The Tiger Warrior Part 8

Howard suddenly felt tired, deathly tired, and he took off his helmet and rubbed his stubble. He put it on again, and peered at the lowering sky. "We leave in twenty minutes. The sappers have that much time to finish up here. Hamilton, be so good as to egg them on. Robert, you and I are going to visit that shrine. You said you might have seen shapes in there, Hamilton? Carvings, inscriptions? At the moment all I want to do is get that wretched velpu in there and be out of here. I don't think the muttadar is going to let us leave unless we keep our side of the bargain."

The two men left Hamilton and the sappers behind in the mist, and approached the north side of the clearing where the stream curved around below another waterfall. Through the sheen of spray they could make out three huge boulders, one of which formed a kind of roof over the other two, with a vertical slab of rock blocking the s.p.a.ce in between. The muttadar had been following them, but as the shrine came into view he pulled off his turban and squatted on the ground, muttering and chanting to himself in the Koya language, his eyes wide with terror. Howard turned and knelt beside him, trying to coax out some sense. "He has the most intense horror of this place. Nothing will induce him to go any farther."

"I thought this was his temple," Wauchope said.

"He knows he must return the idol, but he dreads the wrath of the konda devata, the tiger spirit. He says we must take the idol inside for him."

"But without it, he's defenseless. Surely the rebels will kill him."

"He evidently fears the spirits more than he fears death."

Howard spoke urgently to the muttadar, gesturing back in the direction of the sappers, but the man remained immobile, staring ahead as if in a trance. He suddenly reached down with trembling hands and brought a gourd he had been carrying to his mouth, gulping down palm liquor as if it were water. Howard reached over and grasped the bamboo tube from the man's other hand, pulling it until he released it. The container was sealed at both ends with a hard resinous material over a wooden plug. He stood and carried it toward Wauchope, who looked at it with curiosity. "Shall we open it up?" Wauchope said. "He'll soon be too besotted to care."

Howard looked toward the shrine. He thought he could see the shape of a tiger's face in the boulders, the eyes and ears formed by undulations in the rock. He shook his head. "Let's be done with it. I made him a promise. I will not treat these people like savages."

They started forward. A rocky alcove to the left of the shrine entrance came into view. Two thick bamboo trunks formed a kind of verandah, holding up a roof of poles and palm leaves. In front was a line of posts capped with bleached skulls, some of them of prodigious size - elephants, tigers, wild boar. Behind them were two taller poles, festooned with bedraggled feathers. Hanging halfway down the poles were two blackened ma.s.ses, dripping and suppurating. Howard had noticed a smell, but thought it was Bebbie. Now he realized it was the sickly-sweet stench of older putre faction, and he remembered what the sappers had said. The two other police constables. He forced himself to look. Knives were suspended from cords beneath the corpses, slowly spinning around. The heads were smashed and scalped, the eyes gouged out. There was movement on the ground. He spied a gorged rat scurrying away, dragging an indescribable lump from below one of the poles. He turned quickly away, swallowing hard to avoid retching, and joined Wauchope at the vertical slab between the boulders. "We need to get away from this place," he said hoa.r.s.ely, holding himself against the wet rock, his head throbbing.

"We need to finish here first," Wauchope murmured. He was running his finger down the crack on one side of the slab. "It's cut stone. Incredible workmanship. Who made this?"

"Try pushing it," Howard said. Wauchope put his hands on the slab, and it immediately pivoted inward. Inside was a pa.s.sage large enough for them to stoop through side-by-side, but beyond was pitch blackness. The two men cautiously entered. Howard took out a bra.s.s container from his belt pouch and extracted a flint and steel, sparking a length of paraffin-soaked cord and using it to light a small candle. He lifted it up, and was immediately confronted by a crude etching of a lingam, a phallus. He raised the candle higher. All around them were other emblems, crude carvings, stick figures like the one he had seen on the gourd in the ravine. They edged forward. Ahead they could hear the rushing sound of the waterfall through the rocks. Wauchope suddenly tripped and Howard reached out to catch him, dropping the bamboo container with a clatter as he did so. Once Wauchope was upright he picked up the bamboo. One side had splintered, and he could feel something like paper inside. Crouching down, he saw what Wauchope had tripped over, a shallow stone basin full of liquid, still and dark, with a faint metallic tang. He raised the candle over it, and saw his face reflected, as if it were glowing with a deep red aura. Then he remembered what the muttadar had told him. The priest augurs the future in a bowl of blood. He looked again, but saw only the yellow flicker of the candle. He shifted slightly, then he saw something, gasped, dropped the cylinder again and let his right hand fall heavily into the liquid. It was thick, congealing, warm. He pulled his hand out and shook it hard, splattering gobs of red over the walls of the tunnel, then wiped it on his uniform. "I just saw the most ghastly apparitions," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "Tigers, devils, scorpions."

