A Vile Justice (14 page)

"My father was gone ten years. When he returned, his wife dwelt in the netherworld and his son in Nubt. He dared not say a word." Ineni's face registered a bitter anger; his hands moved swiftly over the stallion's legs. "He came sometimes to see me, and in a way we drew close. But Djehuty always stood between us. He seduced me just as he had my mother. He saw how much I loved the land, saw how skilled I was with men and animals. He gave me ever greater responsibilities and, at the age of seventeen, made me manager of his estate. The land became my mistress."

Bak stood erect to wring the water from his rag. "The land, not Khawet?"

"We were of a marriageable age and I cared for her, but ho." Ineni gave another of his harsh laughs. "I was a servant, in no way worthy of the great man's only child."

Bak nodded understanding. Djehuty claimed descent from a long line of provincial governors. Would he not wish his daughter to wed nobility? -

Ineni continued: "That storm you're interested in altered many lives, mine most of all. I was twenty years of age when the desert swallowed up my father. My mother was long dead, and I was alone in the world. Djehuty was a man with no sons, and Khawet his sole daughter. His estate was thriv,ing thanks to my good sense." He squeezed out his rag, came around the stallion's rump, and continued his task, sharing Bak's space. "One day he came to me-four months, it was, after the storm. He wanted to adopt me as his son, he told me, and in return, I must wed Khawet. He wanted his estate to remain whole, and I wanted the land. As for Khawet ... Well, he'd made the decision and she had no say in the matter. And so it happened. The contract was drawn up and witnessed, and she came into my bed." He gave a strained little laugh. "All in all, the arrangement worked out as well as could be expected."

"I've noticed a certain distance between you and Khawet." Bak spoke with care, trying to be tactful when tact was impossible.

"Why should I deny what all the world knows?" Ineni's smile was fierce. "I've done everything in my power to earn her affection, but she clings to the memory of a past beloved, one who long ago entered the netherworld. Even that I might overcome, but her father holds her by his side in Abu, while I must spend much of my time on our estate in Nubt."

Bak recalled Amethu's comments about women who had no children. "How old is she? Twenty-four, twenty-five?" He raised a questioning eyebrow, received a nod. "I know that's well beyond the age when most women first bear a child, but it's surely not too late to give her one."

"I seldom touch her, and so it's always been," Ineni admitted in a gruff voice. "She ... Well, when I go to her, she tolerates me, barely."

Bak eyed him thoughtfully. Through his life, he had known several men whose wives held them at a distance. They all had one thing in common. "You've a concubine?"

"Another secret known to all the world." Ineni tried to make his voice gruff, but pride forbade him to do so. He noticed Bak's hint of a smile and laughed. "Yes, I freely admit I share my bed in Nubt. She's the loveliest young woman in the province, the joy of my life. Last month, she gave me a son. My firstborn. A treasure to behold."

Later, Bak stood alone at the river's edge, watching the long line of horses and men plod through the shallow water to the west bank. He had to admit he was biased in Ineni's favor, preferring to believe that anyone who loved horses as he did would have to be driven hard against a wall to slay a man. On the other hand, the young farmer had more than enough reason to want Djehuty dead. Not only had his true father died in the storm, but all Djehuty's property would someday belong to him and Khawet.

Bak borrowed a skiff from Ineni and spent the remainder of the afternoon sailing back to Abu, the voyage made long and tedious by the fitful breeze. By the time he got his first glimpse of the ancient tombs that overlooked the island from the west bank, tiny spots of light glowed in a darkening sky, and the odor of burning fuel drifted through the air from a multitude of braziers.

As he neared the landingplace below the governor's villa, he had second thoughts about beaching the skiff among several drawn out of the water a few paces upstream, including the vessel Kasaya had left there. The patch of shoreline was too visible from above, as were the stairs he would have to climb. The archer might once again be lying in wait, prepared to slay him. Why take the risk? He sailed on until he found a dozen or more small boats pulled up on shore and a group of men hunkered down nearby, encircling a game of throwsticks.

