The Tiger Warrior Part 3

"He calls it the Nelson touch," Costas said. "Lord Nelson, England's greatest admiral. Sick as a dog every time he put out to sea."

"I do not get seasick," Jack said. "I just empathize with my heroes."

"Well, that's good," Hiebermeyer said. "Because with what I've got here in this case, you won't be having much time to stare at the horizon. Are you really taking us to Arikamedu?"

"Where?" Costas peered at Jack suspiciously. "You've got that look."

Jack cleared his throat. "Where the Romans who sailed from here landed in southeast India. It's an amazing site. Roman pottery in India. The Archaeological Survey of India are planning a new excavation. I'm official advisor for their underwater unit, and I promised to look in when Seaquest II was next in the Indian Ocean. Maurice and Aysha have never been there, and it seems crazy not to give them the chance if they're going to be aboard with us anyway. I've already called our contact at Arikamedu and prepped him. He can't wait to see us."

"I thought we were going to test my new submersible off Hawaii," Costas grumbled. "And find a beach. And prop up a nice little palm-fronded bar."

"Just a small diversion first," Jack said.

Costas stared at him. "Yeah. Right. A diversion."

Jack looked at the carving of the dancing female spirit, then at the sherd with the Tamil graffito. Ramaya. He put it back down carefully on the table, and glanced up at the others. "Well, if you're ready, I think we're good to go. The sooner we do, the sooner we find out what it is you've got in that case."

Hiebermeyer picked up the case. Jack and Costas each shouldered a rucksack lying ready by the tent, and Aysha took a briefcase and a smaller bag. They waved back at the group in the trench and began to walk down the slope toward the helicopter. Hiebermeyer seemed lost in thought again, but suddenly stopped, put the case down and peered at Jack. "I just remembered. Talking about the dinghy reminded me. And then going to southern India. You've got family history out there, haven't you? Your great-great grandfather, wasn't it, the soldier? Something he found in the jungle, back in the nineteenth century. You used to go on about it when we were at school. How you'd love to get out there. As I recall it was somewhere in Tamil Nadu, the Eastern Ghats. If you're at Arikamedu, you won't be that far off."

Jack stared intently at Hiebermeyer. "I've always wanted to see if I could find out more. You're right. I'm pa.s.sionate about it. This is too good an opportunity to miss. It'd be a small diversion, a day or two. I think I can set it up with the Survey of India. And there's a connection with the Romans, I'm sure of it. I've got a gut instinct."

"Uh-oh," Costas said, stopping beside them. "Not just a diversion. A gut instinct. That's serious."

Jack grinned, then dumped the rucksack and reached into his own bag and extracted a small brown envelope. He took Hiebermeyer's hand, held it palm-up and gently tipped out the gold coin. Aysha gasped, and Hiebermeyer held the coin up, the sun glinting dazzlingly off the image of the emperor. "I guessed you'd found something like this, Jack. You were leaving a trail of hints. I do know you pretty well." He held up the coin again. "It's fantastic," he murmured. "The crumbled walls, these sc.r.a.ps of ancient Berenike, they tell a human story, but this place was really about what pa.s.sed through it, incredible riches, the wealth of an empire. To understand what actually went on here, you have to hold this. To hold treasure. That's what fueled this place, treasure on an unimaginable scale."

"And the sea trapped one load in its net," Costas said.

"There are more of these coins?" Hiebermeyer said.

"Thousands of them," Jack said. "All mint issues. All Imperial gold."

"It's the mother lode," Costas said.

Hiebermeyer relaxed his shoulders, gave a broad smile and put his other hand on Jack's shoulder. "Congratulations, Jack. You remember what I used to call you, when we were boys? Lucky Jack." He handed back the coin, picked up the case again then took Costas by the arm, steering him down the dusty slope toward the helicopter. "Now, tell me about these elephants."

"You're not going to believe it."

"Try me."

Three days later Jack stood outside on the flying bridge of Seaquest II, leaning on the railing and looking out toward the eastern horizon. The sun had risen in a clear sky for the first time since they had left the Red Sea, and Jack enjoyed the warm radiance as it reflected off the water. It had been three days not entirely to his liking. The monsoon had hit them as soon as they rounded Arabia, and they had sailed directly across the open ocean toward the southern tip of India. The only saving grace was the twenty-knot speed with the wind behind them. Jack could barely comprehend how ancient Greek and Egyptian sailors had done it, bucketing and wallowing in the swell, hundreds of miles from land with only the direction of the monsoon for navigation. It would have been a tremendous feat of courage, and sailing out of sight of land would have been their worst nightmare. Especially if they had been seasick. Jack swallowed hard, and tried to forget the last seventy-eight hours. The worst had not happened, but it had been close. He felt dog-tired, but also like the survivor of a near-fatal illness with a new lease on life. And it had also been exhilarating, the hours he had spent rooted to this spot, lashed by wind and spray, his eyes roving continuously, searching for the line of the horizon, in the tumult of the swell and flickering blackness that had seemed without end.

