The Tiger Warrior (55 page)

Rebecca held his arm. “Do you think the jewel was here?”

Jack rubbed his chin. “We may just have found it. That boy. The legacy.”

“She means the real jewel, Jack,” Costas said.

“Maybe that’s best left just beyond the horizon,” Jack murmured.

“Yeah, right. Don’t tell me you didn’t want to find it. Don’t tell me you didn’t want to put those two jewels together, and see what would happen.”

“I don’t know.” Jack narrowed his eyes. “I really don’t know.”

“It would have been fun to try though, wouldn’t it?” Costas said. “Just once, I mean. To see what it was like. Immortality. Then we could have put the jewels in the IMU museum at Carthage, on opposite sides of the room. Close enough for a warm fuzzy feeling. People would come out of the museum feeling extra good. And make donations.”

Jack looked at Rebecca, and jerked his head toward Costas. “That’s what I mean. He brings things down to earth. With a crash.”

Costas grinned. “I have got a lab though, and I can check out the properties of peridot and lapis lazuli. Pradesh talked about trying it. There may be something in it. Not immortality, you know, but something more than a trick of the light, a prismatic effect. Some channeling of energy. Some refractive quality.”

Some refractive quality. Jack
looked up toward the sun, shutting his eyes against it. The last few days had been a series of refractions, between past and present, between the world of a century ago and two millennia before that, between lives that seemed to run on parallel trajectories. For a moment he felt as if they were the same, Licinius the Roman legionary, John Howard his ancestor, himself, that they were fueled by the same yearning. Maybe the jewel did that, the idea of immortality, allowed those drawn by it to tap into a trackway far above the ephemeral. He took a deep breath, and put his arm around Rebecca. “I think mortality will do me for a while.”

Costas looked down at his crumpled shirt, and picked at it despondently. He eyed Jack. “Immortality might give us time to get to Hawaii.”

Jack got to his feet. “Point taken.”

“Now I know what Costas means,” Rebecca said.

“About what?”

“About diversions. He said your expeditions always end up being diversions. You never know where they’re going to take you. He says that’s what keeps him on his toes. This was one, wasn’t it?”

Jack took a deep breath, and stared into the ruins. He reached into his bag, then remembered he no longer had the little lapis lazuli elephant. He remembered where they had been, and wondered how he had changed. He gave Rebecca a tired smile. “A bit more than a diversion, I fancy.”

Costas looked at Jack expectantly. “So where do we go from here?”

“Got any ideas?”

“I thought we might go in search of the Isles of the Immortals. You know, that place Katya told us about. The First Emperor sent out expeditions to find them. Somewhere in the eastern ocean. In the center of the Pacific, to be exact. A small but delightful chain of volcanic islands.”

“Aloha,” Rebecca said.

“Aloha,” Costas replied. He made a whirling motion with his fingers, and pointed at the helicopter. Jack scratched his chin, looking at Costas’ sun-beaten face. “You know, you look as if you could do with a few days on a beach.”

“Damn right I could.”

“But Rebecca wants to go to the jungle. To the shrine.”

Costas got up and stretched. “It can wait. Anyway, there’s probably not much more to see. When we were there, I felt a hole in the base of the tomb. I remembered you showing me stone coffins in Rome, with the drainage hole to let the decomposition products flow out. If Licinius was in that tomb, there’s probably not much left there now.”

Jack stared at Costas. “A hole, you say.”

Costas put up his hand, and curled his fingers around. “About this big.”

Jack’s mind was racing. “Big enough to shove a bamboo tube through?”

“I guess so. A small one.”

Jack had remembered something. A possibility that Rebecca had mentioned. She looked at him now, reading his mind. “Robert Wauchope,” she murmured. “The
vélpu
?”

Could it be? Could he have made it back there?
Jack’s heart was suddenly pounding. He felt the familiar thrill of excitement. He slung his old khaki bag on his shoulder.

“Oh no.” Costas shook his head defiantly. “No way. I know that look.”

“We’ve got to get back to
Seaquest II
anyway. She’s in the Bay of Bengal. It would just be a diversion.”

Costas looked despairingly at Rebecca. “See what I mean?”

