the whim of a dictatorial woman.'
Amethu chuckled. 'Best you don't call her a tyrant to her face. She prides herself on her kind and considerate manner.'
'Don't get me wrong. She has every right to be shorttempered. But at times she seems as irrational as her fatherand as stubborn.'
'I've never known her to be this difficult.' The steward brushed a fly off his bald head. 'I've urged her to allow a servant to care for Djehuty while he's ill. She refuses, insisting that no one else can satisfy him. And I've selected a capable and responsible woman who could easily step into Hatnofer's sandals, performing the duties of housekeeper. Again Khawet has refused.'
Bak gave him a sympathetic smile. 'Perhaps when I lay hands on the slayer, your load will be lighter and so will hers.'
'I pray you're right.' Amethu gave him a sharp look. 'Are you closing on him?'
'Sometimes I feel I'm so close I can almost smell him. At other times, I doubt I'll ever lay hands on him.'
'In other words, you haven't the slightest idea who he is.'
Nettled by so bald an assessment, Bak glared at the river flowing along the base of the terrace. Three small boats raced upstream, their sails swollen with the morning breeze. Across the channel, near where Nenu had died, four women knelt at the water's edge, washing linen and spreading the objects over the bushes to dry.
'Four of the five deaths occurred before I came to Abu,' he said, waving off a yellow butterfly. 'Can you remember where you were at the time those lives were taken?'
The steward's head snapped around. 'I resent the insinuation, Lieutenant!'
Bak formed the most amiable smile he could manage. 'I've more or less admitted I'm desperate. Will you not humor me?'
'Humph!' Amethu searched his face. Evidently convinced Bak fully intended to get what he sought, he offered a tight smile. 'Oh, all right! I was in the governor's villa, where I spend all my days. I've no special memory of what I was doing or who I was with except…' He hesitated, cleared a throat that did not need clearing. 'Well, except for the time Lieutenant Dedi was slain. But let me assure you: I've taken no lives.'
'If all were slain by a single man, as I believe, the one accounting will do.'
The steward's eyes fell away; he made a pleat in the skirt of his kilt and another and another, busying himself with minutiae. 'This isn't the easiest tale to tell. You see, in a sense I'm responsible for that young officer's death.'
'You?' Bak asked, not sure he understood.
'That morning, I summoned the servant who tends the animals. His accounts were chaotic-his mathematical skills are close to nonexistent-and we spent several hours going over them, sorting them out. When he returned to the stable, he found the young man dead. If I'd not kept him so long… Well, you can imagine how I felt. How I still feel.'
'Lieutenant Dedi was meant to die, Amethu.' Bak laid a sympathetic hand on the steward's wrist. 'If you hadn't eased the slayer's path, he'd've found another way.'
'So I've told myself.'
Bak let the matter rest, aware that words alone could heal no open sore. If Amethu was the man he thought he was, time and a will to forget would soothe his conscience. 'What can you tell me of Nebmose, the man who dwelt in the villa next to Djehuty's?'
'Nebmose?' Amethu released the pleats in his kilt and glanced up. 'You are reaching far afield, aren't you?' Bak ignored the jibe. 'I walked through the house and grounds this morning and was struck by their value. It occurred to me that Nebmose might've had some distant relative, one whose relationship is unknown to all who dwell in Abu, a man seething with resentment at having his birthright confiscated.'
'No, no, no.' Amethu shook his head vehemently. 'Nebmose had no living relatives, close or distant. That I know for a fact.'
'How can you be so sure? I've lain with women I've told no one about. Might not he or his father or his father's father have done the same, creating a child at the time?'
'You don't understand.' The steward wiggled around on the bench to face Bak, the better to make sure he got his message across. 'Nebmose was his father's only child, and his father was his father's only child, and so it had been for at least six generations. That was their curse. Somewhere in the distant past, the gods had willed that each man in that family would have only one child-one boy. No girls were ever born, no second sons.'
Bak frowned, skeptical.
The steward read the look on his face and turned indignant. 'I knew Nebmose's father well, Lieutenant. We studied together in the scribal school at the governor's villa. And my father knew his, studying with him a generation earlier.'
'I can't believe none of Nebmose's ancestors had concubines.'
'None who conceived, but…' Amethu hesitated, scowled. 'I've heard tales… Well, who knows how true they are? They're told in the servants' quarters and enter the homes of respectable men and women through the back door. They say that pretty servant girls in Nebmose's villa have, in past generations, given birth to babies born deformed, sad little creatures fortunate to die within an instant of seeing the light of day.'
Bak found the tale difficult to believe, the curse superstitious nonsense. But the steward, he felt sure, was not a man to pass on information containing no grain of truth. If only my father were in Abu, Bak thought; as a physician, he would know if such a thing were possible.
A new thought struck. 'You grew to manhood with Nebmose's father?'
Amethu nodded. 'A good man, he was, one I valued as a friend. All who knew him loved and respected him. No malformed babies were born to his servants, I can tell you. His one and only son, Nebmose, was as fine a man as his sire.'
Bak stood up and walked to the edge of-the shade, giving himself time to absorb the news. Throughout his stay in Abu, he had assumed Nebmose to be Djehuty's age. Never had he thought him a young man. Walking back to the bench, he asked, 'How'old was Nebmose when he died?'
'He'd just celebrated his twentieth year.' 'How long ago?'
Amethu drew his head back, surprised. 'Has no one told you? He was an officer in the garrison. A lieutenant. One of the many fine young men — who died in that frightful sandstorm five years ago. The storm in which you've shown so much interest.'
'By the beard of Amon!' Bak was staggered. He had been looking at that house for eight long days, walking its grounds, taking it for granted. Could he, after so much time, have stumbled upon the right path at last? 'Was anyoneanyone at all who toils in the governor's household-related in even the most remote fashion to Nebmose?'
'Simut.' Amethu spoke as if he could hardly credit Bak's lack of knowledge. 'He was Nebmose's uncle.'
Bak eyed the steward warily. Simut's name was the last he had expected to hear, the relationship hard to believe. 'Did you not just tell me Nebmose had no relatives?'
Amethu waved off the objection as if of no significance. 'Simut was no blood relative and had no right to the property. His wife's sister was wed to Nebmose's father, and she died long before her husband. He didn't tell you? I'm astonished. He thought of the boy as one of his own.'
Bak recalled the chief scribe mentioning a nephew lost in the storm, a youth as close to him as a son. Which might explain the offerings left in Nebmose's family shrine. But would it account for the unusual care given the interior of the house and the garden in which the shrine stood? Bak's thoughts leaped back to the possibility that had occurred to him earlier-a notion he had rejected without due consideration. If that idea had any merit at, all, and now he was inclined to think it might, the donor was another individual altogether.
For one thing, Simut could not be the slayer. He had been at the farthest end of the province at the time of Lieutenant Dedi's death, accompanying the tax inspector.
Simut lived in Abu, in a housing block a short walk from the governor's villa. His home was similar to dozens of others Bak had seen in the crowded cities of Kemet, revealing nothing of his lofty position in the province. It was a modest single-story dwelling of five rooms laid out in a square, with an open kitchen at the back that contained a hearth, an oven, and a small conical granary.
The chief scribe spoke with Bak in the reception room, which was larger than the other chambers and whose
