He sipped his beer, allowing no hint of irritation to show on his face. He knew rumors flew through the land of Kemet faster than the swiftest bird, but he had not expected word of his humiliation, his disgrace, to spread through this fortress outpost so quickly.
“That makes you my friend?” he asked.
She drew a stool near his makeshift table and sank onto it, her fat haunches drooping around it. She leaned toward him, gave him a coy look. “We were molded from the same clay, Officer Bak. You enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, and I can provide them.”
Bak pictured the back room, filthy, lice-infested, little better than a pig sty. He laughed. Even in Buhen he should be able to do better for himself than that. “Pleasure is not the reason I came here alone, old woman.”
Her smugness faded; her voice grew defensive, plaintive. “I’m the poor slave of a business that barely keeps me in food and dress. Other than pleasure, what can I give you?”
He took another sip, set down the bowl, and tapped her fat knee. “Inciting a riot is an offense against the lady Maat.” Maat was the goddess of order and truth.
She jerked away from his touch, almost toppling her stool. “You can’t take me before the viceroy! No! You can’t! I’d lose everything! It would kill me!” She dropped her face into her hands, moaned, and rocked back and forth on her stool as if mourning the death of a loved one.
He continued to sip the beer, allowing her to bleat on and on, giving her ample time to dwell on her fate. At last he said, “Be quiet, old woman. Listen to me.”
The moaning stopped and she lowered her hands. Her face was wet, but with real tears or sham he could not tell.
“I don’t like being a policeman,” he said, his voice grim and hard. “I don’t like this barren land of Wawat and I don’t like this dreary fortress of Buhen. The only way I know of escaping, of getting back to my regiment, is to make the city within these walls a place of law and order, a city pleasing to the lady Maat. And you can help me.”
She sat dead quiet, her expression a mixture of wariness and doubt.
“First,” he said, “you must control your customers. I want no more complaints from your neighbors about brawls in this lane. Second, you must speak at all times with respect when you talk of my men. They’re Medjays, yes-but their loyalties lie with Kemet, and you must tell your customers this truth. Third, old woman, you must tell me all you see and hear within these walls that will help me with my task.”
“You’d make me your spy?” she asked, stiff with indignation.
“Would you prefer to face the viceroy?”
She studied the set of his jaw, gave a harsh but not altogether unfriendly laugh, and heaved her bulk off the stool. “You’re a hard man, Officer Bak. And I like hard men. If I were twenty years younger…”
“Sir!”
Bak’s glance swiveled toward the outer door. A slim young man stood in the portal, panting, sweat running down his bare breast. He carried the shield and spear of a fortress guard.
“You must come at once, sir. It’s Commandant Nakht. He’s been slain! His life taken by a hand not his own!”
Chapter Two
Nakht lay on his back in the middle of his private reception room. His eyes were closed, his face contorted in an impossible smile. Fresh blood was everywhere. It was smeared across the white-plastered floor beneath him. It stained his hands and his bare torso and his kilt. A reddish trickle ran from his mouth to the hair at the nape of his neck. A second, wider stream had flowed from the dagger imbedded in his breast and down his ribcage to a streaked puddle on the floor. His death could not have been easy, but with luck and the quick intervention of the gods, his ka, his eternal double, had slipped from his body soon after the attack.
Bak stood on the threshold, barely aware of the armed guard at his shoulder or the murmurs of disbelief and curiosity issuing from the lips of the dozen or so people clustered in the torchlit courtyard behind him. He stared with dismay at the scene. All he could think of was Nakht’s reference to offenses against the gods and a burden he alone must shoulder. Had he been slain to keep secret the knowledge he had refused to share? If he, Bak, had been less concerned about himself, if he had urged the commandant to speak, would he still live and breathe?
The watch officer, Lieutenant Mery, the man who stood at the head of the fortress guard, knelt beside the bloodied form. His slim, boyish torso glistened in the light of a flaming torch mounted in a wall bracket next to the door. His face, as perfectly molded as a statue of royalty, was drawn and pale, accenting a small livid scar at the corner of his mouth.
An overturned chair lay behind Nakht’s body. On a narrow cedar table standing beside it, a pair of pottery oil lamps burned with a dull glow. Several chests, low tables, and stools, all simply but beautifully crafted, were scattered around the room. A lean, hard-faced spearman was posted before a second open door. Through the portal, Bak could see part of the long mudbrick stairway that climbed the inner side of the fortress wall from the ground floor to the battlements, dark and enclosed to roof level, open to the air from the roof to the walkway atop the wall. A stairway for soldiers to use in time of battle, unlike a more formal stone stairwell in another part of the building, which rose to the private apartments on the second floor and opened onto the courtyard.
A fleeting whimper, like the mewling of a newborn kitten, drew him into the room. Standing next to the wall to his right, beside a cedar chest inlaid with ebony, was a shapely young woman of no more than twenty years. Her face, her hands, her ankle-length white sheath were smeared with blood. Her eyes, pools of amber in a rigid, stark white face, were locked on the dead man. Her red-brown hair was pulled back and braided, the thick plait hanging to her waist.
Hovering by her side, his cheeks wet with tears, was a stocky man of middle years wearing a belted white knee-length tunic. His brown braid was as thick and long as the woman’s. He was the commandant’s personal servant, Bak knew, a man named Lupaki, whom Nakht had brought with him from the land of Hatti. If the woman’s hair and pale eyes told true, she too must have come from that distant place. Bak wondered who she was. A servant, most likely, or perhaps Nakht’s concubine.
He recalled the words of Maiherperi, who had advised him at length before sending him to Buhen with the Medjays. When a man is slain in his home, the commander had said, look first to the members of his household; learn which had reason to hate him and which had the most to gain from his death and you’ll very likely learn the name of the guilty man-or woman. If the burden Nakht had mentioned concerned domestic matters, Bak thought, that might well explain his reluctance to speak.
He crossed to the body, relieved this death would be so easily resolved. Kneeling beside Mery, he placed his fingertips on Nakht’s neck to search for a pulse of life. As he expected, he found nothing but the chill sweat of the dead man’s last fatal struggle.
“Who did this, Lieutenant? The woman?”
“No,” Mery said. “No!” His dark eyes were clouded with unhappiness and something else. Uncertainty? “I saw him in her arms, Bak. I saw the pain they shared at the end. She couldn’t have done this.”
“You were here when he died?”
“I came as soon as I heard her scream. Too late to see the one who stabbed him, but he still lived-barely.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
Mery glanced toward the woman and his mouth tightened. “Her husband is dead. Must she stand there and listen? Must she be forced to relive those moments while I describe them?”