fallen were loose and unstable, sliding easily down a slope made hard by time and weather. Spurts of dust forced them to close their eyes, hiding the surface from view when every step counted, leaving no choice but to pause until the wind died down.
If Montu had been destined to die in a contrived accident, he wondered, why had the slayer taken his life openly? Why risk an investigation into his death when an accident would go unexamined? Then again, he had been meant to vanish, with no one knowing where he had gone. True, a search would have been made, but how thorough a search and for how long was anyone’s guess.
“Do you have a specific reason for disliking Montu so, or has the feeling grown through the years?”
The foreman’s mouth tightened to a thin, stubborn line.
“Speak up, Seked. You’ve told me the worst already, why hold back now?”
Seked stopped to face Bak. The slope was steep and he stood as if sideways on a stairway, one foot higher than the other. “I’ll tell you the truth, for I’m an honest man, but you must lay blame on neither my brother nor I. We wanted him dead, but we didn’t slay him.”
“Come,” Bak said, climbing ahead. “The cliff will keep us safe from the wind.”
A gust of dirt-laden air spurred Seked on. “Several years ago, while toiling at the mansion of the lord Amon, Montu bumped into a scaffold, causing it to fall. I was struck as it collapsed and knocked senseless, my forehead sliced open.”
He touched the scar with the tips of his fingers. “When Perenefer tried to aid me, to take me to a physician, Montu accused him of turning his back on his duty. Perenefer carried me off anyway. Montu sent a guard after him, and he, too, helped carry me to the physician. The two of them together saved my life.”
He let out a low, bitter laugh. “Montu pressed the issue, charging them both with desertion. They were sent together far away to the turquoise mines as punishment. The guard died. My brother survived.”
Bak climbed the last few paces to the cliff face. As if smiled upon by the gods, the air was still and hot, protected from the wind by the tall vertical columns of rock. “How did Perenefer manage to come back as a foreman? Was his so-called crime forgiven and forgotten?”
“The officer in charge of the mines recognized his competence and ability. He saw to his early release and found the task for him here.”
“Did not Montu recognize the two of you? Identical twins are not easy to forget, and the scar on your forehead would be a unique reminder.”
Seked’s voice grew harsh, angry. “Montu acted as if the accident was of no consequence, as if the guard’s death and Perenefer’s imprisonment were insignificant, a passing occurrence.”
A man asking to be slain, Bak thought.
He walked a couple steps down the slope and turned around to look up the cliff face. A high wall of golden stone, made irregular by tower-like protuberances and the crevices between them, by niches and slabs of rock that looked ready to come tumbling down. Weathered by wind and sun, heat and cold, by the infrequent torrential rainstorms that drowned anything in their path.
A scattering of sand peppered his head and shoulders. He looked upward, thinking a falcon might have a nest above them. Several rasping sounds followed, and stones large and small began to fall. Thoughts of a bird fled and his muscles bunched, ready for flight. A sharp crack rent the air, followed by the quick rumble of tumbling stones. Recognizing the sound, knowing it for what it was, he yelled a warning to the men below. Grabbing Seked’s arm, he shoved him across the hill. Stones rained down upon them.
Chapter Seven
The silence brought Bak to his senses.
He hoisted his shoulders off the slope and shook his head to clear it. The rockfall had stopped. The valley was still, all movement arrested, speech hushed. The cloud of dust rising around him and from rock and debris that had fallen to the terrace was torn asunder by a gust of wind. A man below began to curse; another prayed to the lord Re and to the sanctified Djeserkare Amonhotep and his mother Ahmose Nefertari.
“What happened?” Seked mumbled. He touched a thin line of red trickling down the side of his face and stared at his fingers, puzzled. “What happened?”
“Rocks fell from the cliff, causing a slide.” Bak rolled half around, sat up, looked at the scene below. No! he wanted to shout. No! But the words caught in his throat.
The end of the northern retaining wall where the men had been working had taken the brunt of the rock slide. Rocks large and small, stone rubble and sand, had flowed over and buried the ramp on which they had been standing. The mound stood taller than the completed, undamaged portion of the wall and ran a third of the way across the terrace. The lower colonnade where Kames and his stonemasons had been toiling was blessedly free of rubble, having been spared a second, devastating blow.
The slide was not directly below, but slightly to the east.
Bak remembered running diagonally across the slope with Seked, dirt and stones falling all around, the foreman below yelling and frantic workmen shouting.
“The lord Amon smiled upon us this day,” he said, the fer-vor of his voice equaling that of his prayer for the men he felt sure had been trapped beneath the rubble.
In the distance, a man yelled. Others took up the call, their shouts horrified, filled with fear, a terrible sense of urgency.
Men ran toward the retaining wall from all across Djeser Djeseru, leaving behind small tools and equipment, bringing levers and mallets and sledges, objects they would need to save men they knew. Men they toiled beside day after day, dwelt with every night. Men whose food they shared, whose jokes and gossip they enjoyed. Men they loved or disliked.
Friends, acquaintances, close or distant kin. Boys dumped the dirt from their baskets and ran to help fathers, uncles, older brothers.
Bak looked closer at his companion, saw scratches and cuts, but no sign of broken bones. “Are you all right?” he asked, thinking of rocks that had struck his own head, and how addled Seked looked.
A man below moaned, and low sobs somewhere farther away mingled with a cry for help.
Seked registered the sounds. His eyes darted toward the pile of rubble. He shook his upper body like a great patriar-chal baboon and scrambled to his feet. “Men are hurt, injured, maybe dying. We must move that mound.”
“Let’s go!”
They raced together down the slope. Loose rocks and debris slid and rattled beneath their feet, half carrying them to the bottom. Reaching the terrace ahead of everyone else, they quickly found the foreman, lying prone at the edge of the slide, a bleeding gash in his hair. His breast rose and fell, his eyes fluttered, but he remained senseless.
“I’ll take his place,” Seked said. “His men will need guidance.”
Twenty or more workmen scattered around the mound, men who had run for their lives, slowly, shakily lifted themselves off the terrace, cut, bruised, and trembling but otherwise unharmed. One man approached the slide with dragging feet, staring upward as if expecting the cliff face to fall a second time. Another was on his knees, head bent to the earth and covered by his hands, muttering to himself. Yet another, trying to rise, cried out in pain when he rested his weight on an injured wrist. As they all began to comprehend what had happened, as they realized that many of their fellows had been buried alive or dead, they shrugged off hurt, fear, and the shame of having run and threw themselves upon the mound, tearing at it with their bare hands.
Pashed and Kasaya were among the first to reach the scene from farther afield. Studying the catastrophe with a pale, shocked face, the architect began to shout orders. He broke the arriving men into crews, ordered Seked and the other foremen to take charge, assigned each of them sections of the mound to keep them from treading on each other’s feet. He sent a boy racing off to summon a physician, and pointed out a place well out of the way where the injured should be taken. He organized the effort so those digging away the mound would not want for water, the injured would not go untended, the terrace would be cleared by day’s end.
With many anxious hands to help, rocks were moved, sand and debris carried away, men released from
