The Arrow Across the Water
Shouts rose from every side. Nehesyu shook off his wandering thoughts and straightened where he stood.
So that was who it was — General Setheph, Supreme Commander of Lower Egypt, the man they called the Pharaoh’s own guard, the finest warrior in all Egypt.
The two-horse chariot he drove came onto the wharf in a boil of dust, and even in the dark the eyes of the women waiting to be searched glittered. They could not look away from him: the long black hair spilling down his back, a face like something carved, a chest hard as hammered iron, thighs thick with strength.
All that swooning will not last.
Nehesyu snorted to himself. Let them learn how many men had already died by the throwing spears and the great bow mounted at the chariot’s front, and by the sword at his hip, and every gaze sparkling with admiration would drown in fear.
“General! What brings you down here at this hour?”
Uriya, captain of the river police, stepped forward to receive him.
“How stands the search?”
“The suspects have not yet shown themselves on the wharf. They may have abandoned the Nile and taken the land road—”
“Their feet are in no state for the land road.”
Setheph spoke as if he had seen those feet with his own eyes. Nehesyu of the river police tilted his head, puzzled — and then he remembered the Libyan bandits who had plagued the western Delta, plundering at will and taking innocent lives as if it were a game.
They had fallen upon some quiet fishing village and lost all track of time savoring its women. When the Medjay came down on them they were crushed outright, yet they managed to withdraw with a chieftain who barely clung to life. Strangely enough, Setheph — then captain of the archers — had found where they hid, stormed the refuge, slaughtered every one of them, and cut off their wrists. Thanks to that thorough vengeance, a Libyan bandit was now all but impossible to find anywhere in the Delta.
“They go barefoot. Have the sandal merchants of Thebes questioned as well, and learn whether any has seen the suspects.”
Hearing him speak to his adjutant, Nehesyu understood. The same man who had once used some uncanny sense to pinpoint the Libyan chieftain had now read the state of the fugitives’ feet.
“Match every soul against the portraits, and miss no one. The instant a suspect is taken, report to me.”
“Yes, General!”
Nehesyu answered loudly, then drew out the papyrus scroll so he might study the portraits properly.
The moment he unrolled it, the sun god — who had spent the night in the underworld of the Duat — at last cast down the wicked serpent Apep, rose newborn, and poured forth a blinding light. Under that brilliant sun the portraits were nothing like what he had squinted at through the night beneath a dim lamp, rubbing his bleary eyes.
“Huh? They look alike.”
The man in the portrait was the very image of that Nubian who had taken, as his wife, the golden-haired beauty Nehesyu had dreamed of all his life and never once had the chance to marry. A sigh escaped him. Such a beauty, wasted. What could she possibly see in a plain man — common as dust even in Nubia, and the very spit of a criminal — that she had up and married him before Nehesyu ever met her?
“Next!”
Calling the next traveler forward, Nehesyu decided that once the day’s work was done he would go to The Drunken Cobra, drink his fill, and get properly drunk, if only to soothe the regret of having been allowed nothing more than stolen glances at a beauty.
Pesejet and her companions had paid their fare with a silver cup shaped like a lotus and taken the first boat bound for Lower Egypt. They stood at the prow.
“Brother, look at that policeman. I think he’s still looking for you.”
Sebua’s skill with paint had surely helped, but even so, Pesejet had never known Kian could be this lovely.
“I don’t want to look. I don’t want to know. I wish today’s wretched appearance of mine would vanish from everyone’s memory.”
“You really are pretty.”
“Stop! Keep needling me and there’s no telling what I’ll do.”
Iuni came up to Kian, who wore the most downcast expression she had ever seen on him, and drew him close with an affectionate arm about the shoulders.
“That’s right, all of you, leave off. My wife says she doesn’t like it.”
At the joke, Kian’s face twisted.
“Oh my, how tender. Since when were you so tender? You were never that sort of husband. Oh — that’s right. You’ve had so many wives, maybe you were tender with the others.”
Sebua’s jest was thick with a former wife’s venom. Iuni, who had been grinning and playing along, could not muster a single reply. He fled into the cabin.
Just then came the sound of a back being slapped, hard, again and again. Some man passing by had been staring, soul-struck, at Kian in his woman’s guise, and his wife had caught him at it. Even as the blows landed, he could not tear his eyes away.
“I’m going in to rest too.”
White to the lips, the color gone from his face, Kian followed Iuni into the cabin. Only Pesejet and Sebua remained at the prow.
“They say there’s a sorcerer in Nubia who’s famous for seeing the future clearly.”
