The Tiger Warrior

12

Lake Issyk-Kul, Kyrgyzstan

Katya Svetlanova leaned back against the boulder, shifted slightly to find a more comfortable position and stretched out her legs on the hard baked ground. She put down her digital SLR camera and tightened her long dark hair in the band behind her neck. She looked at the boulder beside her. Swirling forms had been carved into the rock-snow leopards, leaping ibex, a mysterious solar symbol. The carvings had once been painted in primal colors, in blood and ochre, but were now barely discernible, eroded by the wind and scorched by the sun. They had been carved more than two thousand years ago by the Scythian hunters who had roamed these steppelands, who had sat where she was and gazed out over the lake and the mountains. They were ancestors of the Kyrgyz who still lived up here, her own mother’s ancestors, nomads who knew the power of the shaman. It was a sacred place, a burial ground, where she could still sense the nomad smells of horses and mutton and sweat, yet it was also a place where others had passed through, extraordinary people-adventurers, traders, warriors, people from immeasurably far to the east and the west. Somewhere there must be an imprint of their passing. She had been photographing the carvings, taking advantage of the long shadows of the late afternoon. It had been a hard day, as every day was out here. Each new boulder offered the promise of an extraordinary discovery, yet the one she craved the most was still eluding her.

She swayed slightly, and the carvings came in and out of view, like a hologram. She was dead tired. It had been five relentless weeks, and now there were only a few days left. She remembered how long the great explorers of the Silk Route had spent searching for lost treasures-decades, a lifetime. Most never found what they had been seeking-fabled lost kingdoms, Alexander’s treasure, the Seventh Preciosity, treasures forever just beyond their grasp. Maybe the shamans were right, and this place truly was a heavenly domain, its greatest revelations only attainable to those who took one step farther into the afterlife. Maybe archaeology was really like this, and her time with Jack Howard and IMU hunting for Atlantis had been a magical whirlwind, seducing her into thinking that there was more to life than a career in the Institute of Palaeography in Moscow, studying other people’s discoveries. Jack had warned her, but she needed to find out for herself She needed to find out whether she had finder’s luck.

She took a deep swig from her water bottle, then looked down to where the remarkable blue water of Issyk-Kul lapped the rocky shoreline only a stone’s throw away. It was like an inland sea, stretching off to the Tien Shan Mountains to the south, their snowcapped peaks forming a breathtaking backdrop.

Somewhere beyond lay Afghanistan, the forbidding mass of the Hindu Kush Mountains, the passes that led down to India-the Khyber Pass to the east, the Bolan to the west. But the Tien Shan Mountains girt the lake like the battlements of some impregnable castle, and it seemed inconceivable that anyone should have passed through them. Always the eye was drawn east and west, along the Silk Road-the greatest trade route the world had ever known. To the east, the mountains dipped toward the Taklamakan Desert and the heartland of China, toward the fabled city of Xian. To the west, the route led through Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan and Persia, and then to the shores of the Mediterranean. As the setting sun cast a rosy tint across the lake, coloring it in streaks of red, Katya shifted around to look at the edge of the canyon that led up from the west to the lake. She always felt uneasy coming up that road, as she knew ancient travelers would have. It was a place her Kyrgyz grandmother had warned her about, haunted by demon-warriors on dark steeds who lurked in every ravine, ready to devour any traveler who strayed into their domain. Katya knew these nomad myths for what they were, folk memories of conquest and horror, of the Huns, the Mongols, human hurricanes that swept through from the east. They were her ancestors too, not of her mother but of her father. She had thought of him lately, the modern-day warlord, of seeing his violent death in the Black Sea two years before, with Jack at her side. She had tried to remember her father before temptation had caught him up and swept him away, like the tides of greed and war that had once coursed through these mountain passes. It was in her blood too, but she could not forgive him, and she knew the weight of this place lay in her search for redemption, in her yearning to find strength in her Kyrgyz ancestry, to hear the words of the shaman in these rock carvings.

