“Sir!” Bak heard off to his side where Amonked stood. “A priest has been found dead inside the sacred precinct. Mur dered. Will you come, sir?” Bak looked half around and saw the messenger, a youth of twelve or so years, glance at the procession. “If you can,” he added in a thin, hesitant voice.
Amonked looked appalled. “Not inside the god’s man sion, I pray!”
“Oh, no, sir. In a storehouse.” Looking apologetic, the boy added, “I tried first to find User, Overseer of Overseers of all the storehouses, but I had no luck. When I saw you and you weren’t in the procession… Well, I thought…”
Amonked glanced toward his royal cousin, uncertainty on his face. The musicians were turning toward the sanctuary, followed by priests preparing to usher the two sovereigns and the lord Amon to their first place of rest. His mouth tightened in a decisive manner and he waved off the youth’s bumbling words. “Very well.” He turned to Bak. “You must come with me, Lieutenant.”
“Sir?” Bak eyed Maatkare Hatshepsut and Menkheperre
Thutmose walking in lofty splendor not twenty paces away.
“What of your cousin? Will she not miss you?”
Amonked flung another quick glance her way. “With luck and the help of the gods, we’ll find that the dead man was truly murdered and of sufficient importance to warrant our leaving.”
Bak stepped aside, beckoned Imsiba to stand in his place, and hurried after Amonked and the messenger. He might never get another chance to stand before his men on so aus picious an occasion, and was sorry he had to leave. He would have to be content with catching up with the pro cession later, hopefully in time to watch the dual rulers make offerings to the gods before they entered the southern man sion of Ipet-resyt.
They hastened northward, passing behind the almost de serted booths and the crowds watching the procession with much oohing and ahing, clapping and shouting. Nearing the unfinished gate out of which the procession was filing, the boy led them down a lane between the westernmost construc tion ramp and a residential sector off to the left, avoiding the building materials piled well out of the way of paraders and celebrants. They turned to hurry along the base of the mas sive mudbrick wall that enclosed the sacred precinct of the lord Amon, passing its alternating concave and convex sec tions, gradually leaving behind the shouts of rejoicing.
“Through here, sir,” the boy said, turning into a small, unimposing doorway.
They stumbled along a dark passage that took them through the thick wall. Beyond, bathed in sunlight, lay the sacred precinct, an expanse of white-plastered buildings.
Crowded around Ipet-isut, which was painted white with brightly colored inscriptions and decoration, were shrines and chapels, housing, office buildings, and row upon row of storehouses. Unlike the great warehouses built outside the enclosure walls and closer to the river, most of which con tained bulk items such as grain, hides, and copper ingots, too heavy and ungainly to carry far, these held smaller items of higher value.
The youth ushered them down a lane between two rows of long, narrow, interconnected mudbrick buildings whose elongated barrel-vaulted roofs formed a series of adjoining ridges. Doors, most closed and sealed but a few standing open, faced each other all along the lane. Near the far end, a dozen men hovered around the open portal of a storehouse in the storage block to the right. Included among them were shaven-headed priests, scribes wearing long kilts, and three guards carrying shields and spears. A guard spotted them, and they pulled back from the door, making way for the new arrivals. Drawing near, Bak noticed the smell of burning and saw smudges of soot on most of the men.
Amonked’s eyes darted around the group. “A man is dead, the boy told us. Murdered.”
All eyes turned toward a priest, a tall, fine-boned man no more than twenty years of age. His kilt was as dirty as all the rest. Clearly distraught, he clutched the bright blue faience amulet of a seated baboon, the lord Thoth, hanging from a chain around his neck and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger.
“Yes, sir. Of that there’s no doubt.” He gulped air and clung to the amulet as if to life itself. “I was finishing a task before going out to watch the procession. I smelled smoke and came to look. When I opened the door, I saw him lying on the floor, the flames around him.”
“The rest of you came to put out the fire?” Bak asked.
“We all had a hand in it, yes.” One of the guards, an older man, pointed at the young priest. “Meryamon called for help and we came running. Thanks to the lord Amon, it hadn’t yet gotten out of control and was confined to the one small room. On the floor mostly, burning some scrolls and…”
The words tailed off and he licked his lips, uneasy with the memory. “We dared not let it reach the roof for fear it would spread to the adjoining storage magazines. We keep aro matic oils in this block and if they were to catch fire…” He had no need to explain further. A major conflagration might have resulted, sweeping through, at the very least, this sector of the sacred precinct.
“You did well,” Amonked said, letting his gaze touch every man among them. “You’re to be commended for such swift action.”
Bak peered through the door. A small room had been walled off from the rest of the storehouse. Illuminated only by the natural light falling through the door, it was too dark to see well. The body lay in shadow, the floor around it clut tered with charred papyrus scrolls and the reddish shards of broken pottery storage jars. The dead man’s clothing was wet, as were the documents lying in the puddle around him.
The smell was stronger here.
“We need light,” he said, “a torch.”
The boy sped down the lane and vanished. In no time at all, he hurried back with a short-handled torch, its flame ir regular but free of smoke.
Bak took the light and stepped into the room. He tried not to breathe, but the stench of blood, fire, body waste, burned oil, and charred flesh caught in his throat. As accustomed as he was to death, he felt ill. Swallowing bile, hardening his heart, he walked deeper inside. Careful not to disturb any thing on the floor, he knelt beside the dead man. Amonked entered the room, gasped.
The body was that of a sharp-faced man of about thirty five years, small and wiry. The fire, which had burned many of the scrolls lying around him, had consumed one side of his kilt and had darkened and blistered the right side of his body. A blackened oil lamp, a possible source of the fire, lay broken at his feet. His throat had been cut, the gaping wound dark and ugly. The pool of blood around his head and shoul ders had been diluted by water, making it difficult to tell ex 32
Lauren Haney actly how much the man had lost, but quite a lot. Bak guessed he had been lifeless when the fire started. He prayed such had been the case.
“Do you know him?” he asked Amonked.
“Woserhet.” Amonked cleared his throat, swallowed. “He was a ranking scribe, but was to serve throughout the Opet festival as a priest. He’d been given the responsibility for this year’s reversion of offerings.”
The daily ceremony was one in which food offerings were distributed as extra rations to personnel who toiled in the god’s mansion and to others who petitioned for a share. Why would a man who held such an important but transitory and innocuous task be slain?
“I’d guess the slayer stood behind him, reached around him knife in hand, and slashed his throat with a single deep and firm stroke.” With an absentminded smile, Bak accepted a jar of beer from the boy who had brought them from the barque sanctuary over an hour earlier. “He was slain in much the same way as the Hittite merchant we found dead last week.”
The boy, wide-eyed with curiosity and thrilled at being al lowed to help, handed a jar to Amonked and another to
Meryamon. Taking the remaining jar for himself, he plopped down on the hard-packed earthen floor of the portico that shaded three sides of the open courtyard. After the dead man had been carried off to the house of death, he had brought them to this peaceful haven in one of several buildings that housed the offices of the priests and scribes responsible for the storehouses.
“You believe Maruwa and Woserhet were slain by the same man?” Frowning his disbelief, Amonked pushed a low stool into the shade and dropped onto it. “What would they have in common?”
“Both men’s lives were taken in a similar manner, that’s all I’m saying.” Bak gave the Storekeeper of Amon a fleeting smile. “To tie the two together would be stretching credibil ity. Unless there was a link between them that we know nothing about.”
“One man was burned and the other wasn’t,” Amonked pointed out. “Would not that suggest two different slayers?”
