The Tiger Warrior

4

Three days later Jack stood outside on the flying bridge of Seaquest II, leaning on the railing and looking out toward the eastern horizon. The sun had risen in a clear sky for the first time since they had left the Red Sea, and Jack enjoyed the warm radiance as it reflected off the water. It had been three days not entirely to his liking. The monsoon had hit them as soon as they rounded Arabia, and they had sailed directly across the open ocean toward the southern tip of India. The only saving grace was the twenty-knot speed with the wind behind them. Jack could barely comprehend how ancient Greek and Egyptian sailors had done it, bucketing and wallowing in the swell, hundreds of miles from land with only the direction of the monsoon for navigation. It would have been a tremendous feat of courage, and sailing out of sight of land would have been their worst nightmare. Especially if they had been seasick. Jack swallowed hard, and tried to forget the last seventy-eight hours. The worst had not happened, but it had been close. He felt dog-tired, but also like the survivor of a near-fatal illness with a new lease on life. And it had also been exhilarating, the hours he had spent rooted to this spot, lashed by wind and spray, his eyes roving continuously, searching for the line of the horizon, in the tumult of the swell and flickering blackness that had seemed without end.

The captain’s face popped out of the bridge door, and a hand holding a steaming mug. “We’re entering the Palk Strait now. We’ve got a local pilot coming to navigate us through and I’m putting the ship on alert. The Sri Lankan navy’s fighting a gun battle with Tamil Tiger boats just off the northern tip, and we’ll be within range.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Jack took the mug gratefully and turned back to the sea. He watched the launch carrying the pilot come alongside, skillfully matching their speed while the pilot was hooked into a chair and winched on board. He could see land now on both sides, the southern tip of India and the northwestern coast of Sri Lanka. The narrows ahead were another obstacle facing ancient sailors, treacherous shallows and reefs that only local craft could ply. But once through, the sailors were near the end of their voyage, at the place where they met traders coming from the east, from Chryse, the semi-mythical land of gold, from the farthest places known to westerners. Jack looked at his watch. Maurice had promised that this would be the morning to reveal his find before they reached the Roman site of Arikamedu. Maurice and Aysha had been holed up continuously in the ship’s lab belowdecks, piecing together whatever it was that Maurice had brought on board from his excavation in Egypt. Jack was itching to join them. He would go down and see for himself once he had finished his coffee. Especially now that belowdecks was a realistic proposition, not the lurching nightmare of the last three days.

A hand touched his arm, and he turned to Rebecca. She was dressed in jeans and an IMU T-shirt. “Feeling better?” she said. Jack nodded, smiling. Her accent was American, and her voice was developing the depth that Jack had found attractive in her mother. Rebecca was black-haired, as Elizabeth had been, but had Jack’s blue eyes. There was a sadness in them, a sadness that would always be there, and Jack’s heart went out to a child who had experienced the loss of her mother, and had grown up apart from her real parents. Jack had only known he was a father since the appalling circumstances of Elizabeth’s disappearance and death in Naples less than a year before. Elizabeth had left him sixteen years earlier when she had succumbed to family pressure to return to Naples, and Jack realized she could only have known she was pregnant once she had been sucked back into the dark underworld from which she never found an escape. She had not wanted to risk bringing up her daughter in that world and had sent her to New York. Rebecca had grown up strong and confident under the guardianship of her mother’s friends, and when Elizabeth had explained to her the reasons why, the dark backdrop of her life in Naples, she had understood as only a child could, absorbed in the excitements of her own life. But the death of her mother had been devastating, and after Jack had first met Rebecca in New York, his friends at IMU had become a second family to her. Jack had gone with her to Naples for the commemoration held by her mother’s colleagues from the archaeological superintendency on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, overlooking the Roman site that had been Elizabeth’s lifelong work, and the modern city whose dark tentacles had taken her life. Jack knew they were still there, those who had used her, worn her down, even among her own family, but there was to be no retribution; that cycle had been the poison that killed her. His choice, the one Elizabeth would have craved, was to walk away and take their daughter with him, to create a new and exciting world for Rebecca that would help her package the past in a place where it would never threaten to take hold of her. Jack would never know whether Elizabeth had intended to tell him about their daughter, but he could not afford to dwell on it. His responsibility now was Rebecca’s happiness. He put his hand on hers. “I feel fine,” he said. “I just needed some off-time.”

“For three days? You? Dad.” She had only just begun calling him that. “It’s me, remember? You don’t need to play the hero.”

Jack gestured at what she was holding. “What’s the book?”

“A guy called Cosmas Indicopleustes. That means Cosmas, sailor of the Indian Ocean. He was an Egyptian monk who came here in the sixth century AD. I was doing background reading, like you asked. Being your research assistant. I found this in your library.”

“What does he say about Sri Lanka?”

She opened the book and read:

“The island being, as it is, in a central position, is much frequented by ships from all parts of India and from Persia and Ethiopia, and it likewise sends many of its own. And from the remotest countries, I mean Tzinitza, it receives silks, aloes, cloves and other products, and these again are passed on to marts on this side. And the island receives imports from all these marts which we have mentioned and passes them on to the remoter ports, while at the same time, exporting its produce in both directions. And farther away is the clove country, then Tzinitza, which produces the silk. Beyond this there is no other country, for the Ocean surrounds it to the east.”

