They buried Kheti the next morning, before the heat came up off the sand.
A scribe’s man came to the shelter while the company was still rolling its sleeping mats. He was young, with a fresh linen kilt and a reed tucked behind one ear, and he did not look at any of them for long. He said where the body would go and that men who wished to walk with it might come, provided they were back at the landing when Hapu called. Then he waited outside the matting with the patience of someone who had made this walk before.
Kheti had been wrapped in the night. Someone Idu never saw had wound coarse linen around him from head to feet and tied it at the ankles and throat with cord. The cloth was grey rather than white, the weave loose enough that Idu could have pushed a fingertip through it. He did not. He took one end of the board with Senbi, and two men of the company took the other, and the injured water carrier limped behind them with a stick he had cut from a broken reed bundle.
The path climbed away from the camp and the river. Behind them the long shelters, the bakery smoke and the guarded storerooms fell into a single brown smear over the water. Ahead the ground changed from trodden earth to loose sand, then to sand scattered with flakes of pale stone that turned underfoot. The knocking from the quarry followed them the whole way. It did not stop for a burial. Idu had not expected it to, but he listened for a pause all the same.
At the desert edge, where the last scrub gave out, low humps rose from the sand in uneven rows. Some were heaped rubble, some mud brick crumbling at the corners; a few had a rough stone set upright at one end. Idu could not tell how many there were. They went on beyond the rise, out of sight. Every one of them was a man, or a woman, or a child who had come to this place and not gone home.
A pit had already been scraped out, shallow, its sides slumping. The scribe’s man pointed. They set the board down and lifted Kheti into the sand on his side, knees drawn up a little, the way the men around Idu seemed to think was right. Idu did not know whether it was the custom here or only what the others had seen done. He straightened the linen over his father’s shoulder because it had rucked in the lifting.
Senbi took a loaf from the fold of his kilt, one of the tall conical ones, and laid it by Kheti’s head. The water carrier had brought a small jar of beer with its mud cap still on. He knelt awkwardly, his swollen foot stuck out behind him, and set it beside the bread. Nobody spoke a prayer that Idu could follow. One of the men from the southern villages murmured something in his bent, swallowed speech, and Senbi nodded as though it had been the proper thing.
Hapu came up the path while they were pushing the sand back. He had left his staff somewhere; without it his hands seemed to have nowhere to go. He stood at the foot of the grave and watched them work. He did not take up a handful of sand and he did not say anything, and when it was done he looked at Idu for the space of one breath and went back down toward the landing.
Idu stayed until the scribe’s man coughed. The mound was the same color as all the others. By the next season, he thought, he would not be able to find it without counting from the end of the row. He counted now. Fourth from the upright stone, in a line running toward the river. He fixed the number the way he would have fixed a boundary marker.
In the shelter, Kheti’s bundle lay where he had left it, on his strip of floor beside Idu’s. Idu untied it. A spare kilt, folded twice. A flint blade wrapped in leather. A twist of dried dates, three left. Their mother’s last bread was gone. At the bottom lay the sandal that had stayed on Kheti’s foot, its papyrus sole worn thin at the heel, the toe strap darkened by his skin. Someone had brought it back with the body and set it here. Idu turned it over in his hands and found river mud still packed into the weave.
He tied the bundle again with the sandal inside it and laid it under his own.
Nebi found him there. The foreman stood in the doorway with his short stick against his palm and looked at the two bundles, one atop the other.
“Your company is short a man for the brake and a man for the bread,” he said. “Hapu has asked for neither of them to be you. Today you fetch the company’s rations. The water carrier will show you the way. Count what you are given and bring all of it.”
It was not kindness. Idu could hear that it was not. It might have been something nearer to it, or it might have been only that a grieving man near a braking line was a danger to everyone else. He said, “Yes, overseer,” and Nebi went out.
The bakeries lay behind the camp, downwind of the shelters, and Idu smelled them long before the water carrier brought him round the last wall. It was the smell of the supply station multiplied until it was no longer a smell but weather. Smoke hung low across a yard enclosed by mud-brick walls the height of a man’s shoulder. Inside it, the air shook with heat.
Nearest the gate, a row of women knelt at grinding stones. Each lower stone was a long slab, hollowed by use and set sloping away from the kneeling woman, with its far end raised on a low step of brick. Each woman held a smaller stone in both hands, rounded on top and flat beneath, and drove it forward along the slab with her whole weight, then drew it back, then forward again. A girl beside them tipped grain from a basket onto the upper end. As the stone passed, the grain cracked, then broke, then crept down the slope as coarse meal, gathering in a pale drift at the lip, where another girl scooped it into a bowl. The women’s arms were powdered white to the elbow. Their linen dresses, which hung straight from narrow shoulder straps, had gone grey with meal at the knees and soaked dark between the shoulder blades. One of them sang under her breath to the rhythm of the stone, and the next took the tune up without seeming to notice.
