eaters of carrion had not yet found him?”
“He’d been covered with sand. Not deep enough to banish his scent, but enough to deceive vultures flying aloft.” The soldier took another deep drink. “We often see a pack of wild dogs in that part of the desert, but for the past couple of days, they’ve been down by the river, harrying a young hippopotamus trapped in a backwater. We’ve spotted jackals there, too, awaiting the kill.”
“I see.” Bak glanced around, searching for another stool.
Unable to find one, he sat on the white coffin. The faint odor of fresh-cut wood teased his nostrils. “Did you find footprints of the slayer? A trail to follow?”
88 / Lauren Haney
“Three men went off to look. I left when they did, so I can’t tell you what they found.”
He seemed no more perturbed by Bak’s makeshift seat than he had been by the officer’s slow reluctance to believe.
A man of good sense, Bak thought, a good soldier to have at one’s back in times of trouble. “Did you recognize the dead man?”
“He lay face-down on his belly. We hesitated to raise his head, thinking you’d want him left as he lay, but finally we did.” Amonmose rolled the jar between the palms of his hands, remembering, not liking the memory. “Most of us knew him. None could call him a close friend, but we liked him.”
A long resigned sigh escaped from Bak’s lips. “Then he’s a man of Buhen.”
“Intef. The hunter.” Amonmose’s eyes darted to Bak’s face.
“You surely knew him, or knew of him. He tracked and killed wild gazelle and other creatures of the river verge and desert.
He traded the meat here at the garrison.”
Bak muttered an oath. He had known the dead man only by sight, but had formed an impression of a quiet, hard-working individual.
“He’s over there.” Amonmose pointed toward what appeared to Bak to be a neverending landscape of sand, isolated rock formations, and more sand. “We’re lucky we found him.
He’s in a shallow depression made by the wind blowing between those two rocky mounds.”
The wind gusted, stirring a fine dust into the air and rolling the coarser grains across the undulating surface of the desert.
A golden-beige carpet come to life. The sand flowed with a whisper so delicate it could have come from the mouth of a goddess. A whimsical goddess, Bak thought grimly, one going to great lengths to wipe away every trace of Intef’s movements and those of the man who slew him.
He was glad he was not alone, and from the way Imsiba watched the flowing sand, it was clear he too felt ill at ease.
The two Medjays who had come with them, one carrying a litter and the second a linen bag of fresh bread, fruit, and beer for the men on patrol, eyed the shifting world around them with deep distrust. The river lay out of sight beyond the long north-south ridge that ran behind Buhen, and the sun beamed down from overhead. Without the ridge, which they had followed south for well over an hour, they would have lost all sense of direction. Walking along its back side, they had passed unseen the fortress of Kor and a watchtower located atop a tall, conical hill farther to the south. Their guide strode forward unintimidated; he had patrolled this wasteland often enough to see important landmarks too small or indistinct for the uninitiated to spot. The twin mounds were a good example. Never would Bak have thought them distinctive in any way.
“One of your dogs found him, you said?” he asked.
“Our best bitch,” Amonmose nodded. “She wasn’t following his scent-he came by a different path-but she smelled something. The jackal, I’d guess.”
“Had the wind come up yet?” Imsiba asked.
“It was a breeze then. Nothing like this.” Amonmose veered to the left across a patch of soft sand. “She raised such a fuss we untied her leash and let her go. After a while she started to bark. We called her, thinking she’d cornered a snake or lizard. Usually she comes, but this time she didn’t. So we went to see what she’d found. That’s when we saw Intef.
And the jackal.”
“From what direction had he come?” Bak asked.
“The east, from the ridge.”
“He never traveled in the desert alone,” Imsiba said. “He took one donkey to carry food and water and one or two others to carry the game he killed.”
Amonmose shrugged. “We found no animal tracks, only those of Intef.”
The breeze let up, the whispering sands stilled. They rounded the closest mound and saw between it and the next hillock the five men Amonmose had left behind and three sturdy, broad-chested dogs, a black female and two brindle males. Men and dogs alike were hunkered down around a 90 / Lauren Haney man lying on the ground, arrows rising from his back. To shelter themselves and the body from the blowing sand, the soldiers had built a curved barricade of shields on the wind-ward side. A good-sized drift had formed before it. If Bak had had any illusions that he might find traces of Intef’s slayer, the height of the drift disabused him.
The soldiers, each as dusty-sweaty as Amonmose and as burned by the elements, scrambled to their feet. The oldest among them, a giant of a man with thinning brown hair, raised his hand in greeting. “Lieutenant Bak. It’s good to see you, sir. Not the best of circumstances, I grant you, but if all was right and proper, I’d never have summoned you. Now would I?”
“Heribsen,” Bak smiled. He knew the man from Nofery’s house of pleasure, a favorite haunt. “So it’s you who stands at the head of these laggards. Amonmose didn’t warn me.”
The big man clapped Imsiba on the shoulder, exchanged quips with the Medjays, and welcomed Amonmose back like a long-lost son. One Medjay handed the foodstuffs to soldiers who peeked into the bag like delighted children, the other laid the litter on the ground at the edge of the depression and unrolled the fabric from around the carrying poles.
Bak and Imsiba knelt beside the body. A man of medium height, broad at the shoulder and narrow of waist, thirty or so years of age, lay flat on the ground, arms thrown out as if to break his fall, chest and face in the sand. His kilt was stained from long use and its hem was frayed. He wore a simple bronze dagger in a sheath hanging from his belt. From the cleared areas on his back and legs and odd clumps of grit at unexpected locations, they could see that the men in the patrol had made an effort to brush the body clear of sand.
An inflated goatskin lay near his feet, and a long bow lay by his side, a heavy weapon to bring down large game. A leather quiver lay across his left shoulder, the arrows spilling out onto the sand. The bow, quiver, and arrows were standard army issue, items the hunter had most likely obtained from the garrison arsenal in exchange for fresh game.
The goatskin was full of water, which told them he had not long been away from the river when he was slain.
Three arrows were buried deep in the upper back within a space the size of a man’s palm. As Amonmose had said, any of the three would have killed. Only a small amount of blood had erupted from the wounds to run down his ribcage.
The embalmer would find more in the lungs, Bak suspected.
The arrows were identical to those in the quiver.
Gently, as if the man lay sleeping rather than dead, Bak rolled him onto his side. “Intef,” he said aloud, glancing at Amonmose and nodding. The hunter’s broad chest told no tales, nor did the sand under and around the body. He lay where he had fallen, leaving nothing behind to name his slayer. Hauling himself to his feet, Bak turned to Heribsen.
“You sent men out, Amonmose told me, before the sand began to move.”
“I walked at their head.” Heribsen eyed the body, his face and voice grim. “Intef was a good man. I hoped to lay my hands on his slayer.”
Imsiba arose and brushed his hands together, ridding them of sand. “What did you find?”
“In a word, nothing.”
“Nothing?” Bak signaled the Medjays to bring the litter close and move the body. “The lord Horus can swoop down from the heavens to seize his prey and never touch the earth.
