Unconsciously he nodded agreement, remembering speeches he had heard within the courts of Thebes.
"Therefore they will fasten upon such a dire foretelling—" She hesitated, visibly of two minds about proceeding.
And a flash of sudden and terrifying insight made him add, to his own horror, "Perhaps thinking to make it true by the efforts of man—"
The Royal Mother sat very still. On the wall the black shadow of her vulture headdress had a questing look. But the Royal Wife stirred, her hand half raised from her lap as if to ward off some blow. Then Teti-Sheri smiled, but there was nothing joyful in the curve of her lips.
"Tuya may take joy in the new Hawk; his wits are not dull. Think so, kinsman, but also keep those same thoughts locked within your head. A warning to a soldier in time is as good as an extra company at his back. Take care, and again I say to you, take care! You and your archers stand outside the old patterns of our life. For that very reason you may be able to better fulfill your duty and see that our Lord departs not before his time—"
"There is this also." For the first time Ah-Hetpe spoke. "Because you are from afar, there will be those quick to blame you in preference to friends or kinsmen should aught go wrong. And it may be that no saving hand can be held out to avert disaster—"
He had it now! All his formless and vague fears came into sharp focus. To the queens, he and his men, without local ties and uncorrupt, might be salvation in face of a palace plot. To any plotters the Nubian company would be convenient scapegoats. He must indeed walk blindfolded a path in a crocodile swamp. Something of that realization must have been visible in his face, for Teti-Sheri smiled again, but not with the icy remoteness he had seen earlier.
"Serve us for but a little time, Captain. When our lord goes up against the Hyksos, and he will lead out after the Blessing of the Waters, then their chance will be past. And if they strike, their serpent fangs will only close upon stone."
But that was a promise that held but small comfort, Rahotep decided bleakly, as he sat on a stool in his quarters, gazing a little absently at Kheti whom he had summoned for a conference he did not know just how to begin. He might have known that his foster brother had already gathered some of the threads of the tangle into his capable hands, for the other spoke first.
"The jackal has barked to some purpose tonight, brother. Already tongues wag concerning a warning."
"Aye. And that I have had doubly. We must be truly on guard until after the Blessing of the Waters—"
What more he might have added was not to be said. Nakh- hof, second in command of the guard, stood in the doorway. His face in the lamplight was greenish beneath the brown, oily drops that ran down his cheeks, and he held himself erect with an effort.
"Captain!" His voice was a half cry of pain. "A bad sickness has struck. Half the guard cannot leave their sleeping mats. Take your men and cover the chamber of Pharaoh until I can send you relief!"
On their way from one corridor to the next Kheti spoke hurriedly to Rahotep.
"A sickness which strikes so speedily and fastens upon the men of the inner guard is indeed an odd one. Mayhap one who barks is concerned."
That it was a sickness and a grave one was manifest, Rahotep discovered when he posted his men in place of those who had, for the most part, to be carried away by their comrades. He hoped that the warning he gave secretly to each archer would be enough to keep the men alert and ready for trouble.
The night wore on, and it began to seem that he might have been unduly suspicious. It was less than half an hour by the great water clock before the Pharaoh would be aroused for the dawn greeting of Amon-Re when a cry broke from the inner chamber.
Rahotep raced down the corridor reaching the curtains just as the door guard burst through them. He bumped against that archer, for the room beyond was almost completely dark and the man had paused inside to get his bearings. In the corner where the Pharaoh's bed stood half concealed under a canopy, there was a struggle going on, and Rahotep leaped for the disturbance, shouting at the same time for a light.
He threw himself on a tangle of fighting men, his hands slipped on flesh that had been thickly oiled. Then they met hairy skin, an animal's pointed ear! Pharaoh was fighting for his life against some monstrosity that mounted a beast's head on a human body!
The captain struck out with his fists, blindly, with all the strength he could muster. Something grunted as a light flared in the doorway. The monster wriggled toward the corner. Rahotep took a step forward in pursuit and came down on one knee as his foot caught under a second body. He groped and his fingers closed about metal.
A torch had been brought in behind him by Nakh-hof who had somehow miraculously recovered from his severe illness. As its smoking radiance was swung under the bed canopy, all the crowding guard could see clearly. Rahotep knelt by Sekenenre. The Pharaoh was moaning faintly, and in his upper breast a dagger had been thrust, a dagger whose hilt was now in Rahotep's hold. Save for those who had just entered, the room was empty. To these witnesses he was an assassin caught in the act!
Chapter 10
SLAVES OF ANUBIS
ivahotep pressed his forehead tight to the unyielding stone of the wall against which he lay. Something in that small, self- imposed pain helped to clear a path through the fever haze that imprisoned his body, a path for ill-assorted, broken thoughts and half memories. He was shut in this box of utter black, as if his abused body had been sealed, while still living, into the sarcophagus of a tomb. Yet—his breath caught in the half-sob of a child who has wept himself into exhaustion—for Rahotep, son of Ptahhotep and the Lady Tuya, there would be no tomb, save one the river crocodiles would grant. Lie would be a long time in dying, and afterwards there would come total oblivion instead of any afterlife. Or would the Judges of the Dead be more merciful than those of the living?
