Pashed pursed his mouth; the wrinkles in his brow deepened. “I can tell you nothing of significance, I assure you.”
“You resented him-understandably so-for letting you carry his load as well as your own.”
“I did.”
“A man so thoughtless must’ve had other, equally intolerable traits.”
Pashed opened his mouth to speak, then closed it tight and shook his head.
“What thought did you swallow?” Bak asked.
The architect released a long, unhappy sigh. “Can you not go to the foremen? The chief craftsmen? They’ve as much knowledge of Montu as I. More.”
“Pashed. .” Bak frowned at the architect. “Though Senenmut holds the ultimate responsibility, you and you alone now carry the burden of building our sovereign’s memorial temple. Do you wish to see the project falter while my men time and time again question one workman after another? You can be sure that endless questioning will plant turmoil in their hearts, no matter how much care we take to calm them.”
The architect toyed with the hem of his kilt, shook grit from a sandal. When at last he spoke, the words came out with as much difficulty as a sound tooth being pulled from a healthy jaw. “He never failed to throw his weight around, ordering everyone to do what he thought beneath him. And let me assure you, he felt every task beneath him except issuing orders.” His chin shot into the air, his tone grew resentful.
“He treated all of us-including me-as men placed on this earth to do his bidding. As servants. In spite of the fact that without me to see that the project went on, with or without him, Senenmut might long ago have seen through him.”
Had Senenmut truly failed to see, Bak wondered, or had he simply ignored the dead man’s faults? “How long did Amonked take to notice his many absences?”
“Two weeks at most,” Pashed admitted with grim satisfaction. “Montu underestimated him and failed to alter his indolent ways. He never once noticed that Amonked came day after day, without a break, and that he never failed to see an error in any man’s ways.”
“Senenmut, on the other hand, is a busy man, one who seldom comes to Djeser Djeseru.”
Pashed glanced quickly at Bak, as if suspecting him of being facetious. “Montu’s most disagreeable trait, one we all despised, was that he never failed to take credit for other men’s ideas. The more creative the thought, the quicker he was to make it his own.”
“For example. .?”
Once begun, the architect would not be turned onto a lesser path. “He fawned over Senenmut, gaining his ear, telling tales, making himself look good and everyone else mediocre at best. To hear him talk, he alone created this magnificent building.”
Having heard many tales in the garrison of Senenmut’s penchant for self-aggrandizement, Bak had an idea the bragging fell on deaf ears. Or on the tolerant ears of one who knew he could squash Montu like an insect any time he chose to do so. “Was Montu a competent architect?” he asked, recalling Amonked’s statement that he and Pashed were equally skilled.
“He was,” Pashed admitted reluctantly, “when he shouldered his load.”
“Pashed! Sir!”
A workman came racing down the ramp from the terrace and sped across the sand to where they stood. Every boy outside the tomb, every man toiling on the wall, stopped to look and listen.
“Sir!” The workman halted before Pashed, gasping for breath. Sweat ran down his face and chest. “Another old tomb has been found. Perenefer wishes you to come.”
Pashed stared, distraught, at the messenger and then at Bak. “Not another murdered man. No, just an old tomb. I pray!”
“The donkey stepped in a hole.” The foreman, Perenefer, ran his hand up and down the brush-like mane of a gray donkey laden with large reddish water jars. He was short and stout, and looked so much like Seked, the foreman in charge of the south retaining wall, that they had to be brothers.
Twins. The sole difference as far as Bak could see was that this man had no scar on his forehead. “As he struggled to free himself, the sand fell away. For a time, we feared he, too, would drop out of sight.”
“How’d you save him?” Bak asked the small boy who held the rope halter.
“I yelled, sir, and Perenefer came, and so did they.”
The boy pointed at five men standing nearby, ready to help should help be needed. Or, more likely, unwilling to leave, fearing they would miss something. They were covered with the fine white dust risen from nearby limestone drums, which they had been shaping into sixteen-sided column segments.
“They caught his front hooves and pulled him free.” The boy stared wide-eyed at the black hole, as big as two men’s hands placed one beside the other, down which sand was still trickling. “I thank the lord Amon they were close by.
Only the greatest of gods knows how deep the tomb is.”
“Shall we open it, sir?” Perenefer asked.
Pashed glanced at the lord Khepre, the morning sun climbing the vault of heaven toward midday. “We’ve most of the day ahead of us. Do so.” He turned to Bak. “We’ve been warned of robbers in the local burial places. We dare not leave these old tombs open for long.”
“Have you unearthed many?”
“A dozen or so since first we began to level the land. More than I expected. The surrounding hillsides are riddled with tombs. I thought most of the ancient nobility to be buried there, not here.”
Perenefer glared at the stonemasons, who had begun to edge away. “Why’re you standing there gaping? Come on.
You surely can brush away a little sand.”
The men came forward with scant enthusiasm, but once they set about the task, they toiled with a will. Beneath the windblown sand they found three rectangular stone slabs lying side by side. The corner of one had broken away. A fault had allowed the stone to collapse beneath the donkey’s weight.
At another command from Perenefer, the men took up levers and began to shift the broken stone sideways. The boy led his donkey to a safer spot a few paces away. So he could see better, Bak climbed onto the back of a large red granite statue of a reclining lion with the face of Maatkare Hatshepsut. Only luck and the will of the gods had placed the statue, heavier by far than the donkey, so close yet so far from the weakened stone and the hole into which it might well have toppled. If it had fallen into the tomb, it would have appeared to the workmen as the most dire of omens.
“Unless appearances deceive, the tomb has never been opened,” Pashed said with obvious relief. “We shouldn’t find a new death here.”
With Perenefer urging the masons on, the slabs were quickly shifted and the mouth of the shaft gaped open, a hole as wide as a man’s arm was long and too deep to see to the end.
“Bring a pole and place it across the shaft,” the architect ordered, “and bring a rope and torch. I must go down, and someone must go with me.” He bestowed upon Bak the same pointed look Bak had given him before they entered the tomb in which Montu had been found. “I want no man to accuse me of robbing the dead.”
Bak clung with one hand to the rope and, with the other, held the torch low, trying to glimpse the bottom of the shaft before he reached it. The light danced against the rough-cut walls, forming shifting patterns of dark and glitter. The air, sealed inside for many years, was still and close and hot. He spotted the bottom and glimpsed the black mouth of either a chamber or a transverse tunnel. His feet touched stone and he released the rope. Calling to the men above to raise the line for Pashed, he turned to peer down what proved to be a horizontal shaft. More than a dozen paces long and lined with crumpled baskets, it opened into a room; the burial chamber, he assumed. How large it was he could not tell.
The light from his torch did not reach inside.
He longed to go on, to see all this tomb contained and return to the surface. He did not like enclosed dark spaces. But his task was to lay hands on a slayer and learn the cause of so many accidents, while Pashed was the man responsible for Djeser Djeseru. He had to respect the architect’s authority.