The Tiger Warrior Page 2

  “You are remembering? The battle?” Fabius said quietly.

  “Always.”

  The expedition had been ill-fated from the start. Crassus had been their general. Crassus who saw himself as equal to Caesar. Licinius snorted. Crassus the Banker, Crassus who had only wanted gold. They had despised him, loathed him even more than their Parthian enemy. When they crossed the river Euphrates, there had been peals of thunder, crashes of lightning, and a fearful wind, half-mist, half-hurricane. Then the sacred eagle standard of the legion had turned face-about, of its own accord. Of its own accord. And yet they had marched on. It was not the defeat that was unbearable, it was defeat without honor. Crassus, too weak to die by his own sword, had to be slain by his tribune. Poor Caius Paccianus, primus pilus of the first cohort, whose fate it was to bear the closest likeness to Crassus, had been paraded around by the Parthians in a woman’s red robe, trumpeters and lictors on camels ahead of him, the dripping heads of Roman dead suspended from axes all around. The Parthians had filled his throat with molten gold in mockery of Crassus, a man who had thought that pay and promises of gold were the only guarantee of a soldier’s loyalty.

  But that was not the worst. The worst was to lose the eagle, ripped off its standard and taken away before their eyes. From then on they were ghosts, all of them, the living and the dead.

  “Does the trader give us any news of Rome?” Fabius asked quietly. “You’re the only one who can speak Greek. I heard Greek sounds when he was pleading with us.”

  “He’s been many times to Barygaza, a place on the Erythraean Sea where traders come from Egypt. That’s where the Sogdian caravan was heading, and that’s where he learned his Greek.” Licinius paused, not sure how Fabius would take it. “There is some news, my friend, about Rome.”

  “Ah.” Fabius leaned forward. “Glorious news, I hope.”

  “He says the wars are long over. He says there is a new peace.” He put his hand on Fabius’ shoulder. “And he says Rome is now ruled by an emperor.”

  “An emperor?” Fabius looked hard at him, his eyes ablaze. “Julius Caesar. Our true general. He’s the only one. It must be him.”

  Licinius shook his head. “Caesar is long gone. You and I both know that, in our hearts. And if he’d become emperor, he’d have come looking for us. No, it’s someone new. Rome has changed.”

  Fabius looked downcast. “Then I will seek Caesar in Elysium. I will serve no other as emperor. I have seen what emperors do, in Parthia. We are citizen-soldiers.”

  Licinius held out his hands again, gnarled, scarred, caked in blood and grime, the ends of two fingers missing. “Citizens,” he said ruefully. “Thirty-five years ago, maybe. Are these still the hands of a sculptor?”

  Fabius leaned over on one elbow. “You remember Quintus Varius, who the Parthians made foreman of the southern sector of the walls? First centurion of the third cohort? He’d been a builder on the Bay of Naples before joining up, knew all about concrete. He persuaded the Parthian vizier that the dust that choked us for all those years was the key ingredient of concrete, like the volcanic dust of Naples. Of course it was nothing of the sort. Varius was executed years ago, some trivial thing, but we put that dust with our mortar ever since. Those walls we spent thirty-four years building won’t last another ten. You mark my words. They’ll crumble to dust. That’s a citizen-soldier for you. Brings all his skills as a civilian to bear.”

  “And a citizen-soldier can go back to civilian life.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “The trader said something else.”

  “Spill it, Licinius.”

  “He said this emperor has negotiated peace with the Parthians. He said he had seen a new coin, celebrating the peace as a great triumph. He said the eagles have been returned.”

  Fabius shook his head angrily. “Impossible. He’s spinning you tales. He knew who we were, knew about our looted Parthian treasure. Word must have spread about us along the caravan route. He was eager to please, and thought a tall tale of an emperor would satisfy us. Well, he was wrong. We should have butchered him along with the others.”

  “Then we would never have got here. He guided us through the canyon.”

  “We would have died fighting. Death with honor.”

  “If the eagles have been returned, then we can return too, with honor.”

  Fabius paused. “The eagles would be this emperor’s triumph, not ours. We would be an embarrassment.” He peered at Licinius. “But I know you too well, brother. You are thinking of your son.”

