swords lying in front of him, their blades shimmering as if they were speckled with a thousand jewels. He put his hands into the gleaming gauntlets, curling his fingers around the crossbars, feeling the power of the blades as they extended out from the snarling tigers that adorned each fist. He tensed, and he was suddenly there, among the heavenly steeds, thundering over the steppe, foam-flecked, cutting through the mist of red that streamed off their necks, the glistening sweat of blood. He felt the exaltation of the warrior, of knowing that all would be swept before him. He felt himself cry out, and all he saw was crimson, all he heard was panting, rearing, stamping.
Then the image was gone. He sat back, letting the swords down. Soon there would be a sixth power. The power of light. Just as water had conquered fire, so light would conquer darkness, the light of the celestial jewel, the light of his own soul, the reborn emperor. The man breathed in deeply, and pulled off the swords. Ahead of him a crack of light appeared in the doorway, and shadowy forms began to file in, silently assuming their places at the table. The Brotherhood was reunited. The jewel would be found. The tiger warrior would ride again.
Jack sat in his day cabin below the bridge deck of Seaquest II, his hands behind his head as he contemplated the old wooden traveling chest against the bulkhead in front of him. He had removed the wooden frame that had been used to batten down the chest during the monsoon, and had opened the third drawer down so he could see the contents. It was one of his most prized possessions, an officer’s traveling chest of the eighteenth century, made of camphor wood that still exuded a faint smell of the Orient. For generations his ancestors had taken the chest to sea with them, from the merchant adventurers who had built the Howard family fortune in the early years of the East India Company to his own grandfather, who had carried it with him through the Second World War and last brought it ashore more than forty years ago. No Howard had ever suffered shipwreck before the loss of the first Seaquest in the Black Sea two years before, and Jack had made the decision to install the chest when the new vessel was under construction. But the chest meant more than just good luck. It contained the clues to a quest that Jack had yearned to follow since he was a boy, when his grandfather had first shown him the contents of that drawer.
Jack felt a surge of excitement as he looked at the chest. Hanging on the wall behind it was an old East India Company musket, and below that was the sweeping steel blade of a tulwar, an Indian sword with a distinctive circular pommel and handguard. Both had been the possessions of the first Howard to live in India, the colonel of a regiment of the Bengal army at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Below the sword were two Victorian photographs, one showing a woman and a child, the other a well-dressed young man with dark features and full lips, and a twinkle in his eye. The features came from the man’s Portuguese-Jewish grandmother, the wife of the Bengal army colonel. Below the picture in elegant handwriting were the words Royal Military Academy 1875, Lieutenant John Howard, Royal Engineers. It was the graduation picture of a young man brimming with Victorian confidence, about to set out on the greatest adventure of his life. Yet a mere four years later something would happen that would transform those eyes, and give them the unfathomable look that Jack sometimes saw in his own daughter. Finding out what happened to his great-great-grandfather had been a personal quest of Jack’s for as long as he could remember.
He glanced at the open drawer. On one side was a small stack of leather-bound books and a notebook, with the same handwriting on the spines. On the other side were two box files containing a mass of papers, letters, manuscripts, some of it material Jack had barely begun to delve into. And between were the artifacts he had just been unwrapping. He took out a small red box containing a brass pocket telescope, the ivory surround of the cylinder shrunk with age. For the thousandth time since he had been a boy he extended the telescope to its full length, only a few inches, and peered through it. And just as he always did, he tried to imagine what John Howard had seen through it on that fateful day in the jungle. Jack shut his eyes, closing his mind off from the present, then opened them again, but the view remained the same. Yet he knew he was on the cusp of it now, only a helicopter trip away from the place where the history that he had spent years trying so hard to imagine might finally come to life.
“Cool telescope.” Rebecca had come quietly into the room and was standing beside Jack. He passed it to her, and she peered through it. “That was your great-great-great-grandfather’s,” he said. “He brought it back from India, where he used it in a war in the jungle not far from the Roman site we’re visiting tomorrow morning.”
