Chapter Five
Bak dashed up the stairwell, taking the invisible steps two, sometimes three at a time. He hit the upper landing, veered sharply to avoid a dozen or more porous pottery water jars stacked in a cool corner, and burst into the courtyard. The potted trees and shrubs looked like silent dark sentinels, the loom a low bier, the grindstone an offering table to the shades of night. Ruru was nowhere in sight.
Through a doorway at the back of the courtyard, he glimpsed a flickering light, heard the chitter of frightened women. To his left, from Nakht’s reception room, he heard scuffling, the crash of overturned furniture, a man’s curse. And Azzia half-screaming, half-yelling words he could not understand. As he ran toward the unlighted room, Lupaki raced through the rear door, followed closely by Azzia’s old female servant.
“Bring a torch!” Bak yelled.
He circled a pair of acacias, whose twiggy branches raked his arm, and spotted two shadowy figures wrestling in the dark. He yelled to draw their attention. His foot hit something solid; he stumbled and fell to a knee. A quick glance told him he had fallen over Ruru, who lay sprawled in front of the door, unmoving. Bak looked up, saw the figures inside draw apart. As he scrambled to his feet, one ducked down, grabbed a spear from the floor, and threw it. The weapon struck its target but fell away. The one it hit, Azzia he felt sure, stumbled backward, bumping the wall near the darker rectangle, the open door to the mudbrick stairway leading to the roof.
A mindless fury drove Bak into the room. How could a man attempt to slay a helpless woman? He lunged at the attacker, caught an arm, and pulled him close so he could grab the other arm. Long tendrils of hair tickled his naked torso; his groping hand found a firm, round breast.
“He’s getting away!” Azzia screamed, trying to jerk free of Bak’s grasp.
Cursing his mistake, he pushed her roughly aside and bounded after the fleeing man, who had faded into the black stairwell, the spear in his hand. Bak leaped through the doorway, landed on the stairs. Light flooded the room behind him, Lupaki with a torch. Bak’s eyes darted upward. He noted broad bare feet and thick muscular calves below a knee-length kilt. Yelling at the servant to bring the flame close, he stretched high and grabbed an ankle. The man swung around and kicked, trying to break free. Lupaki held the torch through the doorway. Bak saw in the cavorting shadows a heavy bare torso with muscles turning to fat and massive shoulders, the left dripping blood from a dark, ugly gash. The man’s head was out of sight, above the opening to the roof.
The man shook his leg with the strength of a bullock. Bak’s fingers slipped, held. With a furious snarl, the man swung the spear, slashing at Bak, who jerked away and lost his grip. The man leaped up the stairs and through the opening. He looked back, saw Bak pressing close, midway up the stairway. Hissing like an angered goose, he slashed with the spear. Bak dropped to his knees, and the deadly point whizzed past his head.
Before his attacker could jerk the weapon away, Bak grabbed the shaft not far above the point and pushed it hard against the frame of the rooftop opening. The man held on tight, but Bak had the advantage. Placing all his weight behind the effort, he drove the spear point forward. The shaft broke in two with a loud snap. He lost his balance, came close to tumbling down the stairway. His assailant ran.
Clutching the stub of shaft above the spear point, Bak scrambled to the top of the stairs. The fleeing man was running hard, his feet pounding across the roof toward the board that bridged the lane between the commandant’s residence and the storehouse. Bak sprinted after him, praying he could catch him before he could descend the stairway in the scribal office building and get to the street. If the man was a resident of Buhen, and Bak assumed he was, he would know its streets and lanes far better than any newcomer.
The man darted across the board, pivoted, and kicked out. The bridge vanished between the buildings and crashed on the hard-packed earth below. Laughing derisively, he sped across the barrel-vaulted roof of the storehouse. Its upper surface was a series of plaster-coated half-cylinders running the width of the building, each roofing an individual storage magazine. The adjoining cylinders formed broad straight parallel ridges with narrow hollows in between. The man raced across as agile as a cat.
