Empire of the Eagle

23

Light shone overhead as more and more of the layers of clouds were stripped from the sky. Already the wind was dryer and warmer.

Ssu-ma Chao left the camel he had staked down to walk over to Quintus.

"We are far out of our reckoning," he admitted, the first time any of the Ch'in had done so.

Quintus grasped the Eagle's staff more firmly and nodded. He gestured and Rufus came toward him at a trot as brisk as if the world had not suddenly gaped beneath his feet a short time ago. Draupadi too came to his side. He longed to lay his free arm over her slender shoulders, gaining support from her as he had gained it from the Eagle itself.

Ssu-ma Chao looked out over the desert. "Any storm at all would have destroyed the tracks of other caravans. Let alone this one.... Do you agree? We wait for the sun?"

Sunset would show them the west. Then they could strike due east again, Quintus supposed. The storm had even given them some larger supply of water than they had had. Perhaps they might find a way station that would guide them toward Miran.

Follow the sun? Where was the sun? Light, indeed, shone overhead, but the huge angry disk too bright for anything but an eagle to gaze upon seemed to have been replaced by a glow that spread uniformly over the entire vault of sky.

"Illusion," Draupadi murmured. "They seek to confuse us."

"Lady, they succeed," Ssu-ma Chao said. His eyes held a question.

"Concerted illusion. Several adepts must maintain it. I am only one. I wish it were otherwise," she told him.

"Should we make camp?" It was a bad time to take grim pleasure in the fact that Lucilius's voice still quivered.

"And lie here waiting for whatever-it-is to come eat us?" Forgetting the tribune's higher rank, Rufus cut in. "We had the right of it back in Carrhae. March or die. Keep marching until we die—or we prevail."

Ssu-ma Chao regarded the older Roman with what looked like awe. "We have no such spirit left," he said. "Is it because you have..."he gestured, "... your god back?"

"It is because we are Romans," Quintus replied. "Those two most of all." He nodded respect at the senior centurion and the Eagle itself.

"You said they seek to confuse us," he added to Draupadi. "How can you be sure?"

"Illusion is my art," she reminded him. "And illusion, just as much as truth, comes at a price—a great cost in strength and spirit. And I, thank the Flame, have not the means at my disposal of renewing either as the Black Naacals do. Long ago I took such oaths that I would die first.

"There is great power arrayed against us." She gestured at the light that colored the entire sky and the torn-up horizon. "Now, if they can use that power so that we lose ourselves on the desert, they would count that deed done and well done. Especially now, since they must surely have sensed the use of—" she gestured discreetly at the Eagle, which shone in the false light, "—our weapon here."

"The Eagle? Our standard?" Rufus asked, then looked as apologetic as he ever got.

"You yourself have seen it work. It is the standard of your army, and yet it is also a form of the ultimate weapon that Arjuna, warrior and prince, sought long ago when he fought for his family. It is a mighty weapon for defense or for attack. And they would use it—"

"How, lady?"

Ganesha replied. "They would use it to return things to the way they were. To fill the desolation once more with sea, and to sail over it, uncontested masters of land and water. But I saw the Motherland sink. Those days are gone now, and a new age holds sway. It is for other realms to take up the rule of the world."

He met Rufus's glare firmly. "Yes, I say it, even though I remember those days too. The Black Naacals must be stopped. Found and stopped. Destroyed, if needs be. This is no longer their world."

He paused, as if studying the wreckage of the camp. "Now, if we have the strength."

Quintus met Ssu-ma Chao's eyes. The Ch'in soldier bowed profoundly to Ganesha, even more deeply than he had abased himself before the governor in Kashgar.

"When will you be ready to move out?" the Roman asked him.

"At your command." Ssu-ma Chao bowed again, then shouted the orders that they all knew by now meant break camp, pack, and mount.

None of the Ch'in soldiers moved—not even after a shout from Rufus, followed by a swing from his vinestaff at the nearest laggard, sent the Romans scrambling for their packs. Five of the Ch'in soldiers lay on the ground, oblivious to their discomfort, their knees drawn up against their chins, their eyes squeezed shut. Several more knelt by them. All breathed as if they had run for far too long, and they seemed shrunken in upon themselves by more than hunger.

One of the camels protested being loaded, and a soldier jumped away. Then he collapsed, weeping helplessly, first to his knees, then into a ball of utmost rejection.

Ssu-ma Chao walked over to the man, shouted at him, shook him, and slapped him. His face darkened with anger that was mainly fear, and he drew his sword.

"No!" Draupadi ran forward across ground that Quintus still feared might liquefy or gape open at any moment. Her dirty robe, almost dry now, flared out behind her with a fleeting ghost of her old grace. Men drew aside to let her pass.

With a motion like a wave breaking into a gentle foam as it touches shore, she knelt by the afflicted man, took his face in one hand, and, with the other, peeled up his eyelid. His eyes rolled back in his head.

"His spirit has retreated," she told Ssu-ma Chao. "If we can bear him and his comrades to a place where the light is familiar and the earth does not gape open and ancient dangers do not emerge, he may wake and obey you once more. But you do wrong to kill him for what is not his fault."

The officer glared at her.

"No, you do not lose face," she insisted. All the care she had taken, as long as Quintus had known her, to speak demurely before the Ch'in, to defer, to work through Ganesha, was gone; her voice bore the authority of a sybil.

"He sees visions from his past, and he cannot bear them. Have you not discovered yet that which will break even you? Fortunate man. Let me know when you do, and I shall keep the others from executing you."

Another soldier began to laugh, a high note ending up in a cry of near madness.

"We have to get out of here, or we'll be awash in lunatics," Lucilius muttered.