  Licinius said nothing, but squinted at the rising orb above the eastern horizon, casting a shimmering orange sparkle on the surface of the lake. His son. A son who would not know him, who had been little more than a babe in arms when he had marched off A son who would have carried on in his father’s trade, as generations had done before. Licinius thought about what Fabius had said. I have seen what emperors do. Emperors did not just enslave and terrorize. They also built palaces, temples. There would be work for a sculptor, in this new Rome.

  “Don’t be deluded,” Fabius said. “If what the trader says is true, the world has changed. Rome has forsaken us. We only have ourselves. The band of brothers. Everything else is gone.”

  “My son might still be alive.”

  “Your son is probably in Elysium by now. He too may have become a citizen-soldier, fought and died with honor. Think of that.”

  There was a muffled yell from somewhere beyond the hill. Fabius grabbed his sword handle, but Licinius stayed him. “It’s only the trader. He’s chained up.”

  “I thought you’d killed him. That’s what you came up here to do.”

  “I wanted to see that he was telling the truth. That the boat wasn’t some kind of wreck.”

  “Tell me again what he said. We need to set off now. Dawn is upon us.”

  “He said that where the great orb rose, glistening, was Chrysê, the land of gold. To get there, you must first cross the lake, then go over a pass, then traverse the desert, a place worse than anything we have yet endured, that sucks men in and swallows them up forever. You follow the camel caravans east, and you come to a great city called Thina. And there the bravest will find the empire of heaven. All the riches of the world await those who can defeat the demons that had stalked the trader, a treasure awaiting us, his new masters.”

  The trader had talked too much. He had told them all they needed to hear. He had kept nothing back. That had been his mistake. He had not been used to bargaining with the Fates.

  The trader had told Licinius something else, while he was chaining him up. To the south, due south, was another route. Great mountains stood in the way, then the kingdom of Bactria, and beyond that a mighty river, the river Alexander the Great had crossed. And south from there, for untold miles, through jungle and along coast, was a route to a place called Ramaya, where there were Romans. There were untold dangers. Always beware the tiger, he had said. But at this place, like Barygaza, the goods of trade—the riches from Chrysê and Thina, the serikōn and the precious jewels, the jade and the cassia and the malabathron—would go in ships across the Erythraean Sea, and from there you could make your way to Rome. To Rome.

  Licinius grasped Fabius’ hand hard, as hard as he could, their special bond since they had arm-wrestled as young recruits. They both relaxed and embraced, before pushing each other roughly away. Old men, playing like boys. He reached for the bag he had taken from the trader, and gestured at the other one on Fabius’ belt. “Before we go. We don’t have to placate the trader anymore with promises. May as well look at what we stole from him.”

  Fabius sprang up, pulling on his belt to ease the weight of the chain mail on his hips. “Time for that later.” He pointed at the foreshore, where the others were sitting at the oars gesturing up at them. “The boat’s ready.”

  “The boat to the other side has been waiting for us for a long time, brother.”

  “I don’t mean Charon, you fool. I mean our boat. The boat to
freedom. The boat to untold wealth. We’re going east, to Chrysê.”

  “You go on ahead. I have to finish with the trader. His time has come.”

  “Ave atque vale, frater. In this world, or the next.”

  Licinius stared at Fabius. He knew.

  Fabius bounded down the hill without looking back. Licinius got up and went in the other direction, toward the place where he had left the trader. The sky to the west was darkening again, over the pass they had come up, flickering with lightning, and he felt the first drops of rain. The air was eerily still, just as it had been before the maelstrom the night before. They would be caught in it if they did not set off now. He knew that Fabius would not linger, and the others would follow him. He was their centurion. And Fabius knew they had no time to lose. There would be other boats, hidden like the one they had found, left by other travelers. There was the route around the shore. Their enemy had horses, and could move quickly. Licinius looked at the pass again, and saw the jagged ridges of the gorge silhouetted by distant flashes of lightning. The rain was suddenly pelting down, and he slipped down the slope. The boat was obscured by the hill now, and to the south all he could see was the misty foothills of the mountains. He turned into the hollow. The trader was still there, splayed on the ground, his arms chained above his head around a boulder.

