The Tiger Warrior (54 page)

“And he’ll never see it again,” Costas murmured.

“How’s his archaeology reading getting on?” Jack said.

“He’s lapping it up. He wants more. He said he was already seeing the Roman finds from Arikamedu in a new way, as evidence of trade, society, beliefs, Roman, Egyptian, Indian, his own history. He’s itching to get back there.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Jack murmured.

“And Altamaty?” Jack glanced at Katya.

“He’s staying with Pradesh until they fly him out. Pradesh is trying to teach him English. They get on like a house on fire. Altamaty even brought him a doggie bag of mutton stew. He says it’ll cure anything.”

Costas cleared his throat. “Well, Jack. Maybe you’d like to join them. Maybe you’d like to eat some more sheep’s lip.”

Rebecca looked incredulous.
“What?”

“It’s true,” Costas said. “In Kyrgyzstan, when we first met Altamaty. He ate sheep’s lip. Your dad ate sheep’s lip.”

“Oh my God.”

“I had to,” Jack protested. “If I hadn’t, it would have been deeply offensive. Altamaty would never have spoken to me again.”

“I thought you hated mutton.”

“It’s the only food I can’t eat.”

“Couldn’t you have chosen some other bit? Did it have to be, like,
lip
?”

“I had no choice.” He eyed Katya despairingly. “It had to be lip.”

“I have got,” Rebecca said quietly, “the grossest dad.
Ever.”

Jack grinned. “We need to show Pradesh and Altamaty the ropes. A crash course at the IMU campus, and some onboard experience with our research vessels. I need to talk to the commandant of the Madras Engineering Group to arrange a secondment. Pradesh’ll need recuperation leave anyway and the campus in Cornwall is perfect. As for Altamaty, his training can be part of our funding for the underwater work at Issyk-Kul and the petroglyph research project. We can put temporary staff there while he’s away.”

“That would be wonderful,” Katya murmured. “The funding.”

“It’s what I promised,” Jack replied. “You may well find me back up there again soon.”

“If Altamaty’s away, Katya will definitely need company,” Rebecca said. Costas coughed, and Rebecca continued. “When Costas finally teaches me to dive, in Hawaii, which he’s promised to, I’m going to teach Altamaty all the English words for the equipment so he can order everything he needs from the IMU technical people without having to go through Costas. I told him Costas is a great guy, but usually he’s obsessed with some new submersible or whatever, and if Altamaty wants stuff he should come to me.” She leaned over and gave Costas a doe-eyed look.

“Good to see you’re on top of things, Rebecca,” Jack replied, raising his eyes at Costas.

“And the trouble with you, Dad, is that you hop from one adventure to the next. That’s what Hiemy told me. You know, back in Egypt. He says that when he finds something, he sticks with it, teases out every possible scrap of information from the site. Obsessively.”

“Tell me about it,” Costas muttered.

“He says that he, Professor Hiebermeyer, is the true archaeologist. He said that when he found those fragments of pottery with the
Periplus
on them, he deliberately put them aside, didn’t allow himself to get ex cited.”

Jack narrowed his eyes. “He was on the phone to me in about ten seconds. You remember, Costas? He even came to visit us when we were digging up Istanbul harbor looking for the Jewish menorah. I was the one who was too busy. Sticking with my project.”

“He said that if he hadn’t spent months painstakingly excavating that Roman house by the Red Sea, this whole adventure would never have taken off He said he always did the real work while you were off searching for the Holy Grail or something. He said it was like
Star Trek
, you’d gone over to the dark side. I said it was
Star Wars
, not
Star Trek
. I don’t think he’d ever seen either of them. He said you’d become a treasure hunter, and he was only saying this because you still have potential, and it’s for your own good.”

“I think,” Jack murmured, suppressing a smile, “I might need to have a word with old Hiemy.”

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca replied. “Aysha’s on the case. She says what he needs is a family. Kids, you know. She says she’s working on it.”

Costas nearly choked. “Working on it.”

“Day and night,” Rebecca said.

“Lucky old Hiemy,” Jack said.

“And my next project is going to be south India,” Rebecca said assertively.

“Your next project is school,” Jack said.

