“Dig them out!” Wadjet-Renput yelled.
Prisoners and guards alike gawked at the slide, too stunned to think or act.
“Move, you vermin!” he bellowed. “Would you want to be buried alive?”
The men dived at the slide, frantically scrabbling at rocks and sand. They made almost no headway, merely shifted the debris from one place to another. Shouting a string of curses, the overseer grabbed a basket of gold-bearing rocks abandoned by a bearer, tipped its contents onto the ground, and shoved it into the hands of the closest man. Imsiba ran along the shelf, collecting more baskets. Bak organized the newly arrived Medjays and set all but two to work. Those two he sent to Roy’s lean-to with orders to protect its contents with their lives. If the scribe no longer lived, his belongings might speak for him.
Wadjet-Renput quelled the miners’ frenzy and split them into gangs, appointing guards and Medjays to lead them. Soldiers drawn by the shouts pitched in to help. The mound of fallen stone was soon covered with men toiling under Bak’s sharp eyes, and the overseer was shouting commands at lines of men hauling away the debris.
The mound was bathed in heat. Dust clouded the air. The vultures widened their circle as if they sensed death within the mine. Empty baskets were filled to the brim and carried away. Sand and rocks slid beneath bare feet, sometimes carrying the men above into the arms of those below. Dislodged rocks clattered downward amid warning yells and nervous laughter. Smaller debris was scooped from around boulders that Imsiba prised loose with a lever and allowed, when all was clear, to roll into the wadi. Several times, the hulking young Medjay Kasaya shifted a boulder by brute force alone.
When the slide had been cleared to a quarter of its former size, a gap opened at the top, allowing fresh air to enter the tunnel. The men outside heard a muffled cheer from within. Buzzing with excitement, they labored on with renewed energy. The hole grew steadily larger until the trapped men were able to crawl out one at a time. Roy was not among them. A head count of bearers came up two short. After much hugging and thanking men and gods alike, the released miners, too shaken to toil on what remained of the slide, stumbled down to the wadi floor to await news of the missing trio.
The rescuers, grim-faced, fearful of what they might find, dug away more of the mound, levered away a boulder, and went to work on the rubble inside. A low moan led them to a man buried in loose sand and rocks, a bearer covered with bruises and groggy from a bump on the head, but otherwise unhurt. The second bearer, they found buried under the rubble beside a blood-stained boulder. He was breathing, but would not long survive the great ugly gash that bared the bones of his chest and shoulder.
They found Roy crushed beneath another boulder. He would never speak again. Bak knelt beside the torn and bloody form, half sick with horror and disappointment. The scribe, like Heby, had been doomed the moment he had taken for himself the flesh of the lord Re, but why, Bak wondered, did he have to die like this, before he named the man who had planned the thefts?
Roy’s lean-to was bathed in sunlight. It’s contents looked no different than they had the day Bak had watched the scribe receive the gold and weigh it. He prayed to the lord Amon that in the ensuing days Roy had not substituted one weight for another, or one bowl or anything else. He sat on a flat stone the scribe had used as a stool and inspected the scale, the weights, and the baked clay cones, moving from one object to another, studying each intently. On the hillside behind him, the Medjays he had assigned to guard the lean-to chatted in their own tongue. A tiny brown bird twittered atop a nearby lean-to while it searched for insects among the twigs and rushes. The men at the mine, clearing away the last of the slide debris, spoke with voices muted by the deaths of their fellows.
Bak picked up one of three round-bottomed spouted bowls Roy had used to collect the golden ore for weighing. He noticed a slight discoloration on its lower surface, both inside and out, but thought nothing of it. The second bowl was a consistent reddish-brown. The bottom of the third, like the first, was a shade darker. This time the stain aroused his suspicions. Praying that he held in his hand a key to the thefts, he scratched the discolored interior surface with his fingernail. Bits of dried mud flaked off the baked clay.
Practically holding his breath, he scraped away the remainder of the thin mud veneer. A single flat bead remained in the center of the bowl. He wiped the sweat from his brow and, fairly certain of what lay beneath, pried it up. It plugged a hole, small enough to escape notice, large enough for small granules of gold to seep through. He turned the bowl over. The hole did not penetrate the discolored bottom surface. He was not disappointed; he had expected as much. With trembling fingers, he scraped off the dry mud skin, disclosing another small hole. He raised the bowl toward the sun, twisted it around a bit, and laughed aloud as he matched up the inner and outer holes. The bottom of the bowl was hollow.
