For traces of the Black Naacals were all about them. It was only fools and madmen who spoke of the hissing that he heard. They called the sand ming sha, or singing sand. But Quintus heard it as the sound of great serpents, surviving even in this desolation. Never again, he knew, would he see a serpent—from the wise snakes at Delphi to the most humble farm or house snake—without an inward shiver or without reaching for a weapon.
He felt such a shiver as Wang Tou-fan turned to stare at him—flat, ophidian hostility. The man swung away and, from his breast, took out the instrument with which he studied the sky. He held it up, pondered, observed again, and paused. The sun was not yet at zenith—the deadly noontide when neither man nor beast dared stir, but, rather, lay flat, trying to sleep and, in sleep, evade fearsome dreams. Now Wang Tou-fan signaled a halt That was folly, but Quintus was too tired to feel anything but relief. It meant a chance to lie in whatever shadow might be contrived, to rest, and—best of all—to sip some few mouthfuls of water, tasting of the leathern bottles in which it had been carried. It would be the last water he would drink before sunset.
He brushed the pale dust of dried sweat from his brow and turned about. He wanted to be near Draupadi, to aid her from her camel, and for that moment when he lifted her, to be a man rather than a captive wandering through a land of torment.
As he anticipated, she slid willingly down into his hands. Hot as the sun was, closeness to her made Quintus feel as if they lingered beneath green trees by a pool of sweet water.
Lucilius rode by, and the moment shattered as if they had looked into a pool, seen their faces reflected, then recoiled as a rock splashed nearby, destroying their image.
"I should kill him," Quintus muttered.
"And would that be worse than what he has done to himself? Drink, and tell me now if that is what you desire," she rebuked him gently.
He took a sip of the warm, strong-smelling water. Grit wormed its way into water and mouth alike. The water tasted like the ashen fruit that Legionaries too long in Judaea swore grew by the Dead Sea. He started after Lucilius's back, stubbornly upright even after he dismounted and could safely rest.
Gods keep him; he is dead already. Or worse, as if a lamia had him in thrall.
Draupadi inclined her head. "It is not only blood and strength they take, as they did at Stone Tower."
Too soon, the order came to remount. Quintus saw Draupadi settled in her veils on her saddle, her camel complaining as it swayed to his feet, before he himself mounted. Then he went to check on his men.
His beast rose, moaning like an old slave who wasn't sure he could survive another beating. Quintus had heard that song before; the beast would bear him down the line of march. He must review his men. He must check on their mounts and pack animals—especially the stubborn old camel bearing the Eagle.
Day after day, they rode, and Quintus found one prayer answered. He did not want to see his men divide into those who faltered and suffered in the sun but pressed on until they fell, always facing east, and those who fined down, whose skin blackened and whose eyes grew hidden in the wrinkles caused by squinting against the sun, but who adapted to the desert as if they had been bred there. They must all adapt. Or die.
Their sleep was shallow, dream-filled. It was not a Golden Age that haunted Quintus's rest; it was a Green Age. His home now struck him as unreal as Elysium, more a paradise than the gardens Arsaces had spoken of—and the gods send that the Persian's crafty spirit wandered in such places now. One day, Draupadi mentioned the deodars of the high hills in Hind, and he dreamed of them, too—places he had never seen with his own eyes, but that now seemed as familiar to him as his soul.
Ganesha, learned, enduring, dreamt, he said, of water when he dreamt at all. Inconceivable, what he had said: that all this waste had once lain at the bottom of a great sea.
"Miran?" It was all Quintus had strength to hope for now, as he lifted a packsaddle and fastened it on the protesting beast. The Bactrian's two humps showed still, like the dugs of a woman nursing in a famine—full, for now. They would wither. The water would be consumed; the camels would falter; and they all would begin to die—soon, if they did not reach Miran.
The desert turned cold at night, a deadly blessing against which they built fires of dung and the wood uncovered by the winds. Alternately, they froze and they baked....
...To wake when dawn rose like a fireball from some hellish catapult in the east, the direction in which they must go. The camels groaned when shifted to their feet. The men had no strength to waste complaining. Each day, they settled in their saddles or marched, if it were their turn to struggle on foot. Perhaps water might be found today. That was hope enough.
Wang Tou-fan rode by, Lucilius at his horse's heels, ignoring the grit kicked up. The sunrise cast a molten glory over both of them. They were like brothers these days, intent on whatever enterprise they planned in Ch'ang-an. Quintus remembered The Surena. He had seen a similar gloss of hatred and violence and treachery upon him.
Do not resist. Endure.
Quintus started, saving himself from a slide forward that might have unseated him and hurled him into the path of those riding behind him. Where had that voice come from? A long-absent, familiar prickle over his heart: Yes, his talisman, the bronze dancer, had waked from the long sleep that it seemed to have entered when they reached the deep desert. Or perhaps there was no sufficient danger up till now. And that idea was frightening.
