Nile Builder: The Architect from the East

Chapter 81: Chapter 3: Outer Lines Formed — Layered Works Tighten the Siege

Word that the rebels were coming back reached them on the seventh day of the repairs.

What came first was a single scout. He burst into Horenheb’s sentry post south of the city, and before his horse had stopped he shouted something toward the wall-head. What he shouted, the men on the wall could not make out — the wind carried the words away — but they saw the soldiers in the sentry post rise to their feet, one after another, like a line of grain standing up under a wind. The rising spread from post to post along the line of works, and the men on the wall watched it spread, and knew what it meant before any word reached them.

At noon, the sky to the north turned yellow.

It was dust. Dust without end, rolling in from the direction of the official road, covering half the sky like a curtain. In the dust, first a few banners — dark cloth, the ram’s head showing and hiding — then a line of cavalry, then a column with no end in sight. Men, horses, carts, pack donkeys — black and dense, like a shadow that would not burn away, spreading down from the north. The column was so long that its head reached the river bend while its tail was still lost in the dust.

On the wall-head, the alarm bell sounded.

Dong dong dong — dong dong dong —

The bell rolled over the whole city, striking through the lanes, through the market, through every shut door. The men repairing the wall stopped where they stood, straightened, and looked north. No one spoke. Only the wind moved, carrying the dust of the north up onto the wall, laying it on men’s faces — dry, gritty, the taste of it in their mouths, the feel of it in their eyes. The dust was not the dust of a road; it was the dust of an army.

Lu Zhu went up the north gate tower. He climbed the ladder slowly, and stood behind a crenellation, and watched the column. He watched it for a long while — the banners, the cavalry, the endless body of it — and then he said:

”Thirty thousand. A pot has been put down over us.”

On the wall, the repair crews said nothing. Some men set down their hammers; some leaned their mud-bricks against the wall; the mortar buckets stood in a row, half-filled. The dust from the north pressed closer and closer, until the sound of hoofbeats could be heard — not hoofbeats, actually, but the earth itself trembling, the tremor running up the wall into a man’s feet, into his chest.

”Back to work.” Kamon’s voice rang out, flat and even. ”The work does not stop. They pitch camp; we repair the wall. They rest; we don’t.”

The craftsmen moved again. This time the hammer-strokes were quicker, harder, as if the men were driving something down beneath the hammers — something of their own, something that must not be allowed to rise.

The rebels’ vanguard arrived after noon.

Panhesy brought three thousand cavalry first, riding a full circle around the city, the war-horns rolling along the wall, the hooves drumming in the dust. He looked carefully — at the crenellations on the wall-head, cut to a new and even measure; at the line of works south of the city, where men were still moving; at the figures still climbing high on the wall. He looked, and he looked again, and his adjutant saw the line of his jaw tighten.

”They’re repairing too.” He said to his adjutant. ”Inside the city, they repair the wall; outside the city, they dig ditches. This war has become a war against earth.”

In the two days that followed, the thirty thousand came up in full. The tents went up one after another, from north of the city around the east, spreading to the south; the rows of tents grew like planted rows, and the ground beyond the wall turned from green to canvas-colored. The rebels dug their own ditch — facing the city gates, a shallow trench with two rows of stakes behind it, the points turned toward the gates. They were afraid of the city’s soldiers breaking out at night to raid the camp.

”To surround men, first surround yourself.” Panhesy stood at the edge of the ditch and kicked one of the stakes, testing it in the earth. ”The High Priest always says: before you pen anything in, pen yourself in tight.”

Lu Zhu watched the rebels pitching camp, day after day, from the wall-head. He watched from the north tower, and from the west tower, and from the south; he watched in the morning light and in the evening shadow, his charcoal moving in his notebook, recording the shape of what was being drawn on the land outside.

The camp was laid out by the book of military practice: the main force in the center, the two wings spread out, the grain carts ringed at the camp’s heart, the stables by the water. Beyond the ditch, every hundred paces, stood an archery tower; between the towers, ropes strung with timber stakes made a fence. The camp of thirty thousand was pitched straight and level, like a great game-board drawn on the ground — and the man who had drawn it had drawn it with care.

”This camp,” Lu Zhu said to Kamon, ”was laid out by a man who knows his trade. The ditch is deep where it should be deep, shallow where it should be shallow; the fence is loose where it should be loose; the fire lanes are wide; the water road is left open. There is a builder in the rebels’ camp.”

