The men responsible for the turquoise reluctantly quit their game and hefted the bags of precious stones. Their guards and the Medjays scrambled to their feet and took up their weapons. The men in User’s party hauled themselves off the ground. Suemnut, in his haste to be on his way, strode down the steep slope at the lower end of the ledge.
Bak, several paces behind, started down the slope. A sharp crack stopped him short. He glanced around, not sure what had made the sound. Seeing nothing, he walked on. Perhaps a rock had rolled off a ledge and shattered. Or could stone burst apart when exposed to too much heat and suddenly chilled by shade?
Another sharp report, this so close that small shards of broken stone erupted from the rock beside him. He ducked and looked around. A movement on the hillside high and to his right caught his eye. A man on the opposite side of the ravine. One who looked to be tall and slender. Too far away to see well and standing with his back to the sun, Bak could not discern his features. From his stance, from the way he pulled his arm back and flung it forward, Bak guessed his weapon.
“Get down!” he yelled, throwing himself sideways. “I see a man using a sling!”
A stone struck him hard on the right thigh, dropping him onto the rocks beside the path. Cursing mightily, he scram bled into the inadequate shelter of a broken boulder. Suem nut crouched low and slid down the slope to a bulge in the hillside. Psuro, Nebre, and Kaha hustled everyone else to the base of the trail down which they had come. Huddled against the hillside in a corner of sorts, the man with the sling could not see them.
Bak glanced at his thigh. Except for a slight redness, he saw no sign of the impact, but a hint of soreness promised an impressive bruise. He had no illusions about the power of a sling in the hands of an expert, and he thanked the lord Amon for his good fortune. Men were trained in the army to kill with the weapon and could strike a man’s head with prac ticed ease and deadly force. He had heard that the desert no mads used slings to slay gazelle and ibex and to take the lives of one another in tribal disputes.
The man with the sling heaved another rock. It skidded across the top of the boulder behind which Bak lay, sending bits of stone flying around him. Suemnut yelled at the sol diers he had sent on ahead, ordering them back. His voice echoed through the wadis, the words lost in repetition. In the unlikely event that his troops heard, Bak doubted they would understand the summons.
The man flung another rock, silencing the sergeant. Psuro leaped out into the open and fired off an arrow. The angle was not good, and the missile fell short. The man stood his ground and may even have laughed, reminding Bak of the man he and Nebre had followed deep into the foothills of the red mountain.
Snarling an oath, Psuro ducked away. He spoke a few words to Nebre and Kaha. The former seated an arrow and raised his bow, ready to leap out into the open.
Favoring his thigh, which was beginning to throb, Bak made motions as if to leave his shelter. If he could draw the man’s attention…
“Stay there, sir!” Psuro yelled.
The man sent another rock flying. With an angry crack, it slammed into the boulder near Bak’s head. At the same time,
Nebre stepped out, the look on his face venomous. He raised his bow in a careful and deliberate fashion and fired off an ar row. It struck the man in the left side, but flew on past. A glancing blow at best. The Medjay snapped out an oath and seated another missile.
The man touched his side, raised his hand to look at his fingers and what had to be blood, and slung a rock at Nebre.
The stone grazed the Medjay’s arm, causing him to fumble the arrow. Kaha stepped out to aid his fellow policeman. The man swung around and began to run. Kaha’s arrow flew high, missing its target. Nebre’s missile struck the boulder behind which the man vanished.
The Medjays grabbed their quivers and a waterbag, ran to ward the stepped waterfall above the ravine, and scrambled across a slope of loose rocks on the opposite side, following the man who had ambushed them. The two guards raced after them. Bak leaped up from his shelter, grabbed a spear, and followed.
“No!” Suemnut yelled. “You can’t go after him. It’s too near nightfall and you don’t know the mountain.”
Bak slowed his pace, torn between common sense and a desire to snare the attacker.
“Come back!” Suemnut yelled.
Snapping out a curse, much against his wishes, Bak or dered the men back. Though he had not had a good look at the man with the sling, his basic physical appearance was too familiar to ignore. He had to be the watching man. The man who had, less than two weeks earlier, tried to entice him and
Nebre into an ever more confusing landscape, where they might well have become lost, where they could easily have died from lack of food and water.
Bak plodded down the trail behind Suemnut, seething with fury. The man he sought had an uncanny ability to choose a place and time that would give him the advantage.
Bak had vowed to snare him, and he knew he would, but when and how?
The path was no longer as difficult as it had been, but each step he took jolted the bruise on his thigh, making it ache with the intensity of an open wound. A dark lump had formed and was beginning to extend downward, blood spreading below the skin from the injury. To make matters worse, the day had been long and he was tired and hungry.
The deepening shadows of the peaks to the east were spread ing across the landscape, harbingers of night. At least the heat of the day was waning.
“There you are, sir.” Suemnut stopped and pointed almost straight down.
Bak looked upon the wadi below with mixed emotions. He thanked the gods that their goal had shown itself at last, but it looked impossibly far away. Huge slopes of broken red sand stone fanned out below them. A thin pale line traversing the lower incline marked the path to the wadi floor. Acacia trees sent long, late-evening shadows across the broad strip of bur nished sand, which meandered away between high reddish hills, maybe spurs of the mountain of turquoise.
“We’re not far from the nearest slope of fallen rock,” the sergeant said. “After we reach that, it’s simply a matter of placing one foot in front of the other.”
The troops who had passed them by, physically fit and ac customed to the descent, were nowhere in sight. Bak as sumed they had gone around a shoulder of the mountain or had descended into a ravine and would reappear on the path below. Or they might have already reached the wadi and walked on to Huy’s camp. A depressing thought considering the distance he and his companions still had to travel.
With a quick glance backward to be sure the men for whom he was responsible were keeping up, Suemnut walked on. Bak also looked back. Psuro was close behind, walking with Nebre, trying to convince him that even if they had gone after the man with the sling, they could not have caught him.
The Medjay, furious at having to let him slip away yet an other time, wore a scowl that would have sent fear into the heart of the lord Set himself. Bak, who felt no less angry, sympathized.
Bak sat on a thick pillow stuffed with straw, his leg stretched out before him in the faint hope that he could ease the pain in his thigh. No amount of pampering would heal the injury, he knew. Only time would erase the ghastly black bruise and the constant nagging ache.
Lieutenant Huy, eager for another game of senet, had urged him to accept the pillow. Now the officer sat on a stool on the opposite side of the game board, setting up the playing pieces. As before, he had taken the blue spools for himself and had given Bak the white cones. Lieutenant Nebamon sat on a rock, his back to the wall of the rough stone structure
Huy and his scribe used as a dwelling and office. His face was hidden in shadow, while the light of the torch mounted on the wall behind him illuminated the game board and the two men preparing to play. A yellow dog lay at Nebamon’s feet, twitching and moaning in its sleep.