Flesh of the God lb-7

by Lauren Haney

  “During the morning, nothing. I was outside the wall with the other archers, practicing with the bow. He didn’t summon me until early afternoon.”

  “After he spoke with me.”

  “So I believe.” Harmose shifted on the hard stool; he clutched his knees. “He called me into his office. He seemed troubled, said he wanted me to stay in the audience hall. He…he asked me to keep my bow within easy reach.”

  Bak studied the archer closely, wary of his hesitant speech, his failure to make eye contact. Is he telling the truth? he wondered. Or has Azzia fed him the words to reinforce her story?

  “Go on,” he said, hiding his suspicions.

  “He summoned the lieutenants Nebwa, Paser, and Mery, one after the other, and spoke alone with each of them.” This time, Harmose’s eyes met his with no hesitation. The presence of the three officers in Nakht’s office had doubtless been noted by every man toiling in the building, so a lie would be foolhardy.

  “Do you know what they talked about?”

  “He didn’t say,” Harmose admitted, “but I think he spoke of your suggestions for outwitting tribesmen who raid the caravans.”

  “Why talk to each man alone?”

  “Men resist change, especially when it comes from the lips of an outsider.” His eyes held Bak’s and he went on smoothly, “Particularly an outsider who was banished from Waset at our sovereign’s command.”

  The words pricked like a thorn, but Bak was careful to give no sign.

  “When Commandant Nakht wanted a task done but knew it would meet with resistance, he separated those he needed to convince.” The archer’s gaze drifted toward the empty chair. “That was always his way. He spoke with one man and then another, persuaded each in turn, and in the end, the task was done as he wished.”

  The tactic was good and Bak vowed to use it should the occasion arise. “Who did he speak with after the officers left?”

  “No one. He read the garrison daybook and the dispatches he’d received from Ma’am and from the forts along the Belly of Stones. After filing them away, he bade me and others he met in the audience hall good evening and came upstairs to his quarters.”

  “He never explained why he asked you to keep your weapon near to hand?”

  “Never. At the time, I thought…well, he enjoyed using the bow and we sometimes went outside the walls late in the day to shoot at targets. Later, after he was slain, I was sure the lord Amon or another god had visited him in a dream, had warned him to take care lest someone…” Harmose bowed his head, stared at his clasped hands. “He should’ve warned me, should’ve allowed me to stay by his side.”

  Bak stood up, paced to the door and back. Nebwa, Mery, Paser-and Harmose. All in or near the building when the commandant was slain, all summoned to his office at a time when he clearly expected trouble. If Nakht had suspected one of the four of stealing gold, he could have taken advantage of the solitary interviews to confront the guilty man.

  “How did Nebwa, Paser, and Mery leave Nakht’s office?” he asked. “Angry? Content? Or something in between?”

  “In their usual way.” Harmose rubbed his hand over his face as if to wipe away his sorrow. “Nebwa growled like a lion, Paser’s lips were sealed as tight as the planks in the hull of a ship, and Mery looked like a small boy who’d been spanked.”

  A niggling thought surfaced in Bak’s heart. “Of all the officers in Buhen, why would Nakht speak of my suggestions with those three and no one else?”

  “The tribesmen most often attack the gold caravans. Nebwa, Paser, and Mery have the most knowledge and experience and are the best men to judge your suggestions. Another officer, Ahmose, is equally capable, but he’s away, leading a caravan across the desert from a mine farther upriver.”

  Bak stood quite still, his interest multiplying ten times ten. “I thought Mery had always served as watch officer and Nebwa just with the infantry.”

  “Before Commandant Nakht came to Buhen, Mery, Paser, Nebwa, and Ahmose took turns leading the gold caravans. The same was true of the officers who led caravans to and from the copper mines and the quarries.” Harmose, noticing Bak’s surprise, explained, “Our previous commandant rotated the officers because he thought the trip too strenuous for one man to make every time.” His expression turned cynical. “Of course, he failed to think of the rest of us-archers, spearmen, and drovers who walked the same trail time after time with no complaint.”

  “You’re one of the men who guards the gold caravans?”

