The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  “He said that if he hadn’t spent months painstakingly excavating that Roman house by the Red Sea, this whole adventure would never have taken off He said he always did the real work while you were off searching for the Holy Grail or something. He said it was like Star Trek, you’d gone over to the dark side. I said it was Star Wars, not Star Trek. I don’t think he’d ever seen either of them. He said you’d become a treasure hunter, and he was only saying this because you still have potential, and it’s for your own good.”

  “I think,” Jack murmured, suppressing a smile, “I might need to have a word with old Hiemy.”

  “Don’t worry,” Rebecca replied. “Aysha’s on the case. She says what he needs is a family. Kids, you know. She says she’s working on it.”

  Costas nearly choked. “Working on it.”

  “Day and night,” Rebecca said.

  “Lucky old Hiemy,” Jack said.

  “And my next project is going to be south India,” Rebecca said assertively.

  “Your next project is school,” Jack said.

  “Ever since seeing all that stuff in the old chest, all our family history, I’ve become fascinated by it,” Rebecca said, looking at Jack. “Pradesh has offered to take me to that jungle shrine, to see the carvings for myself He thinks the next step is to get inside that tomb. See what’s in there. He says that now the Indian government is sending in the sappers to build more roads, actually finishing several of the traces that were made by Howard and his men all those years ago.”

  “What about INTACON?” Costas asked. “And Shang Yong? Has terminating the sniper in Afghanistan finished him, Katya?”

  She spoke quietly. “Without his henchman, the Brotherhood will disown him. But they will cling to their belief that they protect the legacy of Shihuangdi, and his tomb.”

  “And how long will that last?” Costas asked.

  “The legacy of the First Emperor is safe, for now.”

  Jack looked hard at Katya, then turned again to Costas. “INTACON was owned by Shang Yong himself, and has been shut down. Pradesh reported back to his headquarters at Bangalore as soon as we got out of the jungle. He got a rap on the knuckles for going into bandit country without authority and taking those two sappers with him, but the colonel immediately dispatched an air assault company. The firefight with the Maoists was the excuse they needed to go in with an iron fist.”

  “Pradesh says the Indian government has withdrawn all mining contracts from the jungle districts,” Rebecca said. “What we’ve set in motion could be the first big break for the jungle people, but Pradesh is worried that the withdrawal is only temporary and there’s still a battle to be fought. We need to show them there’s more revenue to be made from adventure tourism than allowing foreign companies to strip-mine the jungle. Pradesh says it depends on how deep the corruption is. Government officials can get bigger payoffs from mining multinationals than they can from start-up eco-tourism companies.”

  “You should work for an NGO, Rebecca,” Katya said, smiling.

  “I was going to talk to Dad about that. You know, giving IMU another face. It isn’t the first time your discoveries have opened a can of worms. And we can’t just walk away and pass on the problems to someone else.”

  “When you do go to the jungle,” Jack said, “I’ve got something for you to return.”

  “The tiger gauntlet?”

  Jack nodded. “We can’t return the sacred vélpu, as we don’t have it,” he said. “But the gauntlet had been in that shrine for two thousand years, and was venerated by the Kóya too, as the weapon brought to them by Rama, the god who had once lived among them. It may not be the jewel of immortality, but it might just give them an edge. You can do it for your great-great-grandfather.”

  “Maybe it’ll mean closure for him, at last,” she murmured.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Katya was talking to me about it just now, while we were walking up here,” she said. “About my mother. About how we can never second-guess grief, how we should never let anyone tell us how it will pan out. Howard lived with grief for much of his life, and it was somehow wrapped up with what happened to him in the jungle. It’s strange, it’s as if I can feel it. Maybe you do inherit these things from your ancestors, unresolved things. He couldn’t find closure in his lifetime, but maybe now we can do it.”

  Jack looked across at Katya. Their eyes met for a moment, and he looked away. She had said things to Rebecca that he himself did not know how to say. He knew there was still anger in Katya about her own father, still a yawning emptiness in Rebecca, but for a moment he felt as if there were a transcending bond that might protect them both. Rebecca had seen him looking at Katya. “After going to the shrine, Pradesh wants me to study the pottery they’ve been finding underwater off Arikamedu. Aysha might be able to come and help with the Egyptian and Roman stuff and get me going.”

  Costas cleared his throat. “If Hiemy can spare her.”

  “He might need a rest,” Rebecca said, looking at him deadpan. Jack grinned. She swept her hair back. “Anyway, I think it’s going to be my doctorate.”

  “Hang on,” Jack said. “You haven’t even finished high school yet.”

  “High school? After this? You must be joking. These last few days have been the biggest adventure of my life. Now I know what you mean about expeditions, about how close you get to people. I feel as if I’ve known all of you all my life.”

