David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

“They look like earthworks, not masonry.”

“They were made of mud-brick, over and over again, a new wall built on top of the eroded remains of the previous one. But at some point there may have been a failed experiment with mortar. We found a recently exposed section where one of the walls had collapsed, and it was filled with a whitish powdery substance. Almost like concrete that hadn’t set properly.”

“When were you there?”

“The Transoxiana Conference in April,” Jack said. “The Oxus was the ancient name for the great river that runs near here, from Afghanistan toward the Aral Sea. The ancient Greeks and Romans saw it as the limit of their world. The conference focused on contacts between the west and Central Asia.”

“You mean the Silk Road?”

“The time when Chinese and central Asian traders were first appearing in places like Merv, soon after Alexander the Great swept through there.”

Costas peered at the picture. “Hang on. Who’s that? I recognize that person.”

“Just there for scale.”

“Jack! That’s Katya!”

“She chaired my session of the conference. It’s right up her street. She’s been studying ancient inscriptions along the Silk Road. She invited me. We weren’t doing any diving in April, so I could hardly say no.”

“Jack. Well, well. You’ve been seeing Katya again. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Jack Howard, underwater archaeologist, flying off to a heap of dust in the middle of a desert. Turkmenistan, is it? That’s about as far away from a shipwreck as you could find.”

“Just keeping up with old colleagues.” Jack grinned, and closed the screen.

Costas grunted. “Anyway. These Romans. Prisoners of war. I asked whether any of them ever escaped.”

“From St. John’s Island, I doubt it. From Merv is another matter. Hardly any of Crassus’ legionaries could have survived to the time Augustus repatriated the standards, more than thirty years after the battle. But there were rumors in Rome for several generations after.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“The kind you hear about but can never source. Rumors about a band of escaped prisoners, legionaries who had been captured at Carrhae. Prisoners who didn’t go west, back to a world that had forsaken them, but instead went east.”

“You believe this?”

“If they’d survived all those years of toil in the Parthian citadel, they’d have been the toughest. And they were Roman legionaries. They knew how to route-march.”

“Let’s see. Heading east. That’s Afghanistan, central Asia?”

Jack paused. “Some of the rumors come from much farther east. From the ancient annals of the Chinese emperors. But it’ll have to wait. We’re almost there.” Jack pointed ahead to a great tongue of land that jutted out into the Red Sea. “That’s Ras Banas. It’s shaped like an elephant’s head. I thought you’d like that.”

“How could I forget?” Costas murmured. “My elephantegos. Never in a million years did I think I’d find ancient elephants underwater.”

“Dive with me, and anything’s possible.”

“Only if I provide the technology.”

“Touche.”

Jack lowered the collective and the helicopter began to descend. “I can see the excavation now. I can even see Maurice. Those shorts of his are like a signal flag. I’m going to put us down on a rocky patch just in from the shore to avoid making a dust storm. Hold fast.”

The scene that confronted them as they stepped out of the helicopter was one of desolation, enormous expanses of sunbaked ground with nothing but the sea glinting behind. Despite Jack’s best efforts they had raised a whirlwind of sand as they landed, and the view now was refracted through a film of red dust as if the air itself were glowing hot. Inland to the west Jack could just see the line of low mountains that marked the edge of the coastal desert, on the route to the Nile; to the east, the rugged peninsula of Ras Banas curved out into the sea. Tucked in at the head of the bay a few hundred meters away were the ramshackle huts of the Egyptian customs outpost, and beyond that lay a shallow lagoon about a kilometer across enclosed by a thin sandy spit on the seaward side. It seemed a place on the edge of human existence.

Costas stood beside Jack, wearing a straw hat and garish wraparound sunglasses, wiping the dust and sweat from his face. He pointed into the haze. “Here he comes.” A portly figure trundled out of the dust down the small hill beside them, his hand already outstretched. He was shorter than Jack, a little taller than Costas, but whereas Costas had the barrel chest and brawn of his Greek island ancestry, Hiebermeyer had never managed to shake off the impression that his entire being revolved around sausage and sauerkraut. It was an illusion, Jack knew, for a man who was continuously on the move and had the energy of a small army.

“He’s still flying at half-mast, I see,” Costas muttered to Jack.

“Don’t say anything. Remember, I gave him those shorts. They’re a hallowed part of our archaeological heritage. One day they’ll be in the Smithsonian.” He glanced at Costas’ own baggy shorts and luridly colored shirt. “Anyway, you can hardly talk, Hawaii-Five-Oh.”

“Just getting ready,” Costas said. “For where we’re going in the Pacific. You remember? Holiday time. Thought I may as well kit up now.”

“Yes. About that.” Jack cleared his throat just as Hiebermeyer came up and shook hands warmly with him, and then with Costas. “Come on,” he said, continuing down the hill without actually stopping.

“So much for small talk,” Costas said, swigging at a water bottle.

“He’s been wanting to show me this place for months,” Jack said, slinging his faded old khaki bag over his shoulder and following. “I can’t wait.”

“Okay, okay.” Costas tossed the bottle back into the helicopter and followed Jack down the hill, catching up with them about fifty meters from the water’s edge. Hiebermeyer took off his little round glasses and wiped them, and then opened his arms expansively. “Welcome to ancient Berenike. The holiday resort at the end of the universe.” He pointed back up the slope. “Up there’s the Temple of Serapis, down here’s the main east-west road, the decumanus. The town was founded by Ptolemy II, son of Alexander the Great’s general, who ruled Egypt in the third century BC and named the place Berenike after his mother. Flourished mainly under the Roman emperor Augustus, declined after that.”

“So where’s the amphitheater?” Costas looked around. “I don’t see anything at all.”

“Look down.”

Costas kicked at the ground. “Okay. A few potsherds.”

“Now come over here.” They followed Hiebermeyer a few meters farther toward the shore. He had led them to the edge of an excavated area the size of a large swimming pool. It was as if the skin had been peeled off the ground. They saw rough rubble walls of coral and sandstone, forming small rooms and alleyways. It was the foundations of an ancient town, not an immaculately laid out Roman town like Pompeii or Herculaneum but a place without any architectural pretension, where walls and rooms had clearly been added organically as they were needed. Hiebermeyer leapt down with surprising agility onto a duckboard that lay across the trench. He bounded over to the far side and pulled a large tarpaulin away, then gave a triumphant flourish. “There you go, Jack. I thought you’d like that.”

It was a row of Roman amphoras, just like the ones they had seen on the wreck that morning, only these were worn and many had broken rims. “All reused, as you can see,” Hiebermeyer said. “My guess is these went all the way to India filled with wine, then were brought back here empty and reused as water containers. Water’s a precious commodity here. The nearest spring’s on the edge of the mountains, miles away. We don’t even have electricity. We use solar panels to run our computers. And we have to bring our food in, just as they did in ancient times from the Nile Valley. It really makes you empathize with the past.”