They left in the grey hour before the sun cleared the eastern hills, when the river still held the night's coolness and mist lay in the palms like spilled flour.
The three royal vessels waited where they had been drawn up the evening before, their bows resting on the mud. Close to, they were longer than Idu had thought, longer than six men lying head to foot, and built not from a single log or bundles of reed like the village skiffs but from many planks of wood fitted edge to edge. Where the planks met, Idu could see the lines of cord that bound them, pulled tight and dark with water. At the stern of each boat a great oar hung slanting into the river on a post, and a man stood beside it with one hand on the shaft as if he owned it. The painted eyes on the bows looked downstream, toward the north, toward wherever they were going.
The soldiers who had seemed so remote from the field were ordinary men up close. They wore short kilts of coarse linen, belted at the waist, and nothing above them but sweat and the sun-darkened skin of men who lived out of doors. Two carried spears with copper points bound to the shafts; one had a long staff and a shield of hide stretched over a wooden frame, which he leaned against the boat's side while he relieved himself in the shallows. None of them looked at the villagers with any particular interest. That, Idu thought, was worse than hostility. It meant they had done this many times.
The chosen men stood in a loose crowd on the bank with their bundles. Most wore the same kilts they worked the fields in, mended at the hem, stained to the thigh with old mud. Kheti wore his sandals. He walked in them carefully, lifting each foot clear of the mud as though the sandals were borrowed, and the neighbors who had come down to see them off made remarks about it that he pretended not to hear.
Idu's mother had not come. She had said her farewells at the house door in the dark, holding his face between hands that smelled of flour and smoke, and then she had turned back inside to the seed jars. There was too much to do, and she would not stand on a riverbank watching boats. Idu understood. He wished he did not.
His sister had come as far as the first palm. She stood there now, a small figure with her arms folded, and when Idu looked back she cupped her hands around her mouth.
"It is still two paces east!" she shouted.
Several men laughed. Kheti raised his hand to her, solemn as a priest, and she raised hers back.
A soldier waved the men aboard. They waded out and climbed over the side, and were told where to sit: along the edges of the hull, knees drawn up, bundles in their laps. Sabu was nowhere to be seen. The linen canopy at the stern of the foremost boat was closed, its sides let down, and Idu could not tell whether anyone sat behind it. He touched the measuring cord looped at his shoulder, felt the repaired knot under his thumb, and kept still.
Oars ran out. The steersman leaned on his long shaft. The current took them, and the village slid backward into the palms faster than Idu would have believed a whole life could go.
The river carried them north for five days.
They hardly needed the oars. The Nile wanted to go where they were going, and the rowers worked mainly to keep the boats in the stronger water, away from the sandbanks the flood had left behind. Idu learned to sit on the planks without his legs going numb, to sleep in snatches against his father's shoulder, to eat his mother's bread slowly because there would be no more like it. He watched the land. It was the same land, mostly: palms and fields of black silt, villages of mud brick, men knee-deep in channels, the long pale line of the desert rising on either side. But it went on and on, field after field, village after village, and every one of them, Idu supposed, had its own headman and its own quarrel over two cubits.
On the second day the foremost boat pulled ahead and did not wait. By evening it was gone around a bend, and with it the closed canopy. Idu felt his shoulders loosen and was ashamed of how much.
On the third day they put in at a town larger than any Idu had seen, where a wide landing was crowded with men brought in from other villages of the district. There was shouting, and a scribe with a board, and a long wait in the sun while the men were counted and divided. When the boats pushed off again they were fuller. Idu found himself pressed against a stranger, a lean man perhaps the age of his father, with a face creased like an old waterskin and a scar running white across the back of one hand.
"First time," the stranger said. It was not a question.
"Is it so plain?"
"You are looking at everything." The man grinned, showing a gap where a tooth had been. "The second time, you look at the bread. I am Senbi. I come from upriver, from the district above yours. This is my third turn."
"Your third?" Kheti leaned around Idu. "They send a man more than once?"
"They send whoever the headman gives them. Mine likes me less every year." Senbi shrugged. "It is not so bad, if you are not stupid. You serve your turn and then you go home, and other men come to take your place. Over there" — he jerked his chin north — "they will put you in a gang, and the gang has a name, and inside the gang you will be in a smaller company with its own name, and you will learn to hate the men in the company beside yours. It passes the time."
