lived with grief for much of his life, and it was somehow wrapped up with what happened to him in the jungle. It’s strange, it’s as if I can feel it. Maybe you do inherit these things from your ancestors, unresolved things. He couldn’t find closure in his lifetime, but maybe now we can do it.”
Jack looked across at Katya. Their eyes met for a moment, and he looked away. She had said things to Rebecca that he himself did not know how to say. He knew there was still anger in Katya about her own father, still a yawning emptiness in Rebecca, but for a moment he felt as if there were a transcending bond that might protect them both. Rebecca had seen him looking at Katya. “After going to the shrine, Pradesh wants me to study the pottery they’ve been finding underwater off Arikamedu. Aysha might be able to come and help with the Egyptian and Roman stuff and get me going.”
Costas cleared his throat. “If Hiemy can spare her.”
“He might need a rest,” Rebecca said, looking at him deadpan. Jack grinned. She swept her hair back. “Anyway, I think it’s going to be my doctorate.”
“Hang on,” Jack said. “You haven’t even finished high school yet.”
“High school? After this? You must be joking. These last few days have been the biggest adventure of my life. Now I know what you mean about expeditions, about how close you get to people. I feel as if I’ve known all of you all my life.”
Jack suddenly felt overwhelmed, and turned away, swallowing hard. He thought of what they had found in the lake, and his feeling of elation as he had looked up from underwater and seen Rebecca’s face, gazing down on him. Costas put a hand on his shoulder, then stood up, stretching and scratching his bristles, squinting out over the ruins. He kicked a stone, then reached down and picked it up, turning it over and over in his hand, rubbing it clean. Jack realized that the ground was strewn with fragments-pottery, broken brick, all of it crumbling and decaying into the shroud of dust that seemed so close to removing this place from history. Costas turned to him, a quizzical look in his eyes. “I wonder if they did make it?”
“The Romans? Fabius and the others?”
“We’re fifteen hundred kilometers east of Issyk-Kul. If any of them survived the wreck on the lake, that is. Let’s say one survived, unknown to his pursuers, washed ashore somewhere, melded invisibly among the caravans of traders heading toward Xian, just as Liu Jian the trader may have melded among the Sogdians heading west.”
“Maybe one did make it,” Jack said, nodding slowly.
“This place isn’t exactly a fabled eastern paradise, is it?”
Jack looked at the ruins again. In his mind’s eye he saw those other places he had visited, in north Africa, in Germany, in the mountain valleys of Wales, placed at the periphery of the Roman Empire where the ground revealed a few clues to the discerning eye, the humps of buried walls, fragments of pottery, a clump of rusted chain mail, places where veterans had made their mark, had eked out their days. “It’s what they were trained for,” he murmured. “At a certain point, a soldier becomes an old soldier. He no longer yearns to die gloriously in battle. The legion of ghosts who have marched alongside him, his fallen comrades, march away to Elysium, where they will await him. He no longer needs to prove himself He knows he will get there, and will join them. He has done enough.”
“And old soldiers, veterans, gave the empire its true strength, settling the frontiers,” Katya said.
Jack nodded. “It was the Roman way. A place with women, the chance to raise a family, building materials, a little plot of land. It was enough.”
“Yet they would have been told the First Emperor’s tomb was just over the horizon,” Costas said. “Fabled riches, beyond their imagination.”
“Maybe, for the old soldier, the adventurer, the fabled treasure is always just over the horizon, like Elysium,” Katya murmured. “When you have spent all your life searching, it becomes the only way to live.”
“And if it was Fabius, he may have had treasure already, remember?” Rebecca said. “The legionaries had what they could carry, the stuff they’d looted from the Parthians at Merv, from traders along the Silk Road. And maybe they did have the jewel, the peridot.”
