Authors: David Gibbins
Costas traced his hand over the sculpture. “But these soldiers don’t look like Greeks to me. Or Persians.”
Jack swept the torch over the wall. “You’re right. The soldiers to the left are Roman, not Greek. They’ve got chain mail, and early style helmets. They’re carrying the
pilum
, the Roman spear, and the
gladius
, the thrusting sword. They’re Roman legionaries of the first century BC, the time of Crassus.”
“I can see Roman numerals.” Costas peered closely at a standard carried above the soldiers. “The symbols XV, and the letters AP.”
“Fifteenth Apollinaris,” Jack exclaimed. “That’s the legion mentioned on the cave inscription from Uzbekistan, the one Katya’s uncle identified. The sculptor has replicated the Battle of Issus scene, but has substituted Romans for Greeks. This must be the Roman army marching into battle at Carrhae.”
“And the tall guy in the center? Where Alexander should be? Is that Crassus, the Roman general?”
Jack shook his head. “No way. The legionaries who survived Carrhae, who survived imprisonment, who escaped east, would have been the toughest of the tough, probably including veterans of Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and Britain a few years before. But Crassus was an incompetent leader by comparison with the revered Caesar, and the soldiers would have been contemptuous of him. A veteran of Carrhae would never put Crassus in the position of Alexander. And I doubt whether it’s a self-portrait, the sculptor himself That wasn’t the way of a Roman legionary. Your identity was with your section, your
contubernium
. But because of that bonding, close friends could be revered. That’s what I think this is. The members of a
contubernium
called themselves brother
, frater
. That character’s not dressed as a general. Maybe he’s an
optio
, a section leader, or a centurion, but no more. He’s shown as
primus inter pares
, a leader certainly, but definitely one of the men.”
“But he’s larger than life,” Costas said.
Jack put the torch close to the carving. “No. Look again. Not larger than life, just tall. The anatomical proportions are the same as the others, he’s just longer-limbed. And look at his face. Roman funerary sculptors churned out stock images, but when it came to the face they always carved actual portraits. Look at these soldiers. I can see faces from central Italy, men from Campania, Latium, Etruria, hard men, grizzled mountain men, farmers, fishermen. These are portraits, real individuals known to the sculptor. You can see it in the quirky features, the humanity. Then look at the taller man. His face is longer, leaner, with higher cheekbones. His hair’s tied back under his helmet in a ponytail, and he’s got a beard. You don’t see that in any of the other legionaries. He’s a Gaul, maybe from the Alps, maybe one of the former enemies recruited by Caesar. And look at his expression, the toughness, the fortitude, even the hint of humor in those eyes, the black humor of the soldier. There’s a lot to admire in that face. He must have been a close friend of the sculptor,
his frater.”
“It looks as if the sculptor knew something about perspective, anyway,” Costas said. “I count a dozen legionaries down here around the tall man, but above them it looks like a whole legion in low relief, a separate body of men in midair.”
“That’s what clinched it for me,” Jack said. “Even before I looked at their enemy to the right.”
“Explain.”
“That crowd of soldiers above. It isn’t a distant scene, a crude way of showing perspective. It’s a scene in another dimension. It’s a ghost legion.”
“A ghost legion?”
“That standard you spotted, the Fifteenth Legion? It’s not being carried by the soldiers below, the real-life soldiers. It’s being carried by the ghost legion. And look at the carving at the top of the standard. It’s the
aquila
, the sacred eagle. Then look again at the real-life soldiers below, the dozen. They don’t have a standard at all. Now that’s bizarre. A Roman sculptor brought up with all the rules and conventions of iconography would never have done it. A legion in battle
always
has its eagle. For a sculptor who’d also been a soldier, not depicting it is almost unimaginable.”
“These were the legionaries who lost their eagles at Carrhae,” Costas murmured.
“Precisely. And that’s why this isn’t a depiction of Carrhae. It’s another battle.
A later battle
. The iconography is perfect. The soldiers above, the ghost legion, are the men who fell at Carrhae, with their eagle. The men below are the survivors. Here’s what I think. These are the escaped prisoners from Merv, fighting another battle of their own, far to the east, in a place where the legend of Alexander’s conquests must have been on their minds, something that persuaded the sculptor to use the Battle of Issus as his template.”
