Bird in a Snare

by N. L. Holmes

  “How long a trip is it, Lord Hani?” Maya whispered, respectful of the silence of the early hour.

  “From what they tell me, we should be there by shortly after midday. There are mountains between us and the marshes.” Hani suppressed his amusement at Maya’s stricken expression. “You can ride in the cart anytime you like, my friend.”

  But the little secretary said gamely, “No, no. If our skinny friend can do it, so can I.”

  “Ah, but our skinny friend’s legs are a lot longer than yours. In fact”—Hani chuckled—“they’re a lot longer than mine, too. You and I may both end up in the cart.”

  Milk-addi walked, torch in hand, at the driver’s side as the man led the donkey from the courtyard and out the gate of the palace. Hani and Maya followed the vehicle. In the utter silence of predawn, the cart creaked aloud, and the donkey’s small, patient hooves clattered rhythmically over the paving stones, echoing against the walls that surrounded them. The sleepy guards let them pass. Hani confirmed with one of them that a few soldiers were due to follow, and he urged them not to fall too far behind. The journey, much of it still in darkness, worried him more than the boat trip on the marsh, where they would be able to see for iterus.

  The air was bone-chilling, although Hani knew that the rising sun would bring some warmth. He and Maya were dressed in the clothing of Beruta, like their companions—closed leather shoes and woolen tunics and cloaks as heavy as carpets. He hoped the unaccustomed footgear wouldn’t raise blisters, or he would be riding in the cart for sure. Part of him was as joyful as a little boy on holiday, trudging down the street in the darkness, en route to see the birds. Part of him cursed himself for risking their lives like this. Why didn’t I bring a unit of soldiers with us? But under such conditions, perhaps the prospective assassins wouldn’t attack.

  Milk-addi held the torch up to illumine the way, but the night sky, festooned with glittering stars, was far from lightless. The Egyptians, trailing the cart, were bathed in a pale, starry luminescence of the heavens, almost bright enough to cast a faint shadow before them. It was a magical moment—one Hani would have relished had the awareness of their danger not hovered over him like an owl hunting in the night.

  They left the town behind them then, and the creak of the cart and clatter of hooves grew small as the echoing walls of the city, with its paved streets, fell away and the vastness of nature enveloped them. After a long time, the crunch of Hani’s steps became a kind of incantation; he began drifting into a somnambulant state. The stars faded as morning rose in the travelers’ faces, its pale, pearly aura diluting the indigo of the east, and Hani found himself thinking of death and what it could possibly be like to row the Sun Barque through the undying stars—to dip a paddle into that liquid night that would surely grow luminous, as this one did, with the majestic approach of the Lord Ra. To either side of them, he was aware of trees that would not have been visible only a short while earlier—blacker against the tender greenish darkness, like the iridescent wing of a blackbird. He drew a deep breath. The cold air was sweet as perfume. He had only rarely experienced such a delicate, dry cold and seldom had had the luxury of sucking great fragrant drafts of its cleanness into his lungs.

  The sky was whitening. Morning was well up, but the mountains ahead of them blocked the sun. They were passing through an orchard—olives, he thought. Birds had begun to twitter in the trees. He pictured the baboons of Ra raising their hands and singing their greeting to the morning. It all seemed profoundly real out here in the countryside, although it was not the countryside he knew.

  He was thus lost in admiration of the dawn hour when a skittering of stones somewhere near the road made him jerk to attention. He held out a hand to stop the driver and directed Milk-addi to extinguish his torch, the better to see into the twilight.

  Maya murmured, “What is it, my lord?”

  Hani saw the whites of Milk-addi’s eyes as the eunuch stared around fearfully. “I thought I heard something.”

  They stood, straining their gazes into the shadowy trees, but nothing moved. The blood beat rhythmically in Hani’s ears. All at once, something flashed past them. Maya let out a yelp, and Milk-addi dropped the extinguished torch with a cry. Even Hani started. But it was only a hare, frozen in the weeds, that saw its chance to break for safety.

