The Tiger Warrior (9 page)

“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 Berenikê, 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 Thêrôn
, 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
Taprobanê
. 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 Barakē is the gulf of Barygaza and the shore of the land of Ariakē, the beginning of the kingdom of Manbanos and of all India. The inland part, which borders Skythia, is called Abēria; the coastal part is Syrastrēnē. 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 Chrysê, 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:

LIC
AP.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.