The Right Hand of Amon by Lauren Haney Page B

from the sun stood among ancient carvings scratched on the rocks. The hill was not quite a shrine, but a place to visit and stand in awe of the long-ago past.
    "Doubt if we'd spot a body coming downriver," said the older of the two, a grizzled veteran forty or so years of age.
    ' `He was caught in the roots of a palm tree," Kasaya said.
    The younger soldier, as bald as a melon, laughed. "One tree looks much like another from our post. And a dead man would look little different than a dead bullock."
    The older man, noting the doubt on Kasaya's face, hastened to explain. "We're too far from the river to see much. And anyway, our task is to guard the desert trail."
    Bak, though he had faith in Meru's guess that Puemre had gone into the water near Iken, stepped in to describe the dead man. "Did anyone answering to that description pass by your post?"
    "No, sir," the bald soldier said. "We saw no officers at all, nor any soldiers we didn't know. The only strangers were traders, men with caravans."
    "Did you happen to see..." Bak described Seneb's caravan in detail, the men and children and animals.
    "Sure we did." The older man spat on the ground to show his contempt. "It was all we could do to make ourselves- stay at our post. But since our sergeant would've served up our heads to Troop Captain Nebwa if we so much as set one foot off that hill, we had to content ourselves with a signal to Kor. Hope it did some good."
    "You did well." Bak smiled. "I was summoned from Buhen, and now the trader Seneb is locked away, awaiting his turn to stand before Commandant Thuty." His smile faded. "Now tell me, did he or anyone else in his party ever leave the caravan?"
    "I don't know what they did farther upstream, but from the time we first laid eyes on them until they walked into Kor, not a man among them set foot off the trail."
    South of Kor, they found the river obstructed by islands, some large enopugh for habitation, others mere boulders, black granite glistening wet from the frothy waters roiling around them. On one of the bigger chunks of land, men as industrious and plentiful as ants climbed among new mudbrick walls rising above the rocks and trees and brush. A fortress was taking shape, replacing a mudbrick fort built in the distant past and long ago fallen to ruin.
    They plodded on, deeper into the Belly of Stones. There they found the river wild and angry, as different as night from day to the smooth, sedate flow that passed Buhen. Clusters of rocky islets, many bleak and bare, some green with vegetation, formed a labyrinth of narrow, swift channels and tumbling rapids. Where the channel was clear, the reddish brown water flowed smooth and strong, but across much of the width of the great river, it leaped over boulders and tumbled down falls and whirled in circles around unseen obstacles, whipped into a colorless froth. At times, it collected in quiet pools or rippled through narrow passages or cascaded down steps of glittering black stone. All the while, it whispered and murmured and sang like a living creature, a siren.
    Bak was awed by its raw power and its beauty and at the same time he was appalled. A fleeting vision of himself in a skiff, riding these tumultuous waters, sent a chill down his back. He dismissed the thought as fanciful. No sane man would take a boat into bedlam.
    Away from the water, a world of golden sand and black rocks stretched out to the west, disappearing in a pinkish haze that blended land and sky. The opposite shore, less encumbered by sand, looked bleak and desolate in the distance, a tortured world of rock eroded by sun and wind, abraded by blowing sand. The rising- sun Khepre slowly climbed the vault of heaven, drawing the moisture from their bodies, burning their flesh, searing the barren land. Their feet, shod in reed sandals, burned with every step. They stopped often to dunk themselves in a pool of still water and drink their fill or merely to look at a river gone mad.
    Life went on, even amidst