Although he doubted the archer had the faintest idea where he was, he took no chances. He beached his skiff as close to the game as he could, hastily pulled the vessel out of the water, and darted into the nearest lane. Keeping to the shadows, moving fast and silently, he sped along the unfamiliar streets of Abu. The faint afterglow vanished from the sky, the stars brightened, and the narrow thoroughfares were blanketed in ever-deepening gloom. Voices sounded on the rooftops above, families sharing their evening meal. A lone goat wandered down a lane, bleating. Dogs howled in first one sector of the city and then another, urging each other to greater voice.

As he hurried along, he thought of the unwanted gifts that had been left each evening in his quarters, followed by the blatant attempt to slay him with bow and arrows. Why the threats? Why the more forthright attempt to take his life? He had learned a lot since coming to Abu, but felt himself no closer to the slayer than when he had arrived. He was a long way from the truth. Much too far away.

One thing he did know: if the archer and the slayer were one and the same, Ineni could not be the guilty man. He had been far from Abu all day, on the island with the horses.

Bak saw ahead the mouth of the lane leading to his quarters. He slowed his pace and approached with care, scanning rooftops and pitch-black doorways for any sign of the archer, thinking of the herd, wondering where Ineni would take them. Not far from Nubt, he suspected. Someplace where people knew and liked him.,So great a number of horses would be impossible to hide. Ineni would need the helpand the silence-of men and women he could trust.

Finding nothing suspicious, Bak slipped into the narrow lane. The way ahead was cloaked in darkness, a black tunnel with a faint wedge of light at the far end. A figure appeared there, vaguely illuminated and hard to see, a patch of white. His heart leaped into his throat. He dodged sideways and flattened himself against the wall, making less of a target. The figure vanished, probably around the far corner. A neighbor, most likely, going about the business of living.

Laughing at himself but taking care nonetheless, he hurried on. As he neared the end of the lane, he realized the light came from his own quarters. Murmuring voices on the roof and the odors of stewed fish and onions .told him Psuro and Kasaya were there. They must have lit the lamp so neithei he nor they would be accosted by an uninvited guest hiding in the dark. He smiled, pleased by the reassuring glow, the though of warm food and friendly faces.

He walked up to the door, stopped in his tracks, sucked in his breath. A stool stood just inside the threshold, barring the way. A bright puddle adorned its upper surface. Fresh blood. He ducked aside, out of the light and the line of fire. Fearing he knew not what, he stood silent and still, every sense alert. He heard no movement inside, felt no human

presence. He peered around the doorjamb. A small baked clay lamp cast a feeble light from the stairway, enough to see the room much as he and his Medjays had left it, cluttered with their possessions but empty of life.

Yet the blood made clear that something was wrong. Puzzled, curious, unsure what to expect and strangely reluctant to find out, he slipped past the stool and ducked off to the right, out of the lighted doorway. He scanned the room a second time, finding nothing altered and no one inside. He half swung around to look again at the stool. His eyes were drawn upward to the woven reed mat, tightly rolled and tied out of the way above the door. Hard against the mat, pinned upside-down with a short, sharp dagger, was a full-grown gray-brown rat, so fresh-killed a final drop of blood clung to its neck. The stool had been carefully aligned below to catch the creature's blood, to draw attention to its murder.

Snapping out an oath, Bak crossed the room in three quick strides, scooped up the lamp and, shielding the flame with a hand, carried it back to the door for a closer look. The dagger was bronze, a plain, unmarked weapon common to the army. The rat's neck had been cut before it had been pinned to the mat. The creature, he knew without doubt, symbolized the slain sergeant Senmut, from all reports a rat in his own right.

The message could not have been more clear, yet Bak was confused. He had been so sure the slayer would leave no more unwanted gifts. Why this now? Why this kind of message when the bow was more direct?

He backed off and stared. The rodent so recently slain, the fresh blood on the stool, sent a chill up his spine. This gift was disgusting, sinister, its delivery demonstrating contempt for himself and his men. The intruder could not have been gone more than a few moments. He had taken the rat's life and left his ugly message, with Psuro and Kasaya on the rooftop only a few paces away.