Well, that much was true.

"No sad words for your comrade?" Quintus gibed, and then was sorry. Bent as he was, the patrician tribune was wary; and they would need his wits too since so many others' wits seemed to have gone wandering.

Quintus studied the Legionaries. Restored to what order they might manage, they assembled in formation. Their eyes were shadowed; they were tired, bruised, and afraid. But they were all, thank the gods, sane.

Their formation looked blessedly normal. He went over to stand before the line in his proper place. The men straightened as he neared them bearing the Eagle; they saluted, fists to chests, as proudly and precisely as if they prepared to enter the newly surrendered capital of a great empire.

Quintus smiled. "Brothers," he spoke very gently, "we have our Eagle and our Legion's honor back." No one moved, but the sun-blackened faces glowed. He struggled for words to express his pride and his desire to reassure these men, then, as his throat closed, for any words at all. He knew his grandsire would have told him not to babble. The memory gave him the words he needed. "Once again, we may call ourselves Romans."

They had always been Romans, but captives, only half themselves, stripped of their Eagle and their pride, marching at other soldiers' commands. Now, once again, even in a strange place, they led. The formation, small as it was, seemed to draw strength from the bronze Eagle.

Quintus made the decision he had been pondering.

"Break ranks," he told them. "I want each of you to aid them—" he gestured to the Ch'in, who had begun to fight their own way back into some semblance of order. "They are our comrades. Help them now as if they bore the Legion's brand."

"They will slow us," Lucilius hissed.

"Ssu-ma Chao held our lives and honor in the palm of his hand," Quintus snapped. "And returned them to us. Shall we betray him too?"

To abandon the men who had marched with them so long—Quintus's outrage mounted until he realized that it was not just his anger, but the memory of that other life in which he had sought a weapon, wooed a princess, and fought a battle against illusions and evil images. Just as he fought now.

For an instant, the ground trembled underfoot again, as if he balanced on the floor of a great chariot, a chariot such as Arjuna had owned and Krishna had driven. He had no such chariot now, but he remembered that battle, . feeling lost, feeling fear and indecision that paralyzed him just as it did the Ch'in soldiers whom he now watched being tied to the groaning packbeasts. As Arjuna, he had known fear and indecision. As Quintus, he would not permit other men to suffer for what he had known.

He had crouched in the center of the battlefield, all eyes upon him. Krishna seemed to have stopped time somehow; and he—Arjuna—knelt at its crux, the hub of the Yuga, or cycle, of this world. Go forward? Go back? Conquer or flee—he had the sense of being transfixed by a hundred fates, all of which clamored, Choose me, choose me! Self-disgust hit him hard. He was Arjuna, and he had less spirit than a dancing master—less spirit than the eunuch he had been. He dared not look. Everyone he loved had assembled. His brothers were at his back. The men he must kill—his enemy, a man who had cherished him like a father, and even the ancient who had taught him the art of war—they were all arrayed against him.

The dancing figure heated against his tunic. All his life, it had been Quintus's talisman; now—with his free hand he reached for it and drew it out. It shimmered under his bleary gaze: trove from a tomb in Latium, image of enigmatic Krishna, dancing in grief and joy, urging him to fare forward.

He rose from his knees, staring at the bronze talisman as it lay reassuringly on his hand. Draupadi was waiting for him. Once again, she waited for him to win the battle she was part cause for.

Unwilling to resign the Eagle to a standard-bearer hand, Quintus mounted, still holding it. Well, he thought, here we are. Wherever here is. Where shall we go? In what direction? "Fare forward," thank you very much, was little aid when the sun lay hidden. For all he knew—and he suspected that the Black Naacals intended this—they could wander in circles until the camels collapsed and they all died.

The bronze standard warmed in his hand. He looked up at the Eagle. The diffused light that was all he could see struck it, picking out the fine details that some craftsman had put into shaping its feathers or the sleek, deadly line of its beak. It was a sign, a weapon—and a guardian of their honor. Would it guide them now?

Light struck the Eagle's head, enveloping the entire standard in a glow that blinded, then moderated. A beam shot from it before him. Taking that as an omen—please all the gods it serve him as a beacon and not a snare—he gestured the soldiers forward.

A horse whinnied in fear. Quintus slowed. Gods only knew what it thought it saw. One man, marching, cried out and looked down at his foot. Rufus gestured the tribune forward. He would see to the soldier; let Quintus lead.

The camel seemed to pad through puddles of water. Its huge feet made sucking sounds as it lifted each one free.

"Illusion," Draupadi repeated. "We are fortunate. Thus far, they have not mustered even more strength."

The desert floor shuddered even as she spoke, and a dune began slowly to collapse. Why that particular dune? If the Black Naacals' plan succeeded, they would distrust their very shadows and, at the end, turn on one another.

What might lie buried in that dune, dead as the sea monster whose bones they had seen—or perhaps horror that was not dead?

Behind him, someone muttered, and Quintus heard the thwack of a vinestaff. Ssu-ma Chao began to protest, then fell silent, as if ashamed of his own reluctance to proceed. If any of them might know this land, it was the Ch'in frontier officer.

"Forward!" Quintus shouted and gestured with the Eagle. The flawed sunlight ran down the shaft and into his eyes. Once again, he felt strong, perhaps even somewhat rested. He could ride for ever, if he must, to achieve his goals.

The light glanced down over his camel. It bawled a protest but lurched forward into the swaying movement that it could keep up for hours upon hours.

They would follow the path of the Eagle. Not even the gods themselves could demand more than that. The caravan gathered what speed it might. The Eagle's presence kept it from feeling as if it fled.