  “I am,” Harmose said, nodding. “Commandant Nakht was less impressed by a man’s status and rank, and more concerned with his skills. When first he came to Buhen, he watched the officers, learned each man’s good points and bad. Nine or ten months ago, he gave them the more permanent assignments they now have, based on what they do best.”

  Bak’s thoughts tumbled. Paser, Mery, Nebwa, and Harmose had all traveled to the mines. None but Paser continued to do so. Did that mean he was the guilty man? Not necessarily. Any of them could have placed an ally there to steal the gold and pass it in secret back to Buhen. And all of them spent a considerable amount of time in this building, the heart of the garrison. Azzia’s home.

  Irritated by the thought, he swung back to Harmose. “How long were Nakht and Azzia wed?”

  “Eight years. She was fourteen when he took her as his wife, but he’d soldiered with her father for many years and watched her grow to a woman.”

  “Was the marriage a happy one?”

  “He worshipped her. She was as the stars and the moon and the sun to him, and he the same to her.”

  “Yet they had no children.”

  Harmose’s voice grew bitter, his expression filled with scorn. “In the land of Hatti, failure to please the king brings death not only to a man, but to all he holds dear. When the old king of Hatti died, the man who took the throne thought Azzia’s father loyal to another man. He judged him a traitor and sent soldiers to slay the family. None lived but Azzia, who was left for dead.” His glance strayed to the empty chair and his expression softened. “Nakht and his servant Lupaki found her, hid her, brought her back to life. They could do nothing to make her whole. She can have no children.”

  Bak’s heart grew heavy with compassion. If the tale was true, Azzia had suffered more in her youth than most men or women in a lifetime. Would she, could she, have slain the man who pulled her from death? He wanted to think it impossible, but Maiherperi had said: Any man can slay another; all he needs is a weapon and the passion to strike the blow. As a child of that cruel and unforgiving court, she would have the passion.

  “I’ve been told she has a lover,” he said.

  “It’s not true!” Harmose sprang from his stool, his face dark with anger. “Who told you such a vile thing?”

  “Do you know her so well you can say for a certainty she was never unfaithful to her husband?”

  Harmose controlled his anger with a visible effort. “I’ve trusted her with my most secret thoughts, and she confides in me. I’d swear to the lord Horus himself that she’s never looked at any man but Nakht. She loved him too much.” He stared over Bak’s shoulder toward the door of Azzia’s empty sitting room. Worry clouded his face. “I fear for her. Without him, she has no one.”

  His sincerity was disquieting. So was the envy Bak felt. He quashed the unwelcome emotion. The archer’s every word could be a lie, as was most certainly the case if he was the man who stole the gold and gave it to Azzia for safekeeping.

  Bak hurried along the empty street, the rapid pat of his sandals loud and distinct on the stone pavement. Light filtered down from myriad stars spread thickly across a clear, cloudless sky. A faint glow beyond the battlements hinted of the rising moon. The aromas of fresh bread, onions and leeks, beans and lentils, fish and fowl, lingered in the air. Hushed voices drifted from the rooftops of the married officers’ quarters somewhere to his left. He pictured the men lounging atop their houses, finished with their evening meal, playing with their children,
lying with their wives. The air would be cooler there, fresher, not so still and heavy. He seldom regretted his unmarried state, but for an instant, he paused, listened, wished.

  He stopped at the door of the commandant’s residence, grasped the heavy wooden latch. His mission was simple, he told himself. All he had to do was question Azzia about her intimate life and tell her of Tetynefer’s decision to send her to Ma’am.

  To invade a woman’s privacy was an abomination; to tell her she must stand before the viceroy, accused of slaying her husband, would take all the courage he possessed.

  He raised the latch. A dog let out a long, mournful howl. He shoved the door wide and crossed the threshold. Another cur answered the first one’s call. A third and a fourth joined in, and a dozen more took up the dirge, each echoing the others all across the city. He closed the door, muting their voices, and leaned back against it. He stood there for several moments, steeling himself to face her.