He felt like shouting his joy to all the world. He knew at last how the gold was taken. Roy would coat the outer surface with mud and let it dry. The next time he used the bowl, bits of gold would trickle into the cavity from above. Later, alone and unseen, he would open the bottom hole and let the gold flow into a cone, which he would later hide on one of the donkeys bound for Buhen.
Bak resisted the urge to break the bowl and look at the cavity or to tamper with the second mud-coated bowl. He would save them until later, until the time came when he had to demonstrate to Tetynefer how the gold had been stolen before the eyes of many unsuspecting men. Of course, he had yet to identify the man responsible for the thefts and for Roy’s death and the others, but he felt more certain of success than he had for many days.
He wrapped his trophies in the dirty cloth Roy had used to erase his scribal mistakes. Heby must have made the bowls, forming the wet clay around molded lumps of wax that melted away when they were fired. He had seen no spouted bowls in Heby’s house, but…the crucible shard! Yes, he had noticed a hollow at the bottom, a fault, he had assumed. Heby had used exactly the same method to melt the gold that Roy had used to steal it, forming the thin slabs in the false bottom of a crucible while a dozen or so coworkers toiled around him.
Bak clambered up the final steep, rocky incline and stood amid the jumble of outcropping stone and boulders that capped the summit above the mine. From high above the wadi, he watched the two Medjays return to their camp, one carrying the bundle containing the false-bottomed bowls. He was delighted at having found them, but could not help but castigate himself for his failure to question Roy the instant his suspicions were aroused. If he had not been so set on finding proof before he acted, the scribe would still be alive and he would know the name of the man responsible for murder and theft.
While Imsiba ascended the last few paces, Bak wiped the sweat from his face, the self-blame from his thoughts. At least he knew how the gold had been stolen, and with Roy dead, no more would be taken. He gazed down the hillside to the wadi floor below. Miners, guards, soldiers, and Medjays, all so filthy it was hard to tell them apart, were standing or sitting or squatting, their arms around each other’s shoulders, their voices loud and raucous.
“Look at them,” he said with a bemused smile. “Yesterday misery filled the miners’ hearts; they walked like wooden dolls and none thought of any man but himself. Our men stood alone, with few soldiers willing to befriend them. Today they celebrate life together, sharing their small rations of beer with men they feel closer to than brothers.”
Imsiba chuckled. “I think we Medjays have proved our worth today.”
“Maybe not to Nebwa’s satisfaction, but the miners won’t forget.” Bak clasped his sergeant’s shoulder, teased, “If one among them is a teller of tall tales, you may someday be spoken of as heroes, men who sit among the gods.”
Imsiba’s cynical snort failed to hide the pleasure the thought gave him.
Bak sobered, eyed the boulder-strewn summit. “Come. Let’s look for proof of what we suspect.”
They sidled between two boulders and worked their way around a jagged slab of rock to the topmost point of the landslide. There they found two stone fangs the height of a man and, between them, a depression partially filled with sand. Both fangs showed signs of recent damage on the sides facing the shallow hole. The fresh abrasions and places where the stone had broken away were paler than the rock, which had been long exposed to the weather. The fangs had supported another tooth, which would ultimately have fallen through the natural process of erosion, but probably not for many years without help.
Bak knelt beside the depression and picked up a chunk of broken rock as thick as the palm of his hand. The boulder had been well-supported and could not have been easy to dislodge. Rocking forward, he dug through the sand. He found several bits of wood and a splinter half the length of his lower arm, rounded on one side as if torn from a pole. Someone had levered the boulder off the summit.
“I doubt the man who did this carried his lever back to camp,” he said, holding up the splinter. “He’d not risk someone noticing.”
Imsiba glanced toward the west, where the sun hung low over the horizon. “We’ll soon be robbed of daylight, my friend. We must hurry if we’re to find it.”
They examined every square cubit of the summit, working as quickly and thoroughly as possible. They found nothing but a few indentations in the soft sand that might have been footprints.
Assuming the man who had set off the slide had intended to destroy the bowls in Roy’s lean-to, they worked their way down the back side of a steep, irregular shoulder that dropped to the floor of the secondary wadi behind the shelters. Rocks and boulders of all sizes cluttered the slope, cracks and crevices abounded. Sharp, broken stone scraped their sandaled feet. The hot still air caked the dust on their sweaty bodies. They found no sign that another man had preceded them until, halfway to the wadi floor, the last lingering rays of the setting sun touched an object jammed into a narrow fissure, making it shine. Hurrying to it, they saw the tip of a polished bronze spear point.
