The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  “Weird thing to find in this place,” Costas said.

  Jack turned the object over. “Bronzes like this have been found along this shore before, hauled out by fishermen,” he said. “Mirrors, elaborate horse harnesses, cauldrons. It was what first excited the attention of the Russian, Przhevalsky. The objects were all like this, intact, very high quality workmanship, not the kind of things people usually throw away. Rumors spread of a sunken palace, a drowned city.”

  “Or a tomb?” Costas said.

  “That’s my gut instinct,” Jack said. “But these finds don’t fit with the story of Genghis Khan. Mongol tombs were concealed, discreet. And I don’t think a Mongol warlord would have had grave goods like these, mirrors, cauldrons. It doesn’t add up. But I’ll wager this must have been thrown up out of a burial site by the earthquake, something pretty prestigious. That would explain the past finds too. And these are not the result of tomb robbing in antiquity, when this slope was still dry land. Tomb robbers don’t abandon valuable items like this.”

  Costas pointed to where fine lines of incision were visible on the handle, swirling shapes and bulbous eyes. “The decoration reminds me of that halberd Katya found in the Roman burial on the other side of the lake. It looks the same, Chinese.”

  “I agree,” Jack replied. “The local population here includes those displaced Muslim Chinese from the fringes of the Taklamakan Desert, and there were earlier migrations, Uighurs. This mirror looks more than two thousand years old, but back then this end of the lake would have been a cultural melting pot, a staging post between west and east. Prestigious Chinese artifacts could have found their way here. But I don’t think that accounts for these finds. Stuff like this wouldn’t just be tossed into the lake. These people were traders.”

  Jack put down the bronze, and Costas placed a miniature electronic beacon beside it. Jack took the lead this time, finning along the forty-meter depth contour. The visibility was still only a few meters, but it was enough to see that the ridge of clay curved around to his left, and the lakebed dropped off to the right. “An erosion channel,” Costas said from behind. “This must be the edge of the gully that leads down from the creek, cutting a ravine into the lakebed. It’s consistent with the profiler readout. It should be dropping down ten meters deeper, and be twenty meters or so across. I think it’s normally smothered in sediment, but the earthquake’s shaken it away. This must be the converging feature Rebecca saw on the printout, that looked so promising. Maybe not man-made after all.”

  “I want to look a bit farther. Just to make sure.”

  “The mirror’s a great find, Jack. We can surface with it like a pair of treasure hunters. Rebecca will be thrilled.”

  Jack was already finning ahead. “I’ve just got a feeling about this.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a feeling too,” Costas replied urgently. “And it’s a bad one. Did you see that?” There was a shimmer in the water, then a shudder. “Jack, there’s a wall of sediment about three meters above you. It’s where the turbitude slipped down that revealed the channel. Any moment it’s all going to come down. We need to get out of here. Now.”

  Jack looked up, saw the darkness of the sediment wall, then looked down again. He was motionless, spread-eagled above the lake floor. The shudder had lifted a veil of silt that had obscured his vision almost completely. The glow from the headlamp behind him diminished as Costas began to ascend. Jack knew Costas would remain a few meters to one side until he was certain Jack was following. He flicked on his own headlamp, so Costas could see him, and looked at his compass readout. He had come far enough. There was nothing more to be seen. “Roger that,” he said. He reached for the buoyancy control on his E-suit. Costas was right. This was no place to die.

  There was another shimmer in the water. Jack was suddenly wary, feeling that he himself was an active part of the forces around them, that his own movement could trigger the next quake. He looked down at the buoyancy valve on the front of his suit, checking that it was clear of sediment that might jam it open. It was a design glitch he had noticed before. He would have a word with Costas about it. He kept his right hand over the valve, then raised his head. His helmet bumped against something. He rolled over and looked up, seeing only the reflection off sediment. It would be unlike Costas to be so close overhead when he knew Jack was ascending. It must be something else. He rolled back, and felt forward with his left hand. It was a solid object, angled out of the lakebed toward him. It felt like a tree trunk. He suddenly remembered the lost torpedo. But this was wrong. The surface was like bark on an old maple, thickly segmented. He felt his way up with both hands, to where it angled above him. If it was an old tree trunk, it was hoary, twisted, with the remains of branches on either side. He felt the top. The trunk narrowed, then came out again before ending, like a bulbous growth.