”You mean—” Kamon squinted, his eyes following the lines of the camp, ”they’ve got a man who knows walls?”

”Not walls.” Lu Zhu said. ”War. A man who knows war uses his camp the way a wall is used — to hold, to cover, to threaten. Such a camp is not easy to break.”

Kamon said nothing. He drew his stone chisel from his belt, weighed it in his palm once — the old familiar balance, the weight he knew better than the weight of his own hand — and slid it back.

”Not easy to break,” he said, ”then we wear it down slowly. They pitch their camp; we repair our wall. We’ll see who runs out of patience first. A camp can be pitched in a day; a wall is repaired forever.”

The city’s people did not dare come up onto the wall-head to look until the second day.

Among the watchers was an old man who counted the tents for a while, lost count, and gave it up. He leaned on a crenellation, spat outward, and said: ”Thirty thousand men, ringed around our one city. Fighting or cursing, they can’t starve us and they can’t dry us up. The master builder is here, the wall is here, the people are here — what’s to fear?”

His mouth said he was not afraid. But the hand he had used to count the tents shook all night, long after he had gone home to bed — the fingers trembling against the blanket, counting without his knowing.

The rebels’ great camp was completed on the third night.

The tents ran from north of the city, around the east, all the way down to the river south of the city. Three sides of camp, one side of river — Thebes stood in the middle like a well, the city ringed as neatly as a well is ringed with stone. When the torches were lit, the men on the wall saw the fires beyond the wall join into one great ring, and the ring was complete, with no gap in it. On the river to the west, a few points of fire were rocking — small, but present.

There were boats on the river too. The rebels’ river soldiers had drawn their boats into a single line, lying crosswise across the channel. The bows all faced the city; the torches on the boats reflected in the water, so that it looked as if a ring of fire were burning in the river as well. The reflection broke and reformed with the current, and the fire seemed to breathe.

”The river is sealed too.” Lu Zhu said. He stood at the crenellation and watched the line of boats, the reflected fire rocking on the water.

”Sealed.” The adjutant beside him said. ”Only the west bank, their boats can’t reach — General Horen’s men have bows mounted on the far shore. The river is half ours, half theirs; the line runs down the middle of the channel.” He paused, and added: ”The boats are the one thing they built that we cannot repair away.”

That night, Lu Zhu rearranged the city’s business. He called the meeting in the assembly hall behind the gate tower, and the men came in from the wall with the dust still on them — Kamon, the adjutant, the chief officiant, the captains of the new companies. Lu Zhu went through the city’s account aloud, item by item, the way he had gone through building accounts for years.

Kamon drew up the garrison roster: the craftsmen kept their three shifts; one shift was drawn out and filled out with able-bodied citizens, formed into a city-defense company. The company was divided among the four gates, one captain per gate, and the captains were all old men of the guilds — men who had spent their lives reading walls and gates, and who knew where a gate could be forced and where it could not. The wall-head sentries changed twice a night, with an extra change before cockcrow, when the night was coldest and the eyes were sleepiest.

For grain and firewood — Mery was not in the city, so Lu Zhu put the adjutant in charge for now. The granary accounts were reported once a day, the numbers read aloud at the same hour, so that every man who needed to know the number knew it. For water: the same twenty-four wells, plus the aqueduct south of the city.

”The aqueduct’s sluice gate,” Lu Zhu said, tapping the defense map, ”is two li outside the wall. And that ground now belongs to the rebels’ camp. That gate is hanging by a thread.” He drew the circle around the gate on the map again, pressing the charcoal down. ”The thread is outside our reach. That is the weakest place in this city, and it is not even inside the city.”

He sent for the chief officiant. The chief officiant picked the able-bodied men from among his followers and formed them into a night-patrol, one small lamp per man, walking the lanes one by one. The lamps moved through the dark lanes like slow stars, and the patrols passed one another at the lane crossings, and the code of the night was silence.

”We patrol people.” The chief officiant said. ”The night shows the state of a heart most clearly. Whose lamp burns all night without going out, who no longer speaks to his neighbors — those houses get a question the next day. A question, not a charge; the night patrol is a shepherd’s walk, not a constable’s.”

”Good.” Lu Zhu said. ”To hold a city, first hold its hearts. That first post — you stand it.”