Idu thought of his mother at their own quern, the one stone in their house that had come from her mother. He had never once thought of it as work. It had been a sound in the morning.
Farther in, past a trough where men in short kilts worked meal and water together with their forearms, lay the pits of embers he had seen at the station. Bell-shaped pots stood heating in the coals in rows, their thick mouths upward. A man in nothing but a scorched kilt lifted them out with a pad of folded cloth wrapped round his hand, set them upright in a shallow trench, and stepped back while another poured in the wet dough from a jar. A third pot went over each as a lid. The men moved without speaking, in an order that had worn its own paths into the floor. Where cooled pots had been knocked apart, the conical loaves lay in heaps on mats, brown at the shoulders, paler at the tip.
The brewery shared a wall with the bakery. Through its doorway Idu saw great jars sunk to their bellies in the floor, taller than a kneeling man, each giving off a sour, thick smell that caught in the back of his throat. A woman stirred one with a paddle. Along the far wall, finished jars stood in ranks, and a boy went among them with a basket of wet grey mud, pressing a cap over each mouth and smoothing it down with his thumbs. A man followed him with something small held in his fist and pressed it into each cap while the mud was soft. Idu could see the impression left behind, a little row of shapes, but it meant no more to him than birds’ tracks.
At the yard’s inner door, a clerk sat cross-legged on a reed mat with a writing board across his knees. The water carrier named the gang and the company. The clerk found a place on the board with his reed, looked up, counted the two of them as if they might be the whole company, then made a mark.
Porters set down baskets. Idu counted the loaves into his own basket, one by one, his lips moving. Twenty-one. The company had been twenty-two. Then he understood, and the understanding went through him like cold water: the board already knew. Someone had written that the company was smaller, and the bread had shrunk to match before Idu had thought to tell anyone his father would not eat.
He counted again. Twenty-one. He counted the onions and the dried fish, and the beer jars the water carrier hoisted onto his good side. They matched too. Everything matched.
It should have been a comfort. At the station, when the bread had matched the men, something in his chest had loosened. Now he stood in the heat with the basket against his hip and felt only that the counting was very good here, and fast, and done by people who could read what he could not. Six rations for six men who did not exist had been written down in his village as easily as one ration had been taken away this morning.
“Come on,” the water carrier said. “Bread’s heavier the longer you hold it.”
He made the same trip the following morning, and the count was the same, and he went back to the landing afterward because Hapu had sent word he was wanted there.
Hapu kept him on the boats. He did not set him near the post. The braking line that morning was new, very pale, and Idu caught himself watching the men who tended it rather than the stone on his own lever. Each time the load paused and the line went taut, his shoulders rose. Each time the sledge moved on, they came down again a little later than they should have.
In the afternoon, while the crew waited for a berth to clear, a cargo vessel lay off the landing with its bow tied to a stake and its stern swinging in the channel. A young man sat on the edge of its deck with his feet in the water. He was perhaps twenty, lean and long-armed, barefoot, his kilt hitched up and knotted at the hip so that it would not drag when he waded. A coil of mooring line hung over one shoulder as though he had forgotten it was there. When the crew settled into the shade, he swung himself down into water to his thighs, waded across and climbed onto the landing timbers beside Idu.
“You’re his son,” he said. “The man under the runner.”
Idu looked at him.
“I was out there.” He nodded at the channel. “Three boats back, waiting. Everybody on the water saw it. I saw him go down the ramp when everyone else was going up it.” He held out a hand, hard as a plank across the palm, ridged where some long wooden shaft had rubbed it for years. “Dedi. I steer for that tub when her master’s asleep, which is most of the time.”
“Idu.”
“I know. The man with the cord.” Dedi grinned, not unkindly. “The whole landing knows. A peasant with a measuring cord who stares at Sabu like a heron at a frog. You want to stop that. Herons get eaten by crocodiles all the time.”
Idu’s hand went to the cord before he could stop it. Dedi watched the movement and said nothing about it, which Idu liked better than anything he might have said.
“The scribes read you your gang and your company,” Dedi said, settling against a bollard. “They don’t read you the rest. Want the rest?”
“Yes.”
“Then here it is, for nothing, because your father pushed a friend of my cousin’s out of the way. That one.” He tipped his chin toward the man who had carried the wedge, who was squatting at the far end of the landing with his eyes shut. “Boatmen think haulers are oxen with names. Haulers think boatmen are idlers who sit while the river does the work. Both are right, mostly. The quarry men think everybody below the terraces is soft. Everybody hates the bakers because the bakers eat first.”
Idu almost smiled. It hurt, so he stopped.
