“The lord Re must think man a toy.” Imsiba scowled at the dry, eroded watercourse below. “To spread bits of his golden flesh through these vile desert wadis, then tempt man with the metal’s perfection, was an act of cruelty beyond measure.”
Bak headed across a steep slope covered with loose, broken rocks, taking care where he placed his feet. “You’ve lived in the land of Kemet too long,” he teased. “You’ve been spoiled by a life of ease and comfort.”
“Humph!” Not long after midday, the caravan had entered the wadi where the mine called the Mountain of Re was located. Bak and his Medjays had left the long line of men and donkeys before it reached its destination. While they had set up camp on a rocky shelf some distance above the wadi floor, the sturdy beasts had been led farther up the dry watercourse to the miners’ camp, where food, water, tools, and other supplies had been unloaded. After an hour’s rest, the animals had been laden with empty water jars, and the drovers, under the watchful eyes of Harmose and his archers, had led them off to a spring a few hours’ walk away. Dust hung in the air along the path they had taken. Nebwa’s troops had camped lower down the wadi, Mery’s men with them.
Imsiba laid his bow and quiver beside a cracked, rough-surfaced boulder and removed a sandal to brush a rock fragment from the sole of his foot. “My own sweat has washed the dust of travel from my body, and I feel like a man cooking in his own juice.”
Bak’s smile broadened. “I heard no complaints from the nomad shepherds we passed along the trail.” He had no need to remind the sergeant that the nomads were Medjays, just as he was.
“They know no better way of life. If they did, my friend, they, too, would find fault with their lot.”
Bak eyed the surrounding terrain, and his smile faltered. Like the sergeant, he thought the land foul, a place forsaken by the gods. The wadi was narrow, the dun-colored peaks to either side harsh, ragged, and barren of life. The heat was intense, the sun blinding. Sweat trickled down his face, breast, back, and thighs. Thirst parched his mouth. He longed to taste the waters of the river and to feel its soothing current the length of his body.
He shook off the dream and spoke with reluctance. “Nebwa drew me aside this morning. He complained of the many times you stand apart with Harmose and speak of things no other men can hear.”
Imsiba’s mouth tightened. “Who I make my friend is no business of his.”
“He thinks the two of you plot against the caravan. He fears for its safety and for the safety of the gold we’ll carry when we return to Buhen.”
“Surely you don’t believe him!”
“You know I don’t!” Bak wiped the sweat from his face and spoke in a more reasonable voice. “No man is more loyal to the land of Kemet than you, Imsiba. But I must admit I feel no better about your friendship than Nebwa does.”
“Because you suspect Harmose of murder and theft?” Imsiba’s laugh was hard, cynical. “You err! He’s as eager to find the man who slew Commandant Nakht as you are, and as worried for mistress Azzia.”
Bak tried to swallow the lump rising in his throat, a lump which formed each time he thought of Azzia. Where is she? he wondered. Safe in Buhen? Or has she gone to Ma’am and is she standing even now before the viceroy? Could she already be dead, unjustly punished?
Shoving away so fearsome a thought, Bak forced an apologetic smile. “I worry at seeing you befriend a man who might be less than he seems, that’s all.”
The Medjay did not return the smile. “I accept your belief in the woman’s innocence. Can you not accept mine that Harmose is without guilt?”
“I’d like to, yes, but I dare not.”
Stiff with wounded pride, Imsiba shouldered his quiver and picked up his bow. “That boulder overlooks the mine.” He pointed to a wind-gouged lump of stone protruding from the hillside farther along their path. “I’ll watch you from there. Should any man approach you with a dagger in his hand or a spear or any other weapon, my arrows will fly true.”
Bak muttered an oath at his friend’s obstinacy. He glanced along the slope in the direction from which they had come, squinting to lessen the glare. A craggy outcrop hid their campsite, but two of his men, both fully armed, were traversing the hillside at a higher level, ensuring his safety. If the man he hoped to catch meant to slay him, he had made no attempt during the long trek from Buhen. Imsiba and the other Medjays were as concerned for his welfare as he was for theirs, and as careful to guard his back. This his adversary doubtless knew.
“The men who follow us can use the bow as well as you.” Bak clasped his friend’s shoulder, determined to mend the rift between them. “You must come with me to the mine. We’ll be here only a few days, and I’ll need your eyes and ears If I’m to learn how gold is stolen.”
