The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  Jack laughed. “Well, I’ve been waiting. Hiemy’s been holed up like Caractacus Potts working on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He’s been like that ever since we were at school. Every time he calls me up with a new discovery, insists that I come and see it, I agree to go, and then he realizes he needs more time to make absolutely sure. So before going I usually wait until he’s come to see me personally three times. Then I know. It’s a fine art.”

  “I’m sworn to secrecy. I could tell you what it is, but I can’t. That was his condition for allowing me to help them in the lab.”

  “That’s part of the game too.” He looked into her eyes, thought for a moment, then spoke carefully. “I’ve been thinking about your mother a lot over the past days. You know when I saw her last year I hadn’t been in contact with her since before you were born and when I did see her, it was for only a few moments in the archaeological site at Herculaneum. But I’ve got a perfect memory of her from when we were together all those years ago, like a favorite old film that will never change. You’re in that film now too. It’s as if we’re a family together. I can see a lot of her in you.”

  “When she told me about you the last time I saw her, she said the same about you,” Rebecca said. “She was planning to contact you after my sixteenth birthday, you know. She said she always meant to, once I was old enough to look after myself. My birthday was a month after she disappeared.” Rebecca looked at Jack with unfathomable eyes, and then draped her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulders. Jack held her tight, and smiled. “Maybe she was right,” he said. “Maybe there is a bit of me in you.”

  “Not the seasick bit, I hope.”

  “I do not get seasick.”

  “Yeah, right.” She leaned back into the bridge and yelled, “Dr. Jack Howard, famous underwater archaeologist and commando extraordinaire, gets seasick.”

  “Time you were back in school,” Jack grumbled.

  “Hah. We’re on the high seas. I’ve been reading about that too. Out here, no laws apply.”

  A hand clamped her shoulder, and Scott Macalister stepped out from behind her, smiling at Jack. “Young lady, only one law applies, and that is the law of the captain. Anyone signed on under the age of eighteen is my personal responsibility.” He placed an old brass sextant into her hands. “Navigation class at 1600 hours.” At that moment a white streak appeared a few hundred meters off the starboard bow. “Tracer rounds,” he said. “Everyone inside, now.” He ushered them into the bridge and shut the door, pulling down a steel plate over the window. He took out his binoculars and peered through the bulletproof glass of the front screen. “That was a spent round from the gun battle a couple of miles away, but better safe than sorry.”

  “Ben’s been teaching me to shoot with a twenty-two,” Rebecca said.

  “I don’t think you’re going to be taking on the Tamil Tigers with a twenty-two,” Macalister murmured, eyes still fixed to his binoculars.

  “I hope you were wearing ear protection,” Jack said.

  “I can look after myself.” She turned around and walked toward the rear hatch that led down to the accommodation decks.

  “Maybe she does have a bit of me in her,” Jack muttered, looking apologetically at Macalister. “Teenagers.”

  “Come on, Dad,” Rebecca called. “They’re ready for you in the lab. That’s what I came up to tell you. I helped Aysha with the final pieces. You’re going to love this. It’s my present to you for rescuing me from school.”

  Jack felt a surge of excitement, and turned to Macalister. “Okay, Scott. Let me know when we clear the strait, will you? And I want the Zodiac prepared. Our meeting with the Archaeological Survey of India people at Arikamedu is at 0900 hours tomorrow, and I don’t want the schedule to slip.”

  “Will do, Jack.” Macalister jerked his head toward the hatchway. “You’d better follow the boss.”

  The main laboratory on Seaquest II was the size of a school classroom, set below the accommodation block and above the engine room. The wet cleaning and conservation of finds was carried out in a room behind, with a cluster of desalination tanks for timbers and other artifacts too delicate to be taken out of water. Jack thought of the complex like a field hospital for the stabilization of finds that would then be transferred for long-term treatment to the IMU museum at Carthage in the Mediterranean or the IMU campus in England. The lab was a dry facility for the cleaning of finds such as pottery that could safely be removed from water for short periods. Farther forward were rooms for analytical work, including multispectral imagery, thin-section petrology and mass spectrometry. The complex was designed to allow basic questions to be answered during an excavation when time might be pressing.

