Dagger (20 page)

"Oh, Nanefer," she said through her sobs. "My prince, my brother, my only love.

..."

"Don't be afraid," Samlor whispered, bending to kiss her forehead and eyelid.

"There isn't anything to fear."

"We're going to enter the realm of the gods, aren't we?" she said, looking up at him. Her eyes, her jewels, and the tears on her cheeks were all that was visible in the screened moonlight.

"Yes," said Samlor simply. "I am. There's no need for you to go with me, though. Shay will do as I order, and-—

"

"Would you leave me behind then?" Ahwere demanded fiercely. "Watch you go off to die and never return? Is that what you want?" Fresh tears were welling up even though she was so angry that Samlor thought she might strike him.

"I'm not going to die, my darling," he said, trying to ease her close to him again. She resisted only for a moment. "I'm going to come back with the Book of Tatenen. I just

138

don't want to force you to help me in this if you'd rather not."

"Rather leave you?" Ahwere said, but this time wijhra lilt of joyous remembrance in her voice. "The way I left you when our father would have married you to a governor's daughter and me to a general?"

Samlor smiled and quoted King Merneb, " 'Shall I marry my son to my daughter and risk all my happiness at once? No, I don't dare risk the gods' envy that way."

"And it was 1 who made him change his mind," said Ahwere, "so that you and I could find happiness with the only souls on earth who could make us happy. I will not leave you now."

They kissed. Lips still joined, they moved toward the bed, shedding their clothes with increasing urgency.

141

SAMLOR WAS so engrossed that he did not notice when Ahwere entered his work area, the flat roof of one of the temple buildings—

now screened so that direct

sun would not melt the hard yellow wax. He had shaped a section of the bow and was reaching for another block of material when he realized that his wife was watching him with a slight smile.

He started, dropping the baton with which he formed the wax into a perfect simulacrum of a wood surface.

Ahwere's face clouded. "I'm sorry," she blurted, turning toward the stairs again. "I didn't mean—

"

Samlor caught her in his arms. "No," he said, "don't go. You should see this, if you want to. 1 was just—

concentrating on what I was doing."

The smile that returned was shaky, but Ahwere allowed herself to be drawn close to what Samlor was constructing.

It was a boat, small but otherwise similar to the vessel which was docked at the temple quay—

except that this one was built of wax. Samlor had fitted the flat bottom, shaping the pyramidal cakes of wax into a perfect duplicate of irregular, pegged-together planks of sycamore wood. Now he was raising the slanting wales, starting from the bow.

Ahwere stretched out her finger but did not touch the "planks" until her husband had nodded approval. The

140

material had the grain of wood, but it retained the feel of wax as well as its yellow translucence.

"Watch," he said, anticipating the question she might not have been willing to ask. He picked up his baton, a section of hollow reed the length of his forearm, and took a fresh block of wax which he held against the end of one of the blanks.

When Samlor drew the baton across it, the wax flowed like paint before a brushstroke. Instead of taking the texture of the baton, it formed another

"plank"—

perfect in its irregularities, even to the trenails pinning it to the pieces it abutted.

Samlor smiled to Ahwere, but he could feel the sweat of concentration on his brow.

"Shay came to tell you that the fittings have been removed from our ship," she said, nodding toward the edge of the roof. The vessel on which the royal party arrived was just visible past the line of the dock, riding on its cables. "He says they'll begin loading the sand after midday. But—

"

Ahwere frowned. "But why, my husband? Why don't we just use the real ship instead of—

" she gestured. "Though it's very wonderful, what you're doing." Samlor smiled so that the implication of danger wouldn't be the first answer his wife received. "The real boat might be able to—

enter the realm where we'll find

the book," he explained, "But nothing alive could travel with it for the entire distance. We'll be perfectly safe in this vessel—

" he patted the waxen side,

without quite touching it "—

and the other will carry the equipment we need."

Ahwere hugged him but would not meet his eyes as she said, "Well, I shouldn't have disturbed yotl'll go now."

"You don't disturb me," Samlor said.

