“I didn’t find the jewel. But it may be the right place. If Fabius and the others did reach the eastern shore of the lake and then went down in a storm, this is about where the wreck would have ended up. Everything they carried with them might still be here, somewhere in the silt below us now. Or Fabius may have escaped and taken it with him, into China toward Xian.”
“Back toward the First Emperor’s tomb.”
“To the place that history calls the First Emperor’s tomb.”
There was a brief silence. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I only saw it for a second. Less than a second. But I’m sure of it.”
Costas checked the old Rolex diving watch he wore over his suit and gave a thumbs-up. Jack repeated the gesture, and watched the depth gauge inside his helmet as they rose ten meters. Their buoyancy systems automatically adjusted to neutral and Costas turned to face Jack. “So, how are you going to explain to your daughter that she’s been responsible for one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made, something that could change the perception of Asian history, but that we’re going to say nothing about it and instead talk about a torpedo, or if pressed maybe mumble something about Genghis Khan?”
“I don’t want to tell anyone. For the reason you just said. Asian history. There’s too much at stake. A whole national myth. Right now, the Chinese might need that myth, the myth of the First Emperor’s tomb at Xian, the myth of untold wealth buried with their greatest ruler. Revealing the truth might unleash a dangerous unfolding of control in China.”
“You don’t believe that. I’ve never known you to leave treasure unexcavated because you’re worried about a national myth.”
“Okay, I just want to wait until the seismic activity quiets down. That can take a couple of years out here. And that should give us time to develop equipment for getting through a mountain of lake sediment. Give you time, I should say.”
“I was blueprinting a new sub-bottom excavator in my mind while you were ferreting around down there. I knew you’d got something, and that we’d be back. So what about Rebecca?”
“Two, maybe three years down the line. When we’re ready to come back here. Then I’ll tell her what I saw. I’d rather her first big discovery wasn’t one that might upset the entire world order.”
“Kids know everything. She’ll be onto you as soon as she sees that look in your eyes. And show me one of our discoveries that didn’t upset the course of history. If she sticks around, she’s going to have to get used to that. She’ll be up there on the boat by now,” Costas added. “I bet you tell her, the moment we surface.”
Jack looked up. They had only a few minutes now. He tasted a hint of salt from the lake. He remembered something Katya had told him, an old Kyrgyz legend about how the nomads kept the spirits of their ancestors at bay by weeping into the lake, along the shoreline beside the carved stones that marked their passing. If the mourners wept, the waters would rise around the ghosts, and they would drown. But now there were too few mourners, too few left to remember. Jack had seen the boulders left dry by the receding shoreline, the stain of a watermark meters above. Now the mountains themselves needed to mourn, to release meltwater in torrents, to keep the spirit below them at bay, the spirit of Shihuangdi, the First Emperor.
Jack thought about where they were again, the fabled Silk Road. A place swept by the divine wind, where little is left except myth and legend, stories that still adhere only because they are so light and insubstantial.
But not here. Not underwater. This was real.
There was another tremor, more violent this time, and a darkness swept over the lakebed below them, obscuring it completely. Jack checked his computer. It was time to go. Costas jerked his thumb upward. Jack looked up, and saw the shadow of the patrol boat, and moored beside it the Zodiac, its outboard directly overhead. A cluster of faces was visible over the stern of the patrol boat, around the ladder where Costas was already beginning to ascend, but a solitary face was peering down at him over the side of the Zodiac. The hulls were like dark clouds, but the faces reflected off the silvery surface of the water like stars, the brightest one directly above him. Jack rose up and broke surface, then flipped up the visor from his helmet and held on to the side of the Zodiac, looking up at the face with sunglasses and long dark hair gazing down at him. He kicked up and peered over the top of the pontoon, seeing that they were out of earshot of the others. He dropped down again and gestured for Rebecca to come closer. He snorted into the water and cleared his throat. He was as excited as he had ever been in his life.
“You remember our trip to the terracotta warriors exhibit in London?” he said. “Well, you are not going to believe what we’ve just found.”
“Try me, Dad.”
22
Gansu Province, China
Forty-eight hours later, Jack stood in front of a low wall, the remains of a rampart that had once been several meters thick inside a complex of ancient ruins. He knelt down and touched the surface, feeling it crumble in his fingers. It was loam, compacted clay with fragments of pink and gray granite. This place desperately needed rain, but the wall was so desiccated that rain would only hasten its destruction, washing it away rather than strengthening it. The loam looked like ancient concrete, like mortar, but was not. This wall was not Roman. He turned and waved to Costas, who was trudging up the path behind him, a slightly disconsolate figure in the dust. Farther back he could see Katya and Rebecca, picking their way together among the stones, and beyond them a dust cloud where the rotor of the Lynx helicopter was powering down. The helicopter had flown them here in stages from Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, east over the mountain pass of the Tien Shan, skirting the northern fringes of the Taklamakan Desert, then down the narrowing funnel of the Gansu Corridor into the heart of the ancient Chinese empire. It had been a marvelous journey, following the Silk Road from the air, and they had camped on the site of a long-abandoned caravanserai. That morning they had swept in low over the Great Wall of China, over a section constructed during the Han dynasty two thousand years ago. They were within a few hours of Xian, the eastern anchor of the Silk Road and the site of the First Emperor’s tomb. But for Jack the end of their quest was this place, the last hint of an extraordinary ancient journey they had been following from another world unimaginably far to the west.
A waft of breeze brought a hint of something exotic, heady even, some crop in the valley perhaps, but then the air was still, and all Jack could sense was the dusty smell of decay and dereliction, the familiar lifeblood of the archaeologist. He breathed it in, relishing it. He wished Maurice Hiebermeyer was with him now. He would have helped Jack to make sense of the walls, the jumble of ruins. Or perhaps it was too far gone to unravel, and there was nothing more to glean than what he could see in front of him.
Jack looked around. The place had a desolate beauty. They had passed ruinous houses, mud-brick walls bleached white by the sun, surrounded by patches of corn and barley that seemed doomed to lose the battle against the scorching sun. Rutted tracks led across stony fields, the scars of plowing and long-dry irrigation channels baked hard by the sun. In the distance the odd goat and sheep picked at the ground, finding something in the gravel and dust. The sky itself seemed scorched, colorless, and most of the time he could see nothing beyond the low plateau he stood upon, but then some upper wind would push apart the dust and the sky would streak with red. In those moments he saw the foothills of the Xaipan Mountains, great folds and spurs that rose up to a jagged skyline. To the north was another line of mountains, more distant, and between the two chains of mountains lay the Gansu Corridor, the eastern Silk Road. Here the pounding progress of the camel caravans had once stirred up a continuous storm of dust, a storm whose residue seemed to remain above the valley floor like the exhaust of history, a great exhalation from the past that was still unable to settle.
Jack realized that he had been to places like this before, on the edge of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, in the north Syrian desert, in Andalusia in Spain. Places where ancient communities had once thrived on the periphery, but where exhaustion of the land and the spirit had overwhelmed all attempts to carve an existence out of the precious pockets of soil, so easily swept away by the whims of climate and erosion. He was told that it rained less and less here now, and the agriculture that had once sustained the village was being blown away in the wind. Soon, even the ancient walls would become part of the dust cloud that eddied and flowed along the Silk Road, caught between the endless chain of mountains that defined the corridor that had once linked the great empires of east