She closed the book. “Okay. Tzinitza is China, the clove country is Indonesia. What he’s saying is that Sri Lanka was a kind of clearinghouse, midway between two worlds. Captain Macalister suggested I look at the Admiralty chart. I saw how treacherous this strait is, a deathtrap for big ships. So what Cosmas was saying was, ships from Egypt came here, off-loaded their stuff onto local craft, then waited. The local craft took it over the shallows to the other side, loaded it on big ships coming from the Bay of Bengal, Indonesia, even China. And the same thing happened in reverse. You can really picture it out here, those big fat-hulled Roman ships where we are now, and over there on the other side Chinese junks, with all kinds of canoes and catamarans in between. Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty cool,” Jack replied, grinning. “Cosmas was writing five hundred years after what the Romans we’re talking about at Berenike, but basically it’s the same scenario, until the Arab conquest of the Middle East and north Africa shut down the sea routes to India. Cosmas provides the most detailed account we have of the ancient trade that went on here. Good work, research assistant.”

“Think outside the box. That’s what Uncle Costas tells me.”

“Uncle Costas?” Jack said.

“Hiemy says I’m a lot like you. I don’t know whether that’s praise or not.”

“Who?”

“Hiemy. You know, your old buddy. Herr Professor Dr. Hiebermeyer. That’s what Aysha calls him, Hiemy.”

“Of course,” Jack said. “Hiemy.”

“Aysha’s in love with him, you know.”

“Hang on a second. One thing at a time.”

“Just getting you up to speed. You’ve spent the last three days with your head in the clouds.”

Jack laughed. “Well, I’ve been waiting. Hiemy’s been holed up like Caractacus Potts working on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He’s been like that ever since we were at school. Every time he calls me up with a new discovery, insists that I come and see it, I agree to go, and then he realizes he needs more time to make absolutely sure. So before going I usually wait until he’s come to see me personally three times. Then I know. It’s a fine art.”

“I’m sworn to secrecy. I could tell you what it is, but I can’t. That was his condition for allowing me to help them in the lab.”

“That’s part of the game too.” He looked into her eyes, thought for a moment, then spoke carefully. “I’ve been thinking about your mother a lot over the past days. You know when I saw her last year I hadn’t been in contact with her since before you were born and when I did see her, it was for only a few moments in the archaeological site at Herculaneum. But I’ve got a perfect memory of her from when we were together all those years ago, like a favorite old film that will never change. You’re in that film now too. It’s as if we’re a family together. I can see a lot of her in you.”

“When she told me about you the last time I saw her, she said the same about you,” Rebecca said. “She was planning to contact you after my sixteenth birthday, you know. She said she always meant to, once I was old enough to look after myself. My birthday was a month after she disappeared.” Rebecca looked at Jack with unfathomable eyes, and then draped her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulders. Jack held her tight, and smiled. “Maybe she was right,” he said. “Maybe there is a bit of me in you.”

“Not the seasick bit, I hope.”

“I do not get seasick.”

“Yeah, right.” She leaned back into the bridge and yelled, “Dr. Jack Howard, famous underwater archaeologist and commando extraordinaire, gets seasick.”

“Time you were back in school,” Jack grumbled.

“Hah. We’re on the high seas. I’ve been reading about that too. Out here, no laws apply.”

A hand clamped her shoulder, and Scott Macalister stepped out from behind her, smiling at Jack. “Young lady, only one law applies, and that is the law of the captain. Anyone signed on under the age of eighteen is my personal responsibility.” He placed an old brass sextant into her hands. “Navigation class at 1600 hours.” At that moment a white streak appeared a few hundred meters off the starboard bow. “Tracer rounds,” he said. “Everyone inside, now.” He ushered them into the bridge and shut the door, pulling down a steel plate over the window. He took out his binoculars and peered through the bulletproof glass of the front screen. “That was a spent round from the gun battle a couple of miles away, but better safe than sorry.”

“Ben’s been teaching me to shoot with a twenty-two,” Rebecca said.

“I don’t think you’re going to be taking on the Tamil Tigers with a twenty-two,” Macalister murmured, eyes still fixed to his binoculars.

“I hope you were wearing ear protection,” Jack said.

“I can look after myself.” She turned around and walked toward the rear hatch that led down to the accommodation decks.

“Maybe she does have a bit of me in her,” Jack muttered, looking apologetically at Macalister. “Teenagers.”

“Come on, Dad,” Rebecca called. “They’re ready for you in the lab. That’s what I came up to tell you. I helped Aysha with the final pieces. You’re going to love this. It’s my present to you for rescuing me from school.”

Jack felt a surge of excitement, and turned to Macalister. “Okay, Scott. Let me know when we clear the strait, will you? And I want the Zodiac prepared. Our meeting with the Archaeological Survey of India people at Arikamedu is at 0900 hours tomorrow, and I don’t want the schedule to slip.”

“Will do, Jack.” Macalister jerked his head toward the hatchway. “You’d better follow the boss.”

The main laboratory on Seaquest II was the size of a school classroom, set below the accommodation block and above the engine room. The wet cleaning and conservation of finds was carried out in a room behind, with a cluster of desalination tanks for timbers and other artifacts too delicate to be taken out of water. Jack thought of the complex like a field hospital for the stabilization of finds that would then be transferred for long-term treatment to the IMU museum at Carthage in the Mediterranean or the IMU campus in England. The lab was a dry facility for the cleaning of finds such as pottery that could safely be removed from water for short periods. Farther forward were rooms for analytical work, including multispectral imagery, thin-section petrology and mass spectrometry. The complex was designed to allow basic questions to be answered during an excavation when time might be pressing.