The captain's face popped out of the bridge door, and a hand holding a steaming mug. "We're entering the Palk Strait now. We've got a local pilot coming to navigate us through and I'm putting the s.h.i.+p on alert. The Sri Lankan navy's fighting a gun battle with Tamil Tiger boats just off the northern tip, and we'll be within range."

"Okay. Thanks." Jack took the mug gratefully and turned back to the sea. He watched the launch carrying the pilot come alongside, skillfully matching their speed while the pilot was hooked into a chair and winched on board. He could see land now on both sides, the southern tip of India and the northwestern coast of Sri Lanka. The narrows ahead were another obstacle facing ancient sailors, treacherous shallows and reefs that only local craft could ply. But once through, the sailors were near the end of their voyage, at the place where they met traders coming from the east, from Chryse, the semi-mythical land of gold, from the farthest places known to westerners. Jack looked at his watch. Maurice had promised that this would be the morning to reveal his find before they reached the Roman site of Arikamedu. Maurice and Aysha had been holed up continuously in the s.h.i.+p's lab belowdecks, piecing together whatever it was that Maurice had brought on board from his excavation in Egypt. Jack was itching to join them. He would go down and see for himself once he had finished his coffee. Especially now that belowdecks was a realistic proposition, not the lurching nightmare of the last three days.

A hand touched his arm, and he turned to Rebecca. She was dressed in jeans and an IMU T-s.h.i.+rt. "Feeling better?" she said. Jack nodded, smiling. Her accent was American, and her voice was developing the depth that Jack had found attractive in her mother. Rebecca was black-haired, as Elizabeth had been, but had Jack's blue eyes. There was a sadness in them, a sadness that would always be there, and Jack's heart went out to a child who had experienced the loss of her mother, and had grown up apart from her real parents. Jack had only known he was a father since the appalling circ.u.mstances of Elizabeth's disappearance and death in Naples less than a year before. Elizabeth had left him sixteen years earlier when she had succ.u.mbed to family pressure to return to Naples, and Jack realized she could only have known she was pregnant once she had been sucked back into the dark underworld from which she never found an escape. She had not wanted to risk bringing up her daughter in that world and had sent her to New York. Rebecca had grown up strong and confident under the guardians.h.i.+p of her mother's friends, and when Elizabeth had explained to her the reasons why, the dark backdrop of her life in Naples, she had understood as only a child could, absorbed in the excitements of her own life. But the death of her mother had been devastating, and after Jack had first met Rebecca in New York, his friends at IMU had become a second family to her. Jack had gone with her to Naples for the commemoration held by her mother's colleagues from the archaeological superintendency on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, overlooking the Roman site that had been Elizabeth's lifelong work, and the modern city whose dark tentacles had taken her life. Jack knew they were still there, those who had used her, worn her down, even among her own family, but there was to be no retribution; that cycle had been the poison that killed her. His choice, the one Elizabeth would have craved, was to walk away and take their daughter with him, to create a new and exciting world for Rebecca that would help her package the past in a place where it would never threaten to take hold of her. Jack would never know whether Elizabeth had intended to tell him about their daughter, but he could not afford to dwell on it. His responsibility now was Rebecca's happiness. He put his hand on hers. "I feel fine," he said. "I just needed some off-time."

"For three days? You? Dad." She had only just begun calling him that. "It's me, remember? You don't need to play the hero."

Jack gestured at what she was holding. "What's the book?"

"A guy called Cosmas Indicopleustes. That means Cosmas, sailor of the Indian Ocean. He was an Egyptian monk who came here in the sixth century AD. I was doing background reading, like you asked. Being your research a.s.sistant. I found this in your library."

"What does he say about Sri Lanka?"

She opened the book and read: "The island being, as it is, in a central position, is much frequented by s.h.i.+ps from all parts of India and from Persia and Ethiopia, and it likewise sends many of its own. And from the remotest countries, I mean Tzinitza, it receives silks, aloes, cloves and other products, and these again are pa.s.sed on to marts on this side. And the island receives imports from all these marts which we have mentioned and pa.s.ses them on to the remoter ports, while at the same time, exporting its produce in both directions. And farther away is the clove country, then Tzinitza, which produces the silk. Beyond this there is no other country, for the Ocean surrounds it to the east."

