The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  “What does this have to do with convicts?”

  “Backtrack to 53 BC. Rome is still a republic, ruled by the triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey and Crassus. Already things are falling apart, with personal rivalries and ambitions that would lead to civil war. Military prestige is what matters. Pompey has his, having cleared the sea of pirates. Julius Caesar is getting his, campaigning in Gaul. Crassus is the odd one out. He decides to seek glory in the east, and to hunt for gold. The difference was Pompey and Caesar were both seasoned generals. Crassus was a banker.”

  “I think I can guess what happened.”

  “The Battle of Carrhae, near modern Harran in southern Turkey. One of the worst defeats ever suffered by a Roman army. Crassus was a useless general, but his legions fought for Rome, and for their own honor. They fought hard, but were overwhelmed by the Parthian cavalry. At least twenty thousand were slaughtered, and the wounded were all executed. Crassus was killed, but a Roman soldier was dressed up as him and forced to drink molten gold.”

  “Fitting end for a banker.”

  “At least ten thousand Roman soldiers were captured. Those who weren’t executed were sent to the Parthian citadel of Merv, and probably used as slave labor building the city walls. That’s the connection. Mines, quarries, slave labor. The lot of prisoners of war in antiquity. Merv wasn’t cut off by sea like St. John’s Island, but was marooned in the desert wastes of what’s now Turkmenistan. At that time hardly anyone knew what lay beyond the lands conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, beyond the Indus and Afghanistan.” Jack flipped open the computer screen between the two seats, and clicked the mouse until an image came up. It showed a scorched landscape of ruins and dusty tracks surrounded by a vast, decayed rampart, flattened in places to a rounded hillock. “That’s what’s left of Merv,” he said. “Those are the walls of ancient Margiana, the name of the city at the time of the Parthians.”

  “They look like earthworks, not masonry.”

  “They were made of mud-brick, over and over again, a new wall built on top of the eroded remains of the previous one. But at some point there may have been a failed experiment with mortar. We found a recently exposed section where one of the walls had collapsed, and it was filled with a whitish powdery substance. Almost like concrete that hadn’t set properly.”

  “When were you there?”

  “The Transoxiana Conference in April,” Jack said. “The Oxus was the ancient name for the great river that runs near here, from Afghanistan toward the Aral Sea. The ancient Greeks and Romans saw it as the limit of their world. The conference focused on contacts between the west and Central Asia.”

  “You mean the Silk Road?”

  “The time when Chinese and central Asian traders were first appearing in places like Merv, soon after Alexander the Great swept through there.”

  Costas peered at the picture. “Hang on. Who’s that? I recognize that person.”

  “Just there for scale.”

  “Jack! That’s Katya!”

  “She chaired my session of the conference. It’s right up her street. She’s been studying ancient inscriptions along the Silk Road. She invited me. We weren’t doing any diving in April, so I could hardly say no.”

  “Jack. Well, well. You’ve been seeing Katya again. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Jack Howard, underwater archaeologist, flying off to a heap of dust in the middle of a desert. Turkmenistan, is it? That’s about as far away from a shipwreck as you could find.”

  “Just keeping up with old colleagues.” Jack grinned, and closed the screen.

  Costas grunted. “Anyway. These Romans. Prisoners of war. I asked whether any of them ever escaped.”

  “From St. John’s Island, I doubt it. From Merv is another matter. Hardly any of Crassus’ legionaries could have survived to the time Augustus repatriated the standards, more than thirty years after the battle. But there were rumors in Rome for several generations after.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  “The kind you hear about but can never source. Rumors about a band of escaped prisoners, legionaries who had been captured at Carrhae. Prisoners who didn’t go west, back to a world that had forsaken them, but instead went east.”

  “You believe this?”

  “If they’d survived all those years of toil in the Parthian citadel, they’d have been the toughest. And they were Roman legionaries. They knew how to route-march.”

  “Let’s see. Heading east. That’s Afghanistan, central Asia?”

  Jack paused. “Some of the rumors come from much farther east. From the ancient annals of the Chinese emperors. But it’ll have to wait. We’re almost there.” Jack pointed ahead to a great tongue of land that jutted out into the Red Sea. “That’s Ras Banas. It’s shaped like an elephant’s head. I thought you’d like that.”