He took the dancer out and regarded it: delicate, ancient, surprisingly strong. Its upraised hands caught and held the last explosions of the sunrise, diminishing now to what was almost bearable splendor. A faint wind stirred the grit, setting swirls arise in an updraft, above the ungainly knees of the camel ahead of his own, veiling him in a world by himself.
Rays of light seemed to erupt from the dancing figure, spooking Wang Tou-fan's horse. It reared, screaming through a throat parched even for a desert beast. It danced on its hind legs, hurling the Ch'in aristocrat forward. He clung to its neck for a moment, then flew off, dust, grit, and small stones scattering about him. The Roman swerved his camel to avoid trampling the officer. A shining arc pierced the veils of dust as the bronze direction finder flew from Wang Tou-fan's hands.
Light overhead... was it a trick of the dawn that made its shadow resemble a great winged creature? It swooped, it neared them, and it dropped like a raptor, snatching up the chain of the direction finder as if an eagle spied a serpent and caught it, to fly off, prey in its mouth, to its eyrie.
No, Quintus told himself. It was another trick of this soul-destroying desert. He could not, most assuredly not have heard a shriek of triumph. No bird of prey would shriek so close to its prey and, thereafter, it must keep its beak firmly clasped around it.
He would have sworn, though, by all the lares and penates of his vanished home that he had seen an eagle swoop down to steal Wang Tou-fan's bronze device. But why would an eagle—the Romans' symbol—have chosen precisely the instrument on which all their lives depended?
They would never see Miran; they would die in the desert! Quintus hurled himself off his mount toward the Ch'in officer and Lucilius, who had begun frantically to burrow in the dust and grit. Blood welled from cuts in their hands, drying quickly on their sleeves and in the thirsty desert floor.
"That won't help." Rufus's hoarse voice held them all—officers, nobles, horsemen, soldiers—in their place. "All of you pile into one spot and start kicking up sand... rock... whatever... and what you're looking for will never turn up. You want to do this orderly-like."
He was in there then, bringing order out of panic with his raspy-voice commands and occasional blows from a very battered vinestaff. Roman-fashion, the ground was cleared and quartered; the officers helped up, patched up, and brushed to some semblance of order—but no direction finder turned up. Quintus had not expected that it would.
Remounted, Quintus met Draupadi's and Ganesha's eyes as if the three of them studied the wreckage of their futures
with the assurance of complete despair.
However, sun, sky, and desert had turned themselves into the usual noontime smelter before the others were able to concede that the bronze direction finder was gone for good. Some hurled themselves, gasping and red-faced despite their weathering, upon the grit in rage. A Ch'in soldier reached for a waterskin.
"Hold!" Rufus was there, his staff striking the man's hand away from the precious water. One of the Ch'in's fellows began to draw on him, and he raised his vinestaff again.
You have stumbled into deep water, old friend, Quintus thought and moved in to back him. The Ch'in soldiers' mood was ugly and could turn uglier. They could not mutiny, but they must blame something for their loss of hope. There could easily be more blood on the sand before long.
"Listen to me, man," Rufus spoke Latin, and there was no way the man-at-arms would understand him. Still, the force of his years of command, the assurance his knowledge of soldiers gave him kept the Ch'in soldiers' swords in their sheaths. "Listen. We knew this trip was going to be terrible even when His Excellency or whatever had that little... what-do-you-call-it... You know it. Now, with the way finder gone, we are going to have to go forward and find water. But it is going to take us much longer, don't you think?"
The wind had gone dead. Ganesha did not bother to raise his voice, but it rang out anyhow, translating Rufus's words. To Quintus's surprise, Lucilius flung up his hands on which the blood had dried.
"Do you think we will ever last till Miran?" Quintus asked Ganesha in an undertone.
"There is sun. There are stars. We can travel as sailors do." The old priest recited precisely the words they needed to hearten them. Though sailors preferred not to journey out of sight of land, Ganesha had sailed upon some very strange seas. What he said could be relied on—at least to enable them to survive through today.
All might yet be well. Quintus had a sudden vision of Draupadi in her place by the pool, water slicking her hair back, molding her saffron robe to her amber skin. He was hot with more than the sun—useless dream for a man who never would see Miran. All would not be well, and they would die in the desert. Wind and sand would cover them, hiding them in a necropolis as vast as Egypt.
He remembered striking men away from the brackish water in the marsh outside Carrhae. That water would be nectar now. Yet it had not been time then to lie down and die. It was not time now. Quintus entered the quarrel between Ch'in and Rome, urging quiet, urging rest, urging travel at night. The setting sun showed them the direction west (and how he wished he were heading that way): They must head opposite to it.
He expected a sneer from Lucilius, but the man was sitting propped against a packsaddle. The sun glinted off his hair, bright as the coins he had never ceased to covet. Draupadi had veiled against the sun. She stood beside him, a hand on his brow. This was no time for even a traitor to be struck down by the sun.
"No birds," he muttered. His lips were pale. "No birds in this Orcus-be-damned waste. But I saw one. I saw an eagle. It came down and snatched our lives away...."
Treason was punishable by death. In Rome, traitors were hurled from the Tarpeian rock, or slain in other, slower ways. When Spartacus and the rebel slaves had been put down, the roads had been lined with crosses. A long death if the man was strong and a painful one.