And Bak himself had missed him by a hair.

"Why would a man use a bow and arrow at midday and go back to a more insidious threat that same evening?" Bak, his forearms resting on either side of the prow, scanned the unfamiliar waters ahead of the skiff, searching for rocks lying beneath the surface, awaiting a lapse of attention. "I don't understand."

Psuro sat farther back, manning the sail. "Are you sure he meant to slay you, sir? His arrows never once came close, you said."

"I'm not certain of anything," Bak grumbled. He was firmly convinced someone had set out to slay him, but to argue the matter with Psuro was futile. The stocky Medjay was a good man, but he was not Imsiba. Bak needed the sergeant's ear, his common sense arguments that sent Bak's thoughts down untraveled paths.

"There's the island where we're to meet User," Psuro said, pointing. "The place of inscriptions."

Bak eyed the patch of land rising from the river some distance ahead, an outcrop of granite larger than Abu and as stubbornly resistant to erosion. Acacias and tamarisks lined the water's edge, while mounded boulders, their surfaces blackened by time, rose above a blanket of yellow sand too sterile to support much life. He was not impressed.

Rising to his feet, he turned around to study the river behind them, as he often had since their departure from Abu. Among the many islands through which they had threaded their way, bits and pieces of ships darted into and out of sight, as if playing the child's game of hide-and-seek. He glimpsed mastheads, portions of sails, sometimes a fully rigged craft that vanished in the blink of an eye behind islands crowned with vegetation or massive clumps of boulders devoid of foliage. Distance shrunk the vessels, light and heat waves distorted them, preventing him from identifying any one boat that might have remained behind them all along. He did not think anyone was following, but he could not be sure.

"According to Pahared," Psuro said, "we'll find a multitude of writings left on the rocks from ancient times." "Rapids to the right," Bak warned, spotting a stretch of foaming water.

A minute adjustment of the braces eased the vessel left. The stiff breeze sped them southward, making light of the northbound current. With their sail fully ballooned, the water whispering beneath the hull, they sped past the eddy and through an irregular row of islets guarding their approach to the island: a channel separating the rocky barrier from the east bank of the river. Patches of froth warned of hidden hazards. The chill of night had passed, and the warm breath of the lord Khepre, the morning sun, had lifted the mist from the water. Birds wheeled overhead, riding the air currents in lazy circles, ready to dive at any fish foolhardy enough to rise to the surface.

"The patterns I spotted the day we arrived in Abu point to a solitary slayer having a single reason for his actions," Bak said, thinking aloud. "If I weren't so sure of that, I'd suspect a second man fired those arrows yesterday."

"Anything's possible, I suppose," Psuro said doubtfully. Bak scowled at the channel ahead. Imsiba, too, would have doubts, he thought, but he would have alternate suggestions as well.

They raced up the channel, following a small, stout cargo vessel riding low beneath a heavy load of plump sacks he assumed were filled with grain. To their right, a tall, steep ridge strewn with boulders rose from the island. On the east bank, a mudbrick village nestled beside a small bay edged with sycamores, palms, and acacias. Spindly lean-tos shaded a thriving market along the shore. The vessel ahead swung into the bay to merge with a fleet of skiffs whose masters had brought produce for trade. Psuro adjusted the sail, veering in the opposite direction toward the island.

"What rank did User hold when his unit was besieged by the storm?" Bak asked, his eyes on the approaching shore. "Spearman." Psuro spilled air from the sail, cutting their speed "He was a raw recruit, a youth not long off the farm, having no experience in warfare."

"That looks a good place to land." Bak pointed toward a stretch of sandy beach near the southern end of the ridge. "We're to meet him at the shrine of the lady Anket." The goddess, along with the lord Khnum and the lady Satet, served as a guardian of the source of the great river on which they sailed. "He came close to walking with the gods, he told me. He was the last to come back from the desert, and if he hadn't been found by a boy searching for a stray goat, he'd have died less than an hour's walk from the river." They neared the shore and Psuro let the upper yard fall. Bak leaped overboard before the current could drag them backward and towed the vessel into shallow water. Psuro scrambled out, and together they pulled the boat onto the beach. The island looked peaceful enough, deserted even, and they both wore sheathed daggers at their waists, but with an intruder leaving threatening gifts in their quarters and an archer lurking about, they opted to arm themselves with the spears and shields they had brought from Abu.