Rebecca put her arm around Jack. “Don’t worry, Dad. He’ll follow you anywhere.”

Jack looked questioningly at Costas. “Well?”

“You really think we might find it?”

“No promises.”

Costas sighed. He glanced again at his Hawaiian shirt, then looked dolefully at Jack. They stared each other in the eye. Jack’s face broke into a broad smile, and Costas looked down, shaking his head. “What can I say.”

“Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THE SEEDS OF THIS STORY WERE PLANTED WHEN I
first stood as an archaeology student among the ancient ruins of Harran in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border. The heat was stifling, the sky was lowering, and a wind had whipped up the dust and obscured the light. It seemed a place on the very edge of existence, and it made a deep impression on me. This was the site of the Battle of Carrhae, where a Roman army under Crassus had been catastrophically defeated by the Parthians in 53 BC. It seemed inconceivable that a battle could have been fought in such heat. I had read the story of captured legionaries being marched east, never to be heard of again. Could the rumors be true, that some of them might have escaped and undertaken a fantastic trek as far as China? In the years that followed, my own travels took me deep into central Asia along the ancient Silk Route, and on the trail of Roman seafarers who had traded as far east as the Bay of Bengal. I became fascinated by the early history of archaeological exploration in India during the period of British rule, and with the lives of my own ancestors who had been soldiers and adventurers there in the nineteenth century. Always my mind returned to the question of Crassus’ legionaries. Could there be a connection? Had these men truly risked everything to seek Chrysê, the land of gold known to the traders? What tales had they been told of the fabled riches of the east? What could have driven them on?

The fate of Crassus’ lost legionaries from Carrhae is one of the most beguiling mysteries of ancient history. It exerted a strong pull on the Roman imagination; the poet Horace asked, “Did Crassus’ troops live in scandalous marriage to barbarians… grow old bearing arms for alien fathers-in-law… ?”
(Odes
, iii, 5, trans. W G. Shepherd). For the Emperor Augustus, who agreed to peace terms with the Parthians in 20 BC, the return of the captured legionary standards was one of the greatest triumphs of his reign, celebrated by a famous series of gold and silver coins bearing the legend
SIGNIS RECEPTIS
, “The standards returned.”

The surviving ancient sources on Carrhae are all reliant on earlier histories, now lost. According to Plutarch, Crassus marched with “seven legions of men-at-arms, nearly four thousand horsemen and about as many light-armed troops”
(Crassus
, xx, 1), implying about forty thousand men. The identity of the legions is not known; however, Plutarch mentions that a thousand of the cavalry had “come from Caesar,” presumably veterans of Julius Caesar’s recent campaigns in Gaul and Britain. At that date, legionaries were still “citizen-soldiers” rather than career professionals, bound by terms of service not normally exceeding six years. The memories of the campaign in my prologue, including the ill omens on crossing the Euphrates, the death of Crassus and the humiliation of Caius Paccianus, are all from Plutarch
(Crassus
xix, xxxi-ii) and Dio Cassius
(Roman History
xl, 16-27); Plutarch has Crassus being killed by a Parthian, and Dio Cassius “either by one of his own men to prevent his capture alive, or by the enemy because he was badly wounded.” Afterward, “the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery.” Plutarch tells us that in the whole campaign “twenty thousand are said to have been killed, and ten thousand to have been taken alive.”

The only indication of the fate of those prisoners is a single line in the
Natural History
of Pliny the Elder, who describes Margiana, a city east of the Caspian Sea, as “the place to which the Roman prisoners taken in the disaster of Crassus were brought” (vi, 47). Margiana, present-day Merv in Turkmenistan, was a Parthian citadel and gateway to central Asia. The Roman prisoners could have been used to build the huge circuit of walls whose crumbling ramparts can still be seen at Merv today. The walls required rebuilding on numerous occasions, and it is intriguing to note that the Romans in Italy were first developing techniques of concrete construction at this time—the basis for the idea in the novel of how deliberate sabotage may have come about.

