Empire of the Eagle

5

His helmet had fallen across his eyes: He was blind, and he was down. Hands pinned Quintus to the ground. Better to die than be taken prisoner by Parthians! He struggled wildly, but in silence. He was no match for the man he fought.

"Dis take you, man, what do you think I'm doing?" came a harsh voice. "Help me hold him. I don't want to put him out again. He might never wake up. Sir, sir, will you stop it! You're among friends!"

The big hands tightened on Quintus's shoulders, shaking him until his ears rung and he lost the will to struggle. He sank back, panting against the rough comfort of rolled cloaks. Raising one hand to his head, he brought it away damp, and a cloth fell to his lap.

Surrounding him, looking more like cutpurses than Legionaries, was a circle of soldiers. It was Rufus, the senior centurion, who had subdued him. There was a bruise starting near his mouth.

Quintus flung up a hand, as if he had taken a telling blow in training.

"Ah! that's better now."

Grins flashed, as if the Legionaries really cared that their tribune had waked. That surprised him. He had heard mutterings about some of the young officers— Lucilius, for example—being arrogant know-nothings, more trouble than they were worth to honest soldiers. He had heard muttering about him, that he had about as much life as a deathmask and couldn't take a joke if he found it in his pack.

But his men were relieved that he had wakened. Quintus found himself almost teary-eyed at that thought. He couldn't let them see it, so he forced himself to look around, as if inspecting them.

Squatting a little behind them was Arsaces, the Persian, his eyes and teeth flashing in the light of a tiny fire. Quintus squinted at it, then sniffed, remembering the sandalwood and frankincense of Draupadi's incense.

No such luck. Surrounding him were the smells not of a Roman force correctly dug in for the night, but of the confusion that passed among the easterners for camps: dung, smoke, sweat, and beasts. The fire hurt his eyes. Looking away Quintus saw the bulk of camels out beyond the tents and bedrolls of ... was this a caravan?

Where were they? It felt strange, almost naked, to lie around a fire like a boy, camping out on the hillside, rather than in the orderly security of a proper castra.

Everything had changed. He looked up into the sky, searching for some sort of permanence—Orion hunting his Bear, perhaps. Here in the deep desert, the stars too looked different. Orion might still hunt somewhere, for all Quintus knew, but the stars were not the familiar twinkles of Tiber valley, blurred by the mists from the water or even the aloof gleams of the sky above the drylands of Syria. Above this land, enormous fires burned in the clear blackness. Daunted, his gaze slipped to the crest of a hill. The night wind blew, and pale swirls rose from the crest, dancing down the ridge like dust from the coils of a huge serpent. Was this the deep desert? He had thought Syria had been barren. He had never imagined such desolation. And he feared worse was to come.

But there was another question he must ask first.

"The men?" he whispered. "Our Eagle?"

Rufus brought a fist down slowly onto the blankets in which Quintus was wrapped.

"You saw the proconsul." The senior centurion didn't ask a question, but stated fact.

They all bent their heads, nodded. No point in asking about the Eagle, then, and making Rufus drag it out of the silences in which he buried dishonor.

"Died like a Roman, at the last. He got his honor back. Protecting the Eagles. That was when you fell. Trying to guard him.

"Aren't many of us left. We started out with—what? Some twenty-eight thousand of us and four thousand cavalry? Maybe ten thousand made it out. Most of them—they're sending them on to Merv along with the standards."

Yes. Quintus remembered. The Eagles would tarnish on the altars of whatever gods the Parthians worshipped.

The young man gestured vaguely. He didn't see ten thousand captive Romans, much less hear them or smell the wounds or sickness that must inevitably accompany so great a throng of prisoners. He thought he remembered.... He dropped his hand to his waist. No belt. His fingers groped at his side for the weapons he had been trained to keep ready to hand. Nothing.

He should have expected that.

Seeing him search for weapons, Rufus went expressionless. It was worse than rage.

"They disarmed us, of course. Not that they think they need to worry. Just leave troublemakers and mutineers behind, and the desert will even save you the trouble of a burial party."

