a lever and allowed, when all was clear, to roll into the wadi. Several times, the hulking young Medjay Kasaya shifted a boulder by brute force alone.
When the slide had been cleared to a quarter of its former size, a gap opened at the top, allowing fresh air to enter the tunnel. The men outside heard a muffled cheer from within. Buzzing with excitement, they labored on with renewed energy. The hole grew steadily larger until the trapped men were able to crawl out one at a time. Roy was not among them. A head count of bearers came up two short. After much hugging and thanking men and gods alike, the released miners, too shaken to toil on what remained of the slide, stumbled down to the wadi floor to await news of the missing trio.
The rescuers, grim-faced, fearful of what they might find, dug away more of the mound, levered away a boulder, and went to work on the rubble inside. A low moan led them to a man buried in loose sand and rocks, a bearer covered with bruises and groggy from a bump on the head, but otherwise unhurt. The second bearer, they found buried under the rubble beside a blood-stained boulder. He was breathing, but would not long survive the great ugly gash that bared the bones of his chest and shoulder.
They found Roy crushed beneath another boulder. He would never speak again. Bak knelt beside the torn and bloody form, half sick with horror and disappointment. The scribe, like Heby, had been doomed the moment he had taken for himself the flesh of the lord Re, but why, Bak wondered, did he have to die like this, before he named the man who had planned the thefts?
Roy’s lean-to was bathed in sunlight. It’s contents looked no different than they had the day Bak had watched the scribe receive the gold and weigh it. He prayed to the lord Amon that in the ensuing days Roy had not substituted one weight for another, or one bowl or anything else. He sat on a flat stone the scribe had used as a stool and inspected the scale, the weights, and the baked clay cones, moving from one object to another, studying each intently. On the hillside behind him, the Medjays he had assigned to guard the lean-to chatted in their own tongue. A tiny brown bird twittered atop a nearby lean-to while it searched for insects among the twigs and rushes. The men at the mine, clearing away the last of the slide debris, spoke with voices muted by the deaths of their fellows.
Bak picked up one of three round-bottomed spouted bowls Roy had used to collect the golden ore for weighing. He noticed a slight discoloration on its lower surface, both inside and out, but thought nothing of it. The second bowl was a consistent reddish-brown. The bottom of the third, like the first, was a shade darker. This time the stain aroused his suspicions. Praying that he held in his hand a key to the thefts, he scratched the discolored interior surface with his fingernail. Bits of dried mud flaked off the baked clay.
Practically holding his breath, he scraped away the remainder of the thin mud veneer. A single flat bead remained in the center of the bowl. He wiped the sweat from his brow and, fairly certain of what lay beneath, pried it up. It plugged a hole, small enough to escape notice, large enough for small granules of gold to seep through. He turned the bowl over. The hole did not penetrate the discolored bottom surface. He was not disappointed; he had expected as much. With trembling fingers, he scraped off the dry mud skin, disclosing another small hole. He raised the bowl toward the sun, twisted it around a bit, and laughed aloud as he matched up the inner and outer holes. The bottom of the bowl was hollow.
He felt like shouting his joy to all the world. He knew at last how the gold was taken. Roy would coat the outer surface with mud and let it dry. The next time he used the bowl, bits of gold would trickle into the cavity from above. Later, alone and unseen, he would open the bottom hole and let the gold flow into a cone, which he would later hide on one of the donkeys bound for Buhen.
Bak resisted the urge to break the bowl and look at the cavity or to tamper with the second mud-coated bowl. He would save them until later, until the time came when he had to demonstrate to Tetynefer how the gold had been stolen before the eyes of many unsuspecting men. Of course, he had yet to identify the man responsible for the thefts and for Roy’s death and the others, but he felt more certain of success than he had for many days.
