She followed the shouts and splashes towards the swimming pool of the Peshawar Club. Through the trees she saw men falling from the sky — muscled and young, broad of shoulder, water drops glistening on pale chests, dark necks. Officers of the Frontier Corp, on leave after weeks of protecting Peshawar from the fanatics in the mud-and-pebbled hills. One had scarcely dived from the board before the next was there to take his place. Some fell like cannonballs, some swooped like swallows. Water and air, in both they were in their element. It was the ground they wanted nothing to do with, climbing from pool to high board by way of a rope-ladder that someone had tied to the railing.
One of them — sandy-haired — sat on the high board, legs swinging, surveying the world. The Lord of Everything. Viv looped her arm around a tree, watching him, watching them all. Here was the world set right again.
They sat beneath the weeping willow, Najeeb at the school desk which he had carried in last week from God knows where, and Viv in her rattan chair. The local name for weeping willow was Majnu, Najeeb had told her the first time he came out into her garden and followed it up with a retelling of the love story of Laila and Majnu, declaimed with such pride that she hadn’t the heart to tell him she knew it already. In Labraunda, Mehmet had spun the tale out over several evenings, paying particular attention to Anna, the younger of the German women, as he spoke of Majnu’s undying love. Cigarettes, figs, wine, and stories beneath the Carian sky — would it ever really be possible again?
Najeeb looked up from his Greek letters, and the wind turned the pages of his exercise book, smeared the freshly inked-in date. Viv leaned forward and placed a piece of grey slate onto the book to weigh it down. Picking it up, Najeeb examined the carved hand, palm turned up. A fragment from a stupa, one of many which had Atlas holding up a platform for the seated Buddha. It was worth very little — the Sikh man who owned an antiquities store in the Walled City had presented it to her as a gift as she was walking empty-handed out of his store, to ensure she would return — but it possessed a certain charm. Najeeb placed it between the pages of his exercise book and rubbed his pencil over the page; the colour of the stone so closely resembled the grey of a lead pencil that it seemed an act of metamorphosis, turning stone into paper.
She watched him, realised how familiar his expressions, his way of holding a pencil, the angle of his back as he bent over his books had become. She had been the one to suggest he came to her during his school holidays if he wanted to hear the stories of Peshawar, but he’d been the one to insist on Greek lessons and refuse to allow the start of the school term to force any change in their routine. Why d’you let him take advantage of you, Remmick had asked, but there was nothing in all of Peshawar that delighted her more than the hunger of Najeeb’s mind, the tinge of covetousness in his curiosity — apparent now as he finished the rubbing and turned the stone fragment over in his hands. Did parenthood feel anything like this, she wondered, and smiled to think of Tahsin Bey lifting Najeeb onto his shoulders to look a giant Buddha in the eye.
— Do you want to hear about a treasure hunt?
— What treasure?
— The Circlet of Scylax. Remember Scylax from our first lesson?
— Of course. The Shade Man.
— The Emperor Darius so trusted him that he gave him a circlet — that’s like a crown — decorated with figs. It was a special kind of circlet, reserved for heroes and men who slay monsters. Though the fig part was unique to Scylax. Long after Scylax died, his home of Caria was ruled by a dynasty called the Hecatomnids who had the Circlet as one of their prized possessions, and stamped it onto their coins.
— And then what happened to it?
— There’s the question. Alexander conquered Caria in 334 BC, the Hecatomnid period ended, and there’s no further record of the Circlet. Except this.
She picked a slim, leather-bound book off the grass and, opening it to the right page, turned it towards him.
— The Fragments of Kallistos. He was a Byzantine historian, who didn’t think to leave the great work of his life in a place where the moths wouldn’t nibble on it. Read what’s there; I’m getting more ice.
She stood, hoisted up the steel tub placed halfway between her chair and his desk, and sloshed the cold water within it onto his bare feet, to exclamations of delight. When she returned a few minutes later, ice steaming within the tub, she would have welcomed Najeeb’s assistance in carrying the weight of it across the garden but he was bent over Kallistos, in the shade of the weeping willow, his concentration too beautiful to disrupt.
— So that’s why, he cried out, looking up.
— Why what?
— Why you always spend so much time in the Museum looking at that ugly thing.
— What have you found in there?
She walked round to his side of the table, picked up the book and balanced it on his head as she read words she hadn’t looked at in years.
She led the holy men to the Sacred Casket mounted with the Holy One which contained the Relics but they would not be tempted. Their mission was not one of theft, and they trusted the Casket would come under divine protection. She next implored them to take the great traveller’s crown of figs which was in her safekeeping, but they saw no reason to carry something which had no value to them so she went outside and buried the crown at the base of the Great Statue of the Holy One. The light of the Holy One illuminated her task, so those who watched knew this was the right course of action.
The book shifted, fell against her torso as Najeeb tipped his head back to look at her.
— I guessed right, didn’t I? The Sacred Casket is the Kanishka Casket. And the crown of figs is buried beneath a statue somewhere near where the casket was found? Somewhere in Shahji-ki-Dheri?
— A relic casket mounted with a holy figure? You could find a thousand objects scattered around the world which match that description. And most of them would probably have a statue in the vicinity.
He looked so disappointed she tugged a lock of his hair and said, No one’s found the circlet in the eighty years since Kallistos’ Fragments were rediscovered in a church attic. It would almost be rude to those who’ve tried for decades if an eleven-year-old ferreted out its location with a single glance.
— I’m twelve now.
— Are you? When did that happen?
— Last month.
— Why didn’t you say? Put your books away immediately. We’re going to find you some cake. Oh, and here — happy birthday.
She placed the stupa shard in his hand. He looked up at her, not understanding, and she said, Well, why shouldn’t you have it. It’s your history after all, Pactyike.
Najeeb ran his thumb over Atlas’ wrist, a shimmer to his eyes which it took her a moment to recognise as tears. She could see it had been pleasing before, this piece of Gandharan art, but now that it lay in his palm, transformed into both gift and heritage, it had become precious. Together with the promise of cake it had entirely wiped Kallistos from his mind.
Viv knew this about Tahsin Bey: he wasn’t reckless or foolish or lazy. A relic casket with a Buddha on top wouldn’t be enough to make him set aside his dreams of finding the Circlet in Labraunda in favour of a stupa that wasn’t built until five hundred years after the Circlet vanished from history. So there was something else; something he’d been certain she would work out if he just pointed her in the direction of Peshawar. Caspatyrus! Where journeys begin and end. Not her journey — the journey of the Circlet.