David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

Lake Issyk-Kul, central Asia, autumn 19 BC

The sun hung ominously in the eastern sky, reddened by a swirl of dust from the desert beyond. The man reached the top of the hill, shifted the armor on his shoulders and eased the great sword on his back. Below him lay the boulder-strewn foreshore, and beyond that a great body of water that seemed to stretch off to infinity. He had tasted the water, and it was more fresh than salt, so they had not reached Ocean, and the horizon ahead was not the fiery edge of the world. He strained his eyes to see where the lake narrowed and the towering snowcapped mountains dipped, to the pass that led beyond, under the rising sun. The trader had told him these things, but still he was not sure. Were they already dead? Had they crossed the river Styx? Was this Elysium? For the first time he felt a pang of fear. Do the dead know they have passed beyond?

“Licinius!” A voice bellowed up. “Get your arse back down here!”

The man cracked a tired smile, raised his arm then looked down to the others. They were waiting on the far side of the icy torrent he had forded to get here, where the meltwater that filled the lake rushed through the treacherous canyon they had traversed the night before. Earlier that morning the trader had led him to the secret place where the boat was hidden. The trader. Licinius could still smell him, smell the fear. He had chained him to a rock behind the hill. It would not be long now. He remembered what the man had said, over and over again, desperately, as they dragged him along. That he knew where to find the greatest treasure in the world. The tomb of an emperor, the greatest the world had ever known, somewhere over the eastern horizon. He would show them the way. They were guaranteed the riches of kings. They would live like emperors, each of them. They would find immortality. Immortality.

Licinius had been sceptical. The others had been entranced. It was what they had wanted to hear, the lure that had drawn so many to their deaths along this route. But Licinius was still not sure. He glanced to the horizon again, then looked south. Had he made the right decision? He looked back to the lakeshore. On the far side was their camp, rectangular, surrounded by sharpened stakes facing outward. The ground had been hard, baked like rock, and they had been beyond exhaustion the night before, but they had dug a ditch and heaped up the stony soil into a rampart, as they had been trained to do. And they had good reason. They had a terrifying new enemy, one who had first come for them after they had attacked the Sogdians and captured the trader. It was an enemy they had heard but hardly seen, had grappled with in the terrible swirling darkness of the canyon the night before. An enemy who had taxed all their strength and guile as soldiers. As Roman legionaries.

They had route-marched for weeks now. Twenty-five miles a day, when the going allowed it. But the nightmare had begun a lifetime ago. Two hundred miles east from the Mediterranean coast to the battlefield at Carrhae. Fourteen hundred miles from there to the Parthian citadel of Margiana, chained and whipped by their captors. Anyone who faltered was beheaded on the spot. It had left only the toughest. And now, thirty-four years later, they had escaped and were on the march again, a thousand miles over desert and mountain, in scorching heat and icy cold, through storms of dust and snow that veiled their past as if it were a shadowland. They had followed the route of Alexander the Great. On the edge of the desolate plain beyond Margiana they had passed the last of his altars, a great plinth that marked the eastern limit of his conquest. They had dug for treasure there, no longer mindful of the wrath of the gods. They had found a few coins, nothing else. Ahead of them had risen a forbidding wall of mountains, and the caravan route. Others from Margiana had escaped this way almost twenty years before, and word had come back, rumors that had spread among the prisoners like wildfire, of great armies beyond the mountains, armies that would pay a king’s ransom for mercenaries, for soldiers who had once fought for Rome.

And now there was another reason. Licinius remembered what the trader had told him. A great tomb, buried under a pyramid of earth, built by seventy thousand slaves. A tomb that he, the trader, could open up for them. The tomb of the greatest emperor the world had ever known, an emperor who would make them forget Alexander. A tomb that contained all the riches of the world, riches that would be theirs for the taking, in a place where they would be treated like gods.

They had been fifty strong when they had broken out of the citadel, fleeing through the breach they had made in the walls with all the gold they could carry. Half of them had been cut down before they were out of sight of the walls. The caravan route, the route of the traders, had been sinuous, confusing, not one road but many, and more than once they had been tempted up a blind alley, gone higher and higher, through narrower defiles until they came out on snow, places so high an eagle could not fly, where fire burned with a pale flame, where they had gasped for breath, knowing their own mortality, trespassing in the home of the gods. They had come down again, and marched on. They had needed to find a guide. They had needed food-desperate, ravenous with hunger, they had become no better than the wild dogs who circled travelers in these parts, preying on the stragglers and the dying. And fate had cast her dark spell on first one companion, then another. They had been attacked by others like them, marauding bands who preyed on the caravans, but now they were stalked by some darker force that had followed them, hunted them down since they had pushed the trader ahead and told him to find a way out of this place of nightmares.