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 the 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
