“Not long before dusk, we found a sheltered spot at the mouth of a dry watercourse, a desert wadi. Captain Ramose deemed it safe and there we tied up for the night-unaware of what lay just around a stony ridge, awaiting discovery.”
Tjanuny, the oarsman Bak had chastened the previous day, paused for dramatic effect.
Imsiba, who sat at Tjanuny’s back, oars shipped while the current sped the skiff downstream, tore his gaze from the east bank along which they sailed and rolled his eyes skyward. Stifling a smile, Bak stared expectantly at the wiry sailor. Soon after arriving in Buhen, he had learned that the people of this wretched land enjoyed nothing more than playing games with their betters. Patience, he had discovered, gave them the chance to amuse themselves and gave him the answers he needed, but he dared not inspire exaggeration by a show of too deep an interest.
“The wadi goes back some distance but is narrow, and the water at its mouth is deep. The banks rise steep and rocky, leaving no space for crops.” Tjanuny scratched a flank, stole a look at Bak. “I and three of my fellows left the ship to walk along the water’s edge. We thought it a good place to search for wood and other items of small value flung ashore by the storm.”
Bak eyed the land sweeping by to either side, a poor, thirsty land where the term “of small value” was the literal truth. To the west, a blanket of sand bleached white-gold by the midday sun clung to the top of the escarpment, sometimes creeping down a long-dry wadi or drifting over the dark cliffs to be nibbled away by the swollen river. Now and again the escarpment drew back, making room for a narrow floodplain of rich black soil that sustained a number of small villages.
Palms, tamarisks, and acacias, their roots soaked by the receding waters, edged fields, ditches, and the river. Men plowed the higher, dryer land, drawing clouds of birds to the overturned earth and the worms and insects thus exposed.
On the eastern side of the river, the golden desert was tinted with brown, the landscape harsher and more rocky.
Squeezed between the higher land and the river, a few stingy pockets of soil were emerging from the flood. A wadi opened up ahead, a narrow triangle of water-logged fertility lying between the high, stony banks of an ancient river, luring ibises, cranes, and egrets. Much of the oasis was shaded by palms, while grapevines flourished on a natural terrace just out of reach of all but the highest inundation. A couple dozen buildings built of stone and mudbrick perched on a sandy shelf overlooking the arable land.
“We’re nearing the wreck,” Tjanuny said. “It lies in the next wadi after this village.”
With quickening interest, Bak studied the small cluster of drab houses. This, he suspected, was where he would find the cargo, and the crew as well if any had survived the storm.
The village looked no different than all the others in this poor land. In narrow, crooked lanes, ducks and geese scratched in patches of mud and dogs squabbled halfheartedly. Naked children stared out at the passing skiff while their mothers washed clothing at the edge of the turbid waters. Two men sat in the shade playing a board game, waiting for the flood to subside. If the people here had been the first to come upon the wreck, they would have made it their own, as would most others along the river.
Bak’s divided attention spurred Tjanuny to get on with his tale. “We walked around the ridge and ahead was the wrecked ship. It was hard to see so late in the day, shadowed as it was by the cliff. One man hurried back to tell our cap-38 / Lauren Haney tain, while the rest of us hastened to the vessel. It lay broken and battered, with no man standing guard.”
“You didn’t notice the missing cargo?” Imsiba’s voice was sharp, holding less patience than Bak’s.
Tjanuny swung around, giving the Medjay a quick look as if to see how far he could go. Not far at all, he must have concluded, for he came straight to the point. “A few items remain on deck, so we thought the cargo skimpy but intact.
It was the captain, when he came, who climbed aboard to look around.” He turned again to Bak. “It was he who found the deckhouse empty and nothing stowed below. That’s why he sent me to Buhen, to summon you.”
Belowdeck cargo served as ballast. No responsible captain would sail far without a load-even if he had to haul rocks.
The shallow-keeled, round-bottomed vessels were top-heavy, easily capsized, especially when traveling upstream under an enormous spread of sail, but also when voyaging north, propelled by the current and a crew of oarsmen. As few men would take so great a risk, Ramose’s assumption that the cargo had been carried off was most likely correct. Unless Ramose himself had salvaged it and, like Rennefer, hopped to cloud Bak’s eyes with a pretense of innocence.
