and west.
Jack sat down on a stone revetment. Costas came up and sat beside him, wiping the dust from his face. He stared glumly at the wall. “This is when you know you’re in the presence of a real archaeologist,” he said. “One of the greatest wonders of history lies just over the horizon, the fabled tomb of the First Emperor, the terracotta army. But no, we come to sit in front of a crumbled wall in a wasteland in the choking dust and the burning heat. Hungry, thirsty, tired and needing a holiday very badly.”
Jack passed him his water bottle. “But I can never make sense of it without you. Archaeology, I mean. You keep my feet on the ground.”
“Right.” Costas swigged from the bottle, then passed it back. “So what’s the truth about this place, Jack? Is this what you brought us all the way to see?”
Jack passed Costas a piece of paper. “I printed this out from the helicopter’s computer this morning. I knew you’d need an antidote to a ruined wall. Headline news, CNN. Your elephant ship off Egypt. Remember? I think that stands up to the terracotta warriors, don’t you? And we found it.”
Costas peered at the photo and his eyes lit up. “Look, they got my new submersible in the picture, the ROV- 6. I asked the IMU film team to get that into the publicity shots. You can even see the new strobe array. Perfect.”
“The elephants, Costas, the elephants.”
“Yeah, that too.” They stared for a moment at the extraordinary image they had first seen ten days before, the coral-encrusted shape of an elephant sitting on the bottom of the Red Sea. Costas read out the caption. “Egyptologist Dr. Maurice Hiebermeyer announces sensational shipwreck find.” He slapped the paper. “I don’t believe it. No mention of us anywhere. Just Hiebermeyer.”
“We’ve got to allow the dirt archaeologist a moment of glory,” Jack said. “After all, he was the one who got us out to Egypt in the first place.”
“This happened when we found Atlantis,” Costas grumbled. “I’d set up a special demonstration of the Advanced Deep Sea Anthropod. The press were all over Hiebermeyer and his wretched mummies.”
“That’s Egyptology for you.”
“Anyway, it should be you doing the interviews.”
“Maurice is better at it than me. He’s got all that bubbly energy. And he’s less threatening.”
“Threatening?” Costas peered at him. “Let me guess. You don’t want the world to know there’s a real Indiana Jones around, do you? It might put the bad guys on their guard. You like to keep a low profile.”
“Exactly.”
“You didn’t answer my question. The truth about this place.”
Jack gestured at the crumbling wall. “It’s what you see in front of you. A few years ago, Chinese archaeologists identified these walls as Han dynasty, contemporary with the Roman Empire. They thought this might be the site of Lijian, a settlement in the Gansu Corridor mentioned in Han records. Lijian might derive from a Han Chinese word for westerner, for those who lived beyond the Persians. Later this place might have been renamed Jielu, possibly meaning ‘captives from the storming of a town.’ It was common for the Han to settle their prisoners of war in places that were then named after their origin. The big leap of imagination was to connect this place with the theory that the Chinese employed Roman mercenaries, survivors of Crassus’ legions who had escaped from Persian imprisonment.”
“So that’s it,” Costas murmured. “That’s why we’re here.”
“It’s not clear-cut,” Jack said. “The story of Fabius and the others in the boat might have ended on Lake Issyk-Kul. But it might not. There’s another possibility. A really fascinating one.”
“Go on.”
“The Roman survivors of Carrhae were imprisoned in Merv in 53 BC. Licinius and Fabius and their comrades made their break about thirty years later. Over the years others must have tried to escape. Perhaps one group was successful, and word filtered back to Merv of the opportunities for mercenaries in the east, the great riches to be had. Perhaps that was what inspired Licinius and Fabius. And the hints about this place would seem to refer to an earlier group. The History of the Former Han Dynasty records soldiers fighting in 36 BC for a renegade Hun warlord, deploying in a formation reminiscent of the Roman testudo maneuver with interlocked shields above their heads. That’s the one shred of evidence on which the whole theory hangs. A few who had been persuaded by the argument began to identify Lijian with the Roman settlement. And here we are.”
