Empire of the Eagle

10

Laughter like a chime of sweet bells rang out from the woman reclining on cushions and carpets. The old man himself joined in her amusement.

"Another mistake?" she called.

To the end of his life, Quintus thought, he would never know if she spoke Latin or not: Her voice was like her skin—dark honey. And what mattered were not the words she spoke, but that she spoke at all.

"Ah no, Draupadi," the old man cried. "I could not be wrong about this one. Not that I have not been wrong before—as I was the first day of my life."

He turned to Quintus, who had retrieved his broken blade, wondering how he would find, among the stores, one that would suit him—or any sword at all. At the worst, he must go to Ssu-ma Chao and beg for arms. The old man must be some sort of soothsayer, then, to call him beggar. Ruefully, he sheathed the metal fragments.

"You do better than a god, young sir. In truth, you outdo my father Shiva, who slew me the day of my birth. I was born full-grown, and my mother Parvati bade me guard the door, that no one disturb her while she was bathing. My father approached and would enter, but in my inexperience I sent him away. Angry, he cut off my head and threw it far beyond the Roof of the World."

Quintus shook his own head, almost testing its security on his own shoulders at the old man's ravings.

"My mother appeared, weeping. The Lord of All the Worlds, to heal her grief, took up the first head he saw— which happened to be that of an elephant.

"Placing it on my shoulders, he restored me to life. And since then, I have sought only understanding."

He picked up his scroll. "Welcome to your part in this tale, young lord."

Again, the woman seated beyond him laughed. Delicate shell bracelets tinkled on her wrists. "You do not explain enough, Ganesha. Is this how our champion must be left—confused? That is not how Arjuna looked the day he won me and brought me home."

"Let me explain the tale," said the creature—man, god, gods-only-knew-what—called Ganesha. "Whoever hears this tale and understands a small bit of it escapes the chains forged by deeds of good or evil. Success he finds, for the tale holds the power of victory! The man who tells it to eager listeners gives them as a gift the Earth with her belt of seas. Stay with me and tell me..."

He broke off and shook his head.

"That is not right. It is my turn to tell, not to record, is that so?"

Quintus blinked, not expecting to be addressed. A moment more and he would either laugh or flee.

Ganesha clapped his hands. "Well, follow me." He led the way onto that cushioned platform floating upon the glowing lake and gestured to a pile of cushions only slightly less ample than those Draupadi reclined upon. She bent and, from a golden pitcher richly encrusted with red and green stones, poured a fragrant drink into a matching cup.

The old man threw a wreath of flowers and a white scarf about Quintus's neck.

"We do that for honor," the woman told him.

"Well, why do you tarry?" the scribe demanded. "Sit, sit, sit! And I shall begin."

Quintus laid the cup aside. How was he going to explain the breaking of his short sword?

Draupadi laughed in delight. "We offer him incense, we offer him stories, we offer him even amrita, the very nectar of heaven, and, see, he grieves for a weapon. Truly, he is the warrior we seek."

But are you the one I seek? Her eyes, elongated by the kohl, challenged him. The fragrance of sandalwood rose from her hair, and a line of red gleamed where she had parted it and dressed it with gems. A wreath of flowers lay beside her, and the odors rising from the cup at his side were very sweet.

If he drank that, what would he be transformed into? Would he, like old Ganesha, bear an elephant's head? More likely the head of an ass, he thought. For leaving my camp; for listening to these lunatics, even for a moment. In the stories, Circe had transformed Ulysses's men into swine, and the Greek hero had menaced her with his sword. But his sword had shattered on the rock.

Once again, he met the woman's eyes. Deep as the Mediterranean, they caught the fires that encircled them. Shapes formed in the fires: his brothers the Pandavas, the eldest, his king with golden eyes, who lost Draupadi in a game of dice and plunged them into war; his enemy, who possessed arms that made him invincible—unless he ... Arjuna ... could find weapons to set them at naught.

"This wreath is twin to the one I brought my husband. That was Arjuna, under a vow to share all he won with his brothers. And so, I married five brothers. You are..." She paused as if drawing the name from his thoughts, "... named Quintus. That is five, is it not? Take the wreath!"

