The Tiger Warrior (10 page)

“For the survivors, the name of the legion would still have been their binding force, even with the sacred eagle standard gone.”

“So they were still loyal to Rome.”

“They had fought for themselves, for their comrades, as soldiers always have done. They were proud of being citizen-soldiers, of having civilian professions. They were proud to fight for a commander if they respected him, if he was one among
them, primus inter pares
. They fought for Caesar. They fought for their families. Whether they would have fought for Rome as an empire is another matter.”

“And the legion?” Costas asked.

“The legion was sacred,” Hiebermeyer replied. “That was where loyalties lay. And within it, the cohort, the century, the
contubernium
, the squad of ten or twelve men who even called each other br
other, frater”

“So losing the eagle was bad, big-time,” Rebecca cut in.

“The worst. A battle they could lose, Crassus they couldn’t care less about. But losing the eagle? A legion that lost its eagle would have been a legion of the dead, never able to show themselves in Rome again. Even to their families.”

“Do you think they fragged him, Crassus?” Costas said.

“Crassus signed his own death warrant as soon as he committed them to battle. They probably would have called it assisted suicide.”

“These men, if they really did survive and escape, must have been the toughest of the tough,” Aysha said.

“There are always a few,” Jack said. “Those who escape execution, who survive the beatings and the torture, who have the mental strength to endure. And some of the legionaries with Crassus were men who had been recruited five years before and fought with Caesar in Gaul. They may have been citizen-soldiers, but they were among the most ruthless killers the world has ever known. Men who killed with the spear, the sword, with their bare hands.”

“And with the legion a hollow memory, there are no checks, no controls,” Costas said.

Jack nodded. “Some of these guys in the late republic saw much more action than the professional legionaries of the empire, and the idea of their civilian lives, their jobs, became a kind of myth. But if you spend your life killing, who knows where the boundaries are? When the time comes, if it ever does, how do you know when to stop being a soldier, and become a citizen again?”

“An age-old problem,” Hiebermeyer murmured.

“If they did escape, word would have passed on the Silk Route,” Jack said. “That was bandit country, but even there the Romans’ reputation would have preceded them. You would not have wanted to encounter these guys.”

“What about the Silk Route?” Costas asked. “Are there any more inscriptions?”

“Katya’s spent the last couple of seasons roaming the mountains and passes of central Asia, searching. A lot of it’s still unexplored territory.”

“And still bandit country,” Hiebermeyer said.

“I seem to remember Katya knows how to use a Kalashnikov,” Costas murmured.

Jack opened his notebook again. “A few months ago she hit pay dirt at a place called Cholpon-Ata, on the western shore of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. That’s hundreds of miles east along the northern Silk Route from the place with the Fifteenth Legion inscription, on the edge of the Tien Shan Mountains and the pass that leads down to the Taklamakan Desert and China. For years now archaeologists have known about this place, a desolate boulder-strewn landscape where there are hundreds, probably thousands of petroglyphs, shallow-cut rock carvings of ibexes, other animals, hunters. Most were carved by Scythian nomads. But it would also have been a staging post along the Silk Route for traders who had survived the trek from the west, and before embarking on boats toward China.”

“How big is the lake?” Rebecca asked.

“It’s the second biggest mountain lake in the world after Lake Titicaca. There are many stories of sunken settlements, of treasure. There’s a lot to be found. The Soviets used the lake as a submarine and torpedo testing site.”

“Can we go?” Rebecca said. “I want to meet Katya.”

Jack smiled. “It’s on the cards. Last year, Katya stumbled across a boulder there that might have an inscription on it. The boulder was almost entirely buried, and the permit for an excavation had only just come through at the time of the conference. She’s out there now.”

“Not alone, I hope,” Aysha said.

“She has Kyrgyz collaboration,” Jack said. “That means one guy and a creaky old tractor, as far as I can tell.”

“You’ve spoken to her recently?” Costas eyed Jack.

“This morning.”

Costas grunted. “So we might be able to join some dots.”

“There’s another thing. A really fascinating idea.”

“Fire away.”

“Well, the dots might not just lead east. They might also throw a curveball south.”