  Jack followed Rebecca inside. Four long tables had been drawn together to form one surface, their legs locked into runnels on the floor. Above them a cluster of fixed tungsten lights bathed the tables in a warm glow. Aysha and Hiebermeyer were hunched together over a camera stand. Aysha was nudging something into place on the black baseboard under the camera, and Hiebermeyer was poised over the viewfinder, holding the remote shutter control. They looked as if they were performing a strange embrace. Rebecca glanced at Jack, pointing at them as if to rest her case. They both waited silently while Hiebermeyer clicked the shutter, and then Aysha slid the object back onto the table. Hiebermeyer turned toward them. “Jack!” In the tungsten light his face seemed to have a feverish glow, and his eyes were red-rimmed. “Sorry to keep you in the dark for so long. I just wanted to be absolutely sure.”

  Rebecca went around to the far side of the table and sat on a stool, surrounded by the books and notepads she had accumulated over the past few days. Costas had also been summoned and came through the door behind Jack, and they moved to the table. On the surface were hundreds of fragments of pottery, some of them tiny, only a centimeter or two across, others the size of small saucers.

  “We playing jigsaw?” Costas said.

  Jack’s pulse began to race. “Ostraka!” He leaned over the table. Aysha ushered Costas to a stool. “It’s the Greek word for potsherd,” she said. “But archaeologists use it for sherds with inscriptions on them, where the pottery was used as a writing surface. In the ancient world, papyrus was a fairly valuable commodity, used only for top copies. If you wanted a writing surface for day-to-day use, for jotting notes, writing letters, composing rough drafts, you just found the nearest old amphora and smashed it up.”

  Jack circled the table, staring at the sherds, his mind racing. “They’re Roman amphora fragments, Italian, first century BC or first century AD. It’s the same type as the wine amphora we saw at Berenikê. And the writing’s Greek, as you’d expect in Egypt at that time. Greek was the lingua franca ever since Alexander conquered Egypt. The writing all looks as if it’s in the same hand. I’m assuming you found all of these sherds in the merchant’s house you were excavating?”

  Hiebermeyer’s face gleamed. “It’s an astonishing find. I still can’t believe it.” He paused, looking Jack steadily in the eye. “You ready for this? Okay. What you’re looking at is the only known ancient text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei. The only one actually to date from the Roman period when it was first written.”

  Jack gasped. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The greatest travel book to survive from antiquity. It was exactly what you might find at Berenikê, in an outpost on the edge of the empire. Not a great work of literature, not a lost history or a volume of poetry, but a travel guide, an itinerary for sea captains and merchants. He cleared his throat. “Copy, or draft?” he said.

  “Draft.”

  Jack exhaled forcefully. Draft. This was even more extraordinary. A draft could mean emendations, material deleted from the polished version. All the rough notes that get edited out. Precious words and phrases. He peered at Hiebermeyer. “I hardly dare ask. Have you seen anything new?”

  Hiebermeyer was bursting with excitement. “I saw it within days of starting the excavation at Berenikê. You remember when I tried to s
peak to you in Istanbul? Little did I know then how many more sherds we’d find, and how long it would take. This has been an exercise in patience. I couldn’t have done it without Aysha.” He turned and looked at Aysha, who nodded. He reached over and clicked a control panel. The plasma screen on the wall beside the table showed a CGI of the sherds in 3-D, jumbled together. “This is how they looked in the excavation. We call it the archive room, but really it was more like a study. After drafting each sentence on a large amphora sherd, we believe the author transferred it to papyrus and then tossed the sherds in a corner. Some sherds survived almost intact, others broke into pieces. I realized we were going to have to record all the spatial relationships in situ if we were going to stand any hope of piecing it all back together. That’s been Aysha’s job. She’s been wonderful.”

  “Somebody had better fill me in,” Costas said.

  “Maris Erythraea, the Erythraean Sea, translates as Red Sea,” Aysha said. “Which to the ancients meant all the seas east of Egypt—the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, what lay beyond. Periplus means to sail around, and was the term for a nautical guide, an itinerary.”

