The Tiger Warrior (21 page)

Pradesh coughed, glancing at the shirt. “So I see. Holiday?”

“Work,” Jack said.

Pradesh looked out at the river. “I’m extremely grateful,” he said. “Even the smallest find at this site is worth its weight in gold. And the riverbed could be our treasure trove. Now, please excuse me for a few minutes while I let my people know.” He hurried off to a group of divers organizing equipment on the jetty, and Jack turned toward the main excavated area of the site. What had the author of the
Periplus
seen when he had disembarked here at this spot, two thousand years ago? It was a jungle clearing on a riverbank, an area smaller than a soccer pitch. In his mind’s eye Jack saw mud-brick walls, narrow alleys, flat-roofed warehouses; a line of Roman amphoras along the wharfside, crates of red-glazed pottery from Italy. Arikamedu was like Berenikê on the Red Sea, functional to the point of impoverishment, with no temples, no mosaics—a bartertown on the edge of the unknown, yet a place that belied the enormous value of the goods that passed through it; every scrap of pottery preserved unique evidence for one of the ancient world’s most extraordinary endeavors.

“Jack!” Hiebermeyer came bounding up, followed by Aysha and Rebecca. He was pouring sweat. “You remember at Ostia, the port of Rome? The Square of the Merchants, with all the little offices? That’s what we’ve got here, this warehouse building. It’s like a stable, with each stall being for one merchant, one firm. And you won’t believe whose office we’ve just found. Aysha spotted it.”

An Indian student came up with a finds tray. Aysha carefully took a plastic bag from it and extracted a worn pot sherd. “It’s local, south Indian manufacture of the late first century BC.”

“There’s graffiti on it,” Jack said.

Aysha nodded. “It’s Tamil. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it.” Her voice was tight with excitement. “It’s the same name as a Tamil graffito we found on the sherd in the merchant’s house at Berenikê. The name of a woman, Amrita.”

“And now look at the other sherds,” Hiebermeyer said, picking one out and showing it to Jack. “The pottery’s central Italian, from a wine amphora. Recognize the writing?”

“Numbers,” Jack murmured. “They’re ledgers, accounts. What you’d expect.” He saw some words in Greek. He suddenly gasped. “I recognize the style. Look, the way the letters are sloped. It could be the same hand as the sherds you found at Berenikê with the
Periplus
text!”

Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically, then pointed at the excavation. “Here’s what I see. We don’t know his name, but let’s call him Priscus. He’s sitting over there in his office with his wife, Amrita. They’re a husband and wife team. She’s local, perfect for business contacts over here, and her family keeps an eye on their office when they’re back in Egypt. You remember we suspected our man was a silk merchant, maybe with a sideline in gems? Well, look at these Greek words. That’s
serikōn
, silk. The numbers must be grades, quantities, prices. And look at this one.
Sappheiros
. That’s a Greek word for lapis lazuli. It’s the word the author of the
Periplus
uses. In antiquity, that can only mean the lapis mined in the mountains of Badakhshan, in Afghanistan.”

“You mean this stuff,” Costas said, pulling out a piece of shimmering blue stone from his shorts pocket, holding it in front of them.

Hiebermeyer gasped. “That’s the piece you found at Berenikê! We can’t take you anywhere! What is it with divers?”

“Well, Jack does it sometimes,” Costas said, his expression deadpan. “I just borrowed it. For good luck, until we get to Hawaii. Then you can take it back.”

Jack suppressed a smile. “Anything else, Maurice?”

Hiebermeyer snorted at Costas, then turned to Rebecca. “Well, your daughter has just won her archaeological credentials,” he said. “It was during those few minutes we spent troweling with the students. She has finder’s luck.”

“That sounds familiar,” Jack said. Rebecca opened her hand and showed him a perfect olive-green gem, uncut but brilliantly reflective in the midday sun.

“Peridot,” Jack exclaimed, taking the gem from her and holding it up. “From St. John’s Island, near Berenikê. Costas and I flew over it on the Red Sea just a few days ago. So you think our man was exporting this from Egypt?”