“Will you bet a good, long drink of water that this isn’t the lever we’ve been seeking?” Bak asked.
“You think me so foolish, my friend?”
Bak tugged the weapon free. The end of the shaft was broken, jagged. The splinter he had found on the summit fit snugly within a long gouge that followed the grain of the wood. The identifying symbol, much to his relief and Imsiba’s, told them the weapon had come from the garrison arsenal rather than their own. Bak murmured a prayer of thanks to the lord Re and another to the lord Amon for good measure. The Medjay’s long silence testified to the fervor with which he gave thanks.
The two men descended a mass of tumbled rocks and came upon a narrow trail which followed the contour of the hillside. Bak thought it a wild animal track, but a closer look told him many human feet had smoothed its surface.
“While you were hunting in the desert, Pashenuro came upon a shrine near the upper end of this wadi,” Imsiba said. “This must be the path to reach it.”
“A shrine?” Bak’s eyes narrowed. “Let’s take a look.”
“Even if the man we hope to find went that way, he’d have gone long ago.”
“True, but he may have left an offering to appease the god for the destruction he wrought on the mine and those trapped within. We might learn who he is by what he left.”
The path rose steadily, taking them up the rough, narrow watercourse. Soon they saw, a hundred or so paces ahead, an uneven rock-hewn stairway rising to a deep semicircular bay atop a ledge. A movement caught Bak’s eye, a bit of white. Someone was up there. The man who had hidden the spear? Would he have remained for so long?
Bak and Imsiba forgot their thirst, their bruised and aching feet. They raced along the path through the deepening shadow of evening. Gripping the damaged spear, Bak took the stairs two at a time and, with the Medjay at his side, burst onto the ledge. The archer Harmose was there, kneeling at the rear of the bay, his head bowed. Imsiba pulled up short, his sandal skidding on the gritty floor. Harmose swung around, startled, and clutched the dagger at his waist. He saw who they were, his hand fell from the weapon, and he rose to his feet.
“I thought no one near,” he said with a sheepish smile. “I should’ve known I’d not be alone for long.”
Imsiba stared, looking surprised and rather confused.
“How long have you been here?” Bak demanded. “Why have you come?”
Harmose frowned, puzzled by the brusque questions. “I came to give thanks for the men whose lives were spared.”
Bak walked deeper into the bay. Boulders lay on the slopes to right and left, most of them etched with graffiti left by men who had toiled in the mine through the passing years. In the center, behind the archer, he saw a small shrine carved in the living rock. The gray-brown body of a dead hare lay in the deep niche. Bak lifted it’s head. It was limp, not long dead.
Imsiba relaxed, smiled at the archer. “We thought…”
“How long ago did you come?” Bak cut in, glaring a warning at the sergeant.
Harmose shrugged. “Not long. I knew nothing of the accident until after the tunnel had been opened. I saw the men come out and thought, while I was close by, to bend a knee in gratitude for their safety. Why do you ask?”
Bak scowled at the offering. Would the man who had caused the landslide have had the time to flush a hare? “Accident?” He shifted the spear so the archer could see the damaged end. “A man used this to unseat a boulder high above the mine-mouth. Now two men are dead.”
Harmose’s horrified eyes darted to Imsiba and back. “You think the slide deliberate? Surely you know not what you say!”
Could anyone pretend such shock, such revulsion? Bak glanced at Imsiba, who gave him an I-told-you-so look. The big Medjay obviously had no reservations about the man he had so recently made his friend.
“Imsiba and I have been high above this wadi since the slide was cleared. How did you get here unseen by either of us?”
Harmose could not help but realize the import of the question. He spoke in a voice tight with suppressed anger. “I came over that ridge.” He pointed west, toward a point from which he could have seen the mine, but Bak and Imsiba could not have seen him. Clamping his mouth shut, he pivoted on his heel and strode to a boulder near the shrine. From a space alongside, he withdrew his bow and quiver and the limp bodies of five hares. He held the creatures up by the thong binding their rear legs together. “I spent much of the day hunting in the wadi west of here.”
Bak knew from his own hunting excursion that to find six hares and slay them took much patience and many hours, especially in the heat of the day when small creatures hid from the sun and from birds of prey.
