04 The Tiger Warrior.

David Gibbins.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, inst.i.tutions, places and incidents are creations of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual or other fictional events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. The factual backdrop is discussed in the author's note at the end.

...after this, toward the east and with the ocean on the right, sailing offsh.o.r.e past the remaining lands on the left, you come upon the land of the Ganges; in this region is a river, itself called the Ganges, that is the greatest of all the rivers in India, and which rises and falls like the Nile. Close by this river is an island in the ocean, the very farthest part of the inhabited world toward the east, beneath the rising sun itself it is called Chryse, the land of gold. Beyond this land, by now at the most northerly point-where the sea ends at some place in the outer limits-there lies a vast inland place called Thina. From there, wool, yarn and silk are transported overland by way of Bactria to Barygaza, and by way of the river Ganges back to Limyrike. As for this place, Thina, it is not at all easy to get to; for people only rarely come from it, and then only in small numbers. The place lies directly beneath Ursa Minor, and is said to be anch.o.r.ed together, as it were, with parts of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, where they turn away... What lies beyond this region, because of extreme storms, immense cold and impenetrable terrain, and because of some divine power of the G.o.ds, has not been explored...

-- From the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.

Egyptian Greek, c. First Century AD.

In the ninth month the First Emperor was interred at Mount Li. When the emperor first came to the throne he began digging and shaping Mount Li. Later, when he unified the empire, he had over seven hundred thousand men from all over the empire transported to the spot. They dug down to the third layer of underground springs and poured in bronze to make the outer coffin. Replicas of palaces, scenic towers and the hundred officials, as well as rare utensils and wonderful objects, were brought to fill up the tomb. Craftsmen were ordered to set up crossbows and arrows, rigged so they would immediately shoot down anyone attempting to break in. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtse, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow. Above were representations of all the heavenly bodies, below, the features of the earth... After the interment had been completed, someone pointed out that the artisans and craftsmen who had built the tomb knew what was buried there, and if they should leak word of the treasures, it would be a serious affair. Therefore, after the articles had been placed in the tomb, the inner gate was closed off and the outer gate lowered, so that all the artisans and craftsmen were shut in the tomb and were unable to get out. Trees and bushes were planted to give the appearance of a mountain...

-- Sima Qian, Records of the Grand Historian.

Second Century BC.

Lake Issyk-Kul, central Asia, autumn 19 BC.

The sun hung ominously in the eastern sky, reddened by a swirl of dust from the desert beyond. The man reached the top of the hill, shifted the armor on his shoulders and eased the great sword on his back. Below him lay the boulder-strewn foresh.o.r.e, and beyond that a great body of water that seemed to stretch off to infinity. He had tasted the water, and it was more fresh than salt, so they had not reached Ocean, and the horizon ahead was not the fiery edge of the world. He strained his eyes to see where the lake narrowed and the towering snowcapped mountains dipped, to the pa.s.s that led beyond, under the rising sun. The trader had told him these things, but still he was not sure. Were they already dead? Had they crossed the river Styx? Was this Elysium? For the first time he felt a pang of fear. Do the dead know they have pa.s.sed beyond?

"Licinius!" A voice bellowed up. "Get your a.r.s.e back down here!"

The man cracked a tired smile, raised his arm then looked down to the others. They were waiting on the far side of the icy torrent he had forded to get here, where the melt.w.a.ter that filled the lake rushed through the treacherous canyon they had traversed the night before. Earlier that morning the trader had led him to the secret place where the boat was hidden. The trader. Licinius could still smell him, smell the fear. He had chained him to a rock behind the hill. It would not be long now. He remembered what the man had said, over and over again, desperately, as they dragged him along. That he knew where to find the greatest treasure in the world. The tomb of an emperor, the greatest the world had ever known, somewhere over the eastern horizon. He would show them the way. They were guaranteed the riches of kings. They would live like emperors, each of them. They would find immortality. Immortality.

