Quintus stiffened. They had never agreed, he and Lucilius, not from the moment that the patrician had eyed him and marked him as a bumpkin and his family's client; and Quintus had, in return, seen the other as responsible for his family's degradation. All this long round of service and exile, they had been like enemies manacled on a short chain and tossed into deep water, to drown together or, together, struggle onto dry land.
"Here is a blade," said Wang Tou-fan. "And here is a phial. They have fine poisons in the farthest East. But a scratch..."
Lucilius made a sound of revulsion.
"Do you want to be a fighting man all your life, one step up from a slave, when Ch'ang-an holds so much promise for a talented man who understands where his advantage lies. Take the knife!"
"He is not worthy of my attention," the Roman muttered. "To die at the hands of one of my gens is more honor than that rustic deserves."
"Can you be so sure? Or is it that you fear him—or that hulking oaf who marches behind him and serves him? As he should have obeyed you. Tell me, Lucilius, are you afraid?"
Afraid of Rufus? If Lucilius was not, he ought to be— if only for listening to this talk of betrayal. Quintus's belly chilled. He would not have thought...
"What's there?" Lucilius whispered and whirled about.
The Ch'in laughed softly. "Afraid? As I thought. Review your enemies; and what is there to fear? The oaf, the young fool, the old man from Hind, perhaps, and she who travels with him."
"She is of interest to me...." Lucilius purred.
"Take her if you wish," said Wang Tou-fan, as if throwing a coin to a whining beggar. "They are not... unskilled, adepts like herself. As you may have observed. As your enemy the rustic doubtless has discovered."
The other laughed softly. "She is of interest to many."
"I'll kill him myself!" Quintus got the words out between gritted teeth.
"Quiet!" Draupadi hissed. She flung her arms about him as he started toward Lucilius and Wang Tou-fan and out of the range of the protective illusion she had cast. Her breath against his neck was warm and comforting.
"No, Quintus," Draupadi crooned it almost as if she cast another spell. Lady, you do bespell me with every move. "No. Caius. Dear one. Be still, please!" She seemed to rock him back and forth, as if seeking to relax his too-taut body. "I am here. Stay with me."
So it was treachery by Lucilius, was it? Knives in the back. And not just in his back, but Rufus's. Quintus had known Lucilius to be venal, known him to be ambitious, spoiled, too ready to assume that all good things were his for the asking. But not evil. Now—with a strangled moan, he let his head fall onto Draupadi's shoulder. Her body felt better in his arms than he could have dreamed. And this, he knew, was no illusion.
Nevertheless, he let her go. He needed to get closer, to see the two men, born half a world from each other yet united in treachery. Romans had shamed Rome before, but this... this was somehow different. And there were so very few of them left this far from home.
"Who's that?" Lucilius's voice rang out sharply.
"How long have you been in the desert?" asked Wang Tou-fan. "Are you truly fool enough to believe the stories of demons and goblins?"
A hissing began to rise in the outermost range of Quintus's hearing, a hissing of great snakes, their jaws wide, draining the life through shining, hollow fangs until their prey were ancient-seeming, bled-out husks such as he had seen at Stone Tower.
"Yes," Draupadi whispered. "Yes. Surely, he has been touched by their power, promised..."
Surely, Lucilius had been promised—what? Draupadi herself? The gold he had always wanted? He would be lucky if he did not find himself, like his master the dead proconsul, with more gold than he could safely swallow—the mock of his enemies.
Still, Lucilius stood. "Why not do it yourself?" he demanded. "You could say he tried to escape. You could say he ran mad and tried to kill someone."
"Perhaps I require proofs of those in my hands. For example, you know, as does every man here, that as long as one of you Romans remains alive, he will not abandon him. He would not even, I imagine, abandon you."
Quintus could guess Lucilius's answering, high-nosed glare. But would he take the knife and the poison?
