no one. His head throbbed, the pain radiating out from a spot above his left ear. He had no memory, could not imagine where he was or how he had gotten there. He lay on his stomach on a warm bed of sand, his right cheek pressed against the grit. The world around him was dark and he faced a stone wall. His hands were behind him tied at the wrists.
He tried to roll onto his side. A sharp voice-a reprimand or an order-cut through the murmurs. He heard the rustle of movement and a strong hand clutched his shoulder to hold him down. He tried to struggle free. A sharp blow brought him up short, sending agonies of pain through his head, ex tracting a moan from him.
He lay unmoving, letting the pain ebb. Bits and pieces of his life began to creep into his thoughts. The desert. The
Eastern Desert. Walking at the head of a caravan up a gradu ally narrowing wadi. Rocks falling all along the wall of the watercourse. Men and donkeys scrambling for safety.
Afraid for them, he struggled to rise, to go to them. A spat out warning and another clout, a fresh wave of pain so sharp it took his breath away. He lay as if paralyzed, waiting for the torment to subside, wondering how he had gotten himself into such a dreadful situation.
He thought he heard the hoof of a horse strike stone.
Surely not. Not out here. Not in this desert where the lowly donkey served man’s needs. Not… Memory came flooding back: a man calling for help, running up the wadi with
Senna, the man in the ravine. He cursed himself for a fool.
How could he have let himself be led into what had clearly been a trap?
What had happened to the caravan? To his Medjays? To the other men and the donkeys? Had they all been slain? Or had the falling stones been a distraction, giving these men the chance to snare him?
Was this what had happened to Minnakht? To the man who vanished almost a year ago?
A man hissed, silencing the murmurs. Bak felt the tension around him and strained to hear. Other than soft breathing and the thud of a hoof in the sand, the world was silent. He had a feeling they were hiding, allowing other men to pass them by. His Medjays searching for him. Praying fervently to the lord Amon that such was the case, that his men were alive and well, he tried to roll over, to call out. A callused hand came down hard on his mouth, muffling him. Another man dropped onto his thighs, pinning him to the ground.
How long they remained so still and quiet, he had no idea.
A long time, long enough for his legs to grow numb. Gradu ally the tension eased and the voice of the man Bak took to be the leader issued a quiet but firm order. The man on Bak’s legs stood up and he and the one who had silenced him moved away.
Bak rolled from his stomach to his side. No one seemed to notice. From his improved position, he could see that he was in a rough, natural enclosure of boulders, with an overhang forming a roof of sorts. Three men stood at the far side, look ing out toward the starry sky and what Bak supposed was a wadi. Nomads, he took them to be.
A donkey stood deep inside the enclosure, held there by a fourth man. No, the creature was too big to be a donkey. A horse? Out here in the Eastern Desert? A horse wouldn’t sur vive a month in so hot and dry a place, with forage too rough for all but the hardiest of animals.
No sooner had he rejected the possibility than the creature turned its head and flicked its long ears. In other, better cir cumstances, he would have laughed. It was neither donkey nor horse, yet it carried the blood of both. It was a mule. A creature of which Bak had little knowledge. It would be stur dier and hardier than a horse, he assumed, but not much bet ter adapted to this barren land. What were these nomads doing with a mule?
The man in charge barked out a command to the others, who abandoned their observation spot to gather together goatskin waterbags and weapons, preparing to move on.
Eyeing Bak, the leader took from a ragged bundle a pottery container much like a beer jar and removed a hardened mud plug held tight by a square of fabric. He crossed the rough floor of the enclosure, knelt, held the jar to his prisoner’s mouth, and signaled him to drink. Thirst vying with mistrust,
Bak took a careful sip. He tasted an unfamiliar bitterness and jerked away. The man grabbed a handful of hair; yanked his head back, jolting his pounding head; and pressed the jar to his lips. Bak doubted the liquid was poison. If these men had wished to slay him, they would have silenced him with a dag ger, not kept him quiet by brute force.
Unless they were beginning to feel the pressure of pursuit and no longer wanted to be burdened with him.
He let the liquid trickle down his chin. The man barked out an order. Another man came, held Bak’s nose, and pried his mouth open. Bak choked on the liquid the leader poured in side-and swallowed much of it.
By the time the men were ready to move out, he was so groggy he needed help to sit up. The men untied his hands and dragged him to the mule. His eyelids drooped and he knew no more.
Bak came half-awake. He was straddling the back of the mule, his feet tied together beneath its belly, his arms secured around its neck. The creature’s gait was rough, its breathing labored. Each step it took made Bak’s head pound, but time-or maybe the sleeping potion-had eased the pain, which was neither as sharp nor as intense as before.
The leader trotted a few paces ahead, while one man led the mule and two others hurried along behind. They, like their charge, were breathing heavily. The sun, which held the warmth of early morning but not the heat of midday, beat down on Bak’s back. As fuzzy as his thoughts were, he con cluded that they had traveled through the night, keeping up the fastest pace they could to put as much distance as possi ble between themselves and the place where they had taken him from the caravan.
He remembered lying in the rocky enclosure, the nomads silent and tense, and clung to the hope that they had been hid ing from his Medjays. That the stones falling into the wadi had been a diversion and his men, User, and everyone else in the caravan had come away unscathed. That no further attack had occurred and sooner or later they would find him.
The man leading the mule said something to the leader, who snapped out a sharp disagreement. The other man ar gued. The leader remained adamant. Dropping back a pace or two, the man ran a hand down the creature’s neck and held it up so the leader could see how lathered up it was, how badly in need of a rest. The men behind spoke up, evidently agreeing. With angry reluctance, the leader allowed them to stop, giving the mule the respite it needed.
While the man in charge of the mule gave the creature a drink, another man wiped the animal down, working around Bak’s limbs as best he could, and the third massaged its trem bling legs. The leader paced back and forth, looking at the sun at irregular intervals, silently nagging them to hurry. His impatience failed to move them. They dithered and fussed over the mule, giving themselves a rest as well as the animal.
Bak was too drowsy to consider escape, but was alert enough to know that he could not allow himself to become too lost. The thought was so ludicrous he almost laughed aloud. He had been senseless for hours. He had not the vaguest idea of how far they had come or in which direction they had traveled. Nonetheless, certain natural features stood out above all others and they would not have changed.
Letting his cheek rest on the mule’s wiry mane, Bak forced himself to concentrate. Mule and men stood on a nar row trail that wound around a steep hillside on which were strewn chunks large and small of a dull yellowish sandstone.
Spread out around them was a vast broken landscape of hills, ridges, and tablelands in various shades of yellow, brown, and beige. He glimpsed the pale gold of sand far below and a hint of green, the floor of a wadi containing a few trees or bushes. They had evidently left the system of wadis Senna had been leading them through and were following a track across the higher elevations.
Slightly off to the right, beyond a range of dark gray hills,
Bak spotted the same high reddish peak he had seen the pre vious day. Thanking the gods for its very existence, he stud ied its jagged profile. It appeared closer than it had before and the perspective was somewhat different, but it gave him a general idea as to where he was. They had to be traveling in a similar direction to the caravan. If the caravan was still on the move.
One of the men noticed that Bak’s eyes were open. He said something to the leader, who pulled out the jar containing the sleeping potion. He grabbed Bak by the hair and twisted his head around, indifferent to the sharp jolt of pain he brought on, and forced the liquid down him. Bak was asleep before the mule moved on.
When next Bak came to his senses, he was lying on the sand in the shade of an upturned slab of dark gray