Bak studied the village and a path rising up the natural terraces that walled in the wadi. Above, he could imagine the desert, golden sand too hot to cross bare-footed and out-cropping rocks shading the small creatures who lived there: lizards, scorpions, snakes. “The path leads to the wreck?”
“An easy walk beyond the village, yes.”
Bak pressed the rudder, guiding the skiff closer to shore.
“And it’s from here you stole this boat?” The words slipped out as smooth as a dagger from a well-fitted sheath.
Tjanuny tensed for an instant, then relaxed. His face took on a wide-eyed look of honesty and candor. “I borrowed it.”
Imsiba sputtered, a sound falling somewhere between a laugh and a snort. The oarsman’s expression froze. Bak formed a scowl, squelching a laugh.
Tjanuny dredged up some indignation. “If I’d traveled on foot, sir, I’d not have reached Buhen until after nightfall. I thought it best to get a boat-to borrow one-so you could reach the wreck in a timely manner. Captain Ramose wishes to be on his way north, but as I told you when first I saw you, he feels obligated to help. To carry any survivors back to Buhen-should they summon the courage to appear at a ship that’s been plundered-and to haul back any salvageable goods.”
Bak gave the oarsman a stern look. “Later, after I talk with Ramose, you can row me back to this village. There you can explain that it was you who stole-borrowed-the skiff.”
A look of dismay flitted across Tjanuny’s face.
Bak relented. The man’s offense was minor, easily set right.
“I doubt you’ve cause to worry. If we find they’ve taken the cargo, they’ll be too busy explaining their own actions to complain about your misdeed.”
“Was it truly an accident?” Bak waded closer to the overturned ship, taking care not to stir up the mud beneath his feet, clouding the water more than it already was. He bent low to get a better look at the hull. “Or could the vessel have been deliberately run aground?”
Captain Ramose, his ruddy face taut with suppressed anger, stood close by. “You’re overly suspicious, Lieutenant.”
He was referring to his own vessel as much if not more than the wreck. He had looked on in tense silence when Imsiba had swum out to his ship and climbed aboard.
Though not a word had been uttered, he had guessed the sergeant’s purpose: If he and his crew had removed the cargo from the wrecked ship and hauled it to some secret place nearby, the Medjay would learn the truth.
Bak remained mute, admitting only in the privacy of his own thoughts that he might sometimes err on the side of caution.
Ramose pointed to the broken keel-plank running down the ship’s spine. “You can see for yourself, its back is broken.”
40 / Lauren Haney
The vessel, probably seventy paces long from stem to stern, lay hard against a large sandstone boulder that in the distant past had been washed down the wadi when one of the rare but vicious rainstorms in the eastern mountains had sent floodwaters crashing down the dry waterway. Not merely the keel-plank, but several boards on the port side of the hull had been splintered as if struck by a gigantic arrowhead. The ship lay skewered, half on its side, its hull washed in water as high as a man’s thigh.
“I know too little of ships and sailing to hazard a guess as to what happened,” Bak admitted, standing erect and splashing backward. “You’ll have to enlighten me.”
“Only the gods could’ve driven this ship so far inland and thrown it so hard against the boulder.” Ramose eyed the mud surging up in Bak’s wake, then waded along the hull, running his hand over wood darkened and grainy from years of service. At the bow, he ducked low beneath the finial and stared out toward the wadi mouth and his own ship. His voice took on an edge. “I’d say they were caught unawares by the storm. Captain Roy must’ve seen this wadi and thought it a godsend. Instead, they were blown into the shallows and onto the boulder, with no chance to save themselves.”
The theory made sense, and yet…“You think all the crew perished?” Bak eyed the ship, the deck atilt but unharmed.
A school of tiny fish swirled around his legs, tickling him.
“Other than the fatal wound, the damage is so slight and the water so shallow it seems impossible.”
“The storm was fierce, yet…” Ramose scowled, thinking back. “Most of the men probably made it, but I’d not be surprised to learn that one or two were swept overboard before they left the open river. I saw for myself the water washing the upper terrace at Buhen. And after the storm I saw fish there, lying with dead and injured birds carried on the wind.”
Bak thought again of the village to the south, so tempting to men seeking shelter, so convenient for men burdened by salvaged items. But where, he wondered, was the captain?
Surely he would not abandon his vessel and cargo.