“Map, Jack,” Costas said.

Aysha reached over and unrolled a map of the world on the chart table. Jack traced out the features as he talked. “The Silk Route goes west-east, from Merv in Parthia to Xian in China, through the mountains of central Asia. Lake Issyk-Kul lies at the northeastern end of that massif with only one major pass to go before you get to China. But you can also leave the route along the way and break off south. If you do that from Lake Issyk-Kul, you’ve got a huge mass of mountains to get through, really forbidding places, through eastern Afghanistan, but then you break into northern Pakistan and the jungles of India. From there, if you’re a traveler from the west in the first century BC, the Roman world is within reach again.”

Costas’ eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting that escaped Roman prisoners may have gone that way?”

Jack paused. “One of Katya’s colleagues, a man named Hai Chen, is an independent scholar based in Xian who’s made a lifelong study of the Roman connection. He encouraged Katya to explore Kyrgyzstan, the petroglyphs at Issyk-Kul. He believes passionately in the story of Crassus’ lost legionaries, but with a twist. He’s originally a linguist, an expert on analyzing foundation stories and mythology among peoples with a strong oral tradition. As a young man he spent several years in Chitral, a kind of Shangri-la in northeastern Pakistan, the first place you’d come to after breaking through the mountains from the north.”

“The people who believe they’re descended from Alexander the Great,” Hiebermeyer murmured.

“The mythologies of the region—Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist—are full of stories of travelers from afar, princes, pilgrims, holy men dispensing wisdom. Sometimes they’re on a quest, or princes on a transformative journey, like Buddha himself Imagine the
Canterbury
Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
, Hercules’ Labors, Moses in the desert. Sometimes the arrival fulfills a local prophecy, and the traveler becomes king.”

“Didn’t Fa-hsien come through the mountains?” Hiebermeyer asked.

Jack nodded, and glanced at Costas. “A Chinese Buddhist monk who came to India in the early fifth century AD in search of the holy texts of his religion. His
Records of the Buddhistic Kingdoms
is one of the great early travel books. He came to Gandhara, the ancient Buddhist state of northern India. But Katya’s colleague Hai Chen wasn’t on the trail of a Buddhist monk. He’d heard of someone else. The traveler he recorded from the oral stories was a
yavana
, meaning westerner. And this
yavana
was no monk but a warrior, one who ruled with a golden hand. He came to Chitral for a short time, and then left. Farther south Hai Chen heard another legend of a god-king called
Haljit Singh
, Tiger Hand. He too left, and went south.”

“Where are we leading with this?” Costas said.

“If you’re our Roman, once you get through the mountains of Afghanistan, past Chitral, the way’s open to the west. You have two options. You can travel down the valley of the Indus southwest to the head of the Indian Ocean, to the port of Barygaza, near modern Karachi in Pakistan. From there you can sail to Arabia, then the Red Sea toward home. But there was another option. If you want to make contact with fellow
yavanas
, with other Romans in India, the better route was to go southeast, down the valley of the Ganges to the Bay of Bengal. You’d end up passing extensive tracts of jungle in eastern India. Look at the travels of the monk Fa-hsien. He took that route, and sailed south all the way to Sri Lanka. Then look at the
Periplus
. It describes the same route, just looking in the opposite direction. Listen to this.” Jack picked up the modern edition of the
Periplus
on the table, and flicked through it until he came to the page he was looking for.
“After this, toward the east and with the ocean on the right, sailing offshore 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.”
Jack gestured toward the porthole, where the shore was just visible. “Remember, the author of the
Periplus
was recalling being here off southern India, looking north. It was probably as far as he ever came. But he knows men who’ve come down from there, maybe Indian middlemen from Gandhara, maybe even traders who have come all the way down from central Asia—Bactrians, Sogdians, even western Han Chinese.”

“The kind of trader who would have told our
yavana
, our escaped Roman, which way to go,” Aysha said.

“But probably not lived long enough to guide him there,” Jack said. “All a Roman legionary needed was a pair of stout marching sandals and a clear view of the sun and stars. With that, he was set. A guide would never have kept up with him.”

