by Tom Pollack
Yang strained against Cain’s grip, utterly shocked by the meddlesome foreigner. The two locked eyes.
Yang’s men readied spears to slay the disrespectful bystander.
“Hold!” Yang ordered. Strangely, he found himself impressed by the old merchant’s courage.
Cain gradually relaxed his grip and feigned an innocent grin. It took only a split second, but why had he gotten involved? These men were ruthless. What did it matter to him if another old merchant was slain?
“On your knees, for now you take his place!” commanded the angered leader. With that, Cain was quickly pressed to the ground by other bounty hunters who had rushed forward.
He was at their mercy.
Fearing Yang would need to save face in front of his men, Cain prepared for the blow.
Meanwhile, several soldiers held up wanted posters made of the finest silk paper bearing the images of Cain and Kwok-se for the crowd to view. Obviously, Li Si had spared no expense for this mission. No doubt other supporters, friends and relatives of the First Emperor had already been rounded up as the prime minister consolidated his grip on power.
Cain glanced up and noticed the leader examining him in detail. Was his gray hair showing its dark roots? He regretted not wearing a hooded cloak. He could feel beads of perspiration mixed with rainwater dripping down his cheek—would it smudge his makeup and give him away? Seconds later, his hair was violently pulled upward. Cain yelped in pain as a clump of hair was ripped from his scalp.
Yang examined the silvery strands for a moment and then demanded, “Where did you see these fugitives?”
“I only saw one of them—this man,” Cain replied, pointing a shaky finger toward the illustration of Kwok-se. “It was on the southern branch of the Silk Road just a couple weeks ago. He was staying east of here, in Hotan. He was badly wounded, I would guess from a fall off his horse. Judging from his shattered leg and other injuries, there is no doubt he is still there recovering!” Cain sensed he’d spun a credible tale.
“You may survive yet, brave one,” Yang smirked as he motioned for his men to release the informer at his feet. Then in a blur, he thrust his weapon into the neck of the elderly man Cain had earlier saved. Yang held his stance for a few seconds before withdrawing his sword in a single motion.
“Not even a sound, old man!” he cruelly exclaimed while deftly wiping his crimson blade on the shoulder of his victim.
Cain gasped as his tunic absorbed the errant arterial spray.
“Let this be a warning to all who would lie about the whereabouts of these fugitives.” Yang stared downward at Cain as he delivered his proclamation. “We know that Philo of Alexandria aided a royal concubine to wear a wig and pose as an old woman to escape her glorious fate in Qin Shihuangdi’s tomb! But we found her anyway and buried her alive! Be on the lookout for these fugitives,” he barked, gesturing toward the posters being tacked to the nearby posts. “Young Philo of Alexandria will himself be disguised as an elderly man.”
A nervous buzz emanated from assembled traders as they heard Lijuan’s morbid obituary. Then, in hopes of collecting the prime minister’s generous bounty, a crowd gathered around the illustrations of Cain and Kwok-se.
The bounty hunters checked other elderly men in the crowd by pulling their hair, but finding no impostors or anyone resembling Philo, the imperial trackers swiftly departed for Hotan. Yang ordered a few men to stay behind in Kashgar and confine Cain to house arrest at his inn. He knew Yang would be back, and when he returned, Cain’s only reward for his “cooperation” would be a sword.
After a restless sleep during which he worried about the fate of his friend, Cain awakened. He had no intention of lingering in Kashgar as Yang’s prisoner, and something he’d seen that morning gave him an idea. Many of Yang’s men, it appeared, had also been victims of their leader’s brutality, and the guards here at the inn were no exception. Cain reckoned that the men, once outside of Yang’s purview, might lack the discipline of professional soldiers.
To his delight, loud snores greeted Cain’s ears as he tiptoed to his door, and he wasted no time. Slipping out his window in the dead of night, he stole a couple horses from a barn on the outskirts of town and rode swiftly to the west, swearing to remain far away from China until everyone living there was long dead.
While Yang may have possessed some expert trackers, Cain, of course, was a master fugitive. Plus, the previous morning’s cloudburst had fortunately grown into a steady downpour, promptly covering his tracks.
Once he was well clear of Kashgar, Cain isolated himself in mountainous terrain far off the Silk Road. Relying on skills he’d last employed thousands of years earlier, he would live off the land until the passage of generations cleansed his past. The imperative of survival now trumped any commercial ambitions or desires for companionship. Cain only wished he could have found and warned his friend Kwok-se. Hopefully, he had ventured nowhere near Hotan.
***
In 160 BC, Cain finally determined it was safe to end his solitary existence, and he returned to the Silk Road. With its steadily increasing traffic from all parts of the world, the Silk Road now reminded Cain of a picturesque version of Alexandria, elongated and rural, where mountains reared their majestic crests and time had slowed down.
As in the great Egyptian city, he met scores of intriguing travelers from every conceivable culture. He sharpened his multilingual abilities as well as his commercial talents. The Silk Road, many times longer than the Nile River, became his nomadic home, and he easily disappeared into its cosmopolitan fabric. Living in thriving towns along its southern and western span, Cain continued to marry and raise families, but he inevitably abandoned them all. With no permanent home, he buried his wealth in dozens of secret hiding spots along the famous trading route. As on the Nile many centuries before, he was constantly on the move, following the calling and curse of his immortality.
