by Lauren Haney
Satisfied Psuro could continue without him, Bak plucked a tall, hefty Medjay from among the men searching the vessel, and the two of them ushered the captain down the gangplank and onto the quay. Mahu held his head high, trying without success to hide his distress. The onlookers, murmuring among themselves, parted to let them through, fell in behind, and followed them to the fortress. As they passed out of the sunlight and into the shade cast by the twin-towered gate, Bak saluted the sentry with his baton of office. The sentry, a seasoned veteran with graying hair, gave Mahu a curious look, then eyed the men who followed as if not quite sure how to deal with them. The Medjay solved the problem for him. He pivoted, held his long spear horizontally in both hands, and stood, legs spread wide, to hold the onlookers back.
Bak and Mahu entered the dimly lit passage through the gate, passing so quickly from light to near darkness that they were close to blind.
“You’re known as a man who searches out the truth,” Mahu said. “Will you do so for me?”
“And if I find you guilty?”
“I’ve done no wrong, I promise you.”
Bak heard something in Mahu’s voice, a sincerity perhaps, that came close to convincing him. “I’ll do what I can.”
Side by side, they stepped out of the passage. The sun, a smoldering orb hovering above the western battlements, reached into the citadel, setting aglow the white walls of the buildings lining the street, dazzling them with light. Muttering an oath, Bak snapped his eyes shut. A faint whisper 68 / Lauren Haney sounded, a dull thud. Mahu jerked backward and cried out.
Bak’s eyes shot open. He swung around, saw the captain staring wide-eyed at an arrow projecting from his abdomen.
Another wisp of sound and a thwack. A second arrow struck dead center below Mahu’s ribcage. He stumbled back and crumpled to the pavement. His life dripped onto the stones beneath him, forming a fast-expanding red puddle. He tried to speak. Blood bubbled from his mouth and he went limp.
Yelling for the sentry, Bak scanned the street, searching for the assailant. The bright walls and pavement, the fierce light, burned his eyes, making it hard to see. Three small boys, who had been playing in the dirt behind the old guardhouse, peeked around the corner, attracted by his shout.
Two elderly women, also driven by curiosity, moved out of the shade of an intersecting lane. They all gaped, too startled to move, too afraid to draw near. None could have seen Mahu struck down.
A sudden movement caught his attention, drawing his eye up and to the left, to the roof of the building across the street from the guardhouse. A warehouse, with grain stored on the ground floor, the top floor in need of repair and no longer occupied. He glimpsed a dark blur, barely visible in the sun’s glare. An instant later it vanished.
Mahu moaned, his eyes fluttered open. His breathing was rough and tortured.
“Sir!” The sentry ran out of the passage, saw the wounded man, gaped.
“Stay with this man. And send someone for the physician.”
Bak’s voice turned hard. “I want the one who did this.”
He raced to the warehouse door, shoved it open, and burst through. The guard on duty, curled up in a corner asleep, woke with a start and scrambled to his feet. He grabbed for his spear, leaning against the wall with his shield, and at the same time recognized Bak. The spear slipped through his fingers and clattered to the hard-packed earthen floor.
“The stairs!” Bak yelled, swinging his baton toward the man. “Where are the stairs to the roof?”
The guard pointed toward an open door. “Through there!
The first room to the right.”
Bak dashed down a dark hallway, offering a hasty prayer to the lord Amon that he would soon lay hands on the man he sought. He found an open portal, spotted a mudbrick stairway rising to the second floor. A swath of light shone down from above, illuminating the steps. He raced upward, found himself in an open court so small that half its space was taken up by another stairway. He darted on up, burst out onto the roof, stopped. The heat rose in waves from the flat white surface, so bright it made his eyes water. The nearly square expanse was empty of life, the plaster too hot to walk on unshod, and the air reeked of fish. Some enterprising soul had cleaned dozens of perch and laid them out to dry. The surrounding rooftops were as hot and uninviting, as empty.
Laundry lay drying on one roof. Small dark objects, grapes he thought, dotted a sheet spread out on another.