The Ch'in noble's hands dropped. He stood motionless. Quintus heard other footsteps, passing so close beside him that surely the conspirators must have heard their breath in the stillness of the night.
Ssu-ma Chao! Why had he ventured outside the safety of the camp, unless—and the thought made Quintus's belly chill—he too...
"Who goes there?" the frontier officer snapped. Quintus might well have laughed at the way the two conspirators attempted to look casual, guilt-free.
Wang Tou-fan recovered himself first, staring at Ssu-ma Chao—a contest of wills as each sought to make the other cast down his eyes. The younger man was from Ch'ang-an, was in favor with the Court; but Ssu-ma Chao had a will of iron. He might have been called a provincial, accused of filial impiety, and all but accused of treachery to the Son of Heaven, but he knew his own mind. The man from Ch'ang-an had, by his own code, toyed with treachery, conspired with a prisoner; he could not meet the older man's eyes.
"These lands are not safe," Ssu-ma Chao said. "Not just the demons, but our own soldiers have died. When you have ranged the deserts as long as I—which the spirits of your ancestors forbid!—you will know that this land holds traps, even for the wary." Then he bowed ironically and deeply. "This one humbly suggests that one trip across the Takla Makan does not make the esteemed officer from the capital an expert guide. And you—" he turned to Lucilius, "—are under guard, or should be. So, back to your camp. I will not report this to your officer, and you will not be punished."
Lucilius stiffened. Hoc habet! Quintus thought, as he might have applauded a deadly blow. Even in the darkness, Quintus could see how the patrician's light eyes flamed. A slave and a subordinate—that was what Ssu-ma Chao had treated him as. Now, he gestured at Wang-Tou-fan as if requesting him to take charge of a somewhat recalcitrant prisoner so that the ranking Roman officer—Quintus himself—might not need to be told. And that, no doubt, would rankle Lucilius worse.
"This is my command now," snapped Wang Tou-fan.
Ssu-ma Chao bowed even more deeply. Then, deliberately, he turned and began to walk back toward the camp, toward the fire. The hissing Quintus had heard subsided. There would be no attempt tonight, he thought.
Wang Tou-fan glanced down at a small, poisoned blade slipped from his sleeve. It would be easy, so easy for him to run up behind the other officer and stab, not even stab, but scratch him. At this moment, he hated Ssu-ma Chao more than he wanted Quintus himself dead. If he stabbed him, it might even be blamed on the Romans.
Draupadi raised her hand and made a tiny motion. An instant later, Wang Tou-fan stopped, as if struck by something... something about the size of a small rock that clicked off his arm and onto the desert floor.
Draupadi sagged, and Quintus caught her. With her spell-casting and her sudden move to protect the border officer, she had come to the limits of her strength, as he had seen her do before.
"You spin powerful illusions, lady," he whispered against that silky hair that, even in the desert, never lost its scent of sandalwood.
"You do not understand," she said. "I had no pebble in my hand when I began. This was not illusion, but true creation."
He embraced her very gently. In the midst of treachery, she had achieved the victory she had sought for so many years.
Lucilius joined Wang Tou-fan. The Ch'in aristocrat was muttering to himself.
"Old men. Always old men. Send me out here where I am slighted. Make your future, they say. Make us proud. How, in the names of my ancestors? Here is just a prison of swords. So I seek power and, should I succeed, not even the Dragon Throne itself would be barred to me. It means power to those who stand with me, and all the gold in the Realm of Gold. Are you with me?"
Lucilius's hand shot out. Had Wang Tou-fa
n been a Roman, the gesture would have been finished in a clasp of arms or shoulders. "Make a future? So they would keep you short of silver and gold; sit on power till they die."
Wang Tou-fan laughed, softly, almost a hiss of amusement. "Old men. All old men and the younger fools—like those two—who serve them. But men die. Oh yes, they can die. And their power... it shall be mine. It will be mine."