***
Eventually arriving in Syria 150 years after leaving China, Cain deemed it a good place to try to commercialize a process he had first seen long ago in his great wandering—the fusion of intense heat and sand. Experimenting with blast furnaces, new tools, and different types of sand, he set up a glass factory and presciently retained an ownership interest in its output. The locals were expert craftsmen and responded well to his tutelage. With their distinctive shapes and hues, some of the blown-glass pitchers manufactured there were nearly crystal-clear, and they soon became wildly popular with Mediterranean traders. With the injection of colorful minerals and pigments, glassmaking now became an art form, and the price of the wares soared.
Just before dusk one evening, Cain entertained a group of Egyptian traders at his manufacturing plant. During contract negotiations over pitchers of beer, they delivered devastating news: the Great Library of Alexandria had burned to the ground during a war between Emperor Julius Caesar and a rival. The Romans were fighting for control of Alexandria when dozens of ships in the harbor were set ablaze, and flames aided by strong winds jumped ashore. The library caught fire and all of its contents were incinerated.
Two hundred years of accumulated knowledge was now a pile of ash and rubble.
After hearing the tragic story, Cain excused himself from the party and went out for a walk. He felt ill. For fifty years he had been a contributing scholar at the Great Library, and now all of his maps, detailed charts, and translations of ancient cultures were obliterated. He would never again be able to walk the halls of the Great Library and read the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Plato, or Archimedes. All of the irreplaceable knowledge contained in the medical school and astronomy labs was lost. It was a disaster.
Cain leaned against a tree and placed his head in his hands. He had planned to contribute to the Great Library again one day, but now that was impossible. Was there nothing humans could build that would last forever? The pyramids were still standing after more than two thousand years, but even their sealed treasures buried under millions of quarried stones were still vulnerabl
e to industrious grave robbers and foreign conquerors. After all, the pyramids were sitting aboveground in plain sight.
It was then his concentration was interrupted by an accounting scribe who had dutifully followed him outside. He also had news to report.
“Sir, please excuse me for sneaking up on you,” he said, noting Cain’s startled look, “but as ordered, the small shipment of glass we sent to Babylon to test the market price has returned with full payment.”
He handed Cain a papyrus scroll with the transaction numbers. Cain’s moist eyes bulged when he unrolled it and saw the figures.
“What? This can’t be right—it says the blown glass fetched more than its weight in gold!”
“Yes sir. The Persian royalty eagerly purchased almost all of it! Our men reported that the farther they traveled from here, the more kings and queens along the Silk Road would pay!”
A golden sun was just about to set, and the rays struck the interior of Cain’s warehouses. He stared at the papyrus ledger in his hands and glanced back over his shoulder to see crates full of sparkling blown-glass products stacked high inside his plant. In anticipation of the arrival of Egyptian customers, he had increased production significantly. These merchants intended to purchase his entire product line, albeit at a substantial discount from the prices in Babylon.
Looking up at the half-moon overhead, Cain wondered what astronomical price the glass would fetch if he carted it all to Xi’an, the extreme eastern point of the Silk Road. Enough time had passed, and it was safe to go back there again. Furthermore, he had heard reports that the Han dynasty was very stable and experiencing a new age of remarkable prosperity.
Rolling up the scroll, and jovially slapping it on the back of his now promoted scribe, Cain made his decision. Later that evening, the surprised glass merchants from Alexandria were bitterly disappointed.
Their sole supplier, and the most valuable commodity in the world, were headed to China.
CHAPTER 55
Xi’an 49–2 BC
WHEN HE ARRIVED BACK in Xi’an, Cain found the city changed considerably from his time there during the reign of the First Emperor. Back in those days, Xi’an had the flavor of an improvised capital. Now, more than a century into the Han dynasty, bureaucracy ruled. But Cain was no stranger to bureaucrats, having witnessed layers upon layers of Egyptian officialdom firsthand.
He discovered that Kwok-se’s old estate was for sale. Perhaps for sentimental reasons, he paid an exorbitant price to the owners who had, in turn, purchased it from the last of his old friend’s descendants. Lining the pockets of the estate agents in charge of the sale allowed him to avoid objections to his foreign origins.
“Now you can relax,” he told himself. From the sale of blown glass to the imperial dynasty, Cain had more money than he would ever need, and Kwok-se’s estate afforded complete privacy. At last, he could surrender the nomadic life without misgiving. The main veranda, the old venue for tea with Kwok-se, was his favorite spot. By day and by night, he passed many hours simply staring at the river, pondering things past, present, and to come.
Even in such idyllic surroundings, however, Cain never entered into a haven of true spiritual repose. Memories sometimes delighted him, but other times they gnawed at him. There was little purpose in his life, he felt. And Xi’an, despite its picturesque local color, served as a reminder of the most bizarre irony in his whole experience: the obsessive quest of the First Emperor for immortality, and the dismal culmination of that quest.
