The Tiger Warrior

by David Gibbins

  Jack looked back at the wall. “The sculptor could have made up other pigments from mineral outcrops in the jungle, just as the Kóya do for body paint. And we know he had lapis lazuli for the ceiling. But it looks as if red was the only color he used here. It gives a powerful impression, like looking at a black and white projection through a red filter. This was a scene reduced to its essentials, seared into his consciousness. The individuality of the faces, the detail of the weapons, the armor. And the color of blood.”

  “A memory of battle.”

  “And of that warrior on the horse,” Jack said. “Look at his headgear. In the Alexander mosaic, Darius wears a Persian hood, rising up around his chin and high above his head. It was probably made of felt, protection against the sun and cold on the steppe. That’s what this headdress looks like too, until you inspect it closely.” He handed the flashlight to Costas, who held it above his head with the beam angled down on the wall, enhancing the shadows. “I can see eyes,” he murmured. “And fangs, big ones. It’s the head of an animal. A lion.”

  Jack shook his head. “No. A tiger.”

  “A tiger”

  “The south China tiger,” Jack said. Today there are only a few dozen left in the wild. At the time of the First Emperor, they were probably widespread.”

  Costas raised the light higher to the left, to the level of the ghost legion, near the ceiling of the cavern. There was another relief sculpture above the soldiers, a roundel about a meter across containing two sculpted faces. Costas stared at it. “What you were saying earlier, on the way to Arikamedu,” he murmured. “About the arrival of Christianity in this region. That looks awfully like a mother and a child.”

  “I saw that when we first came in here,” Jack said. “I wanted to work this whole scene through, but now I’m sure of it. It’s too early for Christianity. I think this place was sculpted some time in the final decades BC, and that roundel’s by the same hand, not some later addition. Those two portraits inside are real people too. You can see they were carved with special care. The woman’s not exactly pretty, is she? A bit heavy round the jowls, a crooked nose. The little boy has protuberant ears, and his eyes are close together. But these details are carved with loving care. This was a mother and child he adored, real people in his memory.”

  “His wife and child,” Costas murmured.

  “The roundel’s another Roman sculptural type, often funerary,” Jack said. “Look how the sculptor’s put it up there on the same plane as the ghost legion, as if the woman and child are in heaven. It’s as if he’s acknowledged the truth. Maybe his yearning for them brought him here, a trek across a continent to seek out his own kind. Maybe he met Romans at Arikamedu, and maybe they told him, a weather-beaten old tramp who arrived from the north, what he knew to be true, that the life he had left behind years before on the other side of the world was gone for good, that there was only one route left for him to join his loved ones.”

  “You really do believe this was one of Crassus’ legionaries.”

  Jack nodded. “Decades beyond the time when he last saw his wife and child, when he marched off from Rome to Carrhae. Thirty, perhaps forty years have passed. Rome has been devastated by civil war. He’d heard about that at Arikamedu, before retreating to this place. He hopes that his son followed in his footsteps as a sculptor, or lived and died a legionary.” Jack stared at the roundel. He would have known that the image was of loved ones long gone, who survived only in his memory. Standing here, chisel in hand, two thousand years ago, he knew he was never going back. It was easier for him to think of them in Elysium. And for the soldier who had left his family to go to war, there was a catharsis in this scene. Jack turned to Costas. “He and his comrades have fought for each other, for the honor of the legion. But they’ve also fought for their families. Putting the roundel there, above the battle scene, tells him that he did not abandon them. It reassures him, in his crushing moments of doubt.” Jack wondered whether John Howard had seen this too, on that day in 1879 when he and Wauchope had stumbled into this place. His own child, his little boy, left behind with his mother, an image that would only ever live on in his memory. Had Howard felt it? Had he seen an image of a death foretold? Was that what he had feared most of all, a fear for his own child, so far away from him, when he turned from this place to leave, to escape from this darkness?

  Costas panned the light down from the roundel and along the Chinese warrior’s arm, showing where it extended toward the tall legionary. Between the two figures the stone was blackened and furrowed where water had dripped down the rock from an opening somewhere above, eroding the sculpture. He moved the flashlight to and fro. “His hand, where it looks as if he’s raising a fist to the Romans. He’s actually wearing some kind of glove. If I angle the light, you can see he’s holding a sword.”

