David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

It was a human head.

It was a statue, made of stone, larger than life, leaning out over the lake floor. He stared at the face. It was like a death mask, the eyes nearly shut, the mouth drawn back in a grimace. High cheekbones, flat nose, thin moustache hanging down, braided. The words of the Kyrgyz legend flashed across Jack’s mind. A golden coffin set on a silvery sea. But that was about Genghis Khan. He had dismissed the story. Had he been so wrong? He looked again. What had felt like bark were scales of armor, segmented, overlapping. And he saw that the statue was cradling a sword, a great straight blade, finely shaped out of the stone. It had a long, rounded guard at the hilt, concealing the hand completely. Jack looked back up at the face, and then realized what he had seen. Not a hilt. A gauntlet. He hardly dared believe his eyes. He sank down, and looked closely. It was all there: the feline ears, the almond-shaped eyes, the grimacing mouth where the blade protruded. Jack stared in astonishment at the sculpted figure leaning over him.

A gauntlet sword.

A tiger warrior.

Jack looked up. He could just make out Costas a few meters above, releasing a marker buoy. There was a distant roaring in his ears, a noise that sounded like it came from the bowels of the earth, mixed with the sound of a boat engine. He saw the wall of silt behind the statue, and realized how close he had been. Now it was happening again. The silt was shimmering, blurred. He realized he was being pushed by some force in the water down the slope. He was suddenly over the edge of a black pit, the sides extending off into the swirling silt beyond. The shudder ended, and he sank down. He was fifty meters deep now. He could see where the pit had once been completely buried, where the earthquake had cracked open the hard clay surface and revealed a hollow space beneath, now almost choked with silt. He saw something white in his headlamp. It was a skull. A human skull. And then he saw more. There were skulls everywhere, human skulls, rows of them, eye sockets empty, jaws hanging down, dislocated, some lolling to left or right. Below the skulls were flashes of green and brown. He sank down farther, into a space in the pit, until he could see more. There was no doubt about it. The green-brown was metal, bronze. Segmented armor. Rows of skeletons, a whole regiment of them, buried upright in a pit, wearing segmented bronze armor. Ancient Chinese armor. He looked again, scarcely believing what he was seeing. Each skeleton had the remains of a rope around its neck, perfectly preserved in the freshwater of the lake. They were an army for the afterlife. An army who had gone willingly to their deaths.

Jack’s mind was racing. The statue, the warrior, must be a guardian. He looked again at the skulls, rapidly disappearing beneath a cascade of silt. The words of an ancient chronicler flashed through his mind. The hundred officials, as well as rare utensils and wonderful objects, were brought to fill up the tomb. He looked up the slope at the statue, just visible in the gloom. Then he realized. The tiger warrior was not a guardian. He was an executioner. Jack looked back at the skulls. These were the true bodyguard, the loyal soldiers, the retainers, those who had built the tomb and brought the body, who had devoted themselves to the whims of their leader, who had sworn to protect the secret, sworn an oath that had failed to protect them. They were not a willing army for the afterlife. They were the victims of mass murder. They had been murdered not to satisfy the vanity of one who believed he would rule forever, but to satisfy the hunger for immortality of those who thought they were his most trusted lieges, the warriors whose guardianship of the secret would assure their power for all eternity. Suddenly Jack knew for certain. Rebecca had been right. There was something here, something in the darkness beyond, something so astonishing he could scarcely believe it. The secret of the First Emperor’s tomb.

Suddenly it was happening again. Something was sucking him down. He began finning, kicking hard. For the first time on the dive he felt the icy grip of fear, as if there were some empty space in the macabre army reserved for him, for having dared to see what he had seen. He was going nowhere. He realized that the entire lakebed was moving, sliding down the slope. The statue and the pit had vanished. A massive surge threw him sideways, pushing him away from the gully. Then he was miraculously clear, floating above the storm of sediment, bathed in sunlight. He saw Costas only a few meters away. The intercom indicator inside his helmet was flashing red, and he realized that it must have failed. He flashed an okay signal to Costas with his hand, then saw Costas do the same. He looked down again, breathing hard, waiting for his pulse to slow before ascending.

He shut his eyes. He had seen something else. Something in the split second of that jolt. Something that had flashed into view while the sediment was sucked off the lakebed in a swirling vortex. He had seen walls, great stone walls, lining the sides of a passageway, converging at a dark entranceway in the side of the slope, sealed in with more stone. He opened his eyes. He was sure of it. He thought of what else he had seen down there, what he had touched. He looked up toward the surface, through water that was now sparklingly clear. They were less than twenty meters deep, and he was sure he saw the wavering line of snowy peaks to the south, cutting through the silvery reflection of sunlight on the surface. The words of the Chinese chronicler came into his head again. Mercury was used to fashion imitations of the hundred rivers, the Yellow River and the Yangtse, and the seas, constructed in such a way that they seemed to flow. Above were representations of all the heavenly bodies, below, the features of the earth. Then he realized. There, in the tomb at Xian, it had all been artifice. Here, below the celestial mountains, where the lake was liquid like mercury, it was all real. Here, where the realm of heaven was on the horizon to be seen, and the orb of the earth and the heavens could truly be the domain of one emperor.

One emperor. Jack was barely breathing now. Not Genghis Khan. An emperor far greater than that. An emperor of all that is known under heaven.

Shihuangdi. The First Emperor.

Jack remembered the Sogdian, the man whose act more than two thousand years before had led them to this place, a man whose very existence was part surmise, part reality. Had they been right about him? Had he really stolen the celestial jewel from under the noses of the tiger warriors at Xian? Or had he been fulfilling a promise, one the first caretaker had made to the dying emperor, to take the jewel from Xian to this place, the real tomb? Had the emperor lost trust in the tiger warriors? Had he foreseen the future, seen how his legacy would be usurped by those who would profess to protect it? Had the brotherhood of the tiger been living a lie, propped up by murder, a fantasy of guardianship that had only ever been about their own greed and power?

Jack thought of the celestial jewel, the elusive treasure that had brought them on this extraordinary journey. Had the jewel been installed above the empty casket under Mount Li, a priceless heart of the emperor’s dream they would be sworn to protect, yet which one day a descendant of the caretaker would spirit away and try to take to its rightful place? Jack remembered Katya’s uncle, the story of the tiger warriors told by Katya herself, streams of knowledge that seemed to come from some reservoir deep in the past, exactingly remembered, passed down from generation to generation. Jack thought of Katya again. Had there been one among the Brotherhood, one entrusted by Shihuangdi, he who trusted so few, to keep the eyes of the others away from the truth? Had they lived a lie for sixty-six generations, protecting a tomb at Xian that one among them always knew was empty? Had Katya’s uncle been after the jewel not just to keep it from Shang Yong, but to bring it secretly here? Jack thought of something Katya had said about her uncle. He was grooming me. Had she told them the whole story? Who was the caretaker of the tomb now?