She closed the book. "Okay. Tzinitza is China, the clove country is Indonesia. What he's saying is that Sri Lanka was a kind of clearinghouse, midway between two worlds. Captain Macalister suggested I look at the Admiralty chart. I saw how treacherous this strait is, a deathtrap for big s.h.i.+ps. So what Cosmas was saying was, s.h.i.+ps from Egypt came here, off-loaded their stuff onto local craft, then waited. The local craft took it over the shallows to the other side, loaded it on big s.h.i.+ps coming from the Bay of Bengal, Indonesia, even China. And the same thing happened in reverse. You can really picture it out here, those big fat-hulled Roman s.h.i.+ps where we are now, and over there on the other side Chinese junks, with all kinds of canoes and catamarans in between. Pretty cool, huh?"

"Pretty cool," Jack replied, grinning. "Cosmas was writing five hundred years after what the Romans we're talking about at Berenike, but basically it's the same scenario, until the Arab conquest of the Middle East and north Africa shut down the sea routes to India. Cosmas provides the most detailed account we have of the ancient trade that went on here. Good work, research a.s.sistant."

"Think outside the box. That's what Uncle Costas tells me."

"Uncle Costas?" Jack said.

"Hiemy says I'm a lot like you. I don't know whether that's praise or not."

"Who?"

"Hiemy. You know, your old buddy. Herr Professor Dr. Hiebermeyer. That's what Aysha calls him, Hiemy."

"Of course," Jack said. "Hiemy."

"Aysha's in love with him, you know."

"Hang on a second. One thing at a time."

"Just getting you up to speed. You've spent the last three days with your head in the clouds."

Jack laughed. "Well, I've been waiting. Hiemy's been holed up like Caractacus Potts working on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He's been like that ever since we were at school. Every time he calls me up with a new discovery, insists that I come and see it, I agree to go, and then he realizes he needs more time to make absolutely sure. So before going I usually wait until he's come to see me personally three times. Then I know. It's a fine art."

"I'm sworn to secrecy. I could tell you what it is, but I can't. That was his condition for allowing me to help them in the lab."

"That's part of the game too." He looked into her eyes, thought for a moment, then spoke carefully. "I've been thinking about your mother a lot over the past days. You know when I saw her last year I hadn't been in contact with her since before you were born and when I did see her, it was for only a few moments in the archaeological site at Herculaneum. But I've got a perfect memory of her from when we were together all those years ago, like a favorite old film that will never change. You're in that film now too. It's as if we're a family together. I can see a lot of her in you."

"When she told me about you the last time I saw her, she said the same about you," Rebecca said. "She was planning to contact you after my sixteenth birthday, you know. She said she always meant to, once I was old enough to look after myself. My birthday was a month after she disappeared." Rebecca looked at Jack with unfathomable eyes, and then draped her arms around him and rested her head on his shoulders. Jack held her tight, and smiled. "Maybe she was right," he said. "Maybe there is a bit of me in you."

"Not the seasick bit, I hope."

"I do not get seasick."

"Yeah, right." She leaned back into the bridge and yelled, "Dr. Jack Howard, famous underwater archaeologist and commando extraordinaire, gets seasick."

"Time you were back in school," Jack grumbled.

"Hah. We're on the high seas. I've been reading about that too. Out here, no laws apply."

A hand clamped her shoulder, and Scott Macalister stepped out from behind her, smiling at Jack. "Young lady, only one law applies, and that is the law of the captain. Anyone signed on under the age of eighteen is my personal responsibility." He placed an old bra.s.s s.e.xtant into her hands. "Navigation cla.s.s at 1600 hours." At that moment a white streak appeared a few hundred meters off the starboard bow. "Tracer rounds," he said. "Everyone inside, now." He ushered them into the bridge and shut the door, pulling down a steel plate over the window. He took out his binoculars and peered through the bulletproof gla.s.s of the front screen. "That was a spent round from the gun battle a couple of miles away, but better safe than sorry."

"Ben's been teaching me to shoot with a twenty-two," Rebecca said.

"I don't think you're going to be taking on the Tamil Tigers with a twenty-two," Macalister murmured, eyes still fixed to his binoculars.

"I hope you were wearing ear protection," Jack said.

