The Tiger Warrior (14 page)

Jack sensed the whiff of excitement that had first drawn western explorers—his own ancestors—into these waters. The eastern sky seemed full of allure, and with the risks that made the draw that much more beguiling. Jack had been thinking about the Romans again. Here, two thousand years ago, they would have been on the cusp of the unknown, the place where the author of the
Periplus
had drawn the line between what he himself had seen, and the world beyond. Ahead lay places half-imagined, which the author knew only from the goods that were brought to him—silk, lapis lazuli, exotic spices and medicaments, carried by traders across great mountains and deserts to the sea. The traders he met would have told him little, and what they did tell might have been deliberately misleading, designed to put him off searching for the sources himself Yet their tales would have needed little exaggeration. The dangers were all too real, even today. Jack remembered the final lines of the
Periplus. What lies beyond this region, because of extreme storms, immense cold and impenetrable terrain, and because of some divine power of the gods, has not been explored
.

Costas came up beside him, and turned to speak. “Rebecca wants to come with us, Jack. She has three weeks’ more holiday from school.”

“She can come to the Roman site at Arikamedu, but not to the jungle. It’s bandit country out there. The place is a haven for Maoist terrorists. It’s heated up since the Indian government allowed foreign mining speculators into the jungle, and the Maoists have stirred up the tribal people.”

“Okay, you tell her.”

“She seems to listen to you, Uncle Costas.”

“She knows already.” Aysha was standing on the other side of Jack. “I told her.”

“Oh, thanks, Aysha.” Jack’s eye was suddenly caught by a spectacular image. The eastern shoreline of India had been visible a few miles off the port bow, but was now lit up by the morning sun as it rose above the haze to the east. It was an extraordinary sight, a thin line of beach and fringing palms glowing orange, as if a channel of fire were ripping up the shore toward the northern horizon. Jack thought of India in 1879, the year of the jungle rebellion. It was an India of Mughal opulence and colonial civility, yet there was another India, a darker place of desperation and cruelty, of starvation, of disease that took half the children and would kill a person within a day. Two decades before the Rampa Rebellion, India had been torn apart by the mutiny of the Indian troops of the East India Company’s Bengal Army, an orgy of barbarism and bloodshed. Three years before the rebellion, in 1876, a dreadful famine had settled in the south and killed millions. India seemed a place of temptation, yet a place where fickle mortality sharpened the senses, focused experience on the present. Jack remembered those last words in the diary of John Howard, written somewhere out here in the jungle beyond the line of coast that burned across the horizon.
Lord help me
. What had he seen?

A warm breeze wafted over them as
Seaquest II
picked up speed. Jack turned and went down the stairs to his cabin, leaving the door open. A few minutes later Rebecca came in flopping down on his foldout bed. “I’ve been reading a story you put by my bed, Rudyard Kipling’s
The Man Who Would Be King
. It was published in 1888, and the book’s signed John Howard, Captain, R. E.”

“Go on,” Jack said.

“It’s about two British adventurers, former soldiers, who go north to Afghanistan in search of a fabled lost kingdom. They find it, and one of them becomes king, ruling like a god. But he accidentally cuts himself and the people see his blood and realize he’s mortal, and he comes to a sticky end. I also found James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon
, published in 1933. That’s about Shangri-la, somewhere in the mountains to the northeast of India, the fabled place where people were nearly immortal.”

“These are both modern legends,” Hiebermeyer said, walking into the cabin with Aysha, both carrying steaming mugs of coffee. Costas followed behind.

Rebecca shook her head determinedly, and pointed at a book on the desk. The cover showed an image of an exploding volcano at sea, superimposed on an underwater photograph of a rock-cut stairway leading to a dark entranceway surrounded by mysterious symbols. Across it was the single word
Atlantis
. “My mother sent a copy of that to me even before I knew you. That first chapter on the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. Atlantis is also a modern legend, but there was a kernel of truth in it.”

“So you think we’re looking for a lost kingdom, for Shangri-la?” Hiebermeyer said dubiously.

Rebecca shook her head and pointed at a small pottery statue of a Chinese warrior used as a paperweight on Jack’s desk. “I’ve been thinking about that warrior.”

