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.