  “The nautical guide of the Erythraean Sea,” Costas murmured.

  “It’s truly one of the most amazing documents to survive from antiquity,” Jack said. “The Periplus wasn’t written by an aristocrat, by a Claudius or a Pliny the Elder, but by a working man with his feet on the ground. Yet it tells of a journey far greater than any fantasy of Odysseus or Aeneas, a true-life account of exploration and trade to the nether regions of the ancient world. The whole text seemed hard to believe until archaeologists began to find Greek and Roman remains where we are now, in southern India.”

  “So the guy who lived in the villa, the merchant, was the author?” Costas said.

  “I’m absolutely convinced of it.” Hiebermeyer clicked the console again, revealing an aerial shot of the excavated house in Berenikê they had visited three days before, looking down over the ancient port and the Red Sea. “We know from a Roman coin embedded in the foundations that the archive room was built soon after 10 BC, and the whole house was abandoned about AD 20. Because these sherds hadn’t been swept out of the room, we’re guessing that the text dates from just before the abandonment, about the early years of the reign of the emperor Tiberius.”

  “You mean when the trade was beginning to decline?” Costas said. “What we were saying in Egypt a few days ago, about the emperor plugging up the bullion flow?”

  “Correct. But I don’t think that was why the house was abandoned. Everything points to this man being old, retired. Aysha?”

  She looked up. “Luckily, we’ve got a lot of scholarship to go on. Before this find, the earliest surviving text of the Periplus was a medieval copy dating from the tenth century AD, and it’s been studied in translation since the nineteenth century. What we’ve found confirms what many scholars have thought, but adds a fascinating new dimension. First of all, it’s clear from the vocabulary, the analogies, that he was Egyptian Greek. Second, there’s no doubt that he himself had sailed the routes described in the Periplus, as far down Africa as Zanzibar, then around Arabia to northwest India, and using the monsoon route to southern India. He’s done it enough times to know a lot about navigation, but it’s clear that he’s a merchant, not a sea captain. He’s mainly interested in naming the ports, telling how to get to them, and listing the goods to be traded there. In southern India it’s predominantly bullion, meaning gold and silver Roman coins that were exchanged for pepper and a fantastic range of other spices and exotica, some of it transshipped from far distant places.”

  “Any idea of his specialization?” Costas asked.

  “You remember the piece of silk we showed you at the excavation? We think that was it. He would have had contacts with the very farthest reaches of the trade, with traders who had come west through the Strait of Malacca from the South China Sea, and down through Bactria, modern Afghanistan, from central Asia. From the Silk Road.”

  “I think I’ve got you,” Costas said. “The book was a retirement project. He finished it, he croaked and the house went on the market, but there were no buyers.”

  “Eloquently put, as always.” Hiebermeyer pushed his little round glasses up his nose. “Unusually for an Erythraean Sea merchant, he didn’t retire to Alexandria or Rome, but seems to have stayed in the Egyptian port that had probably been his base all his working life. Perhaps he was given some sort of administrative role, maybe as duovir, prefect of the town, to supervise it during the off-season when it was largely deserted. But few wealthy men able to afford a villa actually wanted to live in Berenikê, and his house was impractical, especially with the high-value trade winding down.”

  “Maybe he didn’t die there.” Rebecca looked at Aysha, who nodded encouragingly. “Aysha thinks he had a wife, and she was Indian. One sherd had a female Indian name, Amrita. She showed me pictures of some of the stuff they found, other sherds with Tamil graffiti, fragments of Indian textile, pottery from southern India. Maybe the Periplus was his last say as a trader, and after finishing it he took his family and left on a final voyage to the east, never to return.”

  Costas rubbed his chin. “Nice thinking. Maybe after all that time trading in India, he went native.”

  Jack was absorbed in a cluster of small potsherds placed close together, clearly the remains of two large sherds which had been smashed. “Look at this,” he exclaimed. “Amazing. I can read the words Ptolemais Thêrôn, Ptolemy of the Hunts. That’s the elephant port on the Red Sea, Costas. And over here, Rebecca, on this other sherd, I can see Taprobanê. That’s what Sri Lanka was called, five hundred years before Cosmas Indicopleustes sailed here.” He straightened up and looked at Hiebermeyer. “Well? This is all fantastic. But I know you too well. What did you really want me to see?”

