The Right Hand of Amon (23 page)

"So that's my tale." Bak wiped the last tender morsels of stewed duck from the inside of his bowl and popped the chunk of bread into his mouth. "All I've seen and done from the time I walked into Iken three days ago until I found these sketches in the boy's hiding place." He nodded toward the four pottery shards lying beside him on the hardpacked earthen floor.

Kenamon, seated cross-legged amid a clutter of cloth and papyrus packets, small jars, and bowls, looked up from the grayish quartz bowl he held on his lap. "Commander Woser has much to account for."

"He does. But is he guilty of murder with plans to slay a king? Or merely hiding some personal secret?"

They sat in the courtyard of the spacious house the elderly priest and his staff had borrowed for their stay in Iken. Next to the mansion of Hathor where the lord Amon was living, it offered comfortable and convenient quarters for Amon-Psaro's son and the priest-physicians who would tend him. A pavilion had been erected over half the court to shelter its occupants from the sun. Seven large water jars leaned against a shaded wall, but all other signs of the family who normally occupied the building had been removed.

Kenamon untied the corners of a cloth packet and shook out a handful of small, pointed leaves, pale green and crispy dry. He dropped them into the bowl, retied the knot, and laid the packet aside. "I'll speak with him, if you wish, and remind him of his duty to the company of gods and our sovereign, Maatkare Hatshepsut."

"I won't trouble you yet." At any other time, Bak would have smiled at the powerful figures, both human and divine, Kenamon could summon to his lips at any given moment, but he was too upset about the slain child Ramose. "I think it too soon to reveal what I've guessed about a possible attempt on Amon-Psaro's life. If I know no more by midmorning tomorrow, I'll come for you then, after you've performed the morning ablutions for the lord Amon."

Imsiba came hurrying through the door. "My friend! You wish to see me, I've been told."

Bak knew of no way to soften the news. "We found the mute child, Imsiba, and now he's dead."

The tall Medjay muttered something in his own tongue. The grim look on his face left no doubt as to the meaning. "How did it happen?"

Bak told him. While he spoke, the frail old priest crushed the brittle leaves with a wooden pestle, bringing out a tangy odor that cleansed the air of other smells. He added several black seeds, from a poppy Bak thought, and sprinkled a few grains of malachite into the bowl. He crushed the substances further, wrinkled his nose, sneezed.

Bak finished his tale, then had to calm Imsiba with assurances that Kasaya had been no more at fault than anyone else. "If you're eager to lay blame, look to me. I thought it more important to find the boy than to keep our search a secret. Now all we have to show for my haste is a dead child and a few tangled sketches."

Imsiba knelt in front of the shards. "These?" he asked, picking them up, studying them one by one.

Bak nodded. "I thought to leave them in Kenamon's hands. My quarters are like a woman in a house of pleasure: open to all who wish to enter."

Imsiba held out the shard showing one man slaying an

other near water. "You were right, my friend. The child witnessed Lieutenant Puemre's death."

And the knowledge killed him, Bak thought bitterly. "The others are harder to understand." He picked up a fragment and studied the multiple pictures, trying to distinguish the red figures from the black. "I thought, among the three of us, we might sort out at least a few of the sketches, separating each one from all the rest."

"First let me finish this poultice." Kenamon unplugged a small jar and poured honey onto the mixture, added three reddish drops from a glass vial, and enough beer to form a thin paste. Stirring the concoction, he added, "The scribe who loaned us this house has an abscess on his neck. After I open it, this should help him heal."

"I see an empty boat." Imsiba scowled at the shard in his hand. "And here's a soldier fighting the enemy on the _ field of battle. No. A man marching, more likely."

"This one also has a boat, but with a crew." Bak eyed a thick black arc holding stick-like men with paddles. "It has no sail, so it's traveling downstream."

Kenamon covered the quartz bowl with a square of linen and tied it in place. Setting the medication aside, he picked up the other two pieces of pottery, glanced at the one showing Puemre's death, and laid it back down to examine the remaining shard.

"This may be an army." Bak held his shard for Imsiba to look and pointed at a red stick figure. "You see the multiple profiles of this man?"

The Medjay tilted his head, studied the sketch. "Men marching side by side. Yes, an army. But whose? Did you notice the headdress?"

