from the side, and then there was panic in the ranks as the cavalry thundered into the them. Jabala himself killed two, including the enemy commander, a proud man with a hooked nose and a heavy golden helmet which surmounted a burnished, olive face. The man had shown no fear, and died hard. Jabala respected that, and silently said a prayer for his dead enemy.
When the fight was over, the Jafnid commander inspected what they had found. So. The spies had been right. Packed into wagons, hitched to now dead and injured oxen, were dozens of marble panels, wrapped carefully in straw and protected by wooden pallets. The panels were ornately carved and inscribed, showing equestrian scenes, depictions of hunting, and a panorama of long ago battles. The main panel showed a figure on a horse, holding up the hand of a defeated enemy in triumph, trampling on battle standards and armed men, all watched over by what Jabala knew to be a representation of the god of the Sasanians, Ahura Mazda. Moving down the line of wagons, Jabala searched until he found the golden sarcophagus, elaborately carved with more battle scenes and with the face of its occupant etched carefully into the death mask at its head. Panels in the wagon belonged to the front of the tomb, which, when reassembled, would be a large, squat, rectangular enclosure. Elaborate writing in a language and script which Jabala could not read, but which proclaimed the greatness of Shapur, his deeds, and his family achievements, lay on one of the larger marble panels. As Jabala ran his fingers over the carefully incised writing, he heard a gasp from the Roman officer, the commander of the four centuries borrowed from the Tenth Legion at Aila. Resplendent in his tall, plumed helmet, now stained with dust, and flecked with dried blood from the fight, he strode forward and pointed at the bottom right of the main panel. He spoke to Jabala in Greek, a language which Jabala had learned, as his father and his forefathers had also done, the better to work with their Roman brothers. The Roman explained that, in the area which he now pointed out, there was a small graffito picked into the stone. He knew, he told Jabala, that the language was Latin, the old speech of the Romans from many moons ago when they worshipped different gods and looked to the far-away land of Italy, now reconquered by the armies sent generations ago by the Emperor Justinian, and restored to the Christian Roman realm. He knew that, he continued, since they still used it in the army for parade ground orders. Jabala smiled, and clapped the Roman on the shoulder. He could not care less if the writing was made by fairies from the underworld. Let the commander have his Latin. He, Jabala, knew what he saw, and he knew that he had captured a prize worth more than he or his ancestors could ever have hoped to win. The lives of the spies had been a price worth all of this; and surely, now, the fame of the Jafnids and their army would be written for all to see. For here, within the panels, lay the tomb of Iran’s greatest hero, Shapur the Great, the age-old tales of whose exploits still struck terror into the hearts of Romans throughout their far-flung Empire. None had equalled Shapur – and none ever could. But the Roman spies had reported, breathless, that Parvez sought to emulate him, using his body and bringing it in the invasion as a talisman to give a new birth to the Sasanian Empire, by ripping the soul out of its hereditary Roman enemy, taking its land, taking its people. The body of Shapur, his tomb, the panels showing his life and victories – all would bring fire to the bellies of Iran’s conscript levies, restore the pride of its nobility, and start a new golden age of Iranian cultural and political dominance which embraced the whole of the east just as the Iranians, before Alexander the Great had invaded and destroyed them, ruled everything from Turkey to Afghanistan. But now that dream would come to nothing, Jabala thought, as he smiled at the sarcophagus. Not for you, the Roman Empire. My Empire.