“I’ve taken no human lives,” Harmose snapped. “Nor will I ever except on the field of battle.”
“You must forgive the questions,” Imsiba said quietly. “We had to ask, as you must know.”
Bak left Imsiba to placate the archer and wandered around the arc of boulders. He looked at the words scratched into the rocks but his thoughts were on Harmose, a man who had volunteered to help his Medjays should trouble arise with Nebwa’s men. The archer behaved like an innocent man. The hares were newly slain. And Imsiba, usually a good judge of men, trusted him.
Bak stopped before a text so worn he had trouble reading it in the deepening twilight: “I came in year eleven of the reign of Khakaure Senusret to take the flesh of Re from this mine.” The simple message, scratched on the stone in the far distant past, had been signed by a man called Nakht. The written name jarred Bak’s memory, reminding him for the first time in many days of Commandant Nakht’s office and the scrolls that had been disturbed by a man who could read. Harmose had been Nakht’s translator, which made him seem an educated man. But basically he was an archer, and few archers knew how to read even the simplest words. Could Harmose?
He uttered a brief prayer to the ancient king Senusret, who had long ago joined the company of gods, then called to Imsiba and Harmose “This text must’ve been written when the mine was first worked.” His excitement was real, but it had nothing to do with the ancient message. “Come, let me show you!”
Imsiba headed his way, openly puzzled by the odd summons. Harmose trailed behind as if suspicious.
Bak touched the faint symbols contained in an oval. “I think this reads Khakaure Senusret.” He moved his finger to the right. “This could be year ten. And this…” He hesitated, glanced at the archer. “Can you make it out, Harmose?”
The archer flushed. “What kind of man are you? First you accuse me of wanton murder. Now you make light of me because I can’t read. Why do you treat me so?”
Bak was certain no man could pretend so great a hurt and frustration. His suspicions vanished once and for all and he started to laugh. The gods had torn that wretched scribe Roy from his grasp, but they had given much in return. He had survived the landslide, he had the false-bottomed bowls, and he had at long last eliminated one of his four suspects.
He clasped the startled archer’s shoulders. “Come back with us to our camp and share our evening meal. I’ve a tale to tell, and then you’ll understand.”
A delighted smile brightened Imsiba’s face.
The long line of men and donkeys plodded across a broad, flat, dun-colored plain which simmered in the heat. Fine sand, disturbed by hooves and feet, rose around the caravan to smudge the clear blue sky. The hot erratic breeze licked up funnels of sand and sent them scudding across the valley floor. Vague images of water and trees and animals, floating near enough to the earth to seem real, tantalized the eye with promises of life where none existed.
Bak and Kasaya walked parallel to the column, well off to the side where the air was clean. They moved faster than the weary, dust-stained men and animals, overtaking one after another on their way to the head of the caravan. They had been on the trail for four days, rising before dawn to travel through the cooler hours of early morning, resting in the midday heat, and traveling again late into the night. From the start, Bak had made a practice of walking the length of the caravan each time they set out, morning and evening. He assumed Roy had passed on at least one cone of stolen gold before his death and that it had been hidden in one of the donkeys’ loads for transport to Buhen. He hoped to find it.
“Kasaya!” a spearman yelled. “Come take this beast on your shoulders. We’d move twice as fast if you carried him.”
The soldier was trudging along beside a black donkey laden with heavy jars filled with water. He and the rest of Mery’s men had been spread out along the caravan by Nebwa to guard the animals and their cargo.
“Why don’t you carry the water for him?” Kasaya retorted with an easy grin. “Give him a chance to complain of your slow pace.” The young Medjay had become a favorite among the soldiers who had toiled alongside him on the landslide.
The good-natured banter continued as they walked along the column, relayed by men who had helped at the mine and many others as well, men who had remained neutral before, waiting to see which way the wind blew. Bak listened to the jokes and laughter as if they were music, paying little attention to the words but enjoying every note of the tune. His eyes were on the donkeys, his thoughts on the loads he had seen placed on their backs before daylight.
The rangy gray beast with an ugly gall on its shoulder carried food in its baskets: onions, lentils, dried fish. Slung from the back of the next in line, a dainty creature more black than gray, were two equally balanced bundles of spears, a portion of the arsenal. Three spearmen walking alongside joshed Kasaya. A sergeant tried half-heartedly to silence them with a scowl, but failed to do so.