  Jack followed the beam. He stared at the hand, his mind racing. “It’s a gauntlet,” he said, his voice taut. “A gauntlet sword. A pata”

  “You mean like the one you inherited?”

  Jack took the flashlight from Costas, and angled the light in different directions. Suddenly he saw it, the distinctive ears, the mouth, the fangs bared. His voice was barely a whisper. “It’s identical. The Roman must have taken it from the warrior, in this battle. He must have brought it here. And then Howard took it, that day in 1879.” He reached out and touched the sculpted fist, just as he had touched the real pata in his cabin on Seaquest II the day before, tracing his fingers over the features so familiar to him since his grandfather had given it to him as a boy. History suddenly seemed to contract, so that he was there, standing with the ghostly form of the man who had sculpted this image, an old man scarcely recognizable as a Roman, chipping and rubbing, living out his final days in here, finishing the image of his loved ones before he went to join them in Elysium. Jack remembered the Periplus fragments, the first glimmerings of the incredible story that was playing out in the shadows on this wall. It was all true.

  There was a clatter and a curse and Pradesh was beside them, revolver in hand. He stood rooted to the spot, staring, swaying slightly. “Good God,” he whispered.

  “Want a rundown?” Costas said.

  “We don’t have time. My sapper says there’s a party of Maoists coming this way. He counted fifteen of them. They’re only twenty, twenty-five minutes away. I’ve called in the chopper. We’ve got to get out of here. I’ve set some C-4 explosives at the entrance of the shrine. It’ll blow it in, and keep this place safe until we can make it back here again.”

  “Five minutes,” Jack said urgently, taking out his camera.

  “No more.” Pradesh stared at the sculpture again, a look of blank astonishment on his face, and then ducked back through the entrance tunnel. Jack passed Costas the flashlight. “Shut your eyes. I’m using flash.” He began methodically photographing the wall, waiting a few seconds between each shot for the flash to recharge. Costas stumbled and slipped backward, swearing under his breath as he righted himself “Keep the beam on the sculpture,” Jack said urgently. “I need to see what I’m photographing.”

  “I think you might want to look at what I’ve just bumped into.”

  Jack turned, and caught his breath. He had sensed some shapes behind them as they entered the chamber, and had assumed it was the boulders. But this was man-made. It was a large, rectilinear shape, about two and a half meters long and a meter and a half high, carved from the natural rock. Jack’s eyes darted over it, measuring, estimating. He began to smile, shaking his head. It was the right size, the right dimensions. He could see that the upper surface was a stone lid. “It’s a sarcophagus,” he exclaimed. “You’ve found his sarcophagus. This place wasn’t a shrine. It was a tomb.”

  Costas traced his fingers along the join below the lid. “So our sculptor carves out his own coffin, then sculpts the funerary scene on that wall. He takes one last look at the image of his loved ones, then gets inside and pulls the lid over himself.”

  “The last act of strength by th
e toughest of the tough, a legionary who had survived the Persian quarries at Merv.”

  “He blows out his candle, lies down and shuts his eyes, that final image seared in his mind.”

  “He’s back in Rome, with his wife and child,” Jack murmured. “Forgetting he was on the other side of the world, slowly dying in a hellhole in the jungle of southern India.”

  “And he’ll still be in there.”

  Jack stared at the lid. There was something odd about it. He leaned over. The sandstone was encrusted with a layer of hard translucent material, like resin, evidently a calcite deposit that had formed over the centuries as condensation had dripped onto the tomb. In the center was a depression in the accretion layer, as if something had been removed. Jack shone the light closely. There was another thin accretion layer covering the depression and the thicker formation surrounding it, showing that whatever had been removed was taken decades ago, perhaps a century or more. He stood back and looked at the shape. Of course. Twentieth August 1879. “This is where the gauntlet was lying,” he whispered. “You can see the shape of the fist, and the sword blade, broken off below the hilt.”

  Costas felt the dampness of the stone. “Amazing any of the blade survived from antiquity.”

  “If it was first-grade Chinese steel, chromium-plated, then it’s possible.”

  “Chinese,” Costas murmured. “You really think so?”