Jack followed Rebecca inside. Four long tables had been drawn together to form one surface, their legs locked into runnels on the floor. Above them a cluster of fixed tungsten lights bathed the tables in a warm glow. Aysha and Hiebermeyer were hunched together over a camera stand. Aysha was nudging something into place on the black baseboard under the camera, and Hiebermeyer was poised over the viewfinder, holding the remote shutter control. They looked as if they were performing a strange embrace. Rebecca glanced at Jack, pointing at them as if to rest her case. They both waited silently while Hiebermeyer clicked the shutter, and then Aysha slid the object back onto the table. Hiebermeyer turned toward them. “Jack!” In the tungsten light his face seemed to have a feverish glow, and his eyes were red-rimmed. “Sorry to keep you in the dark for so long. I just wanted to be absolutely sure.”

Rebecca went around to the far side of the table and sat on a stool, surrounded by the books and notepads she had accumulated over the past few days. Costas had also been summoned and came through the door behind Jack, and they moved to the table. On the surface were hundreds of fragments of pottery, some of them tiny, only a centimeter or two across, others the size of small saucers.

“We playing jigsaw?” Costas said.

Jack’s pulse began to race. “Ostraka!” He leaned over the table. Aysha ushered Costas to a stool. “It’s the Greek word for potsherd,” she said. “But archaeologists use it for sherds with inscriptions on them, where the pottery was used as a writing surface. In the ancient world, papyrus was a fairly valuable commodity, used only for top copies. If you wanted a writing surface for day-to-day use, for jotting notes, writing letters, composing rough drafts, you just found the nearest old amphora and smashed it up.”

Jack circled the table, staring at the sherds, his mind racing. “They’re Roman amphora fragments, Italian, first century BC or first century AD. It’s the same type as the wine amphora we saw at Berenike. And the writing’s Greek, as you’d expect in Egypt at that time. Greek was the lingua franca ever since Alexander conquered Egypt. The writing all looks as if it’s in the same hand. I’m assuming you found all of these sherds in the merchant’s house you were excavating?”

Hiebermeyer’s face gleamed. “It’s an astonishing find. I still can’t believe it.” He paused, looking Jack steadily in the eye. “You ready for this? Okay. What you’re looking at is the only known ancient text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei. The only one actually to date from the Roman period when it was first written.”

Jack gasped. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The greatest travel book to survive from antiquity. It was exactly what you might find at Berenike, in an outpost on the edge of the empire. Not a great work of literature, not a lost history or a volume of poetry, but a travel guide, an itinerary for sea captains and merchants. He cleared his throat. “Copy, or draft?” he said.

“Draft.”

Jack exhaled forcefully. Draft. This was even more extraordinary. A draft could mean emendations, material deleted from the polished version. All the rough notes that get edited out. Precious words and phrases. He peered at Hiebermeyer. “I hardly dare ask. Have you seen anything new?”

Hiebermeyer was bursting with excitement. “I saw it within days of starting the excavation at Berenike. You remember when I tried to speak to you in Istanbul? Little did I know then how many more sherds we’d find, and how long it would take. This has been an exercise in patience. I couldn’t have done it without Aysha.” He turned and looked at Aysha, who nodded. He reached over and clicked a control panel. The plasma screen on the wall beside the table showed a CGI of the sherds in 3-D, jumbled together. “This is how they looked in the excavation. We call it the archive room, but really it was more like a study. After drafting each sentence on a large amphora sherd, we believe the author transferred it to papyrus and then tossed the sherds in a corner. Some sherds survived almost intact, others broke into pieces. I realized we were going to have to record all the spatial relationships in situ if we were going to stand any hope of piecing it all back together. That’s been Aysha’s job. She’s been wonderful.”

“Somebody had better fill me in,” Costas said.

“Maris Erythraea, the Erythraean Sea, translates as Red Sea,” Aysha said. “Which to the ancients meant all the seas east of Egypt-the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, what lay beyond. Periplus means to sail around, and was the term for a nautical guide, an itinerary.”

“The nautical guide of the Erythraean Sea,” Costas murmured.

“It’s truly one of the most amazing documents to survive from antiquity,” Jack said. “The Periplus wasn’t written by an aristocrat, by a Claudius or a Pliny the Elder, but by a working man with his feet on the ground. Yet it tells of a journey far greater than any fantasy of Odysseus or Aeneas, a true-life account of exploration and trade to the nether regions of the ancient world. The whole text seemed hard to believe until archaeologists began to find Greek and Roman remains where we are now, in southern India.”

“So the guy who lived in the villa, the merchant, was the author?” Costas said.

“I’m absolutely convinced of it.” Hiebermeyer clicked the console again, revealing an aerial shot of the excavated house in Berenike they had visited three days before, looking down over the ancient port and the Red Sea. “We know from a Roman coin embedded in the foundations that the archive room was built soon after 10 BC, and the whole house was abandoned about AD 20. Because these sherds hadn’t been swept out of the room, we’re guessing that the text dates from just before the abandonment, about the early years of the reign of the emperor Tiberius.”

