“Jack showed you the coin from our shipwreck, didn’t he, Rebecca?” Costas said. “That celebrates the return of the eagles, the sacred legionary standards.”
Jack nodded, his mind racing. “The only other hint from Roman sources is in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, who says the captured legionaries were taken to Margiana, the Parthian capital in present-day Turkmenistan.”
“That’s what gives the Periplus plausibility,” Hiebermeyer said. “And look at the Alexander reference. He only tells us what he can verify. Alexander is known to have set up altars during his conquest. They could have been where Alexander took his army across the Turkmenistan desert toward central Asia.”
“Of course,” Jack replied. “Alexander went past Margiana, modern Merv. And if prisoners were escaping east from Merv, they could have passed these altars on the way east toward central Asia. It all fits.”
“Why would the author later delete this reference?” Costas asked.
“It must have been something he felt was true, but could never substantiate,” Aysha said. “Ancient coins you can hold, altars you can see, but stories are just that. We imagine he was told the story by a trader, perhaps a Bactrian or Sogdian middleman who brought him silk. But perhaps that trader had broken off contact, had disappeared without a trace as so often happened on the Silk Route. Perhaps as an old man the author may even have doubted his memory. The story of treasure on the Silk Route may have sounded like an adventurer’s fable. There was enough doubt in the end for him to strike a line through that sentence on the sherd and ditch it into the refuse pile. It was an anecdote best passed on by word of mouth, that might one day reach the ear of an encyclopedist like Pliny the Elder, and find its way into a cornucopia of fact and hearsay like the Natural History”
“And perhaps it did, but only in small part—Pliny refers to the prisoners in Merv, but nothing about the escape east,” Jack said.
“But you talked to me in the helicopter about this, Jack,” Costas said. “About how Roman legionaries might have got to China. The evidence in the Chinese annals.”
“It’s been on my mind for several months now, since I saw Katya.”
“At the Transoxiana Conference?” Hiebermeyer asked.
“Katya’s his new girlfriend,” Rebecca said matter-of-factly to Aysha. “Well, not new, exactly. He met her when he was searching for Atlantis in the Black Sea, but after that she needed some off-time. Then Dad kind of saw someone else for a while, but she was traumatized after another guy she was seeing got spread-eagled. Or something like that. Anyway, she needed some off-time as well.”
Costas coughed, and Jack stared hard at the ground, trying to keep a straight face. He cleared his throat. “As I was saying”—he shot Rebecca a look—“the Chinese connection. In the 1950s an Oxford scholar published a radical theory that Roman mercenaries were used by the Huns of Mongolia in a Chinese border war during the Han period, the Chinese dynasty at the time of the Periplus. The evidence was a reference to a formation that sounded like the Roman testudo, the tortoise, where shields are interlocked above. The battle was in 36 BC. Then a study of the Han annals suggested that Roman prisoners from the battle had been settled in a town in Gansu on the final stretch of the Silk Road toward Xian. Someone noticed that the population of the village today contains a proportion of fair-featured people, and so began the legend of the Roman legionaries in China.”
“What’s the archaeological evidence?” Costas asked.
“There’s nothing definite,” Jack replied. “But you wouldn’t expect to find much. A band of Roman soldiers after decades of imprisonment would have little with them that was recognizably Roman. Escaped soldiers could have made themselves legionary sandals for marching, and possibly rectangular wooden shields, the basis for the testudo theory. But otherwise they would have scavenged what they could on the way, weapons, armor, clothing, anything from Parthian and Bactrian to Sogdian and Han Chinese. But one thing they could have done was leave inscriptions on stone. That’s what got Katya interested. It’s right up her street. The Romans loved making inscriptions, milestones, grave markers, stamps of authority in newly conquered territory. And that’s where archaeology comes into play. A few years ago a Latin inscription was found in a cave complex in southern Uzbekistan, three hundred kilometers to the east of Merv near the border with Afghanistan.” Jack flipped through a notebook he pulled from his pocket, then opened a page with a sketch on it. “Katya drew it for me.” He showed them the letters:
LIC
AP.LG
“Fascinating,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “The first line’s a personal name, probably Licinius. And the second line’s Apollinaris Legio, isn’t it? That’s the legion dedicated to Apollo. That was the Fifteenth legion, wasn’t it, raised by Augustus?”