Sebua spoke to Pesejet, who had been heaving sighs without quite meaning to.
“Then we shouldn’t have taken a boat for Lower Egypt. We should have gone to Nubia, so I could ask about my future.”
“My husband — no, Iuni — went to that sorcerer before he came to Egypt, they say. He was told that if he went to Egypt he was fated to fall into the hands of a witch who bewitches men with fine wine, and that he must never go.”
Pesejet burst out laughing, then froze at a sudden shudder through the deck. She had trusted the boat to stand as firm as the earth. The great rocking was utterly strange to her.
“First time on a boat?”
“Mm…”
“It’s always like this. And they say the sway of a river doesn’t even count as swaying. Merchants who sail the Red Sea and the Mediterranean claim that out on the sea, waves as huge as the pyramids rear up to a point and hammer the ship. Might just be drunks boasting, though.”
Sebua told it with relish, gestures wide, but Pesejet, who had only ever seen the pyramids in wall paintings, could not begin to judge their size.
“Is this what those earthquakes they say happen so often in Crete feel like?”
“That place is a mess these days. There’s a bull deep underground that gores the earth with his horns, so the ground keeps shaking and volcanoes keep heaving up. Merchants whose main trade is with Crete walk around looking half dead. Come to The Drunken Cobra and they drain the strong stuff by the jar.”
Unlike herself, who knew nothing beyond the affairs of Deir el-Medina, Sebua seemed to understand even distant Crete through and through. Pesejet looked at her with respect. Whether Sebua noticed or not, she yawned hugely and muttered.
“I’m sleepy. Worked too late… I’m going in to sleep a little.”
Sebua rubbed at her tired eyes and went into the cabin. Pesejet leaned on the prow and watched the foam born where the hull struck the water. She was not standing on the earth. She was floating on the Nile, and once she thought of it that way, even the white foam the boat cut from the river seemed mysterious.
Gazing down at the dazzling skin of the water, she leaned out from the prow and drew a deep breath. It was the first journey of her life, the one she had always dreamed of. She had never imagined that lifelong dream would come true while she was running.
Besides their party, the boat carried five or six other passengers, a donkey meant to serve as someone’s legs, and — apparently destined for offering — a bull, gazelles, ducks, and geese, all riding along in peace together. Dreaming of the many wharves yet to come, where it would take people aboard and set them down again, the boat glided quietly along the Nile.
That was when a fine chariot, the sort a division commander or someone higher might use, came racing through the dust until it drew near the quay.
Properly, two men rode a chariot — one shooting at the mark, the other holding the reins — but only a single man stood in the chariot that had come up beside the water. That only made him easier to know. He rode behind horses, yes, but he was the very man who could attack just as well from the back of a horse itself.
The distance was great, and Pesejet wore a priestess’s robes that hid nearly every mark of her. He could not possibly recognize her. Even so, she was glad to see him in a moment she had not expected — glad enough that she wanted to call his name, to wave, and, if things were not as they were, to leap from the boat and swim to him.
Then he took up the great bow at the front of the chariot. Slowly, he aimed it toward where she stood.
Had she held some strange faith that even if he learned she was a fugitive he would still reach out his hand — that the man who had saved her life would believe in her innocence somehow? That he was aiming at her, that she meant so little to him he could think of killing her with an arrow and not hesitate for an instant, left her wretched and miserable.
The arrow loosed from that enormous bow — its range plainly tremendous even at a glance — came toward her in a high arc. An Egyptian bow: a body of hard acacia, a string of flax drawn tighter than a bull’s sinew. Add his formidable strength, and the distance was well within his reach!
Thock. The arrow struck home with a clean, solid sound. Pesejet, who had covered her mouth and clenched her eyes shut, opened them slowly onto a reality in which she felt no pain at all.
Nothing about her body had changed. The arrow had not been meant for her.
On the water, a hippopotamus with one ear torn away by a crocodile bled red. It could not endure the arrow sunk deep in its head, and it sank beneath a boil of bubbles.
“A wounded hippo moves with a speed and a strength you cannot trust. It will ram a boat and flip it, so when fishermen see an injured one they throw a spear at once and end the danger. Otherwise you may walk the road to the underworld beside a dying hippo.”
Those had been the words of her wet nurse, Alida, spoken while she told the maxim of the sage Ptahhotep: A good moment passes in an instant, like a crocodile rising.
Far off, Setheph lowered the bow and watched the boat draw away.
Dressed as she was, and at such a distance, he could not have known her and slain the wounded hippo for her sake. Even so, his gaze seemed turned toward her, and the rims of Pesejet’s eyes reddened.