  “How could I forget?” Costas murmured. “My elephantegos. Never in a million years did I think I’d find ancient elephants underwater.”

  “Dive with me, and anything’s possible.”

  “Only if I provide the technology.”

  “Touché.”

  Jack lowered the collective and the helicopter began to descend. “I can see the excavation now. I can even see Maurice. Those shorts of his are like a signal flag. I’m going to put us down on a rocky patch just in from the shore to avoid making a dust storm. Hold fast.”

  The scene that confronted them as they stepped out of the helicopter was one of desolation, enormous expanses of sunbaked ground with nothing but the sea glinting behind. Despite Jack’s best efforts they had raised a whirlwind of sand as they landed, and the view now was refracted through a film of red dust as if the air itself were glowing hot. Inland to the west Jack could just see the line of low mountains that marked the edge of the coastal desert, on the route to the Nile; to the east, the rugged peninsula of Ras Banas curved out into the sea. Tucked in at the head of the bay a few hundred meters away were the ramshackle huts of the Egyptian customs outpost, and beyond that lay a shallow lagoon about a kilometer across enclosed by a thin sandy spit on the seaward side. It seemed a place on the edge of human existence.

  Costas stood beside Jack, wearing a straw hat and garish wraparound sunglasses, wiping the dust and sweat from his face. He pointed into the haze. “Here he comes.” A portly figure trundled out of the dust down the small hill beside them, his hand already outstretched. He was shorter than Jack, a little taller than Costas, but whereas Costas had the barrel chest and brawn of his Greek island ancestry, Hiebermeyer had never managed to shake off the impression that his entire being revolved around sausage and sauerkraut. It was an illusion, Jack knew, for a man who was continuously on the move and had the energy of a small army.

  “He’s still flying at half-mast, I see,” Costas muttered to Jack.

  “Don’t say anything. Remember, I gave him those shorts. They’re a hallowed part of our archaeological heritage. One day they’ll be in the Smithsonian.” He glanced at Costas’ own baggy shorts and luridly colored shirt. “Anyway, you can hardly talk, Hawaii-Five-Oh.”

  “Just getting ready,” Costas said. “For where we’re going in the Pacific. You remember? Holiday time. Thought I may as well kit up now.”

  “Yes. About that.” Jack cleared his throat just as Hiebermeyer came up and shook hands warmly with him, and then with Costas. “Come on,” he said, continuing down the hill without actually stopping.

  “So much for small talk,” Costas said, swigging at a water bottle.

  “He’s been wanting to show me this place for months,” Jack said, slinging his faded old khaki bag over his shoulder and following. “I can’t wait.”

  “Okay, okay.” Costas tossed the bottle back into the helicopter and followed Jack down the hill, catching up with them about fifty meters from the water’s edge. Hiebermeyer took off his little round glasses and wiped them, and then opened his arms expansively. “Welcome to ancient Berenikê. The holiday resort at the end of the universe.” He poin
ted back up the slope. “Up there’s the Temple of Serapis, down here’s the main east-west road, the decumanus. The town was founded by Ptolemy II, son of Alexander the Great’s general, who ruled Egypt in the third century BC and named the place Berenikê after his mother. Flourished mainly under the Roman emperor Augustus, declined after that.”

  “So where’s the amphitheater?” Costas looked around. “I don’t see anything at all.”

  “Look down.”

  Costas kicked at the ground. “Okay. A few potsherds.”

  “Now come over here.” They followed Hiebermeyer a few meters farther toward the shore. He had led them to the edge of an excavated area the size of a large swimming pool. It was as if the skin had been peeled off the ground. They saw rough rubble walls of coral and sandstone, forming small rooms and alleyways. It was the foundations of an ancient town, not an immaculately laid out Roman town like Pompeii or Herculaneum but a place without any architectural pretension, where walls and rooms had clearly been added organically as they were needed. Hiebermeyer leapt down with surprising agility onto a duckboard that lay across the trench. He bounded over to the far side and pulled a large tarpaulin away, then gave a triumphant flourish. “There you go, Jack. I thought you’d like that.”