Decide, Lucilius, Quintus thought. Make your soul whole, or sell it. Be a Roman or a traitor, but choose. It required only for him to take the poisoned blade or not.
The patrician held out his hand for the blade. It glinted in the night, and the poison on its tip seemed the color of rotted wood or of Charon's wharf in Hades.
"Lost," Quintus whispered. The man was his enemy, but his eyes filled with tears. "He is lost. I ought to kill him, but—oh gods, he was a man and a Roman and now—"
"In my old life," Draupadi whispered, "I swore not to wash my hair until I could wash it in my enemy's blood. I understand. There, my heart." She laid her hands on Quintus's arms. "There."
The two conspirators wandered off, too casually, in different directions. The wind blew sand about them until it veiled the vast, uncaring sky.
21
THEY HAD BEEN marching forever in a waste that made the Dead Sea, where it rippled sullenly in the depths of Judaea, seem as hospitable as the Tiber Valley in spring.
No merchants now rode with them because Wang Tou-fan, eager to return to the bright center of the Middle Kingdom, had selected a route so risky that no sane merchant would dare it. Ordinarily, caravans turned north at Kashgar to Aksu, Kucha, and Turpan, nestled in the shadows of the distant Heavenly Hills, or south to Khotan, into Hind past the lower lip of the devouring Takla Makan Shamo. By contrast, Wang Tou-fan planned to cut across the desert—across the tongue, as it were, of its mouth—to Miran, ordinarily a stop along the southern route. And then? Quintus had seen a map, and he was troubled. What need of treachery in a wasteland such as that?
Madness, the merchants had shouted in return. Arsaces's shade, Quintus thought, must be shaking with rage for the stupidity and the waste of the beasts he had tended.
They were all correct. After months of marching and of surviving the deserts, Quintus had thought himself inured to it. But all of the wastelands he had traversed had possessed some life: Here, there was none. The broken-backed ridges of dunes looked like the bones of some immense kraken, cast up on an intolerable shore. Pale, splintering wood projected from the settlements buried as deep in the sand as the tombs of Egypt to impale the careless or those who traveled by night. And when the wind blew, sometimes, they saw leathery and dried-out huddles that had been man or beast once, before the wind blew and their luck changed.
Long ago "Rome's race, Rome's pace" had given way. Rufus, gasping and almost fatally red in the face, now swayed—under Quintus's orders—upon a camel's back. Others took it in turn to ride or march, while the Ch'in officers had horses and chariots. The only pride was in endurance.
Swaying with the rhythm of his own beast, Quintus edged forward past the other Romans. Lucilius rode his horse with his back as straight as if he were on parade, disdaining what he called a show of weakness and what seemed like common sense to Quintus. Well enough, he had thought as they left Kashgar. Keep him tired and off-guard; sap his strength; whittle away his defenses. If it preserved his life or Rufus's, Lucilius might be as arrogant as he wished. When Rufus had collapsed gasping in the heat, he and Draupadi had examined him minutely for wounds: The clammy skin and stertorous breathing were much like the onset of some poisons.
Now Rufus rode past a maniple or so of Legionaries whose turn it was to march, and none dared to comment that he had a soft ride. They had all lightened their packs as much as they dared—and were permitted. Now they carried only food and water—and their arms. Draupadi rode, of course, swaying in the padded saddle, wrapped in the veils that reduced her face to a mere shadow of beauty, the only fair thing in this desolation. Ganesha rode close beside her, seemingly almost asleep.
Quintus passed several of the Ch'in guard. He called out a hoarse greeting. Turning in his saddle, Ssu-ma Chao nodded permission to Quintus to approach. He lowered the cloth with which he protected his face against the sun and stinging grit, and croaked a question at the officer. They would all drink later, when the desert cooled that night and they dared a few slightly less fearsome hours of travel by starlight.
Moisture was too precious to waste on speech. Still, it had to be said.
"Madness," Ssu-ma Chao husked. "I could almost pray for more deaths—of men or beasts. It would stretch out our water supplies."