“Uh-oh,” Costas murmured. “I think we’re in for a bit of Howard lateral thinking.”

“You remember, Dad? You took me to the terracotta warriors exhibit at the British Museum in London the day after we flew in from New York.” She turned to Aysha, suddenly breathless with excitement. “It’s amazing. This guy, the First Emperor, had himself buried with everything, and I mean everything, under a mound the size of an Egyptian pyramid. They haven’t even excavated it yet, can you believe it? There’s only some ancient Chinese account of what it’s like. There’s a complete model of the world with mercury rivers, and even the heavens. The stars were jewels. And around the mound is what they’ve actually dug up, those warriors, all life-sized, thousands of them. It’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.”

Hiebermeyer began tapping his fingers. “What’s your point, Rebecca?”

“I think it’s all about immortality.”

“That’s what tombs are usually about,” Hiebermeyer said, still tapping. “Equipping people for the afterlife.”

“I don’t mean the afterlife, I mean immortality,” she said impatiently. “With the First Emperor, it was a complete obsession. You remember, Dad? In the exhibit it said he sent out a huge expedition in search of some fabled islands in the Pacific, the Isles of the Immortals. I asked whether you’d ever hunted for them.”

Costas had a faraway look in his eyes, and began humming the Hawaii-Five-Oh tune. “I think I know where they are.”

Rebecca’s face crumpled with frustration. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

Jack looked at the statue. “The Chinese concept of the afterlife was close to the notion of immortality. You didn’t go to heaven as we might understand it. Instead you remained in a kind of parallel universe, shadowing the real world. For the First Emperor of China,
Shihuangdi
, in the third century BC, the idea of heaven couldn’t offer him more than he already had on earth. That’s what the terracotta army was about, a copy of what he had at his command during his mortal life.”

Rebecca was silent, looking down and fiddling with her fingers. Aysha leaned forward and looked at her. “I know what you’re driving at. It’s the allure of the east, isn’t it? Do you think that’s what Howard was after, when he disappeared? For some, it was remote fantasy valleys, Shangri-la, lost kingdoms, heaven on earth, places where you could live forever in earthly paradise. For others, it was where you might find the secret of immortality. Always it was the allure of eternal life, the greatest of treasures.”

“But what about our Roman legionaries?” Costas said. “Is this what they were after too? I thought all they wanted was glorious death, to join their brothers-in-arms in Elysium.”

“Out there, on the Silk Route heading east, they may have thought they were in that shadowland already, marching alongside their dead companions,” Jack said. “But they were still alive, and we should never underestimate human desire. For those among them who still hankered after it, immortality might have seemed their only hope of ever making it back to Rome.”

“How could they have known what lay ahead?” Aysha murmured. “What might have drawn them on?”

“I was getting to that,” Rebecca said. “The First Emperor’s tomb was at the end of the Silk Route, right? Full of treasure, just as it is today. If traders coming down from the Silk Route could tell the author of the
Periplus
about legionaries escaping from Parthia and heading east, then traders could also have told the legionaries about the fabled tomb of the First Emperor. Maybe a trader told them the story in the hope they’d spare his life.”

“Maybe we’re being too mystical about this,” Costas said, rubbing his stubble.

“What do you mean?” Rebecca said.

“Maybe you have the right idea, but it wasn’t some mystical allure. Just good old-fashioned treasure.”

“Dad says you’re wrong about him, he’s an archaeologist, not a treasure hunter.”

“When I see an elephant, I call it an elephant.” Costas stood up. “We need to get to the Zodiac. And I wasn’t being flippant. Hawaii is paradise. The west shore of Kaua’i, you know? There’s a beautiful beach with some shady palms just beyond Hanalei, and the perfect little bar.”

“Dad says you’re a beach bum,” Rebecca said.

“Now you know why I have to go.”

Jack turned to Rebecca. “Keep on reading John Howard’s diary. There might be more in it I’ve missed. And pretty good thinking, by the way. We might just sign you up. All you have to do now is learn to dive.”

“It’s a done deal, Jack,” Costas said. “I’m taking her out from Kaua’i next week.”

“She might not want to, of course,” Jack said. “She might want to learn to fly helicopters instead.”

