Bak turned to watch the row of men ascending the path behind them. Nebre and Kaha were first in line. A dozen paces back, User led the men in his party, checking often to be sure Ani and Wensu were keeping pace. Next plodded the soldiers and prisoners laden with water jars and supplies.
Armed soldiers were spread along the line, maintaining the pace, preventing gaps, and watching for raiders. Attempts to steal supplies were rare, Lieutenant Huy had said, but not un known.
The trail, which had been heavily trodden through the years, was not difficult for a man accustomed to strenuous activity, but the heat was pervasive, with not a breath of air to offer relief. Bak feared for Ani, the most likely among them to suffer from the climb.
He examined the barren landscape around them. The deep defiles, the steep slopes, a total absence of vegetation. A land endowed by the gods with turquoise and then abandoned to the lord Set. The sandstone was a different shade of red than that of the granite peaks in the Eastern Desert. Where those had had a pinkish cast, the stone here was tinted with gold, as if burned by a fire from within as well as by the sun without.
Psuro, following Bak on up the trail, continued their con versation as if it had not been interrupted. “Do you think one of them the guilty man, sir? You haven’t said.”
“I believe the man who’s been watching us the most likely slayer. Whether someone among us is his ally, I can’t say.”
“You speak of the man you and Nebre followed into the mountains.”
“The one who led us into the mountains, you mean.” Bak grimaced, unhappy with the memory.
“The man I should’ve slain,” growled Nebre, walking close enough to hear.
“Would he have followed us across the sea?” Psuro asked.
“A good question, Sergeant. One for which the answer eludes me.”
“I pray to the lord Amon never to have to toil in a place such as this.”
Bak smiled at the intensity in Psuro’s voice, though he agreed wholeheartedly. The mountain of turquoise was not a place where he wished to spend many hours. “You’d best check on Ani, Sergeant. He looks ill. I think the climb was too difficult for him.”
“He must drink more water, sir. He’s not taken in enough to make up for what he’s lost.”
“I’ve seen all manner of men enter the mansion of the
Lady of Turquoise,” User said, joining them. He handed the
Medjay a waterbag. “Get him inside, into the shade. If any one complains, send him to me.”
Psuro strode down a slope of coarse, hard-packed sand as red as the rocks around them. He said a few words to Kaha, standing with the weapons and goatskin waterbags they had brought from the valley camp. Together they approached the plump jeweler, who sat hunched over, his forehead on his knees, and offered him a drink. After Ani took a few careful sips, Psuro took his arm, helped him to his feet, and led him across the grit. Kaha, taking the waterbags and weapons with him, followed them around a chamber being built against the southern wall of an open court. They vanished through a side door into the mansion of the Lady of Turquoise.
Like Bak, User watched to be sure an overly officious priest did not turn the men out. “Amonmose told me of how highly regarded you were in Wawat, Lieutenant. I’m suitably impressed.”
He did not sound the least bit impressed, Bak thought.
“I’m not sure why. Since we left Kaine, three men, including one of my own, have died beneath my very nose.”
“What was your intent this morning? To make us all suspi cious of one another?”
“Any man with good sense would’ve been looking over his shoulder long ago. I believe you to be a man of good sense.”
User’s laugh held not a shred of humor. “Why do you think I agreed to bring Ani and Wensu with me into the desert? To let Amonmose and Nebenkemet come along?”
“You told me you needed additional wealth to pay for physicians,” Bak reminded him.
“I do, yes, but I much prefer traveling alone with a nomad guide. So I intended this time.” User flung Bak one of his hu morless smiles. “I must admit to a certain relief when Ani and Wensu approached me, wishing to come with me. I’d heard, as I told you before, that Ahmose had vanished. Then
Minnakht failed to reappear. Both of them explorers. It set me to thinking.”
He obviously thought himself guilty of a weakness, but
Bak called his concern commonsense. “Amonmose and
Nebenkemet must’ve been easier to accept.”
“The merchant at least knew something of the desert.”
Bak saw Kaha leaving the goddess’s mansion empty handed. He must have found a safe place to leave the weapons and waterbags out of the sun. “You seemed none too happy when we came along.”
“I didn’t know if you were friend or foe. You outnumbered us and you were better armed. If Amonmose had told me who you were…” User shrugged. “He didn’t. He kept the knowledge to himself.”
“I asked that he do so.”
The two men stood on a rise of rock-strewn red sand south of the goddess’s mansion, looking across the low walls that would one day form a large chamber being added to the building by Maatkare Hatshepsut. Ten men toiled at the wall, increasing the height of a ramp up which the next course of stones would be hauled and placed. Prisoners they were, but they chattered constantly as all men do who toil together day after day. An overseer watched, barking out orders, while a guard sat dozing in a slice of shade beside the wall. A sledge containing two large sandstone blocks stood idle on the chamber floor and seven or eight additional blocks lay ready to load. Bak guessed they had been cut the previous season and left for the new crew to place.
“Where’s that overseer, the one called Teti?” User grum bled. “I’ve no desire to spend the night up here.”
The hill on which they stood sloped from south to north, allowing them to look beyond the new chamber and the open court to what had been, many generations ago, another struc ture, now partially destroyed. Kaha had joined Wensu and the pair were walking among a dozen or so monolithic me morial tablets that rose into the sky or lay in the sand at either end of the fallen building, reminders of past kings and long ago expeditions to the mines. Now and again they stopped so
Wensu could read an inscription to the Medjay.
Beyond the building, the irregular surface of the plateau sloped toward the north until suddenly it dropped away. The high, steep cliff overlooked a deep wadi cut through the sandstone by raging waters many generations ago.
The mansion of the Lady of Turquoise, built of the reddish stone taken from the mountain, looked a part of the land around it. It was not large, four or five rooms, Bak guessed, and angled off to the south at the rear of the open court. Lieutenant Huy had told him the goddess’s shrine and that of the lord Sopdu, patron god of the eastern frontier, were cut into the rock be neath the high ground behind the structure. An impressive stand of bushes somehow managed to survive in front of the building, adding life to the hot, dry, and otherwise lifeless land.
Other than the prisoners toiling on the building and the soldiers and prisoners resting from their ordeal of carrying water and supplies up the trail, few men were visible on the tableland atop the mountain. Bak guessed that its uneven reddish surface concealed the mines and those who dug the turquoise from within. A young man wearing the long kilt of a scribe was talking with Sergeant Suemnut, and four men were approaching up a slope farther to the west.
“I thought this place would be busier,” User said, as if reading his thoughts, “an ant hill.”
“According to Huy, too large a number of men would be impossible to supply. Necessity limits the population to about a hundred and twenty.”