The suggestion that survivors of Carrhae may have escaped from Merv and made their way east comes from a controversial interpretation of Chinese written sources, first published in the 1950s. In 36 BC the Han Chinese mounted an expedition against the Hsiung-nu, the Huns, who were establishing a foothold in Sogdiana in central Asia. The ancient
History of the Former Han Dynasty
contains an account of the Han siege of the Hsiung-nu fortress, probably based on contemporary paintings, including a passage translated as more than a hundred foot-soldiers lined up in a “fish-scale” formation (chs. ix, xxiv-v). Some modern scholars have equated this with the
testudo
, the “tortoise,” a Roman formation in which shield was locked with shield, as Plutarch put it in his account of Carrhae
(Crassus
xxiv, 3). The Han army also found a “double wooden palisade” outside the citadel, a description perhaps reminiscent of Roman fortification techniques. These two references have led some to imagine that the Hun army included Roman mercenaries.

Nothing definitive has yet been found in the archaeology of central Asia to support this idea. The most intriguing discovery is an inscription in southern Uzbekistan, some five hundred kilometers east of Merv, similar to the fictional inscription in chapter 3; it may refer to the Fifteenth Legion, possibly an Imperial legion of that number founded in AD 62, but conceivably a legion of the same number from the century before. A thousand kilometers northeast from there lies Cholpon-Ata, the extraordinary field of boulders with petroglyphs—rock carvings—beside Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. The images mainly relate to the spiritual life of the local population, but Issyk-Kul was a staging post on the Silk Route and my own explorations there suggest the potential for discovering other inscriptions. In a mountain valley to the south, I rode a horse that may have descended from the fabled
akhal-teke
, the blood-sweating heavenly horses of Chinese mythology. The lake itself contains inundated ancient structures and artifacts, and rumors abound of sunken cities and tombs, even that of Genghis Khan himself; archaeological diving now underway in the lake could produce wonderful discoveries in the near future.

More than fifteen hundred kilometers southeast, past the forbidding Taklamakan Desert, lies the village of Zhelaizai in Gansu province of China. Some believe this to have been Lijian, a place where prisoners from the battle against the Huns in 36 BC may have been settled. The name Lijian—perhaps derived from “Alexander”—may have meant “westerner.” The population today does indeed contain a striking number of green-eyed, fair-featured people, though DNA analyses to test for western origins have proved inconclusive. Silk Route travelers would have passed this place close to the end of their journey toward Xian, site of the tomb of the First Emperor,
Shihuangdi
, at Mount Li outside the city. The “Brotherhood of the Tiger” in this novel is fictional, but the idea is based on other Chinese secret societies, and the fiefdoms are those of the First Emperor’s family
(Records of the Grand Historian
, Shi ji 5). “Tiger Cavalry” were employed as the Emperor Ts’ao Ts’ao’s personal bodyguard in the third century AD, perhaps based on an earlier bodyguard; their weapons could have included prized bronze halberds such as the one in this novel, based on an actual halberd on display in the British Museum (OA 1949.5-18 1,2). The tomb itself was said to have been guarded by twenty households, supposedly the basis for twenty modern villages around Mount Li, so the idea of a hereditary custodian is rooted in the history of this extraordinary site, one of the remaining unexcavated wonders of the ancient world.

——

The
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
survives as a tenth-century AD manuscript in a library in Heidelberg, copied from an original written in Greek about a thousand years earlier. It is one of the most remarkable documents from antiquity, detailing maritime trade from Roman Egypt down the African coast as far as Zanzibar, and across the Indian Ocean to the Bay of Bengal. In recent decades there has been an explosion of interest in the archaeology of the
Periplus
, especially with the excavation of the Red Sea port sites of Berenikê and Myos Hormos. The merchant’s house in this novel is fictional, but the finds are representative of actual discoveries at these sites, including Italian wine amphoras reused as water containers, thousands of peppercorns from India, ballast stones from Arabia and India, Indian hardwood—reused ship’s timbers, including teak—and south Indian pottery. One sherd had a Tamil
graffito
bearing a personal name also attested in south India. Many other potsherds with inscriptions
—ostraka
—are known, including part of the archive at Myos Hormos of a man named Maximus Priscus. In this novel, the
ostraka
with the text of the
Periplus
, and the previously unknown section—mentioning Crassus’ legionaries—are fictional. Nevertheless, potsherds would have been a sensible writing material for a draft, before copying the final text onto papyrus.