“Oh, I’ll do anything for Uncle Costas,” Rebecca said, waving a diving textbook at them as she followed Hiebermeyer and Aysha out of the door.

Jack turned to Costas, his expression serious. “I’m dog-tired, but I’m looking forward to this.” He jerked his head toward the pile of khaki clothes and jungle boots beside his bed. A shoulder strap and holster lay on top, the butt of his Beretta 92 automatic poking out. “It’s been a while since I’ve worn that.”

“Too long, Jack. We don’t want to lose the edge.”

Jack was suddenly exhilarated. It had been an extraordinary twenty-four hours since he had first seen the shards with the text of the
Periplus
, and he was still reeling. They had begun to fathom out a story from the past, a lattice of possibilities and connections. Already he had begun to see images, the first few pictures in his mind that told him his instincts were right. Gnarled, weatherbeaten faces—Roman faces—the sheen of sunlight off a blood-soaked blade, swirling snow, then something else, the image of a warrior, something he could not shake from his mind. He turned and looked at the pictures above the sea chest, the faded images of the British officer, of his wife and child. Jack felt as if he were about to walk into that image and join his ancestor on his foray into the darkness, to a place Jack had yearned to know all his adult life. He took a deep breath, picked up the holster and looked at Costas. “Good to go?”

“Good to go.”

Godavari River, India, 20 August 1879

L
IEUTENANT JOHN HOWARD, ROYAL ENGINEERS, TOOK
off his pith helmet and wiped his brow. The sun was bearing down directly on the deck of the steamer now, and it was deuced hot. The brass helmet plate of the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners gleamed up at him, lovingly polished by his batman that morning. But it presented an excellent mark for a sharpshooter, and he rubbed his grimy palm into it, and then replaced the helmet on his head. He reached out to touch the metal casing of the paddlewheel, the last spot of shade along the side of the vessel, but the metal was like a furnace. A lump of coal rolled out from under an oilskin in front of him and he kicked it despondently. At least they had managed to get that dry. He had seen speckles of iron pyrites in the coal, and had remembered an alarming demonstration of spontaneous combustion in damp coal at the School of Military Engineering. It would have been a less than glorious end to his first field command, immolated on a sandbar in a godforsaken river gorge in the jungle of eastern India, without ever having fired a shot. He was beginning to realize that war was like that.

He watched a crocodile swim languidly by, seemingly oblivious to the drama unfolding at the river bend, then shifted to face the foredeck of the vessel, pulling his Sam Browne belt around so his holster was out of the way, and keeping his head below the iron plating they had erected as bullet-proofing in the river port at Rajahmundry. He glanced at the nameplate,
Shamrock
, then at his men. Kneeling behind the plating were a dozen Madrasi sappers, their cartridge pouches open and their Snider-Enfield rifles at the ready. Beyond them was the seven-pounder gun, with canisters of grapeshot and a sponging rod laid alongside. Colonel Rammell had urgently requested mountain pack guns for the mules but instead they had been sent two muzzle-loading field pieces with fixed carriages, useless in the jungle. At the last minute the sappers had installed one on the river steamer, and had devised a block and tackle to keep the recoil under control. Beyond the gun the lascar boatmen were still engaged in a futile effort to kedge the vessel off the sandbar which had held them fast for almost two days now. During the night another boat had come upriver, delivering a replacement officer and taking away some of the sappers broken by jungle fever, but every effort of the crewmen had failed to dislodge the steamer. That was another reason to pray for the return of the monsoon. With the river in full spate, they would float off and be able to continue their voyage upriver to Wuddagudem, where they were supposed to be hacking a road out of the jungle. Their mules were still standing patiently in the lee of the deckhouse, with racks of picks and axes stacked beside them. One of the lascars was there too, lying unconscious on a stretcher. His moans and cries had made the previous night intolerable. The afternoon before, the boatmen had taken the anchor out in the little boat and dropped it a hundred feet away, and the unfortunate lascar had been at the capstan when the hawser had broken and snapped back, mangling his legs. Surgeon Walker had dosed him with brandy and laudanum but there was nothing more he could do. The lascar had been their only casualty of the expedition so far, and Howard was too tired for another night like that. He fervently hoped the man would not last the day.