by Lauren Haney
“Sir!” A large-boned young Medjay, assigned to the day watch at the guardhouse, came running up behind them.
“Sir, you must come right away! There’s been another murder!”
Chapter Six
“You’re certain he was murdered.” Doubt registered in Bak’s voice, not because he disbelieved the soldier who had brought the news, but because he could not comprehend another slaying so soon after Mahu’s death. Two murders plus Rennefer’s attempt at murder in five days. Buhen was a garrison usually without serious crime.
Amonmose, a lean, muscular man of about twenty years, took no offense at Bak’s unwillingness to believe. “He had three arrows in his back, sir. Any of the three would’ve felled him.”
Bak and the spearman, member of the six-man desert patrol that had come upon the body, stood just inside the door of the guardhouse. The men on duty, both as staggered by the news as their lieutenant was, had temporarily abandoned the knucklebones to watch and listen.
“We found him…” Amonmose glanced at the shadow outside, a narrowing band made by a sun well on its way to midday. “More than an hour ago, but less than two. Before midmorning, it was. He was slain at the hands of another, of that we had no doubt. So I left then and there to report the news.”
“The other men stayed with him, I hope.”
“He’ll be no meal for jackals or vultures.” Amonmose transferred his shield to the hand holding his spear and wiped his face. His skin was ruddy from sun and wind, and he was coated from head to toe in a fine layer of dust, much of it smudged by sweat. “If we hadn’t come by when we did…Well, it was a jackal that drew our dog to him.”
Though the soldier’s breathing had eased, Bak could see that the long, hurried trek across the desert had sapped his strength. Ushering him into the office, he hauled a stool forward and motioned him to sit. Hori’s belongings no longer littered the floor, he was glad to see, but their presence could still be felt to a much greater extent than he liked. The scribe had thrown everything into baskets, which he had left on the mudbrick bench amid the scroll-filled jars.
Nested on a bed of raw papyrus, Bak spotted the beer jar he had left unopened the previous evening. He broke the plug and handed it over. “My scribe should soon return with food, and Imsiba with men and a litter. As soon as you’ve eaten, we’ll go.”
“Yes, sir.” Amonmose laid his weapon and shield on the floor, sprawled out with his back against the wall, tipped the jar to his lips, and drank deeply. A long contented sigh, a belch, and a broad smile relayed his gratitude and thanks.
“When did he die, do you think?”
“Not long before daylight, I’d guess.” Amonmose wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “There were plenty of flies, let me tell you.”
“He lay lifeless for five or six hours?” Bak’s surprise turned to skepticism. “Other than the one jackal, the eaters of carrion had not yet found him?”
“He’d been covered with sand. Not deep enough to banish his scent, but enough to deceive vultures flying aloft.” The soldier took another deep drink. “We often see a pack of wild dogs in that part of the desert, but for the past couple of days, they’ve been down by the river, harrying a young hippopotamus trapped in a backwater. We’ve spotted jackals there, too, awaiting the kill.”
“I see.” Bak glanced around, searching for another stool.
Unable to find one, he sat on the white coffin. The faint odor of fresh-cut wood teased his nostrils. “Did you find footprints of the slayer? A trail to follow?”
88 / Lauren Haney
“Three men went off to look. I left when they did, so I can’t tell you what they found.”
He seemed no more perturbed by Bak’s makeshift seat than he had been by the officer’s slow reluctance to believe.
A man of good sense, Bak thought, a good soldier to have at one’s back in times of trouble. “Did you recognize the dead man?”
“He lay face-down on his belly. We hesitated to raise his head, thinking you’d want him left as he lay, but finally we did.” Amonmose rolled the jar between the palms of his hands, remembering, not liking the memory. “Most of us knew him. None could call him a close friend, but we liked him.”
A long resigned sigh escaped from Bak’s lips. “Then he’s a man of Buhen.”
“Intef. The hunter.” Amonmose’s eyes darted to Bak’s face.
“You surely knew him, or knew of him. He tracked and killed wild gazelle and other creatures of the river verge and desert.
He traded the meat here at the garrison.”
Bak muttered an oath. He had known the dead man only by sight, but had formed an impression of a quiet, hard-working individual.
“He’s over there.” Amonmose pointed toward what appeared to Bak to be a neverending landscape of sand, isolated rock formations, and more sand. “We’re lucky we found him.
