They had found the nomad outside the village wall, where the weekly market was coming to a close. All that remained were a few farmers packing up produce wilting in the heat, unsold live stock-a cow and calf, a couple of donkeys, and a few sheep and goats-and scattered groups of men and women chatting with friends they might not see for a week or a year. Small children ran laughing and shouting among bundles and bas kets, broken and crushed fruits and vegetables, animal waste.
Four boys played leapfrog beside mounds of reeds, palm trunks, and sun-dried mudbricks lying beside the knee-high walls of a building under construction.
Bak shifted position, placing the sun at his back, and beckoned Imsiba and Psuro, who had preferred to stand aside while the two senior officers were there. “I’ll not apologize for Commander Inebny’s behavior, Senna. Only he can do that. All I can say is that I do believe you’re trying to help.”
The nomad managed the briefest of nods, a signal of un derstanding rather than trust. “Minnakht’s decision to leave as he did was his alone, sir. You must believe me.” Senna, a few years older than Bak’s twenty-five, was a man of medium height with stringy muscles on a thin body. A puck ered whitish scar ran down his right shoulder, beginning at the top and ending beneath his arm, as if someone had tried to cut off the limb.
“He surely had a reason for not taking you with him.”
Senna dropped his gaze to his hands, folded together at his waist. “He failed to say.”
Bak felt certain the guide was evading the truth, and he could see that Imsiba and Psuro felt the same. “You’d trav eled with him before, I understand. Two men alone night and day, walking across the barren desert with nothing better to do than get to know one another. Even if he didn’t give a rea son, you must’ve known in your heart why he left you.”
“He gave no hint, I tell you.”
“Still…” Bak let the question hang between them, a heavy veil of silence that no one but Senna could lift.
The nomad was slow to answer. Finally, staring at the earth beneath his feet, he spoke with visible reluctance. “He left me behind for a reason, yes, one I’m not proud of.”
“Tell me.”
Senna raised his eyes to Bak’s. “While he was away at the turquoise mines, I grew ill. Something I ate, I suspect. I was pale and weak when he returned, not fully recovered. He wanted to leave right away, but thought me too sick to ac company him. He said we’d meet later, and so I believed we would.”
A pack of dogs came racing along the wall, barking at a small yellow cur Bak assumed was an outsider invading the territory of the village mutts.
“Why do you feel shame?” Imsiba asked. “Any man can become ill.”
“I’d agreed to accompany him throughout his travels. To break such a vow is not a thing I do without regret.”
Psuro crossed his arms and leaned a shoulder against the wall. “It was he who broke the vow, not you.”
“You agreed to meet at a specific place?” Bak asked.
“At a spring below the red mountain, which we bypassed on our eastbound trek. A place where the people of many tribes water their flocks.” Senna licked the sweat from his upper lip. “I waited there for over a week, and I talked with all who brought their animals. No one had seen him.”
“Seems simple enough to me,” Psuro said, wrinkling his nose at a sour smell carried on the light breeze. “Whatever happened to him took place somewhere between the port where you last saw him and the area grazed by the eastern most tribe whose members you spoke with.”
“Between the mountains and the Eastern Sea?” The guide shook his head. “Someone should’ve seen him. No one did.”
Bak knew how barren the desert was around Buhen and assumed the Eastern Desert was equally empty of life. He also knew how far and wide nomads ranged and how they gossiped. In spite of the desolation, Minnakht could not have traveled far without someone seeing him. Unless he chose not to be seen. “Did he set off in the boat by himself?”
The nomad shifted his feet, uncomfortable with the ques tion. “He left with two fishermen, men I didn’t know.”
“Do you think he knew them, perhaps from the past?”
“He didn’t say. He merely assured me they were honest men.”
“My son has not journeyed to the netherworld.” Inebny stood close in front of Bak, fists planted on his hips. “I know he’s alive and well. I’d have felt his passing.”
“Senna is certainly worried, sir.”
The commander’s laugh was brusque, cynical. “I’d be worried, too, if I’d allowed the man I was hired to care for to vanish in the wilderness.”
Bak could not avoid Inebny’s belligerence, but he could elude his physical proximity. He stepped a couple of paces back along the narrow path between the cargo and the ship’s railing and sat on a large woven-reed chest marked with a dried mud tag identifying the contents as linens belonging to
Commandant Thuty’s household.
Except for aisles left for the crew, the bow was piled high with similar chests, baskets, bundles, and bags. The sailors and the other passengers sat in the stern, waiting to journey onward, among cargo as densely packed as that stowed for ward. The ship’s master paced the rear deck, impatient to be on his way.
“He feels responsible, of that I’ve no doubt, but I don’t be lieve he’s to blame for whatever has happened to your son.”
Bak shifted his rear so he could push a sliver down in among the woven reeds beneath him. “If he were, why would he not vanish as Minnakht has?”
Thuty, seated on the steps leading up to the forecastle, scowled. “Bak’s right, Inebny. If Senna injured your son in any way, he’d not be here now. The Eastern Desert is vast, a place he knows well. He could hide there for years, until he died of old age and infirmity.”
“He’s a nomad,” Inebny snarled. “Those people know noth ing of our lady Maat, of law and order and common decency.”
He sucked in a breath, snorted. “My son trusted them as he would his own family, but I warned him. More than once. Do I believe this one abandoned him at a time of need? Indeed I do.”
Bak knew that nothing would change the commander’s at titude, nor would anything change his own certainty that
Senna feared something. Or someone. Inebny, probably.
“What do you think, Imsiba? Psuro?”
The big Medjay sergeant chose his words with care. “I’ve nothing of substance to base the feeling on, my friend, but I lean toward his being sincere.”
“He has every reason to be worried.” Psuro, standing at the railing beside Imsiba, glanced toward Senna, seated cross legged on the scruffy grass of the riverbank, waiting to col lect the goats and supplies Inebny had promised, all being held on the afterdeck of the traveling ship. “He’s not been paid for the time he spent with Minnakht, and the way Com mander Inebny’s acting, he can’t be sure he will be.”
“You think him innocent?” Bak asked.
“He may be, but if I were to travel with him in the desert,
I’d sleep with one eye open.”
“I know Inebny can be difficult, Lieutenant.” Thuty spoke in a low murmur so the commander, standing at the top of the gangplank, talking with the master of his traveling ship, would not hear. “I’ve often suspected that his son’s wander lust has more to do with the urge to be free of his parent than with curiosity about the world beyond the horizon. Nonethe less, he’s a friend. A good friend. And you’re the sole indi vidual I know who has a chance of finding the missing man.”
“Sir…”
Thuty raised a hand, staving off objections. “You’ve no wife or family to care for, no responsibilities other than to me. You won’t be leaving any task undone and, upon your re turn from the Eastern Desert, your new task will be awaiting you in Mennufer.”
“How many times must I remind you, sir? I don’t know the
Eastern Desert.”