"How long have I been out?" Quintus whispered it because he was afraid to ask. He held up a hand and was surprised at how it trembled—and that it did not hold the marks of great age.

"Long enough."

It was not an answer.

"Why didn't they...?"

Rufus looked grim. "We have lost enough Romans. We convinced these..."

Quintus stared at the centurion till the older man looked away. "We carried you ourselves. We tended you ourselves."

"And they let you?"

"Drink this—no, slowly if you want to keep it down. Don't spill any."

The watered vinegar stung in his throat on the way down and brought tears to eyes made sore by the desert heat. Yet it tasted sweeter than the Lethe-water he had refused to accept from the treacherous creature who had posed as his own genius loci.

He felt strong enough to press the matter.

"They let you?" he repeated. "I want an answer, Centurion."

"We were granted that much grace," said Rufus. "I ... convinced them." The Roman's powerful hand clasped and unclasped on the skin canteen he held.

Quintus glanced around the circle of Romans. They looked down. He must have begged. It would be poor thanks for his life to press the issue. Glancing up at the huge stars, he sought to change the subject.

"Is this the deep desert?" He had to ask it.

"This trifle of sand and stone? Hardly. The Ch'in tell me that we'll be climbing into mountains that make the Alps look like meadows," Lucilius's light, cultivated voice came from across the tiny fire, like a surgeon's fingers searching out a wound. "Then, the desert gets really bad. Like the stories of Trachonitis. Didn't you ever learn about that from your tutors?"

Quintus could all but see the young patrician's eyebrow arch up in disdain. However, they were now heading into a land where patrician, equestrian, and plebeian, or even officer and soldier, made less difference than the distinction between Roman and outsider—or between quick and dead. Even so, Lucilius couldn't let go of his ingrained superiority.

Maybe it's all he has. That voice in Quintus's ears again. Was it the woman—Draupadi—he had dreamed of, or had he actually gained some wisdom in that nightmare vision of Hades?

"No? Where did you grow ... well, not to make a short story longer than need be, Trachonitis is serpent and basilisk country. They say it is so bare that if the shadow of a bird falls across it, the bird falls dead.

"We owe you, though, Quintus. If it weren't for those very convincing fits you threw, we'd have stopped in Merv. Forever."

"With ... the others?" He was glad for the darkness, which hid his blush at how hard it was to ask. "What happened to..."

Rufus hung his head. "Slaves, gods help them. Leastways, they've got skills, maybe they can buy themselves out...."

"If these barbarians follow decent laws," Lucilius cut in.

"They've got the Eagles too. All but the one you almost got brained with. That's the personal property of this Ssu-ma Chao, who wants to take it back with him to Ch'in to his Emperor. And us with it. He's decided we're auspicious for him, or some such thing. Strange fellows, these yellow barbarians, thinking defeated Romans a good omen. But it's not for me to turn down a chance of not putting my head under the yoke.

"So we're making the trip Alexander didn't live long enough to complete. From Nisibis past Merv, upcountry to Marakanda and into the hills. Then down into the real desert that would have fried any Macedonian born. Dis take me, how do they pronounce these names?"

"Takla Makan Shamo," Arsaces said. For once the mockery, an unwelcome twin to Lucilius's scorn, was missing from his voice. That shook Quintus worse than a warning.

"It means, 'If you go in here, you don't come out.' I have seen this desert. When I was young, I ventured across some small corner of it as a caravan guard. It is terrible, littered with the bleached bones of man, beast, and town. Truly, they also call it the Realm of Fire, but this fire is far from sacred."

He watched the Romans with a mischief that had just better not turn to malice. "I would not swear this or take haoma to prove its truth, but this I will tell you." He glanced about, as if searching for eavesdroppers. "Some say the desert is full of demons."

Did the eavesdroppers for whom he sought have bodies at all? Arsaces gestured, a warding-off sign Quintus had seen before, though not from the usually skeptical Persian.