"They're on the ceiling above you," Wauchope said.

Howard raised the candle and looked up. Of course. There were more etchings on the rock. He had seen reflections. He took a deep breath, and peered ahead. "That must be it. The shrine itself There seems to be some kind of altar in the center." He picked up the bamboo tube again, and stepped carefully over the basin. Through the flickering candlelight he saw figures that were more rounded, sculptures in relief, front-facing masks and dancing limbs. "I recognize these," he murmured. "My ayah used to take me to cave temples like this when I was a child in Bihar. That's Parvati, wife of Shiva. And Vishnu, striding across the wall, vanquishing a demon." He moved forward into the main chamber, where the walls were barely discernible in the candlelight. "But these ones are different. They look like warriors. I need to inspect them more closely."

"Pa.s.s me the candle, would you?" Wauchope had crouched down beside the altar-like structure in the middle, a raised rectilinear shape that had clearly been sculpted out of the living rock. Howard carefully handed over the stub of candle. Wauchope held it close to one side of the stone.

"Good G.o.d."

"What is it?"

"It's an inscription. I can read it."

"What language?"

Wauchope did not reply. Howard watched the yellow orb of light move quickly along the side of the rock, and then back again. He could just make out shapes, carved lettering. Halfway along the fourth row the candle sputtered and went out. They were in near darkness, the only light a dull gray coming through the pa.s.sage from the entrance. "Quick," Wauchope said excitedly. "Strike a light. I think I can read one of the lines." Howard put down the bamboo tube by the altar and hurriedly took out his flint and steel, striking over and over again in the damp air until a spark lit the cord. He cupped his hand over it until there was a flame, and pa.s.sed it carefully over. Wauchope dangled the flame close to the rock and moved it along. The flame reached his fingers and he dropped it, gasping in pain. There was a hiss as the cord hit the wet floor and they were in near darkness again.

"That's it," Howard said. "Well?"

Wauchope was silent. Howard saw the silhouette of his form, nursing his hand, stock-still and staring blindly at the stone. Then Wauchope swiveled toward him, and Howard could just make out his bearded face in the pale illumination from the entranceway.

"It's Latin. Sacra iulium sacularia. Guardian of the celestial jewel. There's more, but that's all I could make out."

"I've heard that before," Howard whispered. "Some memory from my childhood, from my ayah. The celestial jewel. The jewel of immortality."

There was an immense rumble outside, then a clap of thunder. Lightning lit up the interior of the shrine like a flash of gunpowder, revealing for an instant a surging ma.s.s of forms that seemed to be crowding in on them, G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses and demons and glowering tigers, faces contorted in agony and fear, terrifying riders looming above them like the hors.e.m.e.n of the apocalypse. Howard thought he saw Romans. Roman legionaries. He felt as he had in the jungle when the noise of the beasts erupted. He put a hand to his forehead. It was burning, and his hand was shaking. He crouched beside Wauchope and they made their way back toward the entrance. The pounding of the waterfall behind the boulders had increased, and they could see the rain lashing down now, giant droplets that spattered into the pa.s.sageway. Howard realized he was hearing something else, the insistent sound of drumbeats, coming from all sides, sometimes discordant but then steady and rhythmic, just as he had heard that morning from the riverbank. Fear rose in him. He peered into the downpour, searching for the muttadar, and then saw a crumpled form, a forest of arrows sticking out of it and a dark stain seeping over the mud. The rain was pulverizing his body, and it seemed to be disappearing before their very eyes. The two men crawled back into the main chamber. Howard pulled out his revolver, and Wauchope did the same. They knelt up in the confined s.p.a.ce and shook hands.

