“I’m surprised to find you alone, mistress.” Bak looked up at Nefret, seated on a thick pillow on the carrying chair, her face and voluptuous body shadowed by the canopy above her. She had substituted perfume for a bath, and its too-sweet strength tainted the air. “Your most avid admirer is neglecting you.”
He had seen Thaneny walking with Amonked. The scribe’s absence had offered an ideal opportunity to probe deeper into the young woman’s life-and the inspector’s.
If she was the key to Baket-Amon’s death, her guilelessness might lead to the slayer.
“Horhotep?” Nefret laughed. “He only talks to me be cause he fears Amonked has ceased to listen to him and he hopes I’ll use my influence to improve his position.” She laughed again, this time with a strong touch of cynicism.
“He doesn’t seem to realize that I, too, have lost favor.”
Poor Thaneny, Bak thought, the invisible man as far as she was concerned. “Has Amonked not told you he’s trou bled by your many complaints, your failure to accept this journey as fact and adapt as best you can?”
The porters exchanged a surprised look, unaccustomed to such blunt speech from anyone other than Amonked.
“I thought this trip would… Well…” Nefret fussed with her dress, smoothing it across her thigh. “I thought we’d be together more. From the day he took me into his household, he… He’s seldom spent time with me. Only at night. And then we don’t talk much.”
“I see,” Bak said, stealing the noncommittal demeanor and words from the inspector himself.
The porters exchanged another look, this one a smirk.
Amonked had, Bak realized, brought this beautiful young woman on this most arduous journey without really know 194
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“I miss Waset! I long to return!” She flung a fearful look at a yellow dog trotting past. “To sleep in a house, with no insects or reptiles or animals to fear. To bathe each morning in a placid pool. To spend my days in the shade of a syc amore tree, breathing the sweet scent of flowers. To be waited upon by servants who leap to obey my slightest command. To gossip with Sithathor, Amonked’s wife, and his sister and his mother.”
“While you enjoy the pleasures of life, what does he do?”
Bak asked, silently thanking her for opening the door into their lives.
“When he’s home, you mean? What do noblemen usually do? He swims, plays board games, receives guests. Mostly, he fusses with the household accounts and manages his estate and that of Sithathor.” She wrinkled her nose as if so common a task was distasteful to her. “She tells me he’s multiplied her holdings three times over since the day he took her as his wife.”
Bak was surprised. Few men could accomplish such a feat. He had learned long ago not to take people at face value, but he had allowed Amonked’s commonplace ap pearance and Nofery’s old and outdated recollection of the past to influence him into thinking the inspector a shadow of a man. He had erred.
“As storekeeper of the lord Amon, he must now and again toil in the service of the god.”
She rolled her eyes skyward. “He spends hours upon hours in the warehouses, going through records, checking quantities, doing innumerable tasks I suspect could be done by lesser men. He comes home smelling of dusty documents and sometimes of onions or the granary or the animal paddocks.”
Bak had assumed the task a sinecure, Amonked nothing more than a figurehead. Another error, it seemed. “As a favorite of our sovereign, she must often summon him to the royal house.”
“Not so much anymore.” Nefret looked thoughtful. “I don’t know why. Probably because he has too many other tasks.”
“Among them would be to provide masculine entertain ment for lofty friends of the court, such as the hunting and fishing trips you told me about before.”
She waved away a fly. “Also chariot races, wrestling matches, games of skill or chance. Activities all men enjoy,
I’ve been told. Most of the time, anyway.”
Bak asked further questions about these gatherings, but without success. The woman knew nothing about the manly pursuits, nor did she show any interest. Her life clearly revolved around the domestic. “I gather you get on well with Amonked’s wife.”
“Sithathor is wonderful.” Nefret’s face glowed. “She’s kind and gentle and she bears no jealousy toward me, as other wives sometimes do for their husbands’ concubines.”
Her features clouded over, banishing the smile. “My failure to give Amonked the children he wants has been a great disappointment to her.”
“Is she not barren?”
“That’s why he took me into his household.” Nefret’s eyes dropped to her hands; she bit her lip. “I’ve failed them both.”
Bak’s physician father would have suggested that with two women childless, the fault might lay with Amonked, but as no man wanted to think of himself as incomplete, the thought was better left unsaid.
“Sithathor isn’t beautiful or youthful like I am,” Nefret said, “but she has a presence that draws everyone to her.
She’s very well-connected also. Well, you know she’s Sen 196
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“She can talk to our sovereign with ease, I’ve been told, and is equally comfortable with all the nobility. She gives wonderful parties. She’s…” The young woman stopped, laughed softly. “I guess you can see that I adore her.”
A quick glance toward the sun told Bak he must draw this conversation to a close. Pashenuro would be awaiting him. “Amonked admitted he quarreled with Baket-Amon because of you.”
“So he said.” Nefret looked down at her dress, again smoothing it across her thigh. “Sithathor was angry with me then. She said, and I saw for myself, that the confron tation shamed him.” Her chin shot up and she gave Bak a defiant look. “Baket-Amon was a man with two faces: charming and handsome, but self-indulgent. He wanted me but I didn’t want him. I vowed to die rather than go with him, and Amonked knew I spoke the truth.”
Bak did not believe for an instant that she would take her own life. She was much too fond of herself. “Would you have slain the prince rather than share his bed?”
“No. Only myself.”
“That’s the formation you must slip behind.” Seshu looked toward a black flat-topped hill with steeply sloping sides that rose above the desert sands not far ahead. “The dune on the far side goes all the way to the river. Unless tribesmen have been posted behind it, they’ll never know you’ve gone.”
The lead donkeys were already walking along the base of the formation, as were the members of Amonked’s party.
Bak and Pashenuro, carrying long spears and shields, were fifty or so paces behind, two soldiers among many. A yell cut the silence, drawing every eye toward the rear of the caravan. A drover and a guard, spouting curses, exchanged blows. Men abandoned their positions and ran toward the confrontation. Some donkeys plodded on without their drovers, others stopped in their tracks, a confusion of ani mals, a further distraction.
“May the lord Amon go with you,” Seshu said and has tened off to break up the sham fight. Nebwa sped past a short time later, giving them the briefest of glances and a wink.
Bak and Pashenuro strolled away from the caravan. Two of the feral dogs, one brindled and one gray, trotted after them. Soon men and dogs were hidden from the tribesmen by the formation and the high, seemingly endless dune that had formed on the hill’s downwind side.
The trek across the desert was uneventful, allowing Bak and Pashenuro to reach the river long before dark. A farmer weeding a melon field told them where they would find the hamlet in which the headman Rona lived. The lengthy floodplain, with its heavy black soil squared off into fields and dotted with groves of date palms, was richer in re sources than any other location between Buhen and Semna.
Along much of the oasis and beyond the reach of all but the highest flood, an equally wide but more irregular strip provided enough natural vegetation to offer limited grazing.