  “Spill it, Hiemy,” Costas said.

  Hiebermeyer’s eyes bored into Costas. He turned to Jack. “We’ve got a little under a third of the Periplus here, about a thousand words. It’s very similar to the tenth century copy, with only minor differences in wording and grammar. With one exception.”

  “Go on,” Jack said.

  Hiebermeyer pointed at a large sherd beside Rebecca, and they all crowded around. The sherd was about the size of a dinner plate, and was covered with fifteen lines of fine writing, the ink barely discernible in places against the whitish surface patina on the pottery. The text had been written within the sherd, and was not broken off at the edges. “It’s an intact section, like a paragraph,” Hiebermeyer said. “It’s where he describes sailing beyond the Arabian Gulf and looks toward India, just before reaching the port of Barygaza at the mouth of the Indus.”

  “You mean the section where he puts on his archaeologist hat,” Jack murmured.

  Hiebermeyer nodded. “Generally he only digressed where it was of practical value, for example showing where a certain local tribe was to be avoided, or describing an inland region to give an idea of where the trade goods came from. There are two fascinating exceptions, both concerning Alexander the Great. In one place he describes how Alexander penetrated as far as the Ganges but not to the south of India. He says how in the market in Barygaza, near the mouth of the Indus, you can find coins, old drachmas, engraved with inscriptions of rulers who came after Alexander.”

  “Apollodotus and Menander, the first Seleucid kings,” Jack said.

  Hiebermeyer nodded. “Western traders going to India would have been well-versed in the story of Alexander, and doubtless there were locals who saw a quick buck in passing off Seleucid coins as relics. Alexander lived in the fourth century BC, three hundred years before the Periplus was written, but the story was still so big that people coming out here might have felt the dust of conquest had barely settled. Our merchant knew all about sharp dealing and was warning his readers that the relics were bogus. He wasn’t the kind of man who was duped by these stories. That makes me think we should take his second reference seriously, what you see on this sherd.”


  “I’ve spotted the word Alexandros,” Costas said, peering down at the sherd. “My ancient Greek’s a little rusty.”

  “Here’s the translation.” Hiebermeyer picked up a piece of paper covered with his indecipherable handwriting. “Immediately following Barakē is the gulf of Barygaza and the shore of the land of Ariakē, the beginning of the kingdom of Manbanos and of all India. The inland part, which borders Skythia, is called Abēria; the coastal part is Syrastrēnē. The region is very fecund, producing grain, rice, sesame oil, ghee, cotton, and the Indian cloths made from it, those of ordinary quality. There are numerous herds of cattle, and the men are very large and have dark skin. To this day there are still preserved around this area traces of Alexander’s expedition: archaic altars, the foundations of encampments and huge wells”

  Jack nodded. “Archaic altars. That sounds like the familiar text.”

  “But not the next sentence.” Hiebermeyer paused, and pushed up his glasses. And from Margiana, the citadel of Parthia to the north of here, the Roman legionaries captured at Carrhae escaped east, taking the Parthian treasure with them toward Chrysê, the land of gold.”

  Jack reeled as if he had been physically struck. “That’s incredible,” he said, almost whispering. “That’s not in the Periplus.”

  “Isn’t that what you were telling me about in the helicopter, Jack?” Costas said. “Crassus, his lost legions?”

  “Hearsay and rumor,” Jack murmured. “Until now.” He took a deep breath, and looked at Rebecca. “After the Roman defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC, the Parthians took thousands of legionaries prisoner, possibly as many as ten thousand. Their fate fascinated the Romans for generations. The poet Horace wrote of it in one of his odes, wondering if Roman veterans had taken native wives and fought as mercenaries for a foreign ruler. Then Augustus’ son Tiberius negotiated peace with the Parthians and the captured legionary standards were returned, a great triumph for Augustus that closed the chapter on the defeat.”