"I can look after myself." She turned around and walked toward the rear hatch that led down to the accommodation decks.

"Maybe she does have a bit of me in her," Jack muttered, looking apologetically at Macalister. "Teenagers."

"Come on, Dad," Rebecca called. "They're ready for you in the lab. That's what I came up to tell you. I helped Aysha with the final pieces. You're going to love this. It's my present to you for rescuing me from school."

Jack felt a surge of excitement, and turned to Macalister. "Okay, Scott. Let me know when we clear the strait, will you? And I want the Zodiac prepared. Our meeting with the Archaeological Survey of India people at Arikamedu is at 0900 hours tomorrow, and I don't want the schedule to slip."

"Will do, Jack." Macalister jerked his head toward the hatchway. "You'd better follow the boss."

The main laboratory on Seaquest II was the size of a school cla.s.sroom, set below the accommodation block and above the engine room. The wet cleaning and conservation of finds was carried out in a room behind, with a cl.u.s.ter of desalination tanks for timbers and other artifacts too delicate to be taken out of water. Jack thought of the complex like a field hospital for the stabilization of finds that would then be transferred for long-term treatment to the IMU museum at Carthage in the Mediterranean or the IMU campus in England. The lab was a dry facility for the cleaning of finds such as pottery that could safely be removed from water for short periods. Farther forward were rooms for a.n.a.lytical work, including multispectral imagery, thin-section petrology and ma.s.s spectrometry. The complex was designed to allow basic questions to be answered during an excavation when time might be pressing.

Jack followed Rebecca inside. Four long tables had been drawn together to form one surface, their legs locked into runnels on the floor. Above them a cl.u.s.ter of fixed tungsten lights bathed the tables in a warm glow. Aysha and Hiebermeyer were hunched together over a camera stand. Aysha was nudging something into place on the black baseboard under the camera, and Hiebermeyer was poised over the viewfinder, holding the remote shutter control. They looked as if they were performing a strange embrace. Rebecca glanced at Jack, pointing at them as if to rest her case. They both waited silently while Hiebermeyer clicked the shutter, and then Aysha slid the object back onto the table. Hiebermeyer turned toward them. "Jack!" In the tungsten light his face seemed to have a feverish glow, and his eyes were red-rimmed. "Sorry to keep you in the dark for so long. I just wanted to be absolutely sure."

Rebecca went around to the far side of the table and sat on a stool, surrounded by the books and notepads she had acc.u.mulated over the past few days. Costas had also been summoned and came through the door behind Jack, and they moved to the table. On the surface were hundreds of fragments of pottery, some of them tiny, only a centimeter or two across, others the size of small saucers.

"We playing jigsaw?" Costas said.

Jack's pulse began to race. "Ostraka!" He leaned over the table. Aysha ushered Costas to a stool. "It's the Greek word for potsherd," she said. "But archaeologists use it for sherds with inscriptions on them, where the pottery was used as a writing surface. In the ancient world, papyrus was a fairly valuable commodity, used only for top copies. If you wanted a writing surface for day-to-day use, for jotting notes, writing letters, composing rough drafts, you just found the nearest old amphora and smashed it up."

Jack circled the table, staring at the sherds, his mind racing. "They're Roman amphora fragments, Italian, first century BC or first century AD. It's the same type as the wine amphora we saw at Berenike. And the writing's Greek, as you'd expect in Egypt at that time. Greek was the lingua franca ever since Alexander conquered Egypt. The writing all looks as if it's in the same hand. I'm a.s.suming you found all of these sherds in the merchant's house you were excavating?"

Hiebermeyer's face gleamed. "It's an astonis.h.i.+ng find. I still can't believe it." He paused, looking Jack steadily in the eye. "You ready for this? Okay. What you're looking at is the only known ancient text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei. The only one actually to date from the Roman period when it was first written."

Jack gasped. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The greatest travel book to survive from antiquity. It was exactly what you might find at Berenike, in an outpost on the edge of the empire. Not a great work of literature, not a lost history or a volume of poetry, but a travel guide, an itinerary for sea captains and merchants. He cleared his throat. "Copy, or draft?" he said.

"Draft."

Jack exhaled forcefully. Draft. This was even more extraordinary. A draft could mean emendations, material deleted from the polished version. All the rough notes that get edited out. Precious words and phrases. He peered at Hiebermeyer. "I hardly dare ask. Have you seen anything new?"