“But they’re dressed in full legionary gear,” Costas pointed out. “How on earth could they have retained all that from Carrhae, after years of imprisonment?”
“After escaping, they would have had to arm themselves on the way, pick up whatever they could find. But in their minds, they were still Roman legionaries. When they went into battle, they saw themselves this way. So that’s how the sculptor depicted them.”
“Okay. Now for the other warriors. The enemy.”
Jack swung the flashlight to the right. It was an image that seemed impossibly at odds with Roman legionaries. Jack had a sudden flashback to standing with Rebecca in front of nearly identical images in the British Museum, the traveling exhibit he had taken her to see shortly after they had first met in New York. He trailed the beam over the entire image, coming back to linger on the central character, the one opposing the tall legionary. He stared hard.
There was no doubt about it
.
“I may be wrong about this,” Costas murmured. “But are we looking at the terracotta warriors?”
Jack took a deep breath, his heart pounding with excitement. “Look at the armor. It’s segmented, like fish scales. And look at the weapons. Long, straight blades, elaborate halberds, distinctive bows and arrows. In the ancient world, only one army wore armor like that. And this isn’t just generic Chinese armor. The details here are very specific, exactingly observed. The sculptor had been a soldier himself and knew what he was looking at. What we’ve got here is a depiction of first-century-BC Roman soldiers confronting warriors dressed in the armor of the third-century-BC Qin dynasty, the First Emperor of China, a full two centuries before the time of Crassus’ legionaries.”
“How could Romans have seen the terracotta warriors?”
“Not terracotta warriors. Real warriors. Remember our Roman sculptor, the portrait tradition. If he can, he’ll show real people as individuals. I saw the terracotta warriors with Rebecca. There are a number of facial types, but they only give the illusion of being individuals. They’re like a CGI army for a film, with enough individuality to give the authenticity needed but not bearing close scrutiny. And the faces are of a fairly uniform central Chinese type, rounded, without much ethnic distinctiveness. Now get a load of these guys.” Jack flashed the light along the row of figures who seemed to be jostling for position in the foreground, their legs wide apart, weapons at the ready, staring out at them. The faces were hard, scowling, with intense eyes and long moustaches, their hair braided high in topknots.
“They look like Katya’s father did. A face that’s burned into my memory,” Costas murmured. “Like Genghis Khan.”
“Exactly,” Jack said. “These are steppe people, nomads, from the northern fringes of China. These are the First Emperor’s own people. This is what the warriors who accompanied him to victory in China would have looked like. And these are real individuals. But they’re not like the Romans opposite, where you can see affection, humanity. These are faces the sculptor has met in battle. You remember the faces of people who have tried to kill you.”
“Check out the central figure,” Costas murmured.
Jack shone the light again at the figure with its head twisted back toward the tall legionary. The figure was riding a horse, a sinewy charger with wide eyes that seemed to stare upward to the heavens. The sculptor had tried to show the horse twisting sideways, just as Darius’ chariot was shown turning away from the Macedonians in the Issus mosaic. The perspective here was clumsy, but the sense of movement was arresting. The horse and the surrounding warriors were speckled in dull red, as if someone had flicked paint over the rock. Costas rubbed a finger against it, then sniffed the moist smudge that came off “A ferrous base, like ochre.”
Jack looked back at the wall. “The sculptor could have made up other pigments from mineral outcrops in the jungle, just as the Kóya do for body paint. And we know he had lapis lazuli for the ceiling. But it looks as if red was the only color he used here. It gives a powerful impression, like looking at a black and white projection through a red filter. This was a scene reduced to its essentials, seared into his consciousness. The individuality of the faces, the detail of the weapons, the armor. And the color of blood.”
“A memory of battle.”
“And of that warrior on the horse,” Jack said. “Look at his headgear. In the Alexander mosaic, Darius wears a Persian hood, rising up around his chin and high above his head. It was probably made of felt, protection against the sun and cold on the steppe. That’s what this headdress looks like too, until you inspect it closely.” He handed the flashlight to Costas, who held it above his head with the beam angled down on the wall, enhancing the shadows. “I can see eyes,” he murmured. “And fangs, big ones. It’s the head of an animal. A lion.”
Jack shook his head. “No. A tiger.”
