"You put heart into us for this last dash," Quintus said.
For once, there was no mockery in the patrician's gaze.
"Last dash to where?" he asked.
Perhaps he had earned the right to that much irony.
With a final sigh, the last of the sand fell. And the lost caravan stood forth on land that was not covered with grit and gobi, but honest rock. Ahead of them stretched a narrow course sloping down past tall poplars and gleaming rhododendrons into a valley guarded by rock cliffs that jutted up like columns carved and melded together in the morning of the world. The pathway—wide enough for six men to walk abreast or a wagon to traverse carefully—wound past a rock spire. Some cut in the rock caught the sunlight, which pooled there, forming a globe of light from which rays issued.
The light brightened past bearing, then faded. Beyond that rock spire, as much as they could see, stretched a green field tippled with gold and red wildflowers. Willows swayed gently by the deep blue curve of a mountain lake. Beyond, more cliffs rose, sheltering the valley.
The quiet all but sang in their ears. No screams, no hoofbeats or drums, and no whine of Yueh-chih arrows, thank all the gods. Without need of orders, Roman and Ch'in soldiers wheeled to guard the rest of the caravan as it coiled about the entrance to the valley. One by one, they stripped themselves of the heavy felts they no longer needed to wear.
Were they dead? Quintus saw no asphodel on the valley floor. Nothing dead could be as thirsty as Quintus, or as tired. "We are far off my reckoning," Ssu-ma Chao murmured. "I have never heard of this place, and no one I know has ever seen it. I see no mountains, or I would swear we had passed over the desert into the Heavenly Mountains of the North."
He clapped his hands. Merchants, horsemen, and camel drivers attended him while restraining their eager beasts, but their eyes constantly wandered to feast on the green and blue that stretched out below them.
For all his cynicism, the horseman Arsaces swore by his many devas, then choked, "In the midst of the desert, a crystal fountain," he whispered. "I would have taken haoma that it was but a tale told round a fire in the desert."
Rufus cleared his throat, looked for a place to spit, then, obviously, thought better of it. "That looks like real water to me," he said. "Are we going to just stand and admire it?"
Already scenting it, the horses had pressed forward. Even the camels moaned and quickened their gait. Saddles and packs hung low on their backs': The humps in which they stored the precious fluid that made them such fine desert travelers were almost flat. A cart overturned as the beasts drawing it swerved too sharply in their eagerness to get to the water.
"All right, wait your turns!"
The wind blew, overpowering the stinks of frightened, sweaty men and animals with the temptations of water and growing things. The same longing that drove the beasts forward shone in the Romans' eyes. Quintus wanted nothing as much as to stretch out full length by that blue pool and slake his thirst. He and his men joined the other soldiers and the caravan drivers in restraining the animals. After surviving a desert storm and the Yueh-chih, they should not fall victim to their own eagerness in sight of rest and water.
The air filled with noises as those beasts too weak to go any further in safety were unharnessed or relieved of packs and led down to the pool, where others would have to restrain them from drinking till they swelled from it. But the choking dust that rose in the desert was absent: Quintus watched the tally of soldiers, merchants, beasts, and carts.
He had seen that horse collapse in the last rush from the blowing sand. Who else had been lost? Some, wounded, clung to carts, were loaded face-down across pack-animals or tied to their mounts.
"That one won't last the night," Arsaces pointed as a driver clung to one of his charges that was too weary to shy away from the blood scent. "At least he'll have enough water while he dies."
No one will die.
"What did you say?" Quintus started.
No one has died here for ... the voice trailed off.
"Sir are you all right? Your eyes just rolled up...."
"I'm fine." Quintus waved off the concern with what he hoped could pass for irritation. The Romans owed what freedom they had to Ssu-ma Chao's belief they brought him fortune: no use frightening everyone else. Or, he thought, with a countryman's shrewdness, letting the rest of them know.
You are wise, though you are a warrior, not a priest. I have always thought so.
The tattered caravan staggered past him into safe haven. He started to ask if any others had been lost, but his words were lost in the clatter of warped cartwheels on rock. The men of Hind. The Persians. Even the wagons of that fat man who had been so afraid outside Merv, and the man himself, now not nearly so fat and moving the faster for it.
Then, leading their horses, heads down and shuddering, passed the merchants Quintus had seen the night he had emerged from long, long dreams. Seen and distrusted, with their high-bred faces, their hooded eyes, and their tightly held mouths. There had been—how many of them?
More, it was certain, than now passed under his gaze. And there had been women in their numbers, gone now, too. Had part of their train perished under the blades of the Yueh-chih? Or had they decided to take their own escape?
Last of all came the soldiers, limping down the path. Sunlight blazed out overhead, hiding them, for an instant. As the track wound around the spire of dark rock that blocked a full view of the lake below, they paused. Horses and camels balked, but the crack of whips and oaths in a tongue Quintus had never heard (and liked as little as he liked those who spoke it) forced them back up the slope.
"Our beasts ... cannot make it downhill," said one of the merchants, his face still muffled in the wrappings that had protected him from the storm. "We camp here ... outside."
He held up a hand, interrupting the instinctive protests of the soldiers at their charges' foolishness. "We have supplies."
If there had been any one group likelier to husband their own goods while all around them went in need, Quintus had yet to see it. Let them thirst in sight of a blue lake. Let their beasts eat stored fodder when fresh green stalks waited to be cropped—though it was a shame to treat honest animals that way.
"And we will pay—in gold—for water to be brought."
"Wouldn't you just know it?" Lucilius hissed. "You might as well let them go their own way. They will, anyhow."
"Merchants!" This time, Rufus did spit as he watched the strangers coil about the lip of the valley.
The eyes of tribune, centurion, and Ch'in officer met in perfect understanding: Tonight and all the nights thereafter, these travelers would be placed under watch.
Now that all the others had descended, they too could head for the water and rest their bodies craved. First, Quintus thought, water. Then, perhaps there would be fish or even waterfowl, feeding near the lake. In that moment, he might even have traded his lost farm for rest—for him and all of the Romans who had lived.
Shadows began to deepen in the valley. The sky turned indigo, as it did in the hills, and a long sunbeam slanted down the track, pointing out the way.
He nodded to Rufus, who raised a battered vinestaff. "Let's show them how Romans do it, lads," he rasped.
They formed ranks and marched: Rome's pace, Rome's race, down the path toward safety. If the rock slabs underfoot were not the good roads of the Republic, at least they did not shift underfoot.
Another ray from the sun, heading like they themselves to its well-earned rest, struck the rock spire as they passed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but as it died, Quintus thought he saw etched into the rock a serpent, seven heads crowning its sinuous body. Wherever the light touched it, it was slow to fade.