  Jack froze. He had seen something.

  “You okay? You stopped.” Costas’ voice came harshly over the intercom.

  Jack’s voice faltered. “I’ve got something.”

  “Drop it. You need to get out of there. Now.”

  “Roger that.” There was another shimmer, and the suspended sediment that had obscured his visibility suddenly flashed away, like a school of tiny fish. There was a moment of total clarity. Jack could see it clearly now.

  It was a human head.

  It was a statue, made of stone, larger than life, leaning out over the lake floor. He stared at the face. It was like a death mask, the eyes nearly shut, the mouth drawn back in a grimace. High cheekbones, flat nose, thin moustache hanging down, braided. The words of the Kyrgyz legend flashed across Jack’s mind. A golden coffin set on a silvery sea. But that was about Genghis Khan. He had dismissed the story. Had he been so wrong? He looked again. What had felt like bark were scales of armor, segmented, overlapping. And he saw that the statue was cradling a sword, a great straight blade, finely shaped out of the stone. It had a long, rounded guard at the hilt, concealing the hand completely. Jack looked back up at the face, and then realized what he had seen. Not a hilt. A gauntlet. He hardly dared believe his eyes. He sank down, and looked closely. It was all there: the feline ears, the almond-shaped eyes, the grimacing mouth where the blade protruded. Jack stared in astonishment at the sculpted figure leaning over him.

  A gauntlet sword.

  A tiger warrior.

  Jack looked up. He could just make out Costas a few meters above, releasing a marker buoy. There was a distant roaring in his ears, a noise that sounded like it came from the bowels of the earth, mixed with the sound of a boat engine. He saw the wall of silt behind the statue, and realized how close he had been. Now it was happening again. The silt was shimmering, blurred. He realized he was being pushed by some force in the water down the slope. He was suddenly over the edge of a black pit, the sides extending off into the swirling silt beyond. The shudder ended, and he sank down. He was fifty meters deep now. He could see where the pit had once been completely buried, where the earthquake had cracked open the hard clay surface and revealed a hollow space beneath, now almost choked with silt. He saw something white in his headlamp. It was a skull. A human skull. And then he saw more. There were skulls everywhere, human skulls, rows of them, eye sockets empty, jaws hanging down, dislocated, some lolling to left or right. Below the skulls were flashes of green and brown. He sank down farther, into a space in the pit, until he could see more. There was no doubt about it. The green-brown was metal, bronze. Segmented armor. Rows of skeletons, a whole regiment of them, buried upright in a pit, wearing segmented bronze armor. Ancient Chinese armor. He looked again, scarcely believing what he was seeing. Each skeleton had the remains of a rope around its neck, perfectly preserved in the freshwater of the lake. They were an army for the afterlife. An army who had gone willingly to their deaths.

  Jack’s mind was racing. The statue, the warrior, must be a guardian. He looked again at the skulls, rapidly disappearing beneath a cascade of silt. The words of an ancient chronicler flashed through his mind. The
hundred officials, as well as rare utensils and wonderful objects, were brought to fill up the tomb. He looked up the slope at the statue, just visible in the gloom. Then he realized. The tiger warrior was not a guardian. He was an executioner. Jack looked back at the skulls. These were the true bodyguard, the loyal soldiers, the retainers, those who had built the tomb and brought the body, who had devoted themselves to the whims of their leader, who had sworn to protect the secret, sworn an oath that had failed to protect them. They were not a willing army for the afterlife. They were the victims of mass murder. They had been murdered not to satisfy the vanity of one who believed he would rule forever, but to satisfy the hunger for immortality of those who thought they were his most trusted lieges, the warriors whose guardianship of the secret would assure their power for all eternity. Suddenly Jack knew for certain. Rebecca had been right. There was something here, something in the darkness beyond, something so astonishing he could scarcely believe it. The secret of the First Emperor’s tomb.