"G.o.d be with you," Howard said.

"If we ever make it out of here, this place is our secret," Wauchope replied. "I saw something more in that inscription."

"If we rush toward the boulder where we left the sappers, we could make it."

They turned back toward the entrance. Howard reached into the darkness on top of the altar slab and lifted something he had seen earlier, a bra.s.s gauntlet with a fist in the shape of a tiger's head, a rusted blade protruding from the tiger's mouth. He felt his own sword pommel, then thought better of it and slipped his right hand into the gauntlet, curling his fingers round the crossbar inside. The head of the tiger looked like the image he had seen on the boulders of the shrine, with a grimacing mouth and slanted eyes. "Tigers seem to be the one thing they're afraid of," he said. "If it's in the shrine, this thing must be some kind of sacred object. Might put the fear of G.o.d into them."

"I've got an even better idea." Wauchope picked up the bamboo tube and held it in front of him. "You kept your side of the bargain. You brought the muttadar's precious idol back to the shrine. But I think now that he's past caring, we can borrow it for a little longer. If they see that we still have it, the rebels might hold off as they did before."

Through the pounding rain and drumbeats they heard the sharp crack of Snider rounds, then screams. Howard took a deep breath. At least the rebels would not be able to use their matchlocks in the rain. An immense crash suddenly shook them, not thunder this time but the reverberations of an earthquake. They braced themselves. Somewhere behind them was the sound of falling rock, and the boulder above them seemed to shift. Howard remembered the roar of the tiger, and wondered whether it was out there, waiting. He remembered his son. He remembered what he had done. He c.o.c.ked his revolver and held the sword at the ready. For a split second he felt detached from his own body, as if he were standing back and watching the two of them go forward, disappearing through the veil of rain into history. He took a deep breath, and glanced at Wauchope. "Let's do it."

Bay of Bengal, India, present-day Jack reached out with his left hand and pulled the tiller of the outboard engine toward him, bringing the Zodiac broadside-on to the sh.o.r.e and powering down the throttle. Ahead of them, somewhere behind the sh.o.r.eline, lay the Roman site of Arikamedu. Romans, in southern India. It seemed virtually inconceivable, in a setting so completely at odds with all the preconceptions of cla.s.sical history. Jack snapped back to reality. The wave they had been riding caught up with them in a burst of foam and wake, and the boat pitched sideways in the swell coming from the Bay of Bengal. Costas was sitting on the pontoon opposite him and Hiebermeyer and Aysha clung to either side farther forward. Rebecca was crouched in the bow holding the painter line, her dark hair streaming in the wind. They were all wearing orange IMU survival suits and life jackets. Jack peered at the palm-fringed beach, now only a few hundred yards distant, and saw where the swell rose over the shallows. He gunned the throttle and the sixty horsepower Mariner engine lifted them along the crest of a wave, pushing them back over deeper water as they headed south parallel to the coast and left the gray form of Seaquest II farther behind.

"That must be it, over there," Costas shouted above the noise. He gestured toward sh.o.r.e with his GPS unit while holding on to the fixed rope around the pontoon with his other hand. "It looks like the river entrance."

Jack nodded and powered down again, turning the bow toward land and maneuvering between two lines of breakers that marked the outer reef about two hundred yards offsh.o.r.e. The sea went calm, and he throttled back to idle. "We should be okay if we keep to the channel between the buoys, but keep a sharp eye out from the bow in any case." Rebecca turned and made the okay sign at him. For the first time since leaving Seaquest II, Jack allowed himself to relax and look around. They had pa.s.sed the harbor of Pondicherry and the ruins of the old East India Company fort some twenty minutes before, and were now off the dense green fringe that continued some two hundred miles farther to the southern tip of India, to the edge of the Palk Strait they had sailed through in Seaquest II earlier that morning. Jack increased the throttle slightly. They pa.s.sed a lateen-rigged nava, a naked boy in the stern hanging on the arm of the rudder oar. A fisherman's dark eyes followed Jack's as they pa.s.sed, yet he continued to throw out and draw in his net. Rebecca put her arm out to starboard and Jack pushed the tiller to port, seeing where the water became shallow. Their destination was barely distinguishable from the rest of the sh.o.r.eline, a backwater that formed a placid channel into the sea, yet it led to one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in India. Jack had dreamed of coming here since childhood, and to the place in the jungle he planned to visit later. He was tingling with excitement. He glanced back at the nava, now framed by the expanse of the Bay of Bengal. The sun gave the water a steely hue, and it seemed sluggish, heavy like mercury, the reflection of the nava wavering in slow motion with the residue of the sea-swell.