The invitation was a declaration of trust and the big Medjay accepted it as such. His gloomy expression dissolved, and a smile formed on his lips, a twinkle in his eye. “You err, my friend. My skill with the bow is unmatched. But if you wish to place your life in the hands of lesser men, so be it.”
Bak and Imsiba stood among a cluster of jagged, broken boulders lying alongside a stream of loose sand and rocks, the rubble left by water which had rushed down the hillside many months, maybe years in the past. They stared across the wadi, taking their first good look at the mine, a gaping hole in the opposite slope fifteen or so paces above the dry watercourse. The peak towered above the hole, its face harsh and precipitous, its summit capped by boulders.
The tunnel opened onto a shelf formed from the refuse of the mining process. A chain of nearly naked men, all burned by the sun, plodded along the shelf, carrying rush baskets filled with rocks. They were hauling their heavy burden from the mine to a dozen or so lean-tos built on a mound of refuse that filled the base of a short, steep subsidiary wadi. A foreman stood on the slope above them, his stubby leather whip held in the crook of his arm. Shadowy figures labored inside the shelters, rickety affairs made of piled stones and twisted branches covered with cloth, rushes, brush, whatever came to hand to stave off the sun. At least a dozen guards, hard-looking men armed with spears, kept a wary eye on the activity.
Paser and Nebwa stood on the wadi floor below the mine, talking to a hulking man with a neck so thick it seemed a part of his head. His left shoulder sagged, the arm hung useless and wasted. Bak saw that he carried a baton of office.
“The man with Paser and Nebwa must be Wadjet-Renput, overseer of this mine.”
“So I assume,” Imsiba said. “A good man, Harmose told me. He once oversaw a gang of stonemasons building our sovereign’s new memorial temple across the river from the capital.”
Bak chose to ignore the reference to the archer. He wanted no further argument. “What of his arm?”
“A column toppled, with him beneath.” Imsiba’s voice grew sad, pitying. “It took him many months to heal and when he did he was sent here.”
So terrible a reward after so dreadful a misfortune might make a man bitter, Bak thought, bitter enough to seek revenge. “How long ago did he come?”
“Five months, no more.”
The gold had been taken over the course of a year, starting long before Wadjet-Renput’s time. True, he could have been made a party to the thefts upon his arrival, but it was equally possible that he, a man with no experience of mining, could be blinded by a clever deception.
“Our sovereign thought him bad luck,” Imsiba added.
Bak tore his thoughts from the gold. He wanted no talk of bad luck. “More likely,” he scoffed, “she wanted no man there to remind the others of the danger they faced when raising those huge blocks of stone.”
His words failed to erase the uneasy look from Imsiba’s face. “Bad luck and danger make an uneasy partnership, my friend. This Mountain of Re strikes a fear in my heart like few other places I’ve been.”
Like most individuals isolated from their equals, Wadjet-Renput proved to be a garrulous man. He greeted Imsiba with as much enthusiasm as he did Bak and, starved for news of the capital, questioned them both at length. Paser made a pretense of being aloof, but Bak noticed he paid particular attention to the sometimes spectacular rise in positions of men close to his cousin Senenmut. Nebwa shuffled from foot to foot, bored with talk of a world he had never known, and scowled his disapproval at the Medjay’s inclusion in the group.
Aware of the time slipping away, Bak took advantage of a break in the conversation. “How many men toil here?” he asked, eyeing the mine-mouth, the line of filthy, sweating men laden with baskets, and the lean-tos.
Wadjet-Renput’s gaze traveled from one end of the shelf to the other, and his chest swelled with pride. “Eighty prisoners and half as many guards. The miners work in gangs of ten, which I rotate from one task to another each week. Half the guards stay here, the rest keep watch from the heights around us.”
Bak could not understand how any man could hold his head high with so cruel an assignment, but he thanked the lord Amon it was so, for it would make his own task easier. “Neither Imsiba nor I have seen gold taken from stone. Will you show us?”
The overseer’s face lit up like a lamp. “Come!” He plunged up a path worn smooth by many feet, as quick and agile as a gazelle in spite of his useless arm, and stopped on the shelf not far from the lean-tos.
Bak exchanged a quick glance with Imsiba and they hastened after him. Nebwa looked down the wadi as if his camp beckoned, but decided to follow. Paser frowned, evidently preferring gossip to a tour of a mine he had visited often, and plodded up the slope behind them.