He’s in a shallow depression made by the wind blowing between those two rocky mounds.”
The wind gusted, stirring a fine dust into the air and rolling the coarser grains across the undulating surface of the desert.
A golden-beige carpet come to life. The sand flowed with a whisper so delicate it could have come from the mouth of a goddess. A whimsical goddess, Bak thought grimly, one going to great lengths to wipe away every trace of Intef’s movements and those of the man who slew him.
He was glad he was not alone, and from the way Imsiba watched the flowing sand, it was clear he too felt ill at ease.
The two Medjays who had come with them, one carrying a litter and the second a linen bag of fresh bread, fruit, and beer for the men on patrol, eyed the shifting world around them with deep distrust. The river lay out of sight beyond the long north-south ridge that ran behind Buhen, and the sun beamed down from overhead. Without the ridge, which they had followed south for well over an hour, they would have lost all sense of direction. Walking along its back side, they had passed unseen the fortress of Kor and a watchtower located atop a tall, conical hill farther to the south. Their guide strode forward unintimidated; he had patrolled this wasteland often enough to see important landmarks too small or indistinct for the uninitiated to spot. The twin mounds were a good example. Never would Bak have thought them distinctive in any way.
“One of your dogs found him, you said?” he asked.
“Our best bitch,” Amonmose nodded. “She wasn’t following his scent-he came by a different path-but she smelled something. The jackal, I’d guess.”
“Had the wind come up yet?” Imsiba asked.
“It was a breeze then. Nothing like this.” Amonmose veered to the left across a patch of soft sand. “She raised such a fuss we untied her leash and let her go. After a while she started to bark. We called her, thinking she’d cornered a snake or lizard. Usually she comes, but this time she didn’t. So we went to see what she’d found. That’s when we saw Intef.
And the jackal.”
“From what direction had he come?” Bak asked.
“The east, from the ridge.”
“He never traveled in the desert alone,” Imsiba said. “He took one donkey to carry food and water and one or two others to carry the game he killed.”
Amonmose shrugged. “We found no animal tracks, only those of Intef.”
The breeze let up, the whispering sands stilled. They rounded the closest mound and saw between it and the next hillock the five men Amonmose had left behind and three sturdy, broad-chested dogs, a black female and two brindle males. Men and dogs alike were hunkered down around a 90 / Lauren Haney man lying on the ground, arrows rising from his back. To shelter themselves and the body from the blowing sand, the soldiers had built a curved barricade of shields on the wind-ward side. A good-sized drift had formed before it. If Bak had had any illusions that he might find traces of Intef’s slayer, the height of the drift disabused him.
The soldiers, each as dusty-sweaty as Amonmose and as burned by the elements, scrambled to their feet. The oldest among them, a giant of a man wit
h thinning brown hair, raised his hand in greeting. “Lieutenant Bak. It’s good to see you, sir. Not the best of circumstances, I grant you, but if all was right and proper, I’d never have summoned you. Now would I?”
“Heribsen,” Bak smiled. He knew the man from Nofery’s house of pleasure, a favorite haunt. “So it’s you who stands at the head of these laggards. Amonmose didn’t warn me.”
The big man clapped Imsiba on the shoulder, exchanged quips with the Medjays, and welcomed Amonmose back like a long-lost son. One Medjay handed the foodstuffs to soldiers who peeked into the bag like delighted children, the other laid the litter on the ground at the edge of the depression and unrolled the fabric from around the carrying poles.
Bak and Imsiba knelt beside the body. A man of medium height, broad at the shoulder and narrow of waist, thirty or so years of age, lay flat on the ground, arms thrown out as if to break his fall, chest and face in the sand. His kilt was stained from long use and its hem was frayed. He wore a simple bronze dagger in a sheath hanging from his belt. From the cleared areas on his back and legs and odd clumps of grit at unexpected locations, they could see that the men in the patrol had made an effort to brush the body clear of sand.
An inflated goatskin lay near his feet, and a long bow lay by his side, a heavy weapon to bring down large game. A leather quiver lay across his left shoulder, the arrows spilling out onto the sand. The bow, quiver, and arrows were standard army issue, items the hunter had most likely obtained from the garrison arsenal in exchange for fresh game.