They trudged up a short incline blanketed with sand and walked alongside the ridge, a steep jumble of boulders streaked with bird droppings. Bak's eyes strayed to the inscriptions, and his footsteps slowed. He glimpsed messages of kings returning victorious from battles fought far to the south, reminders of proud noblemen leading caravans laden with exotic and priceless trade goods, and records of accomplishments of a more practical nature, such as the digging of a well on a remote desert track.

"Did User say how he managed to survive the storm?" "He was in too great a hurry to leave Abu." Psuro . glanced around, searching for the man they had come to see. "He did say he was so happy to see the river he wanted forevermore to surround himself with water. Now he lives on an island where he can get a drink or go for a swim at any time, day or night."

"If his island is anything like this, he's made a bargain with the lord Set."

Set was a god representing evil and violence, patron of deserts and foreign lands. The sun was indeed ferocious, beating down unrelieved, making the sand so hot it burned their feet. The breeze did nothing to relieve the heat, merely set their teeth on edge as it passed among the boulders, whispering a soft and lonely refrain.

They plodded around the southern end of the ridge, between it and a second, smaller mound. Near the upstream tip of the island, drawn well out of the water and half hidden in a "clump of wispy tamarisks, they spotted an empty skiff. User's vessel, they assumed. Walking on, they found on the west side of the ridge a modest sandstone shrine surrounded by a decrepit mudbrick wall. The building looked across a swath of sand toward a fairly broad channel down which a canal had been cut through the rapids many generations earlier, a great feat for its time but now blocked with boulders and impossible to use.

Thinking to find User inside the shrine, they walked through the open gate and crossed the sand to the building. The door stood open, admitting light to a transverse chamber with three small, dark rooms at the back. Except for the one in the center, which contained a red granite pedestal which would support the wooden shrine of the lady Anket when she traveled upstream from Abu to greet. the rising floodwaters, the building was empty.

Leaving the sacred precinct, they looked around, seeking User, a priest, some sign of life in this lifeless place.

A short, sharp whistle broke the silence.

"Up there." Bak pointed toward the top of the ridge, where a man stood among the boulders, his head shaded by what looked from a distance like an overturned basket. "Is that User?"

"He's been watching us all along," the Medjay grumbled. "Why couldn't he show himself sooner?"

User remained where he was, well shielded by boulders, looking out at the water, examining the landscape on the far side of the ridge. A cautious man, Bak thought. A man either afraid of his own shadow or fearful for good reason. A reason not to be found in Abu, but here.

"Something's wrong," he said, darting toward the mound. Still the man they had come to see hesitated. After a final long look at the channel beyond the ridge, where their skiff lay, he began to move. As agile as a cat, he worked his way down to meet them, sidling between boulders, climbing around broken chunks of granite, swinging across spaces separating one from another. Never did he show himself fully. "I'm Lieutenant Bak," Bak called. "What troubles you?" User stopped not far above and hunkered down in the shelter of an overhanging chunk of rock. He was a stocky man of medium height, wearing a white tunic with loose sleeves that covered his arms and a kilt that fell below his knees. The fabric was heavy and coarse, the garb unusual, restricting freedom of movement for working in the fields or sailing a skiff. What had looked like an upside-down basket from a distance was, in fact, an odd woven reed headdress with a wide brim that kept his face in shadow.

"Do you know you were followed to this place?" he demanded. "A man alone in a skiff, carrying a bow and a quiver full of arrows."

Bak snarled a curse. "Where is he now?"

"Not far upstream from where you beached your vessel. He's in his boat, waiting. I feared this would happen. With so many who survived the storm already dead. . ." User let out a harsh laugh, leaving the rest to the imagination.

