David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

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 foreshore, 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 pass 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 shore. Their enemy had horses, and could move quickly. Licinius looked at the pass 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 hoarse 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 offshore, 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 pass. 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 grass 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.