Empire of the Eagle

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.

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 sky. 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.

His arms swung just as they might have done if he formed part of a column marching down a paved road somewhere in Italy. It was, he thought, much like a galley, its oars beating in unison at the commands of the hortator. But what beat the rhythm here in his mind was not a great drum but the pounding of the blood in temples and heart. Rome had discovered what rhythms would spare mind and heart as long as possible: Pound too long, too fast, or too hard, and the man died.

But not, please all the gods, before he achieved forgetfulness. I am a Roman, his pace said. Left, right; left, right; boots pounding the grit into fine dust. It was all salt here, and he could almost believe in Ganesha's sea stories. Never mind his tales of a sea. You will never see the Middle Sea again. Believe in what lets you march on, he told himself. Left, right.

He was seeking to achieve forgetfulness—but to forget Rome? He had given up family, land, hope of return, even his honor. Now, when he had offered sword to his enemies, must he give up even his patria?

His solution, as Draupadi told him, lay in himself.

But not in Quintus: rather, in the man she named Arjuna, this ancient warrior-prince whose soul, as the wizard priests of Egypt taught, had transmigrated into stubborn Roman flesh. Mule-stubborn. Mule-strong. Left, right; left, right. The sun's hammer clanged down upon his skull—far more drum than he needed.

Forget.

Remember.

The air shimmered. His mind spun. He was Quintus—no, he bore a bow; he had a chariot to drive, and a dancing god to drive him; he was ... a man fell out along the line of march and was packed onto a camel by men too weak to waste their strength on swearing.

The air hurt his chest, and he put his hand up to ease it. His fingers caught as the talisman beneath his garments grew warm again.

Out he drew the tiny image of dancing Krishna, a god old before some artisan who had lived in Italy before his own people made this to be laid in some tomb. How the coins of light had flashed out from it before they flew upward, dazzling man and horse so that the direction finder was lost?

Krishna himself—he had danced with light, mourning and rejoicing with the same movements. Quintus— no, Arjuna—now he remembered that. The god had danced with torches. The one he had been had bent and touched Krishna's feet and asked for the god himself, not his armies. And Krishna had made a pact to drive him.

The one he had been possessed a great weapon. He had sat in a ring of fire to trap power. Now, trapped in another life, he remembered the ultimate weapon he had thus won. But what had it been? That he could not remember, not if he marched until the bones of his feet rubbed away into powder as white as the salt flats on which he stood.

It was net power that he had to seek. It was life. He had sought life before, at the ruin by the pool.

Ah yes. His feet moved now without direct control of his body. He was on the right track. Think of a pool. Think of a river. Draupadi's retreat; his river valley. So far away now—but there had been a tale once, a tale he had heard once under an outcropping of the Roof of the World, where men had huddled together: that in the heart of the desert, found only by men at the extremity of need, there bubbled a spring of clear, pure water. But where it was, no man could say for certain.

An oasis, such as they had in Egypt or Judaea or Syria, perhaps? Or was it something more.

They were lost. They could not be more lost or more desperate. All was failing. Perhaps...?

He had heard of such places, so sacred that animals who were each other's mortal enemies might crouch beside each other and fill their throats with pure water, rather than one another's life blood.

Did that water truce apply to Black Naacals as well? Somehow Quintus doubted that. No, that was not his thought; that had to have been the thought of Arjuna ... he was far from the discipline he had learned at home. Left, right; left, right.

He was not aware that he had quickened his pace, that gradually he outstripped the other Romans, and was drawing even with the Ch'in. Some still rode, masking mouths and noses against the dust. Some were slung across their saddles. Some marched poorly.

Does the Eagle know? Will it see us? It must. Arjuna's thinking again, perhaps? But one didn't have to be a warrior prince, but just a farm lad to know that birds always knew where there was water. A pity there were no birds in the Takla Makan.

Now he pulled level with the Ch'in soldiers. Ssu-ma Chao, judging the temper of some of his allies, had guards posted to prevent someone from killing Wang Tou-fan.

A pack camel stumbled, then stood swaying. Then, it collapsed; the men and beasts behind it swerved just in time to keep from walking into it.

Quintus too halted. It took an act of genuine will to keep himself out of the line of march.

Up ahead, Ssu-ma Chao signaled orders to unload the dead beast's packs. Odd. Why not leave them where they lay? It hardly seemed as if they could use its burden themselves. Then Quintus's bleary eyes flamed.