Bak eyed the next donkey, a sullen creature laden with the officers’ tents. He knew from experience it nipped any man or beast who came near its vicious mouth. Mery was walking beside the fat, bow-legged drover. Bak nudged Kasaya and they veered toward the column.
“Mery!” Bak called. “I thought I’d find you at the head of the caravan with Paser and Nebwa.”
The watch lieutenant grimaced. “When those two are together, I prefer the company of animals.”
His hair was tousled and dusty, his well-formed body coated with sweat-streaked dirt. Bak took a perverse delight in Mery’s disheveled appearance. He knew he looked no better, but if Azzia were to see them like this, she would not be comparing a fine-feathered oriole with an ordinary sparrow.
If she was alive and well.
He quashed the thought, refusing to allow his fear for her to distract him from his mission. “They’re still bickering over the disposition of men?”
“That and everything else. Nebwa yearns to take his company into the desert in search of an enemy, and I pray each day he will. Paser gives an order, he countermands it. If we were raided we’d face disaster.”
Kasaya, who had struck up a conversation with the drover, dropped back to walk alongside the plodding donkey. Crooning to it as if to a baby, he ran his hands over its shoulder and flank. By the time he left the animal, he would know every solid object it carried. The method was imperfect. He could not probe deep within the larger bundles and baskets without being noticed. It did, however, narrow the number of possible hiding places.
“And you?” Bak asked. “How do you fare?”
Mery shrugged. “I resent seeing my sentries turned into caretakers of animals, but it does no good to complain.”
“You must be proud of those who helped clear the mine. Did you see the mountain fall and the way they toiled to free the men inside?”
“I’d walked far down the wadi, so I knew not what had happened until later.” Mery stared at an undulating row of hills on the distant horizon. His voice grew thick with emotion. “I mourned mistress Azzia and felt the need to be alone. I loved her, you see, and I’d hoped one day to make her my wife.”
Bak’s usual compassion failed him. He, too, feared the worst, but to take for granted that Azzia’s fate was already sealed was unthinkable. Had Mery simply given up hope as his appearance suggested? Or was his conscience eating away at his heart because he had allowed the woman he loved to shoulder the blame for one of five deaths he had brought about?
“You must forgive me for speaking my thoughts,” Bak said in a tone of friendly concern, “but mistress Azzia has traveled with her husband through many lands. She knows much of the world and can even read and write. Do you think she’d be content as the wife of an ordinary officer, a man whose skills are limited to the arts of war?”
“Except for this vile place, I’ve not been beyond the borders of Kemet,” Mery admitted, “but I am a reasonably learned man. I used to write poetry for her.” He glanced at Bak, flushed. “I dared not show it to her when she was wed to another, but I’d hoped, with Nakht no longer living…” His words tailed off, he sighed. “Now she’s rejoined him in the netherworld-or soon will-and all my dreams have gone with her.”
Bak wanted to silence the young officer with a blow. Instead, he muttered an excuse and hurried on up the column, leaving Kasaya behind. He did not know which he thought more offensive: pessimism or misery born of selfishness. After he cooled down, after he convinced himself that Azzia might well be safe, he thought about what he had learned. Mery could read; therefore, he might be the man who had been stealing the gold. He seemed too weak, too easily broken by adversity, but his appearance could be feigned. A man so selfish would most certainly sacrifice his love to save himself.
“I find Buhen to be an interesting place,” Bak said. “It’s a city but not a city. A place where villagers from far and wide come for all the good things in life, yet the objects they consider desirable would be less than ordinary to those who dwell within the land of Kemet.”
Nebwa dismissed the observation with a shrug. “Other than the fact that we’re the largest garrison in Wawat, and Buhen’s commandant administers all the fortresses along the Belly of Stones, it’s no different than any other in this land.”
“Commandant Nakht told me he thought to tame its frontier demeanor, to make it a city of women and children in addition to soldiers.”
“I knew of his dream and wished him well.”
Bak eyed the long stretch of desert ahead of them. Low, gently rounded ridges of sand punctuated by solitary blackish rock formations and, on the horizon, long table-like mounds that probably rose no more than ten paces above the surrounding landscape, offered a minimum of relief from the monotony. Some men might think the prospect dreary, but Bak rather liked its sparse beauty.
“If you were to become commandant, Nebwa, would you follow that dream?”