  “Let’s get going again,” Hani said quietly to the driver. The man gave a tug at the animal’s halter and clucked his tongue, and the donkey took up its pace once more. Clop-clop clop-clop went its hooves on the stony earth, and the rumbling and creaking of the cart began anew. Birdsong was swelling in the shadowy trees. That’s a good sign.

  They hadn’t gone much farther, however, before a crow took to the air, cawing in outrage. That’s not a good sign. Something disturbed him. Hani’s head swiveled, watching all sides at once. It was an excellent site for an ambush. The orchards were mounting the foothills, and the road began to turn steeply between big rocky outcroppings. It was full morning now, and the shadows of the mountain leaning over them were sharp and dark, as purple as a bruise.

  Hani nudged Maya and pointed ahead. “It may be here,” he mouthed.

  The secretary’s face was tense, wide-eyed. He shifted his grip on his stick, and Hani did the same, loosening the rug-like cloak around his shoulders so he could shrug out of it unencumbered. Milk-addi swallowed hard and clutched his staff with both hands.

  Then a sharp crack sounded as a rock hit the cart and fell into the road. The donkey lurched and gave a bray of fear, while his driver tried to calm him. Before anyone could properly react, something heavy struck Hani from above—a body hurtling down from the overhanging boulders that flanked the road. It dragged him to the ground with a grunt.

  Hani hit the earth hard, but he knew how to fall. With all his senses alert and his heart pounding, he reacted as someone who had wrestled in his youth. He felt frenzied blows falling into the heavy wool of his cloak as he bucked the man off his shoulders and rolled to one side, out of the garment, to free his staff-wielding arm. While his assailant, tangled in the mass of woolen fabric, struggled to his feet, Hani crawled on the ground, swinging the cudgel at his legs. The attacker danced backward. Hani saw a flash of bronze in the man’s hand, and a flicker of fear rippled through him. This was more than a tumble with a fellow student in the court of the House of Life.

  The fellow rushed at him, his knife raised. Lying on his back, Hani swung his stick, hammering an upward blow at the man’s elbow. With a cry of pain, the man loosed his grip on the blade, and Hani shot out a hard kick with both feet that knocked the attacker to the ground, flat on his back. Before the stunned attacker could rise or Hani could struggle, panting, to his knees, Milk-addi had cracked his staff against the attacker’s skull. The fellow lay motionless. Gasping, Hani hauled himself to his feet. He turned to Maya to find him bouncing on his toes, cudgel in hand, waiting for an opening, while the driver and the second attacker rocked in a clench, the knife wavering overhead. Hani grabbed the knife-wielding wrist and twisted the weapon from the man’s grasp. Then, for good measure, he kicked the attacker in the back of the knees until the fellow buckled, and the driver bore him to the ground, punching him in the nose until he relaxed into unconsciousness.

  “Hurry,” Hani panted at the driver. “Get the rope from the cart and tie them up.” To Milk-addi, who hovered, terrified, at the prone attacker’s feet, he directed, “Tie their hands over their heads, to the wheels.” He hoped the soldiers were on their way but not too close.

  Once the pair was stretched out, bound each to a wheel on either side of the cart, Hani set the driver to guard the Nubian, while he picked up the dropped knives and squatted at the Egyptian’s side. He ordered Milk-addi to sluice the man’s face with the contents of their waterskin. The attacker came to his senses, sputtering and cursing as the cold water hit him.

  Hani brandished the man’s knife and growled, “Who sent you?”

  In a congested voice, the attacker muttered defiantly, “I don�
��t have to tell you.” His nose was gushing blood, and his eyebrow had been split by the force of Milk-addi’s cudgel. Hani flipped open the man’s kilt and prepared to unknot his smallclothes. “How would you like to become a eunuch? Ask Milk-addi here how much fun that is.”

  The man shrank away in terror, his good eye round. “All right,” he blurted in haste. “It was a grandee. Nobody can touch him.”

  “And his name is?”

  “Ya-something. A name of Kharu. I can’t pronounce it.”

  Hani touched the man’s belly with the point of the knife. “Try.”

  “Yadakh, yapakh, yanakh-something. I... I don’t know, I swear.” The man was babbling with fear.