He waded to shore and climbed a few paces up the steep bank. At the mouth of the wadi, Ramose’s ship rocked on the gentle swells, its deck and fittings creaking, its pennants fluttering in a soft breeze. Hawsers fore and aft joined the vessel to mooring stakes driven into the slope above the water’s edge. Imsiba stood on deck, chatting with the crewmen.
Confident the Medjay would reach a firm conclusion, Bak turned his attention to the impaled ship. It carried a fixed mast rising from the center of a modest deckhouse, a wooden frame with walls of brown rough-woven reed mats. As the vessel had been traveling downstream, the yards were lashed out of the way over the deckhouse roof and the sail stowed below. The stern had been thrown against the wadi wall, crushing the steering area and rudder. The undamaged bow reached over the water, bridging the distance to a patch of tough grasses on the opposite shore. A stack of twenty or more ebony logs at least six paces long had broken free at one end to smash through the rail and hang precariously over the side. A man-shaped coffin, painted white with a yellow band of black symbols running from breast to toe and crossed at intervals by transverse bands, was tied to the deckhouse. A dozen or more reed baskets, their lids sealed tight, lined the lower rail against which they had slid at the time of impact.
Bak felt unaccountably saddened by the wounded vessel, an ordinary trading ship of moderate size, unadorned except for the eye of Horus painted on the prow. Yet seen from a distance it must have been beautiful, sweeping up the river with its weathered wood dark and glossy, its rectangular sail spread wide like the wings of a gigantic bird.
“Will it ever sail again?”
“This isn’t a minor repair. The boulder’s torn the heart from the vessel.” Ramose stepped back, splashing his kilt, and studied the damage. “It’ll have to be hauled to a dock-yard, that much I can tell you.”
Bak recalled the ship moored in Buhen the day before the storm. Much of the ebony coming north through the Belly of Stones was cut into short lengths because of the difficulty 42 / Lauren Haney of transport, so these logs had sparked his curiosity. Because the captain, a man he had never met and could barely remember, had been busy inspecting the ship prior to departure, he had talked to the scribe assigned to collect the tolls. The ebony, he had been told, had been brought down the rapids during high water, carried on a small, sleek vessel owned by a Kushite so daring he braved the wild and unruly waters as much for pleasure as for profit.
Other than the wood, the cargo had been commonplace.
Much of the deck had been stacked with bundled cowhides, he remembered, and an unending line of men had been carrying copper ingots from a warehouse to the ship, stowing them in the hold. Now all that remained above was the coffin, the logs, and whatever the baskets contained. Something too heavy to move easily, he guessed, or not worth the trouble.
“Has anything been left below?” he asked.
“Not even the sail.” Ramose climbed the slope to stand beside him. Feet spread wide, thumbs hooked to his belt on either side of his ample belly, he stared at his own ship. Imsiba was still on deck, probing baskets and chests and bundles, chatting, laughing, making light of his task. The Medjay’s smile, his good humor, and most of all his thoroughness had never failed to scare the truth from men with something to hide.
Ramose, seething with anger, tore his gaze from his ship to look at the wreck. “When last I saw this vessel, the men were unloading a cargo of grain at Kor. Captain Roy said he meant to stop next at Buhen for a load of copper bound for Abu. I knew the man, but not well, so I didn’t tarry to chat.”
Bak was loath to praise men who took what belonged to others, offending the lady Maat, but he had to give the thieves their due. Copper ingots were heavy and cumbersome and so were bundled hides. They must have toiled like ants to clean out the boat, clear most of the deck, and hide all they took. Given another day, they would have hauled away the logs and might even have broken up the ship for firewood.
The body, he assumed, would have been thrown overboard, the coffin saved for later use.
Ramose’s eyes darted to his own ship and back to the wreck; his voice turned intense, bitter. “We found this ship as you see it, Lieutenant. May the lord Hapi swallow us all if I’m lying!”
Few men of the river would dare such a plea. Any who sought the river god’s vengeance in such a manner was either honest to a fault or so guilty he knew for a fact that he had earned a watery death.
Bak laid a hand on the captain’s shoulder and smiled.
“You must bear with me, Ramose. I have to be sure of your innocence. If I’m to retrieve this vessel’s cargo, I’ll need your help and that of your men.”
