Imsiba grinned. “Quiet, you say?”
“While you stay here, out of harm’s way, I’ll cross the river to see Nehi.” Bak flashed a smile matching that of the sergeant. “Yesterday, if you recall, you tore me from my purpose, taking an arrow in the arm.”
“Sir!” Hori called, bursting through the door.
Bak tensed, expecting he knew not what. For close on a week, each time the youth had hailed him like that he had brought word of death or destruction.
“I’ve been out on the quay.” Hori shoved a fishing pole against the wall and dropped a musty-smelling basket on the floor. Water trickled from the loosely woven container, half full of small silvery fish. “A man just came from across the river, one of the farmer Penhet’s servants. He brought a message for you, sir, from mistress Nehi. She wishes to see you at her farm, to talk with you.”
Imsiba threw Bak a congratulatory smile. “Your suggestion to Penhet, it seems, has borne fruit.”
“Are you sure this man’s who he says he is, Hori?” After the previous day’s ambush, Bak thought it prudent to be cautious.
Imsiba stood up, concern erasing the smile. “I’ll go with you to the quay, my friend. I spent time with Penhet’s servants the day Rennefer tried to slay him. I know them all.”
“When Penhet summoned me, I knew not what to think.”
Nehi gave Bak a shy smile. “I knew who he was. I’d walked the path through his fields many times-each time I went to the village.” She smiled again, this at herself. “I’d envied him his lush crops and healthy animals, his abundance. Never did I dream he’d invite me to live there.”
Bak tried not to stare. With much of the worry lifted from her shoulders, Nehi looked a different woman. She would never be thought beautiful, but in her own thin way she was attractive, seductive even. “Do you like him?”
“He’s a kind man. Gentle and warm. And so cheerful!
How he can laugh with his life turned upside down, I don’t know.”
After housing Rennefer in the guardhouse for close on a week, Bak could well imagine the freedom Penhet must feel.
A more dour woman he had never met. “Does he often summon your children?”
“They’re with him always.” Her smile broadened. “He’s given them toys and taught them games. If his wounds weren’t troubling him, he’d get down on the floor and play with them.”
Bak eyed her swelling breasts and stomach. “When he’s healed, he’ll want a woman in his bed, and then a child who’s truly his own.”
She looked at the unpainted house, the fields so hard-won from the desert, the neat rows of small brave melon plants.
“Compared to this poor patch of land, his farm is like the Field of Reeds.” She was referring to the ideal land inhabited by the justified dead, those whose deeds had proven worthy.
“I’ll gladly give him whatever he wants.”
They stood under the lean-to in the shade of the ancient vine. The structure was empty, the fowl and animals moved to Penhet’s farm. Two men, Netermose’s field hands, toiled at the far end of the melon field. The house, Bak assumed, would soon be occupied by one of the hands. Nehi had inherited the property from her husband. Rather than sell it or abandon it to the encroaching desert, she had made an agreement with Netermose similar to the one he had with Penhet: he would tend the land and she would share its meager profits.
“You summoned me here for a purpose,” Bak reminded her.
The pleasure vanished from her face; she twisted the ring with the greenish stone. “I…I’m not sure…” Words failed her, and she stared at the ground by his feet.
He muttered an oath. What more must he do to earn her trust? “If you’ve something to tell me, anything that will help find your husband’s slayer, I beg you to speak up.”
“No, I…” She spread a hand over her stomach as if to shield her unborn child. “I shouldn’t have asked you to come.”
“Mistress Nehi!” He forced himself to be patient, to coax rather than demand. “If I thought to punish you for your husband’s faults, would I have suggested Penhet take you into his household?”
Anguish filled her face, her voice. “I thank you with all my heart, yet how can I break a promise to a man no longer living?”
“How can you not speak up when the man who slew him still walks the streets of Buhen? Only yesterday he lay in ambush, bow and arrow at the ready, and he wounded my sergeant while trying to slay me. I thank the lord Amon we’re not both laid out in the house of death, sharing prayers to the dead with your husband.”
The words had come unbidden, prompted by instinct rather than proof that the man who slew Intef had also ambushed him and Imsiba, and that Intef’s death and Mahu’s were somehow connected.
She stared. “Why slay you?”
“Why did he slay your husband?” he countered. “For the few trinkets I found on his donkey?”
She stood mute, twisting the ring, deciding. At last she said, “My children have never known play. Now they do.
For that alone, I owe you the truth. Come.”
Bak offered a silent prayer of thanks to the lord Amon and, hard on its heels, an entreaty. A plea for good, solid knowledge that would at last set him on a true and right path.
Nehi led him into the house, one long, narrow room stripped of possessions. A space at the back, roofed with spindly palm trunks covered loosely with straw through which smoke could escape, served as a kitchen. Bright rectangles of light fell from high, narrow windows. The sleeping platform was bare, the prayer niche empty, the round mudbrick oven cool to the touch. A rickety ladder rose to an opening in the roof, and two gaping holes in the floor revealed the presence of pottery storage jars, now empty.
“Here,” she said, kneeling at the end of the platform. She lifted a trapdoor, swung her feet onto a rough-cut stairway, and climbed down into the darkness. “You mustn’t follow.
The cellar’s too small.”
Bak knelt to peer down. Most such storage areas provided a hiding place for valuables. With luck-and if the lord Amon chose to look upon him with favor-this would be no exception.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark, he saw two large gray-brown storage jars-for grain, he thought-stoppered to keep out mice and insects, and two smaller, rounder jars, both plugged, usually used to hold dried fish. He could not begin to guess the contents of four good-sized reddish jars, also plugged to protect the contents. Nehi, half hunched over 154 / Lauren Haney beneath the low ceiling, filled the remaining space.
“I told a falsehood when you came before. This ring…”
She raised her hand so he could see. “…is old, as you guessed, possibly as old as Buhen itself. Intef found it in a tomb far out in the desert, a chamber robbed long ago, he told me, but a gold mine nonetheless.”
The words slipped out with such ease Bak was slow to absorb their promise. He had early on guessed that Intef had found a tomb in the desert, and he was not surprised to hear that robbers had long ago plundered it, overlooking a few small objects. But a gold mine? Did the tomb contain a second burial chamber, one untouched by robbers? Or something else? “Where’s this tomb located?” he asked, keeping his voice level and hope at arm’s length.
“South of Kor, Intef told me, but I know not where.” With some effort, she shifted aside one of the grain jars and pulled a stone out of the wall behind it, revealing a hole the size of a man’s head. “Even with landmarks to follow, he said I’d lose my way. I’ve never been in the desert, you see, and he told me one place looks much like another to the untrained eye.”
Picturing the lonely spot where Intef had been slain and the vast expanse of desert, Bak swore softly to himself. The tomb could be anywhere, a place more likely to be found by chance than by design. “Along with the jewelry, your husband had a chunk of ivory wrapped in a torn bit of scroll. Part of a ship’s manifest dated not long ago. Where might he’ve laid hands on that?”