She had it in her slender hands. In an instant, she would have it about his neck, and he would be as bound, he knew, as if he slipped his head beneath a conqueror's yoke. The wreath brushed his hair.

He pushed up onto his feet so fast that his bronze statue of the dancer fell onto the carpets.

"Krishna!" the scribe cried. "You and he have been great friends since ... tell me you remember...."

"The tree..." Quintus shook his head. Again, memories not his own overlay his thoughts. An ironic, enigmatic figure whose gentle humor hid a mind as vast as all heaven. A being who was devoted to ... to him? Not to him, certainly. To Arjuna, this hero out of some wild collection of Hind stories.

He had been offered a choice—armies or simply Krishna to serve as his charioteer—and he had chosen Krishna. He. Arjuna. He shook his head, trying to separate his thoughts from the spell of these other stories.

He did not want Arjuna's memories. But the tiny dancer was precious to him, and he scooped it up. Mocking flute music rang in his ears.

"This is magic!" he accused them. "All illusion. Even, I would wager, my sword breaking."

He reached to the leather and brass sheath and drew. The blade shone in the firelight, then shimmered ... the metal length drawing out, blue patterns quivering along it. Even the hilt felt strange. He glanced down: It was decorated with frogs.

"Arjuna's own blade," Ganesha told him. He made a meticulous note in his scroll.

Then the blade shifted form again. Roman issue, the finest in the world. Or so he had always thought.

"Illusions," he whispered. "Is it all illusion?" Abruptly, he was chill with fear. "Is this a dream, too?" Would he wake screaming and find himself bleeding to death from a Yueh-chih arrow? Or would he wake too parched to rave, his tongue swollen in his head as he died of thirst, having led his men to ultimate defeat?

"Illusion?" Draupadi caught up his words.

"You know illusion," she told him. "Do you remember? Maya, god of illusion, made namaste, touching your brother's feet. He proclaimed himself a great artist, eager to create. And you asked him for a palace that no one could imitate."

Ganesha unrolled his scroll. "Yes! He found on a mountain slope flat posts shining like a god's face, bordered with gold and set with golden flowers gleaming with jewels. Ages ago, Krishna had set them on the northern slope of the Mother of the World."

"Who lived there?" Quintus found himself asking.

"You—I mean, Arjuna." Ganesha nodded. "We all did, for a long time. It was your home where you found love and grief, happiness and death. And you remember nothing at all. Well, the wheel turns for all of us. You will.

"Maya built his palace. By the front door he put a tree of lights, its leaves cut from thin sheets of emerald, with gold veins. It sang in the wind. He carried full-grown trees and made parks; he brought songbirds and filled the trees; he made ponds and pools and filled them with fish and flowers. And when he was finished..."

"Is this Maya's palace?"

"One such, perhaps," Draupadi said. "All is illusion." Her eyes turned sorrowful.

"Then am I dead?"

"Illusion can be as powerful as truth," she told him. "We brought you here. The horsemen who would have slain you were real. The storm you endured was real. The use we made of it, to encompass you as you sped upon the circles of the world, that was illusion. And so is the guise of your sword."

"It was illusion that it broke."

"No; indeed, it shattered on that rock, for it is of Maya's building. You carry Arjuna's sword, disguised now so you can return to your people and bring them to our aid."

Slowly, Quintus folded his arms on his chest. The white scarf and wreath brushed his knee. He started to push them away, then forebore.

"If you are powerful enough to call the desert itself to your aid, you need no help from me or mine. We are prisoners, permitted arms only because the desert holds worse fears than Romans far from their home."

"Then why not turn aside?" Draupadi asked. "Some did."

Ganesha looked down at his scroll as if it were a map.

"They hold our Eagle." It came out sounding flat. How could he explain to these dwellers in illusion what the Eagle meant in terms of loyalty and blood? They looked to be of Hind. Perhaps he could explain it in terms of Alexander, who had journeyed that far. But his mouth went dry. He had never been a scholar, never had much time to study or a good tutor. Even Lucilius would tell the tale better than he.

"Loyal," she pronounced. "Well enough. You are here. And they are here. And the talismans. Look you!"