Much of what had happened since Nakh-hof had come upon him with the unconscious Pharaoh, the assassin's weapon in his hand, was mercifully a blur. He had been brutally flogged and questioned through that flogging. When he found no one would listen to his story or his protestations of innocence, that they sought only for a confession of guilt, he had kept silence to the end.
There was one moment he remembered with brutal clarity, when his own captain's flail had been broken ceremoniously across his battered face before the assembled guard. And he had another memory picture of his archers, stripped of their arms and proud insignia, being herded away to the slave compounds, the unconscious Kheti, who had resisted injustice to the end, being dragged along in their midst. After that he had awakened here. Though where he was he did not know, or greatly care any more.
He moved a swollen tongue between torn lips in a vain quest for moisture. Water! A picture of a scummy pool in a dying stream on the Kush border haunted him. He longed for that water. Green with weed, evil-smelling, thick with insects though it was, he desired it avidly. But though he lay in a cell that was dank and chill, there was no water. Perhaps he had already been condemned and was walled in here for all time, shut in with a curse that would imprison his spirit with his moldering body. He had heard dark tales of such punishments. And surely no greater crime could be charged against any man than that of raising a dagger to the Son of Re!
There came periods in which he escaped the dark, the cold, the pain, and ran with the Scouts once more in the open wastelands, or climbed down the cliff to the ledge where Horus had guided him to find the leopard cub. Then once more he would awaken to the cell and the hopeless present.
He was shackled by an ankle ring, he discovered. And the chain leading from that ring was fastened to a bolt set in the stone of the wall. But the mere fact that he was so chained destroyed his worst fear. Had he indeed been walled up and forgotten, they would not have bothered to shackle him. And so, heartened by that one small fact among all his fears and forebodings, Rahotep began to explore his quarters with his outstretched arms.
Pain came at the slightest movement of his flayed shoulders, but
he persisted, driven by an inner core of stubbornness.
His groping hands found no break in the walls about him on three sides. The length of the chain—though he lay full length on his belly and stretched out his arms to their fullest extent beyond his head—prevented him from locating the fourth. But his questing led him to a jar and a plate.
Gasping with eagerness, he pulled the jar to him slowly, fearing to spill even a drop of the precious liquid he could hear sloshing in its depths. He drank sparingly of the musty water. But with every sip he swallowed he believed he could feel new energy flowing into him. The plate held a three- cornered loaf of coarse bread, the husks of grain rasping in the stuff—common slave fare. He ate part of it slowly, wincing at the pain in his lips, choking upon the bites he forced down. But he did not eat it all, though his middle pinched with hunger. There was no sign he might be given other supplies. Best make this last as long as possible. Rahotep sat up straight, not daring to touch his lacerated back to the wall, and chewed carefully.
The food had strengthened him in the belief that he was not to be left there forever. And putting the horrors of the immediate past to the back of his mind, the captain began considering what could be done here and now to help himself. His body was bare of any clothing. Even his throat amulet had been taken from him. He had no possible weapon and he was chained.
Chained! His fingers went to that ring on his anlde, moved along the links to the ring that anchored him to the wall. That had been set deep in the mortar where four blocks met. He tugged at it, already knowing that it would require more than Kheti's strength to loosen it. But mortar—
Once more he groped on the floor, found the plate on which the bread had rested. It was, to the touch, a rough thing of baked clay. But it might be a tool of sorts. At any rate he would not sit in the dark making no effort at all, awaiting death with a broken spirit!
Deliberately Rahotep broke the plate, and was left with two jagged, pointed shards. With one of these he began what he knew was an impossible task, picking with that fragile, crumbling clay point at the stone-hard stuff in which the ring was set. He might as well attempt to drain the Nile with his cupped hands, something within him commented bitterly. But he kept on, though the clay powdered away with every stroke.
There was no night or day, no hours to be marked in the dark. He could have been there for a longer or a shorter time than he guessed. Sleep came. Rahotep drank sparingly of the water when he awoke, stiff and sore, and ate a mouthful or two of the bread. Neither supply had been replenished, and he congratulated himself on the foresight of rationing what he had found.
The last fragment of the broken plate was powder and his fingertips were raw with rubbing the most infinitesimal bits back and forth around the ring. He thought he could feel a slight indentation there, but it was all lost effort. And now he sat quietly, cradling in his hand the one remaining bite of bread.
He was raising that to his lips when there was a burst of blinding light above the level of his head. His hands over his eyes in instinctive protection, Rahotep flattened against the wall where his chain was fastened. He had been so long in solitary darkness that he first did not understand the promise of those sounds from overhead. Sluggishly they fitted into a pattern in his ears, began to make a measure of sense.
"Lord Rahotep—?" There was a familiar slur softening that urgent call. Then a second voice, pitched low, but with the carrying snap of an officer, brushed aside the first inquiry.
