Simut, seated, on a thick linen pad in front of the lesser scribes, frowned at Bak. 'May I help you, Lieutenant?' The soft scraping sound dwindled and ten pairs of eyes turned Bak's way. 'I'm searching for Lieutenant Amonhotep. I've been told he came here after he finished with the craftsman Ipy.'
A look of relief, quickly hidden, flickered across the chief scribe's face. 'He's come and gone. There was a problem at the harbor above Swenet, where ships unload their cargo for overland transport around the rapids. A fight between caravan masters, I understand.'
Bak longed to ask again what secret Djehuty held in his heart, but knew he would get nothing with so many men listening. 'Have you told him of my questions?'
'What the two of you discuss is between him and his master and the gods. It's none of my affair.'
The answer was oblique, but Bak gathered Simut had said nothing. In the unlikely event that no one else had warned the young officer, he would be unprepared for the difficult questions Bak meant to ask and the even harder choices he would have to make. However, unprepared did not mean compliant. Bak had learned during the voyage from Buhen to Abu that if Amonhotep deemed he should say nothing, he would remain mute.
'Your Medjay Psuro is at the landingplace, sir.' The servant, a boy of about eight years, tried hard to look solemn and trustworthy, but his eyes danced with excitement at being entrusted with a message of such great import. 'He has news he says you'll want to hear.'
Bak thanked the boy with a smile and hurried outside. He found the Medjay a hundred or more paces downstream of the landingplace, talking to a gap-toothed old woman with spotted hands and the protruding stomach of one who has borne many children. While they spoke, she lifted sheets and clothing from the bushes and boulders across which she had draped them to dry, folded them, and laid them in a basket. Psuro might not have had the gift Kasay`a had of attracting women who yearned to mother him, but he had a way with those who eked out a living selling foodstuffs and providing minor but necessary services.
Bak stood off to the side, saying nothing, until she had gone on her way. 'She'll wash our linen?'
'She has a taste for pigeon,' Psuro grinned. 'Though she has far too many customers, so she says, she'll squeeze our meager laundry in among the rest, and she'll mend torn articles as well. Each time, I'll give her a bird.'
Bak thought the price too steep, but held his tongue. Every time he had tracked a slayer, he had come away bruised and battered, his kilts torn and filthy. If the slayer in the governor's villa proved equally difficult to lay hands on, he feared the old woman would earn a flock of pigeons.
They headed back upstream, walking close to the river's edge, stepping over rocks and around brush, slipping in patches of mud. The western sky was pale, a sheet of gold diluted with silver. To the east, tiny pinpoints barely visible so early in the evening promised a night brilliant with stars. 'You've news,' Bak prompted.
Psuro, looking pleased with himself, nodded. 'The trader Pahared sends his regards. He remembers well the afternoon he spent with you and Troop Captain Nebwa in Nofery's house of pleasure.' A studied seriousness could not quite, hide a smile. 'A time of revelry and excessive drunkenness, he says.'
Smiling at the memory, pleased with Psuro's success, Bak stepped over a turtle making its slow way toward the water. 'I thank the lord Amon you had better luck in Swenet than in Abu.'
'You must first thank my tenacity,' Psuro laughed. 'If I'd not searched with due diligence, I'd never have found him.'
'He doesn't dwell in Swenet?'
'His wife has a house of pleasure near the market, and they live in a villa close by. I found him in neither place but at the harbor.' Psuro pulled back the branch of a bush and held it while Bak edged by. 'Pahared, I suspect, is on his way to becoming a man of wealth. He's the master of a trading ship, as he was when you met him in Buhen, and he shows no outward sign of success. But he buys hay downriver, ships it south to Swenet, and sells it to caravan masters to feed their donkeys. He admits he has no competition.'
'I took him to be a resourceful man.' Bak climbed onto the stone landingplace, thought what best to do, crossed to the skiff. 'I must speak with him, Psuro. Maybe one who dwells in Swenet, a place where men come and go, transients who owe no special loyalty to Djehuty, can unlatch a door I've failed to open.'