“The stores,” Dedi went on, and lowered his voice without seeming to. “People talk as if they’re one thing. They aren’t. That one by the ramp answers to one office, the one up by the channel mouth to another, and the bread stores to someone else again. Each one has a man with a board. Each man with a board has a man above him. A caller like Hapu takes the rope the store gives him. He can grumble. He can’t send it back. If he holds up the landing arguing about rope, the boats stack up in the channel, and then somebody up the hill asks why Hapu’s landing is slow, and then there’s a new caller.” He shrugged. “So he takes the rope.”
Idu thought of Hapu bending the stiff place in the line between thumb and finger, glancing toward the waiting boats. The store gives me what it gives.
“And the boats?” he asked. “Who decides which one comes in?”
“The scribe at the landing decides. A jar of beer helps him decide.” Dedi laughed at Idu’s face. “Not always. Not with the king’s stone, if it’s wanted on the hill. But if two boats come in together and one has a jar for the man with the board, that one gets the berth. My master keeps two jars under the deck for exactly that. He calls them his oars.”
A shout went up from the channel; a berth had cleared. Dedi stood and shaded his eyes, judging how long before his own boat would be called.
“Look there,” he said, and pointed at a vessel nosing in, low under three blocks. “That’s from the Meidum road quarries, or I’m a bargeman’s goat. See how they’ve lashed it? Ropes crossed over the top, down to the deck beams, and every turn finished off round itself twice like a woman doing her hair. Nobody else does it like that. You can tell whose cargo it is by how it’s tied. Every crew does its fastenings its own way. Fathers teach sons. You’d know my master’s knots in the dark, they’re that ugly.”
Idu kept very still. He thought of the turns he had seen near the end of the broken rope, drawn close against one another in a way he did not recognize, and of the guard calling him away before he could part them.
“Every crew?” he said.
“Every crew worth a loaf.” Dedi was already moving toward the water. “Why? You want to learn knots? Come down to my boat some evening. I’ll teach you three, and you can teach me how to stare at officials without getting killed.”
He waded out, swung himself aboard by the steering oar and was shouting at someone in the bow before Idu had decided what to answer. Idu sat with his hands on his knees. He did not touch the cord. He wanted to unwind it then and there, take out the little cloth packet and look at what he already knew was in it: a few fibers, nothing more, nothing a man could carry to a scribe.
Near sunset, Hapu put a frayed hauling line in his arms and told him to take it to the rope yard rather than the store. “They mend there or they throw it on the fires,” he said. “Either way it’s not mine.” He did not quite meet Idu’s eyes. Idu wondered whether Hapu was sending him away from the storeroom door on purpose, and whether it mattered.
The rope yard lay along the low ground beyond the last storerooms, where the camp ran out toward a strip of palms. Idu heard it before he saw it: a dull, steady thudding, like many people beating washing on stones. Under a reed awning, men sat with bundles of palm fiber across flat stones and pounded them with wooden mallets until the stiff brown stuff loosened into hair. Others drew the loosened fiber through combs made of spines set in a block of wood, dragging out the dust and the short ends, which drifted round their feet in brown drifts. The air was full of it. Idu sneezed twice before he reached the awning.
Past the combers, a woman sat with a heap of cleaned fiber in her lap, feeding it out in a thin even stream while she rolled it down her thigh under the flat of her palm. The fiber twisted on itself as it went and came away as yarn, thin as a reed stem, which she wound onto a stick at her side. She did not look at her hands. Her thigh was shiny and hairless where the yarn had rolled across it ten thousand times.
Beyond the awning the yard stretched out along a length of beaten ground longer than the ramp at the landing. Stakes stood at either end. Between them, men walked slowly backward, paying out yarns from the sticks they held, while others at the far stakes twisted bundles of those yarns together into strands, hand over hand, turning against the twist of the yarn so that the whole thing tightened instead of falling apart. Farther down, three finished strands were being laid together. Four men did it, two leaning back on the ends to keep the strands taut, two walking a short wooden piece between them, notched for each strand, that kept them apart while the rope formed behind it. The rope grew so slowly that Idu could not see it growing. He could only see, when he looked away and back, that the wooden piece had moved a little farther down the ground.
So much work, he thought. All those days of pounding and combing and rolling, and then it went out from here to a store, and a man with a board counted it, and any other man who came near it could undo what it had cost in a few breaths.
An old rope maker took the frayed line from him without asking where it had come from, ran it through his fists and grunted. “Fires,” he said, and threw it on a heap. Then he picked up a finished length lying across his knees and, with a small copper blade worn thin from sharpening, sawed the ragged end clean. He turned the blade’s edge into the strands with short, pressing strokes. When he lifted the rope, its end was flat.
