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apart, with personal rivalries and ambitions that would lead to civil war. Military prestige is what matters. Pompey has his, having cleared the sea of pirates. Julius Caesar is getting his, campaigning in Gaul. Crassus is the odd one out. He decides to seek glory in the east, and to hunt for gold. The difference was Pompey and Caesar were both seasoned generals. Crassus was a banker.”
    “I think I can guess what happened.”
    “The Battle of Carrhae, near modern Harran in southern Turkey. One of the worst defeats ever suffered by a Roman army. Crassus was a useless general, but his legions fought for Rome, and for their own honor. They fought hard, but were overwhelmed by the Parthian cavalry. At least twenty thousand were slaughtered, and the wounded were all executed. Crassus was killed, but a Roman soldier was dressed up as him and forced to drink molten gold.”
    “Fitting end for a banker.”
    “At least ten thousand Roman soldiers were captured. Those who weren’t executed were sent to the Parthian citadel of Merv, and probably used as slave labor building the city walls. That’s the connection. Mines, quarries, slave labor. The lot of prisoners of war in antiquity. Merv wasn’t cut off by sea like St. John’s Island, but was marooned in the desert wastes of what’s now Turkmenistan. At that time hardly anyone knew what lay beyond the lands conquered by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, beyond the Indus and Afghanistan.” Jack flipped open the computer screen between the two seats, and clicked the mouse until an image came up. It showed a scorched landscape of ruins and dusty tracks surrounded by a vast, decayed rampart, flattened in places to a rounded hillock. “That’s what’s left of Merv,” he said. “Those are the walls of ancient Margiana, the name of the city at the time of the Parthians.”
    “They look like earthworks, not masonry.”
    “They were made of mud-brick, over and over again, a new wall built on top of the eroded remains of the previous one. But at some point there may have been a failed experiment with mortar. We found a recently exposed section where one of the walls had collapsed, and it was filled with a whitish powdery substance. Almost like concrete that hadn’t set properly.”
    “When were you there?”
    “The Transoxiana Conference in April,” Jack said. “The Oxus was the ancient name for the great river that runs near here, from Afghanistan toward the Aral Sea. The ancient Greeks and Romans saw it as the limit of their world. The conference focused on contacts between the west and Central Asia.”
    “You mean the Silk Road?”
    “The time when Chinese and central Asian traders were first appearing in places like Merv, soon after Alexander the Great swept through there.”
    Costas peered at the picture. “Hang on. Who’s that? I recognize that person.”
    “Just there for scale.”
    “Jack! That’s Katya!”
    “She chaired my session of the conference. It’s right up her street. She’s been studying ancient inscriptions along the Silk Road. She invited me. We weren’t doing any diving in April, so I could hardly say no.”
    “Jack. Well, well. You’ve been seeing Katya again. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? Jack Howard, underwater archaeologist, flying off to a heap of dust in the middle of a desert. Turkmenistan, is it? That’s about as far away from a shipwreck as you could find.”
    “Just keeping up with old colleagues.” Jack grinned, and closed the screen.
    Costas grunted. “Anyway. These Romans. Prisoners of war. I asked whether any of them ever escaped.”
    “From St. John’s Island, I doubt it. From Merv is another matter. Hardly any of Crassus’ legionaries could have survived to the time Augustus repatriated the standards, more than thirty years after the battle. But there were rumors in Rome for several generations after.”
    “What kind of rumors?”
    “The kind you hear about but can never source. Rumors