David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

Costas brightened. “That’s the first time you’ve come out with the word. Actually said it, without being prompted.”

Jack looked into the lake. In the bay the water was a brilliant blue, like lapis lazuli, like the aura that had emanated from the mine in Afghanistan where they had been two days before. But out here, away from the shore, it was different. The sun bore down directly overhead and bathed the water in an iridescent glow. Some quality of the water, or perhaps the sheer intensity of the sun, meant that the lake seemed to absorb the light and reflect it back a few meters below, as if a layer of liquid silver were floating just beneath the surface. He looked down, and could see no reflection of himself at all. The layer seemed real, like quicksilver spread up from some source below. Jack looked back at the shoreline opposite them. He saw a tall bird, a heron, standing stock-still at the entrance to the creek a few hundred meters away. It was serene, like a sculpture, then dipped its beak down into the water. Jack remembered his visit with Rebecca to the terracotta warriors exhibit in London a few months before, standing in front of an elegant bronze bird, which had once adorned a model shoreline inside the First Emperor’s tomb. Jack looked across to the line of mountains to the south, breathtaking in their grandeur, and raised his hand to shade his eyes, dazzled by the reflection off the snowy peaks that seemed to float above as if they were in some other dimension.

Costas nudged him. “One thing’s been bothering me, since Afghanistan,” he said. “We know what happened to Howard, but not Wauchope. In the lapis lazuli mine there was no sign of the sacred velpu, the bamboo tube you think they brought with them, taken years before in the jungle. Howard might have been grasping it when he fell, but then someone took it from him. If it was the bad guys, they may have found the jewel too, and the whole story would have been different. Shang Yong would have been sitting in his desert stronghold with the jewel of immortality stuck in his ceiling, planning world domination.”

Jack nodded. Since leaving Afghanistan his focus had been on Pradesh, as if his own survival instinct were being marshaled behind their friend. It was only with the assurance that Pradesh would pull through that he had begun to think of everything else, of the man he had shot, of the boy with the suicide bomb. For the man he felt indifference, for the boy a kind of numbness, as if he had seen the explosion on a news report. The shock of that death would sear into him, but not yet. The experience of confronting Howard’s body, his great-great-grandfather, was still vivid, as if he were living it now, too early for reflection. But the fate of Wauchope had preoccupied him as they had sailed across the lake, as he had thought of the convergence of all their routes, the Roman legionaries, Howard and Wauchope, all the Silk Road explorers, of themselves, all focused on that mystical spot over the horizon where the sun rose on Chryse, the fabled land of gold in the ancient Periplus.

He turned to Costas. “You remember Wood’s Source of the River Oxus , the book we used to locate the lapis mines?”

“Sure. With all the annotations from Howard and Wauchope.”

“One of their notes Rebecca pointed out was in the margin of the map at the beginning of the book. An arrow from the valley of the Oxus to the northeast, and the penciled name Issyk-Kul, underlined, beside the word Przhevalsky”

“That Russian explorer?”

Jack nodded. “Przhevalsky actually died here, of typhus in 1888. Rebecca did some research. It turns out he was in London before that, and gave a lecture in the same series at the Royal United Service Institution where Howard gave his talk on the Romans in south India. That was just before Wauchope returned from leave to his job with the Survey of India, and both he and Howard attended Przhevalsky’s lecture. It was about a rare breed of horses he had discovered in Mongolia, and he mentioned the blood-sweating horses. Then he talked of coming to this place, of the legendary treasures of the lake. He spoke of the Tien Shan range, of his explorations deep into the mountains. I think Wauchope would have been entranced by that, as a passionate mountaineer.”

“So that’s where you think Wauchope went?”

“Tien Shan means celestial mountains. From the Taklamakan Desert, they look closer to heaven than any of the peaks in China. The First Emperor was obsessed with those places, always trying to go as high as he could, to leave his proclamations. He must have looked to the Tien Shan when he sensed his own mortality.” Jack swept his arm to the west. “If Wauchope survived the mine, he may have retraced Licinius’ route and come toward Issyk-Kul, then made his way into the mountains. Maybe he was like the Romans, and felt he could never go back to his own world. Maybe he and Howard never had any intention of returning. Przhevalsky told of valleys that were not bleak and unforgiving like Afghanistan, but bountiful, lush, lost in time, like Shangri-la. Even if they didn’t find the jewels, those stories could have tempted them with something of what the legend of the celestial jewel seemed to offer.”

“Or they could have found the jewel in the mine. Wauchope could have gone back with it to the jungle. He could have put the jewel inside the bamboo tube and returned the sacred velpu to the Koya people. He could have found a way into the jungle shrine through the waterfall at the back, and hidden it there. Maybe inside Licinius’ tomb. What they’d done in the jungle in 1879 must have been on Howard’s mind in his final hours. That’s the time when people think of atonement, redemption. Wauchope may have made a promise to him at the end, and then carried it out. That’s the kind of thing friends do. They were soldiers, blood brothers. Like Licinius and Fabius.”

Jack squinted at Costas. “Yes. Maybe.”

“We’re almost there.” The boat slowed down, and began to trace a wide arc toward shore. “There’s something more immediate we need to discuss.”

“Go on.”

Costas squinted at the water. “Have you noticed that when there’s a breeze, it hardly ruffles the surface?”

Jack nodded. “It makes the water seem sluggish, heavy, like molten metal.”

“It’s because the westerly wind is funneled upward as it approaches land. But did you see the shimmer on the surface a few minutes ago?”

Jack nodded. “Seismic aftershock?”

“Worse. Seismic labor pains. There’s been a big quake already, and there’s almost certainly another one coming. Today, maybe tomorrow. Not the ideal diving conditions, but it could be good for us. We’re looking at proximal and distal delta deposits, some glacial out-wash, incised by basinward-converging channels. A lot of piled-up silt.”

“You mean there could be a turbitude.”

“A deformation, a sediment slip. It could reveal those walls, if they exist. They could be visible one moment, and then poof, another tremor and another sediment slip, and they’re gone. We could be lucky. If there’s anything there, now might be the time to see it.”

“You remember the last time we were diving?”

Costas sighed. “Eight days ago. The Red Sea. Beautiful water, coral reefs. Paradise.” He paused. “Elephants. Underwater elephants.”

“That’s what I was thinking about. Your elephants. Did you ever hear the old Hindu story of the blind men and the elephant?”

Costas looked back bemusedly. “Three blind men are led to an elephant, not having been told what it is. One feels the tail, and thinks it’s a rope. One feels the trunk, and thinks it’s a snake. One feels a tusk, and thinks it’s a spear.”

“Remember how I nearly didn’t see that elephant on the seabed? I was too close to it. Remember that when we’re down there today.”