Place of Darkness lb-5

by Lauren Haney

  Seked shouted a curse to focus their attention on their task, nodded a greeting to the newcomers, and moved a dozen or so paces away to stand at the base of a rubble ramp built along a segment of wall raised almost to its completed height. Shading his eyes with a hand, he looked up at two men at the top, who shoved a heavy block of stone off a sledge and into position. The front and upper surfaces of the stone, like those of its neighbors, had not yet been smoothed so facing stones could be laid in front of them. Other small crews were scattered along the top of the ramp, the nearest chipping away the rough surfaces, the next installing facing stones, the third dressing them. The ramp would be raised as each new course was completed.

  Farther west, near the point where the wall joined the retaining wall that supported the mound on which the new shrine of the lady Hathor would be built, the rubble ramps had been removed and scaffolds built for the men who were doing the fine detail work. One crew added the finishing touches to plinths with recessed paneling, while others were carving and polishing deep reliefs of the royal falcon and cobra located at regular intervals high upon the wall.

  Pashed’s greeting was unenthusiastic but resigned. The wrinkles in his brow looked deeper than before, his general air more long-suffering and harried.

  He gestured toward the line of youths. “We need to go on with the retaining wall. I trust you have no objection to our filling the shaft?”

  “None.”

  Turning his back so no one but Bak would hear, Pashed murmured, “I feared if we allowed too much time to pass, the men would convince themselves that Montu’s shade might in anger come back to the tomb and do them harm.”

  Bak spoke as softly as the architect. “I understand. Djeser Djeseru doesn’t need another malign spirit.” Raising his voice to a normal level, he introduced Hori and Kasaya.

  “They’ll serve as my right hand and my left. I wish them to go where they want unimpeded, to ask what they will and be answered with the truth.”

  Pashed eyed the pair critically. “I’ll not tolerate a disruption of the work.”

  “They’ll not intrude. If they do, they’ll answer to me.”

  Not entirely satisfied, or so he looked, Pashed beckoned to a stoop-shouldered, white-haired scribe squatting in a narrow slice of shade beside the wall. The elderly man, his eyes sharp and curious, dropped a limestone chip as big as his hand into a basket filled with bronze tools, laid his scribal pallet on top, and came forward. On any construction site, Bak knew, one of the first tasks of each day was that of the scribe, who had to distribute tools where needed and take back in return those in need of repair or sharpening, recording each transaction as he did so.

  “You must take these men to the foremen and chief craftsmen, Amonemhab. Tell them. .” Pashed repeated Bak’s every word even though the scribe, like all who toiled nearby, had certainly heard.

  With the good humor of a man accustomed to going about his business unseen by the mighty, the scribe led Hori and Kasaya away, taking his basket with him and the tools for which he would be held accountable. After a few paces he realized Bak was not with them. He paused and looked back, waiting.

  Bak waved them away. “I must speak with you, Pashed.”

  “Me? Why me?” The architect tried to appear surprised, but as the sole remaining man of authority who toiled daily at Djeser Djeseru, he had to have known he would be the first to be questioned.

  Taking him by the upper arm, Bak ushered him to an open stretch of sand well out of hearing distance of the many curious individuals toiling near the wall. Pashed’s stride was quick and jerky, agitated.

  Bak hid a smile. The architect was clearly upset, but he was also a man of purpose, and that purpose was to complete the construction of Djeser Djeseru. “You made it clear when you were speaking with Amonked yesterday that you didn’t like Montu, that you thought him a man who shirked his duty.”

  “I didn’t slay him, if that’s what you think,” Pashed said, indignant.

  “I’m not saying you did. But if I’m to lay hands on the man who took his life, I must speak with everyone who knew him, you included.” Bak could not remember how many times he had given the same assurance since walking at the head of the Medjay police at Buhen.

  Pashed pursed his mouth; the wrinkles in his brow deepened. “I can tell you nothing of significance, I assure you.”