  Hani could recognize genuine stupidity when he saw it, but he still found it hard to believe the man didn’t know who employed him. “Describe him. Tall? Short? Fat? Thin?”

  “I never saw him. It was a servant who hired us, gave us our orders.”

  Hani sat back on his heels, his breath still coming hard. “Soldiers of the king are on the way. They know how to get something out of you. Better talk to me willingly while you have the chance.”

  “I don’t know, honest. Ya-something. A grandee. Lives in a big palace. He’s a Fan Bearer. The king protects him.”

  How many people does that describe? Hani thought in disgust. Is the man making this up to get himself off the hook? “What were your orders?” He waved the knife menacingly close to the fellow’s genitals.

  “To kill you and the dwarf and get you off his back.” The man shrank away, but he was helplessly stretched out, with Maya sitting on his feet.

  “And how did you know we were in Beruta?”

  The man stared at him blankly.

  “I said—” Hani began again with careful patience.

  “I know. I just don’t know what to say. We was going to Simurru is all. We had to stop in Beruta overnight. And there was that damned dwarf, still alive.”

  Hani considered this possibility. “You didn’t know we were there? You just happened to encounter us en route?”

  “I swear on my mother’s ka. We was a day ahead of the troops, waiting till they—you, I mean—caught up to us.”

  Hani fixed him with an eye, hoping to divine by some twitch of his face if he were lying or not. It was possible that what he said was true, of course. Anyone traveling from Azzati to Simurru was likely to make a stop at Beruta.

  Hani got to his feet with an effort, beginning to feel the effects of his frantic fight now that the excitement had worn off. He decided to see if the other man confirmed this version of the events.

  But the Nubian was in even worse shape, looking distinctly bleary with pain. He seemed to have trouble understanding the questions, and Hani wondered if he so much as spoke Egyptian. Hani said again carefully, “Who sent you? Who?”

  At last, the fellow seemed to comprehend through the fog inside his shaken head. “Big man. Big palace.”

  “His name?”

  “Don’t know. Servant talk to us. Say we protected.”

  “Who told you we were in Beruta?”

  The poor fellow, whose face was swollen and bloodied even more painfully than his confrere’s, gaped up at Hani. “Just saw dwarf. Not know.”

  All right. Maybe that’s the truth of it. It was hardly worth risking our lives to get this information. He stood up with a sigh of weariness. All the danger had kept him taut and twanging, but it was beginning to ebb, and he realized how exhausted he was. Being knocked to the ground with the force of a man’s full weight had left him bruised, and breathing was getting painful. He looked at Maya, who had come around the wagon and stood at his side, hands on his hips.

  “Any luck over here, Lord Hani?” the secretary asked, a bit of swagger in his manner. He gave the attacker a kick in the leg.

  “No. They don’t seem to know much. Unless,” Hani added pointedly, “they’re being coy. In which case, the soldiers should be able to get something out of them by torture.”

  “No know nothing,” the Nubian cried hoarsely. “For true. Nothing. Just do orders.”

  Maya slipped from Hani’s hand the blade that had killed Abdi-ashirta and wagged it under the man’s nose. “Where’d you bastards get this knife, eh? Who told you to kill Abdi-ashirta?”

  “Big man. He say from king. King wants job. We do it.”

  Hani suddenly felt the cold run up his back as if his tunic had been torn open. “Don’t ask anything else,” he murmured to Maya. The secretary turned to him, surprised, but he said nothing more.

  Still, the Nubian seemed to want to get his crimes off his chest. Gasping and bubbling through his bleeding nose, he said, “Abdi-ashirta, he pay us to guard him. We pretend to be friends, yes. Then, at Simurru, we kill him. Then we run back to Pa-wer. He think we his soldiers. We say, ‘See, we find Abdi-ashirta, and he dead.’”

  In the distance, the sound of marching feet broke the tense silence that had descended over the men. In moments, the dozen or so royal troops Hani had requested rounded the boulders and came into sight. Hani hobbled stiffly to meet them and said, outside the hearing of the two attackers, “Hold them in Beruta until I get word from my superiors about what to do with them. We may or may not question them further.” But he thought, If they’re protected by the king, I doubt if we’ll press them anymore.