Ramose barked out a laugh. “I don’t believe it! At the same time you insult me by questioning my honesty, you ask for aid.” He shook his head in mock disbelief, laughed again. “I doubt I’ve ever met a man so suited to his task. The lady Maat must think you a perfect tool.”
Bak was not sure if the comment was meant as a compliment or a condemnation. He wanted to believe the former, for Maat was the goddess of truth and order, but the word
“tool” bothered him.
To avoid further discussion, maybe heated words, Bak walked along the shore, where a few scraggly reeds reached up through the water. A dozen paces took him to the track that snaked up the steep incline to the top of the escarpment.
The surface of the path was sand and rock, hard-packed by the passage of feet and cloven hooves, impossible to read.
But men in a hurry often took shortcuts, and men heavily burdened sometimes stumbled to left or right.
He climbed to the first bend, where the trail doubled back, and stopped to study the slopes to either side. They were rough and rocky, at first as uncommunicative as the path, but soon he found a tiny pocket of sand deposited by the recent storm, and on it the perfect image of a bare foot, as yet untouched by wind. The print was that of an adult, too large to be a woman, unscarred, ordinary. Maybe that of a sailor, maybe not. Offering a quick prayer to the lord Amon that
44 / Lauren Haney patience would reward him with a more revealing clue, he walked on, taking a step or two at a time, stopping, searching for further sandy patches.
The trail again turned back on itself, climbed higher. He spotted another, larger pocket of sand sheltered by an out-cropping rock four or five paces above the path. He thought he glimpsed some form of imprint. Practically holding his breath, he bounded up the slope. His foot slipped on an unstable bit of rock and he fell, skinning a knee. Indifferent to the blood oozing from the wound, to his burning flesh, he knelt to examine the impression left in the sand.
The image was distinct, easily read. His spirits soared. To the left was a smooth square amid a network of triangles, the imprint of the net-like garment worn by oarsmen, with a leather patch at the rear to protect the kilt. The tiny hand-prints of a monkey, a few smudged as if the creature had grown restless, marked the sand to the right. A monkey? Bak wondered. He could in no way imagine so exotic a creature living in a poor village along this portion of the river. And neither Roy’s ship nor Ramose’s had carried wild animals as part of the cargo. Perhaps the monkey was a pet. A sailor might somehow have laid hands on the animal and kept it as his own. Not a member of Ramose’s crew, for no monkey had been found when his ship was inspected in Buhen.
No, the man who sat here had been among the crew of the wrecked ship. He and the others who had survived the storm had made their way south to the village, where they had recruited men to help salvage the cargo. But what of Captain Roy? Why would a man strip his own vessel of all it carried?
A movement drew his eye toward the wadi mouth. Imsiba stood at the rail of Ramose’s ship, waving both arms over his head, his signal that the captain and his crew were free of guilt. Bak plunged down the trail and hurried to the man he had wronged. An apology was in order.
“Until you came, we knew nothing about a shipwreck.”
Pahuro, the headman of the village upriver from the wreck, shook his shaggy white head in absolute denial. “Since we didn’t know about it, we can’t have taken the cargo.”
The logic was impeccable, Bak thought, and a blatant lie.
Leaning back against the hip-high mudbrick wall that surrounded a paddock containing two plump white cows and a gray donkey, he looked up at the trail where it vanished from sight at the top of the escarpment. No sign of Imsiba, who had gone in search of a youth he had spotted on the clifftop, keeping an eye on the wreck. A villager, maybe, or one of the truant sailors.
Inside the paddock, flies buzzed around several greenish piles of manure whose smell blended with the odor of the animals and the tangy scent of hay. A tame crow hopped along the wall, its hoarse cry a demand for food or attention.
From where Bak sat, the village looked much as it had from the river: a few poor houses reached by narrow, dusty lanes giving access to doorways leading into dark, airless rooms.
Three small, naked children, one with his thumb in his mouth, peered down from a rooftop.
Now and again, Bak glimpsed Ramose’s sailors going from house to house, Tjanuny at their head, looking for missing items. He had made the oarsman their leader as soon as he had returned the skiff with appropriate apologies and sufficient groveling. The villagers stayed out of their way, watching their progress from a distance, whispering. They seemed furtive rather than resentful; people with a secret, not the indignant victims of an unjust search.
“Your village is neat and clean, Pahuro, your fields well tended.” Bak nodded toward the oasis spread out below.