On the first night of the siege, the city’s lamps went out later than usual.

Every household was awake. The dogs of the lanes barked all night, and the barking set men’s hearts racing; the barking carried from lane to lane like a relay of fear. Some people took down their door planks and re-fitted them, bracing them against the frame; some brought out the grain from their cellars and counted it again, handful by handful, in the dark. In the east of the city, an old woman stood in her courtyard and bowed three times toward the direction of the sunrise.

”I bow to the sun.” She said to her grandson, who stood at her side, his small hand in hers. ”Outside the walls, they worship their old gods. Inside the walls, we trust in our sun. The sun rises every day — and while it rises, the city stands. A god that must be carried by men can be dropped; a sun needs no carrying.”

At midnight, from the camp to the north, came the sound of war-horns. One note. Two. Three — long notes, like three knives scoring the night beyond the wall, the sound carrying over the wall and through the lanes. The torches on the wall-head went up one after another, and the men of the garrison climbed onto the wall, their blades in their hands.

The horns sounded for half the night, and nothing else came from the camp.

When the sky lightened, the people learned the truth: it had been the horns of the rebels changing their watches. A camp of thirty thousand changes its watch with horns, like any army.

”Who are they blowing for?” Kamon stood on the wall-head, looking north. ”For us. So that we sleep badly, night after night, and the work slows and the nerves fray.”

”Then let them blow.” Lu Zhu said. ”Horns don’t cost arrows. They blow theirs; we build ours. When the wall is finished, we’ll see who sleeps sound.”

Pamun rejoined the army on the third day of the siege. He had come around with his remnants through the towns to the south, taking the long way, skirting the places where the royal banners flew. By the time he reached the rebels’ camp he had grown thin in the face, and his armor was dented and worn, the white cloth band on it soiled and tattered. He knelt before Nekhem’s tent and did not raise his head.

”High Priest,” he said, ”the city is lost.”

The tent was still for a long time. The lamp flame jumped, and the shadows on the tent wall stretched and shrank, and no one spoke. Outside, the camp went about its ordinary night — the rattle of the patrol, the stamp of a horse, the far sound of the river — and the sounds only made the stillness inside deeper. The silence went on so long that the man in white, kneeling in the corner, ceased to breathe audibly.

”Rise.” Nekhem said.

Pamun did not move.

”I told you to rise.” Nekhem said again. His voice was not heavy, but every word lay like a stone, one on top of the other. ”I have known for some time how the city was lost. A priest shut in a courtyard, a water seller, a boatman, a few stonemasons — and they opened the gate of a city four thousand men were holding. That account is not on your head alone.” He paused, and the pause had the weight of a judgment reconsidered. ”A commander is not the whole city. The city’s hearts were not yours to hold; they were held by the god of a shut temple, and they slipped out of everyone’s hands.”

He walked to stand before Pamun, looking down at him from a height of more than rank.

”They won with hearts. The battle of hearts — we lost that one.” He said. ”But the city is still there—” he raised his hand and gestured beyond the tent, ”the wall is still there, the granaries are still there, the people are still there. What was lost can be retaken. And before it is retaken, it must be strangled. Strangle it — a day, a month, a year — and it will give out in the end. A city is only men; men are only bellies; bellies are only grain.”

”Your officer hears and obeys.” Pamun’s forehead touched the sand.

”Go and rest.” Nekhem said. ”You lost the defense of the city. Do not lose the attack.”

Pamun bowed his head to the ground, but he did not leave at once. He knelt there, and told the whole story of the night the city fell, from the beginning: the gap in the wall, the west gate, the three swings of the torch, the cavalry wading across, the lock in the gate tunnel. He spoke slowly, and every detail came out as if he were cutting it out of his own flesh, and the tent listened in silence.

Nekhem listened to the end, and said: ”The gap — they found it by feeling. The lock — they broke it with a chisel. The gate — they opened it. And your men? Four thousand men, and they could not hold one west gate?”

”Your officer—” Pamun’s head sank lower.

”Let me answer for you.” Nekhem said. ”Half your men were at the granaries, half in the barracks, and the men on the gates were conscripted craftsmen. When the craftsmen’s hearts are not on your side, the gate cannot be held. A spear in a stonemason’s hand is not a spear; it is a stick that wishes to be a chisel.” He paused. ”That is why I have always said: Thebes must first be won in the heart. But we no longer have the time to win hearts. So we will take the city the other way — from the outside, from the belly.”