Jabala sent word of his success to Constantinople, but his dream of making a grand entry to the imperial city, walk its flower-strewn streets, and luxuriate in the adulations of a grateful Emperor and People of the Roman Empire were disappointed. Jabala had taken the panels and the tomb, and his convoy reached southern Syria, crossing the desert away from the Iranian invasion route, which ran northwest along the Euphrates river, to avoid detection and ambush. But a large Roman force sent to escort his prize was diverted suddenly to defend the fortress city of Halabiyya in northern Syria, thought to be impregnable. The fortress fell, and the Roman legions sent to defend it were swallowed up in the maelstrom, never to be heard from again. And so it came to be that the body and the panels were stored in safety at the Jafnid stronghold south of Damascus, preserved at the volcano in the blasted, black desert, guarded by a special force of one thousand of Jabala’s most trusted warriors. The Jafnids became the custodians of the body of Iran’s most celebrated leader, Shapur the Great. Months and years went by, as the war raged closer and the capital city itself was threatened. Despite all the best efforts of the guards, some of the panels were broken and went missing, although the body itself remained intact. And then, abruptly, amidst the fire which threatened everything, word came that Phocas was dead – and a new man, calling himself Heraclius, had taken the purple with the promise to stop the rot. And so it was that, years later, at the bidding of the Emperor Heraclius, Shapur the Great made the final leg of his remarkable journey, carried to the imperial city of Constantine to be enshrined in its greatest sacred place to prove the Christian victory of the Christian Empire over the invaders from the East.
The entire Roman world revelled in Heraclius’ triumph, but all was soon to fade. Shapur, the greatest enemy of the Roman Empire, and the Jafnids who had snatched his body away, preventing Parvez from finding his true destiny and rebuilding the ancient Iranian Empire of his forefathers, were quickly forgotten as a new and unstoppable force from the deserts of Arabia, carrying a new banner – Islam – swept all before it. The Sasanian empire crumbled, the Roman Empire collapsed in on itself, and what had taken place on that dusty afternoon in the year 602 quickly passed away into myth, legend, and darkness.
Chapter One
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
May 22, 4.32pm
Professor Andrew Thorpe looked out at his audience at King Saud University – a mix of graduate students, faculty, and some interested members of the local expatriate community – as he finished his lecture on the Arabian spice trade in antiquity. Sensitive to local concerns, he had carefully excised all religious references from his talk in order to avoid any potential political issues, even though he covered the important role of Mecca in his presentation. To judge by the polite applause, he had done well, and had managed to avoid the pitfalls he was most concerned about. Afterwards he signed copies of his new book, a study of Roman fortifications in Syria, and then passed some time over tea with the head of the archaeology department, Abdul al-Rahman, a genteel and elegant man in his fifties, educated in Boston and Paris, who spoke English with a slight French affectation and who wanted to know, with a mischievous look on his face, what Thorpe had taken out of his talk. ‘The usual things’, he said carefully, knowing the political undercurrents in Saudi Arabia which dictated what sort of historical and archaeological research was allowed to take place. The two men bantered for a while, before Thorpe interjected with a request. ‘The recent discovery at al-Ula, up in the northwest – the Latin inscription’, he said, ‘may I see it once again?’
A few years before, American archaeologists at al-Ula, a small town in the remote northwest of the country, had found a small inscription in Latin, re-used as part of a sunken tomb carved into a hole at a place called al-Kuraybah, nearby to al-Ula. Quite why it had ended up there was a puzzle, because the tombs at al-Kuraybah were far older than the inscription itself. The head of the American team had theorised that it meant that the site was being casually re-used well after the original inhabitants of al-Kuraybah had departed, but nobody could be sure. It had been an exciting discovery – a Latin inscription in an Arab land. What were the Romans doing here, anyway, if they had even been here in the first place?
Al-Rahman assented to Thorpe’s request to see the artefact with a smile and a nod, and took Thorpe down into the basement stores where dozens of objects waited to be catalogued, photographed, and studied. Here, as in many parts of the Middle East, archaeology was of little significance to government priorities, with museums badly funded and collaboration with external scientific agencies limited. Thorpe followed al-Rahman down the staircase, smelling the aroma of wet stone, dry sand, and the mustiness of a storage area. Al-Rahman reached up towards one of the wooden shelves and pulled down a cardboard box, marked with a white tag, and carried it over to a long bench where he placed it down, clicking on an overhead lamp. Thorpe looked at the stone. It was an oblong