“Your date palms must be the envy of every man and woman along this stretch of river. Can you honestly say you didn’t have the good sense, the moment the storm died down, to send children out in search of any useful and desirable items that might’ve blown ashore?”
Pahuro, looking smug at the compliment and torn by the conclusion, readjusted his position on the one chair the village possessed. It was a stiff wooden armchair, its seat covered by a pillow with a complicated pattern of interlocking 46 / Lauren Haney multicolored spirals worked onto its upper surface. Before the old man had settled himself upon it, Bak had noticed how thin the pillow was, perhaps to display the design to its best advantage. Whatever the reason for so skimpy a stuffing, it was too thin to protect the bony rear of the tall, skinny headman. Bak suspected patience would reward him with the truth simply because Pahuro would sooner or later become desperate to stand up. However, he had no desire to wait so long.
“The storm ended late in the day.” Pahuro shifted from his left buttock to his right, from one tale to another. “I don’t like to see the children far from home after nightfall.”
Bak bent to pick up a straw, stuck one end into his mouth, and formed a sympathetic smile around it. “I’d have shared your concern, especially with a dozen or more sailors making their way upriver in search of food and shelter.”
“The crew survived?” Pahuro smiled. “I thank the lord Hapi for sparing them.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t see them! My Medjay sergeant tracked them from the wrecked vessel to this village.” A lie, but the local people believed Medjays more knowledgeable about the desert than any ordinary man of Wawat. It never occurred to them that Bak’s men had all been reared in the land of Kemet, and most had spent their youth tending the fields of the lord Amon.
Pahuro wriggled in his chair, not from discomfort this time, Bak guessed, but because he suspected he was being driven into a corner from which he might not escape.
The sailors came out of the last house to be searched and Tjanuny shook his head. They had found nothing. Nor did Bak see Imsiba on the path, bringing in the youthful watch-man. With the sun racing toward the western horizon, his hope of soon laying hands on crew and cargo was fading with the light.
“I know you salvaged all you could. Why shouldn’t you?
Life in this wretched land is hard.” Bak stared at nothing as if trying to reach a decision, then flung the straw aside and stood up. “This is what I’ll do, Pahuro. If you guide me to the missing cargo, I’ll close my eyes to your offense.”
The old man frowned, skeptical.
“I’ll blame no one in this village,” Bak promised, “neither man nor woman nor child. I’ll turn my back and walk away, and not another word will ever be uttered.”
Pahuro shook his head, sighed. “You lay blame where no blame is due, Lieutenant.” A secret thought touched his face, a look of cunning, and he pushed himself out of the chair.
“Come, let me show you.” Without a backward glance, he walked in among the houses of the village. Bak, hurrying to catch up, beckoned Tjanuny to come along.
Pahuro led them from one house to another, into sheds and through lean-tos, inviting them to prod and poke, to look again at what the search party had already examined.
Certain the old man was trying to cloud his vision, Bak kept his eyes wide open, his thoughts alert to all possibilities. As before, the villagers watched from a distance, whispering, but now they looked to be in good spirits, with a fresh confidence, and he even saw one man nudge another in the ribs.
The plundered cargo was here, he was sure, but where? Had he walked within arm’s length yet failed to see it?
At last a narrow lane took them to a stone and mudbrick structure at the back of the natural terrace. The way the stones were laid and the various sizes of the bricks told Bak the house had been built many generations earlier and repaired or altered at different times in the past. The front portion looked to be recently renovated, but the rear of the building was close to collapse. One wall had fallen, another leaned at a precarious angle. More than half the roof had caved in.
Six large gray pots converted for use as beehives drew Bak’s eye to a section of undamaged roof. What were they doing there? he wondered. Hives were normally placed closer to the oasis, not on the opposite side of a village, forcing the insects to fly over rooftops where the women worked in the cooler hours and the children played. In the lane below the hives, he noticed, bees were flying around a small, broken jar laying in a pool of liquid gold, honey. Rec-48 / Lauren Haney ognizing a master touch, he laughed softly. “Did you search this house, Tjanuny?”
“Yes, sir,” the oarsman said, his new authority giving him greater respect. “We found nothing here.”
“Did you or any of your men go onto the roof?”
“With so many bees swarming around?” Tjanuny shook his head, incredulous. “Who wants to get stung? Anyway, there was no need. We could see inside through the fallen wall.”