"What names?" Idu asked.
"Whatever the scribes have written down. Friends of the king. Drunkards of the king. Something like that." Senbi laughed at Idu's expression. "I am serious. Last time my company was called the Green Ones, and nobody could tell me why."
From the far end of the boat a man from the southern villages called out something that set his neighbors laughing. Idu caught perhaps half of it. The words were the same words he spoke, but bent, the ends of them swallowed or stretched, so that he had to work to follow, as though listening through water. A man beside him answered in the speech of some town to the north, quick and clipped, and the southerners mocked him for it. Idu realized he was among men from places he had only heard named, and that to them his own village speech must sound as strange.
The foreman had come aboard at the district town. His name was Nebi, and he did not say it twice. He was a thickset man with a shaved head and a linen kilt somewhat cleaner than anyone else's, and he carried a short stick that he did not use but never put down. He answered, the men soon gathered, to Sabu's office. He moved along the boat checking bundles and faces, and when he reached Kheti, Kheti spoke.
"Overseer. When will we be sent back? We left fields unsown. If we are home before the harvest—"
"You go home when the scribe releases you."
"And when will that be?"
Nebi looked at him as if he had asked when the sun would decide to rise in the west. "When the scribe releases you," he said again, and moved on.
Kheti sat back. He did not say anything. After a while Senbi offered him a piece of dried date, and he took it, and they chewed in silence while the river went by.
On the fourth day the boats tied up at a supply station on the western bank.
Idu smelled it before he saw it: bread, a great warm cloud of it drifting across the water, so thick and good that the men in the boats stopped talking. Then the bank came into view, a long low run of mud-brick buildings set back above the flood line, with smoke rising from behind their walls and porters going in and out of them like ants from a nest.
The men were let ashore to stretch their legs and fetch their rations. Idu wandered as close to the bakery as he dared. Inside a walled yard, women and men worked around shallow pits of glowing embers. Rows of clay pots stood heating in the coals, heavy and thick-walled, wide at the mouth, shaped like upturned bells. A man lifted one out with a pad of folded cloth, and a woman poured dough into it from a jar — not kneaded dough like his mother's but something wetter, nearly a batter — and the pot was set upright in the embers again with another pot inverted over it for a lid. Further along, a boy knocked the finished bread from cooled moulds with the heel of his hand: tall, conical loaves, brown at the crust, which he stacked in baskets. There were dozens of moulds. There were hundreds.
Beyond the bakery stood jars of beer in rows against a wall, each sealed with a cap of grey mud pressed down over the mouth. Some of the caps bore a mark pressed into them while the mud was wet. Idu could not read it.
At the doorway of a storeroom, a clerk sat cross-legged with a writing board on his knees, and as porters carried baskets out past him he made a mark for each. Nebi stood before him with his own man, naming the gang, and the clerk counted and the porters set down loaves and onions and a bundle of dried fish.
Idu counted too, because he could not help it. Twenty loaves for the first company. He counted the men. Twenty. He watched the second company receive theirs and counted again, and the bread matched the men exactly. He felt something in his chest unclench, then felt foolish for it.
Then the loading began at the third boat.
It was the boat that had carried their own village's men, and it was being emptied of them now, the men told to sit with the others while porters went up and down a plank laid against its side. Baskets of bread. Jars of beer, their mud caps carefully upright. Sacks that might have been grain. Idu counted without meaning to and lost count at thirty baskets, began again and lost it again. It was more than the gang would eat in many days. It was more than the gang would eat in many days even if every man ate like Senbi, who had already eaten his own loaf and was looking with interest at Idu's.
"Where is that going?" Idu said quietly.
Kheti followed his gaze. For a moment his face did the same thing it had done at the granary.
"I don't know," he said. "And neither do you."
"But that is our boat. We were in it. If they write it for our gang—"
"Do you know what they write?" Kheti's voice was low and very even. "Can you read the clerk's board? Do you know who ordered the boat filled, or where it goes, or who will eat from it? There are other gangs ahead of us. There are men at the works who never leave them." He put a hand on Idu's shoulder, over the cord. "The river is long, and many men eat from it."