Swerving around the fish, he raced across the roof to the corner and called down to the two old women. They had seen no armed man. Following the knee-high parapet along the back of the building, he ran to the far corner. From there, he could look down two intersecting streets. Except for a couple of brown puppies play-fighting and a group of spearmen coming through the fortress gate, both were empty.
He had to give the assailant credit; he could not have picked a better time of day, with the sun blinding hot and few men or women venturing out.
He zigzagged back across the roof, peering down into several small open courts that had once served as sources of light and air for the maze of rooms on the second floor. Long abandoned, they had entrapped over the years a thick blanket of sand dotted with broken pottery, bits of rotting wood, fallen plaster, and a variety of objects of no further use to anyone. In one court, he surprised a trio of rats nibbling at some unidentifiable object. In another, he set to flight a flock of swallows living in holes excavated in a decaying wall. In none did he find any means of descent from the roof, nor did he see any telltale footprints in the sand.
70 / Lauren Haney
By the time he reached the main courtyard, his confidence had begun to wane. The front of the building, above the entryway where the guard was posted, seemed an unlikely avenue of escape. Twice the size of the other courts, it had suffered a greater assault from the elements. A large section of wall had collapsed. As he hurried toward the opening, the roof felt springy beneath his feet, fragile and insubstantial, and he noticed a network of tiny cracks where the materials beneath had weakened, breaking the plaster. Slowing his pace, treading as lightly as his weight would allow, he approached with care.
As he knelt at the edge, something snapped beneath his feet and the roof settled with a short, sharp jolt that sent his heart into his throat. Stifling a nervous laugh, he looked down into the open court. Below he saw a mound of crumbling mudbricks sprinkled with sand and trash. A swath of sand had been pushed away on the near side and the bricks beneath were gouged and crushed. As if a heavy object had fallen on the mound. Or a man had jumped from above.
Cursing beneath his breath, Bak pushed himself off the roof. The fall was not great, his landing easy, but his feet slid out from under him and he skidded down the bricks on his backside-as the man before him had done. Standing up, brushing himself off, he looked around. A single set of footprints crossed the sand to an open portal on his right.
Passing through, he found himself in a long corridor, its walls broken on both sides by open doorways. He hurried from one to the next, finding no one inside. Bursting through the final portal, he skidded to a stop. A ladder stood in the middle of the room, its uppermost rungs protruding through a small, square opening to the roof. Off to the side, hidden in shadow, he spotted a bow almost as long as he was tall and an unadorned leather quiver filled with arrows.
He snapped out an oath. Only a man confident that he would escape would leave behind his weapon. A man clever enough to abandon a weapon that would draw attention to himself.
Though he knew the effort was wasted, he climbed the ladder and looked outside. As expected, the expanse of white plaster stretched out before him, with no man in sight. While he had been wasting time going from room to room, his quarry had made his escape.
As much as he hated to admit it, he had been outsmarted.
Thoroughly disgusted, he picked up the bow and quiver and looked them over. They were standard army issue, no different than hundreds of other weapons stored in the armory and carried by th
e archers of Buhen. They could not have been more commonplace.
“He breathed his last in my arms.” The sentry, kneeling beside Mahu’s body, stared at his bloody hands. “Why am I moved? I’ve seen men die before, men I knew well cut down on the field of battle.”
Bak looked at the dead man, slain without warning and for no good reason. Mahu lay flat on his back, as the sentry had left him. One arm rested by his side. The other was folded over his breast, held there by the arrows that had stolen his life. His skin looked waxen, his tan too dark, his bared belly, seldom exposed to the sun, too light. Rivulets of scarlet had flowed from his wounds to congeal on the stones beneath him.
“Did he speak before he died?”
“He said…” The sentry stood up and placed his hands behind him, as he if could no longer bear the sight of them.
“He tried more than once and each time the blood came, snuffing out his words. Somehow, on the brink of death, he found the strength. He said, ‘I’ve done no wrong.’”
Bak muttered an oath. He was saddened by Mahu’s death, and angry. What kind of vile criminal would lie in wait to take a man’s life? A man destined to die anyway unless proven innocent of the crime for which he had been accused?