Jack pa.s.sed Costas the tiller, then swiveled around and faced the sun in the east, raising his head toward it and narrowing his eyes. That was the other extraordinary image from this place. Somewhere out there lay Chryse, the land of gold. Jack remembered the Periplus, words written two thousand years ago by a man who had been at this very spot, who had turned to the east as Jack had done, pondering what lay beyond. Jack squinted again at the nava. What had he seen, that Egyptian Greek who came here so long ago? Had he himself seen the kolandiophonta he wrote about in the Periplus, great ships that came down from the Ganges? Had he seen other ships that came across the ocean from Chryse, ships with towering braided sails and dragons in their bows, ships carrying bales of silk and untold finery, emissaries of a warrior empire as great as Rome itself?

"I'm cutting the engine," Costas said. "I don't trust these shallows." The clear water of the ocean had given way to a muddy brown as they entered the river outflow. Jack nodded, glancing at the laminated chart clipped on a board in front of them showing the location of the archaeological site. "It's only a couple of hundred meters along the river, on the south side of the channel." Costas raised and locked the engine on the transom, and then picked up a canoe paddle from his side of the boat. Jack took the other one, dipping the blade into the murky water, feeling its warmth. The only sound now was the distant roar of the breakers and the rustle of wind between the palms. They pa.s.sed a sand spit that marked the river entrance, and entered a channel less than fifty meters wide. The riverbank was a patchwork of red and green, bursts of bougainvillea and the odd mangrove and lemon tree appearing between the coconut palms. It was suddenly hot, an intense, dry heat, and they both shipped their paddles and copied Hiebermeyer and the two girls, stripping down their survival suits to the waist. They drifted past a line of navas with drying fish strung from the rigging like lights, and then a group of bathing women and water buffaloes, seemingly oblivious to the fiddler crabs and mudskippers that crawled among them. It was a languid, timeless scene, yet one that was also fragile and ephemeral, in a place swept by cyclones and tsunamis, where the lasting achievements of civilization could only be established inland, beyond the danger zone. Jack thought again of the Periplus, and put himself in the mind of the author two thousand years before. It was not only the view to the east that was so beguiling. The view inland, beyond the fringe of palms, also held temptation, and fear. The first Greeks and Romans here were like the earliest European explorers, on the edge of the unknown, thousands of miles of jungle and mountain and desert. All they knew was that somewhere to the north were the lands that had been touched by Alexander the Great. But they had come here not to colonize or conquer but to trade - just as the Portuguese and French and British were to do fifteen hundred years later - with civilizations as old and sophisticated as anything in Egypt and the Mediterranean.

Jack gently paddled the Zodiac over to the opposite bank of the river, and they b.u.mped into a small wooden jetty. A wiry, neatly attired man stood watching them, wearing sandals, shorts and an open-necked khaki shirt with the flashes of the Survey of India on his shoulders. Two other men came up and took the painter that Rebecca held out to them, and they helped her, Aysha and Hiebermeyer off the boat. They removed their survival suits, and without a word Hiebermeyer bounded off toward the edge of an excavation trench, hitching up his outsized shorts. Rebecca looked back at Jack, who waved her on, and she and Aysha hurried off to catch up. Jack smiled at the man as he and Costas climbed out onto the dock. "You must excuse my colleague. He gets tunnel vision when he sees a new excavation."

The man clicked his heels and held out his hand. "Commander Howard. It is an honor to be making your acquaintance, sir."

"Call me Jack. And I'm only a reservist." He shook hands. "You're Captain Pradesh Ramaya?"