"Desert's bad enough without you filling it with demons, man," Rufus growled. His fingers went to his throat though he wore no amulet.

So. Disregarding Arsaces's gabble about demons and bleached bones, Quintus looked out at the desert. If he judged by the number of riding animals alone, this was a smaller, faster caravan with which Quintus and the survivors closest to him rode. Traveling faster than the survivors of Crassus's Legions, but by far on a longer journey.

He would never see his farm again.

He had not expected to. But then, he had not expected to live this long, either. Quintus glanced out beyond the flicker of tiny fires, the kneeling bulks of camels, into the desert. The night wind, cooling now, sent swirls of sand dancing up the dunes. In the firelight, the sand looked saffron, the color of a veil that a lady—or a spirit—might wear.

Far overhead, a star shot down through the heavens toward the eastern horizon. Quintus might have been a boy again, walking in the hills with his father or grandfather. Involuntarily, he smiled. His jaws ached, unfamiliar as the exercise was to them. It had fallen to the right: a favorable omen, thank all the gods.

He stared across the fire at the men who had kept by his side the most closely: Rufus, Arsaces, even Lucilius, and beyond them, other survivors of his Legion. Already, many had wrapped their heads in cloth, a trick borrowed from the caravan routes. Their eyes and teeth—almost all he could see for the swathings of coarse cloth—gleamed red in the firelight as they watched. He could see it now: If they wished to live, they would take on the ways of the desert until they ceased to look like Romans. Gradually, they would cease to be Romans, too. And then what would they be?

Subject people? People without a City or a name? You could not un-name Romans; you could only kill them. His father had died for that truth.

Best not think of it. He was alive. These were his men. They needed each other.

The wind danced down from the dunes he had mistaken for hills. So, he would never see his farm again, never buy it back and purify its altars. But what would he see? A new excitement flashed across his consciousness like the shooting star of a few instants back. It had looked like an eagle, returning in victory to its lofty nest.

Only imagine. He would see Marakanda, he thought. Who would have dreamed his path would cross Alexander's? For a moment, joy blazed up in him. He suppressed it. It was unworthy, he told himself, to feel anticipation in the face of disgrace and defeat.

"Make no doubt about it," Lucilius said. "We're slaves too. Not fancy ones, the sort you show off at banquets. Gladiators, maybe." He spoke as though he hated Quintus for smiling even briefly and all of them for continuing to exist.

He got up and wandered from the small fire.

Gladiators. Crassus, who had wreaked such vengeance when the gladiators revolted, had failed miserably against barbarians; Lucilius was never going to forget it. No wonder he didn't seem as burdened by the loss of weapons as the rest of the veterans.

"Who needs a gladius when he's got a tongue like that?" Rufus asked. His mouth worked as if he wanted to spit, but he forebore, as if oppressed by the dryness all around him.

In the darkness, a darker bulk rose. They could see a campfire shine as this new man moved away from it. The silhouette of helmet, padded armor, and spear was unfamiliar. By that, Quintus assumed the man must be a warrior of Ch'in, who had been watching his Roman captives. Lucilius pointed at the fire, then at a larger fire at the center of the camp. The man nodded. "No doubt he's already started bargaining with the Ch'in," Quintus murmured to the centurion. Rufus nodded, not bothering to look shocked as he might have done when they were all still an army and the distinction between patrician/officer and everyone else was still good for some power.

"At least he's won us the partial freedom of the camp, sir. The Ch'in figure, if they guard the water, the desert will guard us."

Quintus chuckled. "I won't give them a fight about that. They know this land."

"And I think they're curious about what we'll do. The tribune says they have all sorts of notions about us. The merchants?" he shrugged. "A couple of them have women along."

Quintus tensed.

"That Lucilius tried. Didn't get anywhere, but you had to expect him to try."

Their eyes met. Every Legion had one—at least. A man who was an accomplished scrounger. Or who could talk his way out of any punishment. Or help his friends get round the centurion or the tribunes. Perhaps that was one reason why Lucilius had approached the female merchants. Odd concept, that. Foolishness, perhaps, to think they might be softer-hearted.