He waved a hand. Pamun withdrew.

Nekhem stood in the tent for a long time. Then he called for Panhesy and asked: ”The situation to the south — have you felt it out?”

”Felt out.” Panhesy said. ”Horenheb’s main force is south of the city, camped on the slope with his works in front of it. On the west bank there is one more camp, guarding the ferry and the grain road. Inside the city, the garrison is thin — it leans on the wall and the people.”

”Horenheb.” Nekhem repeated the name, his fingertip rubbing the emblem slowly, the worn circle of it. ”The wolf of the western line. He has moved his wolf’s den to our doorstep.” He said it without heat, the way a man names a fact of the weather.

”Who do we strike first?” Panhesy asked.

”No one.” Nekhem said. ”We surround. If they want to rescue anyone, they must cross our camp. If they want to come out, they must first ask leave of the ditches. When they move, we move. Remember — our grain is in Upper Egypt; their grain is in the west. Whoever cuts the other’s road first, wins. The wall is not the battle; the road is the battle.”

Beyond the tent, the night-patrol’s rattle went past, beat by beat. The great camp of thirty thousand was so still that the crackle of the torches could be heard, and the far sound of the river — and in the stillness, Nekhem stood looking at the lamp flame, his hands folded, patient as a stone.

And south of the city, Horenheb’s men had been moving for three days.

The ground he had chosen lay three li south of the city. From the river, it ran east as a gentle slope. The slope was not high — but a man standing on it could see the whole of the rebels’ camp, spread out below like a drawing, and the smoke rising from the city wall beyond it. He pitched his main camp behind the slope, out of sight of the plain, and his works in front of it, in plain sight.

His men, counting horses and all, came to five thousand. Five thousand men could not surround a camp of thirty thousand — but five thousand could hold one line. The line he chose was the south: the south was the road from the rebels’ camp to Upper Egypt, the road by which their grain came up, and to hold the south was to hold their grain. His own grain came up the west bank; the west bank had the river, and the river had boats. The geometry of the war, he had seen at a glance: each side’s lifeline ran through the other’s reach.

”We are few.” He said to his officers. ”Being few, we lean on works. Where a work stands matters more than how high it stands. A ditch in the right place is worth a tower in the wrong one.”

The officers nodded. These were men of the western line, where war was fought with walls, orders passed with smoke, and horsemen stopped with ditches. These methods were their mother tongue; they had learned them the way a child learns to walk, in sand and in stone.

”First, dig the ditches.” He stood on the slope and drew a line on the ground with his riding whip — from the river to the earthen ridge in the east. ”One main ditch, two small ditches. Main ditch: fifteen feet wide, eight feet deep. Small ditches: ten feet wide, waist-deep. The earth that comes out, pile it to the north, into a ridge.”

”General,” a centurion asked, ”do these ditches stop men or horses?”

”Both.” Horenheb said. ”Fifteen feet wide — no horse can jump it, and no rider would try. Eight feet deep — a man who falls in cannot climb out without a ladder and a rope. The two small ditches are for their bundles of brushwood to fill. They fill one, we shoot into the other. By the time they have filled their way to the main ditch, half their men are gone.”

”And the earth that comes out?”

”As I said, a ridge.” Horenheb tapped the north with his whip. ”A ridge a foot high is a wall’s footing. When we need to raise a wall, we take the earth from where we stand. In a siege, every spade of earth is a soldier.”

The soldiers set to work the same day. A thousand men, spread in a line along the marked ground, one man to every arm’s length of it. The wooden spades rose and fell; the yellow earth flew, catching the light. The dug earth went north in baskets, load after load, men passing the baskets hand to hand along the line, building a long ridge. By dark, the main ditch had its outline — lying across the land south of the city like a fresh wound, its edge clean and raw.

The next day, Seb’s crew of craftsmen arrived.

He brought the old hands of the western line — the same men who had raised sixteen towers with him in the desert, their faces darkened by the sun of three campaigns. Beside them came more than two hundred volunteers from the seven villages of the West Bank, carrying their own spades and their own meal sacks. The carts carried timber, hemp rope, ramming tools, and the rolls of drawings he had carried from the western line, wrapped in oilcloth.