What snake would slay a man with a policeman walking beside him, taking him into custody for that very crime?
“I’ll do what I can,” he heard himself say, repeating the promise he had made while Mahu still lived.
Chapter Five
“Our task is to keep trade flowing, not stop it altogether.”
Commandant Thuty strode from his armchair to the door, paused, stared out at a courtyard he probably did not see.
At last he slapped the wall hard with the flat of his hand, pivoted. “All right, Lieutenant, I’ll issue an order at first light.
All ships and caravans will remain in Buhen and Kor until Mahu’s death has been resolved.” With a low growl of vexa-tion, he stalked back to his chair and dropped into it. “I trust you’ll lay hands on the one who slew him before all trading and shipping comes to a standstill.”
Bak took care to keep his voice neutral, his promise realistic. “I’ll do my best, sir.”
“Your best.” Thuty gave him a long, speculative scowl. “I’d not stop traffic crossing the frontier if I thought you’d fail.”
“Yes, sir.” Bak did not know which was worse: the commandant’s reprimands, whether deserved or not, or his refus-al to accept the possibility of failure.
As if satisfied he had made his point, Thuty leaned back in the chair and plucked his drinking bowl from the table beside him. The rich, heavy odor of roasting lamb wafted through the door, tantalizing Bak with the promise of an evening meal he would not share.
As soon as he had sent Mahu’s body to the house of death, he had hastened to the commandant’s residence. He had found Thuty in his private reception room, reading the day’s
dispatches from the other fortresses along the Belly of Stones.
The room, located on the second floor where the commandant’s family was quartered, was private in name only. Over and above the fact that Thuty conducted far more business here than in his office, his household-a wife, a concubine, a half dozen children, and as many servants-had a tendency to fill any available space.
Children’s bows, arrows, spears, and shields lay shoved against a wall with their father’s weapons. The drawer of a game board had been pulled open and the green and white playing pieces were strewn across a rush floormat. A woven reed box overflowing with scrolls sat on top of a basket full of wrinkled linen. A stool lay on its side between two wooden chests. A side door, open to allow the flow of air, offered a glimpse of the long stairway that climbed the wall of the citadel from the ground floor to the battlements. Bak glimpsed in the semidarkness a ball and a pull toy on a step.
He shuddered to think what would happen should the fortress be attacked, with archers racing upward to man the walls.
“You’re convinced Mahu knew nothing about the tusk.”
The comment jerked Bak’s thoughts abruptly to the here and now. “Not long before the attack, he pleaded with me to prove his innocence. I vowed I would.”
Thuty frowned at the younger officer. “Without his conniv-ance, I don’t see how an object so large and ungainly could’ve been taken on board unseen.”
Bak tamped down the urge to remind the commandant of the tusk that had made its way to faroff Byblos. How had it traveled so great a distance without attracting attention?
“Imsiba’s questioning the crew now.”
“I always liked Mahu.” Thuty’s voice turned wishful. “I don’t suppose Captain Roy could’ve had a hand in it?”
“If he did, another man acted for him.” A sour smell drew Bak’s eyes to the door, where a naked baby was crawling across the floor, its pudgy face, hands, and chest smeared with dirt. “Mahu sailed into Kor six days ago. The helmsman told me they took the sail down right away, as soon as they learned they’d be carrying livestock. The task was easier 74 / Lauren Haney with the deck bare and open, before they built the pens. They folded it and stowed it in the hold close on nightfall.
Throughout that day, Roy was moored here at Buhen, and he sailed north before Mahu came back.”
Thuty must have seen the baby crawling toward Bak, drooling, but he paid the child no heed.
Bak inched sideways, away from those filthy, probably sticky fingers. “Much of Roy’s cargo was contraband made legitimate by the false manifest. Once he’d sailed away from Buhen and Kor, leaving behind the many men who could attest to his rightful cargo, the false document would’ve deceived all but the most critical of inspectors. He’d have had no need to slip the tusk onto another man’s ship, where he’d lose control over it.”
