Empire of the Eagle

14

Mists rose as if upborne by the force of mantra chanting and screams—mists in a land so seldom touched by moisture that even the white glint of salt mimicked natural rock. The coils of thickened moisture filled the valley, concealing the Stone Tower. Lazily, they wafted upward, licking at the higher rocks. Though they cloaked now what lay below, they did not deaden the clatter of falling stones, first singly, then in a cascade. The ground trembled in a dreadful warning.

"We have to get down!"

Romans and Ch'in soldiers alike grabbed for handholds. Then, they fought to harness frightened, plunging beasts, to snatch up baggage....

"You cannot reach them in time!" Quintus shouted at Ssu-ma Chao in Parthian.

"Those are our people down there! We have to try!"

Quintus surveyed the mists. He had survived demon storms, but this was no such thing. Not sand, but vapor rose to engulf them. In his boyhood, he had seen such mists rise from the Tiber, bearing fevers with them. Almost he thought that he could smell water—not a river, but a sea: wet, cold, alien in this land of deserts.

Again, the earth shuddered underfoot. Now came the wild screams of panicking animals. The Romans, blessed—or cursed—with pride, cloaked their fear with curses as they fought to pack (but a few prayers rose with the oaths). The Ch'in pleas for protection were as shrill as the cries of the beasts.

Like his men, Quintus swore. Damn all cumbersome Ch'in armies to the cross or the fires of Acheron! So much easier with Marius's mules, to pack up and—ahhhhh, there went Rufus, taking a much-needed part in making those crying barbarians move!

"Load up, you mules! Do Marius proud—who knows, maybe he's watching you! We're getting out of here." Legionaries bore their kit, too much lightened now, but still a burden, on their backs. It let them break camp quickly and move without the complex impediment of baggage trains (unless, gods look kindly on him, you were Crassus) such as these easterners had dragged across mountains and desert. It would not help, Quintus thought, if the mountainside peeled away and they were sent hurtling. He had a sudden, nightmare vision of a Roman lying broken on his back in the shattered frame of his pack, kicking feebly, briefly, like a beetle before sandals crushed the life from it.

No time for that, man. Take Draupadi, be sure of her safety—if he could. He grabbed her by the elbow, pushed her roughly toward Ganesha. "You two! Join the others. Keep up and keep safe!"

A foolish command, and he knew it.

The woman clung to the old" sage, her eyes wide, but not with fear. Why should she fear? After all, hadn't she lived through worse ... many times, if he could believe the tales she told? To his astonishment, he realized what shone in her eyes was courage and reassurance for him. He wanted—gods, he wanted—to promise her she would never again face such an ordeal, to hold her and touch her face.

Once again, the earth shuddered. Not far from where they were working their way down, a chunk fell off the ledge.

"Get back! Now!"

Quintus ran with the others. And as his breath sobbed and stabbed in his chest, memory overtook him.

...In Virata's court, he had been useless. Worse than that, he had been a laughingstock, and his brother the king, the hapless player of dice, had been a gambler who couldn't lose. But he, Arjuna, the champion of that Yuga or any other age, had been a dancing master. No, worse: dressed as a woman, cossetted by the royal ladies, and consulted about brocades and paints as well as the placement of hands and feet in the ancient dances. He had not been able to shield Draupadi then either....

He ran toward his own kit, propelling the woman and the old man before him. Shouldering into his gear with the ease of long practice, he jogged toward where the others had formed up. Even Lucilius was ready, his gambler's eyes glistening with appreciation of the danger.

"They're screaming down there," someone remarked. "The wind brings up the sound."

"You think there's enough of us to take them?" Lucilius asked.

Quintus's eyes flickered from the Romans to the Ch'in soldiers. Were they all ready? Could they finally move, please all the gods? Damn all, why not abandon that stupid chariot!

Because it is like an Eagle to the Ch'in, the answer came swiftly to his mind.

Those of the Legion were ready. Rufus had barely had to use his vinestaff. The Ch'in, though ... Ssu-ma Chao, heedless of his dignity, was harnessing his own beasts. His eyes swept over the Romans and his sallow face sagged.

Easy enough for those now to abandon the Ch'in. Lighter armed, lighter equipped, they could flee, leaving the men they had marched with to whatever hazards the mountains threatened as the earth threatened to burst asunder. Maybe they could double back later and, if the Ch'in were not already dead, prepare an ambush....

"Let's move," Lucilius muttered, his fingers tapping against his sword.

"We wait for our comrades."

Rufus swore under his breath, but he had been swearing steadily since the first tremors: Quintus ignored him.

"We are ready," came Draupadi's voice. Ganesha, steadier than the rock that still upheld them, eyed the Romans and the Ch'in.

If he was deciding with whom to cast his lot, Quintus thought, he might die right there from the betrayal.