  Suddenly it was happening again. Something was sucking him down. He began finning, kicking hard. For the first time on the dive he felt the icy grip of fear, as if there were some empty space in the macabre army reserved for him, for having dared to see what he had seen. He was going nowhere. He realized that the entire lakebed was moving, sliding down the slope. The statue and the pit had vanished. A massive surge threw him sideways, pushing him away from the gully. Then he was miraculously clear, floating above the storm of sediment, bathed in sunlight. He saw Costas only a few meters away. The intercom indicator inside his helmet was flashing red, and he realized that it must have failed. He flashed an okay signal to Costas with his hand, then saw Costas do the same. He looked down again, breathing hard, waiting for his pulse to slow before ascending.

  He shut his eyes. He had seen something else. Something in the split second of that jolt. Something that had flashed into view while the sediment was sucked off the lakebed in a swirling vortex. He had seen walls, great stone walls, lining the sides of a passageway, converging at a dark entranceway in the side of the slope, sealed in with more stone. He opened his eyes. He was sure of it. He thought of what else he had seen down there, what he had touched. He looked up toward the surface, through water that was now sparklingly clear. They were less than twenty meters deep, and he was sure he saw the wavering line of snowy peaks to the south, cutting through the silvery reflection of sunlight on the surface. The words of the Chinese chronicler came into his head again. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtse, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow. Above were representations of all the heavenly bodies, below, the features of the earth. Then he realized. There, in the tomb at Xian, it had all been artifice. Here, below the celestial mountains, where the lake was liquid like mercury, it was all real. Here, where the realm of heaven was on the horizon to be seen, and the orb of the earth and the heavens could truly be the domain of one emperor.

  One emperor. Jack was barely breathing now. Not Genghis Khan. An emperor far greater than that. An emperor of all that is known under heaven.

  Shihuangdi. The First Emperor.

  Jack remembered the Sogdian, the man whose act more than two thousand years before had led them to this place, a man whose very existence was part surmise, part reality. Had they been right about him? Had he really stolen the celestial jewel from under the noses of the tiger warriors at Xian? Or had he been fulfilling a promise, one the first caretaker had made to the dying emperor, to take the jewel from Xian to this place, the real tomb? Had the emperor lost trust in the tiger warriors? Had he foreseen the future, seen how his legacy would be usurped by those who would profess to protect it? Had the brotherhood of the tiger been living a lie, propped up by murder, a fantasy of guardianship that had only ever been about their own greed and power?

  Jack thought of the celestial jewel, the elusive treasure that had brought them on this extraordinary journey. Had the jewel been installed above the empty casket under Mount Li, a priceless heart of the emperor’s dream they would be sworn to protect, yet which one day a descendant of the caretaker would spirit away and try to take to its rightful place? Jack remembered Katya’s uncle, the story of the tiger warriors told by Katya herself, streams of knowledge that seemed to come from some reservoir deep in the past, exactingly remembered, passed down from generation to generation. Jack thought of Katya again. Had there been one among the Brotherhood, one entrusted by Shihuangdi, he who trusted so few, to keep the eyes of the others away from the truth? Had they lived a lie for sixty-six generations, protecting a tomb at Xian that one among them always knew was empty? Had Katya’s uncle been after the jewel not just to keep it from Shang Yong, but to bring it secretly here? Jack thought of something Katya had said about her uncle. He was grooming me. Had she told them the whole story? Who was the caretaker of the tomb now?

  His intercom crackled. “Jack. Can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “I’ve been shouting myself hoarse. You need a ten minute decompression stop. The surge might have pressurized the water and put you beyond your no-stop time.”

  “Five minutes at twenty meters, five at ten.”