Rebecca looked at the pictures. “That’s him, isn’t it, and his family? I can see you in him. I can really feel his presence, holding this. Whenever we do school trips to museums, I always want to touch things. I got into a lot of trouble at the Metropolitan Museum once. They don’t have to be great works of art, just little things. They seem to take me back into the past.”
Jack smiled at her. “Look around this room. There are artifacts from almost every expedition I’ve been on. Most of them are little things, just as you say, shards of pottery, worn old coins. But they’re what makes it real for me. When I sit here and write, I always have something in my hands.”
“Uncle Costas says you’re a magpie. He says you’re really a treasure hunter.” She passed back the telescope and traced her finger over the coat of arms carved into the front of the chest, an anchor over a shield with the Latin words Depressus Extollor carved underneath.
Jack laughed. “Uncle Costas had better watch what he says.”
“Uncle Costas says that without him, you’d be going nowhere in a rowboat.”
“And without me, Uncle Costas would be sailing a desk to nowhere in some technology park in California.”
“No, he says without you, he’d be on holiday in Hawaii.”
“Ever since we planned the Pacific trip, he’s had Hawaii on the brain. Everything else on the way, Egypt, India, is just a distraction, and he’s tolerating it only because I’m his dive buddy and I save his life occasionally.”
“We’ve already talked about it. He says he’s giving you two days, and then he’s going to ask to be dropped at the nearest international airport. He needs a week before we arrive to get everything set up for the submersible testing.”
“He means he needs a week to test the lounge chairs at Waikiki. He’s just a beach bum.”
At that moment Costas bounded in, wearing a garish flowery shirt over baggy shorts, with wraparound sunglasses pushed up his forehead. “Aloha!”
“Aloha!” Rebecca replied, grinning mischievously at Jack.
“Thought I may as well get ready,” Costas said. “We may not have time to change.”
“I hear you,” Jack said.
Costas spied the object Jack had just finished unwrapping. “An elephant! I was getting withdrawal symptoms.”
Jack passed it over, and Costas held it up carefully to the light. “It’s made of lapis lazuli,” Jack said. “The same stone as that fragment you found at Berenike. It’s the highest grade too, from the mines in Afghanistan. You can see the sparkle of pyrites in the layers of blue. It’s been handled a lot, played with. It was among my great- great-grandfather’s possessions, given to him when he was a child. He had wanted to give it to his own son, his firstborn, on his second birthday. But that never happened.”
“It’s beautiful,” Rebecca said reverently, taking it from Costas and stroking the trunk. “Can I have it? I mean, can I borrow it and keep it in my cabin? It’s kind of a shame to have it stuffed away in that old chest.”
Costas wagged a finger at Rebecca. “Careful what you say about that chest. It follows him everywhere. It makes him feel like an old sea dog. Whenever he’s got some downtime, he comes and sits with it.”
Hiebermeyer and Aysha came in, and they all sat down on the chairs Jack had arranged in an arc around the chest. Costas peered in the open drawer and gestured at another object inside, an old revolver. “The Wild West?”
Jack gave a wry smile. “Right period, wrong continent. The period we’re talking about, the 1870s, saw major international confrontations-the Franco-Prussian War which nearly destroyed Europe, the Afghan War which brought Britain head-to-head with Russia. But it was also a flashpoint for colonial conflict. Within a few years you’ve got Custer’s Last Stand in America, the Zulu War in South Africa, and jungle rebellion in India. And in each case it’s unclear which side got off best.”
“Your ancestor John Howard,” Aysha said, as Costas carefully lifted the revolver out of the drawer to inspect it more closely. “He was a British army officer?”
Jack nodded. “Now that we’re all here, I want to tell you about him. In 1879 he was a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, recently posted out to India as a subaltern in the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners. That was one of the premier regiments in the Indian army, based in Bangalore in south India but used on expeditions all