“Me? Commandant?” Nebwa’s laugh boomed out. “I was born in this land and grew to manhood here. I’ve served in the army on the southern frontier from the age of fourteen. I’ve had neither the opportunity nor the desire to make friends in high places. Nor do I have the talent, if the truth be told.”
Bak smothered a smile. No truer statement had he ever heard than the last one. “Come now, Nebwa. Don’t you believe that you rather than Tetynefer should stand at the head of this garrison?”
Nebwa’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing, Bak? Are you trying to make a case against me as the slayer of Commandant Nakht?”
“I’m trying to learn who slew him, yes, but I can do that as easily by eliminating a man from suspicion as by pointing a finger at him.”
Nebwa stopped, planted his hands on his hips, and glowered at his interrogator. “Make no mistake about it: never did I think to step into his sandals. He was one of the finest men I’ve ever known.”
“Did he ever say he wished you to inherit his position?”
“No.” Nebwa glanced back toward the unit of spearmen walking at the head of the caravan, saw how close they were, and stepped out of their path. “He said I might in time make a good garrison commander, but he believed the commandant of an administrative center like Buhen should be an educated man.”
Bak gave him a sharp look. “Educated? What exactly did he mean by that?”
“I never had the time or the inclination to learn to read and write. How could I? I’ve lived my life as a soldier, with no leisure for scholarly pursuits.”
Bak chose not to enlighten the infantry officer, but if he was telling the truth-and who would lie about an inability to read? — he had just eliminated another man from his list of suspects.
“This desert is home to many men,” Paser said, “yet we’ve trekked more than half the distance to Buhen and we’ve met no one. Where are they? Why have they not come to trade with us as they always do when we travel this path?”
“Men don’t change their ways for no good reason.” Harmose’s face was dark with foreboding.
Bak sipped from the communal goatskin waterbag and let the warm, stale water roll around in his mouth. It barely moistened his tongue and failed altogether to quench his thirst. “My men believe the nomad shepherds have taken their flocks deep into the wadis behind us to a place where they’ll be safe from theft and destruction.”
Paser accepted the waterbag with a worried frown. “They either fear a tribe that preys on less warlike peoples or an army that must live off the land through which it passes.”
All Paser’s usual petty pretensions had vanished, erased by his concern for the welfare of the caravan. Bak liked him better for it. The thought was fleeting, swept away by a futile impatience. They could do nothing but watch and wait.
He stood up and climbed the rocky outcrop beside which the three of them had sought shelter from the midday heat. It provided a minimum of shade, but was better than the broad sand-swept plain where the men and donkeys were resting. From the top, he could see the entire camp rather than the small portion visible from their resting place. Drovers and soldiers alike lay in the shade of any object they could find: a shield, a swath of heavy cloth, a mat, anything to shelter them from the sun’s heat. A dozen sentries walked the periphery, their feet and their spears dragging.
His glance shifted to an irregular, haze-shrouded escarpment far to the west. It rose from the valley floor like an impregnable wall, spreading to right and left as far as the eye could see. An ancient watercourse, invisible from so far away, cut through the plateau beyond. If they continued at their current pace, they would sleep at its mouth and pass through the next day. Deep and gorgelike in places, shallow with gently sloping walls at other locations, he thought it a perfect place for an ambush.
“If only Nebwa would trust my men!” His voice rang with frustration. “They should be scouting the land ahead, not plodding along behind the caravan, smothered by dust.”
Paser’s laugh was hard, cynical. “I’ve told him as much, and so has Mery. Like the rest of us, he senses mischief in the air, but he’ll listen to no man but himself.”
“He clings to his beliefs like plaster to a wall,” Harmose added bitterly.
Bak eyed a thin smudge of dust dissolving in the air beyond the caravan. The cloud raised during the morning march had long since dissipated, so something more recent had disturbed the sand while he and the others had shared their skimpy meal. He was about to clamber down the outcrop to investigate when Imsiba broke out of a group of perhaps twenty men standing at the far edge of the encampment and beckoned frantically.
Certain something was amiss, Bak hastened through the mass of resting men and animals to the sergeant’s side.
Imsiba flung him a quick but very troubled look and shouldered his way into the cluster of men, mostly soldiers, and two or three drovers. Bak followed close behind. The focus of attention was Nebwa, who stood with a grim-faced Mery and two nomad shepherds, tall rangy men sparsely clad in rags, powdered with the dust of travel. Nebwa was speaking with them in their own tongue. Bak knew no more than a dozen words that his men had taught him, but he could tell Nebwa was interrogating the pair. His tone was brisk, theirs reticent, the answers not easily drawn from them.