His laughter spurred Bak on. He ran toward the edge of the roof where the bridge had been, uttered a brief, fervent prayer to the lord Amon, stepped onto the low parapet, and leaped through the air. The gap fell away behind him, and the impact brought him to his knees on the first ridge. As he scrambled to his feet, his sandals slid beneath him, unable to grip the sloping surface. Years of grit borne on the wind had smoothed the plaster, making it as slick as a muddy riverbank. He glared at the man ahead, nearly halfway across the storehouse roof, running easily. Bak remembered the man’s bare feet, kicked off his own sandals, and left them where they fell.
His pace initially was uneven, his footing uncertain on the curved surfaces. The man pulled farther away, making no attempt to reach the stairway that descended to the scribal offices. Puzzled, Bak raced after him. As far as he knew, there was no other way off the block of buildings.
Once Bak found a pattern, four long strides, jump, four more strides, another jump, he began to close the gap. He was less than a dozen paces away when the fleeing man reached the end of the building. Bak was elated. He had him! He slowed to a trot, shifted the broken spear from left hand to right.
The man glanced over his shoulder and saw his pursuer closing in. He flung himself over the edge, legs dangling, then vanished from sight. Bak spotted the upper end of a sturdy rope tied to a heavy wooden peg embedded deep in the mudbrick ridge. His quarry had slid down to the lane below.
Spitting out a vile oath, Bak threw himself over the wall and slid down after him. As his feet touched the ground, he glimpsed the man racing around a corner, heading back the way he had come. Bak sped after him, passing the long, bare wall of the storehouse and the more impressive facade of the commandant’s residence. A left turn and a burst of speed carried him along the base of the citadel wall to the unguarded twin-towered gate leading to the outer city. By the time Bak passed through, his quarry had disappeared. He searched the area as well as he could, but finally had to give up, as frustrated and confused by the man himself as by the rabbit warren of lanes. He had never gotten a good look at the man’s face, but he knew for a fact he was not Nebwa or Paser or Mery or Harmose.
Bak knelt beside Ruru, his face tight with worry. The Medjay lay where he had fallen, still and silent, woolly hair matted with blood. Only the steady rise and fall of his chest gave hope he would live. Bak bowed his head and offered a silent prayer to the lord Re, the greatest of all physicians. He could do no more.
He rose to his feet and looked at Azzia. She was sitting at Ruru’s head, a damp cloth in her hand, a bowl of water in her lap. The old female servant sat cross-legged beside her, mixing bits of leaves and other ingredients in a small, flat bowl.
“Who did this?” he demanded. “Did you know him?”
“I didn’t see his face. How could I? You saw for yourself how dark it was.” Her voice shook, and so did her hands, he noticed.
Bak had heard of men weak-kneed with fright after bravely facing the enemy on the field of battle, but to see Azzia afraid after such a valiant effort to protect her home was unsettling. Unsettling but understandable. Several angry red blotches on her bare arms and shoulders would soon turn dark, as would the slight swelling around the broken flesh at the corner of her eye. Over her shoulder, he could see Nakht’s reception room in the light of a torch Lupaki had mounted outside the door. A thin ribbon of smoke drifted from the flame to the open stairwell door. Most of the furniture had been overturned; a leg had been broken off one table. The chests were open and their contents strewn across the floor, the iron dagger among them.
“Calm yourself,” he said. “He’ll not come back tonight.”
She dipped the cloth into the bowl, squeezed out the excess water, and gently washed the blood from the back of Ruru’s head. “If he does?” she asked. “Will you be here to catch him? Or will you chase him away and return empty-handed?”
Bak flushed. He knew how close he had come to catching his prey. The last thing he needed was this woman’s scornful reminder that he had failed.
“Here!” he said, holding out the broken spear. “You can catch him yourself.”
It was her turn to blush. “I missed, yes, because I threw in haste.” She took the bowl from the old woman, wrinkled her nose at the gooey green mess she withdrew on her fingers, and spread it over a linen pad. “Next time, I’ll take more care.”
