David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

“I think,” Jack murmured, suppressing a smile, “I might need to have a word with old Hiemy.”

“Don’t worry,” Rebecca replied. “Aysha’s on the case. She says what he needs is a family. Kids, you know. She says she’s working on it.”

Costas nearly choked. “Working on it.”

“Day and night,” Rebecca said.

“Lucky old Hiemy,” Jack said.

“And my next project is going to be south India,” Rebecca said assertively.

“Your next project is school,” Jack said.

“Ever since seeing all that stuff in the old chest, all our family history, I’ve become fascinated by it,” Rebecca said, looking at Jack. “Pradesh has offered to take me to that jungle shrine, to see the carvings for myself He thinks the next step is to get inside that tomb. See what’s in there. He says that now the Indian government is sending in the sappers to build more roads, actually finishing several of the traces that were made by Howard and his men all those years ago.”

“What about INTACON?” Costas asked. “And Shang Yong? Has terminating the sniper in Afghanistan finished him, Katya?”

She spoke quietly. “Without his henchman, the Brotherhood will disown him. But they will cling to their belief that they protect the legacy of Shihuangdi, and his tomb.”

“And how long will that last?” Costas asked.

“The legacy of the First Emperor is safe, for now.”

Jack looked hard at Katya, then turned again to Costas. “INTACON was owned by Shang Yong himself, and has been shut down. Pradesh reported back to his headquarters at Bangalore as soon as we got out of the jungle. He got a rap on the knuckles for going into bandit country without authority and taking those two sappers with him, but the colonel immediately dispatched an air assault company. The firefight with the Maoists was the excuse they needed to go in with an iron fist.”

“Pradesh says the Indian government has withdrawn all mining contracts from the jungle districts,” Rebecca said. “What we’ve set in motion could be the first big break for the jungle people, but Pradesh is worried that the withdrawal is only temporary and there’s still a battle to be fought. We need to show them there’s more revenue to be made from adventure tourism than allowing foreign companies to strip-mine the jungle. Pradesh says it depends on how deep the corruption is. Government officials can get bigger payoffs from mining multinationals than they can from start-up eco-tourism companies.”

“You should work for an NGO, Rebecca,” Katya said, smiling.

“I was going to talk to Dad about that. You know, giving IMU another face. It isn’t the first time your discoveries have opened a can of worms. And we can’t just walk away and pass on the problems to someone else.”

“When you do go to the jungle,” Jack said, “I’ve got something for you to return.”

“The tiger gauntlet?”

Jack nodded. “We can’t return the sacred velpu, as we don’t have it,” he said. “But the gauntlet had been in that shrine for two thousand years, and was venerated by the Koya too, as the weapon brought to them by Rama, the god who had once lived among them. It may not be the jewel of immortality, but it might just give them an edge. You can do it for your great-great-grandfather.”

“Maybe it’ll mean closure for him, at last,” she murmured.

“What do you mean?”

“Katya was talking to me about it just now, while we were walking up here,” she said. “About my mother. About how we can never second-guess grief, how we should never let anyone tell us how it will pan out. Howard lived with grief for much of his life, and it was somehow wrapped up with what happened to him in the jungle. It’s strange, it’s as if I can feel it. Maybe you do inherit these things from your ancestors, unresolved things. He couldn’t find closure in his lifetime, but maybe now we can do it.”

Jack looked across at Katya. Their eyes met for a moment, and he looked away. She had said things to Rebecca that he himself did not know how to say. He knew there was still anger in Katya about her own father, still a yawning emptiness in Rebecca, but for a moment he felt as if there were a transcending bond that might protect them both. Rebecca had seen him looking at Katya. “After going to the shrine, Pradesh wants me to study the pottery they’ve been finding underwater off Arikamedu. Aysha might be able to come and help with the Egyptian and Roman stuff and get me going.”

Costas cleared his throat. “If Hiemy can spare her.”

“He might need a rest,” Rebecca said, looking at him deadpan. Jack grinned. She swept her hair back. “Anyway, I think it’s going to be my doctorate.”

“Hang on,” Jack said. “You haven’t even finished high school yet.”

“High school? After this? You must be joking. These last few days have been the biggest adventure of my life. Now I know what you mean about expeditions, about how close you get to people. I feel as if I’ve known all of you all my life.”

Jack suddenly felt overwhelmed, and turned away, swallowing hard. He thought of what they had found in the lake, and his feeling of elation as he had looked up from underwater and seen Rebecca’s face, gazing down on him. Costas put a hand on his shoulder, then stood up, stretching and scratching his bristles, squinting out over the ruins. He kicked a stone, then reached down and picked it up, turning it over and over in his hand, rubbing it clean. Jack realized that the ground was strewn with fragments-pottery, broken brick, all of it crumbling and decaying into the shroud of dust that seemed so close to removing this place from history. Costas turned to him, a quizzical look in his eyes. “I wonder if they did make it?”

“The Romans? Fabius and the others?”

“We’re fifteen hundred kilometers east of Issyk-Kul. If any of them survived the wreck on the lake, that is. Let’s say one survived, unknown to his pursuers, washed ashore somewhere, melded invisibly among the caravans of traders heading toward Xian, just as Liu Jian the trader may have melded among the Sogdians heading west.”

“Maybe one did make it,” Jack said, nodding slowly.

“This place isn’t exactly a fabled eastern paradise, is it?”

Jack looked at the ruins again. In his mind’s eye he saw those other places he had visited, in north Africa, in Germany, in the mountain valleys of Wales, placed at the periphery of the Roman Empire where the ground revealed a few clues to the discerning eye, the humps of buried walls, fragments of pottery, a clump of rusted chain mail, places where veterans had made their mark, had eked out their days. “It’s what they were trained for,” he murmured. “At a certain point, a soldier becomes an old soldier. He no longer yearns to die gloriously in battle. The legion of ghosts who have marched alongside him, his fallen comrades, march away to Elysium, where they will await him. He no longer needs to prove himself He knows he will get there, and will join them. He has done enough.”

“And old soldiers, veterans, gave the empire its true strength, settling the frontiers,” Katya said.

Jack nodded. “It was the Roman way. A place with women, the chance to raise a family, building materials, a little plot of land. It was enough.”

“Yet they would have been told the First Emperor’s tomb was just over the horizon,” Costas said. “Fabled riches, beyond their imagination.”

“Maybe, for the old soldier, the adventurer, the fabled treasure is always just over the horizon, like Elysium,” Katya murmured. “When you have spent all your life searching, it becomes the only way to live.”

“And if it was Fabius, he may have had treasure already, remember?” Rebecca said. “The legionaries had what they could carry, the stuff they’d looted from the Parthians at Merv, from traders along the Silk Road. And maybe they did have the jewel, the peridot.”