Usually, the Legion scrounger was not a patrician. But then, he usually scrounged for wood or leather straps or food or wine. Not for political favor, like a client.

But all the Romans who survived here had been bred in a Rome shadowed by the terrors of Marius and Sulla. And Lucilius had sucked up politics with the mists of the Tiber. If Fortune favored them, he would protect their interests as well as his own. If not... Quintus shrugged. Long-disused muscles protested. If not, how much worse could things get?

An uproar brought their heads up. Bells clanged from harness as a small camel caravan approached the pass. Camels groaned, a rebellious clamor that sounded echoes as camels already unloaded for the night remembered their own grievances. Voices shouted in at least three languages.

"Others approach from Nisibis," Arsaces said. "It is best to travel with friends."

The auxiliary's head came up. "They drive their beasts hard," he commented. "Too hard. Unwise..."

"Friends?" Rufus half rounded on the Persian.

"Compared with the desert, all honest men," he paused, with conscious irony, on the word, "are friends. Of course, there are also the bandits. Thus, honest..." again that pause, "... caravans join together for the journey east."

Quintus could understand it. The Ch'in, with their well-armed troops, would stand a good chance of surviving anything but an attack by an army—and no huge army (such as the doomed Legions of which he had been such a guileless and reluctant part) could safely cross. Just the supplies of water and food for man and beast would require a caravan of their own. Thus, a small, well-equipped military party, their small entourage of captive Romans, and...

"Who comes?" Quintus asked.

"Some merchant or other," Rufus muttered. "Armed. I saw spears, guards."

"Nisibis is one of the staging points for the road east." Arsaces's voice took on a chanting overtone. "From Nisibis to Boukhara, Boukhara to Marakanda, to Ferghana of the blood-sweating steeds ... into the hills and down from the high pass to Kashgar, before we venture across the Anvil of Fire...."

"If this were a merchant caravan, we would wait... oh, a long, long time, excellent sirs, until all who wanted to cross had assembled. And then, we would depart. It can be a long time until the next caravan ... especially in the high summer."

A roar, of laughter and surprise mixed, came from the central fire. The shouts reminded Quintus of the fight in The Surena's camp. He grabbed again for the sword he no longer owned. No weapons at all, let alone the miracle weapons that Draupadi had promised could be—might be—found in the desert.

Damn! Had she been only a fever dream?

A crunch of the grit that passed for sand in this godforsaken wilderness brought him around, his head and heart pounding.

"Stop there ... hold it, it's the tribune!"

Lucilius broke back into the firelit circle. Even in the play of firelight and darkness, his face was red, and his breathing came too rapidly.

All around the fire, the surviving Romans leapt up. Arsaces glanced beyond, out at the beasts where they were staked out—and guarded—then set himself to listen.

"You saw that caravan come in," Lucilius said. "You saw how fast it was moving. Well, I found out why."

Long ago, Quintus had found out that when the patrician "found out" anything, he kept it to himself unless he could trade it for greater benefit.

What does he want this time?

"It came here from Artaxata," he went on. "From the court of Artavasdos in Armenia."

Arsaces whistled. "How many of their beasts did they kill?" he muttered to himself. "What news from the wedding?"

The Romans stared at the slight, dark auxiliary, who laughed softly at them. "Oh, aye, there was sure to be a wedding. As soon as Artavasdos and the ... most worthy proconsul parted company, those of us born in this land knew there would be a new alliance."

"As long as Rome was strong, Artavasdos, like a dockside..."

Quintus raised a hand, cutting off Lucilius as his voice rose in a kind of vicious anger. Gravitas was a virtue, one—of many—that Lucilius lost sight of all too frequently. And if he lost control now, how could they expect the men he—or someone—must command to keep it? They would become a rabble of slaves, not veterans who had managed to survive. And they would die in the desert, names and souls as lost as their bodies.

"You heard the tribune," Rufus growled.