Seb did not hurry to begin. First he climbed the slope and looked north. He looked at the rebels’ camp — the rows of tents, the ring of stakes, the smoke of a thousand cookfires. He looked at the smoke on the city wall. He looked at the newly cut ditch. He watched for the better part of a double-hour, his eyes moving over the ground the way his teacher’s eyes moved over a wall — reading it. Then he took his charcoal from his breast, squatted on the ground, and began to draw.

He drew a river first, then a wall — the city wall. Then a great ring — the rebels’ camp. And last, at the position of the south, he drew a string of small squares, and a line of them, neat and even as seeds in a row. He drew slowly, thinking with the charcoal, and the squad leaders squatted around him in a half-circle, watching the drawing grow the way they had watched his drawings grow on the western line — in silence, with the understanding that the lines were decisions.

”Ditch, horse-stop stakes, earth wall, towers.” He pointed at the string of squares, speaking to the squad leaders gathered around him. ”Four layers. The same principle as the western line — not one wall to stop a man, but layer after layer to wear him down. Wear him until he cannot get through — that is the win. Every layer is a question the enemy must answer with men.”

”The towers of the western line stopped raiders.” A squad leader said. ”What’s camped here is thirty thousand men.”

”Raiders are wolves; thirty thousand is a flock.” Seb said. ”A wolf wants a gap; a flock wants a road. Cut the roads one by one, and the flock piles together — the tighter it piles, the worse it tangles.” He paused, and added: ”This is a principle I worked out over years on the western line. Towers stop wolves; ditches cut roads. The things are different; the principle is one.”

The squad leaders looked at one another. This young man from a small West Bank village spoke little — but when he spoke, every sentence landed where it was aimed, and the older men found themselves nodding before they knew it.

That day, Seb divided his crew into groups: one group dug the ditches, one sharpened the wood, one rammed the earth walls, one raised the towers. Every group had its leader, and every leader was an old hand from the western line — a man who had stood behind the sixteen towers and learned what the sand could teach.

The wood-sharpening group had the most urgent work. The horse-stop stakes had to be sharpened — the points pared to a fine edge with adzes and knives, the bark stripped so the points would bite — set slanting into the earth, points outward, three staggered rows. The timber came from the willow grove on the river flats; green wood, heavy, but a sharpened green stake driven into the earth holds firmer than dry wood, and a green point does not split. In one day, along three li of line, more than a thousand stakes went in — seen from a distance, the ground had grown a row of fangs, and the points caught the evening light in a broken line.

”These teeth,” an old woodman said, wiping his adze, ”whoever runs into them loses two of his own first.”

The earth-wall group worked behind the ditch. The wall rose between the ditch and the ridge — chest-high, four feet thick, with crenellations cut along its top. The wall did not need to be tall — men stand behind it, and arrows behind the men. A wall too tall blocks the view of the men it is meant to protect; a wall too low gives the enemy a look at their heads.

”This wall,” Seb said, patting a freshly rammed stretch, the surface still damp and smooth, ”is not to stop men. It is to stand men on. A man behind this wall stands half a head taller than it — he can see, he can shoot, and the arrows cannot reach him. The wall’s height is measured from the eyes of the men who stand on it.”

The tower work was the slowest. Ten towers, set along the line, half a li apart — a distance measured out on the western line: at half a li, smoke can be seen, fire can be passed, and though a shout cannot carry, a drum can. The tower bodies were timber frames on rammed-earth platforms — the platform ten feet high, the frame ten feet more; two men stood on top, one to watch, one to send the smoke. A tower was a day of work for a crew of twenty, and no part of it could be hurried.

Seb supervised the first tower himself. He laid the lines, drove the stakes, and when the platform was being rammed he stripped off his upper garment and lifted the rammer with the laborers, the sweat running down his back in the sun. In the rhythm of the chant his shoulders peeled and blistered — but his eyes never left the plumb line, hanging at the tower’s heart.

”A tower must be straight.” He said. ”Lean an inch, and the man on top sees a yard wide of the truth. When the eye is off, the smoke is wasted.” He tapped the plumb line with one finger, and the string swayed, and steadied. ”The line is the tower’s spine. Check it, and check it again.”

Among the laborers, the men of Jujube Village were the most numerous.