"Rahotep! Brother!"
The captain pulled a name out of his memory, said it aloud in that husky whisper that seemed all that was left to him for a voice.
"Kheti!"
"Aye, brother, Kheti. Hold that torch lower, fool! Nay, after I am through this hole—not before!"
A body squeezed with some effort through the square opening some eight feet up on the far wall, hung for a moment by the hands, and then dropped to the floor. Rahotep's eyes still smarted in the light from the torch extended through the wall hole, but he forced himself to look about the stone cell that had held him—for how long?
"I am chained—" His husky whisper echoed oddly from the bare walls.
Kheti was already down on one knee examining the links and the ring to which they were fastened. He gave a test jerk to the fetters and then shook his head, turning his attention to the ring about the captain's ankle.
"This may be broken, brother. Brace yourself!"
In spite of the pain in his back Rahotep stood against the wall, his arms outspread to balance himself, as Kheti inserted both thumbs into the ring. Muscles stood out on the Nubian's shoulders, and Rahotep felt his bone and flesh caught in the pressure of those hands.
"Ah—the metal is old and worn—" Kheti grunted with satisfaction. "Once more, brother—"
Rahotep closed his eyes, felt a trickle of cold sweat course down his jaw. Then that terrible pressure was gone with the tinkle of metal against stone. His whole foot felt numb as if the circulation in it had ceased, but he stumbled forward without question as Kheti led him across the cell to stand under the opening.
"Up with you now!" The Nubian's hands closed on the captain's waist, and Rahotep was heaved aloft. The torch was withdrawn abruptly, and hands came down to catch his upraised wrists. He was pulled up, out of Kheti's hold, dragged roughly enough for it to seem for a moment that he was being pulled in two.
He lay on his back in a corridor so narrow that his shoulders brushed either wall. And those there stood at his head and feet. But Rahotep's dazzled eyes told him that they were his archers.
"How—?" His question was never finished for there was a scuffle and he heard Kheti once more giving orders.
"Close that stone tightly, you pig of Kush! Let these shaven skulls wonder if their own Great One made a meal of the captain behind their backs. That would be a good story to ram down their throats! Lord"—he loomed over Rahotep, giving him an officer's greeting—"can you walk? We know not where this burrow leads, but it must have an :end somewhere!"
"Give me a hand up. If I have enough left of my foot bones"—Rahotep laughed a little lightheadedly—"I can assuredly walk. Where are we and how did you come hither—?"
Kheti's hands hooked in his armpits dragged him up, and the Nubian's mighty shoulder was behind the captain as a support until he was able to stand steady.
"We are in some hidden way of these sneaking priests—a long hidden way by the looks of this—" His bare toes scuffed in the thick dust on the floor. "Because we can heft stones past the moving of their slaves they brought us in to clear part of a ruined shrine built in the far past on which they plan to raise another lurking place for their magics. Today Mahu chanced to find in the wall a stone which moved under his hands when he cleared away some rubble. Tonight we broke out of the slave quarters and used that door—"
"But how did you find me?" demanded Rahotep as he followed behind two of the archers, one bearing the torch, Kheti and the others at his back.
"There was much talk of how you were kept in some secret place of the temple." Kheti's tone was hard; the hand he had kept on his captain's shoulder as if to steer him aright tightened. "They were planning a mighty spectacle—"
"With me to play the center of it!" Rahotep finished bleakly.
"That is the truth you speak, Lord. Therefore, when this secret way led into the interior of the temple, as we could see through the spy holes in the walls, we kept outlook for aught which might betray where they had prisoned you."
"Aye," Mahu the torch bearer broke in. "Look you, Lord!"
He swung his brand closer to floor level, and Rahotep marked a handhold carved into the side of a block of stone, apparently to aid in its being pulled forward.
"One of these we opened. We found a prisoner's cell beyond—empty—except for the bones of a man long dead. So each we came to we inspected. And in the third we found you!"
"But we are still in the Temple of Anubis then?"
"We are, Lord." Again Mahu's whisper floated ba
ck. "This is an old pile much built over. I do not think the shaven skulls themselves know all its secrets. And if we do not find the other end to this burrow, we can remain hidden for a day, until the chase has spread out into the desert, and then retrace our way through the camp of the slaves."
"Meanwhile, we can learn more of the shaven skulls' secrets," remarked Kheti. "We search now for their treasure room—"
"This is no time to think of looting!" Rahotep half stuttered. The Nubians, as followers of Dedun, would not balk at helping themselves to the offerings of a foreign god. But he was surprised to hear Kheti suggest something so far from their main objective of escape.
"Not loot, Lord!" Hori's tone was one of honest indignation. "We but take what is lawfully ours. These priests pounced upon our weapons as tribute to their Jackal. Give us our arms once more and we shall stand as men—"
A low growl of assent echoed along the line of Scouts. And Rahotep made no protest when they halted now and again to peer through holes in the walls to see what lay beyond. Under those conditions Kheti's search for the treasure chamber made very good sense indeed.