Quintus flicked a glance at Lucilius. Like a bowstring stressed near to snapping, he was no good for his proper job until the tension was removed. Well enough, he thought. The men will need time to think of me as their leader.

The idea was presumptuous, impossible, probably even treasonous, but who remained to say so? Crassus, who nailed traitors to crosses, was dead, and Quintus had all but died in trying to defend him. He did not want command, any more than he had wanted to take the Legions' brand or leave his farm or lose his father. What decisions he had made before, he had made to survive. Quite simply, he trusted his judgment before he trusted Lucilius's—and he trusted Rufus's judgment before he trusted his own. If Rufus had decided to follow him—a case of the strong serving the weak, if ever was—he must assume that the wily old man would get him through this, too.

"Armenia could choose its allies. The King of Kings, for so they style themselves in Armenia, chose Rome." Even muffled by wrappings, Arsaces's voice held all the scorn of the Persian for an upstart king.

"Once the most excellent proconsul decided to travel directly across Syria, rather than the safer upland route, Artavasdos realized that he had chosen wrong."

Again the muttering. Lucilius had concurred with that decision to cross Syria, Quintus recalled. When he himself had expressed doubt, he had gotten the lash of the other man's tongue. He said as much, and was gratified to hear a murmur of approval run round the Romans' fire.

"Will you let me speak?" Arsaces demanded. "The King of Kings Artavasdos has a sister. And the King of Parthia, Orodes, has a son, Pacorus. Not always the most faithful man, Prince Pacorus, but I would swear by the Light that Orodes would prefer him as his heir to, say, The Surena. Would not you?"

Lucilius made a warding-off gesture.

"We should have known that this one would pick up all the scandal, working with the grooms," Rufus said. He lumbered to his feet, holding out a hand to Quintus.

Quintus looked at Arsaces, then at the noble. "Is that the entire story?" he asked.

To his shock, Lucilius hung his head. Shame—on him? "Come," he said. "Hear it. I would tell you, but my tongue would wither in my mouth."

Quintus braced himself and took the centurion's hand up. Once on his feet, he found himself able to walk, however slowly.

"It is beautiful, Artaxata, with its ramparts overlooking the Araxes, which flows swiftly, even in the summer. And Artavasdos is a man of some culture, even if he is not Persian."

Rufus snorted. "Don't play off your airs, horseman. You're a plain soldier like the rest of..."

"Artavasdos knows Greek," Lucilius said. "Knows it well enough to write in it. He wrote an ode, they're saying down at the fire. They sang it at the wedding."

"You can translate it for us, if you will," Quintus said. A neat touch that, turning patrician and officer into mere interpreter. Nothing wrong with his head, even if he had been struck on it by the Eagle. (Best not think of that. Best not think of their Eagle, captured and packed away, perhaps along with the arms they had been relieved of.) Instead, salve the wound to Lucilius's pride. "Your Greek has always been much better than mine."

Which was close to nonexistent, but don't let on about that.

They walked toward the center of the camp. Quintus's eyes were still quite sensitive from the blow; he found himself able to see quite well in the darkness. One or two of the men scuffled their feet.

"Do you fear serpents, that you walk so clumsily, you who pride yourselves on always marching?" Arsaces jibed. "Now, if you wore proper..."

A hiss silenced him, though it came from man, not serpent.

The shouts of the camp grew louder as the firelight brightened. Quintus found himself struggling to set each foot down without testing his footing: Lucilius's nightmare recollection of Trachonitis reminded him that he had strayed far from the lands most Romans knew into lands such as only men like Xenophon or Alexander had seen. You would probably die in them; but the last thing you might see was a creature out of legend, as it reared up out of the sand or plunged from the sky to kill you.

What rose up to block their way, though, was no monster out of the desert, but two long, very deadly spears held by two very determined Ch'in warriors.

The warrior shouted. The moment it took to understand the guard's disastrously accented Parthian was almost their last.

A Ch'in guard's spear pricked at Quintus's throat.