Three years ago, the Libyans’ cavalry had burned their village, and forty-seven people had died — the burned houses still stood broken at the village edge, and the village had not rebuilt them, because there had not been hands enough. The leader of them was a man named A-Jian, not tall, and sparing of words — but when he dug, he did the work of two, the spade biting deep and the earth flying. Someone told him to rest. He said: ”My father died that day. Then, we had only fences — the kind of fence that burns. Now they let me dig ditches — this is how I pay my father back.”

”The rebels are not the Libyans.” The man beside him said.

”The men who surround our city,” A-Jian said, and his spade went in again, ”are all wolves.”

On the fifth day, all ten towers stood.

The day the towers went up, Seb stood from morning to night. He inspected them one by one: whether the bases were rammed solid, whether the frames were lashed firm, whether the ladders were nailed steady. He climbed each tower to its top and looked out, testing the view from every one. When he reached the seventh tower, he climbed to its top and looked north. The rebels’ camp lay below like a black lake, its edge out of sight; to the west, the smoke of the city wall rose straight; to the south, the West Bank road ran like a yellow thread into the dusk.

”Clear view!” He shouted down to the base. ”The smoke is clear, the camp is clear, the road is clear!”

When the shout was out, he laughed at himself — a short laugh, alone on the tower. He remembered the day the first tower of the western line went up; he had stood on its top like this and shouted into the desert, a boy with sand in his hair. Then, beyond the tower had been sand; now, beyond the tower was a battlefield. The tower was still a tower; the principle was still the principle.

”Teacher said the wall must grow with the ground,” he thought. ”These ten towers are eyes grown out of the earth.”

Halfway through the works, Seb brought the western line’s code with him as well.

He had the carpenters make ten wooden boards, whitewashed, lettered in charcoal — one to hang on each tower. On the boards were written three things: the watch schedule, one change every four double-hours; the password for changing guard, one man saying ”West Bank,” the other answering ”smoke”; and the smoke code — one smoke for peace, two for alarm, three for help.

”The towers of the western line were run exactly like this.” He said to the tower sentries, showing them the board with his finger on each line. ”Man on the tower, smoke in his hand, the code on the board. When you are sleepy in the night, look at the board — and remember why you stand here. The board is the law; the law is what keeps the sleep out of the eyes.”

The sentries nailed the boards to the tower posts, and stood back to look at them. A few read the lettering aloud, slowly, learning it by heart; the younger ones asked the older ones about the passwords, and were answered in the old men’s grunts. The wind moved the boards, and the ten white boards swayed on the ten towers like ten small flags — and the code on them was the same on all ten, so that a man changed from one tower to another carried his knowledge with him whole.

That night, Seb sat at the foot of a tower for a long time. He thought of the sixteen towers of the western line — the first one he had built with his own hands, standing outside Jujube Village, with a copy of his drawings buried beneath its base. The whole village had come out to watch it go up, the children running around the base, the old men leaning on their sticks; and an old woman had felt the base with her hand, and said that from now on, she could sleep a whole night through.

”The towers of the western line guard villages,” he thought. ”The towers here guard a city. A village is a city’s root; a city is a village’s support. The principle is one.”

On the third day of the towers, the first smoke rose from the city wall.

It was the signal agreed between Lu Zhu and Horenheb: one smoke for peace, two for alarm, three for help. The smoke rose from the wall-head — a wisp of gray-white, drifting slowly up to mid-sky, hanging in the still air. Seb, standing on his tower, saw it, and shouted down to the base: ”Smoke from the city! One smoke! Peace!”

The men at the base cheered. The sound was not loud, but it carried far — far enough that the men on the city wall heard it, and the cheering passed up the line of towers like the smoke itself.

”Do you hear that?” Lu Zhu stood on the north gate tower, and said to Kamon beside him: ”The works outside have grown up. The city has a voice beyond the wall now.”

Kamon looked south too. The ditch had become a black line; behind the line, stretches of earth wall stood up one after another, like a row of new teeth pushing out of the ground; and at intervals along it, the ten towers stood like posts of a fence that had not existed a week ago.

”This war,” Kamon said, ”has moved from the wall to beyond the wall. The repair work keeps growing.”

”Growing is good.” Lu Zhu said. ”It means the city has people on both sides of the wall now.”

The rebels’ first night attack came on the fifth day of the works.

