“Do the two match?” Bak had expected an accent, but could detect none.
“Well enough.” Tati sat up as straight as he could and for an instant a cloud of pain passed over his face. “We rarely find a perfect match when the items are small. Woserhet never failed to insist that we count each and every one, while the men who originally store them are always far too impa tient to take care.”
Bak shifted forward and brushed away a small stone dig ging into his backside. “The workman in the dwelling below said you were expecting me.”
“Our task was one of great import, given to us by the chief priest, Hapuseneb himself. We doubted Woserhet’s death would be allowed to go unnoticed. Or unpunished.”
Again Bak noted the lack of an accent. “You’re a man of
Kemet, an educated man, and yet you carry a brand?”
“I was born far to the north in the land of Hatti.” The scribe smiled at Bak’s surprise. “I left as a callow youth, ap prenticed to my uncle to become a trader. While traveling through Amurru, Maatkare Hatshepsut’s father Akheperkare
Thutmose marched through the land with his army. I was taken prisoner and brought here.”
“You speak our tongue very well.”
“I learn with ease the words of other lands. For many years I served as a translator, journeying with our sover eign’s envoys to distant cities. A most satisfying and happy time that was.” His smile was sad, regretful. “But alas. The years have caught up with me. With this deformity…” He touched his shoulder. “… and the pain that sometimes be sets me, I can no longer travel. So our sovereign gave me as an offering to the lord Amon.”
“And you were loaned to Woserhet.”
“A good man. I shall miss him.”
“We all will.” The workman who had greeted Bak had come up the stairway unheard. He brought several jars of beer, two of which he handed to Bak and Tati. The rest he placed in a basket before going back downstairs.
Bak broke the dried mud plug out of his jar. “Evidently he told Hapuseneb he’d found some discrepancies in the rec ords of the storehouses of the lord Amon. Other than that vague statement, no one seems to know what he was doing.”
“That was our task, sir. To search out discrepancies. Not the small ones like those I’ve found here…” Tati tapped the document on his lap. “… but significant differences.”
“Woserhet surely wouldn’t have troubled the chief priest with talk of something insignificant.”
“No, he was not a man to worry others needlessly.” Tati let the scroll curl up and set it on the rooftop beside the shard. “He seemed to think he’d found some irregularities, but he wouldn’t tell me what or where they were.” He sipped from his beer jar, frowned. “He often left me puzzled like that, saying if I couldn’t find anything wrong, he might well be mistaken. I appreciated his reasoning, but found the prac tice most annoying.”
“As would I.” Bak glanced at a woman who had come onto the roof at the far end of the block. She got down on her knees and began to turn over the fish drying in the sun.
“You’ve found nothing thus far?”
“No, sir.” Tati smiled ruefully. “I’ll continue to search un til the chief priest or one of his aides remembers us. After that… Well, who knows what the lord Amon has planned for us?”
Bak had no way of setting the scribe’s anxiety to rest, so he made no comment. “Woserhet’s wife, mistress Ashayet, said he’d been troubled for the past few days.”
“Yes, sir.” Tati looked thoughtfully across the cluttered rooftop. “Something bothered him, but what it was I’ve no idea.”
“The irregularities he’d mentioned?”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think so.” Seeing the puzzlement on Bak’s face, the scribe hastened to explain. “When he ini tially suggested I look for discrepancies, he didn’t seem un duly disturbed, so why would he become upset later? Also, why would he not mention the irregularities we’d previously discussed?”
Good questions, both. “Didn’t you ask what the trouble was?”
Sadness clouded Tati’s expression. “Normally, he ex plained what he was thinking, but this time… Well, as he offered no explanation, I assumed the matter personal and let it drop.”
Bak sipped his beer, thinking over what he had learned.
Practically nothing. Many men confided in their servants, but Woserhet had been a man of limited means, one unac customed to retainers and no doubt unwilling to share his thoughts with them. “You must let me know if you find any discrepancy of significance, or anything else unusual. One of your workmen can deliver the message to my Medjays’ quarters.”
While the scribe wrote the location on a shard, Bak said,
“The workman who brought this beer obviously liked
Woserhet, but indicated he could be sour at times. So much so that he made enemies?”
“Sour. Not a word I’d use.” Tati set the shard aside and laid down his pen. “He was honest to a fault, sir, and blunt in all he said. He angered many people, especially the various storehouse overseers when he pointed out problems that, with proper supervision, could’ve been avoided. But I can’t honestly see a man slaying him, offending the lady Maat in the most dire manner possible, for so small a thing.”
Bak had known men to slay for less, but usually in the heat of anger and after too much beer. He doubted such had been the case with Woserhet’s death.
“Many of the scrolls are like this one, sir.”
Hori, seated in the lane outside the small room in which Woserhet had died, carefully unrolled the partially burned document. In spite of the care he took, the charred outer end flaked off onto his lap. Deeper inside the roll, only the lower and upper edges had burned and were dropping away. Most of the words and numbers remained, but the more exposed surfaces were difficult to decipher because of soot and water stains. Farther in, the stains were fewer, the document easier to read.
Bak, kneeling beside the youth, eyed the three piles of scrolls. The largest by far was the one from which Hori had plucked the open document. Another was made up of scrolls slightly damaged or not burned at all. The third was a mass of badly burned documents that looked impossible to salvage.
“Can we take these to our quarters, sir?” Kasaya asked.
“We’d be a lot more comfortable on the roof, have more room to spread out, and nobody would bother us.”
Bak looked into the fire-damaged room. Most of the bro ken pottery had been shoved off to the side, out of the way.
A black splotch on the now-dry floor identified the spot where the oil had burned, and a larger brownish patch had to be dried blood. The smell of burning remained, but not as strong as before.
“All right, but you must reseal this room before you go, and warn the guards to let no one inside. You may need to look at other records, and we don’t want them to walk away while your back is turned.”
“If Woserhet was fretful, I have no idea why.” User, the
Overseer of Overseers of the storehouses of Amon, gave
Bak an irritated look. “All I know is that Hapuseneb sum moned me one day and told me to expect him and those ser vants of his. He said I was to cooperate with them in every way and give them free access to all the storehouses. I re peated his instructions to the men who report to me, and that was that.”
Bak stepped into the shade cast by the long portico in front of the squarish treasury building. User was seated on a low chair about ten paces from the gaping doorway. His writing implements lay on a small, square table beside him.
He looked the perfect example of the successful bureaucrat: his spine was stiff, his demeanor august, with an expansive stomach that brought the waistband of his long kilt almost up to his plump breasts.
“You were never curious about what he was doing?”
“I knew what he was doing.” User sniffed disdainfully.
“He was an auditor, wasn’t he?”