Licinius had been sceptical. The others had been entranced. It was what they had wanted to hear, the lure that had drawn so many to their deaths along this route. But Licinius was still not sure. He glanced to the horizon again, then looked south. Had he made the right decision? He looked back to the lakesh.o.r.e. On the far side was their camp, rectangular, surrounded by sharpened stakes facing outward. The ground had been hard, baked like rock, and they had been beyond exhaustion the night before, but they had dug a ditch and heaped up the stony soil into a rampart, as they had been trained to do. And they had good reason. They had a terrifying new enemy, one who had first come for them after they had attacked the Sogdians and captured the trader. It was an enemy they had heard but hardly seen, had grappled with in the terrible swirling darkness of the canyon the night before. An enemy who had taxed all their strength and guile as soldiers. As Roman legionaries.

They had route-marched for weeks now. Twenty-five miles a day, when the going allowed it. But the nightmare had begun a lifetime ago. Two hundred miles east from the Mediterranean coast to the battlefield at Carrhae. Fourteen hundred miles from there to the Parthian citadel of Margiana, chained and whipped by their captors. Anyone who faltered was beheaded on the spot. It had left only the toughest. And now, thirty-four years later, they had escaped and were on the march again, a thousand miles over desert and mountain, in scorching heat and icy cold, through storms of dust and snow that veiled their past as if it were a shadowland. They had followed the route of Alexander the Great. On the edge of the desolate plain beyond Margiana they had pa.s.sed the last of his altars, a great plinth that marked the eastern limit of his conquest. They had dug for treasure there, no longer mindful of the wrath of the G.o.ds. They had found a few coins, nothing else. Ahead of them had risen a forbidding wall of mountains, and the caravan route. Others from Margiana had escaped this way almost twenty years before, and word had come back, rumors that had spread among the prisoners like wildfire, of great armies beyond the mountains, armies that would pay a king's ransom for mercenaries, for soldiers who had once fought for Rome.

And now there was another reason. Licinius remembered what the trader had told him. A great tomb, buried under a pyramid of earth, built by seventy thousand slaves. A tomb that he, the trader, could open up for them. The tomb of the greatest emperor the world had ever known, an emperor who would make them forget Alexander. A tomb that contained all the riches of the world, riches that would be theirs for the taking, in a place where they would be treated like G.o.ds.

They had been fifty strong when they had broken out of the citadel, fleeing through the breach they had made in the walls with all the gold they could carry. Half of them had been cut down before they were out of sight of the walls. The caravan route, the route of the traders, had been sinuous, confusing, not one road but many, and more than once they had been tempted up a blind alley, gone higher and higher, through narrower defiles until they came out on snow, places so high an eagle could not fly, where fire burned with a pale flame, where they had gasped for breath, knowing their own mortality, trespa.s.sing in the home of the G.o.ds. They had come down again, and marched on. They had needed to find a guide. They had needed food - desperate, ravenous with hunger, they had become no better than the wild dogs who circled travelers in these parts, preying on the stragglers and the dying. And fate had cast her dark spell on first one companion, then another. They had been attacked by others like them, marauding bands who preyed on the caravans, but now they were stalked by some darker force that had followed them, hunted them down since they had pushed the trader ahead and told him to find a way out of this place of nightmares.