Wadjet-Renput glanced at the sky, where the sun hugged the weathered peaks to the west. “It’s too late to enter the mine; no man stays inside after dusk.” Shaking off an obvious disappointment, he smiled. “That you can see tomorrow, the rest I’ll show you now.”
A bearer trudged past, reeking of sweat. He stopped at a knee-high pile of broken rock near the lean-tos, swung the heavy basket from his shoulder, and dumped his load. A fine pale dust rose in the air, coating his already grimy body. As he turned back to retrace his path, he looked neither right nor left, merely plodded past the onlookers like an ox across a field. Bak gave silent thanks to the lord Amon that he was not that man.
Wadjet-Renput plucked a rock from the pile, held it out so they could see the glittering flecks in the quartz, and began to talk. He moved on to the nearest lean-to and the next and the next, explaining, elaborating, adding anecdotes of success and disappointment as the miners had followed the vein deeper into the mountain. They watched nearly naked men huddled beneath the lean-tos, crushing the rocks to the size of peas in large mortars. Others ground the ground stone in hand mills to the consistency of coarse sand. A third group washed the powder in a sloping stone basin, using precious water to separate out the heavier gold.
Prisoner-miners they were, men who had killed or stolen or cheated or committed some other serious offense against their fellow man, offending the gods by their behavior. A few went mad in the heat, Bak knew; others died of exposure or in accidents, or their hearts stopped beating when they could take no more. None who returned to Kemet ever forgot the mine; none repeated his offense. And no wonder, Bak thought, for he could think of no greater punishment than drawing the precious flesh of the lord Re from stone.
He watched and listened intently, seeing many points in the process where gold could be stolen, but never more than a few grains at a time. At that rate, it would take months to collect a large enough amount to make a bar the size of the one hidden in his bedchamber in Buhen. Yet if he had interpreted Nakht’s scroll correctly, enough gold had disappeared in one year to make a dozen or more similar bars. One glance at Imsiba told him his friend was equally puzzled.
As they watched a prisoner pick golden granules from the bottom of a basin, Bak asked Wadjet-Renput, “How much gold is lost to theft?”
“You jest!” The overseer swept his baton in an arc, drawing all eyes to the dry and rock-strewn land around them. “What man with good sense would try such a thing?”
“Greed sometimes makes men foolish-and desperate.”
“Bah!” Nebwa spat on the earth by his feet. “These men have been reduced to animals. What use can a witless beast make of so precious a metal?”
“They watch each other, Bak.” Paser spoke as if to a child with an overactive imagination. “None is willing to share the blame for another man’s folly, and such would be the case if gold were found missing.”
They walked to the final lean-to, built on the hillside three or four paces above the others. Wadjet-Renput beamed at the man inside. He was scrawny, about thirty years of age, with short curly hair and hands so delicate Maatkare Hatshepsut herself would have envied him. He wore a long kilt and sat behind a scale and a set of weights. A pile of pottery cones lay beside one hip, writing implements by the other. He was a scribe, not a prisoner.
“This is Roy,” the overseer said, “the foremost teller of obscene jokes in the land of Kemet.”
A shrill whistle pierced the air, cutting short the introduction.
“The day has ended,” Wadjet-Renput explained and added with a contented smile, “Shall we see what our labor has brought forth for our divine sovereign?”
Bak was surprised at how much time had passed. The sun had slipped beyond the horizon. The wadi lay in shadow, and the peaks to either side were bathed in an orange-gold afterglow. He had been so intent on learning all he could that he had forgotten his thirst and the heat enveloping the land.
The bearers made a final trip across the shelf to empty their baskets. A gang of naked men snaked out of the mine, so covered with dust they looked as if the lord Khnum had molded them on his potter’s wheel from the earth itself. The men who crushed the stone and those who ground it up abandoned their lean-tos. A dozen guards shepherded the lot off the shelf and up the wadi toward their camp.
Those who remained, the men who washed the gold from the rock, carried small pottery bowls to the lean-to and handed them to the scribe. Inside each bowl were the glittering grains so painstakingly collected through the long, sweltering day. Bak’s pulse quickened. This lean-to, with so much of the precious metal in the hands of one man, seemed a likely place for theft. Except two guards stood close by, watching the exchange.
As the prisoners hurried away, Roy poured all the gold into a single round-bottomed spouted bowl about the size of his cupped hand. He then weighed it. While he toiled, he chattered to those watching, relating one tale after another, all funny, all vividly obscene. Bak laughed with the rest, but kept a surreptitious eye on those delicate fingers, intrigued by their deft manipulation of the bowls and the weights. The guards, he noticed, were too distracted by the talk of women and pleasure to pay attention to Roy’s supple hands.