“Ever since seeing all that stuff in the old chest, all our family history, I’ve become fascinated by it,” Rebecca said, looking at Jack. “Pradesh has offered to take me to that jungle shrine, to see the carvings for myself He thinks the next step is to get inside that tomb. See what’s in there. He says that now the Indian government is sending in the sappers to build more roads, actually finishing several of the traces that were made by Howard and his men all those years ago.”

“What about INTACON?” Costas asked. “And Shang Yong? Has terminating the sniper in Afghanistan finished him, Katya?”

She spoke quietly. “Without his henchman, the Brotherhood will disown him. But they will cling to their belief that they protect the legacy of
Shihuangdi
, and his tomb.”

“And how long will that last?” Costas asked.

“The legacy of the First Emperor is safe, for now.”

Jack looked hard at Katya, then turned again to Costas. “INTACON was owned by Shang Yong himself, and has been shut down. Pradesh reported back to his headquarters at Bangalore as soon as we got out of the jungle. He got a rap on the knuckles for going into bandit country without authority and taking those two sappers with him, but the colonel immediately dispatched an air assault company. The firefight with the Maoists was the excuse they needed to go in with an iron fist.”

“Pradesh says the Indian government has withdrawn all mining contracts from the jungle districts,” Rebecca said. “What we’ve set in motion could be the first big break for the jungle people, but Pradesh is worried that the withdrawal is only temporary and there’s still a battle to be fought. We need to show them there’s more revenue to be made from adventure tourism than allowing foreign companies to strip-mine the jungle. Pradesh says it depends on how deep the corruption is. Government officials can get bigger payoffs from mining multinationals than they can from start-up eco-tourism companies.”

“You should work for an NGO, Rebecca,” Katya said, smiling.

“I was going to talk to Dad about that. You know, giving IMU another face. It isn’t the first time your discoveries have opened a can of worms. And we can’t just walk away and pass on the problems to someone else.”

“When you do go to the jungle,” Jack said, “I’ve got something for you to return.”

“The tiger gauntlet?”

Jack nodded. “We can’t return the sacred
vélpu
, as we don’t have it,” he said. “But the gauntlet had been in that shrine for two thousand years, and was venerated by the Kóya too, as the weapon brought to them by Rama, the god who had once lived among them. It may not be the jewel of immortality, but it might just give them an edge. You can do it for your great-great-grandfather.”

“Maybe it’ll mean closure for him, at last,” she murmured.

“What do you mean?”

“Katya was talking to me about it just now, while we were walking up here,” she said. “About my mother. About how we can never second-guess grief, how we should never let anyone tell us how it will pan out. Howard lived with grief for much of his life, and it was somehow wrapped up with what happened to him in the jungle. It’s strange, it’s as if I can feel it. Maybe you do inherit these things from your ancestors, unresolved things. He couldn’t find closure in his lifetime, but maybe now we can do it.”

Jack looked across at Katya. Their eyes met for a moment, and he looked away. She had said things to Rebecca that he himself did not know how to say. He knew there was still anger in Katya about her own father, still a yawning emptiness in Rebecca, but for a moment he felt as if there were a transcending bond that might protect them both. Rebecca had seen him looking at Katya. “After going to the shrine, Pradesh wants me to study the pottery they’ve been finding underwater off Arikamedu. Aysha might be able to come and help with the Egyptian and Roman stuff and get me going.”

Costas cleared his throat. “If Hiemy can spare her.”

“He might need a rest,” Rebecca said, looking at him deadpan. Jack grinned. She swept her hair back. “Anyway, I think it’s going to be my doctorate.”

“Hang on,” Jack said. “You haven’t even finished high school yet.”

“High school? After this? You must be joking. These last few days have been the biggest adventure of my life. Now I know what you mean about expeditions, about how close you get to people. I feel as if I’ve known all of you all my life.”

Jack suddenly felt overwhelmed, and turned away, swallowing hard. He thought of what they had found in the lake, and his feeling of elation as he had looked up from underwater and seen Rebecca’s face, gazing down on him. Costas put a hand on his shoulder, then stood up, stretching and scratching his bristles, squinting out over the ruins. He kicked a stone, then reached down and picked it up, turning it over and over in his hand, rubbing it clean. Jack realized that the ground was strewn with fragments—pottery, broken brick, all of it crumbling and decaying into the shroud of dust that seemed so close to removing this place from history. Costas turned to him, a quizzical look in his eyes. “I wonder if they did make it?”

“The Romans? Fabius and the others?”

