“The storm ended late in the day.” Pahuro shifted from his left buttock to his right, from one tale to another. “I don’t like to see the children far from home after nightfall.”
Bak bent to pick up a straw, stuck one end into his mouth, and formed a sympathetic smile around it. “I’d have shared your concern, especially with a dozen or more sailors making their way upriver in search of food and shelter.”
“The crew survived?” Pahuro smiled. “I thank the lord Hapi for sparing them.”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t see them! My Medjay sergeant tracked them from the wrecked vessel to this village.” A lie, but the local people believed Medjays more knowledgeable about the desert than any ordinary man of Wawat. It never occurred to them that Bak’s men had all been reared in the land of Kemet, and most had spent their youth tending the fields of the lord Amon.
Pahuro wriggled in his chair, not from discomfort this time, Bak guessed, but because he suspected he was being driven into a corner from which he might not escape.
The sailors came out of the last house to be searched and Tjanuny shook his head. They had found nothing. Nor did Bak see Imsiba on the path, bringing in the youthful watch-man. With the sun racing toward the western horizon, his hope of soon laying hands on crew and cargo was fading with the light.
“I know you salvaged all you could. Why shouldn’t you?
Life in this wretched land is hard.” Bak stared at nothing as if trying to reach a decision, then flung the straw aside and stood up. “This is what I’ll do, Pahuro. If you guide me to the missing cargo, I’ll close my eyes to your offense.”
The old man frowned, skeptical.
“I’ll blame no one in this village,” Bak promised, “neither man nor woman nor child. I’ll turn my back and walk away, and not another word will ever be uttered.”
Pahuro shook his head, sighed. “You lay blame where no blame is due, Lieutenant.” A secret thought touched his face, a look of cunning, and he pushed himself out of the chair.
“Come, let me show you.” Without a backward glance, he walked in among the houses of the village. Bak, hurrying to catch up, beckoned Tjanuny to come along.
Pahuro led them from one house to another, into sheds and through lean-tos, inviting them to prod and poke, to look again at what the search party had already examined.
Certain the old man was trying to cloud his vision, Bak kept his eyes wide open, his thoughts alert to all possibilities. As before, the villagers watched from a distance, whispering, but now they looked to be in good spirits, with a fresh confidence, and he even saw one man nudge another in the ribs.
The plundered cargo was here, he was sure, but where? Had he walked within arm’s length yet failed to see it?
At last a narrow lane took them to a stone and mudbrick structure at the back of the natural terrace. The way the stones were laid and the various sizes of the bricks told Bak the house had been built many generations earlier and repaired or altered at different times in the past. The front portion looked to be recently renovated, but the rear of the building was close to collapse. One wall had fallen, another leaned at a precarious angle. More than half the roof had caved in.
Six large gray pots converted for use as beehives drew Bak’s eye to a section of undamaged roof. What were they doing there? he wondered. Hives were normally placed closer to the oasis, not on the opposite side of a village, forcing the insects to fly over rooftops where the women worked in the cooler hours and the children played. In the lane below the hives, he noticed, bees were flying around a small, broken jar laying in a pool of liquid gold, honey. Rec-48 / Lauren Haney ognizing a master touch, he laughed softly. “Did you search this house, Tjanuny?”
“Yes, sir,” the oarsman said, his new authority giving him greater respect. “We found nothing here.”
“Did you or any of your men go onto the roof?”
“With so many bees swarming around?” Tjanuny shook his head, incredulous. “Who wants to get stung? Anyway, there was no need. We could see inside through the fallen wall.”
Bak walked slowly among the insects buzzing around the honey, taking care not to offend them. Reaching the wall, a long swath of stones cemented together with dried mud, he probed the surface with a finger. Though the makeshift cement looked dry, it was cool and damp, soft to the touch.
The stones had been freshly laid. When he turned around, Pahuro was looking at him with a new respect, Tjanuny with something close to awe.
“Make an opening in the wall,” he told the old man.
“There’s no need,” Pahuro said in a resigned voice. “I’ll show you what you wish to see.”
He led Bak into the house and up a broken stairway to the roof. Bees flew over and around them, leaving the hives and returning, intent on a last delivery of pollen before dark.
They walked gingerly to the edge of the undamaged portion of roof and looked down into a small square room, probably long abandoned, that had newly been converted to a windowless, doorless storeroom. Dozens of copper ingots the thickness of a finger and shaped like the skins of some dead animal were stacked against the walls. The bundled hides were not among them.
“Where’ve you hidden the rest?” Bak demanded.
The old man’s eyes leveled on Bak’s, his voice rang with sincerity. “This is all we found.”
The time had come, Bak decided, to point out a simple truth. “I’ve two choices, Pahuro. One is the pledge I gave you before. The second is not so pleasant.” He walked to the edge of the roof and looked across the village toward the oasis, its lush green palms and fertile black soil soon to A FACE TURNED BACKWARD / 49 emerge from the floodwaters. “I can take every man over the age of fourteen to Buhen, and there they’ll stand before the commandant as thieves. If he judges them guilty-and he will-they’ll join a prison gang and be sent into the desert to work the mines for our sovereign, Maatkare Hatshepsut.
Fitting punishment, don’t you think, for men who’ve taken what by rights belongs to her?”
Pahuro stood stiff and pale, jarred by the threat. With all the able-bodied men torn from the oasis, only women and children would be left to plant the fields and tend the crops, a close to impossible task. Even worse, many of the men might never return from so harsh a punishment.
“You will close your eyes to our offense?” The question was not a plea, but it came close.
“I vowed I would, and I will.”
“Come with me.”
“This is all we found on board, each and every item.”
Pahuro looked like a man newly widowed, so great was his sorrow at losing so much of value.
Bak, standing beside him, tried not to show how surprised he was, how astonished. He had thought to see hides, a sail, a few other mundane items-nothing like what he saw before him, a veritable storehouse of precious objects.
The old man had led him to the head of the fertile valley and up a steep path to a deep indentation in the cliff face that had been enclosed by a ring of boulders. Cages lined the back wall, protected from the sun and wind by an overhanging shelf of rock. They held two lion cubs and a pair of smaller cats whose name Bak did not know, four wild dogs-puppies actually-and several monkeys, including two young baboons, sacred animals destined for a god’s mansion in Kemet. If not for the bundles of reddish, dun-colored, and black-and-white hides stacked against the boulders, he might have thought the cargo from a different ship than the one he had seen in Buhen.