“Katya!” A rangy figure appeared above the boulders a hundred yards away. “We’re ready.” She sprang to her feet, waved and picked up her camera. She loved seeing Altamaty, his bounding enthusiasm. She had not yet told him what she was really after up here. She was still wary of goalposts, uncertain what failure could do to her. But she suddenly felt revitalized. Standing up, she could see the enormity of their task, a sea of boulders stretching for kilometers along the shore of the lake, and extending for hundreds of meters up the mountain slope where they had been dislodged and brought down over the centuries by flood and earthquake. She and Altamaty had documented almost three hundred carvings already, yet there were dozens of square kilometers still to explore, each boulder to be painstakingly examined, half of them requiring excavation from the rock-hard earth. Maybe she had bitten off more than she could chew. She remembered Jack again, his offer of a research position at IMU. She would have complete freedom, unlimited resources and could continue to be based out here. But she was the only one in the Institute in Moscow who could stand up for her colleagues against the bureaucracy and corruption. She was her father’s daughter-her father of the old days, the professor and art historian who had founded the Institute. In truth her feelings had been too raw, and she had found it impossible to accept anything from Jack. Her father had become everything she stood against, a scion of the antiquities black market, a warlord who had taken on the trappings of his ancestors. He had become her enemy, and Jack had destroyed him. But she still had a fire within her, the fierce loyalty of a daughter, the tribal bonding of a warrior clan. Seeing Jack at the Transoxiana conference three months before had brought it all back. She needed to find her own peace before she took any outstretched hand.

She slung her camera, and began scrambling over the boulders. She remembered something else Jack had told her. You need luck, but you also need to take risks, to be willing to put everything behind a gut instinct. For Jack that meant committing research ships, his team, Costas, all the paraphernalia of underwater exploration. She looked at the boulders extending in every direction like a giants’ cemetery, and at her little tent by the lake. Out here she needed a small army of fieldworkers, and a camp like a military forward operating base. She stopped and took a deep breath. Maybe the time had come to accept that offer. She had not let herself down. She and Altamaty had done all they humanly could. She needed to contact Jack anyway, to find out if he had made any progress in locating her uncle in the jungle. She had been nagged by anxiety for weeks now, and she needed to know. And she wanted to hear his voice. She would set up the satellite phone that evening.

An engine coughed to life and settled into the chugging rumble of a diesel four-cylinder. Katya crested a rise and saw Altamaty ahead, his cholpak felt hat bobbing above the boulders. He was sitting astride their sole piece of mechanical equipment, a venerable British Nuffield tractor that had somehow found its way up from India into central Asia, part of a reinvigorated Silk Route trade that had come with the fall of the Soviet Union. Katya had become quite fond of it, despite the roar and the belches of black smoke. It was their warhorse, and as long as it fired up there was still hope. She jumped from rock to rock and came down in the small open space in front of the tractor, holding up her hand to Altamaty as she cast an eye over the chain and protective leather strap that extended from the tractor’s bucket around a half-buried boulder. It had become their end-of-day ritual: Altamaty would maneuver the tractor to a promising boulder they had flagged earlier, near one of the rough tracks that ran up from the lake. She eyed today’s candidate. In this case, the boulder that needed moving had fallen against a promising stone, and the space between had filled with hard earth which Altamaty had spent most of the afternoon digging out to get the chain around the rock.

Katya squatted down, inspecting the chain and the horsehide wrapped around it to protect the surface of the rock. The horsehide was getting frayed, but would be fine for today. Providing the chain held. She looked at the slack line of links leading to the tractor. Altamaty had salvaged the chain from an old patrol boat rusting in the shallows nearby, a legacy from the time when the Soviets had used the lake as a secret naval testing base. He had trained here himself as a marine conscript in the 1980s before being sent to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. He said he trusted old Soviet technology more than he did new Russian, even if it was rusty. Katya had to take his word for it. She stood, gave him a thumbs-up then retreated a safe distance over the boulders. She crouched behind one. Altamaty crouched too, behind a barrier of salvaged metal plates he had rigged in front of the steering wheel as protection if the chain should break. Katya put up her hand as a signal, then let it drop. She ducked her head and crossed her fingers. It was like scratching a lottery card each time, and usually about as successful. But this could be the one. They were close to the western defile, the eroded canyon that led up to the lake. If they were ever going to find an inscription from a traveler this would be the place, where the caravans would rest and recuperate, not up the slope where most of the Scythian petroglyphs had been found.