“And trading it for silk,” Aysha said. “Looking at this gem, you can see why peridot might have fascinated the Chinese. It’s like refined jade.”

“The warrior empire,” Jack murmured, holding the piece up to the sun, looking at the green light cast on his other hand.

“What do you mean?” Costas said.

“Just an image I had,” Jack explained. “An image of Chinese ships, of warriors coming from the east. But this makes it real.”

“And it closes the loop,” Hiebermeyer said. “Rome, Egypt, India, lapis lazuli from the mines of Afghanistan, the Silk Route, the fabled city of Xian. Five thousand miles of contact, linking the two greatest empires the world has ever known.”

Costas took the gemstone from Jack. He held it toward the sun, with the piece of lapis lazuli in his other hand. The light flashed through them and they seemed to glow together, as if they were enveloped in the same ball of incandescence. He held them closer together, and then flinched, moving them apart. “Hot,” he said.

“Probably a focusing effect, like a magnifying glass, concentrating the light,” Pradesh said, rejoining the group. “There have always been stories of gemstones doing this, a plausible result of refraction. One of my professors at Roorkee University specialized in it. But I’ve never heard of peridot and lapis lazuli interacting like this before, especially uncut stones. An interesting research project.”

“You’re welcome at the IMU engineering lab anytime,” Costas said enthusiastically, handing the peridot back to Rebecca and pocketing the lapis lazuli. “But you’d soon get bored with gemstones. There’s some incredible underwater robotic stuff I’ve just been working on. A lot of military applications, right up your street I’d imagine.”

“Really?” Pradesh said. “Tell me more.”

“Plenty of time for that later,” Jack said, shielding his eyes and spying the Lynx helicopter coming in low over the shoreline from
Seaquest II
He felt the excitement well up inside him. “Are we ready?”

Pradesh nodded, and pointed at two men in jeans and T-shirts with rucksacks and G3 automatic rifles. “A couple of my sappers,” he said. “I don’t want to aggravate the tribals by showing up in the jungle with soldiers, but there’s a very real threat from Maoist insurgents. I don’t want to be responsible for the disappearance of the world’s most famous underwater archaeologist.”

“And his sidekick,” Costas added.

Rebecca looked dolefully at Jack, holding up the peridot. “If I’ve earned my credentials like Hiemy says, does that mean I can come along now too?”

“Not this time.” Jack eyed Hiebermeyer. “But Hiemy might let you drive the Zodiac back. Slowly.”

“Oh, cool.” She put the stone back in the finds tray and clapped her hands.

Jack grinned, and made a whirling motion with his fingers to Costas. “Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

T
HREE HOURS AFTER LEAVING THE ROMAN SITE AT
Arikamedu, Jack sat beside Costas and Pradesh on the foredeck of a pontoon boat as it chugged west up the broad expanse of the Godavari River, its bow wave cresting against the current. Jack was riding his own personal wave of excitement. This was his chance to fulfill a dream, to tread the same path as his ancestor, to discover what Lieutenant John Howard had seen in the jungle that day in 1879. Jack grasped the rail and looked out, preparing himself They had flown by helicopter north from Arikamedu along the coast of India to the port of Cocanada, and then veered inland up the delta of the river. They had swept low over a million acres of paddy and sugar cane, flying through billowing clouds of sweet ferment where the sugar was being processed into jaggery. At Dowlaiswaram, some thirty miles from the coast, they had landed on the great dam that was responsible for the fertility of the delta, and Pradesh had shown them where the Madras Sappers had been based while they built the dam in the 1860s. The figures were still reeling through Jack’s mind as they transferred to the Godavari Steam Navigation Company pontoon boat above the dam for the trip into the jungle. Two thousand miles of irrigation channels, a five times increase in the acreage under cultivation. It had been one of the enduring achievements of British rule in India, yet as they went upstream, evidence of human mastery over nature diminished, and they saw only adaptation, acceptance, just as they had seen on the coast at Arikamedu. Like all great rivers that swelled with floodwaters, like the Nile or the Mississippi, all attempts to harness the water of the Godavari presented only an illusion of success, ephemeral bastions against an overwhelming force that could sweep away the grandest human achievements in a mere instant.