Bak caught Imsiba’s eye. The Medjay was laughing along with the rest, but his brief nod said that he, too, thought the scribe a likely source of the stolen gold.
How could one be sure?
Reaching into the lean-to, Bak grasped the spouted bowl. Shocked, the scribe stopped his patter in midsentence. The guards stiffened, looked to a gaping Wadjet-Renput for guidance. Paser sucked in his breath. Nebwa took a quick step back, his eyes darted from Bak to Imsiba, his hand clutched his dagger. Whether he meant to protect the gold from men he thought thieves or whether Roy was his confederate and he feared discovery, Bak could not tell.
Bak took a generous pinch of the ore between his fingers, careful to hold it over the bowl so none would be lost. “Could a man not take this much gold every day and carry away a handful at the end of a year with no one the wiser?”
“By all the gods in the ennead!” Nebwa exclaimed. “Are we back to that?” His hand remained on his dagger.
“You take your task as a policeman too seriously,” Paser said in a tight voice.
Roy’s face blanched to a waxy white.
Bak dared not look at Imsiba for fear his elation would show. He had seen few men look guiltier or more afraid. As casually as he could, he let the brilliant flecks trickle into the bowl and handed it back. Muttering a disgusted curse, Nebwa let his hand swing away from the dagger. Wadjet-Renput, Paser, and the guards relaxed.
Roy went on with his task, his tongue less glib, his hands no longer so quick and sure. He pried the plug off a partially filled cone, poured in gold nearly to the top, and plugged it with wet clay, which he impressed with the royal seal. Placing it on the scale, he noted its weight and scribbled it on the baked clay surface. The remainder of the ore he poured into an empty cone and repeated each step though the vessel was less than a quarter full. He turned both sealed containers over to Wadjet-Renput.
As at the goldsmiths’ workshop and at every other step of the process, there seemed no way to steal the gold in any significant quantity. Yet Bak was certain the scribe was taking a part of each day’s proceeds. His impulse was to accuse then and there, but common sense prevailed and he elected to wait. Wadjet-Renput would not take kindly to having his scribe charged with a serious offense simply because he looked and acted like a guilty man.
Bak had to find proof. He had to examine the tools of Roy’s trade. There, he felt sure, lay the secret of the thefts. To do so he needed the bright light of day, not the deepening shadows of evening already filling the lean-to. He muttered a frustrated curse at the need to wait and vowed to return at first light. In the meantime, his Medjays would have to watch Roy, to protect him from the same fate Nakht, Heby, and Ruru had suffered. If the scribe were to die, the trail to the man who had slain the three might forever be lost.
“Bak!” A hand clasped his shoulder and shook him awake. Nebwa was bending over him, his face dark, grim. “One of my sentries saw a man leave this campsite last night. He slipped away in the dark, but we caught him this morning, hiding in a crevice above the miners’ camp.”
Bak sat up and blinked the sleep from his eyes. The wadi below was dark, the hillside gray and featureless. The pink glow of dawn had just begun to wash over the eastern peaks. His Medjays lay scattered around him, a few sleeping or pretending to sleep, most raising their heads to peer at the intruder.
“You’ve not harmed him!” Bak’s voice was sharp-edged, concerned.
“Not yet.” Nebwa spat on the ground by his feet. “I thought to hear your explanation first-if you have one.”
Bak rose from his thin sleeping mat and urged Nebwa along the slope away from the camp. “Like you, I think Tetynefer wrong in believing the tribesmen have formed an army. However, should he prove to be right, they might believe this mine vulnerable, the place to start a war. I’ll not let my men fight blind if fight they must. I sent them out to study the ground on which they’d have to stand.”
Nebwa nodded a grudging approval. “You think like a soldier.” His eyes narrowed and he muttered a curse. “We caught one man. How many others slipped past my sentries unseen?”
“Three,” Bak said, careful to give no hint of the gratification he felt. “They’ll describe all they saw to those who remained behind.”
Nebwa’s dour face promised trouble for the negligent sentries.
Bak pressed his advantage. “You’ve had men watching us from the time we left Buhen. Is their task to ensure our safety? Or to protect your army of almost two hundred men from my small company of twenty-four?”