Was it as painful as dying of thirst?
But why condemn the whole Legion—and those of the Ch'in force who were guiltless? And why condemn... fragments from the poetry Quintus had had to learn edged into his mind, all wrapped about the image of Draupadi in that bridal saffron of hers.
"I do not believe that," Quintus said. He was glad he had thought of the fields, of the world of green things, and water hah" a world away. There was still hope.
Rufus, he saw, was gesturing and shouting at a Ch'in soldier who looked as tough as he. Ssu-ma Chao was translating, a wry smile of perfect hopelessness on his face.
The voices floated in the still air. "Who can we trust? We trust them!" Rufus jerked a thumb at Draupadi and Ganesha. "Let the water be under their care. And, for all the gods' sake, let us do something before we drink it all!"
They rode or marched because the idea of lying down and dying, ultimately, parched skin chafed raw against the grit, seemed even more loathsome. Better to move until one's tongue blackened and a merciful madness blurred consciousness, until one's heart burst.
That had happened to at least five people since the direction finder had been lost. It was impossible to tell from the husks covered over with blankets whether they had been Ch'in or Roman. And that meant there were five fewer men—the weakest at that—to share the water and food that Draupadi guarded.
They had been wandering for days. By now, surely, they might have found at least the ruins of an outpost. There had been no storms to cover the bodies of a patrol with the ever-present dust and grit; and there should have been patrols out. As for scouts of their own—to send a man alone and on a weak mount was a waste of man, mount, and water supply. And the idea of sending a man out without water was hateful: more merciful to cut his throat on the spot.
Quintus remembered when he knew they were lost. One moment they had struggled to the crest of an enormous dune. For that instant of achievement, the desert had been somewhat less hateful. There had even been a night wind, blessedly cool. A delicate spray of dust had spun near their hands.
And then, even when they looked up again, the stars' patterns had appeared to change, to shift. Oh, somewhere, Orion must surely hunt the Bears, lesser and greater; and Cassiopeia still fled her amorous god, or whatever fables the Ch'in made up about the heavens as they saw them. It was only that now, the patterns did not make sense.
"We are at sea here," he had mouthed to Ganesha.
"Once I saw a ship sail down a wave and plunge into the next. I never saw that ship again," the old man said.
It hurt to talk. Quintus just nodded. It didn't do to think of that much water, either. The younger man cast a look at Draupadi. He was not the only man to send longing glances in her direction, but the others had eyes only for the waterskins she kept close at hand.
She shook her head. "Even power of illusion is gone," she whispered. Her lovely voice was gone too. "I cannot even provide the dream of water in your throat."
He reached over and took her hand. When it came his turn to die, he wanted to die clasping it, looking up into her eyes. And then, he thought, when we are all dead, she and Ganesha will go on. As they did before.
She moved her fingers across the callus on his palm. "No. No. For us this is real—too real this time. If you die, we die. Maybe we have had many years, but I am not ready yet to give up!"
Her voice gained strength, then subsided. Could she and the old priest have taken life somehow and gone on—as the Black Naacals had done at Stone Tower? He would have shaken his head, but he found that his brains were already addled enough from the sun without shaking them up further.
Not in all these years. The dancing figure was warming over his heart. Even when they had tossed away everything that might conceivably have held them back, he had refused to part with the tiny bronze. Not the dancer, and not the Eagle, which was borne each day by a different packbeast.
Draupadi pressed his hand. "I wanted reality, not dreams," she said. "This is real. You are real."
Quintus raised her hand with his ring on it to his cracked lips. "And so is this."
They rode on, very calm. Time was when "drifting" was a serious crime. Now, they sought to drift, to go on as painlessly as possible. They drifted between night and day, under unfamiliar star patterns and a sun whose rising and setting brought them no real understanding of where they were. They might as well have been children, turned and spun until they could barely stand, much less find their fellows.
"We are so weak," Quintus rasped to Draupadi when one precious sip of water let him speak. "Why do they not come for us?"
She glanced at the hot chimeras that rose from the desert floor to a cloudless sk
y. Even the white-fanged mountains so far away were a torment since the whiteness of those peaks meant snow. Precious moisture: for others. Never for them.
"The Black Naacals?" Her lips formed the words as if sound might summon them. "It suits them to torment us and to watch. And even now, I think, they find us." Dismay sharpened her too-thin features beneath the grimy veils.
"You and Ganesha?"
"You knew how long ago we were here," she whispered. "It was you who wandered in the waste, seeking Pasupata. You. Quintus—Arjuna—can you truly not remember?"
Then Ssu-ma Chao croaked out the command to mount, to march, to press on—in whatever direction seemed less useless. It was his turn to march, and they were separated, less by distance on the road than by memories.
Think, he told himself. Think. He was marching. It was his turn to march, which was true. But also, he preferred now to march, to feel again the undeviating rhythm of a Legion's pace behind its Eagle and, in that rhythm of so many thousand paces a day under constant discipline, to lose himself.