“You spoke of sailing with Captain Roy to a lonely spot on the river and loading on board the illicit cargo we found on your ship.”
“The tale was true.” The sailor looked up, squinting into the sun, trying to see Bak’s shadowed face. “You saw for yourself signs of our effort.”
“Why did you load there when you usually take on cargo south of Kor?” Bak snapped out the question, risking the guess.
A man sucked in his breath, others muttered curses. A few, Min among them, stared open-mouthed and mute.
“The load was too big!” the youth cried. “Go on, Min. Tell him.”
“The boy tells the truth.” Min spoke grudgingly, nettled by the young sailor’s prodding. “We’d never before been so bold, never loaded so much illicit cargo, never carried so much at one time. But our captain…” He gave a soft, bitter laugh. “He said we’d be safe away from the frontier, where no one would know the truth from a lie, and with false pa-pers to carry us north.”
“In other words,” Bak said, steering his questions back to the path he wished to take, “the place south of Kor is small, with no space for so large a quantity of goods.” He paused to think, added another guess. “And it offers no convenient hiding place should you have to leave it for some reason.”
“That’s right,” Min mumbled, his expression sullen.
“And when there’s no moonlight, it’s as black as the inside of a sealed tomb,” the boy added. “If we’d loaded there, we’d still be stumbling around in the dark, not daring to light a torch for fear of being seen.”
Bak did not have to ask who might see. The river above Kor was dotted with islands rocky but verdant, and soil lay in protected pockets and coves along the water’s edge. Small villages and tiny farms clung to each bit of green, people eking out a living, aware and wary of strangers.
“Describe this place,” he said.
A few men whispered among themselves, someone muttered a curse. The boy opened his mouth to speak, but a hiss made him swallow the words.
Min stared straight ahead, refusing to look at his fellow seamen-or at Bak. “We moored against a rocky shelf near a small oasis on the west bank of the river. It’s above Kor, but the distance I can’t tell you. We always went in the dead of night with no moon to see by, and our captain never sailed a direct path.”
Bak doubted these men who had spent a lifetime on the river would lose their way easily, even with a captain trying to deceive them. They were holding the knowledge back for some reason. “Could you find it if you had to?”
Min shrugged. “A ledge is a ledge, and one oasis much like another.”
Bak was willing to bet they had left mooring stakes behind, and the ledge would surely be scarred from the hull rubbing the stone. “Did you ever meet another vessel there?”
“Never.”
“We sometimes saw signs that a ship had come and gone,” the boy piped up.
Another, sharper hiss brought a flush to his cheeks. At the back of the room, several men exchanged thin- lipped, disapproving glances. The youth was speaking too freely to suit them, inviting punishment.
With Captain Roy gone, Bak could think of only one reason for holding back information: a desire to keep secret someone or something. “I’ve heard tales of a headless man meeting a ship in the dead of night at a secret spot south of Kor.” A loud, heartfelt curse confirmed his guess. “As the ship was yours and the secret spot served as your mooring place, I’m amazed you failed to remember him. Surely one with so outstanding a feature would be hard to forget.”
The men looked at one another, their initial surprise quick to vanish, replaced by glares of accusation, as if they blamed each other for giving away their secret.
“He was there.” The boy ducked away from a well-aimed elbow. “We saw him each time we stopped for cargo.”
Min’s voice took on a placating tone. “He always stood at a distance, a headless wraith in the dark. When the time came for speech, usually after we loaded, our captain went to him. As he walked back, bringing with him a new manifest, the headless man faded into the darkness.”
Remembering how awed these men had been of the place and the ship they had seen when loading the cargo north of Buhen, Bak gave Min a curious look. “You show no fear, as most men would, of a ghostly figure with no head.”
Min snorted. “He’s a man, that’s all.”
“That’s all? A man?” A hard-muscled young sailor strode from the back of the room to tower over him. “Well, let me set you straight, Min. That man had the power to make us all men of wealth-if only you and that boy had had the good sense to keep your mouths shut.”
Min shot to his feet, his chin jutting. “We never saw his face and don’t know his name. How can we approach him, offering our services? If we’ve no ship to call our own and no captain to point the way, what services can we offer?”
“Sit down, both of you!” Bak commanded.
Min dropped where he stood. The younger man tried to melt in among his fellows. As if his accusation alone had put an end to their hopes, they refused to shelter him, forcing him to sit at the front of their ranks beneath Bak’s watchful eye.
With order restored, Bak asked, “Do you know of a man, a Kushite tribesman, who sails a small, sleek ship down the Belly of Stones?”
The sailors looked at each other, seeking a reason for remaining mute. But with their plan to again haul contraband revealed as hopeless, they could find no further reason for secrecy. To a man, they nodded.
“Wensu he’s called,” an older sailor said. “We often haul trade goods he’s brought from far upriver. You saw for yourself the ebony logs we carried on deck. He tied up beside us the day before we sailed north from Kor, and we moved them from his deck to ours.”
“Could he and the headless man be one and the same?”
“No,” the sailors chorused.
“Impossible.”
“Never.”
“The headless man is a man of the north, not the south,”
Min explained. “He’s pale of body and limb, not dark like the Kushite.”
“Wensu?” Captain Mahu’s pilot, a small, wizened man with white hair, wrinkled his nose in mild distaste. “The Kushite, you mean. The one with the traveling ship he’s turned into a trading vessel.”
“So I’ve been told,” Bak said.
“Sure, I remember him there.” Clinging to the stanchion supporting the huge oar-like rudder, one of a pair that controlled the cargo vessel’s direction, the pilot lifted a foot to scratch the instep. “The quay at Kor has limited space, as you know. Because of the large quantity of trade goods that came down the Belly of Stones during high water, ships were moored two and sometimes three deep, awaiting their turn to load. For a time, Wensu’s ship was tied to ours, and his sailors had to cross our deck to go ashore.”
Bak scowled at the man, exasperated. “Did you not tell my sergeant that no one came aboard who hadn’t the right to do so?”
“They had every right. How else could they get from their ship to dry land?”
Offering a silent prayer to the lord Amon for patience, Bak leaned back against the railing around the aftercastle, a raised platform located behind the steering gear. From where he stood, he could see the length of the vessel. The stalls had been cleared away and the deck scrubbed until the wood glowed a warm red-brown. New dark green mats still giving off the tangy smell of fresh sap walled the deckhouse. The sacks of grain and sheaves of hay had been moved into the shade beneath the mat shelter. Sailors were spread out around the ship, polishing fittings, repairing lines and hawsers, and working aloft at the masthead and on the yards.
He wondered if they had grown weary of inactivity and taken these tasks upon themselves or if Userhet had descended upon them on Sitamon’s behalf, urging them to toil doubly hard for their new mistress.
“How many crewmen does Wensu have on board?”
“Only six. Men from far to the south.”
“Did you or your mates get to know any of them?”