  “You resented him-understandably so-for letting you carry his load as well as your own.”

  “I did.”

  “A man so thoughtless must’ve had other, equally intolerable traits.”

  Pashed opened his mouth to speak, then closed it tight and shook his head.

  “What thought did you swallow?” Bak asked.

  The architect released a long, unhappy sigh. “Can you not go to the foremen? The chief craftsmen? They’ve as much knowledge of Montu as I. More.”

  “Pashed. .” Bak frowned at the architect. “Though Senenmut holds the ultimate responsibility, you and you alone now carry the burden of building our sovereign’s memorial temple. Do you wish to see the project falter while my men time and time again question one workman after another? You can be sure that endless questioning will plant turmoil in their hearts, no matter how much care we take to calm them.”

  The architect toyed with the hem of his kilt, shook grit from a sandal. When at last he spoke, the words came out with as much difficulty as a sound tooth being pulled from a healthy jaw. “He never failed to throw his weight around, ordering everyone to do what he thought beneath him. And let me assure you, he felt every task beneath him except issuing orders.” His chin shot into the air, his tone grew resentful.

  “He treated all of us-including me-as men placed on this earth to do his bidding. As servants. In spite of the fact that without me to see that the project went on, with or without him, Senenmut might long ago have seen through him.”

  Had Senenmut truly failed to see, Bak wondered, or had he simply ignored the dead man’s faults? “How long did Amonked take to notice his many absences?”

  “Two weeks at most,” Pashed admitted with grim satisfaction. “Montu underestimated him and failed to alter his indolent ways. He never once noticed that Amonked came day after day, without a break, and that he never failed to see an error in any man’s ways.”

  “Senenmut, on the other hand, is a busy man, one who seldom comes to Djeser Djeseru.”

  Pashed glanced quickly at Bak, as if suspecting him of being facetious. “Montu’s most disagreeable trait, one we all despised, was that he never failed to take credit for other men’s ideas. The more creative the thought, the quicker he was to make it his own.”

  “For example. .?”

  Once begun, the architect would not be turned onto a lesser path. “He fawned over Senenmut, gaining his ear, telling tales, making himself look good and everyone else mediocre at best. To hear him talk, he alone created this magnificent building.”

  Having heard many tales in the garrison of Senenmut’s penchant for self-aggrandizement, Bak had an idea the bragging fell on deaf ears. Or on the tolerant ears of one who knew he could squash Montu like an insect any time he chose to do so. “Was Montu a competent architect?” he asked, recalling Amonked’s statement that he and Pashed were equally skilled.

  “He was,” Pashed admitted reluctantly, “when he shouldered his load.”

  “Pashed! Sir!”

  A workman came racing down the ramp from the terrace and sped across the sand to where they stood. Every boy outside the tomb, every man toiling on the wall, stopped to look and listen.

  “Sir!” The workman halted before Pashed, gasping for breath. Sweat ran down his face and chest. “Another old tomb has been found. Perenefer wishes you to come.”

  Pashed stared, distraught, at the messenger and then at Bak. “Not another murdered man. No, just an old tomb. I pray!”

  “The donkey stepped in a hole.” The foreman, Perenefer, ran his hand up and down the brush-like mane of a gray donkey laden with large reddis
h water jars. He was short and stout, and looked so much like Seked, the foreman in charge of the south retaining wall, that they had to be brothers.

  Twins. The sole difference as far as Bak could see was that this man had no scar on his forehead. “As he struggled to free himself, the sand fell away. For a time, we feared he, too, would drop out of sight.”

  “How’d you save him?” Bak asked the small boy who held the rope halter.

  “I yelled, sir, and Perenefer came, and so did they.”

  The boy pointed at five men standing nearby, ready to help should help be needed. Or, more likely, unwilling to leave, fearing they would miss something. They were covered with the fine white dust risen from nearby limestone drums, which they had been shaping into sixteen-sided column segments.