Idu stared at it. The fibers lay side by side, every one cut off at the same place, level as a field after the water has gone.
He had seen torn rope. He had seen it two days ago, the ragged lengths standing out like the hair of a drowned man. And among them, half hidden beneath the outer fibers, a small cluster that ended almost like this. His fingers wanted to go to the cord. He kept them at his sides.
It proved nothing. He told himself so in his father’s voice. A rope could be cut anywhere: here in the yard, to trim it; in the store, to shorten it; on some other landing, by some other crew, for some ordinary reason he did not know. A blade left level ends. He knew now what a blade did. He did not know whose hand had held one, or when, or why the cut place had been hidden under the twist instead of left in the open where a man would see it.
“You like rope?”
The old rope maker was looking up at him. His eyes were pale and wet from the dust, and they were not stupid eyes.
“My father knew rope,” Idu said.
“Did he.” The man laid the trimmed length across his knees again. “Which crew are you?”
Men who ask about ropes in front of storerooms are remembered. Idu heard Senbi say it as clearly as if he stood at his elbow.
“Hapu’s,” he said. “At the landing.” He made himself shrug, as though the yard were only a place to bring rubbish. “He’ll want me back.”
He walked away at an ordinary pace and did not turn round until he was past the last storeroom. When he did, the old man had bent to his work again, and Idu could not tell whether that meant anything at all.
The next night he went down to the landing after the company had eaten. Dedi’s boat was tied stern-in now, between two others, its planks creaking softly as the channel moved under it. A small fire of dung cakes burned in a pot on the deck. Dedi sat beside it mending a split in the steering oar’s lashing, a loop of cord between his teeth.
“Come for your knots?” he said round the cord.
“No.” Idu stood in the water to his shins. He had been rehearsing this all the way from the shelter, and now it came out badly. “The boats that go south. Do any go far? Past the district town where the men from my village were gathered? My mother doesn’t know.”
Dedi took the cord out of his mouth. He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke he did not joke.
“There’s a man called Ini who takes empty jars upriver. He goes as far as your district, or near it. He drinks with my master.” He turned the oar in his hands. “I can ask him. He can tell someone at the town landing, and that someone can tell a man going to your village, if one goes. I can’t tell you it will reach her. I can’t tell you when. Half a month, maybe. More. Words get dropped in the river like anything else.”
“I know.”
“So what do you want him to say?”
Idu had no board, no reed, no marks he could have made that would mean anything to anyone. Whatever he said would pass through Dedi’s mouth to Ini’s, and from Ini’s to strangers, and each of them would carry it a little differently, the way the southerners bent his own words. It had to be small enough to survive that.
He thought about the rope. About the level fibers, and the turns he had not been allowed to separate, and Sabu saying negligence while the scribe’s pen moved. He thought about his mother hearing those things from a stranger at the edge of a field, with nothing she could do about any of them except be afraid for the son who was still here.
“Tell her Kheti is dead,” he said. His voice went strange on the name, and he waited until it steadied. “Tell her he died at the king’s works, saving three men from a stone. Tell her he is buried properly, with bread and beer. Tell her Idu is well.” He swallowed. “And tell her the neighbors’ sons must keep to the sowing. Kheti said so. Those words. Kheti said so.”
Dedi repeated it back to him, slowly, twice, getting the village and the district town right the second time. He did not ask why there was nothing about how the stone had come to slide. Perhaps he knew already that some things travel badly.
“I’ll ask him tomorrow,” he said. “That’s all I can promise.”
“That’s more than the scribes promised.”
Dedi snorted and went back to his lashing. Idu waded out of the channel and climbed the bank in the dark.
Senbi was still awake by the company’s fire. He looked up when Idu sat down, saw his face and handed him the beer without a word. This time Idu drank it before it warmed.
After a while he took the cord from his shoulder and laid it across his knees, setting each knot beside the last. Near the mended join he felt the small hard fold of cloth with the fibers inside. He did not unwrap it. He did not need to see them again to know what they looked like.
Around the fire, the camp ate and talked and coughed in a dozen kinds of speech. Somewhere behind the shelters, the bakery fires were already being banked for the morning, and in the morning the women would kneel at their stones and the men would lift the hot pots, and a clerk at a doorway would count out twenty-one loaves for Idu’s company because the board said twenty-one. Thousands of loaves, every day, every one of them counted. Somewhere in all that counting were six rations for six men who had never come north. Somewhere a man had counted out a rope for the brake. Somewhere was whatever Kheti had seen near the storeroom door and been unsure of.
Idu did not know how long his turn would be, or whether he would be allowed to choose when it ended. He did not decide anything that night. He only wound the cord around his hands, slowly, knot after knot, and told himself that he would keep watching, and keep counting, and that this time, when he saw the bend in the line, he would remember exactly where it was.