Bak saw none of the sly humor on their faces that he had found in Dedu and had learned to expect from the men of Wawat who dwelt near the river and Buhen. Maybe men of the desert were different than those who lived in villages, but he thought not. He glanced around, searching for the scraggly dogs that always trotted at the heels of shepherds. He saw none, nor did he see any sheep or goats they would have brought if they had come to trade. The scene did not ring true. Imsiba’s dubious expression did nothing to allay his suspicions.
Nebwa gave a final nod of satisfaction and spoke to a sergeant standing nearby. “Bring them water. Four skins’ full. They’ve earned that and more.” His eyes darted toward Paser, who had hurried after Bak, and a broad smile settled on his face. “That old fool Tetynefer was right after all! Can you believe it?”
“What are you saying?” Paser demanded. “What did they tell you?”
Nebwa, his eyes glittering with excitement, raised his baton in a gesture of jubilation. “The tribes have come together! They’ve formed an army! They’re camped at a well a day’s march south of here. If we leave right away, we’ll have them within our grasp before sunset tomorrow.”
Bak knew Nebwa longed for action, but to leave with that treacherous watercourse a mere half day’s march ahead was absurd. “How can you be sure these men have told the truth? This could be a ruse to draw your infantry away.”
“We’ve two times the number of donkeys we usually bring and many times the number of weapons.” Paser’s eyes flashed anger. “Not to mention the gold. I can think of no more desirable a prize to men like these.”
Mery nodded vehemently. “You call Tetynefer a fool, but you propose to leave this caravan unprotected after hearing a tale no more credible than the one he heard.”
“That was different,” Nebwa said. “I had to pry the news from these men’s lips. If they’d not been desperate for water, they’d have said nothing.”
“Where are their flocks?” Bak asked. “Why did they not bring at least one ram to trade for what they need?”
“Did I not say they were desperate for water? They had to leave behind all they own so they could travel fast enough to intercept us.”
“A nomad’s life depends on his flock,” Paser said. “He cares for it above all things. If this tale were true, one man would’ve come, not two. The other would’ve remained behind to see to the animals.”
Nebwa waved off the objection. “You know as well as I that the women and children tend the animals.”
He beckoned two approaching soldiers. Each had a wooden yoke balanced on his shoulders, with full waterbags suspended from either end. A drover helped transfer the yokes to the waiting shepherds, who strode off across the sandy plain, heading in a westerly direction.
“Rouse the men and arm them,” Nebwa ordered his sergeant. “We leave within the hour.”
Bak glared. “You can’t leave this caravan unprotected!”
“It’s folly!” Paser exclaimed.
Nebwa swung on Mery. “You and your men will stay here.” His eyes slid toward Bak. “You’ll stay, too, you and your wretched Medjays. Does that satisfy you?”
“How can you divide our forces like this?” Mery demanded.
“The tribesmen want a battle and I mean to give them one.” Nebwa wheeled around, cutting off further argument, and strode away.
No, Bak thought, you want a battle and you fully intend to have one.
As the foremost rank of infantrymen marched out of the camp and Nebwa disappeared in a cloud of dust at their head, Bak drew his sergeant aside. “Those nomad shepherds lied, Imsiba.”
“They are no more shepherds than I am. They live off the toil of others-stealing, burning, killing.” Imsiba’s voice grew harsh with anger. “Men like them came to my village when I was a child. Well I remember the death and ruin they left behind. They burned our fields and gardens, carried off our flocks and all our young women, my sister among them.”
“How would you like to balance the scales of justice?”
Imsiba eyed him with uncommon interest. “The thought pleases me exceedingly, my friend.”
“I believe those so-called shepherds are part of a band of raiders.” Bak glanced at Imsiba for confirmation, received a nod of agreement. “I’d guess their numbers are too small to risk an attack when Nebwa’s infantry was with us, but are large enough to feel they can succeed with our forces weakened. I think we should give them the chance to try.”
A hint of a smile touched the corners of Imsiba’s mouth. “You mean to catch them in a snare while they try to snare us?”
“You must leave now, taking two other men with you, and follow them. Stay close on their heels, learn all you can, then come back to us with what you know. We must not go headlong into battle with no knowledge of what we face.”