Nor did the stories that the camel drivers told in gleeful singsong around the fire, with sidelong looks to make certain that the strangers, the Romans, were sufficiently horrified as Arsaces translated them: storms bad enough to flense skin off bone and suck the water from a man's body, leaving it a husk as if the embalmers of Egypt had been at it; the demons of the waste that gibbered at noon or whenever a man was too tired to turn a deaf ear to them; the treacherous sands that could engulf a town as easily as a man, then spit it up the way the Maelstrom with one contemptuous swirl could hurl the shattered remnants of a ship onto shore.
Best come down to earth now, before the whispers started that he had sold his loyalty to the Ch'in.
Beware.
The gentle voice touched his mind as soothingly as oil on a parched skin. One last look, then.
What was that on the horizon? Not a cloud, surely. You needed moisture for clouds, and there was, all the gods knew, no moisture in this wilderness.
His temples throbbed as if the air itself squeezed at them. Not all clouds held rain, he remembered.
Balancing skillfully, he climbed down the tower, dismounted, and bowed to Ssu-ma Chao, where he rode nearby. Those memories, or fantasies of his were worth something. Of all the Romans, he was the most skilled with the Ch'in chariots. "... Easy enough when you remember that he rode in a farmer's wagon if his family had any oxen that weren't confiscated for debt...." He had heard Lucilius whisper spitefully.
Quintus shook the grit out of his clothing and armor. As bad as swamp bugs, the grit was. If you didn't watch, grit might give you bleeding sores that stuck to clothes and never healed.
"Well, did you see anything?" Quickly Lucilius asserted his right to demand information.
"Cloud from the east," the tribune said. "I don't like the looks of it."
He used precious energy to jog forward to where Ssu-ma Chao rode. Behind him, the predictable murmurs started. Jupiter Optimus Maximus, he knew you could engrave what he knew about deserts on the pommel of his sword and still have room to list what else he didn't know. But he had lived on the land too long not to know when the weather was changing, and he had heard too many fireside terrors not to respect desert storms.
He didn't need to feel the way the air pressured his temples to know that weather threatened any more than a farmer or a sailor did. Interesting ... the glare winking up from the sand seemed slightly less harsh, as if the sunlight were somehow diminished. He signaled the Ch'in leaders and pushed forward with a burst of wasteful speed. He was sweating, but the sweat dried as rapidly as it formed, forming a white, salty powder on his skin.
Hmmm... that was curious. The sand... beneath the endless yellowish-gray grit and pebbles, he saw patches of white. Quickly, he bent. Scooping up a pinch of it, he brought it to nose arid lips. Salty. He glanced out. Now that he looked, he could see the desert as flatness interrupted by huge dunes, each one of them like an immense tide.
He had heard that in Judaea there did exist a sea so filled with salt that a man could lie in it and never sink. Easy to believe that such a sea had once existed here and had dried totally. Easy to believe? Nothing was easy here.
But imagine it—water, sluicing down from the mountains like the Flood Jupiter had once sent, filling this desert like a basin, sinking all that was in it, letting the earth roil until all was buried as deep as Atlantis. Once he had spoken of this—no more, surely, than a fireside fancy and Lucilius had arched a pale eyebrow in derision that a bumpkin had read Plato.
Shouts broke his musings.
"Buran! Kuraburan!"
Buran, he knew, meant storm. And kuraburan—black storm? Demon storm? All of the now-vanished tribunes who had been Lucilius's companions had been pleased to dismiss them as tales told to scare newcomers to this barbarian land.
All along the line of march, camels were moaning, lowering their heads to the sand, dropping ponderously to their ungainly knees. Horsemen galloped the length of the caravans. Carts ground to a stop. From carpets and from gaudy woven bags (now much dimmed with the sand), men pulled swathings of thick flannel the color of the desert itself.
Arsaces tossed a wad of felt at Quintus. It tumbled out of his arms to his feet.
"There's a storm coming up. The camels always know. Wrap up! This sand could carve the flesh from your bones."
Ssu-ma Chao rode toward him. Already he was muffled in the heavy fabric until only his eyes showed. They were bright, alert as if he sensed danger.
"Bandits strike under cover of these storms," he said. "Will your men fight with mine?"
He barely needed Arsaces's translations now. In the weeks of march past Merv, the caravan had evolved its own tongue—part Parthian, part Persian, and, inevitably, even part Latin and Ch'in. And in all of them, everyone knew the words for "bandits" and "storms."
"We will justify your faith in us," he declared. "Rufus!"
The centurion came on the double, gesturing for the maniples to form up.
"This one's officers will show you where to take your stations." Already, some of them were drawing weapons—the huge, cumbersome swords and wicked long spears of the Ch'in soldier. Were they for defense against the bandits—Saka, Yueh-chih, or Parthians—whom the desert might cast up against them, or against the Romans themselves?
A camel groaned, horses screamed, and a soldier who should have had better control yelped in surprise as the gritty sand whipped up to sting at unexposed flesh.
"Keep your heads down. You've seen sandstorms before!" Rufus shouted, then was interrupted by coughing.
The sky turned an evil yellow-gray. Then the air seemed to congeal and whirl about them, and the full fury of the storm struck.
Quintus sank his head on his breast. He had to see— he had to, yet some bits of the flying sand could have put out an eye. He felt as if he stood lost in a fog, but a fog that bit shrewdly, burrowing into every fold of the felt that stifled and protected him. A drop of sweat ran down his forehead, blissfully cool in the instant before it dried, leaving an itching salt trail. He was very thirsty.
Dis have mercy, if the grit got into the waterskins, they were all doomed! Someone ought to check....
A hand pulled him down again. "In storms like these, you can wander ten paces from your camp and never be found again!" His companion, no, his rescuer, writhed lips about the words so their shape would convince him, for he could hear nothing but the roaring of the storm.
He would have to wait it out. He had waited out storms before.
Gradually, his ears grew accustomed to the storm— the howl of each new gust, the shriek of a particularly rapid one, the crack as something they would probably need later broke under pressure, and the whine of sand and gravel that sped by like arrows. He had never been as thirsty, not even in the square at Carrhae, and no sun shone here, in the belly of the storm.
Quintus stiffened. Other sounds began to pierce the storm's rage: giggles and whispers and threats. Come out, come out before the grit buries you. Come, here is sweet water, here are grapes, here is rest. Lie down and take your ease. He risked raising his head long enough to see one or two of his men shake their heads, then duck them back down against their chests. Hard-headed, Rome's mules: If it didn't present itself before their faces, the Legionaries would dismiss it. He knew his grandfather would have.
You will go mad out here, you know. The sun will bake your brains, and you will babble until they knock you on the head in pity. You never really thought you wire fit, did you? All these years, hiding it... you're weak, and you're going to lead these men to their deaths in a savage land....