Jack nodded. “Pretty good for an Egyptologist. I remember your boyhood passion was the Roman army in Germany. But this wasn’t Augustus as emperor. He raised the legion in his earlier guise as Octavian, adoptive successor of Julius Caesar. The Fifteenth Apollinaris that he raised dates from 41 BC, soon after Caesar’s assassination. That’s twelve years after the Battle of Carrhae. Over the next three centuries it spent a lot of its time in the eastern frontiers of the empire fighting the Parthians. One theory has the inscription carved by a legionary captured by the Parthians and used as a border guard, on the far eastern edge of the Parthian Empire.”
“But?” Costas said.
“I’ve never bought the idea of prisoners of war being used as border guards, let alone one of them making an inscription. Katya and I brainstormed it one day walking the walls of Merv, and came up with another hypothesis. This line from the Periplus gives it just that little bit more weight.”
“Spill it, Jack.”
“At the time of Crassus, most legions were raised for specific campaigns and usually disbanded after six years. We know very few of these legions by number or name, and the same numbers might be used repeatedly. Plutarch and Dio Cassius, the main sources for Carrhae, don’t tell us the names of the legions involved. But already a few legions were gaining legendary status, the legions that had served under Julius Caesar in Gaul and Britain in the years before Carrhae. Several of those legions survived to become the most famous of the Imperial army, cherished by Augustus because of their association with Caesar. The Seventh Claudia, the Eighth Augusta, the Tenth Gemina.”
“You’re suggesting the Fifteenth was one of these?”
“The Fifteenth was founded in 41 BC, right? That’s only a couple of years after Caesar was assassinated. The young Octavian was trying to consolidate his strength, and anything that harked back to his illustrious father was seized upon. The historians tell us that a thousand of the cavalry at Carrhae were veterans of Caesar’s campaigns. Why not one of the legions too? Our theory is that the Fifteenth Apollinaris wasn’t founded in 41 BC, it was refounded. We’re suggesting that Octavian deliberately reconstituted one of Caesar’s revered legions, one that had been shamefully lost by the incompetence of Crassus. It would have been a massive show of confidence and of reverence for past glory, exactly the kind of thing Octavian would have done.”
“Not so glorious for the surviving legionaries, chained up in Merv,” Costas said. “It would have written them off.”
“It was too late for them anyway,” Hiebermeyer said. “Even if people knew the defeat was caused by the incompetence of Crassus, the survivors still couldn’t hold their heads high. They would already have been marching with the dead, looking forward only to finding death with honor so they could join their brothers-in-arms in Elysium.”
“But you’re suggesting that some escaped prisoner was not above inscribing the name of his legion in a cave on the trek east,” Costas said.
“For the survivors, the name of the legion would still have been their binding force, even with the sacred eagle standard gone.”
“So they were still loyal to Rome.”
“They had fought for themselves, for their comrades,
as soldiers always have done. They were proud of being citizen-soldiers, of having civilian professions. They were proud to fight for a commander if they respected him, if he was one among them, primus inter pares. They fought for Caesar. They fought for their families. Whether they would have fought for Rome as an empire is another matter.”
“And the legion?” Costas asked.
“The legion was sacred,” Hiebermeyer replied. “That was where loyalties lay. And within it, the cohort, the century, the contubernium, the squad of ten or twelve men who even called each other brother, frater”
“So losing the eagle was bad, big-time,” Rebecca cut in.
“The worst. A battle they could lose, Crassus they couldn’t care less about. But losing the eagle? A legion that lost its eagle would have been a legion of the dead, never able to show themselves in Rome again. Even to their families.”