  Jack suddenly felt overwhelmed, and turned away, swallowing hard. He thought of what they had found in the lake, and his feeling of elation as he had looked up from underwater and seen Rebecca’s face, gazing down on him. Costas put a hand on his shoulder, then stood up, stretching and scratching his bristles, squinting out over the ruins. He kicked a stone, then reached down and picked it up, turning it over and over in his hand, rubbing it clean. Jack realized that the ground was strewn with fragments—pottery, broken brick, all of it crumbling and decaying into the shroud of dust that seemed so close to removing this place from history. Costas turned to him, a quizzical look in his eyes. “I wonder if they did make it?”

  “The Romans? Fabius and the others?”

  “We’re fifteen hundred kilometers east of Issyk-Kul. If any of them survived the wreck on the lake, that is. Let’s say one survived, unknown to his pursuers, washed ashore somewhere, melded invisibly among the caravans of traders heading toward Xian, just as Liu Jian the trader may have melded among the Sogdians heading west.”

  “Maybe one did make it,” Jack said, nodding slowly.

  “This place isn’t exactly a fabled eastern paradise, is it?”

  Jack looked at the ruins again. In his mind’s eye he saw those other places he had visited, in north Africa, in Germany, in the mountain valleys of Wales, placed at the periphery of the Roman Empire where the ground revealed a few clues to the discerning eye, the humps of buried walls, fragments of pottery, a clump of rusted chain mail, places where veterans had made their mark, had eked out their days. “It’s what they were trained for,” he murmured. “At a certain point, a soldier becomes an old soldier. He no longer yearns to die gloriously in battle. The legion of ghosts who have marched alongside him, his fallen comrades, march away to Elysium, where they will await him. He no longer needs to prove himself He knows he will get there, and will join them. He has done enough.”

  “And old soldiers, veterans, gave the empire its true strength, settling the frontiers,” Katya said.

  Jack nodded. “It was the Roman way. A place with women, the chance to raise a family, building materials, a little plot of land. It was enough.”

  “Yet they would have been told the First Emperor’s tomb was just over the horizon,” Costas said. “Fabled riches, beyond their imagination.”

  “Maybe, for the old soldier, the adventurer, the fabled treasure is always just over the horizon, like Elysium,” Katya murmured. “When you have spent all your life searching, it becomes the only way to live.”

  “And if it was Fabiu
s, he may have had treasure already, remember?” Rebecca said. “The legionaries had what they could carry, the stuff they’d looted from the Parthians at Merv, from traders along the Silk Road. And maybe they did have the jewel, the peridot.”

  A little boy suddenly appeared in the ruins in front of them. “Look,” Costas said. “There’s some of that fair hair you were talking about.” The small head bobbed up and down, coming toward them. He stopped, cocking his head, hearing but not understanding them. He darted into the dust again, then emerged above the loam wall, cautiously peering out. His hair was flaxen, more red than blond. They waved and smiled at him. Jack shaded his eyes, staring into the face. The boy’s eyes were a striking green color, almost olive. And there was something strange about the features, something fleetingly familiar. The boy scrambled over the wall and dropped down in front of them, still standing a few meters back, cautiously. His clothes were rags, and he was barefoot. He seemed suddenly assured, with the confidence of a child. He grinned at them, and held out his hand.

  “What do you give a child like that?” Katya murmured.

  Costas was still fingering the stone he had picked up earlier. He stopped turning it in his hands, then held it up so the boy could see. A light flashed across Jack’s eyes, and he realized that the stone was reflecting the hazy sunlight that was now breaking through. He glanced at it, and saw that it was a rich orange hue, translucent, like amber. He stared again. Amber. He could see an insect preserved inside, a mosquito. He saw that the stone had a hole in the center. It had evidently once had a cord through it, perhaps been worn as jewelry. It was old, worn. He saw marks on it. It looked like incised decoration, swirling. An animal, a swirling creature. Jack’s heart began to pound. He reached out for it.

  It was too late. Costas had not seen him, and tossed it to the boy. He caught it, and held it up, his face rapt with delight. The light shone through the stone. It was amber, there was no doubt about it. It could have come from thousands of miles away. Amber from the Baltic. Jack’s mind was racing. The belongings of a Roman legionary? A legionary who hailed from the Celtic north, from Gaul or Germany, even Britain? He remembered Fabius, tall, ponytailed Fabius, from the tomb carving in the jungle. Could it be? An heirloom, somehow concealed over all those years of captivity? But then this was the Silk Road. All the riches of the world had once come this way. The boy smiled impishly, and held the stone tightly in his fist. He had seen Jack’s hand. He was not giving it up. He stared at Jack with fathomless eyes. Then he was off, scampering away across the ruins. His flaxen hair suddenly seemed perfectly in place here, the color of the mountains, of the dust that rolled through the valley. The color of the Silk Road. But there was something else, something Jack knew with dead certainty. Someone had been here. He took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. Ave atque salve, frater. He turned to the others. “I wonder whether we’ve just stared into the eyes of a Roman legionary.”

  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, sh
aking 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.”