"Indian Army Engineers, seconded to the Survey of India. I'm in charge of the underwater excavation."

"Thanks for emailing the chart," Jack said, stripping off the rest of his survival suit, revealing his khaki trousers. He picked up his old bag from the box in the bow of the boat and slung it over his shoulder, keeping the holster discreetly out of sight. He gestured beside him. "Costas Kazantzakis. Another old navy hand. Engineering too."

"Aha!" Pradesh said, his eyes gleaming, shaking hands. "Which branch?"

"Submarine robotics," Costas said. "Just a couple of years between grad school and meeting up with this character. And you can forget the old navy stuff. I hardly ever had to wear a uniform."

Jack gave him a wry look. "Except when you took a gunboat up the Shatt al Arab during the first Gulf War."

"They put me on an aircraft carrier. Complete waste of my skills. I was just killing time."

"And winning a Navy Cross."

"You can talk. Some reservist. Special Boat Service? Let me think. Those bits of ribbon on your uniform. South Atlantic, Persian Gulf, Adriatic..."

"The bits of ribbon the moths haven't eaten, you mean. All ancient history."

"It is a pleasure to meet two such distinguished warriors," Pradesh said, grinning.

"Archaeologists," Jack replied with a smile.

"Him, not me," Costas retorted. "No way. I'm just his stooge. Along for the ride. For the treasure at the end." He finished stripping off his suit, revealing the lurid Hawaiian shirt. Pradesh stared hard, and coughed. Costas looked at Jack defiantly, then at Pradesh. "You from these parts?"

"I'm from the G.o.davari River region, about two hundred miles north from here. Where we're going after this."

"When I called from Egypt to set up this visit, I had no idea there was any connection," Jack said to Costas. "But when Pradesh emailed back and told me he was from the Madras Engineering Group of the Indian army based in Bangalore, I mentioned my great-great-grandfather."

"The portrait of Colonel Howard holds an honored place in the regimental mess," Pradesh said.

"Colonel?" Costas said. "I thought he was a lieutenant."

"Later," Jack said. "I'll get to that."

"And Colonel Wauchope is one of our most revered heroes," Pradesh said. "His work with the Survey of India in the 1880s and 1890s helped to establish the frontier with Afghanistan. It is an honor to help you. The officers' mess still toasts them on the anniversary of their disappearance."

"They both disappeared?" Costas exclaimed to Jack. "You mentioned that Howard disappeared, but both of them?"

"Later." Jack put a hand on Pradesh's shoulder and pointed to a cache of diving equipment under an awning a few meters down the sh.o.r.eline. "I'm itching to see what you've been doing here. We've only got an hour and a half before the helicopter arrives."

Forty-five minutes later Jack stood up from the work-table under the awning and put down his pencil. He and Costas had been taken on a quick tour of the land excavation, pa.s.sing a trench where Hiebermeyer and the two girls were kneeling on the baked mud and troweling away along with a group of Indian archaeology students. They had returned to the tent with the diving equipment, and Jack had been making notes on the site plan. He turned to Pradesh. "The Roman material is eroding out into the riverbed. Where Hiebermeyer was troweling just now looks like the edge of a large mud-brick warehouse, but my guess is at least half of it is gone. You've got two or three meters' water depth, and below that many meters of buried sediment. It'll be filled with artifacts, but none of it stratified. With the equipment you've got, you're going to have a big problem excavating it. That's where we can help."

"We've tried using a dredge pump, but the hole fills up immediately and the divers can't see a thing."

"Costas?" Jack said.

Costas snapped shut his radio receiver outside the tent. He came in, raising his sungla.s.ses and wiping the sweat off his brow. "We're good to go. We can use Seaquest II's big pontoon boat to bring the gear in over the shallows."

Jack leaned over the plan, and tapped his pencil at various points. "We suggest you establish a floating caisson, a cofferdam, to enclose an area of riverbed ab.u.t.ting the land site," he said. "You discharge sieved sediment outside the caisson, meaning the water inside remains clear. We have a piece of a kit designed by Costas that we first used in the Black Sea, like a gigantic cookie cutter you place on the area of sediment to be excavated, five meters square. It has an integral dredge pump and can be built up as you excavate deeper, with the pipe outlet on sh.o.r.e where the sediment can be sieved for small finds and organic material. I'll have a couple of our technical people stay here with your team as advisors."

