"It is on the road that a man finds a companion," said Tjainufi. In dim light the manikin was more visible than he should have been. Conversely, the sunlight that flooded the travellers now blurred around Tjainufi so that the manikin seemed to have been molded from translucent wax. His voice was no less wingedly clear at one time of day or another.
Khamwas ignored Tjainufi. He bent at the waist and twisted, legs spread and tense as he tried to work the cramps from his muscles.
"We should have hired a boat and crew as soon as we reached the river," he said. His reproach was made impersonal by the fact that he did not turn to face his companion as he spoke. "We would have been here as soon, and been in better shape."
Convinced at last they had arrived, Samlor lifted himself from the saddle of his own camel and dropped heavily to the ground. He could have alighted more gently, or even forced his beast to kneel and halve the distance; but that would have added insult to Khamwas, who already felt injured by the choice of conveyance on which the caravan master had insisted.
"The wind's been in our face all the way down the river," said Samlor, loosening the rust from both mind and tongue as he fitted them to the thought. "A boat couldn't drift against it, not as sluggish as the current is. We'd still be a hundred miles upstream. Not as stiff, mayhap. But not in very good humor by now, I'd judge."
"That's very unusual," said Khamwas as he walked to the edge of the bank. From cracks in the sandstone grew bushes, low and seemingly as dry as the rock and sand around them. They were attractive enough to the camels
that both began to browse instead of bolting or making further attempts to use their teeth on their riders.
"I don't trust the weather, ever," said Samlor. "And I don't know enough about boats to feel comfortable about k." He grinned and squeezed his companion's biceps. "I'm responsible for getting you here, remember? And, unusual wind or not, we've gotten here, haven't we?"
Khamwas grinned back though there was a gray tinge of fatigue behind his expression. "So we have," he agreed. "What do you think of them?"
He gestured downward, over the bank. Samlor stepped forward and followed the gesture with his eyes.
"Heqt and her waters!" he blurted, realizing for the first time that there was something here to see.
The river had cut a scallop in millennia of battering against the sandstone reef. Human labor had then modified the smooth, water-sculpted, curve into an array of huge statues.
Samlor looked down at four of them, their feet half buried by sand that drifted over the escarpment to fill again the cavities that men had carved away.
There was little to tell of the subjects from this angle, but at the further horn of sandstone was another quartet of statues. They were perhaps smaller than those immediately beneath Samlor, but they were not hidden by sand or the angle.
They were monsters of a sort that the Cirdonian hoped were wholly mythical.
All were human in some portion of their physiognomy. The nearest had a woman's head beneath a crescent helmet. She snarled, leaning forward over the river on doglike legs and a hairy body that was more like a bear's than that of any other creature with which Samlor was familiar. The statue was cut into the living rock of the bluff, but it-all four of them-were in such high relief that only their heads and feet remained in contact with the stone of which they were a part.
The statue on the opposite end of the relief bore a man's head, but in no other way was it the male counterpart of the first. The creature's torso was that of a lizard with traces of blue paint remaining in the crevices between its belly plates. Eight legs that could have graced a spider or a crab splayed outward from the shoulder area, gripping the pilasters to either side with clawed feet.
In the center of the array of statues was a doorway cut through a pilaster of double width. It was only by measuring by eye the bluff's height above the river that Samlor could estimate that what seemed to be a low door was really ten feet high-though only a quarter the height of the statues.
The pair of reliefs immediately flanking the doorway were not without human attributes, which made them the more monstrous. A cobra head, its hood flared, watched coldly from above the body of a grasshopper-from which dangled a human phallus and scrotum. The composite creature stood upright, but its limbs were those of a bull.
On the other side of the door, a fish head gaped from a feathered torso with vestigial wings and bare, human breasts. Gnarled, hairy legs, those of a troll or a great ape, completed the grotesque ensemble.
"That's pretty impressive, Khamwas," Samlor said with all emotion purged from his tone. It embarrassed him that shapes in stone could affect him with disgust and more than a touch of fear.
"All things are in the hands of fate and of god," said Tjainufi.
Samlor glanced at the manikin. Tjainufi's features displayed nothing beyond bland indifference. The comment didn't mean anything, so far as Samlor could see. . which, he had learned, might mean there was something important that he didn't see.
"They're paired temples, you see," said Khamwas'as he peered with satisfaction down at the statues cut from the face of the bank directly beneath them. "Harsaphes and Somptu, this is Harsaphes under us here. There's always been a belief that Nanefer was buried with his book on the site-others have been searching for the book a thousand years before / was born. But it seemed he was in the Temple of Somptu, because the reference in the carving from the Old Palace was to 'a tomb in the smaller temple."