Pahared was just as Bak remembered him: a large, heavily muscled man with an incipient paunch and a hint of gray at the temples. His knee-length kilt rode low on his belly and wide beaded bracelets accentuated the thickness of his wrists and arms. He was good-natured under normal circumstances, Bak recalled, but formidable when pushed too hard. They had greeted each other like old friends, not men who had spent a single afternoon drinking and playing games of chance.
'There's not a man or woman in this province who hasn't heard of the murders.' Pahared, seated on a low stool, watched his wife break the dried mud plugs stoppering two beer jars. She was almost as tall as he, but reed- thin, and she had the dark skin and woolly hair of the peoples living far to the south of Kush. 'With so many dying so fast and all in the governor's household, most whisper that a demon of the night has come to lay waste to this province. They're scared, if the truth be told. Afraid the crops will fail, their animals sicken and die, their families starve.'
Bak accepted a jar with a quick smile of thanks, toed a stool away from the wall, and sat beside the trader. 'If Djehuty is the ultimate goal, as I think he is, the demon resides in a man, and he's out to avenge some unspeakable deed.'
'I wouldn't know about that.' Pahared eyed five sailors filing in through the door, their unsteady. gait and slurred speech pointing to earlier visits to other houses of pleasure. 'I'm not sure anybody knows. That's what scares them so. They don't know where to turn, which demon or genie or god to placate.'
Having no patience with superstition, Bak scowled at the room in which they sat: a large, open space with a high ceiling supported by one square mudbrick column. Long shafts of the waning light of evening filtered down from high windows. A large, gangly gray monkey searched through the straw covering the floor, hunting insects. Three- legged stools and a few low tables stood around the room, while the walls were lined with beer vats, wine jars, and baskets filled with drinking bowls. The room smelled of beer and vomit; the sailors reeked of sweat and fish and garlic.
This place of business reminded him of Nofery, though it resembled neither the old hovel where she had once toiled nor her new, much grander house of pleasure. It must be the smell, l e thought, the ever-present stench of the brew and overindulgence. 'You've heard no tales that discredit Djehuty?' he asked.
'I've known of more popular governors, no doubt about it, but nothing that would bring the wrath of the gods upon his head.'
Bak gave the trader a wry smile. 'You disappoint me, my friend. When I saw this place of business, located on the main thoroughfare running through Swenet, close to the market and within easy walking distance of the encampment where the merchants unload their caravans, I thought to myself. how ideally situated to attract patrons from all walks of life-men who ofttimes drink to excess and speak with loose and frank tongues. When I saw your wife…' He nodded toward the woman, who stood with her shoulder against the doorjamb, keeping a close eye on customers and servants alike. '… she reinforced my confidence in you. I never thought superstition would reign.'
Pahared chuckled. 'I hear many tales, I'm bound to admit, some less fanciful than others. Among them, complaints about Djehuty. But none unique to him, I suspect.'
'Tell me. I've nowhere else to turn.'
Pahared laugaed again, not taking him seriously. 'They say he's indolent, a man who lives a life of luxury and ease. One who, in his youth, loved to hunt and fish and fowl, but now prefers to loll away the hours in his villa, eating sweets and drinking wine. A man responsible for meting out the law, yet one who has scant knowledge of the laws of the land. A man who, thanks to the gods, is surrounded by men of talent and knowledge who tend to the needs of this province in his stead.'
Bak suspected the assessment was fair. The brief time he had spent in the audience hall had divulged no brighter side to the man. 'What of the men close to him? Have any of them committed an offense that might be laid at Djehuty's feet?'
Pahared drank from his beer jar, licked his lips, shrugged. 'Not that I've heard-and I would've. Most have lived here since they were babes, and their lives are as open to view as the orb of Re traveling across the sky day after day.'
Bak expelled a quick, frustrated sigh. 'When I press Djehuty for help, he acts like a man with guilt in his heart but denies all wrongdoing. Three men on his staff have hinted he has a guilty secret, and none will enlighten