  “They caught his front hooves and pulled him free.” The boy stared wide-eyed at the black hole, as big as two men’s hands placed one beside the other, down which sand was still trickling. “I thank the lord Amon they were close by.

  Only the greatest of gods knows how deep the tomb is.”

  “Shall we open it, sir?” Perenefer asked.

  Pashed glanced at the lord Khepre, the morning sun climbing the vault of heaven toward midday. “We’ve most of the day ahead of us. Do so.” He turned to Bak. “We’ve been warned of robbers in the local burial places. We dare not leave these old tombs open for long.”

  “Have you unearthed many?”

  “A dozen or so since first we began to level the land. More than I expected. The surrounding hillsides are riddled with tombs. I thought most of the ancient nobility to be buried there, not here.”

  Perenefer glared at the stonemasons, who had begun to edge away. “Why’re you standing there gaping? Come on.

  You surely can brush away a little sand.”

  The men came forward with scant enthusiasm, but once they set about the task, they toiled with a will. Beneath the windblown sand they found three rectangular stone slabs lying side by side. The corner of one had broken away. A fault had allowed the stone to collapse beneath the donkey’s weight.

  At another command from Perenefer, the men took up levers and began to shift the broken stone sideways. The boy led his donkey to a safer spot a few paces away. So he could see better, Bak climbed onto the back of a large red granite statue of a reclining lion with the face of Maatkare Hatshepsut. Only luck and the will of the gods had placed the statue, heavier by far than the donkey, so close yet so far from the weakened stone and the hole into which it might well have toppled. If it had fallen into the tomb, it would have appeared to the workmen as the most dire of omens.

  “Unless appearances deceive, the tomb has never been opened,” Pashed said with obvious relief. “We shouldn’t find a new death here.”

  With Perenefer urging the masons on, the slabs were quickly shifted and the mouth of the shaft gaped open, a hole as wide as a man’s arm was long and too deep to see to the end.

  “Bring a pole and place it across the shaft,” the architect ordered, “and bring a rope and torch. I must go down, and someone must go with me.” He bestowed upon Bak the same pointed look Bak had given him before they entered the tomb in which Montu had been found. “I want no man to accuse me of robbing the dead.”

  Bak clung with one hand to the rope and, with the other, held the torch low, trying to glimpse the bottom of the shaft before he reached it. The light danced against the rough-cut walls, forming shifting patterns of dark and glitter. The air, sealed inside for many years, was still and close and hot. He spotted the bottom and glimpsed the black mouth of either a chamber or a transverse tunnel. His feet touched stone and he released the rope. Calling to the men above to raise the line for Pashed, he turned to peer down what proved to be a horizontal shaft. More than a dozen paces long and lined with crumpled baskets, it opened into a room; the burial chamber, he assumed. How large it was he could not tell.

  The light from his torch did not reach inside.

  He longed to go on, to see all this tomb contained and return to the surface. He did not like enclosed dark spaces. But his task was to lay hands on a slayer and learn the cause of so many accidents, while Pashed was the man responsible for Djeser Djeseru. He had to respect the architect’s authority.

  The men above shouted a warning and the rope creaked as Pashed swung out over the open shaft. Bak held the torch high, letting him see where he was going. The short, slight man proved surprisingly agile, dropping from the rope before his feet touched the floor. Hands on hips, he looked upward, gauging the depth of the shaft down which they had come. Turning, peering into the horizontal tunnel, he held out his hand for the torch. This was not the first old tomb he had entered, and with no expectation of finding a fresh body, he showed no fear.

  Careful not to bump baskets whose age had made them fragile, Bak followed the architect to the burial chamber. It was small, three or four paces to a side, and the ceiling low.

  What had once been a magnificent rectangular wooden coffin filled more than half the space. Water had come in, probably more than once, and a vague smell of decay lingered, blending with the faint scent of flowers or aromatic oils. Pottery jars lay scattered about, a few broken but most whole and sealed. Jumbled together in a corner were three small wooden boats and their tiny wooden crews. Beside them sat several wooden boxes containing tiny wooden men and women and animals, tools, jars, furniture. Miniature necessities of a nobleman’s life thrown into disorder.