Idu knew it was true. He also knew his father had not said the bread was honestly sent. He looked at the clerk, who was not looking at the third boat at all, and then away, because Nebi had turned around.
They were ordered back aboard. A man from one of the northern villages had a foot swollen to twice its size from a cut he had hidden for two days, and he stood at the plank with his bundle and a basket of the company's onions, unable to put his weight down. Nebi told him to get aboard. The man tried and stumbled. Kheti stepped past Idu, took the basket from him and slung the man's bundle over his own shoulder, and gave him an arm up the plank.
"Did I tell you to carry for him?" Nebi said.
"No, overseer."
"Then don't. If he cannot carry, the scribe will write that he cannot carry, and someone will decide what he is worth. That is not you." Nebi tapped his stick once against his palm. "Sit down."
Kheti sat down. He kept the basket at his feet, and Nebi, after a moment, let him.
When the boats pushed off, the third did not follow. It lay at the station with its cargo, and later that day, looking back from a long straight reach, Idu saw it moving at last — not after them, but across the river, toward a landing on the far bank he could not see.
On the fifth day, near noon, Senbi touched his arm and pointed.
At first Idu saw nothing but the desert's edge on the western side, the familiar tawny cliffs. Then he saw that one stretch of it was wrong. It was paler than the rest, raw and almost white in the sun, cut in hard straight lines where the rest of the desert lay in soft slopes. Above it and below it hung a haze of smoke, many thin threads of it rising and spreading into a single brownish veil.
"Cooking fires," Senbi said. "Thousands of them. You will smell the bread before you smell the river."
The water grew crowded. Small craft first: papyrus skiffs, fishermen, a raft of bundled reeds loaded with pots. Then larger boats, and larger still, until Idu was staring at a cargo vessel riding so low under its load that the river nearly lapped over its sides. On its deck, lashed and wedged with timber, sat blocks of stone. Each one was taller than a man's waist and longer than a man lying down, square-edged and pale, and the boat beneath them creaked as it moved.
"How many men to lift one of those?" Idu breathed.
"Nobody lifts them," said Senbi. "You will see."
The boats turned off the river into quieter water, a broad stretch fed by a cut channel, and the shore came at them all at once. Landings ran along it, ramps of packed earth and timber where boats nosed in side by side. Behind them stood storerooms of mud brick, long and low, their doors guarded. Beyond those, on the rising ground, were shelters of reed matting and rows of longer buildings, and paths worn white by feet, and everywhere men: carrying, hauling, shouting, squatting in the shade of walls to eat. Higher still, cut into the face of the plateau itself, rose the terraces of a quarry. Idu could see the gangs on them, small at that distance, and hear, under all the other noise, a ceaseless knocking of stone on stone.
As they came nearer he could make out a gang on the nearest terrace working at a half-freed block. Some swung rounded hammerstones held in both hands, battering at a channel along its base; others crouched with copper chisels and wooden mallets, cutting a straighter line. Dust rose off them in puffs and drifted down the slope.
Their boat grounded among others at a landing where a cargo vessel was being unloaded. Idu climbed out with his bundle and stood in water to his shins and forgot to move.
A block had been levered to the vessel's edge, where timbers ran from the deck down to the landing. Below it waited a sledge: two thick wooden runners, curved up at the front, joined by crossbeams. Men with long wooden levers worked the stone along a hand's breadth at a time, wedging after each push, while a man at the side called the rhythm. Ropes had been passed around the block and around the sledge, and when it tipped at last onto the timbers and slid down, the ropes ran out through the hands of men braced on the bank, slowing it, checking it, until it settled on the sledge with a groan of wood.
Then a line of haulers took up the long ropes at the front, leaning into them. A man walked ahead of the sledge with a jar, pouring water onto the ground in front of the runners where the dust darkened. The caller began a chant, and the haulers answered on the pull, and the sledge moved. Slowly. But it moved.
Idu tried to measure it. The block was perhaps two cubits high, two and a half long; the sledge beneath it heavier than it looked. He counted the haulers: eighteen on the ropes, more ready beside them. If a man could pull so much, and the stone was so much heavier than the same space of mud — but how much heavier? He did not know the weight of a cubit of stone. He did not know how much the water helped, or the wet ground, or the slope. He worked at it until the sledge had gone up the path and out of sight, and the number he reached was nothing he would have let his father drive a spade for.
