No sand stung his face. He put up a hand. No grit, flying by, cut into it. The only sand, in fact, that he saw formed the walls of the passage that engulfed them. Outside, the triumphant screams of the Yueh-chih died. How long before they realized they had been balked of their prey?
Go while you can.
He gestured and shouted, his order seconded from among the clutter of carts along the battered line of march, and what beasts still survived.
The carts creaked. The beasts moaned resentment at having to move directly into what they must surely fear as wind and pain. Whips cracked; the bells on the harnesses of horses and camels rang; and the remnants of the caravan lurched forward.
"To the cross with it! I can't see a damned thing!"
Lucilius's voice, from high overhead. By all the gods, the shifty bastard had gotten Ssu-ma Chao's chariot moving, had climbed its tower, and was getting a free ride.
If you laugh now, you won't be able to stop. Rufus will punch you out, and they'll load you on the wagons. And what will you do then?
A high giggle broke through, but he suppressed the gales of laughter that would have unmanned him.
They plowed onward through the sand. They had been marching for hours. They had never done anything else but march. Their service in the Legions before Syria, the destruction of their fellows at Carrhae and their proconsul, their betrayal, their enslavement—all that seemed far away. The world had narrowed—from the desert to this corridor of still air in the midst of the worst storm Quintus had ever dreamed of.
Was he dreaming of this? Dreaming men did not thirst or hunger as he did: He was sure of that.
He marched, the ground-eating steady Legions' pace. After awhile, Rufus barked the first words of a marching song. His cracked voice made a horrible hash of the tune, but he sang it through to the end, and some of the men echoed him. Damn, was a hobnail working through Quintus's boot into his foot? It felt that way.
Equally barbarous to the ear was the babble of chants and frantic prayers to what had to be at least three separate barbarian pantheons. At a signal from Ssu-ma Chao, Ch'in soldiers fell back, lest the merchants panic and try to break away, perhaps through the wall, thus betraying all of them to the Yueh-chih.
That was prudent. But Quintus thought it was misplaced precaution. Already they had marched for hours and come—how far? Farther than could be guessed in that time, he imagined... and he felt as worn as if he had marched for a full day at a cavalry pace again.
Nearby, Ssu-ma Chao's huge chariot rattled and creaked. Long ago, the senior officer had abandoned it, to walk or ride alongside his men. Lucilius, though, remained in its tower. For what advantage his presence as a lookout might provide, Quintus forebore to protest.
"Do you see anything now?" From time to time, he would call up to Lucilius. The answers grew lurid, then puzzled. Then Lucilius fell silent.
Arsaces joined Quintus as he marched. He led a horse, he who never willingly walked when he could ride. He paused, and Quintus, perforce, had to pause also. "The horses are tiring. If we don't rest them, they'll drop where they are."
"When you know where we are, we can rest," Quintus snapped. He was sorry he had stopped. The brief pause had freed his body from a merciful numbness in which leaden arms and legs performed their duty. Now his back was afire from the weight of his kit, and his limbs prickled as if he had been staked out on an anthill.
Arsaces's bloodshot eyes would have flashed with anger if he had had the strength.
"Some deva has us in his hand," he muttered. "May he set us down soon."
The march dragged out. No one bothered now to question or to speak. They were all too weary. Bona dea, Quintus longed for sunlight, for water, even for a chance to drop to the sand and sleep.
Come. This way.
He shouted, wordlessly. All along the line of march, people cried out in surprise and spurred camels and horses to new effort. Their last effort, Quintus felt certain.
This had better be quick, he told ... whatever. Who do I think I'm talking to? We are all dreaming, and soon we are all going to be dead, wandering in the desert after a storm and a battle.
"Ho!"
Lucilius's voice, arching up, and cracking as he called out.
"What... you see?" Rufus grunted, not waiting for a tribune to ask.
"Up ahead," he called. "The clouds are breaking up!" His voice cracked once again, this time not from thirst. "By the breasts of Venus, I can see the sun!"
9
"Faster," Ssu-ma Chao muttered. His chariot rumbled forward, the tower to which Lucilius climbed creaking as the wheels bumped over the rock-strewn sand. "The sun...."
The Ch'in soldiers urged men and beasts to greater efforts. A packhorse tried to hurl its head up and scream defiance as if it were a warhorse, but its heart broke, its knees buckled, and it sank dead in its traces. Too desperate to unload it, the merchants pushed on by. After a moment, the driving yellow sand behind them hid it.
And still the Ch'in officer pushed for greater speed.
Bleary-eyed, Quintus looked along the plodding line of Legionaries. Could they even complete this day's march—whatever you called a day in this no-place of driving sand—let alone quicken their pace? Their faces were gray with exhaustion and grit, but their eyes blazed.
"At the cavalry's pace," he ordered. He remembered how they had marched, hours upon hours in the hot Syrian sun, with those Nabataean and Armenian traitors jeering and the proconsul thinking only of his precious son and his horses. His heart would burst, and he would lie beneath the sand, like that packhorse. They all would, except maybe Lucilius. He wanted him to come down from his perch and march like a Roman, but...
"Sun. And sky! It's blue. By all the gods, it's a beautiful day!" Lucilius shouted.
A weak cheer rose from the Legionaries.
"All right now, none of that," Rufus ordered. "On the double, now!"
Ahead of them, a ray of sun broke through the opaque walls that had encompassed them for so long. One ray, then another, then seven, brushing across their foreheads with the touch of a mother on a fevered child's brow.
Ssu-ma Chao tripped and measured his length. Instead of struggling to his knees and glaring at anyone who had seen him lose his dignity, he knocked his head against the sand as if the light were his Emperor. That was not sweat that ran down a nearby soldier's drawn face, leaving a clean streak in the mask of sand and dried sweat that coated it. It was not sweat that ran down Quintus's face, either.
With the sunlight came fresh breaths of air. He would have thought he'd had enough winds for a lifetime—the howls, the screams, the battering gusts. This came as a reminder of green hills and hidden valleys, of the blue mists and shadows of his lost home. It soothed his parched skin as if he ducked his head into a mountain stream. And, despite its gentleness, where it brushed against the walls that had been their protection and their trap the rush of sand and gravel thinned and the thin shriek of the wind that kept it blowing about them grew fainter than the highest notes of a flute, rising past a man's hearing to the level of a night flyer's hunting song. Now the sunlight filtered through it, kindling the ugly ochres and gray into rich saffrons and golds. And ahead of them, they could see the glowing blue of a tranquil sky.
Behind the Romans, wailing prayers of thanks rose up, almost as hideous as the wind. Quintus could imagine how the barbarians were kneeling and rubbing their faces on the rock. Not so much as one Roman broke ranks: They stood, waiting for orders. And Lucilius dropped with more speed than Quintus would have thought he had left from the chariot's tower to stand with his fellows.