A shout made the Ch'in guardsman's head snap around. With another shout, he lowered his spear. A heavily armed man, accompanied by guards of his own, marched up. With a kind of furious impatience, the leading newcomer knocked away the spear. The wind subsided. Once again, the moon emerged from clouds, red-tinged now.
Arsaces scrambled to his knees and bowed from them, almost as if the Ch'in officer were the King of Kings. Quintus looked at the man: He had seen him before at The Surena's right hand. The enemy. The captor. The man who had taken his Eagle and his weapons. Who was taking him and his men deep into the great trap of Asia, from which they would never emerge.
"He says this ... turtle ... has made a mistake," Arsaces said. His cynical tone was back in place. The officer's Parthian was better than his man's. Quintus could almost understand it. He promised himself that if he were spared, he would learn more.
"Thank him for correcting that thought, will you?" he asked.
"On my head be it," said the Persian and spoke rapidly.
The officer barked laughter.
His man collapsed to his knees and groveled in the coarse sand. When he raised his head, he looked up. Tiny as his eyes were, Quintus could see how they bulged with terror.
"He says he truly knows not what happened, that he just saw enemies...."
The officer kicked at him and swore.
"Orders are that the prisoners from Ta-Chin are not to be harmed. He is reminding this fellow... Wait, he asks why you do not bow."
Rufus snorted. "Like that cringing fool?"
"We are Romans, tell him," Quintus said. "It is not our custom." He remembered how it had all but killed his grandfather even to bow to a patron he came close to respecting: What the old man would have thought of the scrapings and loutings of the East, he had only too good an idea. He had bowed as a client himself. He swore never to fawn like that again even if it cost him his life. Compared with his honor, what was his life? From Carrhae on, it had been like borrowed money—no telling when the loan might be recalled and at what interest rate.
Lucilius might be willing to live that way, had indeed lived that way and thus made his way from Rome to the desert. Quintus hoped he could show rather more courage. The desert wind hissed derisively at him.
"He says he is Ssu-ma Chao. It is," Arsaces added, "a name known to me. A noble name."
So was Lucilius's. Whatever else happened, at least he had seen the young patrician meet a man who was more than his match for arrogance about his rank.
"Tell him, it is not our nature to abase ourselves before mere men," he added.
The officer barked laughter and spoke rapidly.
"He says, 'You have stiff necks, you Romans, as long as your heads still wag on them.' We have not seen this type of courage before. Others, but not this. Thus, he says, and therefore, you fare east with him. You—and the Eagle."
It would have been easy in that moment to rush upon the officer and die. Too easy. Somewhere in this camp were arms and the Eagle. They must try to find them; then, they would show these people what stuff Romans had in them.
His anger and his intention must have shown on his face as Ssu-ma Chao stared into his eyes. Then, in turn, he looked narrowly at each of the Romans, pausing to slap Lucilius on the arm. What agreement had that one made already? Quintus wondered. No doubt it would come out in the worst possible moment.
Ssu-ma Chao still laughed and waved them past, away from the desert and in toward the fires.
It was beneath Quintus's dignity as a Roman and an officer to glance back, but he could listen, and he did. The Ch'in noble's heavy felted boots crunched behind them. And behind him blew the wind. Listen as Quintus might, he no longer heard the hissing and rustling he had heard before. He might have longed for silence. It did not reassure him. He suspected that for the rest of his life, he would listen always for drums and bronze bells—sounds that had meant death since The Surena's horsemen broke the square at Carrhae.
The centurion's presence at Quintus's shoulder, in case he staggered, was welcome. (He vowed he would not stagger.) For once, he was even grateful for Lucilius, who, typically, knew every man of substance in the caravan and had managed, somehow, to identify the newcomers. For once, that subtlety of Lucilius's was helpful as, imperceptibly, he guided the other Romans toward the men who had come in that night from the king of Armenia's court.
It was a mixed troop, as caravans went. By now, even Quintus could distinguish the dark brows and proudly hooked noses of the Armenians from, say, the sleekness of the Persians, or the quicksilver intensity of the pure Hellenes. Others there were whom he could not identify—they were not Ch'in, nor Saka, or even the Hsiung-nu who were accursed as marauders much further east. And yet they looked familiar.... How?
"We may as well move on," Lucilius muttered. "Asking this lot for anything is like prying bad oysters out of their shells."
So these were the merchants who included women in their numbers? That fined-down look might appeal to a patrician: It made him think of ... well, of his grandfather's patrons.
What would he want in a woman? Before his family's lands had been lost, he had dreamed, but of very little beside a country girl, perhaps from one of the nearby families who ranked with his, her thick braids bound in a saffron veil. Saffron ... he remembered saffron and incense from his dreams.
Dark hair flowing like silk or oil down slender shoulders. Deep pools of eyes, watching him intently. Draupadi.
Omens of a woman? Such omens are for women. He could all but hear his grandfather growl that at him. And not for any women associated with their family, the old man would probably have added.
There had to be another reason, a rational explanation for why these traders looked so familiar. Somewhere before this, he must have seen faces like those of the woman he had dreamed—impossible; who would allow a woman that beautiful to travel these roads?—perhaps in caravans in which journeyed men from Hind, or perhaps those dreams he had known while his wits wandered.
Draupadi ... he remembered her as he remembered the genius loci from his farm. The lithe strength of limb, the sidelong glance of eye, the sleekness of hair and sun-darkened skin all reminded Quintus of her. But Draupadi—at least in his dreams—had eyes that almost melted with warmth. These men kept their eyes hooded, except for quick glances upward. Their eyes were dark, true—but flat, as if not fearing those about them as threat or prey. Draupadi's mouth was generous; these merchants' mouths were tight, betraying nothing except a will to snatch and to keep. The resemblance was as cruel a deception as the shimmering glints on a desert horizon that tricked thirsty men into believing they saw water.
As if alerted by Quintus's thoughts, one of the dusky-skinned merchants turned a little in his direction. His glance flicked out, like a spark shooting from charred wood, from beneath lids darkened with kohl. Threat? No threat? Or perhaps, were they sizing up the Romans as lawful prey?
Quintus held himself in check, though that glance made his fingers crook toward the hilt of the missing sword that a captive could not wear. He had seen more sympathetic looks from vipers.
His nostrils twitched. Over his heart came a familiar jabbing. He would have wagered gold he did not own that, if he pulled out the bronze dancing figure he carried there, the torches that it bore would flicker a warning.
Then, the wind blew, and all he smelled was the fire, redolent of dung.
"...So much for Roman pride? That's a better thing to celebrate than the bedding of the bride!" Quintus could not hear precisely who said that. He suspected it might be one of the men whose nation he could not identify.