did. She’s of an age where she thinks she knows more than her betters, and he enjoyed tweaking her nose.”
Her daughter flushed, whether from embarrassment or anger, Bak could not tell. “Don’t you remember what he said, Mother? That he saw with his own eyes the malign spirit, and another man once told him he did, too?”
Bak’s head snapped around. “He saw it?”
“He was jesting,” Mutnefret said.
The younger woman stared defiance at the older. “So he told us, and I believed him.”
“When and where and what did it look like?” he demanded.
“He wasn’t serious,” Mutnefret insisted. “Sitre is so gullible he couldn’t resist teasing her.”
The young woman flashed her mother a vicious look. “He saw something.” Her eyes, large and intense, darted toward Bak. “He spoke of it last week. He wasn’t specific about where he saw it, but somewhere at Djeser Djeseru. As for its appearance. . Well, from a distance, he said, it looked like light and shadow, but when I asked him how it appeared close up, he laughed and waved a hand, dismissing the question and me.”
“My dear child.” Mutnefret reached for her daughter’s hand. “You want to believe the worst about him. You want to think him a fool. He wasn’t. He was a good, kind man. He had faults, to be sure, but so do you.”
Sitre jerked her hand away, shot to her feet, and flew from the room. Angry sobs reached them through the door.
“She cries for a lost love, not my husband,” Mutnefret said regretfully. “She wished to wed a soldier from the garrison, an infantry officer, a nice young man with no future.
Montu forbade it, insisting instead that she accept the peti-tion of an older man, a wealthy landowner whose country estate adjoins ours. She’s never forgiven him.” She rose to her feet. “I must go to her, Lieutenant.”
Bak also stood up. “Do you have any idea why Montu remained at Djeser Djeseru the night he was slain?”
“I, too, have wondered.” A puzzled frown creased her forehead. “When he didn’t come home for his evening meal, I thought he had gone to our country house. Our scribe, who manages the estate, had been toiling there all day. He returned to Waset, thinking to find him here.”
“Did you not begin to worry?”
“He often spent his evenings in a house of pleasure near the mansion of the lord Ptah, and he’d mentioned a new woman there, pretty and young, he’d told me. I assumed he was with her.”
Bak had met women who willingly shared their husbands with other women, but few as untroubled by unfaithfulness as Mutnefret appeared to be. “I must see Montu’s place of work, mistress.”
She bowed her head in acknowledgment. “I’ll send a servant, who’ll show you the way.”
As she hurried out the door, he picked up a date and popped it into his mouth. He wondered who had been using who: Montu, who had gained comfort and wealth through the alliance, or Mutnefret, who had won a man of some status and the pleasures of the bedchamber.
Bak followed a spindly white-haired servant up an enclosed zigzagging stairway. Large wine vats lined the walls of each landing, giving off a heavy musty scent that failed to overpower the yeasty smell of baking bread that wafted through the house. At the top floor, they crossed a small sunny courtyard where three female servants were sitting in the shade of a palm frond lean-to, weaving coarse white household linen on upright looms. Beyond lay Montu’s private domain.
The architect’s office was spacious and bright, with three sturdy white-plastered mudbrick columns supporting the ceiling and, Bak guessed, heavy granaries on the roof above.
Four high windows made secure by wooden grills allowed the smallest of breezes to cool the interior. Not sure where he should start, he walked around the room, looking without touching. Along one wall, a wooden frame supported several dozen pottery storage jars, most plugged and sealed but a few open to reveal scrolls. Fortunately, Montu or, more likely, the scribe who assisted him in handling his affairs was an orderly individual, who had noted the contents on each jar’s shoulder. About half of them related to the business of the household, the remainder to Montu’s task as an architect.
“Where’s your master’s scribe?” Bak asked the old man.
“I could use his help in going through these scrolls.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but our mistress sent him to her country estate. Someone in authority had to be there, and since she has many decisions to make here in Waset, she sent Teti in her place.”
Bak nodded, well aware of the many options she would have to choose among when arranging for her husband’s embalming and burial. “Does Teti spend much of his time over there?” he asked, recalling that the scribe had been across the river the final day of Montu’s life.
“Two days out of three, sir.” The old man hesitated, added,
“Our master enjoyed the bounties of the estate, but had no talent for farming. Teti managed both land and accounts.”
“He appears to be a man of uncommon worth.”
“Indeed he is, sir.”
Turning away from the files, Bak studied the rest of the room. A thick pallet lay on the floor at the brightest end, marking Montu’s place, while a woven reed mat accommo-dated the scribe. Between the two lay scribal palettes, a water dish, and cakes of red and black ink; a bowl of aromatic leaves and dried flower petals; and a half-empty wine jar and a stemmed bowl with a reddish crust on the bottom. He eyed the bowl with satisfaction. If it told a true tale, no servant had cleaned the room since the architect’s death.
Close to Montu’s pallet were a basket of tied scrolls and several piles of papyrus scraps held in place beneath smooth, flattish stones. Near the scribe’s place were baskets of pottery shards and limestone flakes and three small plaster-coated boards, all used for rough calculations and writings.
Well out of the way against a far wall were surveyors’ and builders’ tools and rock samples. A cast-off tunic lay on a low table, and a pair of fine leather sandals had been kicked off near the doorway.
Bak dismissed the servant, dragged one of three stools close to the files and, with a resigned sigh, set to work. A cursory inspection of the household accounts verified his as-sumption that Montu had wed a wealthy woman. Mutnefret and Sitre had inherited in equal amounts the house in Waset and the substantial country estate on the west bank of the river. Bak was not a scribe, but he could see that the properties had increased in value slowly but steadily over the years.
Whether the scribe Teti had been guided by Montu-and Bak doubted he had if the architect had shirked his duty at home as at Djeser Djeseru-the women’s property had not suffered.
Moving on to Montu’s professional life, Bak found scrolls that revealed a man of modest talent who, as he moved up from the smaller projects to the large, had always toiled among others of equal rank, and had always stood behind another, more dynamic man. One such as Senenmut, who relied on lesser men to make his projects a success.
Beneath the stone weights, Bak found orderly piles of documents, half-completed drawings, and sketches of architectural elements. The rock samples, limestone one and all, he guessed had been taken from various locations around Djeser Djeseru. The pottery shards and limestone flakes would have been gleaned from a trash dump, their smooth, unblemished sides to be used for rough drawings, notes, and quick calculations of too small importance to be placed on the more valuable papyrus.
Glimpsing sketches and scraps of writing on some of the shards, he drew the loose-woven and rather worn basket close to take a better look. If Montu had already used them, he might have carelessly thrown away some hint of what he had been doing that had led to his death.
Lifting out one shard after another, he quickly realized the sketches were not the work of Montu, nor, he assumed, were the bits of writing. He found many fully realized drawings, most having no color, each created by an artist of exceptional talent. He recognized them as trial copies of the reliefs that adorned the walls of Djeser Djeseru, thrown away after the drawing was transferred to the temple wall. The back sides of the shards were bare, which explained why Montu-or, more likely, someone in his stead-had collected them for future use.
Rougher sketches embellished the remainder of the shards. Almost cartoon-like, they revealed a highly developed, sometimes vulgar sense of humor. Many were general in nature, funny but irreverent commentaries on daily life in the capital, on the surrounding farmland, at Djeser Djeseru and the Great Place. A small percentage represented Senenmut or Maatkare Hatshepsut, a few in an extremely unflat-tering way. These sketches, like the more accomplished drawings, had come from a trash pile at Djeser Djeseru, he felt certain.