That night there was no moon. At the third watch, a low stirring began in the camp north of the city — a muffled sound, like ten thousand feet scuffing through sand, a sound that carried in the still air. The sentries on the wall-head sensed it first and moved to raise the alarm — and at that same moment, hoofbeats sounded from the south.

The rebels’ cavalry had slipped out.

Three hundred riders, no torches, hooves wrapped in cloth, came out of the camps east and south of the city in two columns, making straight for the works south of the city. They meant to catch Horenheb off guard — the works unfinished, the men in the open, the camp in the dark, the whole line of defenses still a thing of holes. At the same time, north of the gate, a hundred-odd men were waving torches at the city gate and shouting — a feint, meant to pin the city’s soldiers on the wall-head, so that none could leave the city to help.

What they did not know was that the men in the works never slept sound.

Behind the ditch, the sentries of the ten watchtowers had seen the dark mass long since — the shape of it, moving against the lesser dark of the plain. The drums passed the word from tower to tower — ”boom, boom, boom,” low and urgent, the sound running along the line faster than any horse. On the works, the torches went up one after another, so fast that it looked as if a line of fire had been drawn on the ground.

The cavalry closed in.

The leading horse — a fine animal bred on the western desert, a horse that had carried its rider through a dozen raids — stopped of its own accord ten paces from the ditch. However good a horse, it knew the black mouth in front of it: fifteen feet wide, eight feet deep, gaping in the dark like the earth’s own mouth, and the horse’s ears went flat and it planted its forelegs. The horses behind could not stop; they piled into a knot, neighing in a chaos of sound, the riders cursing and hauling at the reins.

And at that moment, from behind the earth wall, bowstrings sang.

The arrows were not scattered. One volley, aimed deliberately at the riders’ shapes against the dark — the archers had measured the range in the daylight, and the wall stood where it had stood. The first rank of the rebels’ riders went down by the dozen; the rest wheeled their horses and caught a second volley on the turn. A third volley followed their backs, shepherding them back into the night to the east.

When the sky lightened, the open ground before the ditch was littered with a dozen-odd bodies, and a dozen horses trotting in circles where their riders had fallen. The royal soldiers led the horses away; the bodies were covered with reed mats, waiting for the rebels to come and claim them.

”Why not pursue?” Seb asked Horenheb.

”No pursuit.” Horenheb stood behind the earth wall, looking north. ”They came to test. Testing the width of the ditch, the number of our men, the temper of our watch. Let them test.” He said it without anger, the way a man discusses a lesson. ”When the test is done, the next time they will know to be afraid. Fear is a wall too, and it costs no earth to build.”

A night later, the rebels came again.

Not cavalry this time — infantry. Two thousand men, each carrying a bundle of brushwood on his back, crouched low and moved through the dark toward the ditch. At a few dozen paces out, they threw their bundles into the ditch — the bundles landed with a dull thud, one after another, filling the dark mouth with dry brush — one small ditch, then the second, looking as if they would be filled at this rate.

The sentries on the tower saw it clearly. The drums sounded again.

This time the archers behind the earth wall did not hurry. They waited while the rebels filled their way to the edge of the main ditch; they waited while the men crowded together at the lip, passing the brushwood forward. Then one arrow of fire rose from behind the earth wall — its head wrapped in oiled tow and burning — arced across the sky, and landed in the half-filled small ditch.

The brushwood was dry. The fire went up with a roar, the flames running along the ditch like water running along a channel.

The half-filled ditch burned like a river of fire. The light of it turned the whole works bright as day — and showed the two thousand rebels at the ditch’s edge, clear and plain, their faces lit, their bundles still in their arms. They stood in the light, not daring to move, like ants when the stone over them is lifted.

”Shoot.”

The arrows fell like rain.

That night, the rebels left more than three hundred bodies behind. Near dawn, the rest fled back to camp. Some had lost their shoes, some their eyebrows, some the skin of their hands; some ran weeping into the dark: ”Can’t fill it... this ditch can’t be filled...”

When the sky was light, the soldiers of the works went out to collect the arrows.

Arrows were precious. The heads were forged — a set of heads took half a day of a smith’s work, and the shafts had to be straight and the fletching firm. A dozen-odd soldiers went crouching along the ditch edge and under the earth wall, picking them up one by one, working their way along the line in the gray light. The good ones went to the stores; the broken ones were stripped down, the heads saved, the shafts set aside for repair. An old soldier picked up an arrow scorched half away, its shaft blackened, its head still good, and looked at it, and said: ”This arrow came wanting to bite a man. Now it’s going home to light our lamps.”