“You mean when the trade was beginning to decline?” Costas said. “What we were saying in Egypt a few days ago, about the emperor plugging up the bullion flow?”

“Correct. But I don’t think that was why the house was abandoned. Everything points to this man being old, retired. Aysha?”

She looked up. “Luckily, we’ve got a lot of scholarship to go on. Before this find, the earliest surviving text of the Periplus was a medieval copy dating from the tenth century AD, and it’s been studied in translation since the nineteenth century. What we’ve found confirms what many scholars have thought, but adds a fascinating new dimension. First of all, it’s clear from the vocabulary, the analogies, that he was Egyptian Greek. Second, there’s no doubt that he himself had sailed the routes described in the Periplus, as far down Africa as Zanzibar, then around Arabia to northwest India, and using the monsoon route to southern India. He’s done it enough times to know a lot about navigation, but it’s clear that he’s a merchant, not a sea captain. He’s mainly interested in naming the ports, telling how to get to them, and listing the goods to be traded there. In southern India it’s predominantly bullion, meaning gold and silver Roman coins that were exchanged for pepper and a fantastic range of other spices and exotica, some of it transshipped from far distant places.”

“Any idea of his specialization?” Costas asked.

“You remember the piece of silk we showed you at the excavation? We think that was it. He would have had contacts with the very farthest reaches of the trade, with traders who had come west through the Strait of Malacca from the South China Sea, and down through Bactria, modern Afghanistan, from central Asia. From the Silk Road.”

“I think I’ve got you,” Costas said. “The book was a retirement project. He finished it, he croaked and the house went on the market, but there were no buyers.”

“Eloquently put, as always.” Hiebermeyer pushed his little round glasses up his nose. “Unusually for an Erythraean Sea merchant, he didn’t retire to Alexandria or Rome, but seems to have stayed in the Egyptian port that had probably been his base all his working life. Perhaps he was given some sort of administrative role, maybe as duovir , prefect of the town, to supervise it during the off-season when it was largely deserted. But few wealthy men able to afford a villa actually wanted to live in Berenike, and his house was impractical, especially with the high-value trade winding down.”

“Maybe he didn’t die there.” Rebecca looked at Aysha, who nodded encouragingly. “Aysha thinks he had a wife, and she was Indian. One sherd had a female Indian name, Amrita. She showed me pictures of some of the stuff they found, other sherds with Tamil graffiti, fragments of Indian textile, pottery from southern India. Maybe the Periplus was his last say as a trader, and after finishing it he took his family and left on a final voyage to the east, never to return.”

Costas rubbed his chin. “Nice thinking. Maybe after all that time trading in India, he went native.”

Jack was absorbed in a cluster of small potsherds placed close together, clearly the remains of two large sherds which had been smashed. “Look at this,” he exclaimed. “Amazing. I can read the words Ptolemais Theron, Ptolemy of the Hunts. That’s the elephant port on the Red Sea, Costas. And over here, Rebecca, on this other sherd, I can see Taprobane. That’s what Sri Lanka was called, five hundred years before Cosmas Indicopleustes sailed here.” He straightened up and looked at Hiebermeyer. “Well? This is all fantastic. But I know you too well. What did you really want me to see?”

“Spill it, Hiemy,” Costas said.

Hiebermeyer’s eyes bored into Costas. He turned to Jack. “We’ve got a little under a third of the Periplus here, about a thousand words. It’s very similar to the tenth century copy, with only minor differences in wording and grammar. With one exception.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

Hiebermeyer pointed at a large sherd beside Rebecca, and they all crowded around. The sherd was about the size of a dinner plate, and was covered with fifteen lines of fine writing, the ink barely discernible in places against the whitish surface patina on the pottery. The text had been written within the sherd, and was not broken off at the edges. “It’s an intact section, like a paragraph,” Hiebermeyer said. “It’s where he describes sailing beyond the Arabian Gulf and looks toward India, just before reaching the port of Barygaza at the mouth of the Indus.”

“You mean the section where he puts on his archaeologist hat,” Jack murmured.

Hiebermeyer nodded. “Generally he only digressed where it was of practical value, for example showing where a certain local tribe was to be avoided, or describing an inland region to give an idea of where the trade goods came from. There are two fascinating exceptions, both concerning Alexander the Great. In one place he describes how Alexander penetrated as far as the Ganges but not to the south of India. He says how in the market in Barygaza, near the mouth of the Indus, you can find coins, old drachmas, engraved with inscriptions of rulers who came after Alexander.”

“Apollodotus and Menander, the first Seleucid kings,” Jack said.

Hiebermeyer nodded. “Western traders going to India would have been well-versed in the story of Alexander, and doubtless there were locals who saw a quick buck in passing off Seleucid coins as relics. Alexander lived in the fourth century BC, three hundred years before the Periplus was written, but the story was still so big that people coming out here might have felt the dust of conquest had barely settled. Our merchant knew all about sharp dealing and was warning his readers that the relics were bogus. He wasn’t the kind of man who was duped by these stories. That makes me think we should take his second reference seriously, what you see on this sherd.”

“I’ve spotted the word Alexandros,” Costas said, peering down at the sherd. “My ancient Greek’s a little rusty.”