The beast had borne the Eagle. Even as he watched, Wang Tou-fan and Ssu-ma Chao came forward. Both men jockeyed for position, worn as they were. Finally, with two or three imperious words and gestures, Wang Tou-fan won the skirmish. He was in command of this. He was. No one else. And he reinforced that by a hand on his sword, waving away even Lucilius, who eyed the Eagle with some of the same longing that the other Romans—those who had stayed faithful—displayed.

There was no point, good common sense told Quintus, in edging forward. He would not get even so much of a glimpse of the Eagle, and his presence might just make a bad situation worse. Still, he found himself heading toward the standard, his feet kicking up clouds of fine grit. It rose, coating him. When he licked his lips, he tasted salt; and he had not had so much water that his body could sweat that much.

As Quintus reached the dead camel, Wang Tou-fan had laid a hand upon the Eagle. He himself, he declared in words Quintus could not understand—and gestures that he could—would strap the prize to his own pack-saddle.

Quintus gestured to Ganesha. Interpret. Please.

"Well enough," Quintus said, Ganesha repeating his words in the language of Ch'in. "Why not take it out and set it up? Let it shine over the place where we lie down to die."

The man glared at Quintus. "You are leading us to death," the Roman spoke, finding words somewhere. "To die is nothing to us. We all owe Rome a death: time we were paying it. But you—have you not a life and a future?"

Lucilius's head came up, sensing a bargain.

"You do not order this one," Wang Tou-fan said through the interpreter.

"No," said Quintus. "But what about them?" Suddenly, he remembered how, in another life, his brother the king had wagered all and lost all. Having nothing, though, he had nothing to lose. Except his life; and he had reckoned that as a dead loss for years.

"Perhaps you can lead," he conceded. "But can you endure? We can teach you that. And they—perhaps they can guide you."

"And what would you demand for this service?" Too wise, despite Ganesha's earlier attempt to soften the sting of Wang Tou-fan's lies.

"The Eagle," Quintus said bluntly. "Then, if we die, we die in possession of our standard." He shrugged. "You may yet outlast us, and then it would be your possession once more." Much against his better judgment, he glared at Lucilius. "As it is now."

The patrician glared in return but said nothing.

"Well?" Bluff. Pretend you are in a position of strength. It hardly seemed, he realized, like the Roman Quintus, sober, dull, who was about to gamble with life and honor both. He warned himself not to look weak. For the strong do as they will, while the weak suffer what they must. He had been weak for too long.

"And," he added craftily, "a garrison may come and put paid to our agreement after all. What have you to lose?"

Ssu-ma Chao turned away, as if expressing—what? Laughter? Gods, he had spirit. He should have been a Roman.

There was one problem, Quintus thought. If Ssu-ma Chao assented, he would be on the cross before he clasped arms with him like a brother.

"Have you any idea of where we are?"

Help me, Quintus wished of Ganesha and Draupadi with all his might.

"Before the stars changed," Ganesha said promptly, "all this basin was a great Inland Sea. I have seen the charts. In it were islands at which ships might land and..."he allowed himself to look wistful. "They had springs of sweet water, trees bearing fruit. They cannot all have perished wholly; for they were at the very heart of the sea. We might well find water at such a place. But we would need to go into the very bowels of the desert. Have you the courage for it?"

"Say we reach this water. What then?"

"We will have the strength," Quintus said, "to try again for Miran. Or send out a fast scouting party—as we should have done." Had you been a true officer instead of a wastrel and a traitor. He fixed his eyes on Lucilius, willing the patrician tribune to shift his loyalties.

"We have no better choice." Lucilius forced the words out as if under torture. As perhaps he was: He suffered more from the heat than some of the others.

Wang Tou-fan stood irresolute. Clearly, he was afraid; clearly he was thinking rapidly as threat, fear, and exhaustion worked in him. Cunning flashed across his features. Try again. Betray the men who helped you. All of them, especially that stiff-necked oaf who rules an outpost and gives himself the airs of the Son of Heaven. It might not even be necessary to share with the traitor—after all, are they not all barbarians, and the men of the western deserts only slightly better?

"Done!" he said, forgetting nobility and sounding like one of the merchants who had predicted nothing but destruction for this caravan.

Trying not to let his hands shake with eagerness; Quintus nodded gravely, and held out his arms to receive the Eagle.

And, although the sky looked as if not enough water to form even the tiniest of clouds had ever touched it, thunder rumbled and lightning danced across the horizon.