outward sign that such might be the case, but…“Our men would have no shepherd to care for their safety, and the knowledge we share would be lost to other men.”
Imsiba took the hint and said no more. As he walked to the mouth of the mine with Bak and Roy, his face was grim and disapproving.
When they reached the gaping hole into the earth, the foreman whistled a signal. The sound was repeated by a bearer inside and by another and another until it faded away deep within the mine. The signal warned bearers and miners alike, Roy explained, that free men, not prisoners, were entering and would pass through to the end.
Bak gave Imsiba a reassuring smile, uttered a brief but fervent prayer to the lord Amon, and strode into the tunnel behind the scribe. His heart was pounding so loud he failed to hear the Medjay’s farewell. A polished bronze mirror at the entrance caught the sun and threw it deeper into the passage, where it struck another mirror to light the next segment of tunnel. Each time they passed through the beam, a blackness deeper than the darkest night filled the passage ahead. Bak thanked the gods that Roy walked ahead of him instead of behind.
The tunnel began to slope upward and narrowed to the width of Bak’s shoulders. The ceiling dropped so low in places he had to hunch over. Small pottery lamps replaced the mirrors as sources of light, their soft flames filling the passages with an eerie yellow glow. Bak bumped his head, scraped an arm, stumbled over the rough floor. With the space so cramped, the bearers had to relay the rock-filled baskets from one man to the next. They toiled like oxen, communicated with grunts. They were coated with yellowish grime, a mixture of dust and bitter-smelling sweat. When Bak and Roy passed, they shrank back into shallow alcoves or the pitch black mouths of old, abandoned secondary tunnels.
This mine, Roy told him, was deeper than most and more spacious, a better place for a prisoner to fulfill his sentence. If so, Bak thought, edging past an outcropping rock, he hated to think what the other mines were like.
They plodded on, veering slightly to right or left, following the vein of gold-bearing quartz. The tunnel shrank further, forcing them at times to bend at the waist or to sidle through spaces so narrow Bak feared he would get stuck. Sweat rolled off his body, as much from nervous strain as from the heat. He yearned to escape this nightmare place, but his mission drove him forward. As did the desire to face the trap he was certain the scribe meant to spring.
The heat grew more intense, the air more suffocating. The light ahead seemed brighter but cloudier. They heard the rhythmic thunk of mallets on chisels, which accounted for the dust floating around them. They had reached the end of the tunnel.
Roy knelt so Bak could see beyond him. One begrimed man tended a fire, which blazed before the wall at the head of the passage, heating the rock so it would fracture and break. Three others knocked away flame-blackened sections of wall, using wooden mallets and heavy bronze chisels. Another smashed the fallen sections into smaller pieces to fill baskets setting at his feet. Secondary tunnels, none more than a dozen paces long, opened to right and left, where equal numbers of begrimed men performed identical tasks. They worked like wooden dolls with jointed legs and arms, expressionless faces.
Bak watched as long as he could stand it, absorbing every detail. He did not know which was worse: the thick air, the reek of sweat, or the revulsion he felt for men whose excessive greed or anger or licentious behavior had set them apart from their kind and, in the end, had brought them lower than beasts of burden. Yielding at last to the urge to flee, he tapped Roy’s shoulder to let him know he had seen enough and headed back the way he had come. The nape of his neck prickled with awareness of the scribe behind him, and he slipped into the first secondary passage he came to, more relieved than he cared to admit.
With a sly smile, the scribe hurried on ahead, barely giving the bearers he met time to get out of the way. His sudden haste worried Bak, who stumbled after him as fast as he could, determined not to let him out of sight. He wanted no surprises, such as Roy slipping unseen into a secondary tunnel and leaping out with a weapon to strike him down from behind.