  It was a row of Roman amphoras, just like the ones they had seen on the wreck that morning, only these were worn and many had broken rims. “All reused, as you can see,” Hiebermeyer said. “My guess is these went all the way to India filled with wine, then were brought back here empty and reused as water containers. Water’s a precious commodity here. The nearest spring’s on the edge of the mountains, miles away. We don’t even have electricity. We use solar panels to run our computers. And we have to bring our food in, just as they did in ancient times from the Nile Valley. It really makes you empathize with the past.”

  “It sounds like a lunar colony,” Costas murmured.

  Hiebermeyer replaced the tarpaulin and pulled up another one beside it, revealing a pile of dark stones about the size of soccer balls. “Ballast,” he said. “It’s basalt, volcanic, foreign to this area.”

  “Ballast,” Costas repeated. “Why?”

  “An outward-bound ship, filled with gold and wine, is going to sail along fine. A ship returning with peppercorns is going to bob around like a cork. You needed ballast. This stone’s been sourced to southern India.”

  “Maurice!” Jack exclaimed, patting him on the back. “We’ll make a nautical archaeologist of you yet.”

  “India,” Costas said. “Someone’s going to have to fill me in.”

  Jack turned to him. “For millennia, the ancient Egyptians received goods from beyond the Red Sea, but always via middlemen. Then, after Alexander conquered Egypt and the first Greek merchants appeared along this coast, someone told the Egyptians and the Greeks how to sail across the Indian Ocean using the monsoon. They sailed out from Egypt with the northeasterly monsoon, came back with the southwesterly, achieving one round voyage a year. It was dangerous and terrifying, but the winds were as predictable as the seasons. It opened up an amazing era of maritime discovery. The first Greek sea merchants hit India soon after Berenikê was established. After the Romans took over Egypt in 31 BC, everything revved up. Under Augustus as many as three hundred ships left from here annually. It was big investment, big risk stuff, just like the European East Indies trade fifteen hundred years later. Gold, silver, wine went out; gems, spices, pepper came back.”

  “And not just that,” Hiebermeyer said, leaping out of the trench and wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Now for what I really wanted you to see. Follow me up the hill.” A scorching gust of wind blew up, stinging their eyes. Costas crouched back against it, then trudged up behind the other two men.

  “We’ve been talking about the Battle of Carrhae, Crassus’ lost legions,” Jack said.

  “I’m always ready to hear about a Roman defeat,” Hiebermeyer replied, grinning at Jack.

  “Come on. The Romans didn’t rule Egypt that badly. If it wasn’t for them, you wouldn’t be here, sunning yourself beside the Red Sea. This is basically a Roman site.”

  “I’d rather be in the Valley of the Kings,” Hiebermeyer sniffed.

  “Talking to Costas about Carrhae set me thinking about another Roman defeat,” Jack said. “One never forgotten by the emperors. The lost legions of Varus, destroyed in AD 9 in the Teutoberg Forest.”

  Hiebermeyer stopped in his tracks. “That was my first real taste of archaeology as a boy, hunting for the site of the battle. My family owned a lodge nearby, outside Osnabruck in Lower Saxony.”

  Jack shaded his eyes and looked at Costas. “The Romans were pushing into Germany. It was the glory days of Augustus. The possibilities seemed limitless. Then it all went horribly wrong. Varus was inexperienced, like Crassus, and took three legions into unknown territory. They were ambushed by the Germans and annihilated, twenty thousand men at least.”

  “What’s your point?” Hiebermeyer said, walking slowly again up the hill.

  “The decline of Berenikê, after Augustus. It’s bizarre, at the height of the empire when the Roman economy was booming. It’s as if the British government had suddenly pulled out of any interest in the East India Company in the late eighteenth century, when the biggest fortunes were being made.”

  “The defeat stopped the Romans in their tracks,” Hiebermeyer said. “The Rhine became the frontier. Augustus nearly went insane over those lost legions.” Jack nodded. “I wonder if Augustus had second thoughts. He looked east, to Arabia, to India, the lands beyond this place, where everything was ripe for conquest. He looked, and he said no. The empire was big enough. They couldn’t afford another defeat. And the risk out here, the cost of failure, was huge.”

  “And not just military,” Costas said.

