The Tiger Warrior (8 page)

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 Berenikê, 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 Berenikê. 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 Berenikê, 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 Berenikê. 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 Berenikê 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.”