Licinius saw Fabius begin to make his way up the hill. He watched the others wade out to the boat, carrying the sacks of booty, led by Marcus, the shipbuilder from Aquileia, who would try to keep it afloat. He felt his own bag, the shape in it. He had wrested the bag from the trader when they found him. There had been another bag, identical, and he had given it to Fabius. The trader had pleaded with them not to open the bags, and to keep them separate. They had humored him, needing him. Licinius still did not know what lay inside. He would open it as soon as he had dealt with the trader and found somewhere to sleep that night. The rest of the booty had been taken from the Sogdians. The traders had been leading camels across the plain, heading west, laden down with bags of precious stones, textiles, shimmering cloth they called serikon. The legionaries had killed them, all but one. They killed everyone they came across. It was what they did. Then they had made a pyre of it all, the bodies, the textiles, everything, and gorged themselves. They had been famished, and had gnawed at the bones like dogs. They had found wine, skins of it, and had drunkenly fashioned crude branding irons from the camel bits. They had branded themselves. He could still smell the burning flesh. He looked at his forearm, squeezed it, watched the blood oozing out, coagulating. There would be a good scar, one that would cut through all the other scars, the scars of whipping and beating, the old scars of battle. It hurt like Hades, but he relished the pain. It helped him focus. It was how they had been trained. It was how they had survived thirty-four years enslaved, whipped by day and chained by night, building the walls of the Parthian citadel. Most had died. Those who remained were the toughest. He held his fist in a hard ball and grunted. The mark of the brand was a number seared into their souls. XV. Fifteenth Apollinaris. The lost legion. A legion of ghosts. Their legion.

It was as if their souls had been locked within them, frozen for the past thirty-four years. Ten thousand had marched from the battlefield at Carrhae. They were only nine now, one fewer than the day before. "Frater," he whispered, remembering Appius. "Ave atque vale. Hail and farewell. Until we meet in Elysium." They had spent the night in a fearful place, full of crumbling canyons and dead ends, rent with the moans and howls of the spirits who lurked within. The sky had blackened and crackled with lightning, as if Jupiter himself were slashing at the fabric of the heavens. The wind had shrieked up behind them like a dragon breathing fire through the canyons, licks of poisoned breath seeking them out, reaching into every nook and cranny. They had huddled down under interlocked shields, the testudo, the tortoise, as they had been trained to do, under square shields they had made for themselves, while the rain thundered down and the arrows of their enemy slammed in. Appius had gone half-mad, screamed at their enemy to show themselves, to fight like men, and had broken free, and then an arrow had taken him. Licinius had dragged him back under, gurgling, wide-eyed, and held him with an iron grip even after he had pa.s.sed beyond, shaking and convulsing. Death in battle as it really was, not as Licinius had once sculpted it in stone for his patrons in Rome. He had gone half-mad himself, smearing his body with the blood, and had unhorsed the bowman, bellowing in rage and grief, clamping and twisting the man's throat, tearing his eyes out. They were human, he had screamed, not demons, and if they were human they could be defeated. He had wrenched away the horseman's great dripping sword, its gauntlet in the shape of a tiger, ripped off the scale armor, throwing it over his back, and had taken the severed head in his hand, held by the long plaited hair and knot. But the other legionaries had already gone, taking Appius' body with them, leaving him to struggle behind, and he had slipped and dropped the head in the maw of some mighty waterfall.

Hours later he had come upon them, the dwindling band, with the trader in tow, on the edge of the lake. They had found boulders with mysterious carvings, and they had laid Appius there with his weapon, a broken bronze dagger-axe. They had put coins on his eyes, one coin from the altar of Alexander the Great, the other a strange coin with a square hole they had taken from the Sogdians. They could not risk the smoke from a pyre, but he, Licinius, the former sculptor, had used a chisel he had fashioned to gouge out a few words on a rock beside the body. He had put the sacred number of their legion on the stone, so Charon would know where to take Appius when he came for him, to join all the others who shadowed them, the ghost legion.

Fabius reached him and sat down, looking east. Licinius sat beside him, angling the sword on his back out of the way, the gleaming metal tiger gauntlet above his shoulder. Fabius was from the Alps, tall, with blue eyes and red hair, still visible amid the gray stubble. For a while they said nothing. They were blood brothers, the last of the contubernium, the eight who had answered the call to arms when Julius Caesar had marched on Gaul, who had messed and camped and fought together through all the glory days of the legion. Like Appius had been. Licinius glanced at the place where they had laid him, then took something out of a pouch on his belt and pa.s.sed it to Fabius. It was a small, smooth stone, light in weight, with a hole in the center. Fabius took it, and held it up. "The color of honey," he said. "It has something inside it. A mosquito."