Bak walked slowly among the insects buzzing around the honey, taking care not to offend them. Reaching the wall, a long swath of stones cemented together with dried mud, he probed the surface with a finger. Though the makeshift cement looked dry, it was cool and damp, soft to the touch.
The stones had been freshly laid. When he turned around, Pahuro was looking at him with a new respect, Tjanuny with something close to awe.
“Make an opening in the wall,” he told the old man.
“There’s no need,” Pahuro said in a resigned voice. “I’ll show you what you wish to see.”
He led Bak into the house and up a broken stairway to the roof. Bees flew over and around them, leaving the hives and returning, intent on a last delivery of pollen before dark.
They walked gingerly to the edge of the undamaged portion of roof and looked down into a small square room, probably long abandoned, that had newly been converted to a windowless, doorless storeroom. Dozens of copper ingots the thickness of a finger and shaped like the skins of some dead animal were stacked against the walls. The bundled hides were not among them.
“Where’ve you hidden the rest?” Bak demanded.
The old man’s eyes leveled on Bak’s, his voice rang with sincerity. “This is all we found.”
The time had come, Bak decided, to point out a simple truth. “I’ve two choices, Pahuro. One is the pledge I gave you before. The second is not so pleasant.” He walked to the edge of the roof and looked across the village toward the oasis, its lush green palms and fertile black soil soon to A FACE TURNED BACKWARD / 49 emerge from the floodwaters. “I can take every man over the age of fourteen to Buhen, and there they’ll stand before the commandant as thieves. If he judges them guilty-and he will-they’ll join a prison gang and be sent into the desert to work the mines for our sovereign, Maatkare Hatshepsut.
Fitting punishment, don’t you think, for men who’ve taken what by rights belongs to her?”
Pahuro stood stiff and pale, jarred by the threat. With all the able-bodied men torn from the oasis, only women and children would be left to plant the fields and tend the crops, a close to impossible task. Even worse, many of the men might never return from so harsh a punishment.
“You will close your eyes to our offense?” The question was not a plea, but it came close.
“I vowed I would, and I will.”
“Come with me.”
“This is all we found on board, each and every item.”
Pahuro looked like a man newly widowed, so great was his sorrow at losing so much of value.
Bak, standing beside him, tried not to show how surprised he was, how astonished. He had thought to see hides, a sail, a few other mundane items-nothing like what he saw before him, a veritable storehouse of precious objects.
The old man had led him to the head of the fertile valley and up a steep path to a deep indentation in the cliff face that had been enclosed by a ring of boulders. Cages lined the back wall, protected from the sun and wind by an overhanging shelf of rock. They held two lion cubs and a pair of smaller cats whose name Bak did not know, four wild dogs-puppies actually-and several monkeys, including two young baboons, sacred animals destined for a god’s mansion in Kemet. If not for the bundles of reddish, dun-colored, and black-and-white hides stacked against the boulders, he might have thought the cargo from a different ship than the one he had seen in Buhen.
A high-pitched chirp drew his eyes to the wall beyond the cages, where a small gray monkey peered out from the shoul-50 / Lauren Haney der of an oarsman thirteen or so years of age, no doubt the one who had left the imprint in the sand. The boy’s older companion, a heavy-muscled sailor with a crooked nose, hugged his knees close and glared at Pahuro. Painted figures of cattle and men marched across the wall above their heads, and above the cages as well. Farther back, additional blue-black and red drawings decorated the wall behind stacks of wild animal skins-leopard, zebra, and giraffe-baskets of ostrich eggs and feathers, and jars and baskets and chests whose labels identified their contents as aromatic oils, spices, and incense.
So much of value, so many beautiful and rare objects, each and every one, Bak was convinced, an item of contraband.
He held out his hand, palm up. It was sweaty, but at least it did not shake, betraying his excitement. “I’ll need the ship’s manifest.”
Ignoring the sailor with the crooked nose, whose face was aflush with anger and blame, Pahuro walked the length of the shelter and brought back a gray baked clay jar containing a half-dozen rolls of papyrus. “No one in my village can read nor can the sailors who came to us after the wreck, but the scroll you want must be here.”