“A tiger”
“The south China tiger,” Jack said. Today there are only a few dozen left in the wild. At the time of the First Emperor, they were probably widespread.”
Costas raised the light higher to the left, to the level of the ghost legion, near the ceiling of the cavern. There was another relief sculpture above the soldiers, a roundel about a meter across containing two sculpted faces. Costas stared at it. “What you were saying earlier, on the way to Arikamedu,” he murmured. “About the arrival of Christianity in this region. That looks awfully like a mother and a child.”
“I saw that when we first came in here,” Jack said. “I wanted to work this whole scene through, but now I’m sure of it. It’s too early for Christianity. I think this place was sculpted some time in the final decades BC, and that roundel’s by the same hand, not some later addition. Those two portraits inside are real people too. You can see they were carved with special care. The woman’s not exactly pretty, is she? A bit heavy round the jowls, a crooked nose. The little boy has protuberant ears, and his eyes are close together. But these details are carved with loving care. This was a mother and child he adored, real people in his memory.”
“His wife and child,” Costas murmured.
“The roundel’s another Roman sculptural type, often funerary,” Jack said. “Look how the sculptor’s put it up there on the same plane as the ghost legion, as if the woman and child are in heaven. It’s as if he’s acknowledged the truth. Maybe his yearning for them brought him here, a trek across a continent to seek out his own kind. Maybe he met Romans at Arikamedu, and maybe they told him, a weather-beaten old tramp who arrived from the north, what he knew to be true, that the life he had left behind years before on the other side of the world was gone for good, that there was only one route left for him to join his loved ones.”
“You really do believe this was one of Crassus’ legionaries.”
Jack nodded. “Decades beyond the time when he last saw his wife and child, when he marched off from Rome to Carrhae. Thirty, perhaps forty years have passed. Rome has been devastated by civil war. He’d heard about that at Arikamedu, before retreating to this place. He hopes that his son followed in his footsteps as a sculptor, or lived and died a legionary.” Jack stared at the roundel. He would have known that the image was of loved ones long gone, who survived only in his memory. Standing here, chisel in hand, two thousand years ago, he knew he was never going back. It was easier for him to think of them in Elysium. And for the soldier who had left his family to go to war, there was a catharsis in this scene. Jack turned to Costas. “He and his comrades have fought for each other, for the honor of the legion. But they’ve also fought for their families. Putting the roundel there, above the battle scene, tells him that he did not abandon them. It reassures him, in his crushing moments of doubt.” Jack wondered whether John Howard had seen this too, on that day in 1879 when he and Wauchope had stumbled into this place.
His own child, his little boy, left behind with his mother, an image that would only ever live on in his memory
. Had Howard felt it? Had he seen an image of a death foretold? Was that what he had feared most of all, a fear for his own child, so far away from him, when he turned from this place to leave, to escape from this darkness?
Costas panned the light down from the roundel and along the Chinese warrior’s arm, showing where it extended toward the tall legionary. Between the two figures the stone was blackened and furrowed where water had dripped down the rock from an opening somewhere above, eroding the sculpture. He moved the flashlight to and fro. “His hand, where it looks as if he’s raising a fist to the Romans. He’s actually wearing some kind of glove. If I angle the light, you can see he’s holding a sword.”
Jack followed the beam. He stared at the hand, his mind racing. “It’s a gauntlet,” he said, his voice taut. “A gauntlet sword. A
pata”
“You mean like the one you inherited?”
Jack took the flashlight from Costas, and angled the light in different directions. Suddenly he saw it, the distinctive ears, the mouth, the fangs bared. His voice was barely a whisper. “It’s identical. The Roman must have taken it from the warrior, in this battle. He must have brought it here. And then Howard took it, that day in 1879.” He reached out and touched the sculpted fist, just as he had touched the real
pata
in his cabin on
Seaquest II
the day before, tracing his fingers over the features so familiar to him since his grandfather had given it to him as a boy. History suddenly seemed to contract, so that he was there, standing with the ghostly form of the man who had sculpted this image, an old man scarcely recognizable as a Roman, chipping and rubbing, living out his final days in here, finishing the image of his loved ones before he went to join them in Elysium. Jack remembered the
Periplus
fragments, the first glimmerings of the incredible story that was playing out in the shadows on this wall.
It was all true
.