It was quite possible for a caravan to founder of its own weight, with more men and beasts along the line of march than the pack animals could provide for. The men and weaker horses would die first, though many of these horses were bred to the heat and grit. Then the camels would start to die. If those perished, all would die, and the great drifts would cover them—until the wind cast them up again, husks to frighten the next travelers rash enough to venture here.
"Miran," Quintus faltered on the unfamiliar name that had become the object of his desire. "Will we really reach Miran?"
"If the ancestors wish," Ssu-ma Chao said. "And they send no storms..."
Which, of course, was no answer at all. Desert storms could force them to lie up, sweltering in the heavy felt wrappings that would shield them from the storm-borne sharp pebbles and grit that could scour flesh from bone. Such storms could delay them until their water ran out, and they could only bleed their beasts for fluid for so long.
"Say we reach Miran. And then?"
"The caves..." mouthed the Ch'in officer. He was the one who had dared show Quintus the map. The Roman valued him for this, for being unwilling to allow a man he still considered ally, rather than prisoner, to venture into the unknown devastation without some knowledge.
For devastation it was. Once well outside of Kashgar, Draupadi had taken one look and recoiled in horror. Ganesha's wise, sleepy eyes had widened. "So many years for the seabed to dry out and change so," he had mused before talk grew too painful to be much indulged in. "Waves. Capped with white spray, birds soaring on great strong wings like unto the sails of our ships, stroking us forward, as above, so below...."
It was punishment even to think of a galley, cutting through the waters of the Middle Sea—all that blue water. The thoughts of coolness, of wetness, the ability to drink, not to satiation, but to drink at all, could drive a man mad.
For now, at least, there had been no storms. For which mercy they must thank the gods or the ancestors. But there were no birds this deep in the desert. Quintus saw that as a loss.
"An oasis?" he whispered. Shadow, he thought. Shade. Coolness. And, please the gods, a bubbling spring. Draupadi unveiling and freeing that dark wave of hair, her eyes gleaming in fire and starlight—if the sun did not burn out his eyes before he beheld her thus.
"What dangers here?" he husked.
"Storms," Ssu-ma Chao muttered. "Or straying off the path."
Wang Tou-fan had, Quintus knew, an instrument that showed true north. He himself had sought—and failed to find—Polaris, though whether that was his weakness or some shift in the very zodiac itself, he could not tell. He was a simple man and no philosopher. Always before, he had been glad for that to be so.
But now? Quintus wished he had Ganesha's wisdom, his understanding of what they faced, his experience of endurance. Or Draupadi's vision. She had passed this way before, it held no unfamiliar terrors for her. Now, as they traveled toward eternal exile, she still hunted for her enemies in her own way.
Ssu-ma Chao covered his face, veiling his features as had some of the Nabataeans who had betrayed Rome so long ago on the march toward Carrhae. His beast plodded on, complaining as Quintus would have liked to do.
With talk as closely rationed as the water, Quintus fell back on the discomfort of his own thoughts. The desert, it seemed, provoked reflection.
>
You are a Roman. True. You must endure. Unfortunately true. You are of the Legions. That was true, too. Your trade is war. Ah, that it never had been, fight though he had had to. He had asked no more than his family's lands, so richly watered—oh Dis, don't think of the Tiber now, with your mouth as parched as the land around you.
His trade had never been war. But was that still true? Here in the desert, a lie could mean your life. When he shut his eyes, sometimes, images of the deep desert replaced the lands he once knew as well as his own heart. He had become a man whose trade was hardship. Whose trade was war, too, if it came to that. And if Quintus, worn out, rode or plodded through an unspeakable present to an incomprehensible future and dreamed only of lying down and dying along the road, it was the warrior spirit—the elements in him Draupadi identified and cherished as Arjuna—that kept him going and even exulted in the chase that brought him closer and closer to his enemy.