by Lauren Haney
Hori stared wide-eyed. “You’re leaving them here? With me?”
“Who else can I trust?”
Hori sucked in his breath. He glanced from Bak to Imsiba and back again, the desire to go with them vying on his face with the need to feel important. The latter won and he grinned. “I’ve heard mistress Azzia’s servants prepare food fit for the gods. I’ll go there now and offer my services.” He moved the puppy from his lap to Imsiba’s, stood up, and nudged the brazier with his toe. “With luck and if the gods choose to smile on me, I’ll not cook another fish until you return.”
As their laughter died away, Hori disappeared down the stairway. Bak went back to work, tightening the leather thongs binding the ax blade to the handle.
Imsiba swallowed a final bite of fish and let the puppy lick the juice from his fingers. “You’ll think it unwise, I know, but I spoke with Harmose this morning.”
Bak glanced up from his task. “Did he ask for my thoughts about mistress Azzia?”
“He talked of our journey and the trouble our presence may cause. He’s very uneasy, as you can well imagine.”
“Does he fear for us? Or does he fear our presence will remind those men who don’t trust us that he shares the blood of a Medjay?”
“Must you always think the worst of him?” Imsiba grabbed another fish, tore it apart. “You said something yesterday-I know not what-that gained his respect. He believes you’ll do all you can to keep us safe. He said that if we must fight to protect ourselves, he and his archers will stand beside us.”
Guilt flooded Bak’s thoughts, swept away an instant later by suspicion. Harmose’s offer might indeed be sincere, but could as easily be a ploy to lower Bak’s defenses. The barren desert would be an ideal place to slay a man, especially one too quick to trust.
Chapter Thirteen
“The lord Re must think man a toy.” Imsiba scowled at the dry, eroded watercourse below. “To spread bits of his golden flesh through these vile desert wadis, then tempt man with the metal’s perfection, was an act of cruelty beyond measure.”
Bak headed across a steep slope covered with loose, broken rocks, taking care where he placed his feet. “You’ve lived in the land of Kemet too long,” he teased. “You’ve been spoiled by a life of ease and comfort.”
“Humph!” Not long after midday, the caravan had entered the wadi where the mine called the Mountain of Re was located. Bak and his Medjays had left the long line of men and donkeys before it reached its destination. While they had set up camp on a rocky shelf some distance above the wadi floor, the sturdy beasts had been led farther up the dry watercourse to the miners’ camp, where food, water, tools, and other supplies had been unloaded. After an hour’s rest, the animals had been laden with empty water jars, and the drovers, under the watchful eyes of Harmose and his archers, had led them off to a spring a few hours’ walk away. Dust hung in the air along the path they had taken. Nebwa’s troops had camped lower down the wadi, Mery’s men with them.
Imsiba laid his bow and quiver beside a cracked, rough-surfaced boulder and removed a sandal to brush a rock fragment from the sole of his foot. “My own sweat has washed the dust of travel from my body, and I feel like a man cooking in his own juice.”
Bak’s smile broadened. “I heard no complaints from the nomad shepherds we passed along the trail.” He had no need to remind the sergeant that the nomads were Medjays, just as he was.
“They know no better way of life. If they did, my friend, they, too, would find fault with their lot.”
Bak eyed the surrounding terrain, and his smile faltered. Like the sergeant, he thought the land foul, a place forsaken by the gods. The wadi was narrow, the dun-colored peaks to either side harsh, ragged, and barren of life. The heat was intense, the sun blinding. Sweat trickled down his face, breast, back, and thighs. Thirst parched his mouth. He longed to taste the waters of the river and to feel its soothing current the length of his body.
He shook off the dream and spoke with reluctance. “Nebwa drew me aside this morning. He complained of the many times you stand apart with Harmose and speak of things no other men can hear.”
Imsiba’s mouth tightened. “Who I make my friend is no business of his.”
“He thinks the two of you plot against the caravan. He fears for its safety and for the safety of the gold we’ll carry when we return to Buhen.”
“Surely you don’t believe him!”