A little boy suddenly appeared in the ruins in front of them. “Look,” Costas said. “There’s some of that fair hair you were talking about.” The small head bobbed up and down, coming toward them. He stopped, cocking his head, hearing but not understanding them. He darted into the dust again, then emerged above the loam wall, cautiously peering out. His hair was flaxen, more red than blond. They waved and smiled at him. Jack shaded his eyes, staring into the face. The boy’s eyes were a striking green color, almost olive. And there was something strange about the features, something fleetingly familiar. The boy scrambled over the wall and dropped down in front of them, still standing a few meters back, cautiously. His clothes were rags, and he was barefoot. He seemed suddenly assured, with the confidence of a child. He grinned at them, and held out his hand.
“What do you give a child like that?” Katya murmured.
Costas was still fingering the stone he had picked up earlier. He stopped turning it in his hands, then held it up so the boy could see. A light flashed across Jack’s eyes, and he realized that the stone was reflecting the hazy sunlight that was now breaking through. He glanced at it, and saw that it was a rich orange hue, translucent, like amber. He stared again. Amber. He could see an insect preserved inside, a mosquito. He saw that the stone had a hole in the center. It had evidently once had a cord through it, perhaps been worn as jewelry. It was old, worn. He saw marks on it. It looked like incised decoration, swirling. An animal, a swirling creature. Jack’s heart began to pound. He reached out for it.
It was too late. Costas had not seen him, and tossed it to the boy. He caught it, and held it up, his face rapt with delight. The light shone through the stone. It was amber, there was no doubt about it. It could have come from thousands of miles away. Amber from the Baltic. Jack’s mind was racing. The belongings of a Roman legionary? A legionary who hailed from the Celtic north, from Gaul or Germany, even Britain? He remembered Fabius, tall, ponytailed Fabius, from the tomb carving in the jungle. Could it be? An heirloom, somehow concealed over all those years of captivity? But then this was the Silk Road. All the riches of the world had once come this way. The boy smiled impishly, and held the stone tightly in his fist. He had seen Jack’s hand. He was not giving it up. He stared at Jack with fathomless eyes. Then he was off, scampering away across the ruins. His flaxen hair suddenly seemed perfectly in place here, the color of the mountains, of the dust that rolled through the valley. The color of the Silk Road. But there was something else, something Jack knew with dead certainty. Someone had been here. He took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. Ave atque salve, frater. He turned to the others. “I wonder whether we’ve just stared into the eyes of a Roman legionary.”
Rebecca held his arm. “Do you think the jewel was here?”
Jack rubbed his chin. “We may just have found it. That boy. The legacy.”
“She means the real jewel, Jack,” Costas said.
“Maybe that’s best left just beyond the horizon,” Jack murmured.
“Yeah, right. Don’t tell me you didn’t want to find it. Don’t tell me you didn’t want to put those two jewels together, and see what would happen.”
“I don’t know.” Jack narrowed his eyes. “I really don’t know.”
“It would have been fun to try though, wouldn’t it?” Costas said. “Just once, I mean. To see what it was like. Immortality. Then we could have put the jewels in the IMU museum at Carthage, on opposite sides of the room. Close enough for a warm fuzzy feeling. People would come out of the museum feeling extra good. And make donations.”
Jack looked at Rebecca, and jerked his head toward Costas. “That’s what I mean. He brings things down to earth. With a crash.”
Costas grinned. “I have got a lab though, and I can check out the properties of peridot and lapis lazuli. Pradesh talked about trying it. There may be something in it. Not immortality, you know, but something more than a trick of the light, a prismatic effect. Some channeling of energy. Some refractive quality.”
Some refractive quality. Jack looked up toward the sun, shutting his eyes against it. The last few days had been a series of refractions, between past and present, between the world of a century ago and two millennia before that, between lives that seemed to run on parallel trajectories. For a moment he felt as if they were the same, Licinius the Roman legionary, John Howard his ancestor, himself, that they were fueled by the same yearning. Maybe the jewel did that, the idea of immortality, allowed those drawn by it to tap into a trackway far above the ephemeral. He took a deep breath, and put his arm around Rebecca. “I think mortality will do me for a while.”