“The Godavari is the second holiest river in India, after the Ganges,” Pradesh said, as he steered the boat into the central channel. “I wanted you to experience the final fifteen miles of our trip by river so you could empathize with those soldiers in 1879, going up into the unknown on their paddle steamer, with no idea of what lay ahead.”

“Except mosquitoes,” Costas said, slapping his leg.

Pradesh nodded. “By the end of the Rampa campaign, four-fifths of the troops had been laid low by malaria, and many had died. The Kóya people of the jungle have some degree of immunity. They believed the fever was the vengeance of their most dreaded demon, their
konda devata
, the tiger spirit.”

Costas peered dubiously into the haze ahead, at the shapes of low-lying hills just discernible to the east. “Is the source of the river up there?”

Pradesh shook his head. “Much farther west. Some say it pours from the mouth of a holy idol near Bombay. Some even say it’s joined by a subterranean channel to the Ganges, linking the great waterways of India together.”

“Sounds like wishful thinking,” Jack said.

“The engineer in me agrees, but it’s still an attractive concept. In India, everything from the north seems to flow down, to trickle to the south. Invaders like the Mongols, religions like Buddhism. But hardly any of it permeated the hill tracts, the jungle. Rampa district, where we’re going, wasn’t even surveyed until 1928. At the time of the 1879 rebellion, it was a big blank on the map. Even now there are hundreds of square miles which have only ever been visited by Kóya and other tribal hunters. Even the missionaries won’t go there.”

For almost half an hour they carried on upstream without talking, watching the muddy banks as the river gradually constricted from over a mile in width to only a few hundred yards. They glimpsed oxen plowing paddies between lines of coconut palms. They passed women in wet saris bathing in the river, and others thrashing the rocks with washing, risking being swept away in the current. Men in loincloths hung low in the water against the gunwales of their boats, cooling off Everywhere they saw signs of decay or repair, it was hard to tell which. Jack realized that the tranquility of the scene belied the violence of the coming monsoon season, when the floodwaters would sweep away everything on the riverbanks before them.

They passed a line of wooden posts in mid-stream, with the tattered remains of fishing nets bowed out in the current between them. To Jack it was as if the nets were there to catch history, fragments of the past dislodged from the jungle ahead. Since leaving Arikamedu, he had been trying to attune himself to the archaeology of rivers, places which could hold treasures, like the fleeces used to catch gold in mountain streams, but at other times were void, swept clear of anything tangible. It was a different kind of archaeology here, more elusive, with none of the certainties of a shipwreck.

Like the coast at Arikamedu the human imprint on the riverbank seemed ephemeral, constantly reforming. The only permanent structure they saw was a beautiful white temple on a rocky island in the river, its roof a swirl of sculpted snakes above painted tiers of gold. Pradesh slowed the boat down, reached into a bowl and tossed a handful of flower petals into the water. “That’s Vishnu, asleep under the coiled snake Sesha, the five-headed one,” he said. “The deep blue, the blue of lapis lazuli, the color of Vishnu, is the color of eternity, of immortality.”

“Are the jungle people Hindu?” Costas asked.

Pradesh shook his head and opened up the throttle again, raising his voice above the noise. “Up ahead there’s a hill called Shiva, on the edge of the jungle. Naming it Shiva is a bit like putting a Christian cross on an old Roman temple, only here there was no attempt at proselytizing, no attempt to suppress the old beliefs. Hinduism’s like an archaeological site. Strip away the upper layers, and the old gods, the old religions, are all still there. Only where we’re going, there’s nothing to strip away. That temple’s the last bastion of the lowland people against the looming jungle ahead, a place where even their gods fear to go.”

After that they saw fewer people along the shore, and then none. The open paddies gave way to scrub and then jungle, a dense green foliage that reached down the slopes and enveloped the shoreline, fringing the river with palmyra and coconut palms that hung over silvery stretches of beach. Mist rose off the trees and tumbled down the riverbanks, leaving a narrow passage in the center of the river where their vision was clear. Soon the jungle-shrouded hills rose three hundred meters or more on either side of the river, the upper reaches barely visible in foggy blue-green silhouette.