“You know I don’t!” Bak wiped the sweat from his face and spoke in a more reasonable voice. “No man is more loyal to the land of Kemet than you, Imsiba. But I must admit I feel no better about your friendship than Nebwa does.”
“Because you suspect Harmose of murder and theft?” Imsiba’s laugh was hard, cynical. “You err! He’s as eager to find the man who slew Commandant Nakht as you are, and as worried for mistress Azzia.”
Bak tried to swallow the lump rising in his throat, a lump which formed each time he thought of Azzia. Where is she? he wondered. Safe in Buhen? Or has she gone to Ma’am and is she standing even now before the viceroy? Could she already be dead, unjustly punished?
Shoving away so fearsome a thought, Bak forced an apologetic smile. “I worry at seeing you befriend a man who might be less than he seems, that’s all.”
The Medjay did not return the smile. “I accept your belief in the woman’s innocence. Can you not accept mine that Harmose is without guilt?”
“I’d like to, yes, but I dare not.”
Stiff with wounded pride, Imsiba shouldered his quiver and picked up his bow. “That boulder overlooks the mine.” He pointed to a wind-gouged lump of stone protruding from the hillside farther along their path. “I’ll watch you from there. Should any man approach you with a dagger in his hand or a spear or any other weapon, my arrows will fly true.”
Bak muttered an oath at his friend’s obstinacy. He glanced along the slope in the direction from which they had come, squinting to lessen the glare. A craggy outcrop hid their campsite, but two of his men, both fully armed, were traversing the hillside at a higher level, ensuring his safety. If the man he hoped to catch meant to slay him, he had made no attempt during the long trek from Buhen. Imsiba and the other Medjays were as concerned for his welfare as he was for theirs, and as careful to guard his back. This his adversary doubtless knew.
“The men who follow us can use the bow as well as you.” Bak clasped his friend’s shoulder, determined to mend the rift between them. “You must come with me to the mine. We’ll be here only a few days, and I’ll need your eyes and ears If I’m to learn how gold is stolen.”
The invitation was a declaration of trust and the big Medjay accepted it as such. His gloomy expression dissolved, and a smile formed on his lips, a twinkle in his eye. “You err, my friend. My skill with the bow is unmatched. But if you wish to place your life in the hands of lesser men, so be it.”
Bak and Imsiba stood among a cluster of jagged, broken boulders lying alongside a stream of loose sand and rocks, the rubble left by water which had rushed down the hillside many months, maybe years in the past. They stared across the wadi, taking their first good look at the mine, a gaping hole in the opposite slope fifteen or so paces above the dry watercourse. The peak towered above the hole, its face harsh and precipitous, its summit capped by boulders.
The tunnel opened onto a shelf formed from the refuse of the mining process. A chain of nearly naked men, all burned by the sun, plodded along the shelf, carrying rush baskets filled with rocks. They were hauling their heavy burden from the mine to a dozen or so lean-tos built on a mound of refuse that filled the base of a short, steep subsidiary wadi. A foreman stood on the slope above them, his stubby leather whip held in the crook of his arm. Shadowy figures labored inside the shelters, rickety affairs made of piled stones and twisted branches covered with cloth, rushes, brush, whatever came to hand to stave off the sun. At least a dozen guards, hard-looking men armed with spears, kept a wary eye on the activity.
Paser and Nebwa stood o
n the wadi floor below the mine, talking to a hulking man with a neck so thick it seemed a part of his head. His left shoulder sagged, the arm hung useless and wasted. Bak saw that he carried a baton of office.
“The man with Paser and Nebwa must be Wadjet-Renput, overseer of this mine.”
“So I assume,” Imsiba said. “A good man, Harmose told me. He once oversaw a gang of stonemasons building our sovereign’s new memorial temple across the river from the capital.”
Bak chose to ignore the reference to the archer. He wanted no further argument. “What of his arm?”
“A column toppled, with him beneath.” Imsiba’s voice grew sad, pitying. “It took him many months to heal and when he did he was sent here.”
So terrible a reward after so dreadful a misfortune might make a man bitter, Bak thought, bitter enough to seek revenge. “How long ago did he come?”
“Five months, no more.”