“I want no blame attached to my name if trouble arises, nor do I want to lose men I might someday need.”
“Need? My Medjays?” Bak asked, incredulous.
“Tetynefer is a great fool but, should his prediction come true, I’ll need every man I can get-including your wretched Medjays.”
“Men you don’t trust.”
“If they’re as loyal to Kemet as you claim, let them prove it. If not, no man among them will return to Buhen.”
Bak somehow managed to control his anger. “I want the man you hold. Where is he?”
“My sentries took him to our camp.” Nebwa’s expression soured. “They spoke long and loud of seeing him skulking about the wadi. Those who think the worst have visions of being slain in their sleep by Medjays who steal upon them in the night.”
“You’ve no one to blame but yourself. You’ve said time and time again you think my men traitors and murderers. What can you expect of those who follow you?”
Nebwa’s voice hardened. “I’ll deal with my men, of that you can be sure. To ease my path, you must leave this wadi. I want you gone before the lord Khepre rises above the eastern horizon.”
Bak stepped back a pace, stunned. “What are we to do? Camp alone in the desert, far from food and water?”
“You’ll hunt for game,” Nebwa snarled. “The miners need fresh meat. They’ve had none in more than a month. By the time you return, I’ll have set my men’s thoughts on a proper course.”
He’s done nothing before to quell his men’s fear and hatred, Bak thought. Why is he sending us away now? Is he giving himself time to silence the scribe Roy? An accusation formed on his lips and died unspoken. He could say nothing without proof. He tried to make excuses, but Nebwa was adamant: the meat was needed and men spawned in the desert were the logical choice to hunt it down. It mattered not that none of them had lived in Wawat since they were children. As Nebwa was in command until their return to Buhen, Bak had no choice but to agree.
“We’ll go,” he said, “but Imsiba and three other men must stay. I’ll not leave my campsite untended.” Nor will I leave Roy unprotected, he thought.
Nebwa’s mouth tightened. “You must all go together.”
“You take many men into the desert each day, Nebwa, to sweep the land for raiders. The mine could be attacked while you’re gone. If that should happen, only my Medjays can slip through the enemy lines undetected.”
Nebwa thought it over, said grudgingly, “Leave them here if you must.”
He plunged diagonally down the slope in the direction of his camp, heedless of the rocks and sand his feet set in motion. Bak picked up a palm-sized stone, glared at Nebwa’s back, and turned away to throw it as hard as he could across the hillside. He could not remember a time he had been so outraged. At least with Imsiba staying behind he had no need to worry about Roy’s safety. Or did he?
“…So all is well, my friend,” Imsiba said, summing up the events of the past three days. “The miners toiled from dawn to dusk and Roy weighed the gold as before. No attempt was made on his life. His good spirits have returned as if he has no worry or guilt.”
Bak felt like a man reprieved. “I knew not what I’d find on my return, but I feared the worst.” He gave his friend a weary smile. “I prayed with each step I took that no harm would come to him. Or to you, Imsiba, and the men who stayed with you.”
They stood at a bend in the wadi, looking back at the miners’ camp, a dozen squalid stone hovels joined together with common walls. The shelters clung to the hillside well above the level of the deadly flash floods which sometimes thundered through the narrow valley with no warning. In the dry watercourse below the structures, a gang of men was butchering the four gazelles Bak and his Medjays had delivered at midday. Vultures soared overhead and a jackal barked, birds and beast alike alerted by the metallic stench of blood carried aloft by the gentle breeze.
“I, too, prayed,” Imsiba said grimly. “Each time Nebwa took men from his camp to search the wadis for tribesmen, I feared they’d stumble on you and only the carrion creatures would know what fate befell you.”
“Not a man among us failed to think a similar thought,” Bak admitted. “We marched many long hours before we began the hunt.” He turned away from the camp and headed down the wadi toward the mine. “Tell me, Imsiba. What brought happiness back to Roy’s heart?”
The Medjay’s expression grew perplexed. “Initially I thought him relieved because you’d gone. But later, when he heard you’d returned, he seemed not to care.”
“Who spoke with him? Which of our suspects could’ve set his heart at ease?”
Imsiba snorted his disgust. “All of them. He hasn’t enough to do through much of the day and he’s not a man to gladly spend time alone. He searched out all those who had the leisure to listen to his jokes.” He plodded on a dozen paces, added, “Nebwa spoke with him more often than most. He enjoys that kind of humor and can listen to Roy’s tales well beyond a time when any other man would fall asleep from boredom.”