“Do you think they fragged him, Crassus?” Costas said.
“Crassus signed his own death warrant as soon as he committed them to battle. They probably would have called it assisted suicide.”
“These men, if they really did survive and escape, must have been the toughest of the tough,” Aysha said.
“There are always a few,” Jack said. “Those who escape execution, who survive the beatings and the torture, who have the mental strength to endure. And some of the legionaries with Crassus were men who had been recruited five years before and fought with Caesar in Gaul. They may have been citizen-soldiers, but they were among the most ruthless killers the world has ever known. Men who killed with the spear, the sword, with their bare hands.”
“And with the legion a hollow memory, there are no checks, no controls,” Costas said.
Jack nodded. “Some of these guys in the late republic saw much more action than the professional legionaries of the empire, and the idea of their civilian lives, their jobs, became a kind of myth. But if you spend your life killing, who knows where the boundaries are? When the time comes, if it ever does, how do you know when to stop being a soldier, and become a citizen again?”
“An age-old problem,” Hiebermeyer murmured.
“If they did escape, word would have passed on the Silk Route,” Jack said. “That was bandit country, but even there the Romans’ reputation would have preceded them. You would not have wanted to encounter these guys.”
“What about the Silk Route?” Costas asked. “Are there any more inscriptions?”
“Katya’s spent the last couple of seasons roaming the mountains and passes of central Asia, searching. A lot of it’s still unexplored territory.”
“And still bandit country,” Hiebermeyer said.
“I seem to remember Katya knows how to use a Kalashnikov,” Costas murmured.
Jack opened his notebook again. “A few months ago she hit pay dirt at a place called Cholpon-Ata, on the western shore of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan. That’s hundreds of miles east along the northern Silk Route from the place with the Fifteenth Legion inscription, on the edge of the Tien Shan Mountains and the pass that leads down to the Taklamakan Desert and China. For years now archaeologists have known about this place, a desolate boulder-strewn landscape where there are hundreds, probably thousands of petroglyphs, shallow-cut rock carvings of ibexes, other animals, hunters. Most were carved by Scythian nomads. But it would also have been a staging post along the Silk Route for traders who had survived the trek from the west, and before embarking on boats toward China.”
“How big is the lake?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s the second biggest mountain lake in the world after Lake Titicaca. There are many stories of sunken settlements, of treasure. There’s a lot to be found. The Soviets used the lake as a submarine and torpedo testing site.”
“Can we go?” Rebecca said. “I want to meet Katya.”
Jack smiled. “It’s on the cards. Last year, Katya stumbled across a boulder there that might have an inscription on it. The boulder was almost entirely buried, and the permit for an excavation had only just come through at the time of the conference. She’s out there now.”
“Not alone, I hope,” Aysha said.
“She has Kyrgyz collaboration,” Jack said. “That means one guy and a creaky old tractor, as far as I can tell.”
“You’ve spoken to her recently?” Costas eyed Jack.
“This morning.”
Costas grunted. “So we might be able to join some dots.”
“There’s another thing. A really fascinating idea.”
“Fire away.”
“Well, the dots might not just lead east. They might also throw a curveball south.”
“Map, Jack,” Costas said.
Aysha reached over and unrolled a map of the world on the chart table. Jack traced out the features as he talked. “The Silk Route goes west-east, from Merv in Parthia to Xian in China, through the mountains of central Asia. Lake Issyk-Kul lies at the northeastern end of that massif with only one major pass to go before you get to China. But you can also leave the route along the way and break off south. If you do that from Lake Issyk-Kul, you’ve got a huge mass of mountains to get through, really forbidding places, through eastern Afghanistan, but then you break into northern Pakistan and the jungles of India. From there, if you’re a traveler from the west in the first century BC, the Roman world is within reach again.”
Costas’ eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting that escaped Roman prisoners may have gone that way?”