The gold had been taken over the course of a year, starting long before Wadjet-Renput’s time. True, he could have been made a party to the thefts upon his arrival, but it was equally possible that he, a man with no experience of mining, could be blinded by a clever deception.
“Our sovereign thought him bad luck,” Imsiba added.
Bak tore his thoughts from the gold. He wanted no talk of bad luck. “More likely,” he scoffed, “she wanted no man there to remind the others of the danger they faced when raising those huge blocks of stone.”
His words failed to erase the uneasy look from Imsiba’s face. “Bad luck and danger make an uneasy partnership, my friend. This Mountain of Re strikes a fear in my heart like few other places I’ve been.”
Like most individuals isolated from their equals, Wadjet-Renput proved to be a garrulous man. He greeted Imsiba with as much enthusiasm as he did Bak and, starved for news of the capital, questioned them both at length. Paser made a pretense of being aloof, but Bak noticed he paid particular attention to the sometimes spectacular rise in positions of men close to his cousin Senenmut. Nebwa shuffled from foot to foot, bored with talk of a world he had never known, and scowled his disapproval at the Medjay’s inclusion in the group.
Aware of the time slipping away, Bak took advantage of a break in the conversation. “How many men toil here?” he asked, eyeing the mine-mouth, the line of filthy, sweating men laden with baskets, and the lean-tos.
Wadjet-Renput’s gaze traveled from one end of the shelf to the other, and his chest swelled with pride. “Eighty prisoners and half as many guards. The miners work in gangs of ten, which I rotate from one task to another each week. Half the guards stay here, the rest keep watch from the heights around us.”
Bak could not understand how any man could hold his head high with so cruel an assignment, but he thanked the lord Amon it was so, for it would make his own task easier. “Neither Imsiba nor I have seen gold taken from stone. Will you show us?”
The overseer’s face lit up like a lamp. “Come!” He plunged up a path worn smooth by many feet, as quick and agile as a gazelle in spite of his useless arm, and stopped on the shelf not far from the lean-tos.
Bak exchanged a quick glance with Imsiba and they hastened after him. Nebwa looked down the wadi as if his camp beckoned, but decided to follow. Paser frowned, evidently preferring gossip to a tour of a mine he had visited often, and plodded up the slope behind them.
Wadjet-Renput glanced at the sky, where the sun hugged the weathered peaks to the west. “It’s too late to enter the mine; no man stays inside after dusk.” Shaking off an obvious disappointment, he smiled. “That you can see tomorrow, the rest I’ll show you now.”
A bearer trudged past, reeking of sweat. He stopped at a knee-high pile of broken rock near the lean-tos, swung the heavy basket from his shoulder, and dumped his load. A fine pale dust rose in the air, coating his already grimy body. As he turned back to retrace his path, he looked neither right nor left, merely plodded past the onlookers like an ox across a field. Bak gave silent thanks to the lord Amon that he was not that man.
Wadjet-Renput plucked a rock from the pile, held it out so they could see the glittering flecks in the quartz, and began to talk. He moved on to the nearest lean-to and the next and the next, explaining, elaborating, adding anecdotes of success and disappointment as the miners had followed the vein deeper into the mountain. They watched nearly naked men huddled beneath the lean-tos, crushing the rocks to the size of peas in large mortars. Others ground the ground stone in hand mills to the consistency of coarse sand. A third group washed the powder in a sloping stone basin, using precious water to separate out the heavier gold.
Prisoner-miners they were, men who had killed or stolen or cheated or committed some other serious offense against their fellow man, offending the gods by their behavior. A few went mad in the heat, Bak knew; others died of exposure or in accidents, or their hearts stopped beating when they could take no more. None who returned to Kemet ever forgot the mine; none repeated his offense. And no wonder, Bak thought, for he could think of no greater punishment than drawing the precious flesh of the lord Re from stone.
He watched and listened intently, seeing many points in the process where gold could be stolen, but never more than a few grains at a time. At that rate, it would take months to collect a large enough amount to make a bar the size of the one hidden in his bedchamber in Buhen. Yet if he had interpreted Nakht’s scroll correctly, enough gold had disappeared in one year to make a dozen or more similar bars. One glance at Imsiba told him his friend was equally puzzled.