The commandant let the silence grow, reluctant to voice the unspeakable. “Are we faced now with two groups of smugglers, both carrying contraband across the frontier on a large scale?”
“Thuty!” His wife Tiya, a short, stocky woman midway along in her fourth pregnancy, burst through the door, saw the baby. “Oh, there you are, little one!” Never taking her eyes off her husband, she scooped the child off the floor and balanced it on a hip. “Is it true that Captain Mahu has been slain?”
Thuty gave her a look blending fondness with sorely tried patience. “How did you hear so soon?”
“It’s true, isn’t it?” she asked Bak.
He glanced at Thuty, whose resigned shrug permitted him to give her a quick version of the captain’s death. She spoke not a word, but he could see the news distressed her. When he finished, she righted the overturned stool, plopped down, and laid the baby on the floor.
“Has anyone told Sitamon?” she asked.
Bak looked at Thuty. “Sitamon?”
Thuty gave his wife a blank stare.
“Mahu’s sister.” Tiya, seeing how mystified they were, bit her lip. “She came to Buhen not a week ago. Newly widowed, she is, with a child. As Mahu had no wife, and as she had no liking for her husband’s family, nor they for her…” She shrugged. “You know how that goes. So he summoned her, asking her to live here with him and tend to his household.”
Thuty looked so uncomfortable it was obvious he had paid no heed to Sitamon’s name in the garrison daybook, where all newcomers were entered upon arrival. “She’s not been told.”
“Oh, my!” Tiya grabbed the baby, who was crawling again toward Bak, and turned it around, aiming it at the door. “She mustn’t hear by chance…”
“I’ll go,” Bak said.
“…or from someone she doesn’t know.” Tiya might well have been talking to herself. “That poor woman. Alone in a strange city. What will she do now?”
Bak knew Tiya was kind and gentle, but he ofttimes wondered how Thuty maintained his patience. “Has anyone befriended her? Someone who can break the news?”
“I’ll go.” She stood up. “We’ve had no time to grow close, but we’ve talked often during the past few days.” Her eyes focused o
n Bak. “Now tell me what I’m to say. She’ll want the truth, I know.”
Bak offered a silent prayer of thanks to the lord Amon. He disliked breaking bad news, and no news could be worse than that of an unexpected death.
“Tiya left then and there, fearing someone else would stumble in and break the news before she could.” Bak tore a chunk of bread off the oval loaf and dunked it in the bowl of stew. Fish stew. The fifth time in a week. He could almost smell the roasted lamb in the commandant’s residence. “We’ll not add to Sitamon’s pain tonight, but we must see her early tomorrow without fail.”
Imsiba licked the juice from his fingers. “Will she know her brother’s business, do you think?”
“I pray she does. Where else have we to look?”
“Not on board his ship, I suspect.”
Bak set his bowl on the rooftop on which they sat. A large, 76 / Lauren Haney droopy-eared white dog-Hori’s pet-scooted closer, dragging his belly across the plaster. Bak rescued the stew before it could vanish in one quick gulp. Resting his broad muzzle on his front paws, the dog stared at the bowl with dark, yearning eyes.
Streaks of red and orange flared across the western sky, the lord Re clinging to the dying day as his barque carried him into the netherworld. Most of the structures within the citadel lay deep in shadow. The single exception was the wall that enclosed the mansion of Horus of Buhen. Built on a high mound and towering above the single-story guardhouse, the wall caught the pinkish-gold light of sunset and cast its glow over the two men and the dog.
“How did Mahu’s crew account for themselves?” Bak asked, fishing for solids in his bowl.
Imsiba spoke in the monotonous voice of a courier repeating a verbal message. “When and where the tusk was loaded is a puzzle, so they say. During their journey upstream from Abu, their cargo of grain was unloaded at Ma’am. The ingots and jars of oil were loaded there, as were the stones used for ballast. The livestock was taken on board at Kor, along with feed and hay. The men saw nothing out of the ordinary at Ma’am, at Kor, or here in Buhen. No strangers came on board, to their knowledge, and not a man who ascended the gangplank at Kor or Buhen left the deck to go below.”