She snapped one of the fragile shells from the bracelet on her slender wrist. "I break this cowrie shell. And I scatter its pieces ... oh, here . . . and here . . . and here...." She dropped gleaming fragments on the amber and crimson carpet. "But then the need comes for such a shell. A need such as the world has never seen since the stars danced in different patterns in the heavens. So the pieces gather in one place, where the hand that knows them—" her own fingers with their almond-shaped nails were busy collecting the shards, "—and then, they are joined once more. Sol"

She raised her hand, and the shell was whole.

"More shadow-play?"

Ganesha shook his head. "That was true transformation. You have grown, Draupadi."

"I wish to grow beyond illusions into truth. I can spin shadows into pleasing forms. And I can spin them into shapes that can save a man's life. A little, I can take the fabric of the world and change it in truth. But I cannot do more, not without help."

"I have heard," Quintus said, "that those of Hind are great magicians." His voice was very dry. The cup at his feet beckoned, but he did not dare drink it.

"It would protect you from wounds," Draupadi said, "and make you all but immortal. If you spurn that, drink from the pool."

"We are not from Hind," Ganesha said. "Oh, in latter days, before the stars changed once again and we were driven out once more, we lived there ... in that palace Maya built at your ... at Arjuna's ... command. But this was our home before, and we must hope will be so once again."

Quintus paced about the platform. By rights, he ought to call his men or Ssu-ma Chao to restrain the lunatics. But, he recalled, perhaps they were oracles. And those sybils who were holiest seemed the maddest. He thought of the woman before him seated by a tripod, a serpent twined round its legs, as fumes rose from a fissure in the earth and dreams erupted from her lips.

"You cast your nets wide, if you draw in such as we."

"Nets! Now you begin to understand," Ganesha nodded approval. "Long ago, this was a plain, rich with water, fertile fields, forests, and lakes. A great city rose not far from here, the home of a race that had journeyed far from the East, from the Motherland known as Mu. From there, they spread out. Here, to the city of the Uighurs. And beyond it to the island in the sea, now sunken...."

Quintus's palms were wet. That much Plato he remembered. "Atlantis, lost when the earth split, sunk beneath the waves."

"We cast our nets wide, as you say. Wide as the waves that overwhelmed our cities." Ganesha's voice was grave. A tear ran down Draupadi's cheek. "On a night of the blackest evil, waves were sent raging down onto the plain that the Uighurs had made into a worthy daughter of the Motherland. Huge rocks shattered the pillars of the temples and palaces and theatres we had built. Those of us who could, those of us with the training of the Naacals, the caste of priests, fled.

"And when we looked back, we saw only desolation. Boulders had scoured the soil, bare to the very bones of the world. The land dried, and sand came, to bury the ruins of Uighur glory.

"Weeping, we made our way overmountain to Hind, those of us who did not despair, or plunge off the great peaks, or die for lack of breath. But we made our way down into rich fields that reminded us of the land we had lost.

"The people greeted us there beside rivers they called holy. When we named ourselves and spoke of our loss, they bowed and touched our feet. They heaped our necks with wreaths and scarves of honor. For 'Naacal,' they heard 'Naga'—a holy people of their own. And indeed, it had been that those 'Nagas' were loyal daughters of the Motherland and Hind had been the jewel on her brow—as much as Mu. Even the symbol was the same. Draupadi?"

The woman gestured. The air around the nearest brazier shimmered, melded with the sparks, and formed the image of the seven-headed serpent that Quintus had convinced himself he had not seen on the cliff walls.

"Serpents," she said. "It is the nature of man to fear them, and that is wise. But like fire, there is no need to hate. Do not your own priests venerate the serpent?"

Despite himself, Quintus smiled, remembering as a child how he had laid down a saucer of milk for the garden snake that coiled near the household shrine.

Still it was hard, hard to think of the desert through which he had passed in such pain and peril as a seabed— but his eyes had flinched from the noon glare on slick white patches uncovered by the wind, and when he had touched some of this strange sand to his lips, he had tasted salt.

You could still be in the desert. They could serve your head as they served the proconsul's—hurling it into an entertainment to delight barbarians. Or your head could be curing in some Yueh-chih tent, ready for some unwashed carver to make into a drinking cup.

So he owed these people at least a hearing. And it was hard to look away from the woman, who spoke with a voice near that of his own genius loci.