“All four?” Bak queried Imsiba with a glance. “Harmose returned from the well with the donkeys?”
“Two days ago,” Imsiba admitted. “As he and his fellow archers have had no rest since leaving Buhen, they remained behind while other guards went with the drovers to fill the jars another time.”
Bak sighed. Once more the gods had conspired against him. He knew no more now than he had before. True, he suspected Nebwa more than the others, but to discount any of them would be folly.
A short time later they reached the wadi floor below the mine, too close to the sharp eyes and ears of other men to speak further.
Wadjet-Renput, standing near the clustered lean-tos, shouted a welcome and beckoned them to his side. “You’ve done well, my young friend,” he boomed, clapping Bak on the shoulder. “We’ll make an offering to the lord Re in your favor tonight, of that you can be sure.”
“To hunt in the desert is always a joy.” As indeed it would have been, Bak thought, if he had had no other cares.
The overseer’s expression turned rueful and his good hand moved as if of its own volition to his wasted arm. “I can no longer use the bow, but I well remember the pleasure of the hunt.” Shrugging off regrets, he smiled. “Now that you’ve come back safe and well, the caravan will return to Buhen. If you’re to go inside the mine, I suggest it be today.”
“I’d like to see it, yes,” Bak said, smiling. Imsiba looked less certain, but nodded.
Wadjet-Renput swung around, bellowed, “Roy!”
The scribe popped out of his lean-to and hurried to them. He greeted them effusively, his smile so broad and sly a blind man would have grown suspicious.
“My scribe will guide you.” The overseer grinned at the scrawny clerk, teasing him. “He grows bored with so little to do, and his small size allows him to pass through the tunnels with no trouble. He’s volunteered to go in my place.”
The smile froze on Bak’s face. He thought of Roy’s renewed good spirits and wondered if this was the reason. Had the scribe and his confederate planned a fatal accident in the mine, with Bak as the victim? He had to take the risk. He doubted gold could be stolen before leaving the tunnel, but he must see for himself. Surely the miners, hapless prisoners though they were, would let no man be slain inside when they themselves would be blamed.
He sucked in his breath, heard himself say, “Your offer is most generous, Roy. I thank you.” He glanced at Imsiba, who looked appalled. “I alone will go, Imsiba. You’ll remain here to await our return.”
“You’ll not go without me!”
“What if a tunnel should collapse?” Bak asked, making it a joke, sneaking a look at the scribe. Roy gave no outward sign that such might be the case, but…“Our men would have no shepherd to care for their safety, and the knowledge we share would be lost to other men.”
Imsiba took the hint and said no more. As he walked to the mouth of the mine with Bak and Roy, his face was grim and disapproving.
When they reached the gaping hole into the earth, the foreman whistled a signal. The sound was repeated by a bearer inside and by another and another until it faded away deep within the mine. The signal warned bearers and miners alike, Roy explained, that free men, not prisoners, were entering and would pass through to the end.
Bak gave Imsiba a reassuring smile, uttered a brief but fervent prayer to the lord Amon, and strode into the tunnel behind the scribe. His heart was pounding so loud he failed to hear the Medjay’s farewell. A polished bronze mirror at the entrance caught the sun and threw it deeper into the passage, where it struck another mirror to light the next segment of tunnel. Each time they passed through the beam, a blackness deeper than the darkest night filled the passage ahead. Bak thanked the gods that Roy walked ahead of him instead of behind.
The tunnel began to slope upward and narrowed to the width of Bak’s shoulders. The ceiling dropped so low in places he had to hunch over. Small pottery lamps replaced the mirrors as sources of light, their soft flames filling the passages with an eerie yellow glow. Bak bumped his head, scraped an arm, stumbled over the rough floor. With the space so cramped, the bearers had to relay the rock-filled baskets from one man to the next. They toiled like oxen, communicated with grunts. They were coated with yellowish grime, a mixture of dust and bitter-smelling sweat. When Bak and Roy passed, they shrank back into shallow alcoves or the pitch black mouths of old, abandoned secondary tunnels.
This mine, Roy told him, was deeper than most and more spacious, a better place for a prisoner to fulfill his sentence. If so, Bak thought, edging past an outcropping rock, he hated to think what the other mines were like.