Bak eyed what looked like an untidy clump of red grass atop the egg-shaped head. "That's not a headdress; that's hair."

"Why could not the child have been a better artist?" Imsiba grumbled.

The elderly priest twisted his fragment of pottery a quar-

ter turn, studied it closely, and chuckled. "His figures are neither neat nor attractive, but he had a talent. I've no doubt of the message he wanted to convey here." He held out the sketch, a confused mass of red and black lines and curves, and traced with his finger the outer edge of the figures, inked in black, that he had identified: a crudely drawn man wearing a crown entangled with a woman in a lewd embrace.

"The male figure looks like the one in the drawing I found in Puemre's house," Bak said with satisfaction. "That sketch also showed a man wearing a crown. I thought then, and I still do that he was meant to be Amon-Psaro."

"The female figure wears the broad collar of a woman of Kemet," Kenamon said.

Bak hated to disillusion the old man, but.. . "Those collars are no longer unique to Kemet, my uncle. I met a trader only last month who was traveling south to Kush, taking with him a chest full of beaded jewelry, collars included."

"How old was the boy who drew this?" Kenamon persisted. "Only six or seven years, you told me. Too young, I'd think, to create this image without seeing for himself a man and a woman entwined together."

"He did not see Amon-Psaro," Bak said doggedly. "The king hasn't set foot in either Kemet or Wawat for . . ." He hesitated, then admitted, "I don't know exactly how long, but for many years."

"Mutnefer is even now giving birth to Puemre's child," Imsiba reminded them. "Where was the boy when they lay together? Not far, I'd guess."

Kenamon raised his hands, palms forward, and smiled a surrender. "I admit I didn't think out the problem before I provided an answer. But I believe the boy too young and innocent to create a lie. He saw a crowned man with a woman, either with his own eyes or secondhand through those of someone else."

"Puemre knew how to speak with him," Imsiba said.

"According to Nebwa . . ." Bak stood up and took a turn across the courtyard, giving his thoughts free rein. ". . . when the Kushite king learned of the death of Akheperkare Tuthmose, he fomented rebellion among the people of southern Wawat. Maybe a woman of Kemet who lived in this area, a mother or sister or daughter, a lover perhaps, of one of the officers now assigned to Iken, was carried off by the rebels and taken south to Kush as a gift to the kingor a youthful prince close to manhood."

Imsiba nodded. "Did not the girl Mutnefer say the lieutenant talked of revenge?"

"Not long before he died." Bak paced again across the courtyard, swung around, strode a third time to and fro. "We know why Puemre was slain: to silence his tongue. And if that sketch is a valid clue, we know-or think we know-why someone wishes to slay Amon-Psaro: to avenge the death or rape or some unknown violation of a female relative or lover."

"Twenty-seven years is a long time to hold a grudge," Imsiba pointed out, "especially over a wartime incident, no matter how indecent."

"Far-fetched, to be sure." Bak scowled, as dissatisfied with the theory as Imsiba was. "But no more so than Woser and his staff blinding me with ignorance. Revenge is personal, one man against another, not a communal effort."

Bak found Kasaya on the roof with four of the Medjays who had traveled upstream with the lord Amon. Sitting in a strip of shade from the fortress wall, they were sharing a stewed duck, a pot of lentils and onions, and a melon. As their usual diet was far less sumptuous, they were thriving while on their temporary assignment. Bak accepted a chunk of sweetish green melon and hunkered down to wait until the men finished the succulent fowl.

After the quartet filed down the stairs, Bak and the young Medjay crossed the roof to the front of the house, where they could look down on the broad north-south street that connected the two massive towered gates of the fortress. A slick-haired yellow dog lay sleeping in a shady doorway. A child two or three years of age played in a dusty lane too far away to overhear. Heat waves rose from the rooftops. The odors of burnt charcoal and cooking oil and manure were carved on a breeze too soft and gentle to dry the sweat trickling down their bodies.

"I need a weapon, Kasaya, something I can use to break Woser's wall of silence."

The bulky young Medjay frowned, puzzled. "You would go to a garrison commander, dagger in hand?"

"You misunderstand me," Bak smiled. "In this case, I speak of knowledge as a weapon. The more I know about Woser, the better armed I'll be when I go to him for the truth."