Ahwere started to turn away. Samlor seized h^r and said fiercely, "My love, I need you! You don't disturb\me. And you mustn't worry." She nodded, her face against his chest, but Samlor was sure he heard her sobbing as she climbed back down the stairs.

142

David Drake

He took another block of wax, set it in place, and began to shape it. His princely face was as calm as the wax itself, but his mind was filled with images of fire and terror.

After he finished the boat, he would form the six oarsmen to drive it. ...

SHAY CARRIED A rope knout as he oversaw the transport of the wax boat to the water, but he repeatedly slapped his own thigh with it instead of the workmen. The wax vessel was a light burden for so many hands, temple servants as well as Nanefer's sailors, but it was also fragile. The bosun had no intention of making someone stumble with a flick of the rope-end—

and Samlor would have flayed Shay

if he had taken that risk.

"Easy, then," the bosun ordered, stepping backward ahead of the procession. Rather than use the stone quay, Samlor had ordered the priests to build a temporary ramp of bundled reeds across the swampy stretch and down into the river. At first the end of the new ramp floated. The reeds undulated down into the muck as they took Shay's weight. The team of men and the boat they carried would submerge the ramp, permitting the vessel to bob in the water without the risk of damage that any other launch would entail.

Beside Samlor stood Ahwere. Her bright smile could have been sculpted in stone for any movement it had shown. He touched her hand and realized the grin he flashed her was almost as false.

"Come on, come on, ye buggers!" roared Shay. "Are ye afraid the fishies'll eat yer bollocks?" The bosun was in

143

144

David Drake

knee-high water, but the loaded men behind him were driving the ramp deeper even though they were nearer the bank.

"Your highness," said Tekhao, rubbing his sweaty hands together. "And you, your highness," he added with a nervous nod to Ah were. "I trust the arrangements are to your satisfaction?"

Samlor was keyed up to the point that the question, intruding into his imagined future, had the impact of a blow. His face went pale and he opened his mouth to rip out a curse at the fat priest.

Before the words came awareness and contrition. He gripped Tekhao, forearm to forearm as if they were brothers taking leave, and said truthfully, "More than satisfactory, Tekhao, from beginning—

" he nodded toward the temple enclosure.

Another ramp of reed fascines led down from the roof where Samlor had constructed the wax boat.

"—

to now."

"Now hold it, ye buggers!" roared Shay, dog-paddling against the sluggish current. "Don't let it float to bugger-all down the bloody river!"

"But now you'll have to excuse me," Samlor continued, "because it's time for my wife and I to—

proceed."

"Oh, Prince Nanefer," mumbled the chief priest in a voice thick with emotion.

"Oh, your highness. You don't know what that means to me. . . ." As Samlor and Ahwere strode quickly down to the stone quay, he wondered what sort of man Tekhao would have been if he could give his god the sort of devotion he reserved for human superiors. A saint, very likely.

And very likely a much worse administrator of the temple and the land which it governed on behalf of the king.

Sailors splashed in the water to keep the boat from slamming into the quay. The wax vessel rode higher than a boat of wood, so the breeze was a greater danger than the current near the shore.

By contrast, the royal yacht sagged very low and the men who were swinging its bow to the stern of the wax vessel had to struggle hard. The mast, oars, and all moveable tackle had been stripped from the yacht, but it was now

145\

loaded with loose sand carried from beyond the edge of the river's annual flooding.

Samlor's armor and weapons lay atop the sand near the bow along with a bronze shovel. There was no other cargo.

Samlor unlatched the gold pin which bound the ends of his sash, then handed the garment to a waiting temple servitor. He pulled his richly-embroidered tunic over his head and tossed that to the man also before stepping out of his sandals.

The stone was warm and a welcome reminder of the cosmos as he walked to the edge of the quay. Ahwere, nude also and regally beyond self-consciousness, was beside him.

Shay had pulled himself aboard the royal yacht and was waiting in the bow with a coiled line. One end of the line was tied to the support of the forward steering oar. The bosun was eyeing the sternpost of the other craft doubtfully, since it too was made of wax.

