by Lauren Haney
The men dived at the slide, frantically scrabbling at rocks and sand. They made almost no headway, merely shifted the debris from one place to another. Shouting a string of curses, the overseer grabbed a basket of gold-bearing rocks abandoned by a bearer, tipped its contents onto the ground, and shoved it into the hands of the closest man. Imsiba ran along the shelf, collecting more baskets. Bak organized the newly arrived Medjays and set all but two to work. Those two he sent to Roy’s lean-to with orders to protect its contents with their lives. If the scribe no longer lived, his belongings might speak for him.
Wadjet-Renput quelled the miners’ frenzy and split them into gangs, appointing guards and Medjays to lead them. Soldiers drawn by the shouts pitched in to help. The mound of fallen stone was soon covered with men toiling under Bak’s sharp eyes, and the overseer was shouting commands at lines of men hauling away the debris.
The mound was bathed in heat. Dust clouded the air. The vultures widened their circle as if they sensed death within the mine. Empty baskets were filled to the brim and carried away. Sand and rocks slid beneath bare feet, sometimes carrying the men above into the arms of those below. Dislodged rocks clattered downward amid warning yells and nervous laughter. Smaller debris was scooped from around boulders that Imsiba prised loose with a lever and allowed, when all was clear, to roll into the wadi. Several times, the hulking young Medjay Kasaya shifted a boulder by brute force alone.
When the slide had been cleared to a quarter of its former size, a gap opened at the top, allowing fresh air to enter the tunnel. The men outside heard a muffled cheer from within. Buzzing with excitement, they labored on with renewed energy. The hole grew steadily larger until the trapped men were able to crawl out one at a time. Roy was not among them. A head count of bearers came up two short. After much hugging and thanking men and gods alike, the released miners, too shaken to toil on what remained of the slide, stumbled down to the wadi floor to await news of the missing trio.
The rescuers, grim-faced, fearful of what they might find, dug away more of the mound, levered away a boulder, and went to work on the rubble inside. A low moan led them to a man buried in loose sand and rocks, a bearer covered with bruises and groggy from a bump on the head, but otherwise unhurt. The second bearer, they found buried under the rubble beside a blood-stained boulder. He was breathing, but would not long survive the great ugly gash that bared the bones of his chest and shoulder.
They found Roy crushed beneath another boulder. He would never speak again. Bak knelt beside the torn and bloody form, half sick with horror and disappointment. The scribe, like Heby, had been doomed the moment he had taken for himself the flesh of the lord Re, but why, Bak wondered, did he have to die like this, before he named the man who had planned the thefts?
Roy’s lean-to was bathed in sunlight. It’s contents looked no different than they had the day Bak had watched the scribe receive the gold and weigh it. He prayed to the lord Amon that in the ensuing days Roy had not substituted one weight for another, or one bowl or anything else. He sat on a flat stone the scribe had used as a stool and inspected the scale, the weights, and the baked clay cones, moving from one object to another, studying each intently. On the hillside behind him, the Medjays he had assigned to guard the lean-to chatted in their own tongue. A tiny brown bird twittered atop a nearby lean-to while it searched for insects among the twigs and rushes. The men at the mine, clearing away the last of the slide debris, spoke with voices muted by the deaths of their fellows.
Bak picked up one of three round-bottomed spouted bowls Roy had used to collect the golden ore for weighing. He noticed a slight discoloration on its lower surface, both inside and out, but thought nothing of it. The second bowl was a consistent reddish-brown. The bottom of the third, like the first, was a shade darker. This time the stain aroused his suspicions. Praying that he held in his hand a key to the thefts, he scratched the discolored interior surface with his fingernail. Bits of dried mud flaked off the baked clay.
Practically holding his breath, he scraped away the remainder of the thin mud veneer. A single flat bead remained in the center of the bowl. He wiped the sweat from his brow and, fairly certain of what lay beneath, pried it up. It plugged a hole, small enough to escape notice, large enough for small granules of gold to seep through. He turned the bowl over. The hole did not penetrate the discolored bottom surface. He was not disappointed; he had expected as much. With trembling fingers, he scraped off the dry mud skin, disclosing another small hole. He raised the bowl toward the sun, twisted it around a bit, and laughed aloud as he matched up the inner and outer holes. The bottom of the bowl was hollow.
