sea, if for no other reason than to keep them alive and well.
Chapter 12
Bak awoke to the stirring of donkeys. Long ribbons of red colored the sky to the east, heralding the rising sun. A stiff northerly breeze blew across the eastern reaches of the gran ite peaks, swirling fine dust across the wadi floor. Shivering, he rose from his sleeping mat and stretched muscles that ached more after his night of rest than they had the day be fore, immediately after his strenuous swim in the flood.
He and his companions had found the caravan camped in a wadi lying between high gravel banks. Several acacia trees stood at the edge of the latest channel cut into the ancient riverbed. The men were sleeping and he did not disturb them.
Psuro had told him User had decided to remain until evening, opting to travel on to the sea in the cool of a single night.
Bak looked toward the trees where, before falling asleep, he had seen Rona relieving Minmose. The Medjay was no longer there, nor could he be seen anywhere else. Thinking he had either grown thirsty or was more conscientious than most men assigned to guard duty, Bak walked up the wadi.
There the pools were located, so Psuro had said.
He followed the channel to a massive tumble of fallen boulders that rose to the top of a sheer wall of granite. Be yond the cliff, the reddish slopes of the mountain glittered in the early morning light. The dry watercourse took him around an angle formed by gigantic rounded boulders to the spring-fed pools. The songs of birds greeted the dawn and a large greenish lizard clung to the side of a boulder, awaiting a careless insect. Their indifference told him Rona was not here.
Several pools were located near the foot of a dry waterfall, reminding him of the place where the men had slain the grouse. The similarity ended there. Where the earlier gorge had preceded the pools, here the water was found inside the gorge, and its rocky floor discouraged the growth of the lush vegetation found at the other site. According to Psuro, the men had grown excited when they saw the pools, hoping for another feast. They had been sorely disappointed when User told them no grouse drank here; the birds preferred more open water.
Bak strode toward the pools. Three squawking ravens launched themselves into the air from behind a mound of rocks. Curious, he walked closer. A dark, bare foot caught his eye. Muttering a curse and a hasty prayer to the lord Amon that he would not find what he feared, he hurried forward.
Rona lay on his side behind the rocks, his form inert, lifeless.
Blood had drained from a slit in his back, and flies had gath ered in vast numbers on the dry, caked blood around the wound. Bak felt as if he had been struck hard in the stomach.
He forced himself to take several deep breaths, to collect his wits. Jerking a branch off a half-dead bush, he brushed away the flies and knelt beside the dusty body. Gently, as if the Medjay could still feel pain, he turned him onto his stom ach, revealing a pool of dried blood where he had lain. A long thin streak on his cheek betrayed the fact that he had also bled from the mouth. His body had barely begun to stiffen.
Tears flooded Bak’s eyes. In the years since he had stood at the head of his company of Medjays, he had lost only one man. He had vowed at the time never to lose another. Now he had. Out here in this godforsaken desert where he could not be buried as a man should be. Where he could not be sent off to the netherworld with the proper spells and incantations.
Gathering himself together, he stood up and looked around. The gorge was deep, flanked on either side by the huge rounded boulders piled to the tops of the cliffs. He could imagine many thousands of nomads coming for water through the ages, a daily parade of humanity and their live stock. A place dark and forbidding at night. A place of myth and superstition, he felt certain. Why had Rona come here?
“Sir!” Psuro called, hurrying to Bak’s side. He spotted the
Medjay, let out a deep, heart-wrending cry, and dropped to his knees. “How did this happen, sir?”
“He must’ve seen something…” The words caught in
Bak’s throat. “Something that made his life forfeit.”
The sergeant rose slowly, like an old stiff man, aged by the death of a longtime friend. “I must tell the other men.”
“Send Nebre and Kaha to me.” Bak’s voice grew hard, res olute. “We must not let his slayer slip through our hands.”
With Bak looking on, Nebre and Kaha, both grim-faced and determined, painstakingly examined the stony ground around the body. The few patches of sand had been thor oughly churned up by donkeys and goats and men. Nonethe less, they persisted. They finally found, partly hidden by a scrubby bush, one small pocket smoother than the rest where some telltale sign had been rubbed out. This hint of stealth spurred them on and they gradually expanded their search.
They had been toiling at their grim task for about a half hour when Psuro ran into the gorge.
“Sir! Senna is gone!” The sergeant stopped well back on a slab of rock where he would disturb no sign of the slayer.
“We’ve looked everywhere. I’d wager a jar of the best brew in the land of Kemet that he slew Rona and fled.”
Bak snapped out an oath. “He must’ve sneaked away from our camp to meet the man who slew Dedu. Rona probably followed.”
“Into this gorge?” The sergeant eyed the towering walls and the boulders heaped to their summits and shuddered. “At night this place must be as black as a sealed tomb.”
Bak followed his glance. The ravens had circled around to drop onto the rocks about a quarter of the way up the mound.
Their loud, raucous cawing merged with that of two others, perched on boulders slightly apart. “Why he allowed himself to be drawn into a place with no way out, I can’t imagine.”
“We’ll track Senna down like the snake he is,” Psuro growled. “I know you believe the cudgel a faulted means of questioning a prisoner, sir, but surely in this case it’s fitting.
We can strike him and strike him again until he reveals the name of his partner in crime.”
In his heart, Bak applauded the sergeant’s enthusiasm for the hunt-and hunt down their prey they would-but he wanted Senna alive, not beaten to death. The nomad must face the law of the land of Kemet, his guilt weighed on the scales of justice, not meted out in this wretched desert. The punishment would be no less severe.
“Should we go on with our search, sir?” Nebre asked.
“We’re seeking two men, not Senna alone,” Bak reminded him. To the sergeant, he said, “Go find men to carry Rona to our camp. We must see that he’s buried at once.”
“But, sir, the sooner we go after Senna, the better.”
The harsh scolding of the ravens jarred Bak’s senses, wak ing him to another possibility. He studied the birds perched on the piled boulders, cocking their heads one way and an other, peering expectantly at… At Rona’s body and the hu man intruders into their domain or at something else? He glanced higher. In the brightening morning sky above, three vultures circled the gorge.
“Look at the birds, Psuro. What do they tell you?”
The sergeant barked out a curse. An instant later, he and Bak had thrown off their sandals and were climbing the steep, irregular boulder pile. Four or five paces above the floor of the gorge, they came upon a brownish smear, blood drained from a man being dragged upward. They followed other smears until, about ten paces higher, they found a sec ond body stuffed in among the boulders. A man jammed headfirst into a narrow cleft. They had to pull him out to know for a fact that he was the one they sought.
Like Rona, Senna had been stabbed. Unlike the Medjay, the dagger had been plunged into his breast. He must have known and trusted his slayer.
Using spears with sleeping mats fastened between, the
Medjays made two makeshift litters on which to carry Rona and Senna down the wadi to their camp. Bak hated to leave
Rona in this wretched desert, but he had no choice. The cara van was too far from Kaine to send him back