He caught just such a speculative gleam in Lucilius's face. The Romans were ready; let them claim their Eagle and flee west. Assuming the mountains did not rise and crush them for their betrayal—as well as their cowardice in surviving Carrhae. And the abandonment of their Eagle.

For an instant, Quintus felt the weight of an Eagle against arm and shoulder. Go without winning that, and they were no Legion—but a rabble of defeated men. True, it wasn't as if the Ch'in really were federates, allies. They had bought them, imprisoned them, and Ssu-ma Chao was taking them as captives to his Emperor as if they were strange beasts intended to deck a Triumph—if they lived that long.

But the Easterner had treated them as comrades, had returned some of their battered dignity to them with their weapons. He had let them—let Quintus—redeem some of the honor he felt he had forfeited by their defeat.

"The Eagle ahead—where—we cannot get it!" Lucilius whispered it, intent as he had been moments before on the pursuit of Draupadi. His hands flexed and cupped as if closing on a woman's breast.

"Are we men or runaway slaves?" Quintus spat.

Lucilius spared him a twisted grin.

Surely, he wanted the Eagle, yes, and his freedom. Well, Quintus wanted his freedom, even if he wasted it in a vain bid to return to Rome.

But not at the cost of betrayal. Not after he himself had been betrayed so many times. The Eagle itself would lift from its bronze perch above the SPQR and stoop to rend a man guilty of that disloyalty.

"Help them! We go together or no one moves at all!"

Ssu-ma Chao's weary face lit with a relief that had nothing to do with temporary freedom from the racking earth tremors. Rufus headed toward the plunging beasts. Sweat from their fear lathered them despite the cold and the high altitudes and the swearing men attempting to manhandle the chariot down the side of a shaky hill. But he paused to clap Quintus on the shoulder—a liberty Quintus took as an honor. Ganesha, before gliding down the path with more composure than any of the younger men showed, nodded gravely in tribute.

The horse Ssu-ma Chao had saddled plunged and reared. Quintus moved to reassure it with words and actions he had used a thousand times on his farm. This decision would cut him off once again from his home, his grandfather's bones, and everything he had dreamed of winning back.

Except himself. He felt warm despite the heights, sure despite the fear of the earth tremors and whatever damnable slaughter was going on far below. He had seldom felt such confidence, except of course the rare times his grandsire had praised him.

He and the Ch'in officer slammed a packsaddle onto the last beast, trying simultaneously to soothe and subdue it. Once more, the earth shook. Rocks shivered loose from the peaks and rained down among them as if shot from some Titan's catapult. Two men screamed, but their screams were cut sharply as rock blotted them from sight.

"Forgive, forgive this turtle's pace.... They are dying down there and I fail them, I fail my brothers...." Ssu-ma Chao would be weeping in a moment, and then there really would be Charon to pay.

All day they stood in the hot sun with no water. The lucky ones were those who had died early, a Parthian arrow in their eyes or hearts.

But now they were ready. Perhaps they could stop this slaughter.

"MARCH!" Rufus shouted, a cracked shout that surely cost him lung pain in these heights. Roman and Ch'in picked their way down the trembling path. The mountain labored, as that old Greek slave had said, and gave birth to a mouse. But not here. Not here. For what prodigy did this rumbling serve as the midwife?

Probably Orcus himself, Quintus thought. They would all be cast down into Hades without coin enough to pay the ferryman. At least, with the rocks tumbling about, they would not have to worry about burial.

Do not speak to me of death, a voice whispered in his head. It hissed like wind across sand. They are dead on the road below. You may come there if you can. You may bury their bodies, if you choose, just as you have the choice to waste your lives.... These are not your people ... not your land ... not your battle.... Why do you fear a brutish death when you face life as a slave? In Roma the slaves themselves rebelled against their lives.

Lick my sandals, Lucilius had added.

Watch that boulder.... Quintus sought safer footing, guided a man's hand to a more secure handhold. His grandsire had bent his back and slashed his pride, scraping like a client, but he had never faltered.

He nearly stumbled. A stupid fall would be fine, wouldn't it? Tell Minos and Rhadamanthus at the Judgment below, I fell. I was feeling sorry for myself. It would be Tartarus for certain; not that Romans truly believed in such places, but after what he had seen in dreams and in exile, best not risk it.

Quiet, he told the voices that battled in his skull. They seemed to echo in his helmet. Gravel rattled against it, and dust rose until his eyes squinted tears. The lucky men were the ones who died.

You would never get the old man to bend. You will not get me to bend either.

Step by step, battling the very rock and earth of their passage, they struggled down the slope. Depending on how you looked at it, the gods were either favoring them or wishing to punish them further, because most of them survived to reach the valley floor.