“It’s all about the monsoon, isn’t it?” Costas said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, why a legionary looking for fellow Romans might not go to this place at the mouth of the Indus, Barygaza,” he said, pointing at the map. “It’s a lot closer to Egypt. But ships can sail there from the Red Sea pretty well year round, hugging the coast, sometimes taking a direct open-sea route during the monsoon season. There was no need for a permanent western presence at Barygaza, to maintain the port during the off-season. The native traders could do that. But the south of India was a different story. I take it the Egyptian shippers only got there and back during the monsoon season, taking the open-sea route across the Indian Ocean?”

Jack nodded. “The coastal route down western India was too treacherous. The author of the
Periplus
makes that pretty clear. It was like the Skeleton Coast of west Africa, beset with reefs and infested with pirates.”

“So for half the year Arikamedu and the other south Indian ports are empty of business. But it’s crucial that they operate during the sailing season. You need people there during the off-season, your own people, people you trust. That’s my point. If you’re going to search for fellow Romans in India, you go south, not west. That’s what our traveler would have been told. And that’s what this is all leading to, isn’t it? We’re talking about a grizzled old legionary who wants to make contact. Maybe he’s too ashamed to go home, but something drives him to try, some hope, a dream.”

“Maybe he had a family, all those years ago in Rome before he marched off to war,” Aysha said. “They were citizen-soldiers. They had a life before joining up.”

“We can only speculate,” Jack said. “Maybe he had a dream, cherished over all those years of captivity. Going to Barygaza might have put him on a ship to Egypt, yet with little foreknowledge of what to expect, committing him to discovering a truth he may never have wanted. But going to the south of India, to Arikamedu, would have put him directly in contact with other Romans. They would have told him of the civil wars, of the new order, the sweeping away of all that had been before, the passing of the Rome he had known. Maybe he would have had some hint of this from traders they’d encountered on the Silk Route, but he needed to know for certain. Maybe he knew all along that a return voyage could never be more than a fantasy, laden with disappointment and grief. But he still had to make contact, a yearning that could only be satisfied by talking to those who had come from the world he had left.”

Hiebermeyer peered at Jack. “It sounds as if Katya’s colleague might have been following this trail. Did he go farther south?”

Jack pursed his lips. “He was planning an expedition to the tribal peoples of eastern India. Katya said he’d had a revelation about some character in Hindu mythology, a Roman connection. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, but he was secretive about it, didn’t want her to get involved. Katya thinks it was here, just in from the Godavari River Delta.” Jack pointed to a spot north of Arikamedu, in from the east coast of India. “He was going to reveal everything to Katya when he got back. He was due at the Transoxiana Conference, but never made it. That was almost four months ago.”

“Is any of his research published?” Hiebermeyer asked.

“No. He was always secretive. Katya said he always seemed to regret anything he revealed. He was suspicious of everyone around him. And it wasn’t just a scholar with unorthodox ideas battling against the academic establishment. She said it was as if he had some great secret. He thought he was being followed. He always seemed to be putting people off the scent. Katya said he’d been like that as long as she could remember.”

“So how can we trust what he told Katya?” Hiebermeyer asked.

“Because he’s her uncle,” Jack replied.

“Her uncle!”
Costas exclaimed. “Good God. This gets more mysterious by the minute. Uncles tell their nieces things, don’t they? And they’re both archaeologists, linguists. He must have let her in on a bit more of the secret. Didn’t she say
anything
to you?”

“She said he was like one of the Silk Route explorers of a hundred years ago, searching for an elusive treasure he could never seem to find.”

“What treasure, Jack?”

Jack paused. “You’re right. Katya knew more than she was letting on, but I wasn’t going to press her. One thing did happen, though. In the hotel at the conference she showed me her uncle’s work on Chitral. It was his doctoral thesis, one of the few times he wrote anything down. She hadn’t read the section before about the legend of the god-king called
Haljit Singh
, Tiger Hand. When she read that, she visibly paled. I told her about an artifact I had and where it came from, and she nearly fainted. After that she said nothing. End of topic. But she was more troubled than usual. I think there are dark forces at play. Someone who wants her uncle stopped. And that was when she began to get seriously worried about his whereabouts.”