The tunnel broadened, the floor leveled out. The scribe strode past one mirror and the other, with Bak closing the distance between them. Ahead he saw an irregular oval of natural light, the mouth of the mine. He hastened on, drawn by the bright glow and the clean, pure air he longed for. Roy’s speed slackened midway along the final passage. He clutched his side and grimaced as if a stitch had developed. Bak was suspicious; his instincts cried out for caution. He saw Imsiba, standing with the foreman a dozen paces beyond the exit, a relieved smile on his face. All was well outside, it seemed. The scribe walked on, holding his side. Bak followed close behind. A bearer entered the mine with an empty basket and stepped aside to let them pass. The foreman whistled, signaling the men deeper in the mine that they had the tunnel to themselves.
Throwing caution aside, Bak slipped past Roy and the bearer and hurried out through the mouth of the tunnel. As he stepped from shadow to sunlight, he heard the rumble of falling rock. Imsiba and the foreman looked upward; their faces froze. The Medjay yelled. Bak swung around, saw the hillside above collapsing. Sand, rocks of all sizes, and boulders were sliding, tumbling, bouncing toward the wadi floor, and he was directly in their path.
Imsiba hit him, the full weight of his body knocking Bak off his feet and away from the mouth of the mine. The force of the impact carried them off the shelf and they tumbled together to the wadi floor, bombarded by sand and rocks falling from above, enveloped in a cloud of dust. They scrambled to their feet and ducked off to the side, away from the fall. The rumble subsided. A few isolated rocks continued to clatter downward, hidden within the cloud of dust billowing out from the hillside. The cloud quickly broke up in the breeze and drifted away, revealing the sloping mass of rocks, boulders, and sand under which the mine entrance was buried.
Bak was appalled. Thirty, maybe more, prisoners were trapped inside. “Summon our men!” he yelled, scrambling up the slope.
Imsiba’s whistle carried above the horrified murmurs of prisoners stumbling out of the lean-tos to gather on the shelf near the base of the slide. The two Medjays stationed on the slope opposite the mine relayed the signal, dropped their weapons, and half-ran, half-slid down to the wadi floor. The rest of the men appeared within moments and followed suit.
Standing on the shelf, Bak studied the fall and the scarred hillside above. The shape of the summit had changed. At least one large boulder no longer stood where it had before. Below, other boulders had been swept away as if by a torrential flood.
“That slide was no accident, my friend,” Imsiba said in a grim voice. “You were meant to die.”
Bak tore his eyes from the peak and stared at the mass covering the mine-mouth. “Did Roy follow me out, Imsiba? Or did he step back to save himself?”
The question hung between them unanswered.
Chapter Fourteen
“Dig them out!” Wadjet-Renput yelled.
Prisoners and guards alike gawked at the slide, too stunned to think or act.
“Move, you vermin!” he bellowed. “Would you want to be buried alive?”
The men dived at the slide, frantically scrabbling at rocks and sand. They made almost no headway, merely shifted the debris from one place to another. Shouting a string of curses, the overseer grabbed a basket of gold- bearing rocks abandoned by a bearer, tipped its contents onto the ground, and shoved it into the hands of the closest man. Imsiba ran along the shelf, collecting more baskets. Bak organized the newly arrived Medjays and set all but two to work. Those two he sent to Roy’s lean-to with orders to protect its contents with their lives. If the scribe no longer lived, his belongings might speak for him.
Wadjet-Renput quelled the miners’ frenzy and split them into gangs, appointing guards and Medjays to lead them. Soldiers drawn by the shouts pitched in to help. The mound of fallen stone was soon covered with men toiling under Bak’s sharp eyes, and the overseer was shouting commands at lines of men hauling away the debris.
The mound was bathed in heat. Dust clouded the air. The vultures widened their circle as if they sensed death within the mine. Empty baskets were filled to the brim and carried away. Sand and rocks slid beneath bare feet, sometimes carrying the men above into the arms of those below. Dislodged rocks clattered downward amid warning yells and nervous laughter. Smaller debris was scooped from around boulders that Imsiba prised loose with