“Here’s the translation.” Hiebermeyer picked up a piece of paper covered with his indecipherable handwriting. “Immediately following Barake is the gulf of Barygaza and the shore of the land of Ariake, the beginning of the kingdom of Manbanos and of all India. The inland part, which borders Skythia, is called Aberia; the coastal part is Syrastrene. The region is very fecund, producing grain, rice, sesame oil, ghee, cotton, and the Indian cloths made from it, those of ordinary quality. There are numerous herds of cattle, and the men are very large and have dark skin. To this day there are still preserved around this area traces of Alexander’s expedition: archaic altars, the foundations of encampments and huge wells”

Jack nodded. “Archaic altars. That sounds like the familiar text.”

“But not the next sentence.” Hiebermeyer paused, and pushed up his glasses. And from Margiana, the citadel of Parthia to the north of here, the Roman legionaries captured at Carrhae escaped east, taking the Parthian treasure with them toward Chryse, the land of gold.”

Jack reeled as if he had been physically struck. “That’s incredible,” he said, almost whispering. “That’s not in the Periplus.”

“Isn’t that what you were telling me about in the helicopter, Jack?” Costas said. “Crassus, his lost legions?”

“Hearsay and rumor,” Jack murmured. “Until now.” He took a deep breath, and looked at Rebecca. “After the Roman defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC, the Parthians took thousands of legionaries prisoner, possibly as many as ten thousand. Their fate fascinated the Romans for generations. The poet Horace wrote of it in one of his odes, wondering if Roman veterans had taken native wives and fought as mercenaries for a foreign ruler. Then Augustus’ son Tiberius negotiated peace with the Parthians and the captured legionary standards were returned, a great triumph for Augustus that closed the chapter on the defeat.”

“Jack showed you the coin from our shipwreck, didn’t he, Rebecca?” Costas said. “That celebrates the return of the eagles, the sacred legionary standards.”

Jack nodded, his mind racing. “The only other hint from Roman sources is in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, who says the captured legionaries were taken to Margiana, the Parthian capital in present-day Turkmenistan.”

“That’s what gives the Periplus plausibility,” Hiebermeyer said. “And look at the Alexander reference. He only tells us what he can verify. Alexander is known to have set up altars during his conquest. They could have been where Alexander took his army across the Turkmenistan desert toward central Asia.”

“Of course,” Jack replied. “Alexander went past Margiana, modern Merv. And if prisoners were escaping east from Merv, they could have passed these altars on the way east toward central Asia. It all fits.”

“Why would the author later delete this reference?” Costas asked.

“It must have been something he felt was true, but could never substantiate,” Aysha said. “Ancient coins you can hold, altars you can see, but stories are just that. We imagine he was told the story by a trader, perhaps a Bactrian or Sogdian middleman who brought him silk. But perhaps that trader had broken off contact, had disappeared without a trace as so often happened on the Silk Route. Perhaps as an old man the author may even have doubted his memory. The story of treasure on the Silk Route may have sounded like an adventurer’s fable. There was enough doubt in the end for him to strike a line through that sentence on the sherd and ditch it into the refuse pile. It was an anecdote best passed on by word of mouth, that might one day reach the ear of an encyclopedist like Pliny the Elder, and find its way into a cornucopia of fact and hearsay like the Natural History”

“And perhaps it did, but only in small part-Pliny refers to the prisoners in Merv, but nothing about the escape east,” Jack said.

“But you talked to me in the helicopter about this, Jack,” Costas said. “About how Roman legionaries might have got to China. The evidence in the Chinese annals.”

“It’s been on my mind for several months now, since I saw Katya.”

“At the Transoxiana Conference?” Hiebermeyer asked.

“Katya’s his new girlfriend,” Rebecca said matter-of-factly to Aysha. “Well, not new, exactly. He met her when he was searching for Atlantis in the Black Sea, but after that she needed some off-time. Then Dad kind of saw someone else for a while, but she was traumatized after another guy she was seeing got spread-eagled. Or something like that. Anyway, she needed some off-time as well.”

Costas coughed, and Jack stared hard at the ground, trying to keep a straight face. He cleared his throat. “As I was saying”-he shot Rebecca a look-“the Chinese connection. In the 1950s an Oxford scholar published a radical theory that Roman mercenaries were used by the Huns of Mongolia in a Chinese border war during the Han period, the Chinese dynasty at the time of the Periplus. The evidence was a reference to a formation that sounded like the Roman testudo, the tortoise, where shields are interlocked above. The battle was in 36 BC. Then a study of the Han annals suggested that Roman prisoners from the battle had been settled in a town in Gansu on the final stretch of the Silk Road toward Xian. Someone noticed that the population of the village today contains a proportion of fair-featured people, and so began the legend of the Roman legionaries in China.”

“What’s the archaeological evidence?” Costas asked.

“There’s nothing definite,” Jack replied. “But you wouldn’t expect to find much. A band of Roman soldiers after decades of imprisonment would have little with them that was recognizably Roman. Escaped soldiers could have made themselves legionary sandals for marching, and possibly rectangular wooden shields, the basis for the testudo theory. But otherwise they would have scavenged what they could on the way, weapons, armor, clothing, anything from Parthian and Bactrian to Sogdian and Han Chinese. But one thing they could have done was leave inscriptions on stone. That’s what got Katya interested. It’s right up her street. The Romans loved making inscriptions, milestones, grave markers, stamps of authority in newly conquered territory. And that’s where archaeology comes into play. A few years ago a Latin inscription was found in a cave complex in southern Uzbekistan, three hundred kilometers to the east of Merv near the border with Afghanistan.” Jack flipped through a notebook he pulled from his pocket, then opened a page with a sketch on it. “Katya drew it for me.” He showed them the letters: LICAP. LG

“Fascinating,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “The first line’s a personal name, probably Licinius. And the second line’s Apollinaris Legio, isn’t it? That’s the legion dedicated to Apollo. That was the Fifteenth legion, wasn’t it, raised by Augustus?”

