She closed the book and spoke quietly. “What I’ve told you so far is all documented. What I’m about to tell you no other westerners have ever heard, and no one in China outside a small and secret fold that includes my own family.”
“Here we go,” Costas murmured, eyeing Katya.
“There’s an ancient myth,” she said. She paused, and Jack could see the burden on her, the decision to reveal something kept secret by generations of her forbears. She looked at him, and he nodded. She took a deep breath and carried on. “A myth about a pair of precious stones, set together in the First Emperor’s tomb at the apex of the heavens. A pair of stones that shone with dazzling light, a light the emperor believed would assure his immortal power. And a myth that the guardian of the tomb secretly took those stones before the burial chamber was sealed. That those who swore to protect the tomb, to assure the emperor’s eternal reign, pursued the guardian and his descendents relentlessly, through the ages, but never found the stolen jewels.”
“Good God,” Jack murmured. “The inscription in the jungle shrine.”
“Fast-forward two thousand years,” Katya said. “To a foggy night in Victorian London, at the Royal United Service Institution. It was the usual Thursday night venue, sherry and sandwiches followed by a lecture.” She took out a clear plastic sleeve containing a faded brown broadsheet, and passed it to Jack. He looked at it for a moment, stunned. “Well I’ll be damned,” he murmured. He read it out:
An illustrated lecture at the Royal United Services Institute, 6.30 to 7.30 pm, Thursday, 26 November 1888. “Roman Antiquities of Southern India.” Accompanied by lantern slides and artifacts on display. By Captain J. L. Howard, R.E., of the School of Military Engineering, formerly of the Queen’s Own Madras Sappers and Miners”
Jack looked at Katya incredulously. “How on earth did you get this? I knew about Howard’s lecture, but I’ve never seen an original broadsheet.”
“It’s covered in scribbled notes, in Chinese characters,” Costas said, peering closely. “In pencil, so faded you can barely read it. As if someone were taking notes.”
“It was a Chinese diplomat called Wu Che Sianghu, a Kazakh Mongolian,” Katya said. “He’d been posted the year before to the Chinese embassy in London, and frequently attended public lectures. He had a special interest in India because he’d been sent by the Chinese government to investigate the opium trade, which was still flourishing despite Victorian moral opprobrium. He was particularly concerned about the spread of opium use among the hill tribes of the upper Godavari River, following the end of the Rampa Rebellion and the departure of the troops in early 1881. I know about this because Wu Che’s papers came into my uncle’s possession.”
“Your uncle?” Costas said. “The uncle whose body we found in the jungle?”
Katya nodded. “But the broadsheet probably never would have been saved had it not been for one thing Howard said in that lecture, the one thing that explains how my uncle came to be in the jungle and to die there. It’s in those pencil notes.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
She took the paper out of the plastic. “It’s at the bottom. It says, ‘Roman military-style carvings found in jungle.’ And then ‘cave temple$$ The first note was taken from what Howard said, and the second was guesswork by Wu Che. Almost all ancient carvings then being found in southern India were from cave temples or shrines, so it was a reasonable surmise.”
“Incredible,” Jack murmured. “There are no surviving drafts of the lecture and it was never published. In Howard’s papers I found an exchange of letters with the editor of the institute journal badgering Howard for a typescript. The paper had been co-authored with Robert Wauchope, who’d been posted back to the Survey of India. Howard claimed the two of them needed to collaborate to produce a polished version, but that evidently never happened. There was a new editor a few years later and the matter was dropped. It always struck me as odd for Howard not to publish. His collection of Roman coins from India was a passion of his. But what you’ve said might shed light on it. Something was holding him back.”
“Something he said in the lecture he shouldn’t have said?” Costas suggested.
“Here’s what I know,” Katya said. “At the bottom of this sheet Wu Che writes ‘Spoke privately after the lecture to Captain Howard, no more information forthcoming.’ But then I think he tried to contact Howard again.”