They plodded on, veering slightly to right or left, following the vein of gold-bearing quartz. The tunnel shrank further, forcing them at times to bend at the waist or to sidle through spaces so narrow Bak feared he would get stuck. Sweat rolled off his body, as much from nervous strain as from the heat. He yearned to escape this nightmare place, but his mission drove him forward. As did the desire to face the trap he was certain the scribe meant to spring.
The heat grew more intense, the air more suffocating. The light ahead seemed brighter but cloudier. They heard the rhythmic thunk of mallets on chisels, which accounted for the dust floating around them. They had reached the end of the tunnel.
Roy knelt so Bak could see beyond him. One begrimed man tended a fire, which blazed before the wall at the head of the passage, heating the rock so it would fracture and break. Three others knocked away flame-blackened sections of wall, using wooden mallets and heavy bronze chisels. Another smashed the fallen sections into smaller pieces to fill baskets setting at his feet. Secondary tunnels, none more than a dozen paces long, opened to right and left, where equal numbers of begrimed men performed identical tasks. They worked like wooden dolls with jointed legs and arms, expressionless faces.
Bak watched as long as he could stand it, absorbing every detail. He did not know which was worse: the thick air, the reek of sweat, or the revulsion he felt for men whose excessive greed or anger or licentious behavior had set them apart from their kind and, in the end, had brought them lower than beasts of burden. Yielding at last to the urge to flee, he tapped Roy’s shoulder to let him know he had seen enough and headed back the way he had come. The nape of his neck prickled with awareness of the scribe behind him, and he slipped into the first secondary passage he came to, more relieved than he cared to admit.
With a sly smile, the scribe hurried on ahead, barely giving the bearers he met time to get out of the way. His sudden haste worried Bak, who stumbled after him as fast as he could, determined not to let him out of sight. He wanted no surprises, such as Roy slipping unseen into a secondary tunnel and leaping out with a weapon to strike him down from behind.
The tunnel broadened, the floor leveled out. The scribe strode past one mirror and the other, with Bak closing the distance between them. Ahead he saw an irregular oval of natural light, the mouth of the mine. He hastened on, drawn by the bright glow and the clean, pure air he longed for. Roy’s speed slackened midway along the final passage. He clutched his side and grimaced as if a stitch had developed. Bak was suspicious; his instincts cried out for caution. He saw Imsiba, standing with the foreman a dozen paces beyond the exit, a relieved smile on his face. All was well outside, it seemed. The scribe walked on, holding his side. Bak followed close behind. A bearer entered the mine with an empty basket and stepped aside to let them pass. The foreman whistled, signaling the men deeper in the mine that they had the tunnel to themselves.
Throwing caution aside, Bak slipped past Roy and the bearer and hurried out through the mouth of the tunnel. As he stepped from shadow to sunlight, he heard the rumble of falling rock. Imsiba and the foreman looked upward; their faces froze. The Medjay yelled. Bak swung around, saw the hillside above collapsing. Sand, rocks of all sizes, and boulders were sliding, tumbling, bouncing toward the wadi floor, and he was directly in their path.
Imsiba hit him, the full weight of his body knocking Bak off his feet and away from the mouth of the mine. The force of the impact carried them off the shelf and they tumbled together to the wadi floor, bombarded by sand and rocks falling from above, enveloped in a cloud of dust. They scrambled to their feet and ducked off to the side, away from the fall. The rumble subsided. A few isolated rocks continued to clatter downward, hidden within the cloud of dust billowing out from the hillside. The cloud quickly broke up in the breeze and drifted away, revealing the sloping mass of rocks, boulders, and sand under which the mine entrance was buried.
Bak was appalled. Thirty, maybe more, prisoners were trapped inside. “Summon our men!” he yelled, scrambling up the slope.
Imsiba’s whistle carried above the horrified murmurs of prisoners stumbling out of the lean-tos to gather on the shelf near the base of the slide. The two Medjays stationed on the slope opposite the mine relayed the signal, dropped their weapons, and half-ran, half-slid down to the wadi floor. The rest of the men appeared within moments and followed suit.
Standing on the shelf, Bak studied the fall and the scarred hillside above. The shape of the summit had changed. At least one large boulder no longer stood where it had before. Below, other boulders had been swept away as if by a torrential flood.
“That slide was no accident, my friend,” Imsiba said in a grim voice. “You were meant to die.”
Bak tore his eyes from the peak and stared at the mass covering the mine-mouth. “Did Roy follow me out, Imsiba? Or did he step back to save himself?”
The question hung between them unanswered.