As they watched a prisoner pick golden granules from the bottom of a basin, Bak asked Wadjet-Renput, “How much gold is lost to theft?”
“You jest!” The overseer swept his baton in an arc, drawing all eyes to the dry and rock-strewn land around them. “What man with good sense would try such a thing?”
“Greed sometimes makes men foolish-and desperate.”
“Bah!” Nebwa spat on the earth by his feet. “These men have been reduced to animals. What use can a witless beast make of so precious a metal?”
“They watch each other, Bak.” Paser spoke as if to a child with an overactive imagination. “None is willing to share the blame for another man’s folly, and such would be the case if gold were found missing.”
They walked to the final lean-to, built on the hillside three or four paces above the others. Wadjet-Renput beamed at the man inside. He was scrawny, about thirty years of age, with short curly hair and hands so delicate Maatkare Hatshepsut herself would have envied him. He wore a long kilt and sat behind a scale and a set of weights. A pile of pottery cones lay beside one hip, writing implements by the other. He was a scribe, not a prisoner.
“This is Roy,” the overseer said, “the foremost teller of obscene jokes in the land of Kemet.”
A shrill whistle pierced the air, cutting short the introduction.
“The day has ended,” Wadjet-Renput explained and added with a contented smile, “Shall we see what our labor has brought forth for our divine sovereign?”
Bak was surprised at how much time had passed. The sun had slipped beyond the horizon. The wadi lay in shadow, and the peaks to either side were bathed in an orange-gold afterglow. He had been so intent on learning all he could that he had forgotten his thirst and the heat enveloping the land.
The bearers made a final trip across the shelf to empty their baskets. A gang of naked men snaked out of the mine, so covered with dust they looked as if the lord Khnum had molded them on his potter’s wheel from the earth itself. The men who crushed the stone and those who ground it up abandoned their lean-tos. A dozen guards shepherded the lot off the shelf and up the wadi toward their camp.
Those who remained, the men who washed the gold from the rock, carried small pottery bowls to the lean-to and handed them to the scribe. Inside each bowl were the glittering grains so painstakingly collected through the long, sweltering day. Bak’s pulse quickened. This lean-to, with so much of the precious metal in the hands of one man, seemed a likely
place for theft. Except two guards stood close by, watching the exchange.
As the prisoners hurried away, Roy poured all the gold into a single round-bottomed spouted bowl about the size of his cupped hand. He then weighed it. While he toiled, he chattered to those watching, relating one tale after another, all funny, all vividly obscene. Bak laughed with the rest, but kept a surreptitious eye on those delicate fingers, intrigued by their deft manipulation of the bowls and the weights. The guards, he noticed, were too distracted by the talk of women and pleasure to pay attention to Roy’s supple hands.
Bak caught Imsiba’s eye. The Medjay was laughing along with the rest, but his brief nod said that he, too, thought the scribe a likely source of the stolen gold.
How could one be sure?
Reaching into the lean-to, Bak grasped the spouted bowl. Shocked, the scribe stopped his patter in midsentence. The guards stiffened, looked to a gaping Wadjet-Renput for guidance. Paser sucked in his breath. Nebwa took a quick step back, his eyes darted from Bak to Imsiba, his hand clutched his dagger. Whether he meant to protect the gold from men he thought thieves or whether Roy was his confederate and he feared discovery, Bak could not tell.
Bak took a generous pinch of the ore between his fingers, careful to hold it over the bowl so none would be lost. “Could a man not take this much gold every day and carry away a handful at the end of a year with no one the wiser?”
“By all the gods in the ennead!” Nebwa exclaimed. “Are we back to that?” His hand remained on his dagger.
“You take your task as a policeman too seriously,” Paser said in a tight voice.
Roy’s face blanched to a waxy white.
Bak dared not look at Imsiba for fear his elation would show. He had seen few men look guiltier or more afraid. As casually as he could, he let the brilliant flecks trickle into the bowl and handed it back. Muttering a disgusted curse, Nebwa let his hand swing away from the dagger. Wadjet-Renput, Paser, and the guards relaxed.