.