The light dawned on Kasaya's face. "Oh! Information!" Smothering his smile, Bak studied the young Medjay. Tall, broad at the shoulder and narrow of waist, a handsome yet innocent visage. "I can think of no one better able to help than you."

"You think me worthy after..." Kasaya stared unhappily at his large, naked feet. ". . . after I let the child die?" Bak laid his hand on the young man's shoulder. "We failed this morning, you and I both, and we can in no way make amends. But let's not let his death go unavenged. Let's find the man who slew him."

Kasaya raised his chin and stiffened his spine. "How can I help, sir?"

"I don't know how many servants toil in the commander's residence. From what I've seen of mistress Aset, I doubt she liftSS a hand to care for the household, so the number may be large. Servants move back and forth through the rooms, seeing and hearing much and saying little."

A donkey squealed in terror or pain outside the northern gate, drawing Bak's attention and Kasaya's. A man yelled, hooves clattered on hard-packed earth, and the creature burst through the portal, the baskets it carried bouncing to the rhythm of its trotting hooves. A portly man clad in a knee-length kilt raced after the animal, stick raised, chasing it all the way to the southern gate, where a guard stepped into its path and grabbed its halter.

The pair on the roof could not help but laugh. Bak was grateful for the young Medjay's resilience-and his own, for that matter.

"Go to the commander's residence." Bak stared across the rooftops toward Woser's house. "Be friendly. Especially with the women: those who are older and motherly and those close to you in age. Ask no questions. Say, if you think it would help, that I removed you from your duties because you failed in some small task. If you confide in them, gain their sympathy and trust, they may confide in you, telling you all they've seen and heard in Woser's household."

Kasaya thought over the assignment, and a smile wiped the gravity from his face. "I feared, when I saw you coming, that I was to be punished. Instead, it seems, I'm given a reward."

"They all hated him," Minnakht said.

Puemre's sergeant, a large, heavy man in his late twenties, with a crooked nose and an ugly scar on his thigh, stood beside Bak, hands on hips, legs spread wide, watching his men cutting bricks out of the partly collapsed wall of an old warehouse. Not a man among them looked happy with so menial a task.

"I don't like to think they envied him," he went on. "I respect them all. But what else can I think? Oh, I know Lieutenant Puemre sometimes trod on other people's toes, but he was raised a nobleman. Aren't they all like that?"

"My contact with the nobility has been limited," Bak said, keeping his voice neutral, uncritical.

Minnakht gave him a quick, amused glance. "I've heard you were exiled to Buhen because your fist made contact with a nobleman's chin. Or was it his nose?"

Bak was always amazed at the way useless information spread along the southern frontier. As a police officer, he thought it best to let this particular item die a natural death from lack of attention. "More than half the bricks are coming away broken, I see. Has that been the case since you started this task?"

The smile faded from the sergeant's face. "The mud hasn't been moistened for years and the straw that binds it has rotted away. Here, let me show you." He strode to a mound of bricks so broken they looked like the clods in a newly plowed field. Picking up a chunk, he crumbled the black earth between his fingers, turning it to dust. "You see?"

Bak's voice grew firm, an officer speaking to a lesser man. "Have you tried other walls in other parts of Iken?" The sergeant stiffened at the unexpected tone of command. "No, sir, but I doubt. . . "

"Do it. The buildings in this city couldn't have been raised all at one time or by a single brickmaker or mason. The binder will be different, the consistency, the way they dried. They'll have weathered in different ways, depending on their location."

Minnakht's eyes narrowed in thought, then a look of approval passed over his face. Without another word, he selected five men and sent them to various ruined sections of the city.

Bak watched the nearest man slowly, painstakingly extract a brick from a wall. "Tell the men here to cut bigger blocks from these poor walls. The island fortress has many large gaps as *ell as small ones."

"Yes, sir." The sergeant strode through the ruined building, issuing the new orders. By the time he came back, his men looked more cheerful and he more content with this new and untried officer to whom they must report.

Satisfied with the tentative acceptance, Bak let his voice return to normal. "Puemre served for a short time in my old regiment, the regiment of Amon. Why did he transfer so soon to Wawat?"