The goatskin was full of water, which told them he had not long been away from the river when he was slain.
Three arrows were buried deep in the upper back within a space the size of a man’s palm. As Amonmose had said, any of the three would have killed. Only a small amount of blood had erupted from the wounds to run down his ribcage.
The embalmer would find more in the lungs, Bak suspected.
The arrows were identical to those in the quiver.
Gently, as if the man lay sleeping rather than dead, Bak rolled him onto his side. “Intef,” he said aloud, glancing at Amonmose and nodding. The hunter’s broad chest told no tales, nor did the sand under and around the body. He lay where he had fallen, leaving nothing behind to name his slayer. Hauling himself to his feet, Bak turned to Heribsen.
“You sent men out, Amonmose told me, before the sand began to move.”
“I walked at their head.” Heribsen eyed the body, his face and voice grim. “Intef was a good man. I hoped to lay my hands on his slayer.”
Imsiba arose and brushed his hands together, ridding them of sand. “What did you find?”
“In a word, nothing.”
“Nothing?” Bak signaled the Medjays to bring the litter close and move the body. “The lord Horus can swoop down from the heavens to seize his prey and never touch the earth.
I’ve yet to meet a man who can accomplish a like feat.”
Heribsen smiled at the cynicism. “We went around this spot in ever-widening circles until at last we found signs of the slayer.” He pointed toward a long, narrow rock formation roughly ninety paces away. “Up there, they were, in a pocket of sand. The one who stood there didn’t bother to brush his tracks away, and for good reason. The sand is soft, filling in details as soon as a foot is lifted, leaving nothing specific behind.”
Bak stared across the intervening stretch of sand, nodded.
“His view of Intef would’ve been open and clear.”
“The distance would deter most men,” Imsiba said.
“Not this one.” Heribsen pointed toward the body, which 92 / Lauren Haney the Medjays were lifting onto the litter. “Look at the spacing of those arrows. He’s good, very good.”
The wind gusted, shoving the sand before it, lifting a fine veil of dust. Bak turned his back, closed his eyes. “Were you able to follow his trail?”
Heribsen snorted his disgust. “If we’d found his prints sooner, who knows where they’d have led us. As it was, we tracked him to the ridge, and there we met up with the man I’d sent off to follow Intef’s trail.”
“The slayer followed his victim.” Bak found he was not surprised.
“So we believe.” Heribsen scratched the sparse hair at the crown of his head. “About that time, the wind stiffened and the sand began to move. We followed the tracks south along the ridge for…Oh, probably two hundred paces. Then they vanished, blown away by the gale.”
Bak followed the ridge in his imagination and visualized the land to either side. An arid wasteland to the west, reaching into the unknown, and to the east, a broad stretch of sand broken by rocky mounds, dunes, and low shelves of stone falling away to the river. The farther south one walked, the rockier and more broken the landscape.
“Did you look for his donkeys?” Imsiba asked.
“That’s why I sent a man to backtrack him. I thought to find them.” Heribsen eyed the golden sands and a far horizon lost in a haze of dust. “If he tethered them somewhere and they can’t get food and water…” He shook his head, his expression bleak. “Well, we’ll keep our eyes open, but I don’t hold much hope.”
“Do you think it possible he ran into a wandering band of tribesmen?” Imsiba asked. “Perhaps one among them tracked him down, finding him a temptation too great to resist-especially if his donkeys were loaded with fresh meat.”
“We’ve been patroling this stretch of desert close on a week,” Heribsen said. “We’ve seen no sign of intruders.”
Bak wished the murder could be that simple: a starving band of men and women desperate for food. “No,” he said aloud. “Intef left the donkeys behind, in a place impossible to see from here. If the animals and their burden were the prize, they’d have been taken by stealth and led deep into the desert, with him none the wiser until he went back for them. There’d have been no need to slay him. And if the prize was more modest, merely the objects he carried, his water and weapons would be gone.”
Imsiba frowned. “You’re saying his life was taken for him alone. Why? He was a poor man, a hunter.”
Bak gave his friend a wry smile. “I fear the gods are testing us, Imsiba, with each problem being harder than the one before. First Penhet was stabbed, and soon we found a reason and sufficient traces of his assailant to lay hands on Rennefer. Next Mahu was slain and though we have a reason, the ivory tusk, we’ve found no track left by his slayer. Now this man is dead, and we’ve neither a trail to follow nor a reason.”
