certain death. No man shirked his duty. Artists, sculptors, stonemasons, ordinary workmen toiled side by side beneath foremen they knew only by sight. Word spread to the neighboring farms and villages, and their men came to help.
The usual chatter was missing, the good humor and laughter absent. Finding a man alive with no serious injuries was cause for a quick drink of water and a grim smile. Finding a man with a crushed or broken limb brought forth angry curses and lent a greater urgency to the digging. Finding a man dead made the survivors sick at heart.
As the lord Re dropped toward the western horizon, the wind died down, allowing the heat to build and the dust to settle on sweaty bodies. Thirst was ever-present, and the water boys hustled back and forth to the nearest well. Children came from the nearby villages, leading donkeys laden with water.
Bak shared the burden and so did Kasaya, moving stones and debris, carrying the injured to the physician, locating friends or relatives who would see the walking wounded safely home. Hori wanted to help, but Bak sent him back to the tomb to stay with Imen. He felt certain that the cliff face had fallen at the hands of a man. The raspy sounds he had heard might well have been that of a lever being used to pry away rock, the sharp crack had sounded like the breaking away of stone. He was uncertain of the reason. Had he, Bak, been meant to die? Or had the rockfall been intended as a distraction so someone could. . What? Rifle the tomb? Or was it meant to seem a warning from the malign spirit that any who doubted its existence would bring catastrophe upon Djeser Djeseru?
“This temple is cursed,” Bak heard a man say. The voice was loud and angry and every man on the mound could hear.
“There’ve been too many accidents, too many men hurt or slain. We must leave this valley before we all die.”
“What’re you saying?” another man asked.
“I say it’s time we turned our backs on this temple, this valley.”
“Our sovereign would never allow it.”
A third man broke in, “If we all lay down our tools, what can she do?”
“Yes,” a fourth said, as if the idea was new to him. “What can she do? Not a thing.”
“She can bring prisoners to toil here in our place,” a fifth man said. “She can send us to the desert mines.”
No one heard him. No one wanted to hear him.
The first man said, “I say we-all of us together-go to Waset and stand before Senenmut. He’s responsible for the building of this temple. Let him tell our sovereign we’ll never again risk our lives in this accursed valley.”
“She’s known of the malign spirit for months, and what’s she done about it?”
“She sent her cousin. Amonked.”
“What’s he done? Nothing!”
“He brought in that Lieutenant Bak.”
“Who’s he?” Scorn entered the man’s voice. “A soldier.
An officer from the southern frontier. A man who’ll say what he’s told to say.”
“This is what I think we should do,” the first man said.
“We should meet here on the terrace at first light tomorrow and. .”
Bak stood on the slope above the fallen section of retaining wall. The dead and injured had been carried away and the men were clearing the last of the slide. Their words, their anger and fear, ran through his thoughts. Their scorn ran-kled, but was of no significance compared to their threat to lay down their tools and walk away, a threat that had spread to every man and boy since first he had heard it. They might dismiss Maatkare Hatshepsut as helpless and turn their backs on her temple, but as one who had suffered her wrath, he could not take her so lightly. The men must remain at Djeser Djeseru.
Cursing them for creating so foolhardy a plan, he turned his back on the temple and forced himself to concentrate on the cliff face. A large elongated scar, lighter than the rest, marked the source of the fallen rock. In his heart he was certain someone had pried loose a boulder to start the fall. A man, not a malign spirit. A man responsible for yet another death, another serious injury, and three more broken limbs.
Not to mention the cuts and bruises, the heartache, of those who had survived.
Anger boiled within him each time he thought of the slide, the injured and the dead, the many workmen who had been willing to toil until they dropped to save their fellows.
This so-called accident was the most recent of many, perhaps not the last. Unless he could lay hands on the culprit.
He must do so. He must. And as a beginning he must climb that wretched cliff. He and Kasaya.
The husky young Medjay, standing on the terrace below, called, “I think we must grow wings, sir.”
“If someone else climbed up there, we can.”
“Surely a man would’ve been seen from below.”
“Not if he climbed up farther to the east and crossed along the tops of those tower-like formations.”
“The men are convinced a malign spirit. .” The Medjay bit back the rest. He knew well how Bak felt about that subject.
Giving no sign that he had heard, Bak walked along the slope, studying the cliff looming above him. Its face was far from smooth. For untold generations the soft limestone had been eroded by heating and cooling, by the wind, and by infrequent but pounding rainstorms to form the deeply weathered tower-like formations that protruded from the mass. As far as he could tell, none had actually broken free of the cliff face. Immediately above the slope where he stood, a row of these formations rose about a third of the way up the seem-ingly endless wall of eroded rock that reached for the sky behind them. They bunched against other tower-like projections, taller and much more irregular, that rose between them and the upper rim. The scar marred the surface of one of the lower formations.
Lower, yes, but a long, hard climb nonetheless.
This late in the day the clefts between the towers were shadowed and not easy to see. He walked back the way he had come, his eyes probing their depths. Some were shallow and very steep. Others had been etched deeply into the cliff, giving them a more gradual rise and what appeared from below to be an easier slope. Rocks had fallen and lodged there.
Weathering had formed rough, irregular steps. Sand had blown or trickled from above, filling cracks and crevices, blanketing only the lord Amon knew what.
Could he come down from above? Certainly not before nightfall. The trail over the high ridge that connected Djeser Djeseru to the Great Place, the deep dry watercourse in which Maatkare Hatshepsut’s illustrious father Akheperkare Thutmose had chosen to have dug his eternal resting place, rose up the slope some distance to the east. Its path was cir-cuitous, traversing a fairly steep but, to Bak’s way of thinking, reasonably easy grade in an easterly direction to a point where the cliff diminished and merged into the ridge. There the trail turned back on itself to follow the top of the cliff, passing above Djeser Djeseru, where a branch path ascended to the summit, passed a cluster of workmen’s huts, and dropped down to the Great Place. Given enough time, a long enough rope, and several men he would trust with his life, he might be able to climb down from that path, but time was crucial. He must go without delay, while signs of tres-pass remained: the tracks of a man or possibly the mark of a chisel or lever.
Two clefts in the rock face looked less steep than the others and easier to climb. He selected the one closest to the whitish scar.
“Come, Kasaya. We must be up and back before darkness falls. We don’t want to spend the night on the cliff.”
“We could climb up at first light,” the Medjay said hopefully.
Bak scowled at him. “I’ve explained once why we must go now, and I’ll not repeat myself.”
With ill-concealed reluctance, Kasaya lifted a coil of rope onto his shoulder, tied a small bag of tools to his belt, and picked up a goatskin water bag. Climbing onto the slope, he scrambled up to Bak’s side.
“We must climb with care and patience,” Bak said, head-ing upward. “Should one of us fall and be seriously hurt or killed, or should we cause another rock slide, the workmen’s conviction that a malign spirit walks this valley will be impossible to dislodge.”
“They’re already convinced. You heard their threat to lay down their tools-as did I.”