  The vestibule and hallway were vague gray spaces, seemingly alive, otherworldly, in the light of a flickering torch mounted somewhere in the audience hall, too far away to share much light, too close to allow total darkness. The stone stairway, walled off from the light, was a series of broad shadowy lines, black and blacker alternating, steps and risers. The sole sound was the soft rustle of mice.

  A scream shattered the silence. He started, stiffened. A second cry reached down the stairwell and reverberated through the empty rooms on the ground floor. A woman’s voice. Azzia!

  Chapter Five

  Bak dashed up the stairwell, taking the invisible steps two, sometimes three at a time. He hit the upper landing, veered sharply to avoid a dozen or more porous pottery water jars stacked in a cool corner, and burst into the courtyard. The potted trees and shrubs looked like silent dark sentinels, the loom a low bier, the grindstone an offering table to the shades of night. Ruru was nowhere in sight.

  Through a doorway at the back of the courtyard, he glimpsed a flickering light, heard the chitter of frightened women. To his left, from Nakht’s reception room, he heard scuffling, the crash of overturned furniture, a man’s curse. And Azzia half-screaming, half-yelling words he could not understand. As he ran toward the unlighted room, Lupaki raced through the rear door, followed closely by Azzia’s old female servant.

  “Bring a torch!” Bak yelled.

  He circled a pair of acacias, whose twiggy branches raked his arm, and spotted two shadowy figures wrestling in the dark. He yelled to draw their attention. His foot hit something solid; he stumbled and fell to a knee. A quick glance told him he had fallen over Ruru, who lay sprawled in front of the door, unmoving. Bak looked up, saw the figures inside draw apart. As he scrambled to his feet, one ducked down, grabbed a spear from the floor, and threw it. The weapon struck its target but fell away. The one it hit, Azzia he felt sure, stumbled backward, bumping the wall near the darker rectangle, the open door to the mudbrick stairway leading to the roof.

  A mindless fury drove Bak into the room. How could a man attempt to slay a helpless woman? He lunged at the attacker, caught an arm, and pulled him close so he could grab the other arm. Long tendrils of hair tickled his naked torso; his groping hand found a firm, round breast.

  “He’s getting away!” Azzia screamed, trying to jerk free of Bak’s grasp.

  Cursing his mistake, he pushed her roughly aside and bounded after the fleeing man, who had faded into the black stairwell, the spear in his hand. Bak leaped through the doorway, landed on the stairs. Light flooded the room behind him, Lupaki with a torch. Bak’s eyes darted upward. He noted broad bare feet and thick muscular calves below a knee-length kilt. Yelling at the servant to bring the flame close, he stretched high and grabbed an ankle. The man swung around and kicked, trying to break free. Lupaki held the torch through the doorway. Bak saw in the cavorting shadows a heavy bare torso with muscles turning to fat and massive shoulders, the left dripping blood from a dark, ugly gash. The man’s head was out of sight, above the opening to the roof.

  The man shook his leg with the strength of a bullock. Bak’s fingers slipped, held. With a furious snarl, the man swung the spear, slashing at Bak, who jerked away and lost his grip. The man leaped up the stairs and through the opening. He looked back, saw Bak pressing close, midway up the stairway. Hissing like an angered goose, he slashed with the spear. Bak dropped to his knees, and the deadly point whizzed past his head.

  Before his attacker could jerk the weapon away, Bak grabbed the shaft not far above the point and pushed it hard against the frame of the rooftop opening. The man held on tight, but Bak had the advantage. Placing all his weight behind the effort, he drove the spear point forward. The shaft broke in two with a loud snap. He lost his balance, came close to tumbling down the stairway. His assailant ran.

  Clutching the stub of shaft above the spear point, Bak scrambled to the top of the stairs. The fleeing man was running hard, his feet pounding across the roof toward the board that bridged the lane between the commandant’s residence and the storehouse. Bak sprinted after him, praying he could catch him before he could descend the stairway in the scribal office building and get to the street. If the man was a resident of Buhen, and Bak assumed he was, he would know its streets and lanes far better than any newcomer.