Bak trudged up a low dune, stubbed his toe on a rock buried in the sand, and cursed. His mouth was dry, his skin gritty and parched, long since stripped of the oil he had rubbed in at daybreak. Pausing at the summit, he shaded his eyes with a hand and looked eastward, where he could now and again glimpse through the filthy air a wide band of brownish water flowing around dark rocky islands, a few bedecked with greenery, and the silvery ripple of isolated patches of rapids. The river, the goal he yearned to reach.
His hope of finding Intef’s donkeys in the bleak landscape between the ridge and the water seemed absurd. Heribsen’s promise to search the desert on the opposite side of the ridge was even more ludicrous.
Amonmose, walking a like path fifty or so paces to his right, appeared and disappeared as the blowing dust and the landscape permitted. Imsiba was somewhere beyond, too far south to see. Nor could Bak see the black dog Heribsen had let them borrow, the bitch that had found Intef. Amonmose had let her run free in the hope that she would find the donkeys-or any jackals attracted to whatever game the crea-94 / Lauren Haney tures might carry. Far to his left, Bak glimpsed the two Medjays carrying the litter, then the wind gusted and dust enveloped them. Because they were burdened with the body, he had given them the northernmost path to the river and the shortest route to the fortress of Kor, too far away to see.
He closed his thoughts to his thirst and plodded forward, his feet sinking to the ankles in the warm sand. Who would slay a man like Intef? he wondered. He considered one reason and another and anot
her, but at no time could he get around one basic fact: Intef had nothing. He was a poor man, one who hunted game to live, a precarious existence at best.
A dog began to bark, a harsh, angry sound that carried across the dunes. Other dogs answered-or were they jackals? — snarling, yelping, growling. Bak stood quite still, trying to see through the swirling dust, trying to locate the direction from which their voices came. To the south, he thought, and sprinted that way. He saw Amonmose run up a knoll, stop on top to listen, point to a spot somewhere ahead.
Bak crested a low mound, rounded a jagged cluster of rocks, and found on the far side an ancient watercourse filled nearly to the brim with sand. The terrified bray of a donkey drew his eyes down the wadi and added wings to his feet.
The black bitch stood in front of three laden donkeys, her hackles raised, her teeth bared, growling at a pack of feral dogs, doing her best to hold them off. The donkeys, their forelegs hobbled, danced nervously around the bitch. Bak yelled to distract the attacking dogs, hoping at the same time to summon Imsiba. Drawing his dagger, a close to useless weapon in the face of a dog pack, he slowed his pace to a cautious trot.
A yellow cur ran at the black dog, nipping at her, trying to distract her. A brown dog outflanked her to leap at a dead gazelle tied onto the back of a donkey. The donkey screamed in terror and kicked out with flying rear hooves. A spotted mongrel slipped between the donkey and its fellows, snapping at a bound foreleg and shoulder, forcing the creature back and away from the safety of numbers. A leggy gray dog leaped at its neck, trying to bring it down. The donkey shook him off, but at the cost of several long scratches down its shoulder. A rangy yellow and white dog, its hackles bristling, crept up on the black bitch’s far flank.
Bak yelled again. A huge white dog swung around to face him, its lips drawn back in a throaty snarl. Amonmose ran up behind Bak, holding his shield before him, his body and spear poised to strike. Imsiba appeared on the far rim of the wadi, spear at the ready. The yellow and white dog crouched, ready to leap at the bitch. With a blood-curdling roar, Imsiba threw his spear, which cut the beast nearly in half. Blood gushed. The dogs not yet frenzied by action paused. Amonmose lunged forward, burying his spearpoint in the white dog’s chest, bringing him down with a fatal yelp. A dog at the rear of the pack slunk away. Two more followed, their tails tucked between their legs. Imsiba dropped into the wadi, jerked his spear free, and prodded the cur worrying the black bitch. Its snarl turned to a yelp and it turned and ran, dragging a rear leg. While Amonmose freed his weapon, Bak ran forward to cut the throat of the leggy gray dog, bringing him down with a strident cry. The remaining mongrels raced off across the haze-shrouded sands.