Kheti had walked a few steps along the landing, to where coils of heavy rope lay on a mat in the shade of the storeroom wall. He crouched and lifted one end of the nearest coil. It was as thick as Idu's wrist, made of three great strands twisted together, each strand of many smaller ones. Kheti turned it in his hands, pressed his thumbs into the lay to see how it opened and closed, bent it, sniffed it, ran a palm along a length of it feeling for breaks.
"Good," he said, mostly to himself. "Palm fiber, well cleaned. Tight twist, even all the way. Whoever made this knew his work." He let it fall back on the coil. "A rope like that will hold a great deal."
"Away from there," said a man by the storeroom door, and Kheti stood and came back.
By evening the gang had been marched up from the landing to a long reed-matting shelter at the edge of the camp, where they were shown a strip of floor no wider than a man's shoulders for each of them. The air inside was thick with the smell of other men who had slept there before. Bread was issued, and onions, and a little dried fish, and Senbi showed Idu how to soften the hard crust of the conical loaf in a mouthful of beer.
Before dark Nebi assembled them outside, and a scribe read from a board what the gang would do. Idu understood only part of it at first: words for companies, for stones, for a place. Then Senbi muttered it plainly. From the next morning, their company would work at the river landing, unloading the stone boats as they came in.
"Is that good?" Idu asked.
"It is close to the water," said Senbi. "And far from the overseers on the hill. It could be worse."
As the scribe finished, there was movement on the path below the shelters. A group of men came up it in clean linen, two of them with staffs, a servant with a parasol of woven reed held behind the man at their center. Idu knew him before he could see his face, by the stillness of the way he walked.
Sabu passed within ten paces of the gang. He was speaking to the man beside him, a short man with a writing case on a strap over his shoulder, and his eyes moved across the assembled men the way a farmer's eyes move across a field of ordinary barley. They did not stop on Idu. They did not stop on Kheti. They went on, and the party went on, and the path was empty.
Idu found he had been holding his breath. He let it out slowly. He had feared Sabu's notice for five days. He had not expected to fear its absence more. A man who looked at you was deciding something. A man who did not look had already decided.
When the assembly broke up, Kheti went to Nebi.
"Overseer. The boats that go south again — could a man send word with one? Only a message to my village. My wife is sowing alone. If someone could tell her we have arrived—"
Nebi looked at him for a long moment. He did not seem angry. He seemed tired.
"The boats carry what the scribes put on them," he said. "Go and eat."
That was all. Kheti came back and sat by the small fire the company had built from dung cakes and scraps of reed, and Idu sat beside him.
For a while neither of them spoke. Around them the camp settled into its night noises: a hundred conversations in a dozen kinds of speech, somebody singing badly, the cough of a man in the shelter behind them, and under it all, even now, a faint knocking from the quarry where some gang worked on by lamplight.
"At home," Kheti said at last, "when I argued with the headman, I knew the ground. I knew where the bank was, and I knew what he wanted, and I knew that if I was wrong I would have to eat at his table anyway and make it right." He turned a piece of reed in the fire. "Here every rope belongs to someone. Every loaf. Every boat. Every order comes from a man who got it from a man who got it from a man, and I will never see the one at the top. I cannot even send your mother word that we are alive."
Idu looked up at the dark shape of the plateau. He could not see the raw stone now, only the smoke catching the light of the fires below, and above it the stars.
"Can a man measure a thing that large?" he asked. "A mountain?"
Kheti was quiet for long enough that Idu thought he would not answer.
"A mountain is only many small measures," he said. "One stone, and the next, and the next. Like the knots on a cord." He reached over and touched the cord at Idu's shoulder. "And each one can be wrong."
Idu lifted the cord from his shoulder and wound it around his hands, laying each knot beside the last, the way he had been taught. He found the mended place by feel.
In the morning they would go down to the landing where the stone came in. He would see the boats unloaded, the levers and the ropes and the sledges, and perhaps he would learn the weight of a cubit of stone.
He still remembered twenty-four rations for eighteen men. And now he had seen how much bread a river could carry, and how quietly a boat could turn toward a landing no one would name.