Khamwas gestured across the curving rock face toward
the grotesque reliefs-a temple? – facing them. As he did, the door in the center of the design disappeared into deeper shadow. Samlor blinked at the illusion, then realized that the panel had been opened inward.
A hunched figure stepped into the light. It looked mouse-sized at the feet of the rock-carved monsters, but it was certainly human-a small man, stooping, dressed in a robe of black or sooty brown. The hatred in his glance was palpable, even over a distance far too great for Samlor to discern his features.
"But that must have been a mistake. Or perhaps a deliberate deception," said Khamwas, returning his attention to the figures beneath him. At least from this angle they appeared to be a quartet of seated men, monstrous only in that they were even larger than the reliefs on the opposite horn of rock. Sand drifting over the escarpment had covered one figure waist high, lying across the feet of the next and the threshold of the door set between pairs of figures.
"We've got company, Khamwas," said Samlor, touching his companion's arm and nodding toward the distant figure. "Across the way."
"Oh, yes, him," Khamwas replied unconcernedly. "He's been here since, well, long before the first time I came here to examine the temples. The Priest of the Rock, the local villagers call him, some sort of holy man. He actually lives in the Temple of Somptu, praying, I suppose, and the villagers support him with little offerings. Not that his needs are very great."
Khamwas paused, then rubbed his hands together and said, "Well, we'd best look the place over, hadn't we? I've examined the temple before, of course. But it's very different now that I know Prince Nanefer is buried here."
"A moment, friend," said Samlor, checking Khamwas with a touch. "We'll need food, the camels'll need fodder-and I think we'd best take care of those things at the village-" he nodded in the direction of the palm fronds and squealing water wheels " – before we settle in here."
"Just a look-"
"It's waited a thousand years, you tell me," said the caravan master with a tight grin. "It'll wait for tomorrow better'n dealing with the-living surroundings-will."
"Well, I rather thought you'd, ah, take care of such things without my presence," said Khamwas. His expression was hooded and his voice careful, because he didn't understand why he had to state the obvious. Samlor was not only competent to deal with mundane cares of food and campsite, those were the reasons the Napatan scholar had hired him.
"I can take care of that, sure," said Samlor gently. "But I can't do that and watch you at the same time… which is why you hired me."
Khamwas blinked, suddenly aware of parallel truths, his and his companion's.
"The fellow down there," Samlor continued. "He doesn't like us a bit, and he may have friends who feel the same way. I'm not leaving you here alone."
"The Priest?" Khamwas said. He straightened and faced the distant figure, arms akimbo. The men were scarcely more than blobs of color to one another, but the challenge was as obvious as a slap in the face. "He's harmless."
The Priest of the Rock turned and disappeared within his shadowed doorway like a sow bug scurrying back beneath a rotting log. The panel closed behind him. It was so massive that the curving rock brought the sound of the door slamming all the way to the men watching it close.
"He's old," said Khamwas. "He lives in the temple and he'd like to think he owns it, owns them both. But he knows he's there on sufferance of the crown of Napata. All the ancient monuments are property of the state. If a peasant like him ever interferes with visitors, he'll die chained to a water wheel on a prison farm."
"Honor the old men in your heart," said Tjainufi, his posture matching the stiff arrogance of the man on whose shoulder he stood, "and you will be honored in the hearts of all men."
Khamwas jerked his head around, though the manikin must have been too close for his eyes to focus on it.
"This is far too important for the wishes of some mud-dwelling hermit to be consulted," Khamwas snapped. For the first time since Samlor had met them, he saw the scholar angry at Tjainufi. "I did him no harm when I was here before, unless you call clearing away the filth in which he lived harm. I'll do him no harm now. But he will not keep me away from this prize because he doesn't like other men examining these temples!"
Tjainufi did not speak or change his stance. After a moment, Khamwas turned his head away.
Samlor looked at the facing reliefs, grimaced, and looked down at the temple his companion intended now to explore. It must be cut back into the rock directly under them-a vaguely unsettling notion, though the footing here was certainly more secure than that of an ordinary building's floor. They would have to reach the temple door by the sand slope to the left, awkward going down and damned difficult coming up. Maybe he could rig a knotted rope as an aid. .
"I'm going to go down to the temple," said Khamwas, transferring the angry challenge in his voice from the manikin to Samlor. "You may leave or stay as you choose."
"Always true," agreed the caravan master with a smile which threatened more than the words did. Khamwas read the expression correctly and paused.
Idly, half pretending that he wasn't doing what he knew full well he was, Samlor slid the coffin-hilled dagger from its new sheath. The bright sun bathed the whole blade in a shimmering surface reflection which had no color or form but that of white light. But turn the flat slightly, and there crawled the whorls and quavers of black metal on white, a meaningless design-