Jack nodded. “Pretty good for an Egyptologist. I remember your boyhood passion was the Roman army in Germany. But this wasn’t Augustus as emperor. He raised the legion in his earlier guise as Octavian, adoptive successor of Julius Caesar. The Fifteenth Apollinaris that he raised dates from 41 BC, soon after Caesar’s assassination. That’s twelve years after the Battle of Carrhae. Over the next three centuries it spent a lot of its time in the eastern frontiers of the empire fighting the Parthians. One theory has the inscription carved by a legionary captured by the Parthians and used as a border guard, on the far eastern edge of the Parthian Empire.”

“But?” Costas said.

“I’ve never bought the idea of prisoners of war being used as border guards, let alone one of them making an inscription. Katya and I brainstormed it one day walking the walls of Merv, and came up with another hypothesis. This line from the Periplus gives it just that little bit more weight.”

“Spill it, Jack.”

“At the time of Crassus, most legions were raised for specific campaigns and usually disbanded after six years. We know very few of these legions by number or name, and the same numbers might be used repeatedly. Plutarch and Dio Cassius, the main sources for Carrhae, don’t tell us the names of the legions involved. But already a few legions were gaining legendary status, the legions that had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul and Britain in the years before Carrhae. Several of those legions survived to become the most famous of the Imperial army, cherished by Augustus because of their association with Caesar. The Seventh Claudia, the Eighth Augusta, the Tenth Gemina.”

“You’re suggesting the Fifteenth was one of these?”

“The Fifteenth was founded in 41 BC, right? That’s only a couple of years after Caesar was assassinated. The young Octavian was trying to consolidate his strength, and anything that harked back to his illustrious father was seized upon. The historians tell us that a thousand of the cavalry at Carrhae were veterans of Caesar’s campaigns. Why not one of the legions too? Our theory is that the Fifteenth Apollinaris wasn’t founded in 41 BC, it was re founded. We’re suggesting that Octavian deliberately reconstituted one of Caesar’s revered legions, one that had been shamefully lost by the incompetence of Crassus. It would have been a massive show of confidence and of reverence for past glory, exactly the kind of thing Octavian would have done.”

“Not so glorious for the surviving legionaries, chained up in Merv,” Costas said. “It would have written them off.”

“It was too late for them anyway,” Hiebermeyer said. “Even if people knew the defeat was caused by the incompetence of Crassus, the survivors still couldn’t hold their heads high. They would already have been marching with the dead, looking forward only to finding death with honor so they could join their brothers-in-arms in Elysium.”

“But you’re suggesting that some escaped prisoner was not above inscribing the name of his legion in a cave on the trek east,” Costas said.

“For the survivors, the name of the legion would still have been their binding force, even with the sacred eagle standard gone.”

“So they were still loyal to Rome.”

“They had fought for themselves, for their comrades, as soldiers always have done. They were proud of being citizen-soldiers, of having civilian professions. They were proud to fight for a commander if they respected him, if he was one among them, primus inter pares. They fought for Caesar. They fought for their families. Whether they would have fought for Rome as an empire is another matter.”

“And the legion?” Costas asked.

“The legion was sacred,” Hiebermeyer replied. “That was where loyalties lay. And within it, the cohort, the century, the contubernium, the squad of ten or twelve men who even called each other br other, frater”

“So losing the eagle was bad, big-time,” Rebecca cut in.

“The worst. A battle they could lose, Crassus they couldn’t care less about. But losing the eagle? A legion that lost its eagle would have been a legion of the dead, never able to show themselves in Rome again. Even to their families.”

“Do you think they fragged him, Crassus?” Costas said.

“Crassus signed his own death warrant as soon as he committed them to battle. They probably would have called it assisted suicide.”

“These men, if they really did survive and escape, must have been the toughest of the tough,” Aysha said.

“There are always a few,” Jack said. “Those who escape execution, who survive the beatings and the torture, who have the mental strength to endure. And some of the legionaries with Crassus were men who had been recruited five years before and fought with Caesar in Gaul. They may have been citizen-soldiers, but they were among the most ruthless killers the world has ever known. Men who killed with the spear, the sword, with their bare hands.”

“And with the legion a hollow memory, there are no checks, no controls,” Costas said.

Jack nodded. “Some of these guys in the late republic saw much more action than the professional legionaries of the empire, and the idea of their civilian lives, their jobs, became a kind of myth. But if you spend your life killing, who knows where the boundaries are? When the time comes, if it ever does, how do you know when to stop being a soldier, and become a citizen again?”

“An age-old problem,” Hiebermeyer murmured.

“If they did escape, word would have passed on the Silk Route,” Jack said. “That was bandit country, but even there the Romans’ reputation would have preceded them. You would not have wanted to encounter these guys.”