  The coffin had broken apart and much of it rotted away, revealing an inner coffin in an equally poor state. The wrappings on the body were stained and decayed, exposing a portion of the painted plaster mask, one foot whose flesh was gone, leaving behind a broken pile of bones, and a wrinkled and blackened arm wearing two bracelets. Tiny inlaid butterflies adorned one; the second was a wide gold band with three miniature golden cats lying in a row along the top.

  Both were exquisite.

  As expected, no fresh body shared the chamber with the ancient body.

  Bak bent to look closer at the bracelets. The five pieces he had found in Buhen were similar in workmanship to these.

  They had been taken from a tomb much like this one, he felt sure. A richer tomb, most likely, but the noble man or woman who had been laid to rest here had gone to the netherworld at about the same time. If he walked in Lieutenant Menna’s sandals. . He did not. He could only suggest that Menna look closer at the ancient burial places in the vicinity of Djeser Djeseru. And he could keep his own eyes open, wide open.

  “I must notify Lieutenant Menna of this tomb,” Pashed said, “and I must summon Kaemwaset. They can come together.”

  “I’ve met the guard officer, but who is Kaemwaset?”

  “A priest in the mansion of the lord Amon in Waset. The first prophet has given him the responsibility for all the rou-tine rituals performed while Djeser Djeseru is being built.

  Each time a man is injured, he comes with the physician to offer the necessary incantations that will aid in healing.

  Each time we find an old tomb, he utters the necessary prayers before we seal the burial chamber and cover it over.

  If the lord Amon smiles upon us, he’ll come long before nightfall.”

  Bak thought of the lord Khepre, making his slow progress toward midday. He had seen for himself how quickly Pashed could and would close a tomb, but if a man wished to rob the dead, leaving this one open for even an hour would tempt fate.

  “You must assign a guard to stand watch until this sepulcher is closed. The bracelets we see are of great beauty and value. Can you imagine what treasure lies hidden beneath the bandages?”

  Bak found the chief scribe Ramose sitting cross-legged on a tightly woven reed mat beneath a lean-to built against the mudbrick wall of a workmen’s hut. His task was to keep track of equipment and supplies, of labor performed and food and objects given in return. Two other scribes shared the burden and the square of shade cast by the palm frond roof. The older one was the large, stooped man who had
taken Hori and Kasaya off to meet the chief craftsmen and foremen. The other was a child of twelve or so years, an apprentice who, if appearances did not deceive, was Ramose’s son. Bak had seen the three of them together, standing among the onlookers when Montu’s body had been carried away.

  Ramose rose to his feet to greet him. “Welcome to my place of business, Lieutenant. I’ve been expecting you.”

  “Because you’re now next in line in importance to Pashed?” Bak smiled to lighten the weight of his words. “Or because when trouble arises on a construction site, the first man to be suspected of wrongdoing is the one who keeps the accounts and minds the store?”

  The chief scribe laughed. The pair behind him exchanged an uneasy look.

  “Will you take a seat, sir?” Ramose pointed to a low stool he evidently reserved for worthy guests and returned to his mat. “I’m afraid the beer we have is of poor quality, but on a hot day such as this, a bitter brew is better than none.”

  He offered a jar, which Bak accepted. The beer on the southern frontier, usually strong and sometimes appalling, had toughened Bak’s palate to a point where he could drink almost anything. He found the warm, thick, acrid liquid a close match to the worst he had ever tasted.

  “As you must know,” he said, “Amonked has asked me to look into Montu’s death and find a cause for the many accidents here at Djeser Djeseru.”

  “Yes, sir.” The chief scribe was in his middle years and of medium height, neither slim nor heavy. He had short, straight dark hair and the ordinary features of a man easily lost in a crowd.

  “Montu’s life was taken by another man,” Bak said.