  The man darted across the board, pivoted, and kicked out. The bridge vanished between the buildings and crashed on the hard-packed earth below. Laughing derisively, he sped across the barrel-vaulted roof of the storehouse. Its upper surface was a series of plaster-coated half-cylinders running the width of the building, each roofing an individual storage magazine. The adjoining cylinders formed broad straight parallel ridges with narrow hollows in between. The man raced across as agile as a cat.

  His laughter spurred Bak on. He ran toward the edge of the roof where the bridge had been, uttered a brief, fervent prayer to the lord Amon, stepped onto the low parapet, and leaped through the air. The gap fell away behind him, and the impact brought him to his knees on the first ridge. As he scrambled to his feet, his sandals slid beneath him, unable to grip the sloping surface. Years of grit borne on the wind had smoothed the plaster, making it as slick as a muddy riverbank. He glared at the man ahead, nearly halfway across the storehouse roof, running easily. Bak remembered the man’s bare feet, kicked off his own sandals, and left them where they fell.

  His pace initially was uneven, his footing uncertain on the curved surfaces. The man pulled farther away, making no attempt to reach the stairway that descended to the scribal offices. Puzzled, Bak raced after him. As far as he knew, there was no other way off the block of buildings.

  Once Bak found a pattern, four long strides, jump, four more strides, another jump, he began to close the gap. He was less than a dozen paces away when the fleeing man reached the end of the building. Bak was elated. He had him! He slowed to a trot, shifted the broken spear from left hand to right.

  The man glanced over his shoulder and saw his pursuer closing in. He flung himself over the edge, legs dangling, then vanished from sight. Bak spotted the upper end of a sturdy rope tied to a heavy wooden peg embedded deep in the mudbrick ridge. His quarry had slid down to the lane below.

  Spitting out a vile oath, Bak threw himself over the wall and slid down after him. As his feet touched the ground, he glimpsed the man racing around a corner, heading back the way he had come. Bak sped after him, passing the long, bare wall of the storehouse and the more impressive facade of the commandant’s residence. A left turn and a burst of speed carried him along the base of the citadel wall to the unguarded twin-towered gate leading to the outer city. By the time Bak passed through, his quarry had disappeared. He searched the area as well as he could, but finally had to give up, as frustrated and confused by the man himself as by the rabbit warren of lanes. He had never gotten a good look at the man’s face, but he knew for a fact he was not Nebwa or Paser or Mery or Harmose.

  Bak knelt beside Ruru, his face tight with worry. The Medjay lay where he had fallen, still and silent, woolly ha
ir matted with blood. Only the steady rise and fall of his chest gave hope he would live. Bak bowed his head and offered a silent prayer to the lord Re, the greatest of all physicians. He could do no more.

  He rose to his feet and looked at Azzia. She was sitting at Ruru’s head, a damp cloth in her hand, a bowl of water in her lap. The old female servant sat cross-legged beside her, mixing bits of leaves and other ingredients in a small, flat bowl.

  “Who did this?” he demanded. “Did you know him?”

  “I didn’t see his face. How could I? You saw for yourself how dark it was.” Her voice shook, and so did her hands, he noticed.

  Bak had heard of men weak-kneed with fright after bravely facing the enemy on the field of battle, but to see Azzia afraid after such a valiant effort to protect her home was unsettling. Unsettling but understandable. Several angry red blotches on her bare arms and shoulders would soon turn dark, as would the slight swelling around the broken flesh at the corner of her eye. Over her shoulder, he could see Nakht’s reception room in the light of a torch Lupaki had mounted outside the door. A thin ribbon of smoke drifted from the flame to the open stairwell door. Most of the furniture had been overturned; a leg had been broken off one table. The chests were open and their contents strewn across the floor, the iron dagger among them.

  “Calm yourself,” he said. “He’ll not come back tonight.”

  She dipped the cloth into the bowl, squeezed out the excess water, and gently washed the blood from the back of Ruru’s head. “If he does?” she asked. “Will you be here to catch him? Or will you chase him away and return empty-handed?”

  Bak flushed. He knew how close he had come to catching his prey. The last thing he needed was this woman’s scornful reminder that he had failed.

  “Here!” he said, holding out the broken spear. “You can catch him yourself.”