Samlor stepped down into the wax boat, supporting his weight on his arms as long as possible so that his feet touched rather than slammed the planking. The wax slipped beneath the pressure of his toes. The men treading water to keep boat and dock from smashing together cursed as the hull wobbled and thrust them beneath the surface.

Ahwere followed with the natural grace of a gull banking through the air. Samlor reached a hand out to her, but he found the best help he could provide was to lean toward the other side of the high-floating vessel so that it did not tilt so much.

"Nanefer, are you sure . . . ?" called Shay from the bow of the other vessel. The bosun's concern for the situation had driven normal honorifics from his vocabulary.

"Yes, yes," Samlor agreed, making his way cautiously to the stern between the lumpish pairs of wax "crewmen" with fragile oars in their ill-formed hands. The steering sweep in the stern was becoming increasingly transparent as full sunlight raked through it, evidence that the wax was softening and would soon begin to sag.

"Throw me the rope!" Samlor ordered as the bosun hesitated. 146

David Drake

"Sir!" Shay muttered and tossed the hawser expertly to his superior. The coil opened as it flicked across the water, so that Samlor caught only the final loop; just enough to take a turn around the wax sternpost and bind the vessels together.

Ahwere hugged herself, not in modesty but as if she stood naked in a cold rain. The sunstruck hull shifted greasily beneath Samlor's toes. He bound off the hawser with a face as emotionless as the clear sky above them.

"Jump out now, Shay," Samlor called to the man in the other vessel.

"Nanefer, I—

"

"Jump out!" Samlor cried in a voice thin with fear. "On your life!" Shay nodded and obeyed by leaping like a baboon to the quay where sailors fended the vessel from the stone with poles.

The wax boat wobbled. Its sternposts started to give as the current put strain on the hawser. The six wax oarsmen bent forward, then leaned back against the drag of their oars. Ahwere cried out as the vessel surged away from the quay despite the inertia of the sand-laden boat it towed.

The sternpost held. There were real planks beneath Samlor's feet as he took the steering oar.

The oarsmen were no longer crude parodies but humans in all but color and their stony lack of expression. They stroked at a measured rate, plunging their blades so deep in the water that real oars would have fractured under the strain. The wax shafts held, and the waxen torsos bent and lifted, driving the linked vessels against the current.

The oarsmen's faces were turned toward Samlor by necessity of their position, but the blank eyes paid him no attention.

Ahwere stood near the bow, facing her husband. She was afraid but no longer crying. He had thought when he asked her to join him that she would prove steadfast where no one else could be trusted. Now, looking into the love in her eyes, he knew he was right.

The crowd on the quay were watching the vessels, but the few who tried to walk along the bank beside them were

147

stopped at once by the swamp. Reed bracts waved sluggishly in a breeze that did not touch the sun-hammered surface of the water.

They had reached midstream. The Wall of Tatenen was a black stroke between the river and the vegetation beyond it on the starboard side.

Samlor leaned against the steering oar. The starboard oarsmen feathered their blades for the space of three mechanically-powerful strokes by the wax figures on the port side.

The vessel's bow came around while the towed yacht eased closer, slackening the hawser between them.

All oars striking together, the wax boat drove for the bank. The hawser thrummed taut and the yacht unwillingly obeyed its pull.

Samlor let go of the steering oar, needless now that they were committed whether he would or no. He walked forward, between the wax men who cared nothing for him or for anything, and put his arms around his wife.

The face in the middle of the stone wall was beginning to blaze. It was already brighter than the sun, and its color was the blue of lightning crashing in the heart of a storm. The linked vessels were stroking toward it as fast as a man could walk on level ground.

Ahwere put her arm around Samlor's waist so that they stood side by side, watching the visage of Tatenen grow into a glaring tunnel that pierced the stone and the swamp and all the universe beyond.

They plunged into the tunnel. Hell roared around them.

Where the wax prow should have flattened on stone, the vessel bucked. Samlor heard Ahwere murmur, "Nanefer—