She shut her eyes tight. She heard Altamaty put the tractor in reverse gear, slowly lower the throttle lever until the engine was a roaring crescendo and then gently release the clutch. The entire surface of the ground seemed to throb. She opened her eyes and watched the tractor inch backward, a meter, then two. It came to a halt, and reared upward until the front wheels were off the ground, and then the noise abated and it lurched back down. Altamaty stood up and waved. Katya got to her feet, and saw that the boulder had been pulled upright, jamming against another rock to its rear. There was no way of pulling it out farther. But the rock they were trying to uncover looked accessible, covered only by a layer of loose dirt. Altamaty pulled on the hand brake, leaving the engine in idle, and jumped down with a trowel and brush in his hands. By the time Katya came over he was already in the hole cleaning the rock. It had clearly once been upright, and been pushed over by the boulder they had just moved, probably dislodged in a flash flood. She saw that the exposed surface was flat, at least a meter across in both directions. She held her camera at the ready. It looked perfect. But she steeled herself for disappointment. Her colleagues at the Institute had told her it was a wild-goose chase. Bactrians and Sogdians, the traders who passed through here, did not even carve stone inscriptions. But then she remembered Jack. He said you had a feeling, impossible to describe. She crossed her fingers tight.

Altamaty stood up, his back to her, blocking her view. She put her right hand on his faded old combat jacket. She realized she was bunching it up, holding it tight in her fist. For a moment they were still. Then she realized he was trembling, shaking. She had held him before, but never felt this. He was laughing. She relaxed completely, all the tension gone, let her hand drop, grinned insanely and began to shake with laughter herself, the first time since she could remember. Something had let go inside her, and she had not even seen the rock yet. Altamaty turned, and she saw his craggy, handsome face beaming at her. “I’m not a scholar of Latin,” he said in Kyrgyz. “And I’ve never been west of Afghanistan, but when I was a boy I read all the books I could find on the Romans. I recognize that.”

She followed his finger, then gasped and put her hand back on his shoulder, steadying herself She knelt down, and looked hard. She remembered Jack again. Those first few moments are crucial. You might never see it again. Forget the euphoria. Be a scientist. With the sun low in the sky the contrast was perfect, and even the slightest undulation on the surface of the rock was visible. She quickly took a dozen photographs, using three different settings. She remained stock-still, fearful that the image would disappear. It was an eagle. She pulled a clipboard out of her bag, and flipped through the pages until she found the right one. She was looking at a drawing made by her uncle in a cave in Uzbekistan, more than four hundred kilometers to the west of here. Beside the drawing was Jack’s handwriting, notes made when they had pored over the drawing at the conference three months ago. She looked at the stone again, and back at the clipboard. There was no doubt about it. It was the same. Carved by the same hand . She stood up, staggering slightly. “I’ve got to go back to the yurt,” she said, her voice shaking. “I need to get to the satellite phone.”

“What is it?” Altamaty said. “What have we found?” She looked at his weatherworn features, the beguiling blue eyes. She hugged him tight for a moment. She could smell his sheepskin jerkin, the tang of sweat, feel his stubble against her cheek. She felt extraordinarily good. She let go, and shouldered her bag. She also felt extraordinarily tired. She needed to make that call before she collapsed. But she wanted Altamaty to hear it first. “In all of your reading about the Romans,” she said, “did you ever come across the story of Crassus’ lost legionaries?”