Costas looked down at his crumpled shirt, and picked at it despondently. He eyed Jack. “Immortality might give us time to get to Hawaii.”
Jack got to his feet. “Point taken.”
“Now I know what Costas means,” Rebecca said.
“About what?”
“About diversions. He said your expeditions always end up being diversions. You never know where they’re going to take you. He says that’s what keeps him on his toes. This was one, wasn’t it?”
Jack took a deep breath, and stared into the ruins. He reached into his bag, then remembered he no longer had the little lapis lazuli elephant. He remembered where they had been, and wondered how he had changed. He gave Rebecca a tired smile. “A bit more than a diversion, I fancy.”
Costas looked at Jack expectantly. “So where do we go from here?”
“Got any ideas?”
“I thought we might go in search of the Isles of the Immortals. You know, that place Katya told us about. The First Emperor sent out expeditions to find them. Somewhere in the eastern ocean. In the center of the Pacific, to be exact. A small but delightful chain of volcanic islands.”
“Aloha,” Rebecca said.
“Aloha,” Costas replied. He made a whirling motion with his fingers, and pointed at the helicopter. Jack scratched his chin, looking at Costas’ sun-beaten face. “You know, you look as if you could do with a few days on a beach.”
“Damn right I could.”
“But Rebecca wants to go to the jungle. To the shrine.”
Costas got up and stretched. “It can wait. Anyway, there’s probably not much more to see. When we were there, I felt a hole in the base of the tomb. I remembered you showing me stone coffins in Rome, with the drainage hole to let the decomposition products flow out. If Licinius was in that tomb, there’s probably not much left there now.”
Jack stared at Costas. “A hole, you say.”
Costas put up his hand, and curled his fingers around. “About this big.”
Jack’s mind was racing. “Big enough to shove a bamboo tube through?”
“I guess so. A small one.”
Jack had remembered something. A possibility that Rebecca had mentioned. She looked at him now, reading his mind. “Robert Wauchope,” she murmured. “The velpu?”
Could it be? Could he have made it back there? Jack’s heart was suddenly pounding. He felt the familiar thrill of excitement. He slung his old khaki bag on his shoulder.
“Oh no.” Costas shook his head defiantly. “No way. I know that look.”
“We’ve got to get back to Seaquest II anyway. She’s in the Bay of Bengal. It would just be a diversion.”
Costas looked despairingly at Rebecca. “See what I mean?”
Rebecca put her arm around Jack. “Don’t worry, Dad. He’ll follow you anywhere.”
Jack looked questioningly at Costas. “Well?”
“You really think we might find it?”
“No promises.”
Costas sighed. He glanced again at his Hawaiian shirt, then looked dolefully at Jack. They stared each other in the eye. Jack’s face broke into a broad smile, and Costas looked down, shaking his head. “What can I say.”
“Good to go?”
“Good to go.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE SEEDS OF THIS STORY WERE PLANTED WHEN I first stood as an archaeology student among the ancient ruins of Harran in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border. The heat was stifling, the sky was lowering, and a wind had whipped up the dust and obscured the light. It seemed a place on the very edge of existence, and it made a deep impression on me. This was the site of the Battle of Carrhae, where a Roman army under Crassus had been catastrophically defeated by the Parthians in 53 BC. It seemed inconceivable that a battle could have been fought in such heat. I had read the story of captured legionaries being marched east, never to be heard of again. Could the rumors be true, that some of them might have escaped and undertaken a fantastic trek as far as China? In the years that followed, my own travels took me deep into central Asia along the ancient Silk Route, and on the trail of Roman seafarers who had traded as far east as the Bay of Bengal. I became fascinated by the early history of archaeological exploration in India during the period of British rule, and with the lives of my own ancestors who had been soldiers and adventurers there in the nineteenth century. Always my mind returned to the question of Crassus’ legionaries. Could there be a connection? Had these men truly risked everything to seek Chryse, the land of gold known to the traders? What tales had they been told of the fabled riches of the east? What could have driven them on?
The fate of Crassus’ lost legionaries from Carrhae is one of the most beguiling mysteries of ancient history. It exerted a strong pull on the Roman imagination; the poet Horace asked, “Did Crassus’ troops live in scandalous marriage to barbarians… grow old bearing arms for alien fathers-in-law…?” (Odes, iii, 5, trans. W G. Shepherd). For the Emperor Augustus, who agreed to peace terms with the Parthians in 20 BC, the return of the captured legionary standards was one of the greatest triumphs of his reign, celebrated by a famous series of gold and silver coins bearing the legend SIGNIS RECEPTIS, “The standards returned.”
The surviving ancient sources on Carrhae are all reliant on earlier histories, now lost. According to Plutarch, Crassus marched with “seven legions of men-at-arms, nearly four thousand horsemen and about as many light- armed troops” (Crassus, xx, 1), implying about forty thousand men. The identity of the legions is not known; however, Plutarch mentions that a thousand of the cavalry had “come from Caesar,” presumably veterans of Julius Caesar’s recent campaigns in Gaul and Britain. At that date, legionaries were still “citizen-soldiers” rather than career professionals, bound by terms of service not normally exceeding six years. The memories of the campaign in my prologue, including the ill omens on crossing the Euphrates, the death of Crassus and the humiliation of Caius Paccianus, are all from Plutarch (Crassus xix, xxxi-ii) and Dio Cassius (Roman History xl, 16-27); Plutarch has Crassus being killed by a Parthian, and Dio Cassius “either by one of his own men to prevent his capture alive, or by the enemy because he was badly wounded.” Afterward, “the Parthians, as some say, poured molten gold into his mouth in mockery.” Plutarch tells us that in the whole campaign “twenty thousand are said to have been killed, and ten thousand to have been taken alive.”
The only indication of the fate of those prisoners is a single line in the Natural History of Pliny the Elder, who describes Margiana, a city east of the Caspian Sea, as “the place to which the Roman prisoners taken in the disaster of Crassus were brought” (vi, 47). Margiana, present-day Merv in Turkmenistan, was a Parthian citadel and gateway to central Asia. The Roman prisoners could have been used to build the huge circuit of walls whose crumbling ramparts can still be seen at Merv today. The walls required rebuilding on numerous occasions, and it is intriguing to note that the Romans in Italy were first developing techniques of concrete construction at this time-the basis for the idea in the novel of how deliberate sabotage may have come about.
The suggestion that survivors of Carrhae may have escaped from Merv and made their way east comes from a controversial interpretation of Chinese written sources, first published in the 1950s. In 36 BC the Han Chinese mounted an expedition against the Hsiung-nu, the Huns, who were establishing a foothold in Sogdiana in central Asia. The ancient History of the Former Han Dynasty contains an account of the Han siege of the Hsiung-nu fortress, probably based on contemporary paintings, including a passage translated as more than a hundred foot- soldiers lined up in a “fish-scale” formation (chs. ix, xxiv-v). Some modern scholars have equated this with the testudo, the “tortoise,” a Roman formation in which shield was locked with shield, as Plutarch put it in his account of Carrhae (Crassus xxiv, 3). The Han army also found a “double wooden palisade” outside the citadel, a description perhaps reminiscent of Roman fortification techniques. These two references have led some to imagine that the Hun army included Roman mercenaries.
Nothing definitive has yet been found in the archaeology of central Asia to support this idea. The most
