The Eden Legacy

THIRTY-THREE
I

Knox arrived at the foot of the steps to find himself in a large room of much the same size and shape as the boathouse above, tall enough that he could only just touch its ceiling with his fingertips. To his immense relief, there were no horrors waiting for him. In fact, the place looked rather dull. A dehumidifier and an air-conditioning unit stood at the far end. There was metal-rack shelving against the near wall, wooden bookshelves against the far, and a spine of processing tables running down the middle, fitted with power-points for computers and other equipment, buttressed by a three-drawer filing cabinet. The top two drawers were empty, but hanging folders in the bottom contained salvage licences, correspondence and contracts with MGS, and a report Emilia had written about her visit to England in which she noted the promises of secrecy she’d exacted from all MGS project members. Knox couldn’t have asked for a better way to explain himself to Rebecca than by bringing her here and giving her this to read.

He put it back, glanced at the shelves either side of him. He could see the books he’d given Emilia on the treasure fleets and on underwater archaeology, along with rows of other textbooks and printed out articles. But it was the metal shelving that drew him. Most of the racks were empty, awaiting the start of salvage. But there were a dozen or so white plastic tubs, a few boxes too. The first tub contained several handfuls of silver pieces-of-eight; but that was the only sign of the Winterton he found. Everything else was distinctively Chinese or impossible to attribute. Tubs of shattered ceramics sat next to others of rusted nails, ironwork and Ming coins. Elsewhere, several pieces had somehow survived largely intact. Most were rough-and-ready coarse-ware, but two were of a different order altogether. With great care, Knox picked up a blue-and-white bowl, turned it around in his hands. It was as fine a piece of eggshell porcelain as he’d ever seen, let alone handled. And it was flawless, as far as he could tell, without chip or crack, only the very slightest discolouration in the exquisitely painted pomegranates, grapes and lychees that decorated its exterior. One quite similar had sold for over two million dollars at auction a year or so before. Cheung had kept gloating about it, how rich they were all going to be. And here this was, just sitting on a shelf.

He set it down, picked up an enamelled flask instead, gorgeously decorated with dragons front and back. He walked a little further on. At the end of the shelf, he found an ornately carved wooden box filled with tissue paper. He pulled it aside to expose a fragment of black ceramic. His heart began to race a little as he reached in and carefully picked it up. It was evidently of a kneeling man, though he was missing his head and his feet and much of the left side of his body. A broken stem protruded a millimetre or so from his back. It wasn’t the piece itself that so shook him, however. It was the style of it. Because it didn’t look Chinese at all.

It looked Chimu.