  “My grandfather said that the pata did once have a blade, but that it was already broken when Howard found it. Howard removed and discarded the broken section in the Godavari River after they got out of the jungle. All he kept was the gauntlet.”

  “It seems strange that he took it,” Costas said. “This was a shrine of the Kóya, and maybe the gauntlet had become one of their sacred objects, one of those vélpus.”

  “He and Wauchope were soldiers, remember? Soldiers first, engineers second, anthropologists a distant third. They’d been trained to fight with the sword. They’d have had their own weapons, but Howard reaches for another blade, even a broken one. If it came to a fight, they might have no time to reload their revolvers and two blades were better than one. It was little short of a miracle they’d made it this far without being cut down, and they’d have been pretty apprehensive. Howard had his own survival to think of, his own wife and child. Respecting the local culture would not have been high on their list at that point. They probably only had a short time in here, and the war drums would have been beating outside.”

  “Like they are now, Jack.”

  “Okay. Time’s up.”

  “I spoke too soon. I should never do that.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s an inscription. Where my hand was. I thought the rock felt pitted.”

  They could hear the sound of the helicopter now, the noise throbbing through the chamber. Jack swung his flashlight to where Costas was pointing at the side of the tomb. To his astonishment he saw five lines, in Latin. He squatted down and read out the words:

  HIC IACET

  LICINIUS OPTIO XV APOLLINARIS

  SACRA IULIUM SACULARIA

  IN SAPPHEIROS NIELO MINIUM

  ALTA FABIA FRATER AD PONTUS AD AELIA ACUNDUS

  HERE LIES

  LICINIUS, OPTIO OF THE 15TH APOLLINARIS LEGION

  GUARDIAN OF THE CELESTIAL JEWEL

  IN THE DARK SAPPHEIROS MINES

  THE OTHER IS WITH FABIUS, BROTHER, ACROSS THE

  LAKE TOWARD THE RISING SUN

  “Sappheiros,” Costas exclaimed. “I remember that from the Periplus. Doesn’t that mean lapis lazuli?”

  A voice bellowed down the passageway from outside. “Time to go!”

  Costas swung the flashlight around the chamber one last time. There was another dark fissure at the back, where they had heard the sound of water trickling. He hesitated, then stumbled forward, holding the wall with one hand, and leaned through. For a few moments he was stock-still, the beam shining into the darkness. “Jack, it’s my worst nightmare. I think I can smell it. Get me out of here.”

  There was another noise outside, the drumming of gunfire. Jack quickly joined Costas. He stared into the pool of light. At first it seemed like another sculpture, white, an extrusion of the rock. But this was different. He realized with horror what he was looking at. A human body. It was stretched out in the waterfall, the arms behind the back, the head tilted forward at a garish angle. The neck was reduced to bone and sinew. The face was grotesquely adiposed, unrecognizable. Costas swayed slightly, and Jack held him by the shoulder. He forced himself to look again. The head was held up by a noose, tied around a rock above the waterfall. It looked as if the man had died by slow hanging, left with just enough rope to stay alive as long as his feet could find some purchase on the rock. He could have survived like that for hours, even days. A scurry of black shapes left the legs, and Jack saw that the calves had been stripped almost to the bone. The man’s shirt had been eaten away, revealing the skin of his left shoulder. Then Jack saw it. He felt a cold certainty. It was a tiger tattoo. It was distinct from the ones they had seen on the bodies outside, more elaborate. He remembered what Katya had told him about her uncle’s tattoo. Then he realized. She had known they might find him like this.

  “It’s Hai Chen,” he said hoarsely. “Katya’s uncle.” He swallowed hard. He had seen enough. There was another burst of automatic fire outside. He turned Costas around and pushed him back toward the chamber entrance. Jack glanced one last time at the sculpture on the wall. His mind was racing. Romans. Raumanas. Rama. A shrine of Rama. He saw the tall one, the legionary in the middle. Was that Fabius? He flashed his torch across the breastplate, the sword belt, the garlands. There was something he needed to see again. He had seen it before, but had dismissed it, some Roman Republican military decoration, lost to history. But now he knew what it was. A round shape, like a sun, with beams extending from it, carried inside a pouch on the legionary’s belt. A shape like a jewel. There was another bellow outside, another burst of gunfire. He took out his Beretta and cocked it. “Let’s get out of here.”