  “Go on.”

  “Massive fortunes were involved, right? Shiploads of gold and silver. That means only the wealthiest investors, including the emperor himself What are the chances of shipwreck on a voyage out here, one in three, one in four? Let’s say it happens, and the emperor loses big-time. His own cash. A high-risk investment gone wrong, and then those legions wiped out. It’s all too much. He pulls the plug on India.”

  Jack stopped. “That’s a hell of an idea.”

  “I’ll sell you it for a cold beer,” Costas said, wiping his forehead.

  “Find me a wreck out here full of mint issues of Imperial gold, and I might believe you,” Hiebermeyer said, trudging determinedly up the slope ahead of them. Costas looked questioningly at Jack, who grinned and followed Hiebermeyer.

  “Speaking of shipwrecks, thanks for the hint, Maurice,” Jack said loudly, catching up.

  “Huh?”

  “That translation you emailed me. From the Coptos archive. The ancient shipwreck. The elephantegos.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  “We found one.”

  “Ah. Good.”

  “We found an elephantegos.”

  “Ah. Yes. Good.” Hiebermeyer stopped, clearly deep in some other train of thought, nodded sagely, then carried on walking. After a few moments he stopped again, dead in his tracks, and peered at Jack, his mouth open in astonishment. Jack caught Costas’ eye, and the two of them continued up the slope. Hiebermeyer followed them to the edge of another large excavation trench, where he was suddenly preoccupied by the busy scene in front of them. He gesticulated at a group of students and Egyptian workers under a tarpaulin in one corner. A dark-featured Egyptian woman quickly came over and climbed out of the trench in front of them, her hair tied back under a bush hat. She spoke quietly to Hiebermeyer in German. He nodded and turned to Jack. “You remember Aysha? She dug with me in the mummy necropolis in the Fayum. She’s in charge there now, but I got her down here as soon as we started finding what you’re about to see.”

  “Congratulations on your doctorate.” Jack shook hands warmly with her.

  “And on your assistant directorship of the Institute in Alexandria,” Costas said.

&nbs
p; “Someone had to look after Maurice,” she said.

  Jack smiled to himself. Two years ago Aysha had been Hiebermeyer’s top graduate student, a naturally gifted excavator who had more patience than Maurice did for the minutiae of a dig, able to spend hours dissecting a shred of mummy wrapping where Maurice would have quickly become flustered. She was never subservient to him, always quietly in control. She was his perfect foil, and he was never pompous with her. Jack looked at them together for a moment, and then banished the thought. It was impossible. Maurice would never allow the distraction.

  “You must miss New York City,” Costas said. “I get back whenever I can.”

  “When I finished at Columbia, I kept the apartment,” Aysha said. “When this dig’s over for the season, I’m back in NYC for a sabbatical. The apartment’s where we arranged with Rebecca’s guardians for her to meet up with Jack for the first time. They stayed there together in the spring.”

  “Thanks again for that, Aysha,” Jack said, smiling at her. “You know she’s with us on Seaquest?”

  “Of course. She emailed me this morning. A running commentary on your friend’s appalling jokes.”

  “When you’re back in Queens, say hello to my barber, Antonio,” Costas said wistfully. “Corner of Fourteenth and Twenty-second. For ten years he cut my hair. While I was at school. Five bucks a go. Gave me my first shave. Taught me everything I know.”

  “Of course, Costas,” Aysha said, rolling her eyes. “Next time I make a hair appointment.”

  “No appointment needed. You just show up.”

  Jack laughed. Hiebermeyer stamped his foot impatiently, and Jack saw his expression. “Okay, Maurice, what have you got?” Hiebermeyer nodded at Aysha, who ushered them to the edge of the trench. “It’s a Roman villa,” she said. “Or I should say, what counts as a villa in this place. The owner’s used the best available materials and put some expense into it. The walls are made of blocks of fossil coral, the main building material here, but they’re veneered with slabs of gypsum that must have been hauled by camel caravan from the Nile. The little columns are Egyptian gray granite, quarried in the mountains to the west of here. The really fascinating thing is that he’s got a polished wooden floor, completely at odds with Roman tradition. The wood’s teak, from southern India. It’s reused ship’s timbers.”