"Because Jack and I are going to Hawaii," Costas murmured.

Pradesh coughed, glancing at the shirt. "So I see. Holiday?"

"Work," Jack said.

Pradesh looked out at the river. "I'm extremely grateful," he said. "Even the smallest find at this site is worth its weight in gold. And the riverbed could be our treasure trove. Now, please excuse me for a few minutes while I let my people know." He hurried off to a group of divers organizing equipment on the jetty, and Jack turned toward the main excavated area of the site. What had the author of the Periplus seen when he had disembarked here at this spot, two thousand years ago? It was a jungle clearing on a riverbank, an area smaller than a soccer pitch. In his mind's eye Jack saw mud-brick walls, narrow alleys, flat-roofed warehouses; a line of Roman amphoras along the wharfside, crates of red-glazed pottery from Italy. Arikamedu was like Berenike on the Red Sea, functional to the point of impoverishment, with no temples, no mosaics - a bartertown on the edge of the unknown, yet a place that belied the enormous value of the goods that pa.s.sed through it; every sc.r.a.p of pottery preserved unique evidence for one of the ancient world's most extraordinary endeavors.

"Jack!" Hiebermeyer came bounding up, followed by Aysha and Rebecca. He was pouring sweat. "You remember at Ostia, the port of Rome? The Square of the Merchants, with all the little offices? That's what we've got here, this warehouse building. It's like a stable, with each stall being for one merchant, one firm. And you won't believe whose office we've just found. Aysha spotted it."

An Indian student came up with a finds tray. Aysha carefully took a plastic bag from it and extracted a worn pot sherd. "It's local, south Indian manufacture of the late first century BC."

"There's graffiti on it," Jack said.

Aysha nodded. "It's Tamil. I couldn't believe it when I saw it." Her voice was tight with excitement. "It's the same name as a Tamil graffito we found on the sherd in the merchant's house at Berenike. The name of a woman, Amrita."

"And now look at the other sherds," Hiebermeyer said, picking one out and showing it to Jack. "The pottery's central Italian, from a wine amphora. Recognize the writing?"

"Numbers," Jack murmured. "They're ledgers, accounts. What you'd expect." He saw some words in Greek. He suddenly gasped. "I recognize the style. Look, the way the letters are sloped. It could be the same hand as the sherds you found at Berenike with the Periplus text!"

Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically, then pointed at the excavation. "Here's what I see. We don't know his name, but let's call him Priscus. He's sitting over there in his office with his wife, Amrita. They're a husband and wife team. She's local, perfect for business contacts over here, and her family keeps an eye on their office when they're back in Egypt. You remember we suspected our man was a silk merchant, maybe with a sideline in gems? Well, look at these Greek words. That's serikon, silk. The numbers must be grades, quant.i.ties, prices. And look at this one. Sappheiros. That's a Greek word for lapis lazuli. It's the word the author of the Periplus uses. In antiquity, that can only mean the lapis mined in the mountains of Badakhshan, in Afghanistan."

"You mean this stuff," Costas said, pulling out a piece of shimmering blue stone from his shorts pocket, holding it in front of them.

Hiebermeyer gasped. "That's the piece you found at Berenike! We can't take you anywhere! What is it with divers?"

"Well, Jack does it sometimes," Costas said, his expression deadpan. "I just borrowed it. For good luck, until we get to Hawaii. Then you can take it back."

Jack suppressed a smile. "Anything else, Maurice?"

Hiebermeyer snorted at Costas, then turned to Rebecca. "Well, your daughter has just won her archaeological credentials," he said. "It was during those few minutes we spent troweling with the students. She has finder's luck."

"That sounds familiar," Jack said. Rebecca opened her hand and showed him a perfect olive-green gem, uncut but brilliantly reflective in the midday sun.

"Peridot," Jack exclaimed, taking the gem from her and holding it up. "From St. John's Island, near Berenike. Costas and I flew over it on the Red Sea just a few days ago. So you think our man was exporting this from Egypt?"