  “Roger that.”

  “The intercom interference must have been electromagnetic.”

  “I’ve been worried about that. The quake might have dislodged that lost torpedo, and reactivated something in the electronics.”

  “We’ll want to cordon off the area,” Jack said. “This whole sector of coast becomes a no-go zone. That’s our condition for working with NATO and the Russians. We’ll fund the whole cleanup operation, put the Russians through any underwater training program they want. Once everything’s ready, two years, maybe three years down the line, we’ll initiate the search. Nobody goes in the water before then. Health and safety.”

  “Right, Jack. As if health and safety’s ever been high on your list. So what exactly did you find down there? I take it we’re looking at more than a bronze mirror.”

  “Is this a secure channel?”

  “A closed system. Just you and me. The navy boat didn’t have the right receiver and we couldn’t get one freighted out in time.”

  Jack cleared his throat. “I found a statue and some bones.”

  “I said, what did you find, Jack?”

  “That’s what I saw for certain. That’s what I touched.”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, I might have found a tomb.”

  “Genghis Khan?”

  “Not sure. We need more to go on.”

  “You didn’t find the jewel? The other one. The peridot.”

  “I didn’t find the jewel. But it may be the right place. If Fabius and the others did reach the eastern shore of the lake and then went down in a storm, this is about where the wreck would have ended up. Everything they carried with them might still be here, somewhere in the silt below us now. Or Fabius may have escaped and taken it with him, into China toward Xian.”

  “Back toward the First Emperor’s tomb.”

  “To the place that history calls the First Emperor’s tomb.”

  There was a brief silence. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “I only saw it for a second. Less than a second. But I’m sure of it.”

  Costas checked the old Rolex diving watch he wore over his suit and gave a thumbs-up. Jack repeated the gesture, and watched the depth gauge inside his helmet as they rose ten meters. Their buoyancy systems automatically adjusted to neutral and Costas turned to face Jack. “So, how are you going to explain to your daughter that she’s been responsible for one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made, something that could change the perception of Asian history, but that we’re going to say nothing about it and instead talk about a torpedo, or if pressed maybe mumble something about Genghis Khan?”

  “I don’t want to tell anyone. For the reason you just said. Asian history. There’s too much at stak
e. A whole national myth. Right now, the Chinese might need that myth, the myth of the First Emperor’s tomb at Xian, the myth of untold wealth buried with their greatest ruler. Revealing the truth might unleash a dangerous unfolding of control in China.”

  “You don’t believe that. I’ve never known you to leave treasure unexcavated because you’re worried about a national myth.”

  “Okay, I just want to wait until the seismic activity quiets down. That can take a couple of years out here. And that should give us time to develop equipment for getting through a mountain of lake sediment. Give you time, I should say.”

  “I was blueprinting a new sub-bottom excavator in my mind while you were ferreting around down there. I knew you’d got something, and that we’d be back. So what about Rebecca?”

  “Two, maybe three years down the line. When we’re ready to come back here. Then I’ll tell her what I saw. I’d rather her first big discovery wasn’t one that might upset the entire world order.”

  “Kids know everything. She’ll be onto you as soon as she sees that look in your eyes. And show me one of our discoveries that didn’t upset the course of history. If she sticks around, she’s going to have to get used to that. She’ll be up there on the boat by now,” Costas added. “I bet you tell her, the moment we surface.”

  Jack looked up. They had only a few minutes now. He tasted a hint of salt from the lake. He remembered something Katya had told him, an old Kyrgyz legend about how the nomads kept the spirits of their ancestors at bay by weeping into the lake, along the shoreline beside the carved stones that marked their passing. If the mourners wept, the waters would rise around the ghosts, and they would drown. But now there were too few mourners, too few left to remember. Jack had seen the boulders left dry by the receding shoreline, the stain of a watermark meters above. Now the mountains themselves needed to mourn, to release meltwater in torrents, to keep the spirit below them at bay, the spirit of Shihuangdi, the First Emperor.