“Any Roman artifacts?” Costas said, kicking the dust. They looked up as the two women joined them. Rebecca carried on, walking around the ruins in front of them, examining the walls. Costas shifted to make space for Katya on the wall.
Jack shook his head. “It’s like Katya said at the Roman burial beside Lake Issyk-Kul. You wouldn’t expect to find any. If Romans were here, they would have had nothing of their former life with them. It would have been stripped away from them on the battlefield, and then at Merv. But there’s one fascinating feature of this place. Not artifacts or ruins, but people. There’s a striking incidence of fair features, green eyes, flaxen hair, big noses. Some Chinese scholars who came here saw these features as western Asiatic, then someone remembered the Roman connection, and the idea caught on.”
“What do they know about it?” Costas asked. “The local people, I mean?”
“It’s impossible to tell. There might be some residual memory of their ancestry. But they’re desperately poor, and buying into the Roman theory might be a ticket to tourist dollars.”
Katya spoke. “Anywhere along the Silk Route you could have genetic input from the west-Persian, Sogdian, Bactrian, Indian and yes, Greek and Roman-but with input going as far back as the early Neolithic, even to Indo- Europeans who came this far. You just couldn’t be certain.”
Jack nodded. “DNA studies have been carried out and are pretty inconclusive. And the whole idea’s based on a Chinese misapprehension about the Romans, that they were blue-eyed, blond-haired giants. Ironically, Roman legionaries from the heartland of Italy would have had more in common with the physiognomy of Han Chinese warriors-short, stocky, dark-haired, brown-eyed. What the Chinese were imagining is much closer to the Celtic or Nordic type. Of course, by the time of Julius Caesar and Crassus, there were plenty of men like that in the legions, Celts from northern Italy, Gauls, even Britons. The Huns weren’t the only ones to employ mercenaries in their armies.”
“What’s your gut instinct?” Costas said.
Jack pursed his lips. In the distance he could see a farmer hacking at the ground, his implement bouncing off the rock-hard surface. Beyond him the mountains rose like crumpled paper, the folds and valleys in dark shadow. “My gut instinct,” he replied. “This place would have been more fertile in antiquity, a more viable agricultural settlement, but always demanding, not a place of choice. My gut instinct is that prisoners of war could have been settled here.”
Rebecca came over and stood in front of them. She had stripped off her fleece to reveal a gray T-shirt with the letters USMC stenciled across the front.
“You seem to have made some new friends,” Jack said.
Costas inspected the shirt, nodding his approval. “Hoo-ah,” he said.
“Hoo-ah,” Rebecca replied, high-fiving him. Jack rolled his eyes. She flopped down on the low wall beside him and took off her cap, wiping her forehead. “It’s deuced hot,” she said.
Jack turned to her in astonishment. “What did you just say?”
“I said it’s deuced hot.” She looked at him sheepishly. “That’s what John Howard would have said. I read it in a letter you have he wrote to his wife, from the jungle. When their little boy was ill. It was one of his favorite expressions. I’ve been thinking about him a lot. He so much wanted to be with them, but couldn’t. I hope he found them in the end.”
Jack put his arm around her and smiled. He remembered the lapis lazuli mine, the body. For a moment he saw them, Howard and Wauchope, standing together, not old men in ragged sheepskins but young officers, in white helmets and khaki tunics with telescopes and maps, staring off toward the horizon. He held Rebecca tight and then took his arm away. “You’ve just been on the cellphone to Bishkek, haven’t you? How’s Pradesh?”
“He’s good.” Rebecca suddenly looked downcast. “Altamaty and I went to see him at the U.S. medical complex at Bishkek just before we flew out here. The bullet missed everything vital. But without the first aid he would have bled to death. He’s grateful to you for saving his life.”
“Costas did the triage. And I hardly saved him. I was the one who put him in danger.”