Her eyes were upon him. "I told you, we cast our nets of illusion wide—and our nets of vision even wider."

He looked down at the statue of Krishna.

"You have pipes—flutes, music, dancing—in your own land," she was continuing. "There can be no pipes without his presence, somehow."

There's Pan or Silenus. It seemed useless to say so, however.

With a stubbornness he thought his grandfather would have approved of, for once, Quintus brought up what seemed to him the most telling argument against this madness. "Lady, you broke that shell. Then you reassembled it—I do not know how. But you knew where all its pieces were and why you did what you did."

"Excellent!" Ganesha said, clapping plump hands together. "Look up!"

Quintus gazed up into the sky. Once again, the stars bloomed, even more brightly than in the deep desert.

"You see the patterns in the stars?"

Ganesha pointed out the ones Quintus had been taught as a boy. "When I was your age, there was no Hunter, no great or lesser Bear. We had the Naga, the Crown ... ah, they are all passed. But the patterns shift in the sky. And when certain patterns emerge, then it is time for change in the world. As above, so below. It is a crucial time, and past time. Does it not seem to you that there is no order, no justice in the world, that all is confusion?"

His father dead afar, his pretty, vigorous mother withering, his grandfather dying, rigid in his bed, their lands lost. Betrayal in the desert, the slithering in the sand of serpents he could not hear, the vanishing of carts from the illusions that should have saved them.

What if you were not mad, but right, to sense that all was amiss?

He sat back down and used the scarf of honor to dab at his brow.

"Have you ever seen," Draupadi asked, "men and women who resemble Ganesha and I? Who look like us, but with whom you would never sit, much less listen to unless you came armed and protected by strong amulets?"

Her hand moved over the water of the pool, and faces formed. "Have you seen any who look like this?"

Dark hair; eyes kept lidded, but dark and with fire in their cores; narrow-lipped mouths; a high-bred look, but one that seemed to raise his hackles the way the rustling of unseen serpents had outside Merv.

Twin to Draupadi, perhaps, but a twin as devoted to darkness as she seemed to the light.

"Those are the Black Naacals," Draupadi told him. "For as the stars moved into their appointed patterns, they stirred. And we have been drawn from our long contemplations, and you from your proper life to stand against them."

He was insane. In the morning, they would miss him. They would seek him out. And they would find him, his face twisted in a madman's grimace, his hair torn out— that is, if they did not count him fled.

"Draupadi!"

Both of the creatures who called themselves Naacals stiffened as if scenting the air. It quivered, seemingly thickening, and from as far off as the cliff walls ringing the valley, Quintus heard the rustle of giant coils. Descending by night, seeking out the warmth of the camp, the lives of his men...

"No!"

"Hold!"

Ganesha picked up his scroll. Draupadi opened her hands in the gestures that Quintus had seen summon her illusions. For a moment longer, the air thickened and the rustling drew closer. Quintus drew his sword.

"You cannot slay the serpent with a sword," Ganesha told him. "You need a bow—Gandiva, which only Arjuna might draw."

"You do not need me," Quintus told them. "My men do. Let me go to them."

"The serpent has been contained, illusion banished with illusion. But I am no warrior, nor is Ganesha. For the serpent of the Black Naacals to be slain, we must have a man of war. You. And you must have weapons. It seems to me that, just as a bird flies, with the serpent that it has caught dangling from its beak, your Eagle plays a role in what we must do. And it may even be that you, like Arjuna, must seek out weapons that could wreck the earth. But better at your hands, should you err, than at those of the Black Naacals."

From far across the lake, Quintus heard someone call out. The watch? Had the guards found someone slain, or discovered him missing? He glanced up. Banners began to fly at the horizon—crimsons and purples and golds— as the night sky dimmed, hiding the stars that he had heard signaled such war for the world. It was all but dawn, and he had never known.

He had passed the entire night in conversation with these Naacals or spirits—whatever they were, they were beings at least as strange as the genius loci of his childhood.

"It is time," Ganesha said. He picked up the huge shell and blew into it, producing a cry that any trumpeter would have praised.

"You've given away your location," Quintus pointed out.

"They do not seek us, but you," Draupadi said. "And they bring news that you must hear."