The wailing they had heard as the earth began to shake had died away. No one could remember at what point the rumbling under the ground had ceased. No one could remember when the screams borne up to them by the winds and mists had been put to silence.

A few last rocks fell and stuttered into quiet as the Romans and Ch'in staggered to a halt on the plains. None of them fell to their knees in relief, and Quintus felt the warmth of pride. Even the wind that swiftly dried the sweat from their heaving bodies had fallen silent. Mist licked them around and brought a thick silence.

Grayish-white, that mist writhed up to billow against them. Moving through it was like scouting through a ruin, not so much festooned with cobwebs but barriered with them. Soft as the mist was, the brush of it on gaunt faces and bleeding hands was something subtly vile. Lucilius grimaced as if touching carrion.

"Ugh!"

"Quiet there!" grumbled Rufus.

Draupadi wrapped a grimy saffron fold of her garments over her face. Quintus found himself breathing thinly as if still on the heights, unwilling to draw any more of this mist-laden, unwholesome air into his lungs. The mist will breed in you, came the unwelcome voice in his head. The webs will ensnare you, and you will gasp and cough until blood spurts from your mouth, staining the webs. Thus shall you leave your bones here, where corpses of mighty cities have vanished without a trace.

Working through that smell of must, of something old, salty, and spoiled like rotten shellfish were the desert smells. That made it somehow worse.

"Steady, boy, steady," came Rufus's voice as a horse panted and struggled. The mount lacked the strength to put up a convincing fight: It was too tired and too afraid to panic. Up and down the line of march, eyes showed white rimmed in fear. The men sagged, exhausted with more than their mad plunge in the path of the earthquake to the desert floor.

"Mists are getting thicker, sir," someone muttered.

Cocooned in mists the way a spider entraps a fly, would they encounter worse the further they moved into the true desert?

Draupadi was a mistress of illusion, came the thought. Surely, she...

"Domina?" Gently, Quintus addressed the sorceress as if she were a great lady of his own race.

"In this mist," he told her, "we will wander lost until we die."

Her eyes met his, then fell. "Later would be better," she admitted. "They watch, or something does. Already, I make shields...." She put out a hand that trembled. "I promise."

Abruptly, even an instant longer spent in those mists seemed about an age too long. Thicker and thicker they grew, as if they drew strength from the men trapped to wander in them. The stink of something messily dead grew stronger.

"I would spare you what you will see," she said.

For the first time since Quintus had known her, Draupadi seemed unsure of herself. "You are on the proper trail, I beg you to believe me," she said. Briefly, she shut her eyes. When she opened them again, she flinched as if she gazed upon horrors hidden to the others.

None of them shared her sight—if true sight she had. In the silence, a horse stumbled, and Quintus heard a bone snap. A moment later, the coppery scent of blood filled the air as a Ch'in armsman ended the creature's thrashing pain. Trying to see where the horse had fallen, Quintus set his foot down awry, and nearly measured his length in the grit. He saved himself, but at the cost of the skin on one palm and knee and a sharp pain in his chest like unto the Legions' brand touching him once more. He did not like to think of the way the mist seemed to lick at the blood that oozed from his scratches.

The image of a slender figure, torches held aloft in its hands, kindled in Quintus's thoughts. "Krishna," he whispered to himself. His bronze talisman, the last link between his home and this gods-forsaken place, the guardian that had always warned him of danger.

As it warned him now against the lure of protection from piercing the mists that wreathed them about.

Quintus strode toward the sybil from Hind. "Can you end this spell?" he demanded in a voice he never had used to her before. "Never mind what we may or may not wish to see. We don't—none of us—wish to be here anyhow, let alone with our legs and necks broken from falls."

Draupadi studied his face through the mists as if finding in it something she had loved and had missed for a long, long time. As her voice rose in a chant, she raised her hands in slow gestures. Her, eyes rolled in her head. Drained from the effort of lifting whatever illusion she fought against, she sagged, and he caught her just in time. The fragrance of sandalwood and musk, the salt of her sweat, were the most wholesome things he had smelled for weeks.

The mist dissipated. As the last tendrils vanished, the muffled clangor of harness bells was heard, subdued and strangely echoing, as one of the caravan beasts bearing them appeared in sight.

With a cry that was half oath, half laughter, one of the Romans dropped his hand from his pilum. No sense killing a beast they might need.

The reek of terror and of ancient seabeds evaporated with the mists. Someone caught the wandering pack beast and silenced its bells. In this waste, their release from fear seemed almost obscene.

The beast coughed once and toppled, as if only the sound of its bells had kept it alive that long. With the mists gone, they could indeed see clearly. All along their path, camels and horses were lying as if whatever had shaken the earth had stolen their lives from them.

Near them, all about, were their masters—untidy bundles of travel-worn robes. And all of them were dead too.