Hiebermeyer was bursting with excitement. "I saw it within days of starting the excavation at Berenike. You remember when I tried to speak to you in Istanbul? Little did I know then how many more sherds we'd find, and how long it would take. This has been an exercise in patience. I couldn't have done it without Aysha." He turned and looked at Aysha, who nodded. He reached over and clicked a control panel. The plasma screen on the wall beside the table showed a CGI of the sherds in 3-D, jumbled together. "This is how they looked in the excavation. We call it the archive room, but really it was more like a study. After drafting each sentence on a large amphora sherd, we believe the author transferred it to papyrus and then tossed the sherds in a corner. Some sherds survived almost intact, others broke into pieces. I realized we were going to have to record all the spatial relations.h.i.+ps in situ if we were going to stand any hope of piecing it all back together. That's been Aysha's job. She's been wonderful."

"Somebody had better fill me in," Costas said.

"Maris Erythraea, the Erythraean Sea, translates as Red Sea," Aysha said. "Which to the ancients meant all the seas east of Egypt - the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, what lay beyond. Periplus means to sail around, and was the term for a nautical guide, an itinerary."

"The nautical guide of the Erythraean Sea," Costas murmured.

"It's truly one of the most amazing doc.u.ments to survive from antiquity," Jack said. "The Periplus wasn't written by an aristocrat, by a Claudius or a Pliny the Elder, but by a working man with his feet on the ground. Yet it tells of a journey far greater than any fantasy of Odysseus or Aeneas, a true-life account of exploration and trade to the nether regions of the ancient world. The whole text seemed hard to believe until archaeologists began to find Greek and Roman remains where we are now, in southern India."

"So the guy who lived in the villa, the merchant, was the author?" Costas said.

"I'm absolutely convinced of it." Hiebermeyer clicked the console again, revealing an aerial shot of the excavated house in Berenike they had visited three days before, looking down over the ancient port and the Red Sea. "We know from a Roman coin embedded in the foundations that the archive room was built soon after 10 BC, and the whole house was abandoned about AD 20. Because these sherds hadn't been swept out of the room, we're guessing that the text dates from just before the abandonment, about the early years of the reign of the emperor Tiberius."

"You mean when the trade was beginning to decline?" Costas said. "What we were saying in Egypt a few days ago, about the emperor plugging up the bullion flow?"

"Correct. But I don't think that was why the house was abandoned. Everything points to this man being old, retired. Aysha?"

She looked up. "Luckily, we've got a lot of scholars.h.i.+p to go on. Before this find, the earliest surviving text of the Periplus was a medieval copy dating from the tenth century AD, and it's been studied in translation since the nineteenth century. What we've found confirms what many scholars have thought, but adds a fascinating new dimension. First of all, it's clear from the vocabulary, the a.n.a.logies, that he was Egyptian Greek. Second, there's no doubt that he himself had sailed the routes described in the Periplus, as far down Africa as Zanzibar, then around Arabia to northwest India, and using the monsoon route to southern India. He's done it enough times to know a lot about navigation, but it's clear that he's a merchant, not a sea captain. He's mainly interested in naming the ports, telling how to get to them, and listing the goods to be traded there. In southern India it's predominantly bullion, meaning gold and silver Roman coins that were exchanged for pepper and a fantastic range of other spices and exotica, some of it transs.h.i.+pped from far distant places."

"Any idea of his specialization?" Costas asked.

"You remember the piece of silk we showed you at the excavation? We think that was it. He would have had contacts with the very farthest reaches of the trade, with traders who had come west through the Strait of Malacca from the South China Sea, and down through Bactria, modern Afghanistan, from central Asia. From the Silk Road."

"I think I've got you," Costas said. "The book was a retirement project. He finished it, he croaked and the house went on the market, but there were no buyers."

"Eloquently put, as always." Hiebermeyer pushed his little round gla.s.ses up his nose. "Unusually for an Erythraean Sea merchant, he didn't retire to Alexandria or Rome, but seems to have stayed in the Egyptian port that had probably been his base all his working life. Perhaps he was given some sort of administrative role, maybe as duovir, prefect of the town, to supervise it during the off-season when it was largely deserted. But few wealthy men able to afford a villa actually wanted to live in Berenike, and his house was impractical, especially with the high-value trade winding down."

"Maybe he didn't die there." Rebecca looked at Aysha, who nodded encouragingly. "Aysha thinks he had a wife, and she was Indian. One sherd had a female Indian name, Amrita. She showed me pictures of some of the stuff they found, other sherds with Tamil graffiti, fragments of Indian textile, pottery from southern India. Maybe the Periplus was his last say as a trader, and after finis.h.i.+ng it he took his family and left on a final voyage to the east, never to return."