He felt like shouting his joy to all the world. He knew at last how the gold was taken. Roy would coat the outer surface with mud and let it dry. The next time he used the bowl, bits of gold would trickle into the cavity from above. Later, alone and unseen, he would open the bottom hole and let the gold flow into a cone, which he would later hide on one of the donkeys bound for Buhen.
Bak resisted the urge to break the bowl and look at the cavity or to tamper with the second mud-coated bowl. He would save them until later, until the time came when he had to demonstrate to Tetynefer how the gold had been stolen before the eyes of many unsuspecting men. Of course, he had yet to identify the man responsible for the thefts and for Roy’s death and the others, but he felt more certain of success than he had for many days.
He wrapped his trophies in the dirty cloth Roy had used to erase his scribal mistakes. Heby must have made the bowls, forming the wet clay around molded lumps of wax that melted away when they were fired. He had seen no spouted bowls in Heby’s house, but…the crucible shard! Yes, he had noticed a hollow at the bottom, a fault, he had assumed. Heby had used exactly the same method to melt the gold that Roy had used to steal it, forming the thin slabs in the false bottom of a crucible while a dozen or so coworkers toiled around him.
Bak clambered up the final steep, rocky incline and stood amid the jumble of outcropping stone and boulders that capped the summit above the mine. From high above the wadi, he watched the two Medjays return to their camp, one carrying the bundle containing the false-bottomed bowls. He was delighted at having found them, but could not help but castigate himself for his failure to question Roy the instant his suspicions were aroused. If he had not been so set on finding proof before he acted, the scribe would still be alive and he would know the name of the man responsible for murder and theft.
While Imsiba ascended the last few paces, Bak wiped the sweat from his face, the self-blame from his thoughts. At least he knew how the gold had been stolen, and with Roy dead, no more would be taken. He gazed down the hillside to the wadi floor below. Miners, guards, soldiers, and Medjays, all so filthy it was hard to tell them apart, were standing or sitting or squatting, their arms around each other’s shoulders, their voices loud and raucous.
“Look at them,” he said with a bemused smile. “Yesterday misery filled the miners’ hearts; they walked like wooden dolls and none thought of any man but himself. Our men stood alone, with few soldiers willing to befriend them. Today they celebrate life together, sharing their small rations of beer with men they feel closer to than brothers.”
Imsiba chuckled. “I think we Medjays have proved our worth today.”
“Maybe not to Nebwa’s satisfaction, but the miners won’t forget.” Bak clasped his sergeant’s shoulder, teased, “If one among them is a teller of tall tales, you may someday be spoken of as heroes, men who sit among the gods.”
Imsiba’s cynical snort failed to hide the pleasure the thought gave him.
Bak sobered, eyed the boulder-strewn summit. “Come. Let’s look for proof of what we suspect.”
They sidled between two boulders and worked their way around a jagged slab of rock to the topmost point of the landslide. There they found two stone fangs the height of a man and, between them, a depression partially filled with sand. Both fangs showed signs of recent damage on the sides facing the shallow hole. The f
resh abrasions and places where the stone had broken away were paler than the rock, which had been long exposed to the weather. The fangs had supported another tooth, which would ultimately have fallen through the natural process of erosion, but probably not for many years without help.
Bak knelt beside the depression and picked up a chunk of broken rock as thick as the palm of his hand. The boulder had been well-supported and could not have been easy to dislodge. Rocking forward, he dug through the sand. He found several bits of wood and a splinter half the length of his lower arm, rounded on one side as if torn from a pole. Someone had levered the boulder off the summit.
“I doubt the man who did this carried his lever back to camp,” he said, holding up the splinter. “He’d not risk someone noticing.”
Imsiba glanced toward the west, where the sun hung low over the horizon. “We’ll soon be robbed of daylight, my friend. We must hurry if we’re to find it.”
