"Who lived there?" Quintus found himself asking.
"You—I mean, Arjuna." Ganesha nodded. "We all did, for a long time. It was your home where you found love and grief, happiness and death. And you remember nothing at all. Well, the wheel turns for all of us. You will.
"Maya built his palace. By the front door he put a tree of lights, its leaves cut from thin sheets of emerald, with gold veins. It sang in the wind. He carried full-grown trees and made parks; he brought songbirds and filled the trees; he made ponds and pools and filled them with fish and flowers. And when he was finished..."
"Is this Maya's palace?"
"One such, perhaps," Draupadi said. "All is illusion." Her eyes turned sorrowful.
"Then am I dead?"
"Illusion can be as powerful as truth," she told him. "We brought you here. The horsemen who would have slain you were real. The storm you endured was real. The use we made of it, to encompass you as you sped upon the circles of the world, that was illusion. And so is the guise of your sword."
"It was illusion that it broke."
"No; indeed, it shattered on that rock, for it is of Maya's building. You carry Arjuna's sword, disguised now so you can return to your people and bring them to our aid."
Slowly, Quintus folded his arms on his chest. The white scarf and wreath brushed his knee. He started to push them away, then forebore.
"If you are powerful enough to call the desert itself to your aid, you need no help from me or mine. We are prisoners, permitted arms only because the desert holds worse fears than Romans far from their home."
"Then why not turn aside?" Draupadi asked. "Some did."
Ganesha looked down at his scroll as if it were a map.
"They hold our Eagle." It came out sounding flat. How could he explain to these dwellers in illusion what the Eagle meant in terms of loyalty and blood? They looked to be of Hind. Perhaps he could explain it in terms of Alexander, who had journeyed that far. But his mouth went dry. He had never been a scholar, never had much time to study or a good tutor. Even Lucilius would tell the tale better than he.
"Loyal," she pronounced. "Well enough. You are here. And they are here. And the talismans. Look you!"
She snapped one of the fragile shells from the bracelet on her slender wrist. "I break this cowrie shell. And I scatter its pieces ... oh, here . . . and here . . . and here...." She dropped gleaming fragments on the amber and crimson carpet. "But then the need comes for such a shell. A need such as the world has never seen since the stars danced in different patterns in the heavens. So the pieces gather in one place, where the hand that knows them—" her own fingers with their almond-shaped nails were busy collecting the shards, "—and then, they are joined once more. Sol"
She raised her hand, and the shell was whole.
"More shadow-play?"
Ganesha shook his head. "That was true transformation. You have grown, Draupadi."
"I wish to grow beyond illusions into truth. I can spin shadows into pleasing forms. And I can spin them into shapes that can save a man's life. A little, I can take the fabric of the world and change it in truth. But I cannot do more, not without help."
"I have heard," Quintus said, "that those of Hind are great magicians." His voice was very dry. The cup at his feet beckoned, but he did not dare drink it.
"It would protect you from wounds," Draupadi said, "and make you all but immortal. If you spurn that, drink from the pool."
"We are not from Hind," Ganesha said. "Oh, in latter days, before the stars changed once again and we were driven out once more, we lived there ... in that palace Maya built at your ... at Arjuna's ... command. But this was our home before, and we must hope will be so once again."
Quintus paced about the platform. By rights, he ought to call his men or Ssu-ma Chao to restrain the lunatics. But, he recalled, perhaps they were oracles. And those sybils who were holiest seemed the maddest. He thought of the woman before him seated by a tripod, a serpent twined round its legs, as fumes rose from a fissure in the earth and dreams erupted from her lips.
"You cast your nets wide, if you draw in such as we."
"Nets! Now you begin to understand," Ganesha nodded approval. "Long ago, this was a plain, rich with water, fertile fields, forests, and lakes. A great city rose not far from here, the home of a race that had journeyed far from the East, from the Motherland known as Mu. From there, they spread out. Here, to the city of the Uighurs. And beyond it to the island in the sea, now sunken...."
Quintus's palms were wet. That much Plato he remembered. "Atlantis, lost when the earth split, sunk beneath the waves."
"We cast our nets wide, as you say. Wide as the waves that overwhelmed our cities." Ganesha's voice was grave. A tear ran down Draupadi's cheek. "On a night of the blackest evil, waves were sent raging down onto the plain that the Uighurs had made into a worthy daughter of the Motherland. Huge rocks shattered the pillars of the temples and palaces and theatres we had built. Those of us who could, those of us with the training of the Naacals, the caste of priests, fled.
"And when we looked back, we saw only desolation. Boulders had scoured the soil, bare to the very bones of the world. The land dried, and sand came, to bury the ruins of Uighur glory.
"Weeping, we made our way overmountain to Hind, those of us who did not despair, or plunge off the great peaks, or die for lack of breath. But we made our way down into rich fields that reminded us of the land we had lost.
"The people greeted us there beside rivers they called holy. When we named ourselves and spoke of our loss, they bowed and touched our feet. They heaped our necks with wreaths and scarves of honor. For 'Naacal,' they heard 'Naga'—a holy people of their own. And indeed, it had been that those 'Nagas' were loyal daughters of the Motherland and Hind had been the jewel on her brow—as much as Mu. Even the symbol was the same. Draupadi?"
The woman gestured. The air around the nearest brazier shimmered, melded with the sparks, and formed the image of the seven-headed serpent that Quintus had convinced himself he had not seen on the cliff walls.
"Serpents," she said. "It is the nature of man to fear them, and that is wise. But like fire, there is no need to hate. Do not your own priests venerate the serpent?"
Despite himself, Quintus smiled, remembering as a child how he had laid down a saucer of milk for the garden snake that coiled near the household shrine.
Still it was hard, hard to think of the desert through which he had passed in such pain and peril as a seabed— but his eyes had flinched from the noon glare on slick white patches uncovered by the wind, and when he had touched some of this strange sand to his lips, he had tasted salt.
You could still be in the desert. They could serve your head as they served the proconsul's—hurling it into an entertainment to delight barbarians. Or your head could be curing in some Yueh-chih tent, ready for some unwashed carver to make into a drinking cup.
So he owed these people at least a hearing. And it was hard to look away from the woman, who spoke with a voice near that of his own genius loci.
Her eyes were upon him. "I told you, we cast our nets of illusion wide—and our nets of vision even wider."
He looked down at the statue of Krishna.
"You have pipes—flutes, music, dancing—in your own land," she was continuing. "There can be no pipes without his presence, somehow."
There's Pan or Silenus. It seemed useless to say so, however.
With a stubbornness he thought his grandfather would have approved of, for once, Quintus brought up what seemed to him the most telling argument against this madness. "Lady, you broke that shell. Then you reassembled it—I do not know how. But you knew where all its pieces were and why you did what you did."