Costas rubbed his chin. "Nice thinking. Maybe after all that time trading in India, he went native."

Jack was absorbed in a cl.u.s.ter of small potsherds placed close together, clearly the remains of two large sherds which had been smashed. "Look at this," he exclaimed. "Amazing. I can read the words Ptolemais Theron, Ptolemy of the Hunts. That's the elephant port on the Red Sea, Costas. And over here, Rebecca, on this other sherd, I can see Taprobane. That's what Sri Lanka was called, five hundred years before Cosmas Indicopleustes sailed here." He straightened up and looked at Hiebermeyer. "Well? This is all fantastic. But I know you too well. What did you really want me to see?"

"Spill it, Hiemy," Costas said.

Hiebermeyer's eyes bored into Costas. He turned to Jack. "We've got a little under a third of the Periplus here, about a thousand words. It's very similar to the tenth century copy, with only minor differences in wording and grammar. With one exception."

"Go on," Jack said.

Hiebermeyer pointed at a large sherd beside Rebecca, and they all crowded around. The sherd was about the size of a dinner plate, and was covered with fifteen lines of fine writing, the ink barely discernible in places against the whitish surface patina on the pottery. The text had been written within the sherd, and was not broken off at the edges. "It's an intact section, like a paragraph," Hiebermeyer said. "It's where he describes sailing beyond the Arabian Gulf and looks toward India, just before reaching the port of Barygaza at the mouth of the Indus."

"You mean the section where he puts on his archaeologist hat," Jack murmured.

Hiebermeyer nodded. "Generally he only digressed where it was of practical value, for example showing where a certain local tribe was to be avoided, or describing an inland region to give an idea of where the trade goods came from. There are two fascinating exceptions, both concerning Alexander the Great. In one place he describes how Alexander penetrated as far as the Ganges but not to the south of India. He says how in the market in Barygaza, near the mouth of the Indus, you can find coins, old drachmas, engraved with inscriptions of rulers who came after Alexander."

"Apollodotus and Menander, the first Seleucid kings," Jack said.

Hiebermeyer nodded. "Western traders going to India would have been well-versed in the story of Alexander, and doubtless there were locals who saw a quick buck in pa.s.sing off Seleucid coins as relics. Alexander lived in the fourth century BC, three hundred years before the Periplus was written, but the story was still so big that people coming out here might have felt the dust of conquest had barely settled. Our merchant knew all about sharp dealing and was warning his readers that the relics were bogus. He wasn't the kind of man who was duped by these stories. That makes me think we should take his second reference seriously, what you see on this sherd."

"I've spotted the word Alexandros," Costas said, peering down at the sherd. "My ancient Greek's a little rusty."

"Here's the translation." Hiebermeyer picked up a piece of paper covered with his indecipherable handwriting. "Immediately following Barake is the gulf of Barygaza and the sh.o.r.e of the land of Ariake, the beginning of the kingdom of Manbanos and of all India. The inland part, which borders Skythia, is called Aberia; the coastal part is Syrastrene. The region is very fecund, producing grain, rice, sesame oil, ghee, cotton, and the Indian cloths made from it, those of ordinary quality. There are numerous herds of cattle, and the men are very large and have dark skin. To this day there are still preserved around this area traces of Alexander's expedition: archaic altars, the foundations of encampments and huge wells"

Jack nodded. "Archaic altars. That sounds like the familiar text."

"But not the next sentence." Hiebermeyer paused, and pushed up his gla.s.ses. And from Margiana, the citadel of Parthia to the north of here, the Roman legionaries captured at Carrhae escaped east, taking the Parthian treasure with them toward Chryse, the land of gold."

Jack reeled as if he had been physically struck. "That's incredible," he said, almost whispering. "That's not in the Periplus."

"Isn't that what you were telling me about in the helicopter, Jack?" Costas said. "Cra.s.sus, his lost legions?"

"Hearsay and rumor," Jack murmured. "Until now." He took a deep breath, and looked at Rebecca. "After the Roman defeat at Carrhae in 53 BC, the Parthians took thousands of legionaries prisoner, possibly as many as ten thousand. Their fate fascinated the Romans for generations. The poet Horace wrote of it in one of his odes, wondering if Roman veterans had taken native wives and fought as mercenaries for a foreign ruler. Then Augustus' son Tiberius negotiated peace with the Parthians and the captured legionary standards were returned, a great triumph for Augustus that closed the chapter on the defeat."