Jack paused. “One of Katya’s colleagues, a man named Hai Chen, is an independent scholar based in Xian who’s made a lifelong study of the Roman connection. He encouraged Katya to explore Kyrgyzstan, the petroglyphs at Issyk-Kul. He believes passionately in the story of Crassus’ lost legionaries, but with a twist. He’s originally a linguist, an expert on analyzing foundation stories and mythology among peoples with a strong oral tradition. As a young man he spent several years in Chitral, a kind of Shangri-la in northeastern Pakistan, the first place you’d come to after breaking through the mountains from the north.”
“The people who believe they’re descended from Alexander the Great,” Hiebermeyer murmured.
“The mythologies of the region—Vedic, Hindu, Buddhist—are full of stories of travelers from afar, princes, pilgrims, holy men dispensing wisdom. Sometimes they’re on a quest, or princes on a transformative journey, like Buddha himself Imagine the Canterbury Tales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Hercules’ Labors, Moses in the desert. Sometimes the arrival fulfills a local prophecy, and the traveler becomes king.”
“Didn’t Fa-hsien come through the mountains?” Hiebermeyer asked.
Jack nodded, and glanced at Costas. “A Chinese Buddhist monk who came to India in the early fifth century AD in search of the holy texts of his religion. His Records of the Buddhistic Kingdoms is one of the great early travel books. He came to Gandhara, the ancient Buddhist state of northern India. But Katya’s colleague Hai Chen wasn’t on the trail of a Buddhist monk. He’d heard of someone else. The traveler he recorded from the oral stories was a yavana, meaning westerner. And this yavana was no monk but a warrior, one who ruled with a golden hand. He came to Chitral for a short time, and then left. Farther south Hai Chen heard another legend of a god-king called Haljit Singh, Tiger Hand. He too left, and went south.”
“Where are we leading with this?” Costas said.
“If you’re our Roman, once you get through the mountains of Afghanistan, past Chitral, the way’s open to the west. You have two options. You can travel down the valley of the Indus southwest to the head of the Indian Ocean, to the port of Barygaza, near modern Karachi in Pakistan. From there you can sail to Arabia, then the Red Sea toward home. But there was another option. If you want to make contact with fellow yavanas, with other Romans in India, the better route was to go southeast, down the valley of the Ganges to the Bay of Bengal. You’d end up passing extensive tracts of jungle in eastern India. Look at the travels of the monk Fa-hsien. He took that route, and sailed south all the way to
Sri Lanka. Then look at the Periplus. It describes the same route, just looking in the opposite direction. Listen to this.” Jack picked up the modern edition of the Periplus on the table, and flicked through it until he came to the page he was looking for. “After this, toward the east and with the ocean on the right, sailing offshore past the remaining lands on the left, you come upon the land of the Ganges; in this region is a river, itself called the Ganges, that is the greatest of all the rivers in India, and which rises and falls like the Nile.” Jack gestured toward the porthole, where the shore was just visible. “Remember, the author of the Periplus was recalling being here off southern India, looking north. It was probably as far as he ever came. But he knows men who’ve come down from there, maybe Indian middlemen from Gandhara, maybe even traders who have come all the way down from central Asia—Bactrians, Sogdians, even western Han Chinese.”
“The kind of trader who would have told our yavana, our escaped Roman, which way to go,” Aysha said.
“But probably not lived long enough to guide him there,” Jack said. “All a Roman legionary needed was a pair of stout marching sandals and a clear view of the sun and stars. With that, he was set. A guide would never have kept up with him.”
“It’s all about the monsoon, isn’t it?” Costas said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, why a legionary looking for fellow Romans might not go to this place at the mouth of the Indus, Barygaza,” he said, pointing at the map. “It’s a lot closer to Egypt. But ships can sail there from the Red Sea pretty well year round, hugging the coast, sometimes taking a direct open-sea route during the monsoon season. There was no need for a permanent western presence at Barygaza, to maintain the port during the off-season. The native traders could do that. But the south of India was a different story. I take it the Egyptian shippers only got there and back during the monsoon season, taking the open-sea route across the Indian Ocean?”
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