  Licinius drew the great sword from under the leather loops on his back, put his hand inside the golden gauntlet and grasped the crossbar. He stared at the image of the tiger, then wiped the blade across his forearm. He found a cleft in the rock and pushed the blade into it, then bent it until it snapped, leaving the gauntlet attached to a jagged point about two feet long. That was more like it. More like a Roman gladius. He turned on the trader. The man had thought there was a chance, had led them through the canyon to this place, but now he knew. Licinius knelt down, close enough to smell the man’s armpits, his breath, the way animals smelled when they were cornered, trapped. He put the broken edge of the blade below the man’s chest. He could see the heart pounding.

  Here, there was no right or wrong.

  They killed. That was what they did.

  The man looked up. Licinius remembered his son. It was like looking down at a child, just as helpless. But this was different. The man’s breath was short, rasping, his face contorted with terror, his mouth drooling. A foul smell came from below, and Licinius turned his head away, nauseated. He knelt up to put his weight behind the sword, and for the first time saw that the man was different from the other Sogdians, his eyes less slanted, his cheekbones higher, a wisp of a moustache over his lips. His skin was that of a city-dweller, not a desert nomad. Then he remembered what the man had said. He himself had come from this land far to the east, this great inland city. He said he knew the tomb. He said he knew how to get inside. He said he was the caretaker. He’d been babbling, desperate to please.

  The man was trying to speak now, looking toward the bag Licinius had taken from him. He spoke in a hoarse whisper, the Greek so heavily accented Licinius could barely understand it, the words scarcely comprehensible.

  His grandfather had seen it and grasped it, the greatest star in the heavens.

  His grandfather, two hundred years old, had kept the secret.

  He, Liu Jian, had taken it, to return it to its rightful place, and they had come after him.

  “Now they will come after you.”

  The man tried to raise his head from the ground. His Greek was suddenly clear, as if he knew the words would be his last. “You have taken the celestial jewel that belongs above the emperor’s tomb. It is in two parts. One part is blue, lapis lazuli from the mountains of Bactria, the other green, peridot from the island in the Erythraean Sea. You must take what you have to the lapis lazoli mines, and hide it there. That is the only place where the power of the stone will not be felt. You must never put the two stones together, to make the jewel whole. Only the emperor may have immortality. Those who follow will pursue you, relentlessly. They must never be allowed to have the power.”

  The man slumped back, lips trembling. Licinius remained still. He suddenly realized. The treasure the trader had babbled about the day before, the treasure of the emperor’s tomb. It was not in that far-off place to the east. It was here. He felt the bag at his waist, the shape within. He leapt up, and stumbled to the edge of the hollow, looking out over the lake. He was too late. The others were already far offshore, pulling for their lives. They had seen the coming storm. Fabius would never know. Licinius turned back to the trader. He felt hollow, in limbo. Had he forsaken the greatest treasure of all, the lure of immortality, for a hopeless dream of finding his son?

  He turned toward the looming darkness. The wind stung his eyes, laden with red dust that seemed to swirl around the lake from the east, whipped into a frenzy by the storm coming up the pass. Then he heard it, above the distant rumble of thunder, at first barely discernible, like a pounding of blood in his ears, then insistent, louder. A drumbeat. He remembered the night before. Horses, rearing up, black horses with yellow eyes, the red dust swirling in and out of their nostrils, their life-breath. Horses slick with blood, their own blood, as if they were sweating it. Horses that pulled chariots, crossbowmen barely visible, and in front of them the rider with the skin of the beast draped over his armor, the face framed by savage teeth, only darkness within.

  And now they had come again.

  Licinius turned back to the trader and drove the blade in hard, crunching through the spine. The man died wide-eyed, the blood from his last heartbeat spurting out of the wound. The body convulsed, the muscles clasping the blade, and Licinius got up and put his foot down to pull it out. He stood there, blade dripping, and peered back through the darkness and the rain. Then he saw it. A silhouette on a ridge, looking toward him. Hooves pawing the ground, skin glowing red, breathing out the dust that glowed with the sun, the snarling head and jagged teeth above, a great sword held high and glistening.