They examined every square cubit of the summit, working as quickly and thoroughly as possible. They found nothing but a few indentations in the soft sand that might have been footprints.
Assuming the man who had set off the slide had intended to destroy the bowls in Roy’s lean-to, they worked their way down the back side of a steep, irregular shoulder that dropped to the floor of the secondary wadi behind the shelters. Rocks and boulders of all sizes cluttered the slope, cracks and crevices abounded. Sharp, broken stone scraped their sandaled feet. The hot still air caked the dust on their sweaty bodies. They found no sign that another man had preceded them until, halfway to the wadi floor, the last lingering rays of the setting sun touched an object jammed into a narrow fissure, making it shine. Hurrying to it, they saw the tip of a polished bronze spear point.
“Will you bet a good, long drink of water that this isn’t the lever we’ve been seeking?” Bak asked.
“You think me so foolish, my friend?”
Bak tugged the weapon free. The end of the shaft was broken, jagged. The splinter he had found on the summit fit snugly within a long gouge that followed the grain of the wood. The identifying symbol, much to his relief and Imsiba’s, told them the weapon had come from the garrison arsenal rather than their own. Bak murmured a prayer of thanks to the lord Re and another to the lord Amon for good measure. The Medjay’s long silence testified to the fervor with which he gave thanks.
The two men descended a mass of tumbled rocks and came upon a narrow trail which followed the contour of the hillside. Bak thought it a wild animal track, but a closer look told him many human feet had smoothed its surface.
“While you were hunting in the desert, Pashenuro came upon a shrine near the upper end of this wadi,” Imsiba said. “This must be the path to reach it.”
“A shrine?” Bak’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s take a look.”
“Even if the man we hope to find went that way, he’d have gone long ago.”
“True, but he may have left an offering to appease the god for the destruction he wrought on the mine and those trapped within. We might learn who he is by what he left.”
The path rose steadily, taking them up the rough, narrow watercourse. Soon they saw, a hundred or so paces ahead, an uneven rock-hewn stairway rising to a deep semicircular bay atop a ledge. A movement caught Bak’s eye, a bit of white. Someone was up there. The man who had hidden the spear? Would he have remained for so long?
Bak and Imsiba forgot their thirst, their bruised and aching feet. They raced along the path through the deepening shadow of evening. Gripping the damaged spear, Bak took the stairs two at a time and, with the Medjay at his side, burst onto the ledge. The archer Harmose was there, kneeling at the rear of the bay, his head bowed. Imsiba pulled up short, his sandal skidding on the gritty floor. Harmose swung around, startled, and clutched the dagger at his waist. He saw who they were, his hand fell from the weapon, and he rose to his feet.
“I thought no one near,” he said with a sheepish smile. “I should’ve known I’d not be alone for long.”
Imsiba stared, looking surprised and rather confused.
“How long have you been here?” Bak demanded. “Why have you come?”
Harmose frowned, puzzled by the brusque questions. “I came to give thanks for the men whose lives were spared.”
Bak walked deeper into the bay. Boulders lay on the slopes to right and left, most of them etched with graffiti left by men who had toiled in the mine through the passing years. In the center, behind the archer, he saw a small shrine carved in the living rock. The gray-brown body of a dead hare lay in the deep niche. Bak lifted it’s head. It was limp, not long dead.
Imsiba relaxed, smiled at the archer. “We thought…”
“How long ago did you come?” Bak cut in, glaring a warning at the sergeant.
Harmose shrugged. “Not long. I knew nothing of the accident until after the tunnel had been opened. I saw the men come out and thought, while I was close by, to bend a knee in gratitude for their safety. Why do you ask?”
Bak scowled at the offering. Would the man who had caused the landslide have had the time to flush a hare? “Accident?” He shifted the spear so the archer could see the damaged end. “A man used this to unseat a boulder high above the mine-mouth. Now two men are dead.”
Harmose’s horrified eyes darted to Imsiba and back. “You think the slide deliberate? Surely you know not what you say!”