He wrapped his trophies in the dirty cloth Roy had used to erase his scribal mistakes. Heby must have made the bowls, forming the wet clay around molded lumps of wax that melted away when they were fired. He had seen no spouted bowls in Heby’s house, but…the crucible shard! Yes, he had noticed a hollow at the bottom, a fault, he had assumed. Heby had used exactly the same method to melt the gold that Roy had used to steal it, forming the thin slabs in the false bottom of a crucible while a dozen or so coworkers toiled around him.
Bak clambered up the final steep, rocky incline and stood amid the jumble of outcropping stone and boulders that capped the summit above the mine. From high above the wadi, he watched the two Medjays return to their camp, one carrying the bundle containing the false-bottomed bowls. He was delighted at having found them, but could not help but castigate himself for his failure to question Roy the instant his suspicions were aroused. If he had not been so set on finding proof before he acted, the scribe would still be alive and he would know the name of the man responsible for murder and theft.
While Imsiba ascended the last few paces, Bak wiped the sweat from his face, the self-blame from his thoughts. At least he knew how the gold had been stolen, and with Roy dead, no more would be taken. He gazed down the hillside to the wadi floor below. Miners, guards, soldiers, and Medjays, all so filthy it was hard to tell them apart, were standing or sitting or squatting, their arms around each other’s shoulders, their voices loud and raucous.
“Look at them,” he said with a bemused smile. “Yesterday misery filled the miners’ hearts; they walked like wooden dolls and none thought of any man but himself. Our men stood alone, with few soldiers willing to befriend them. Today they celebrate life together, sharing their small rations of beer with men they feel closer to than brothers.”
Imsiba chuckled. “I think we Medjays have proved our worth today.”
“Maybe not to Nebwa’s satisfaction, but the miners won’t forget.” Bak clasped his sergeant’s shoulder, teased, “If one among them is a teller of tall tales, you may someday be spoken of as heroes, men who sit among the gods.”
Imsiba’s cynical snort failed to hide the pleasure the thought gave him.
Bak sobered, eyed the boulder-strewn summit. “Come. Let’s look for proof of what we suspect.”
They sidled between two boulders and worked their way around a jagged slab of rock to the topmost point of the landslide. There they found two stone fangs the height of a man and, between them, a depression partially filled with sand. Both fangs showed signs of recent damage on the sides facing the shallow hole. The fresh abrasions and places where the stone had broken away were paler than the rock, which had been long exposed to the weather. The fangs had supported another tooth, which would ultimately have fallen through the natural process of erosion, but probably not for many years without help.
Bak knelt beside the depression and picked up a chunk of broken rock as thick as the palm of his hand. The boulder had been well-supported and could not have been easy to dislodge. Rocking forward, he dug through the sand. He found several bits of wood and a splinter half the length of his lower arm, rounded on one side as if torn from a pole. Someone had levered the boulder off the summit.
“I doubt the man who did this carried his lever back to camp,” he said, holding up the splinter. “He’d not risk someone noticing.”
Imsiba glanced toward the west, where the sun hung low over the horizon. “We’ll soon be robbed of daylight, my friend. We must hurry if we’re to find it.”
They examined every square cubit of the summit, working as quickly and thoroughly as possible. They found nothing but a few indentations in the soft sand that might have been footprints.
Assuming the man who had set off the slide had intended to destroy the bowls in Roy’s lean-to, they worked their way down the back side of a steep, irregular shoulder that dropped to the floor of the secondary wadi behind the shelters. Rocks and boulders of all sizes cluttered the slope, cracks and crevices abounded. Sharp, broken stone scraped their sandaled feet. The hot still air caked the dust on their sweaty bodies. They found no sign that another man had preceded them until, halfway to the wadi floor, the last lingering rays of the setting sun touched an object jammed into a narrow fissure, making it shine. Hurrying to it, they saw the tip of a polished bronze spear point.
“Will you bet a good, long drink of water that this isn’t the lever we’ve been seeking?” Bak asked.
“You think me so foolish, my friend?”