"I doubt he's come for you. It's me he wants to slay." "You?" User asked, skeptical.

Psuro hefted his spear. "Shall I go after him, sir?"

"I wouldn't," User cut in before Bak could answer. "He's sheltered within a clump of trees and surrounded by open space. No man can get close without being seen."

"Did you get a good look at him?" Bak asked. "He's too far away."

Bak stood, hands on hips, thinking. He had taken every precaution he could and still he had been followed. Maybe the lord Amon had handed him a gift in spite of himself. "Show me where he is. We must decide how best to lay hands on him."

"I'm glad you agreed to help," Bak said.

User, who had had no choice in the matter, gave him a rueful grin. "As you pointed out, Lieutenant, it's my neck, too."

Bak poled the skiff into deeper water, then settled down in the stern. He wished they were sailing his own swift vessel instead of the blocky, work-a-day craft of the island farmer. And he wished for a weapon with a longer range than a spear. He shook off the thought. The beached skiff was unreachable, useful as bait and nothing more, the object that held the archer where he was, the sole reason he had not stalked Bak and Psuro across the island as soon as he arrived.

User dipped the oars deep, sending the vessel across a patch of bubbling water and down a cascade that took Bak's breath away. "The currents are in our favor, so it shouldn't take long to get to him. The problem, as I see it, will be that list stretch of open water."

"With luck and the help of the gods, Psuro will distract him." Bak prayed he was right. The Medjay had a strong arm, but could he hurl rocks far enough and fast e- fough to hold the archer's attention? "You met us on this island to speak of the sandstorm. I can think of no better time than now."

"I'll be frank with you, Lieutenant. I don't like to talk about it or even think about it. The storm. Those many days in the desert..." User raised a shoulder and wiped his sweaty face on his tunic. His voice dropped to a low croak. "I'll never know what kept me alive."

Bak felt compassion, sympathy, but he had to know what drove the slayer on. "I'd like nothing more than to walk away and leave you in peace, but I can't."

"The man you seek will be within our grasp in less than an hour. Let him speak for himself."

Bak eyed him long and hard. "How many men survived that storm, User?" Getting nothing in return but a stubborn scowl, he snapped, "Surely you can answer so simple a question!"

User veered closer to shore, avoiding the stronger current farther out. "Eleven," he muttered.

"Eleven men who've remained mute for five long years." Bak kept his voice hard, cold. "Why? Why hold a time of mutual suffering so close within the heart? Would it not be natural to talk, to share so horrible an experience with all who wish to listen? To lessen the load through repetition?" "You don't understand!"

"I suspect Djehuty ordered all who survived to remain quiet, but I, too, have lived in a garrison. I know a commander's orders won't silence whispers."

User stared at him, his face wracked with pain. Without warning, he leaned hard on an oar, turning the skiff, and rammed its prow into a stand of thick, spiky grass. Bak, taken unawares, slid off the wooden brace he occupied and landed hard on the centerboard amid a clutter of fishing poles and farm tools.

"We're ashamed!" User cried. "Some of us for one reason, I suspect, and some for another. But we all have reason for shame."

Bak rocked forward, brushed off the back of his kilt, and sat again on tha, brace. He eyed the former spearman with a mix of sympathy, tolerance, and blame. User read the look and a flush spread across his face. He clutched the oars and, pushing hard against the grass, freed the skiff.

Back on course, he said, "With so many of us so recently slain . . ." He paused,, rubbed his forehead as if to ease the pain. "The tale must be told, I know."

"The wind came up and the skies blackened," Bak said, thinking to lead him into his story.

User's expression lightened; he grabbed at the words like a drowning man grabbing at a lifeline. "You know the tale already?"

"I've seen an approaching storm, that's all."

Deflated, User eased the skiff between two boulders. The task seemed to calm him, to resign him. "With the storm upon us, blinding us, the men did what any sensible men would do. They started to bunch up and huddle down with the donkeys. Commander Djehuty ordered us to stay in line and march on." He gave a harsh, cynical snort. "As if any man could keep going in such a tempest!"