there anything …?'
Barca eyed her critically. 'You can listen to those around you, those you come into contact with. Learn what they know. Anything, even something trivial, could be used as a weapon against the Greeks.'
'Listen?' She stared at the floor, her jaw tight. 'While the men march off to fight? Men who have lost nothing?'
'It's no easy thing to lose a family. I understand this. You must understand that whatever we undertake here will not be done out of a desire for revenge. This is not a personal crusade, no matter what you may think.'
'Tell me it's not personal after they kill someone you love! ' The vehemence in her voice startled her. She blinked back tears and struggled to get herself under control. 'T-The sage Ptah-hotep wrote that a person should only speak when invited. I have worn out my invitation. With your leave, I will go. I have much listening to do.'
Barca held up a hand. 'I understand your anger, but it's misplaced on me, as is your role of a petulant slave. If you don't like my opinion, then tell me. If you have pressing business, then go to it. You need not wait for my permission to speak or to leave.'
'I'm sorry,' she said, bowing slightly. She opened the door, stopped with one foot across the threshold. 'Thank you for everything,' she said, her voice frosty, and then she was gone.
That woman had fire, Barca had to admit. Fire and strength on a magnitude that surprised even the Phoenician. Enraged, she would be a match for any man. Barca hoped she had the self-control not to go out and do something foolish. He sat in the fading light and thought about another spirited woman, a woman twenty years dead.
It was a massacre.
Phanes walked among the bodies, Lysistratis at his side. A smile twisted his perfect lips. 'So, these were the feared Medjay,' he said. 'How easily they were disposed of.' He spotted movement: an old soldier clawing toward the hilt of his sword. Arrows pierced his limbs and stood out from between his ribs. Phanes reached his side, kicking the Medjay's sword out of reach. 'Your leader,' he said. 'Where is he?'
Eyes filled with a terrible hate, Ithobaal raised himself on his elbows and spat blood at the Greek's foot.
Phanes gestured, and the Spartan slit the old man's throat.
'Kill the rest of their wounded.'
'Who is this Judaean you seek?' Lysistratis said, wiping blood from his knife on the Medjay's kilt.
'A man of little consequence who knows far too much for his own good.'
'Think he's here?' Lysistratis glanced around. A few bystanders had been hit along with the Medjay. A sobbing child crawled to his mother, her body riddled with arrows. Others were being pulled to the fringes of the bazaar. In all, the losses were acceptable. 'Had I known. .'
'You did well, Lysistratis. Not a man under your command suffered so much as a splinter. Excellent. As for the Judaean, he is here. Servants of our new-found ally followed him from his home.'
Hands clasped behind his back, the Greek stepped over the dead and dying to enter the stall of a wine merchant. An Egyptian lay face down across his wares, an arrow standing out a handsbreadth from the back of his skull. Another man lay on the ground.
Phanes smiled. It was the Judaean.
An arrow gored his hip; a second shattered his kneecap. Fear clouded his eyes as he stared up at Phanes. Fear and pain.
'Greetings, Matthias ben Iesu. I have some dire questions that need answers.'
At dusk, Barca slipped from Weni's home and ghosted through the streets. An odd sense of expectancy tinged the air, a feeling of oppression and fear. He wondered how the Greeks reacted to finding their dead. Had they put some sort of curfew in place? Corners that should have thronged with people were deserted; houses were dark and silent. It was as if Memphis held its breath and waited for the axe to fall.
Barca returned to the Judaean's without incident. At one time a garden thrived at the rear of the house, a holdover from a time when this part of Memphis boasted numerous mansions and villas. He paused at the base of a low wall of flaking stucco, listening. Hearing nothing, the Phoenician bounded up, caught the crumbling stone coping, and swung himself over the wall as lightly as a man mounting a horse. He dropped to the earth, scimitar half-drawn, and took in his surroundings with a glance.
A willow tree scrabbled through the hard-packed earth, gleaning a twisted existence from the dead black soil. Pottery shards crunched under foot as Barca crept past empty stalls of mud brick and wood that once housed a collection of potted plants. A skeletal grapevine hung from an arbor like an unburied corpse. Nothing moved; the air, warm and thick, bore the stench of decay. A light burned in an upper window of the house. The lack of sound disturbed Barca, as did the lack of movement. Even if his men lurked inside, Ithobaal would have posted sentries on the roof or in the garden, yet Barca saw no one.
Frowning, the Phoenician pushed open the rear door, the crack of its warped wooden hinge-pins explosive in the silence. From his left, ambient light filtered down a flight of mud brick stairs, built as an extension of the wall. In the heyday of his wealth, Matthias surrounded himself with opulence, with rugs and hangings, with furniture hand- carved from precious woods, and with vessels of alabaster and gold. Now, Barca found the extent of his friend's poverty heartbreaking. Matthias kept this part of his house sparse, the floor bare save for a scattering of cushions and a low table strewn with the scraps of papyrus and ostraka scrounged from temple refuse heaps.
Where were his men?
A strange smell permeated the house. It floated down the stairs, tickling Barca's nose. It reminded him of seared meat, though subtly different. The Phoenician padded to the stairs.
The upper floor was as bleak as the rest of the house. The only sign that the place was occupied at all came from Matthias' bedchamber. A curtain covered the doorway; light spilled out from around it. Eyes narrowing to slits, Barca used the tip of his blade to push the curtain aside.
The Judaean's sleeping place reflected his love of the heavens. A riot of loose papyrus, ostraka, and clay tablets depicted the night sky from every point of the compass. That stench … Its strength increased as the Phoenician crossed the threshold of the bedchamber.
The skin between Barca's shoulder blades prickled; the hair stood up on the back of his neck. He spun to his left, sword extended, and felt his stomach tighten.
A man hung against the wall, his body held erect by thick bronze spikes driven through his wrists and ankles. His crucified form had been savagely tortured, his limbs broken, his face and eyes ruined. Flames had seared away his hair and beard, and a mixture of blood and liquified fat seeped through ruptures in his charred skin. There was something familiar about him. Realization struck the Phoenician, a hammer that cracked his soul.
The thing on the wall was Matthias ben Iesu.
'Who did this to you?' Barca whispered, staring at the body of his friend. The Greeks, Barca reckoned. They must have discovered Matthias was aiding the Medjay and tortured him for information. But bow? Barca could not fathom it, but they knew he was in Memphis. Phanes would hunt him, a lethal game of cat and mouse. By all the gods! If that was the game he wanted, Barca would oblige him.
Sickened, the Phoenician turned away, looking for something to cover the body with. He would have to pry the spikes out with his sword. After that, he would find Ithobaal and …
'Barca!' a voice from the street bellowed, speaking Egyptian with a Greek accent.
The Phoenician sprang from the bed chamber and peered out one of the windows overlooking the Street of the Chaldeans. Torches flared, reflecting off the polished armor of a squad of hoplites. More were pouring from the adjacent buildings. One man stood apart from the rest, his armor silver-inlaid.
Phanes.
'Your friend, the Judaean, was a man of remarkable valor. I couldn't tell if he spoke the truth when he said you had twenty more men with you. I only counted nineteen corpses in the bazaar. Oh, well. I'm afraid I had to get a bit … rough with him, in the end. I offer you one chance to save yourself. Swear allegiance to me, pledge your blade to my service, and you just might walk out of this with your hide intact! Time grows short! What is your answer?'
So, that was it, then? Ithobaal and the others were dead, too. Dead because they trusted him. Barca bowed his head. In the afterworld, twenty new souls occupied the Scales of Justice, swinging the balance farther toward the jaws of damnation. Twenty new souls cried out for vengeance.