How could he achieve serenity? Could he ever see his fellow human beings, or himself, in even half a redemptive light? These gnawing questions brought him to the edge of despair. His existence just seemed to drag on.
***
One evening in 31 BC, while standing on the veranda gazing at the sky, Cain called aloud upon God.
“For what have you made me? What would you have me do?” The frost of his breath ascended toward the stars, but quickly dissipated, bringing to mind the grain sacrifice God had rejected in his youth. Characteristically, no answer was forthcoming.
However, several nights later in a dream, Cain was haunted by the grievous story of the Alexandrian Library in ruins. Yet, he awoke the next day with a fresh insight. He recalled how, after the death of Tanith, he had found comfort and a sense of value in his role as a bard, preserving history through oral tradition. Now, so many centuries later, how much more was he, and he alone, equipped to preserve and convey the great arc of human endeavor? By the time he finished breakfast, the aftermath of a bad dream had been transformed into a compelling obsession: Cain determined that he would use his flawless memory to recreate and archive as many of the Great Library’s contents as possible
In a mere five years he had completed his transcriptions of the Homeric epics, as well as the plays of Aeschylus, including dramas authored by that master tragedian after Cain had left Athens for Persia. Having read them in the Great Library, he could recall them word for word. He also transcribed everything of Sophocles and Euripides, as well as a number of other tragedians from the golden age of Greek drama.
He then moved on to history, philosophy, science, and mathematics, with special attention to the theorems and doctrines of Pythagoras. Cain considered that these would be especially valuable for posterity, since Pythagoras wrote very little and his teachings were known almost exclusively from oral tradition.
Cain did not confine himself to texts, however. There was much to be known from drawings and scale models. He busied himself with sketchings for a scale model of Noah’s ark, and also with reproducing the drawings he had made in Egypt for Menes and Ramesses. Then he turned to maps and charts. Cartography, after all, had been one of his most beloved vocations, both in Alexandria and in China.
Twenty years later, in 2 BC, he had virtually completed the archive. Now, his challenge was how to preserve it. Mindful of the First Emperor’s great mausoleum, he considered subterranean caves, but he rejected that idea because humidity levels underground would eventually ruin the texts, if not the other artifacts. What he needed was a damage-proof repository that would still preserve the texts.
While reviewing a detailed map of the Mediterranean coastlines, a solution for the site of his archive came to him. He recalled the volcanic mountain he had seen long ago to the south of Rome. He had heard that it was now called Vesuvius. The mountain lay within the territory of the Romans, who had become the masters of the Mediterranean and most of the western world. If he acquired land near this mountain to establish his museum, would it not turn out to be the safest location for his treasures? For, when the volcano eventually erupted again, the ash would seal everything indefinitely, affording Cain the opportunity to play another unique role—the arbiter of the moment in the future when all these treasures of history could be “discovered” and revealed to the world.
***
Reflecting on his labors in retrospect, he realized that gradually, almost imperceptibly, the project had afforded him the serenity that seemed so elusive a quarter of a century before. He recalled his dream of the ruined library, and also the clear, chilly evening on the veranda when he had called upon God for a direction in his life.
Had God answered after all?
As he pondered the question, he came to realize that his archiving work had rooted him in the same place far longer than any previous era of his life after the flood, save for his stay in the prison at Babylon. Why this blessed relief from a lifetime of wandering? If these endeavors, however unwittingly, were gaining him favor with his Maker, could he somehow obtain a reprieve from his infernal existence?
Then, it hit him: he would offer all this excellent work to God. Perhaps the one who had rejected his original, ill-fated offering would now accept this archive of humanity’s achievements as a substitute and remove his curse at last.
Cain lowered his head.
“Eternal One. You have made me a vagabond on this earth for eons. Until now, I have known no peace. Yet here I bow before you wit
h the product of all I have learned and done during that time. If my very best work is acceptable in your sight, I give it now to you. Do with it as you will.”
Accustomed as he was to silence in response to his infrequent petitions, Cain nevertheless yearned for an intelligible answer.
The next night, as he was finalizing his constellation maps, he noticed a strange object in the heavens. Using his telescope to study the western sky, he was astonished to see a brand-new celestial body that shouldn’t have been in the constellation Leo. It certainly hadn’t been there the night before. On the brightness scale devised by his old friend Hipparchus in Alexandria, the star—or whatever it was—rivaled the planet Jupiter. Cain decided at once to observe the star carefully and to consult his Chinese astronomer friends.
It was now late fall, and the skies were usually clear. Night after night, he viewed the new star, which, if anything, was becoming brighter than ever. He rejected the idea that it was a comet. Comets moved in orbits, and this celestial body appeared to remain in the same position.
After several weeks of observations, he made up his mind. It was time to begin the journey west to the archive’s ultimate home, but he would investigate the strange star along the way. By his calculations, it appeared to be in a stationary position directly over the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. Surely it was being observed by astronomers in that region. Longing to know more about the star, Cain decided to sell the estate, pack up his entire archive of historical treasures, and organize hundreds of camels and attendants into a caravan that would take him over four thousand miles to the city of Antioch.
CHAPTER 56
Antioch: 1 BC