"I took it from Appius' body," Licinius said. "It was an heirloom, pa.s.sed to him by his mother. It's a strange stone he called burn-stone that comes from the sh.o.r.e of the sea to the north of Germania. You remember the patterns on the shields of the Gauls we fought at Alesia, the swirling animals? You can see the same, etched on the stone. Appius' mother was a German, you know. He said this stone was for children. It brought them luck. He hoped one day he might have a child. I promised I would take it if I survived him. Somehow he kept it, all those years in the quarries."

"I hate to think where he hid it," Fabius said. "But knowing Appius, it makes sense. He was always talking out of his a.r.s.e."

"We will miss him."

"Until Elysium."

Licinius closed his pouch. "It's yours. We are old, but not too old, and maybe one day you will escape from all this and find a woman and have a child. My time for that has pa.s.sed. I had a child once, a boy whose hair would now be flecked with gray, but for me there will be no more. Hold it, and remember Appius. Remember me, Frater. Remember all of us, this day."

Fabius said nothing, but held the stone. Licinius looked him over. Macrobius, the leatherworker, had fashioned sandals from camel skin, good, st.u.r.dy marching sandals, tied up their bare calves to the knees. With those, they could go anywhere. Apart from that, they looked like barbarians. Fabius wore armor and weapons he had pillaged along the way, a leather jerkin rigid with dried blood, shreds of Parthian chain mail crudely sewn into it. The chain was in the Roman fashion, better able to counter a sword thrust, but Licinius' new shirt of segmented metal squares might stop a few arrows and would help to keep the wind at bay. Fabius had their prized weapon, a short bronze thrusting sword covered with intricate foreign patterns, dragons and tigers and demons. It was like a Roman gladius, perfect for close-quarters fighting. The great sweeping sword on Licinius' back was a slashing blade, as sharp as swamp gra.s.s, and had decapitated his enemy the night before as if it were a head of cabbage. But sweeping blows left the body exposed, and were not the Roman way. He would get Rufus the metalsmith to cut the sword down to size. But then he remembered. Rufus was gone too. And it scarcely mattered now. He extended his bare arms, and held out his hands. "Look at us. I hardly feel the cold anymore. My skin is like camel leather. And when I kill now, I do it with my bare hands."

"Maybe we are becoming G.o.ds." "The G.o.ds are our brothers who have gone before." When Licinius heard Fabius speak he still heard the voice of a young man, but when he looked he saw a man ravaged by the years, gray-stubbled and h.o.a.ry, halfway to Elysium already. The day before, blind drunk and freshly branded, they had shorn their hair and beards, preparing for the final battle. They had not expected to survive the canyon, and when they joined the others in Elysium they had wanted to look right. Licinius felt his scalp. It was rough, hard, like every surface of his body, like the freshly sawn marble he had once traced his fingers over in their workshop in Rome. He felt the weals around his wrists, as thick as elephant hide. Thirty-four years in chains. They were survivors, but he felt they were living ghosts, men whose souls had departed that day on the scorching battlefield of Carrhae.

"You are remembering? The battle?" Fabius said quietly.

"Always."

The expedition had been ill-fated from the start. Cra.s.sus had been their general. Cra.s.sus who saw himself as equal to Caesar. Licinius snorted. Cra.s.sus the Banker, Cra.s.sus 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. Cra.s.sus, too weak to die by his own sword, had to be slain by his tribune. Poor Caius Paccia.n.u.s, primus pilus of the first cohort, whose fate it was to bear the closest likeness to Cra.s.sus, 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 Cra.s.sus, 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 embarra.s.sment." 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 m.u.f.fled 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 Chryse, the land of gold. To get there, you must first cross the lake, then go over a pa.s.s, 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 Chryse and Thina, the serikon and the precious jewels, the jade and the ca.s.sia 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 foresh.o.r.e, 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 Chryse."

"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 pa.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e. Their enemy had horses, and could move quickly. Licinius looked at the pa.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 offsh.o.r.e, 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 pa.s.s. 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 gra.s.s 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 panning 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 G.o.d."