Could anyone pretend such shock, such revulsion? Bak glanced at Imsiba, who gave him an I-told-you-so look. The big Medjay obviously had no reservations about the man he had so recently made his friend.
“Imsiba and I have been high above this wadi since the slide was cleared. How did you get here unseen by either of us?”
Harmose could not help but realize the import of the question. He spoke in a voice tight with suppressed anger. “I came over that ridge.” He pointed west, toward a point from which he could have seen the mine, but Bak and Imsiba could not have seen him. Clamping his mouth shut, he pivoted on his heel and strode to a boulder near the shrine. From a space alongside, he withdrew his bow and quiver and the limp bodies of five hares. He held the creatures up by the thong binding their rear legs together. “I spent much of the day hunting in the wadi west of here.”
Bak knew from his own hunting excursion that to find six hares and slay them took much patience and many hours, especially in the heat of the day when small creatures hid from the sun and from birds of prey.
“I’ve taken no human lives,” Harmose snapped. “Nor will I ever except on the field of battle.”
“You must forgive the questions,” Imsiba said quietly. “We had to ask, as you must know.”
Bak left Imsiba to placate the archer and wandered around the arc of boulders. He looked at the words scratched into the rocks but his thoughts were on Harmose, a man who had volunteered to help his Medjays should trouble arise with Nebwa’s men. The archer behaved like an innocent man. The hares were newly slain. And Imsiba, usually a good judge of men, trusted him.
Bak stopped before a text so worn he had trouble reading it in the deepening twilight: “I came in year eleven of the reign of Khakaure Senusret to take the flesh of Re from this mine.” The simple message, scratched on the stone in the far distant past, had been signed by a man called Nakht. The written name jarred Bak’s memory, reminding him for the first time in many days of Commandant Nakht’s office and the scrolls that had been disturbed by a man who could read. Harmose had been Nakht’s translator, which made him seem an educated man. But basically he was an archer, and few archers knew how to read even the simplest words. Could Harmose?
He uttered a brief prayer to the ancient king Senusret, who had long ago joined the company of gods, then called to Imsiba and Harmose “This text must’ve been written when the mine was first worked.” His excitement was real, but it had nothing to do with the ancient message. “Come, let me show you!”
Imsiba headed his way, openly puzzled by the odd summons. Harmose trailed behind as if suspicious.
/> Bak touched the faint symbols contained in an oval. “I think this reads Khakaure Senusret.” He moved his finger to the right. “This could be year ten. And this…” He hesitated, glanced at the archer. “Can you make it out, Harmose?”
The archer flushed. “What kind of man are you? First you accuse me of wanton murder. Now you make light of me because I can’t read. Why do you treat me so?”
Bak was certain no man could pretend so great a hurt and frustration. His suspicions vanished once and for all and he started to laugh. The gods had torn that wretched scribe Roy from his grasp, but they had given much in return. He had survived the landslide, he had the false-bottomed bowls, and he had at long last eliminated one of his four suspects.
He clasped the startled archer’s shoulders. “Come back with us to our camp and share our evening meal. I’ve a tale to tell, and then you’ll understand.”
A delighted smile brightened Imsiba’s face.
The long line of men and donkeys plodded across a broad, flat, dun-colored plain which simmered in the heat. Fine sand, disturbed by hooves and feet, rose around the caravan to smudge the clear blue sky. The hot erratic breeze licked up funnels of sand and sent them scudding across the valley floor. Vague images of water and trees and animals, floating near enough to the earth to seem real, tantalized the eye with promises of life where none existed.
Bak and Kasaya walked parallel to the column, well off to the side where the air was clean. They moved faster than the weary, dust-stained men and animals, overtaking one after another on their way to the head of the caravan. They had been on the trail for four days, rising before dawn to travel through the cooler hours of early morning, resting in the midday heat, and traveling again late into the night. From the start, Bak had made a practice of walking the length of the caravan each time they set out, morning and evening. He assumed Roy had passed on at least one cone of stolen gold before his death and that it had been hidden in one of the donkeys’ loads for transport to Buhen. He hoped to find it.