"And trading it for silk," Aysha said. "Looking at this gem, you can see why peridot might have fascinated the Chinese. It's like refined jade."

"The warrior empire," Jack murmured, holding the piece up to the sun, looking at the green light cast on his other hand.

"What do you mean?" Costas said.

"Just an image I had," Jack explained. "An image of Chinese ships, of warriors coming from the east. But this makes it real."

"And it closes the loop," Hiebermeyer said. "Rome, Egypt, India, lapis lazuli from the mines of Afghanistan, the Silk Route, the fabled city of Xian. Five thousand miles of contact, linking the two greatest empires the world has ever known."

Costas took the gemstone from Jack. He held it toward the sun, with the piece of lapis lazuli in his other hand. The light flashed through them and they seemed to glow together, as if they were enveloped in the same ball of incandescence. He held them closer together, and then flinched, moving them apart. "Hot," he said.

"Probably a focusing effect, like a magnifying gla.s.s, concentrating the light," Pradesh said, rejoining the group. "There have always been stories of gemstones doing this, a plausible result of refraction. One of my professors at Roorkee University specialized in it. But I've never heard of peridot and lapis lazuli interacting like this before, especially uncut stones. An interesting research project."

"You're welcome at the IMU engineering lab anytime," Costas said enthusiastically, handing the peridot back to Rebecca and pocketing the lapis lazuli. "But you'd soon get bored with gemstones. There's some incredible underwater robotic stuff I've just been working on. A lot of military applications, right up your street I'd imagine."

"Really?" Pradesh said. "Tell me more."

"Plenty of time for that later," Jack said, shielding his eyes and spying the Lynx helicopter coming in low over the sh.o.r.eline from Seaquest II He felt the excitement well up inside him. "Are we ready?"

Pradesh nodded, and pointed at two men in jeans and T-shirts with rucksacks and G3 automatic rifles. "A couple of my sappers," he said. "I don't want to aggravate the tribals by showing up in the jungle with soldiers, but there's a very real threat from Maoist insurgents. I don't want to be responsible for the disappearance of the world's most famous underwater archaeologist."

"And his sidekick," Costas added.

Rebecca looked dolefully at Jack, holding up the peridot. "If I've earned my credentials like Hiemy says, does that mean I can come along now too?"

"Not this time." Jack eyed Hiebermeyer. "But Hiemy might let you drive the Zodiac back. Slowly."

"Oh, cool." She put the stone back in the finds tray and clapped her hands.

Jack grinned, and made a whirling motion with his fingers to Costas. "Good to go?"

"Good to go."

Three hours after leaving the roman site at Arikamedu, Jack sat beside Costas and Pradesh on the foredeck of a pontoon boat as it chugged west up the broad expanse of the G.o.davari River, its bow wave cresting against the current. Jack was riding his own personal wave of excitement. This was his chance to fulfill a dream, to tread the same path as his ancestor, to discover what Lieutenant John Howard had seen in the jungle that day in 1879. Jack grasped the rail and looked out, preparing himself They had flown by helicopter north from Arikamedu along the coast of India to the port of Cocanada, and then veered inland up the delta of the river. They had swept low over a million acres of paddy and sugar cane, flying through billowing clouds of sweet ferment where the sugar was being processed into jaggery. At Dowlaiswaram, some thirty miles from the coast, they had landed on the great dam that was responsible for the fertility of the delta, and Pradesh had shown them where the Madras Sappers had been based while they built the dam in the 1860s. The figures were still reeling through Jack's mind as they transferred to the G.o.davari Steam Navigation Company pontoon boat above the dam for the trip into the jungle. Two thousand miles of irrigation channels, a five times increase in the acreage under cultivation. It had been one of the enduring achievements of British rule in India, yet as they went upstream, evidence of human mastery over nature diminished, and they saw only adaptation, acceptance, just as they had seen on the coast at Arikamedu. Like all great rivers that swelled with floodwaters, like the Nile or the Mississippi, all attempts to harness the water of the G.o.davari presented only an illusion of success, ephemeral bastions against an overwhelming force that could sweep away the grandest human achievements in a mere instant.