“We’re fifteen hundred kilometers east of Issyk-Kul. If any of them survived the wreck on the lake, that is. Let’s say one survived, unknown to his pursuers, washed ashore somewhere, melded invisibly among the caravans of traders heading toward Xian, just as Liu Jian the trader may have melded among the Sogdians heading west.”

“Maybe one did make it,” Jack said, nodding slowly.

“This place isn’t exactly a fabled eastern paradise, is it?”

Jack looked at the ruins again. In his mind’s eye he saw those other places he had visited, in north Africa, in Germany, in the mountain valleys of Wales, placed at the periphery of the Roman Empire where the ground revealed a few clues to the discerning eye, the humps of buried walls, fragments of pottery, a clump of rusted chain mail, places where veterans had made their mark, had eked out their days. “It’s what they were trained for,” he murmured. “At a certain point, a soldier becomes an old soldier. He no longer yearns to die gloriously in battle. The legion of ghosts who have marched alongside him, his fallen comrades, march away to Elysium, where they will await him. He no longer needs to prove himself He knows he will get there, and will join them. He has done enough.”

“And old soldiers, veterans, gave the empire its true strength, settling the frontiers,” Katya said.

Jack nodded. “It was the Roman way. A place with women, the chance to raise a family, building materials, a little plot of land. It was enough.”

“Yet they would have been told the First Emperor’s tomb was just over the horizon,” Costas said. “Fabled riches, beyond their imagination.”

“Maybe, for the old soldier, the adventurer, the fabled treasure is always just over the horizon, like Elysium,” Katya murmured. “When you have spent all your life searching, it becomes the only way to live.”

“And if it was Fabius, he may have had treasure already, remember?” Rebecca said. “The legionaries had what they could carry, the stuff they’d looted from the Parthians at Merv, from traders along the Silk Road. And maybe they did have the jewel, the peridot.”

A little boy suddenly appeared in the ruins in front of them. “Look,” Costas said. “There’s some of that fair hair you were talking about.” The small head bobbed up and down, coming toward them. He stopped, cocking his head, hearing but not understanding them. He darted into the dust again, then emerged above the loam wall, cautiously peering out. His hair was flaxen, more red than blond. They waved and smiled at him. Jack shaded his eyes, staring into the face. The boy’s eyes were a striking green color, almost olive. And there was something strange about the features, something fleetingly familiar. The boy scrambled over the wall and dropped down in front of them, still standing a few meters back, cautiously. His clothes were rags, and he was barefoot. He seemed suddenly assured, with the confidence of a child. He grinned at them, and held out his hand.

“What do you give a child like that?” Katya murmured.

Costas was still fingering the stone he had picked up earlier. He stopped turning it in his hands, then held it up so the boy could see. A light flashed across Jack’s eyes, and he realized that the stone was reflecting the hazy sunlight that was now breaking through. He glanced at it, and saw that it was a rich orange hue, translucent, like amber. He stared again.
Amber
. He could see an insect preserved inside, a mosquito. He saw that the stone had a hole in the center. It had evidently once had a cord through it, perhaps been worn as jewelry. It was old, worn. He saw marks on it. It looked like incised decoration, swirling. An animal, a swirling creature. Jack’s heart began to pound. He reached out for it.

It was too late. Costas had not seen him, and tossed it to the boy. He caught it, and held it up, his face rapt with delight. The light shone through the stone. It was amber, there was no doubt about it. It could have come from thousands of miles away.
Amber from the Baltic
. Jack’s mind was racing. The belongings of a Roman legionary? A legionary who hailed from the Celtic north, from Gaul or Germany, even Britain? He remembered Fabius, tall, ponytailed Fabius, from the tomb carving in the jungle.
Could it be?
An heirloom, somehow concealed over all those years of captivity? But then this was the Silk Road. All the riches of the world had once come this way. The boy smiled impishly, and held the stone tightly in his fist. He had seen Jack’s hand. He was not giving it up. He stared at Jack with fathomless eyes. Then he was off, scampering away across the ruins. His flaxen hair suddenly seemed perfectly in place here, the color of the mountains, of the dust that rolled through the valley. The color of the Silk Road. But there was something else, something Jack knew with dead certainty.
Someone had been here
. He took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly.
Ave atque salve, frater
. He turned to the others. “I wonder whether we’ve just stared into the eyes of a Roman legionary.”