“What about the Silk Route?” Costas asked. “Are there any more inscriptions?”

“Katya’s spent the last couple of seasons roaming the mountains and passes of central Asia, searching. A lot of it’s still unexplored territory.”

“And still bandit country,” Hiebermeyer said.

“I seem to remember Katya knows how to use a Kalashnikov,” Costas murmured.

Jack opened his notebook again. “A few months ago she hit pay dirt at a place called Cholpon-Ata, on the western shore of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. That’s hundreds of miles east along the northern Silk Route from the place with the Fifteenth Legion inscription, on the edge of the Tien Shan Mountains and the pass that leads down to the Taklamakan Desert and China. For years now archaeologists have known about this place, a desolate boulder-strewn landscape where there are hundreds, probably thousands of petroglyphs, shallow-cut rock carvings of ibexes, other animals, hunters. Most were carved by Scythian nomads. But it would also have been a staging post along the Silk Route for traders who had survived the trek from the west, and before embarking on boats toward China.”

“How big is the lake?” Rebecca asked.

“It’s the second biggest mountain lake in the world after Lake Titicaca. There are many stories of sunken settlements, of treasure. There’s a lot to be found. The Soviets used the lake as a submarine and torpedo testing site.”

“Can we go?” Rebecca said. “I want to meet Katya.”

Jack smiled. “It’s on the cards. Last year, Katya stumbled across a boulder there that might have an inscription on it. The boulder was almost entirely buried, and the permit for an excavation had only just come through at the time of the conference. She’s out there now.”

“Not alone, I hope,” Aysha said.

“She has Kyrgyz collaboration,” Jack said. “That means one guy and a creaky old tractor, as far as I can tell.”

“You’ve spoken to her recently?” Costas eyed Jack.

“This morning.”

Costas grunted. “So we might be able to join some dots.”

“There’s another thing. A really fascinating idea.”

“Fire away.”

“Well, the dots might not just lead east. They might also throw a curveball south.”

“Map, Jack,” Costas said.

Aysha reached over and unrolled a map of the world on the chart table. Jack traced out the features as he talked. “The Silk Route goes west-east, from Merv in Parthia to Xian in China, through the mountains of central Asia. Lake Issyk-Kul lies at the northeastern end of that massif with only one major pass to go before you get to China. But you can also leave the route along the way and break off south. If you do that from Lake Issyk-Kul, you’ve got a huge mass of mountains to get through, really forbidding places, through eastern Afghanistan, but then you break into northern Pakistan and the jungles of India. From there, if you’re a traveler from the west in the first century BC, the Roman world is within reach again.”

Costas’ eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting that escaped Roman prisoners may have gone that way?”

Jack paused. “One of Katya’s colleagues, a man named Hai Chen, is an independent scholar based in Xian who’s made a lifelong study of the Roman connection. He encouraged Katya to explore Kyrgyzstan, the petroglyphs at Issyk-Kul. He believes passionately in the story of Crassus’ lost legionaries, but with a twist. He’s originally a linguist, an expert on analyzing foundation stories and mythology among peoples with a strong oral tradition. As a young man he spent several years in Chitral, a kind of Shangri-la in northeastern Pakistan, the first place you’d come to after breaking through the mountains from the north.”

“The people who believe they’re descended from Alexander the Great,” Hiebermeyer murmured.

“The mythologies of the region-Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist-are full of stories of travelers from afar, princes, pilgrims, holy men dispensing wisdom. Sometimes they’re on a quest, or princes on a transformative journey, like Buddha himself Imagine the Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hercules’ Labors, Moses in the desert. Sometimes the arrival fulfills a local prophecy, and the traveler becomes king.”

“Didn’t Fa-hsien come through the mountains?” Hiebermeyer asked.

Jack nodded, and glanced at Costas. “A Chinese Buddhist monk who came to India in the early fifth century AD in search of the holy texts of his religion. His Records of the Buddhistic Kingdoms is one of the great early travel books. He came to Gandhara, the ancient Buddhist state of northern India. But Katya’s colleague Hai Chen wasn’t on the trail of a Buddhist monk. He’d heard of someone else. The traveler he recorded from the oral stories was a yavana, meaning westerner. And this yavana was no monk but a warrior, one who ruled with a golden hand. He came to Chitral for a short time, and then left. Farther south Hai Chen heard another legend of a god-king called Haljit Singh, Tiger Hand. He too left, and went south.”

“Where are we leading with this?” Costas said.

“If you’re our Roman, once you get through the mountains of Afghanistan, past Chitral, the way’s open to the west. You have two options. You can travel down the valley of the Indus southwest to the head of the Indian Ocean, to the port of Barygaza, near modern Karachi in Pakistan. From there you can sail to Arabia, then the Red Sea toward home. But there was another option. If you want to make contact with fellow yavanas, with other Romans in India, the better route was to go southeast, down the valley of the Ganges to the Bay of Bengal. You’d end up passing extensive tracts of jungle in eastern India. Look at the travels of the monk Fa-hsien. He took that route, and sailed south all the way to Sri Lanka. Then look at the Periplus. It describes the same route, just looking in the opposite direction. Listen to this.” Jack picked up the modern edition of the Periplus on the table, and flicked through it until he came to the page he was looking for. “After this, toward the east and with the ocean on the right, sailing offshore past the remaining lands on the left, you come upon the land of the Ganges; in this region is a river, itself called the Ganges, that is the greatest of all the rivers in India, and which rises and falls like the Nile.” Jack gestured toward the porthole, where the shore was just visible. “Remember, the author of the Periplus was recalling being here off southern India, looking north. It was probably as far as he ever came. But he knows men who’ve come down from there, maybe Indian middlemen from Gandhara, maybe even traders who have come all the way down from central Asia-Bactrians, Sogdians, even western Han Chinese.”