  THE MAN WITH THE RIFLE COULD SEE THE TWO FIGURES by the lakeside clearly now, motionless among the boulders near the shore, framed by the Tien Shan Mountains to the east, the edge of the celestial empire itself He had been watching them all afternoon, waiting for the sun behind him to lower, to accentuate the forms, but before the shadows were too long. He had learned everything he could about their behavior, watched every intimate movement, just as his grandmother had taught him to do. The tall one, the man, was awkward, angular, given to sudden movements and gestures, especially when he was working the tractor. But he was also given to watching the woman when she was hunched over, scraping and brushing, photographing. When he did that, the tall man was still for many minutes, sometimes half an hour or more, as if he did not want the woman to know he was watching. The man with the rifle curled his lip. The Kyrgyz were steppe nomads like his own ancestors, but nomads who had given up the ways of the warrior and become little better than sheep. He despised them. He wished he could target the man first, but the woman was the priority. He shifted his gaze to her. She was raven-haired, finely built, the Lycra tight against her thighs as she squatted down, athletic but curvaceous. She aroused him, and that increased his fervor. Her clan had strayed. The Brotherhood would exact its retribution.

  The light was perfect now. He looked up at the line of snowcapped mountains across the lake, and then let his eyes drop back to the two figures. Always start at the horizon, his grandmother had taught him, and then everything will fall into place. He remembered her face, the handsome Kazakh features that had adorned postage stamps and murals across the motherland, the very picture of the Zaitsev Soviet march of progress. Only her unit of production had been death. Her master had called her Zaichatel, “little hare,” but the Germans called her Todesengel, the angel of death. Her tally at Stalingrad had been in the hundreds. Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union. He remembered what she had told him on her deathbe
d, high in the mountains on the Chinese border, their homeland. She had told him that by the end, she had not killed for a cause. She had killed because it was what she did. She had seen that in his eyes too, as he looked down on her, devoid of emotion, only wanting to take up where she had left off.

  He had her rifle now. He pushed himself back, lying on his front in the rocky hollow on the ridge. He opened up the long brown package beside him, the leather cover still supple after seventy years, impregnated with gun oil. He lifted out the rifle and cradled the forestock in his right hand, careful not to touch the scope. He brushed his left hand over the wood below the receiver, touching the dents and scars of war, wounds that had strengthened the weapon, not diminished it. The female Soviet snipers always gave their weapons names. Fire dragon, she had called it. He looked at the markings on the metal. Mosin-Nagant, 1917, made under contract in Williamsburg, Maryland. His grandmother had laughed at the irony of it, during the long years of the Cold War when she had trained generations of snipers to take on the Americans. But she had said the instruments of death held no allegiance. At her own death he had taken it from her, and he had come to know it as he knew himself She had said that each kill was like an act of passion with a lover, and the more he fired it the more he would know its needs, and the more it would become part of his very soul.

  He opened the bolt, touching the fresh sheen of oil on the receiver. He took two cartridges from a leather pouch. He had hand-loaded them himself, using the same batch of primers, the same powder, measuring the loads to the microgram. She had taught him that too. He had polished the bullets until they gleamed. He pressed the cartridges into the magazine then pushed the bolt forward and down, chambering one round. He slowly raised the muzzle on the small sandbag wedged beside the boulder, careful not to press down on the end of the barrel, then edged himself forward on his elbows and knees, holding the butt against his shoulder. He had smeared chalk and dirt on his face, and there was nothing reflective on the rifle. He would be in visible against the setting sun. He saw the two figures again. 880 meters. He sensed it. That was his gift. He dialed in the scope, adjusting the turrets for windage and elevation. The air was thin, and there was little wind. The target was downslope, and gravity would pull the bullet down. He had already compensated for that, adding one eighth to the distance. He had seen a shimmer of air around the tractor engine, the optical distortion. He would aim a meter to the left of the woman’s head, at the boulder with the carvings beside her. The bullet would take more than a second to arrive. She would not even hear the report. It would go through her neck, split her spinal cord. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled and stopped breathing. He slowed his heartbeat. Synchronize with your very soul. He curled the ball of his finger around the trigger, then lowered his eye to the scope. Great is the virtue of the First Emperor The entire universe is his realm.