Bak glanced at notes scrawled on the outside of the documents. He found not one sealed manifest, as he should have, but two. The first was short and concise, listing cowhides, ebony logs, and the coffin of a man named Amenemopet taken aboard at Kor and copper ingots loaded at Buhen. It was written in the familiar, cramped hand of a senior scribe Bak knew well. The second was longer, recording the exotic objects in the shelter in addition to the more ordinary items.
It was a false manifest, intended to convince any curious inspector that the entire cargo was legitimate. The writing was neat with perfectly formed symbols, as if prepared by a scribe intent on omitting all slovenly habits that might some time in the future point to him as the author.
Bak walked the length of the shelter, comparing the list with the items he saw. Without an exact count, he could not be sure, but he thought he found everything. Numbers of individual objects could be compared with the document later when they were loaded on Ramose’s ship for transport to Buhen.
Scrolls in hand, his excitement tamped down to a manage-able level, he stood before the sailors. “Where’s Captain Roy?”
“Gone,” the older sailor growled. “Washed overboard.”
Bak glanced at the youth for confirmation.
“It’s true!” The monkey grabbed the boy around the neck, startled by the tension in his voice. “The storm struck sooner than Captain Roy expected. We were still securing the cargo, trying to tie down the logs. The air was so thick we couldn’t see our feet beneath us. The captain knew these waters as I know the freckles on my hands, so he stood on the bow, searching for safe harbor. A great wave struck us, and he was gone. And so was Woserhet and Maya, though we didn’t miss them until later.”
The tale had a ring of truth, but…“How did you find the wadi where your ship lies now?”
“The gods took pity on us! We were blown into its mouth!”
The boy looked awed by the memory. “We didn’t know where we were. If we had, we might’ve saved the vessel.”
“We thought we were on the open water,” his companion growled.
The boy nodded. “Not until we ran aground did we realize our error.”
The older sailor sneered. “If the captain had been with us, he’d have known.”
Bak could well imagine the chaos that must have reigned with no man to give orders and no one knowing what to do.
“Where’d you load this precious cargo?”
“At Kor,” the man said before the boy could answer.
Bak gave him a withering glance. “I know exactly what you loaded at Kor: hides, ebony, and the coffin. You loaded the copper at Buhen three days ago, and later that same afternoon you sailed north.”
The youth, eyes wide and afraid, opened his mouth to 52 / Lauren Haney speak. His companion clamped a hand tight around his thigh, digging his fingers deep, drawing a cry from the boy that sent the monkey cowering into his arms.
“My Medjay sergeant is even now searching out your fellow sailors. He’ll find them, you can be sure.” Tapping the man’s knee with a scroll, Bak made his voice ominous. “Will you tell me what I wish to know, or will you stand back and let another man speak? Will you be given favorable treatment because you helped me, or will one of your fellows walk away from Buhen, freed of all guilt, while you go with the others to the desert mines?”
The man glanced at the boy, whose eyes pleaded for openness and honesty. He spat off to the side, as if obliged to show his contempt, and began to speak, his mien surly, his tone grudging. “We stopped that night about halfway between here and Buhen. On the west bank of the river. A lonely spot of desert too barren and dry for any man to live.
A fire drew us to the shore, where we found all you see here.
We loaded in haste, barely able to see, stumbling from the fire’s meager light to our ship, where Captain Roy held a torch. After all was stowed on deck, we set sail.”
“Who did you meet there? Who turned these objects over to your captain?”
“We saw no one.” The sailor lowered his gaze, as if the question made him uneasy. “It was a dark night, with no moon to speak of. Away from the fire, we couldn’t see our hands before our faces. Guards may’ve been posted, but we didn’t see them.”
The tale sounded farfetched, like the stories Bak’s father had long ago told his young son to tire him with excitement so he would fall sleep. Like those tales of myth and adventure, Bak longed to believe. “Can you show me that place?”
The man hesitated, frowned. “I think so, but…” He glanced at the boy, who looked as uncertain as he did. “We can try.”
A long, trilling whistle sounded from afar. A Medjay signal.
Bak hastened outside and looked up the wadi toward the path that climbed the escarpment to the north. Imsiba was hurrying down the track, followed by a motley crew of men.
The missing sailors.
Several of Ramose’s men brought up the rear lest anyone try to flee. Bak glanced toward the west and the orange-red glow of the lord Re, a sliver of flame on the horizon. Too late to load Ramose’s ship, and too late to set sail. But a satisfactory day nonetheless. More than satisfactory.