  He remembered what the trader had called it.

  The tiger warrior.

  Licinius turned south.

  He began to run.

  The Red Sea, present-day

  JACK, YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE WHAT I’VE found.”

  The voice came through the intercom from somewhere in the blue void ahead, where a silvery stream of bubbles rose from beyond a rocky ledge to the surface of the sea nearly fifty meters above. Jack Howard took a last look at the coral-encrusted anchor below him, then injected a burst of air into his buoyancy compensator and floated above the thick bed of sea whips bending in the current, like tall grass in the wind. He powered forward with his fins, then spread his arms and legs like a skydiver and dropped over the ledge. The view below was breathtaking. All down the slope he had seen fragments of ancient pottery, Islamic, Nabatean, Egyptian, but this was the motherlode. For years there had been rumors of a ships’ graveyard on the windward side of the reef, but it had been just that, hearsay and rumor, until the unusually strong tidal currents in the Red Sea that spring had scoured the plateau and revealed what lay before him. Then there had been the rumor that set Jack’s heart racing, the rumor of a Roman shipwreck, perfectly preserved under the sand. Now, as he saw the shapes emerging from the sediment, row upon row of ancient pottery amphoras, their tall handles rising to wide rims, he exhaled hard, dropping faster, and felt the familiar excitement course through him. He silently mouthed the words, as he always did. Lucky Jack.

  The voice crackled again. “Fifteen years of diving with you, and I thought I’d seen everything. This one really takes the cake.”

  Jack turned toward the far edge of the plateau. He could see Costas now, hovering motionless in front of a coral head the size of a small truck, the growths rising several meters higher than him. Two more heads rose behind the first, forming a row. Beyond them the water was too deep for coral to flourish, and Jack could see the sandy slope dropping off into an abyss. He flicked on his headlamp and swam toward Costas, coming to a halt a few meters before him and panni
ng his light over the seabed. It was an explosion of color, bright red sponges, sea anemones, profusely growing soft corals, with clown fish darting among the nooks and crevices. An eel drooped out of a hole, mouth lolling, eyeing Jack, then withdrew again. Jack looked down through a waving bed of sea fans and saw fragments of amphoras, so thickly encrusted as to be almost unrecognizable. He peered again, saw a high arching handle, a distinctive rim. He turned to Costas, his headlamp lighting up his friend’s yellow helmet and the streamlined backpack that held his trimix breathing gas.

  “Nice find,” he said. “I saw sherds like this coming down the slope. Rhodian wine amphoras, second century BC.”

  “Switch off your headlamp.” Costas seemed riveted by something in front of him. “Take another look. And forget about amphoras.”

  Jack was itching to swim over to the wreck he had seen in the sand. But he lingered in front of the coral head, stared at the dazzle of color and movement. He remembered the words of Professor Dillen, all those years ago at Cambridge. Archaeology is about detail, but don’t let the detail obscure the bigger picture. Jack had already known it, since he had first gone hunting for artifacts as a boy. It had always been his special gift. To see the bigger picture. And to find things. Lucky Jack. He shut his eyes, flicked off his headlamp then opened his eyes again. It was as if he were in a different universe. The profusion of color had been replaced by a monotone blue, shades of dark where there had been vivid purples and reds. It was like looking at an artist’s charcoal sketch, all the finish and color stripped away, the eye drawn not to the detail but to the form, to the overall shape. To the bigger picture.

  And then he saw it.

  “Good God.”

  He blinked hard, and looked again. There was no mistaking it. Not one, but two, sticking out of the sand, curving upward on either side of the coral head, symmetrical, gleaming white from centuries of burial in the sediment. He remembered where they were. The Red Sea. The eastern extremity of Egypt, the edge of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. Beyond here lay fabled lands, lands of terror and allure, of untold treasure and danger, of races of giants and pygmies and great, lumbering beasts, beasts of the hunt and of war that only the bravest could harness, beasts that could make a man a king.