“You met me and we talked,” Bak said, suppressing his anger with an effort. “If I hadn’t insisted you join our cara van, which was made up of far too many men who’d know you weren’t Minnakht, would you have followed us across the Eastern Sea?”
“I knew, when I failed to join you as I promised, that you’d guess the truth.” Ahmose wiped his face on his shoulder a second time, as if he could still feel the spittle. “Senna had told me you’d talked with Nefertem. I suspected you’d joined forces, and I dared not slay you in this wretched desert. I thought to follow you into that alien land, where I could slay you and slip away, with no fierce tribe of nomads prepared to avenge your death.”
Leaning forward, elbows on knees, Nefertem spoke in a voice as soft and rumbling as the purr of a lion. “Tell me of my father, Ahmose. You took his life, did you not?”
Not a man present could mistake the threat, and Ahmose was no exception. “I know nothing of his death.”
User jerked the stick from the hearth and held its flame-red end within a hand’s breadth of the prisoner’s eyes. “We want no lies, Ahmose.”
The bound man cringed. Whether he feared most the tribal chieftain or the explorer, Bak could not begin to guess. “In the beginning I believed that if I was to learn where Min nakht had found gold, Senna had to get close to him. He had to serve as his guide. But as long as your father lived, he would accept no one else.” Ahmose saw the fury on Nefer tem’s face and quickly looked away. “I placed poison in his waterbag. I meant him to die right away, but he drank too small an amount. He lingered long enough to go home, and there I heard he died.”
Nefertem bounded forward, gripped him by the neck, and began to squeeze. Ahmose pounded the earth with his feet, his face turned fiery. Bak shouted an order to Psuro, who leaped forward. Together with User, the three of them pulled the nomad from the man he meant to slay.
The tribal chief was still struggling, still trying to reach the man who had slain his father, when Bak shouted, “Nefertem!
Stop! He must see the truth.”
Bak’s words seeped into the nomad’s heart and he grew more calm. Staring at Ahmose, he shrugged off User’s grip and Psuro’s and wiped the sweat from his face. A harsh laugh escaped from his lips and he nodded. “Yes, let him see what a fool he’s been.”
Early in the evening, User’s party, the nomads, and Bak and his Medjays left the oasis with their prisoner to travel north up the subsidiary wadi. Bak had thought Nefertem would object when he said he wished the explorer and his party to come along, but his fears proved unfounded. The tribal chief agreed they had every right to participate to the end.
They rested through the darkest of the night and set out long before daybreak to follow a series of smaller wadis deeper into the desert. An hour after sunrise, they arrived at a camp, simple in construction and inhabited by nomads. Several tents that looked suspiciously like those issued to the soldiers of
Kemet had been erected near the base of a tall brownish hill. A rough wall of stone supported a lean-to of spindly poles and brush. A dozen or so donkeys stood in its shade, munching hay that might well have been stolen from a caravan crossing the desert between Kemet and the Eastern Sea.
A tall, thin nomad stood beside a tent, removing baskets of grain from the back of a mule. Bak smiled. This had to be the animal on which he had been transported during his abduc tion.
The man returned his smile. “Lieutenant Bak. I’m happy to see you again.”
Bak stared, aware that somewhere in the past he had seen this man, but where? “Waset!” he said. “You were with your wife, preparing to leave the city.”
“You came to our aid.” The man glanced at Nefertem. “I told my brother of the service you did us.”
“Your brother?” Bak looked at the tribal chieftain, surprised.
Nefertem gave him what might have passed for a sheepish smile in a man less regal. “When I took you captive, you were unknown to me. Some days later, Hor came to our camp. When I told him of you, he told me of the way you’d saved his life. His and that of his wife and unborn child. Not until then was I certain I could trust you.”
Eyeing Hor in a new light, Bak guessed, “You’d gone into
Waset to trade?”
“My wife was carrying our first child.” Hor smiled at the thought, but quickly sobered. “I wished her to talk to a woman of Kemet who helps others give birth. I paid the woman dearly to reveal her secrets, thinking to improve their chance of survival during the ordeal.”
“While in the city,” Nefertem added, “they picked up a few items impossible to get in this empty land. We’ve a friend who helps us trade for what we need. What we can’t carry on a single donkey, he brings later on a string of animals.”
Bak thought of the besotted fools who had attacked Hor out of simple malice. If they had only known that he had ar rived in the capital carrying the wealth of the desert. “Your wife is well, I hope?”
“I have a son,” Hor beamed. “We call him Minnakht.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” User stared in awe at the gigantic slash in the earth.
“Nor have I,” Bak said, as amazed as the explorer.
Nebenkemet shook his head, whether in wonder or nega tion was impossible to tell. “Not the best way of taking gold from the earth. Too much effort by far.”
“I’d prefer toiling in the open air to burrowing in the dark ness of a tunnel,” Ani said, “but those high walls don’t look safe.”
Ahmose stood with them, hands bound behind his back, staring at the long ditch cut deep into the side of the high brown hill. A half-dozen nomads were breaking up the stone at the far end and a like number carried heavy baskets back along the cut, taking the broken stone to be processed. The prisoner’s face looked gray. He had come so close to finding what he sought. Now here he was, looking upon his failure.
“You know mining?” Nefertem eyed Nebenkemet with in terest. “Minnakht said there had to be a better way, but this is all we knew to do.”
“I not long ago toiled in the gold mines east of Abu.”
Nebenkemet wiped the sweat from his brow, added, “I could make a few suggestions if you wish.”
Bak turned away from the excavation to walk a half-dozen paces along a well-trodden track to where the bearers were emptying their baskets beside a second group of nomads.
These men were seated on the ground, pounding the exca vated rock, painstakingly reducing the stone to the consis tency of coarse sand. Another man sprinkled the granules into a sloping metal basin partially filled with water. He sloshed them around, allowing the gold to fall to the bottom while the lighter stone remained on top.
“I guessed Minnakht had found gold when I was told of the questions he asked at the turquoise and copper mines,”
Bak said. “Or did you find the vein, Nefertem, and ask for his help?”
“We’ve been taking gold from this place for many years, but we believed the vein had run out. I knew we could trust
Minnakht, so I brought him here. He urged us to dig farther.
He was right. The vein went on and our ditch went ever deeper, its walls higher and less stable. One man was felled by falling rocks, losing his life, and several have been hurt when walls collapsed. Minnakht thought to cross the sea to learn a safer way of mining.”
A pottery bowl sat on the ground beside the man washing out the gold. A mound of the precious metal sparkled within.
Bak glimpsed Ahmose’s face, his look of unadulterated greed.
“I suppose he found other veins in this wadi.”
“He did.” Nefertem beckoned a nomad who stood nearby.
The man poured the glittering grains of gold from the bowl into a leather bag already bulging with earlier deposits and handed it to the tribal chief. “My people have no need for great wealth. We dig only what we require to keep us alive and well in times of hardship. When we come to the end of this vein, we’ll go on to another.”
“I’ve a need to relieve myself,” Ahmose said.
“Can you not wait?” Psuro snapped.