  “Yes, my lord,” their officer said. They swarmed the cart, where Milk-addi and the soldier-driver stood, cudgels in hand, keeping guard over the two attackers. Before long, the men had been detached from the wheels, pulled to their feet, and marched away, dripping a trail of blood in the road. Hani stood staring after them, not knowing what to think about the Nubian’s words.

  Finally, Maya said, “What now, my lord? Do we go on to the marshes or back to Beruta?” He glanced down at the gold-hilted blade still in his hand.

  Hani looked up, roused from his reverie. “Back, I guess. We’ve done what we came to do.”

  He translated the orders for Milk-addi and the driver, whose weary faces relaxed with relief. Hani thought that whoever had told him it was only eight or nine leagues to the marshes had been optimistic. They would barely get back before midafternoon as it was, and they needed to eat something before they started out. The marshes and their wonderful birds would have to wait for another time.

  Tired as he’d become from his fight, he found he was disproportionately disappointed. He could picture himself stamping his foot and insisting in the voice of a temperamental child, “But I want to see the birds!” He laughed at himself, still a little giddy from the danger and the fight.

  Maya looked up from his examination of the knife.

  “Nothing, Maya. You and the others were splendid.” Finding that the heat of his exertion had deserted him, leaving him chilled, he picked his cloak up out of the road. He slapped the back of the young eunuch, whose face was scarlet and sweating with the unaccustomed exercise. “Milk-addi, excellent job. You, my good man—well done, both of you. There will be something in it for you when we get back to Beruta.” The two men of Kharu grinned happily. “Now, break out that food basket, Milk-addi, and let’s have something to eat before we go back.”

  But Maya, his eyes round with confusion, held the confiscated dagger out to Hani. “My lord, do you see these two tiny lines on the pommel? They cross. This isn’t the knife I lost.”

  CHAPTER 14

  By the time they reached Azzati, Hani had had weeks to consider what he wanted to say to Yanakh-amu. But he couldn’t convince himself without reservation that he should bring up the suspicious involvement of Yanakh-amu’s name in the shady business of the north. If the man were really as guilty as he seemed, he might retaliate. On the other hand, all the evidence against him was ambiguous, and Hani earnestly longed to hear him proclaim his innocence—or, more important, to prove it.

  Hani’s breathing was constricted as he waited in the antechamber, hope and dread at war within him. When he was finally summoned, he rose, wrapped himself in the diplomatic robe of
calm, shook out his shoulders, and entered.

  “Hani,” said Yanakh-amu, standing at the door of his office. He was, as always, pleasant of expression, relaxed of manner. No doubt every visitor felt, as Hani did now, that Yanakh-amu was especially pleased to see him. “Come in. Tell me what’s going on. I understand Aziru never deigned to show up.”

  “That’s so, my lord. Lord Ptah-mes said to leave him word that he needed to head for Kemet as soon as he got back to Simurru. One can only hope he’s on his way.”

  Yanakh-amu snorted and shook his head. “Arrogant bastard.”

  As he followed Yanakh-amu into the office, Hani told his superior about the supposed meeting with other vassals at Tunip to concoct a defense against Nuhasshe.

  “You know, Tunip has gone over to the Hittites,” the commissioner said as he seated himself. “I guess the defense didn’t work.”

  “I wonder what Aziru was really doing up there.”

  They discussed the various events taking place in the north, Hani growing tenser and tenser as he prepared himself to dive into the matter that preoccupied him. Finally, he approached the testimony of Milk-addi. “One of the former staff of Rib-addi, who is now perforce employed by Aziru, had some interesting things to say about news he overheard his new master and Ili-rapikh discussing, among others.”

  “Kebni and the hapiru in bed together, eh?”

  “So it seems, my lord. He said that Yapakh-addi is actively involved with both of them.”

  The commissioner’s eyes widened. “Well, well. I guess that shouldn’t surprise us. He has a finger in many affairs. I wasn’t aware he was doing anything in the north, however.”