“The kind of trader who would have told our yavana, our escaped Roman, which way to go,” Aysha said.

“But probably not lived long enough to guide him there,” Jack said. “All a Roman legionary needed was a pair of stout marching sandals and a clear view of the sun and stars. With that, he was set. A guide would never have kept up with him.”

“It’s all about the monsoon, isn’t it?” Costas said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, why a legionary looking for fellow Romans might not go to this place at the mouth of the Indus, Barygaza,” he said, pointing at the map. “It’s a lot closer to Egypt. But ships can sail there from the Red Sea pretty well year round, hugging the coast, sometimes taking a direct open-sea route during the monsoon season. There was no need for a permanent western presence at Barygaza, to maintain the port during the off-season. The native traders could do that. But the south of India was a different story. I take it the Egyptian shippers only got there and back during the monsoon season, taking the open-sea route across the Indian Ocean?”

Jack nodded. “The coastal route down western India was too treacherous. The author of the Periplus makes that pretty clear. It was like the Skeleton Coast of west Africa, beset with reefs and infested with pirates.”

“So for half the year Arikamedu and the other south Indian ports are empty of business. But it’s crucial that they operate during the sailing season. You need people there during the off-season, your own people, people you trust. That’s my point. If you’re going to search for fellow Romans in India, you go south, not west. That’s what our traveler would have been told. And that’s what this is all leading to, isn’t it? We’re talking about a grizzled old legionary who wants to make contact. Maybe he’s too ashamed to go home, but something drives him to try, some hope, a dream.”

“Maybe he had a family, all those years ago in Rome before he marched off to war,” Aysha said. “They were citizen-soldiers. They had a life before joining up.”

“We can only speculate,” Jack said. “Maybe he had a dream, cherished over all those years of captivity. Going to Barygaza might have put him on a ship to Egypt, yet with little foreknowledge of what to expect, committing him to discovering a truth he may never have wanted. But going to the south of India, to Arikamedu, would have put him directly in contact with other Romans. They would have told him of the civil wars, of the new order, the sweeping away of all that had been before, the passing of the Rome he had known. Maybe he would have had some hint of this from traders they’d encountered on the Silk Route, but he needed to know for certain. Maybe he knew all along that a return voyage could never be more than a fantasy, laden with disappointment and grief. But he still had to make contact, a yearning that could only be satisfied by talking to those who had come from the world he had left.”

Hiebermeyer peered at Jack. “It sounds as if Katya’s colleague might have been following this trail. Did he go farther south?”

Jack pursed his lips. “He was planning an expedition to the tribal peoples of eastern India. Katya said he’d had a revelation about some character in Hindu mythology, a Roman connection. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, but he was secretive about it, didn’t want her to get involved. Katya thinks it was here, just in from the Godavari River Delta.” Jack pointed to a spot north of Arikamedu, in from the east coast of India. “He was going to reveal everything to Katya when he got back. He was due at the Transoxiana Conference, but never made it. That was almost four months ago.”

“Is any of his research published?” Hiebermeyer asked.

“No. He was always secretive. Katya said he always seemed to regret anything he revealed. He was suspicious of everyone around him. And it wasn’t just a scholar with unorthodox ideas battling against the academic establishment. She said it was as if he had some great secret. He thought he was being followed. He always seemed to be putting people off the scent. Katya said he’d been like that as long as she could remember.”

“So how can we trust what he told Katya?” Hiebermeyer asked.

“Because he’s her uncle,” Jack replied.

“Her uncle!” Costas exclaimed. “Good God. This gets more mysterious by the minute. Uncles tell their nieces things, don’t they? And they’re both archaeologists, linguists. He must have let her in on a bit more of the secret. Didn’t she say anything to you?”

“She said he was like one of the Silk Route explorers of a hundred years ago, searching for an elusive treasure he could never seem to find.”

“What treasure, Jack?”

Jack paused. “You’re right. Katya knew more than she was letting on, but I wasn’t going to press her. One thing did happen, though. In the hotel at the conference she showed me her uncle’s work on Chitral. It was his doctoral thesis, one of the few times he wrote anything down. She hadn’t read the section before about the legend of the god-king called Haljit Singh, Tiger Hand. When she read that, she visibly paled. I told her about an artifact I had and where it came from, and she nearly fainted. After that she said nothing. End of topic. But she was more troubled than usual. I think there are dark forces at play. Someone who wants her uncle stopped. And that was when she began to get seriously worried about his whereabouts.”

“So is that really why we’re going to the jungle, Jack? To find Katya’s uncle? To find what he was after? The elusive treasure?”

Jack stared at the map for a moment, then looked out of the lab at the open door of his day cabin. “There’s more to it than that. A lot more.” He glanced at the clock. “We’re due at Arikamedu early tomorrow morning. Before that, there’s something I want you all to see. A little treasure trove of my own.”