Jack’s mind was suddenly racing. “I knew this rang a bell. He did try again. It’s in another letter in Howard’s papers, in the chest in Seaquest II It dates from a few years later, in 1891. Someone from the Chinese embassy in London wrote to Howard about the Rampa Rebellion. That’s why I remember it. I’m certain it was the same Chinese name, Wu Che Sianghu. The letter was purportedly about opium. He knew that Howard had been one of the longest-serving British officers in Rampa. He wanted to know if Howard knew of any ritual contexts in which opium might be used by the jungle peoples, in ceremonies, in caves, temples.”
“He was fishing for more details about that shrine,” Costas suggested.
“Wu Che must have done some research after the lecture, worked out where Howard was during his time in India with the Madras Sappers, anywhere out of the ordinary. Details of officers’ deployments were published in the annual Army List. He would have seen Howard’s deployment to Rampa in 1879 and 1880. It was close to the area of Roman influence in southern India yet hardly explored by Europeans, with hundreds of square miles of jungle not even surveyed. It was just the kind of place where soldiers on patrol might have stumbled on an ancient shrine. The Royal Engineers officers and NCOs of the Madras Sappers were the only British army personnel with the Rampa Field Force, and it’s possible that Howard was the only veteran in England at the time of his lecture. Wu Che might have played on that too. He might have expected Howard to be eager to respond to any query about the campaign. But Wu Che’s letter has Howard’s handwritten ‘Not replied’ across the top. It was obviously Howard’s firm decision, but it was perhaps a mistake. Not replying at all might have rung alarm bells for Wu Che.”
“I thought Howard had clammed up about the rebellion anyway,” Costas said. “Something you think happened to him out there. Some trauma.”
“But Wu Che wouldn’t have known about that,” Jack said. “He would have assumed the lack of reply was because Howard refused to be forthcoming about something he’d found.”
“Howard may have regretted his slip in the lecture, mentioning the sculpture, and determined never to make the mistake again,” Katya said. “When the letter arrived he would have remembered Wu Che from after the lecture, and that may have set off his own alarm bells too. He might have remembered the pact Jack thinks he and Wauchope made after leaving the shrine. That’s maybe when he decided not to go ahead with publishing the paper.”
Costas looked puzzled. “What is it that excites a Chinese diplomat in 1888 about reports of Roman sculpture in a jungle shrine in southern India? What’s that got to do with opium?”
Katya paused. “That’s why I told you about the First Emperor. There’s a connection. A pretty astonishing one. And you are the first outsiders to hear this.” She took a deep breath. “When the First Emperor was planning his afterlife, he entrusted the sanctity of his tomb to his most trusted bodyguards, to men of his clan who had ridden down with him into China from the Qin homeland in the northern steppes. They were Mongols, fierce nomad horsemen, from the stock who would one day spawn Genghis Khan and the most terrifying army the world has ever known. The emperor’s bodyguard wore tiger skins over their armor, and wielded great swords. They called themselves tiger warriors.”
Jack stared at Katya. “Go on.”
“There were twelve of them, his closest bodyguard,” Katya continued. “Six was the First Emperor’s sacred number, and any multiples of it had special power. Even during his lifetime the warriors were secret, and they revealed themselves only to the emperor’s enemies, to those they were sent to hunt down, those who would never live to tell what they saw. In time, one of them became the killer, the emperor’s closest bodyguard, and he alone became known as the tiger warrior. On the emperor’s deathbed, the twelve were entrusted with the outer ring of defenses of his tomb. The inner sanctum was entrusted to a hereditary family of guardians, who lived within the tomb precinct. The twelve were sworn to infiltrate Xian society for generations to come, as courtiers, officials, army officers, an invisible power always ready to pounce. They were promised immortality through endless reincarnation, the eternal earthly vanguard of the terracotta warrior army who were buried around the emperor’s tomb. For more than two thousand years the tiger warriors have kept the tomb inviolate, from tomb robbers, from later emperors, from archaeologists. Inviolate, that is, with one exception.”
“Something was taken,” Jack murmured.
Katya nodded. “Of all the wondrous treasures of the tomb, only the guardian and the twelve knew what lay at the apex of the heavens, directly over the tomb itself Sima Qian, author of the Records of the Grand Historian, knew