In the camp, Panhesy’s face was very dark. He called the centurions who had failed, to the front of his tent, and cursed them for half a double-hour — his voice carrying over the camp, the words sharp and bitter. In the middle of the cursing, Nekhem’s man arrived, carrying a message.

”The High Priest says: a defeat is a defeat. Don’t curse the soldiers — the officers led them badly.” The messenger paused, and the pause was careful. ”The High Priest also says: from now on, no night attacks without his order. No one’s.”

Panhesy swallowed the second half of his sentence, and waved the centurions away. They went quickly, their shoulders dropping as they went.

”No punishment for the deserters?” He asked the messenger, low.

”The High Priest said,” the messenger said, ”a man deserts when his belly and his courage have talked it over together. Punish the courage, and the belly panics all the more.”

Panhesy said nothing more. He stood before his tent, looking at the burnt-out line of fire to the south — the smoke still rising thinly from the ditch — and said: ”This ditch is as vicious as anything on the western line.”

The news reached the commander’s tent, where Nekhem was studying a drawing by lamplight.

The drawing was a scout’s sketch — the lines rough and wavering, drawn in the dark at the edge of the works — but the message plain: one main ditch, two small ditches, a row of earth wall, ten towers. Nekhem looked at it for a long time, his eyes moving over the lines the way a man reads a familiar text. Then he held the sheet to the lamp and let it catch fire, watching it burn from the corner to the center — the lines of the ditches blackening first, then the towers — and laid it in the brazier, and watched the ash hold its shape before it crumbled.

”Those men,” he said, ”have moved the wall of the desert down to the south of the city.”

”That is the one called Seb.” The man in white said from the side. ”Lu Zhu’s senior apprentice. The sixteen towers of the western line were his work. He is young — but he has the master’s way of reading the ground.”

Nekhem said nothing. His fingertip rubbed the emblem, circle after circle, the old worn circle of it, the gesture that had accompanied his thinking for longer than most of his priests had been alive. After a long time he opened his eyes and said:

”A master who repairs walls, and an apprentice who builds towers. Their walls are harder than our blades.” He paused, and his voice was level, without heat. ”It is not the wall that is hard. It is the thinking that goes into the wall. The thinking travels; it has crossed the river.”

He raised his head and looked out of the tent. In the darkness beyond, the torches of the south ran like a thin bright line, burning steadily.

”Pass the order down.” He said. ”The night attacks stop. We strike at their grain road instead. To win a siege, first cut the roots.”

On the works, the ditch-digging went on as before.

The soldiers and the laborers worked mixed together, the spades rising and falling in the same rhythm, and when they rested they squatted at the ditch edge and traded jokes. An old soldier of the western line planted his wooden spade in the earth and said: ”On the western line, we built walls to guard our homes — when the wolves came, we squatted behind them. Here, the wall has changed its trade. It pens men in.”

”A pen for sheep has to be higher than the sheep.” A West Bank laborer answered him. ”Didn’t you hear the master say: this ditch is fifteen feet wide, eight feet deep? Never mind sheep — a camel couldn’t jump it.”

”So the wall we’re building is stouter than a border fort.” The old soldier smacked his lips. ”Before, it was the Libyans coming at us, and us squatting to guard. Now it’s turned around — we dig ditches to pen them in. What do you call that?”

”Call it what?”

”Call it payback.” The old soldier grinned, showing the gaps in his teeth. ”And call it a load off our chests.”

The ring of men laughed. The laughter was not loud; it fell into the night wind and was gone, like sparks from a fire. But when each man picked up his spade again, the blades bit deeper and faster than before, and the rhythm of the digging was a little quicker.

Inside the city, life went on as usual.

The gates did not open; the market moved into the lanes. The date seller set up his stall before his own door; the flatbread seller moved his oven under his window, the smoke of it going up between the eaves. The trade was smaller than before, but it went on — the same voices calling, the same bargaining, a little lower in volume and a little quicker in temper. The same hands passed the same small goods back and forth, and the exchange of a date cake or a flatbread meant a little more than it had meant a month ago. An old date seller said: ”The city is ringed, but the days must still be lived. People must eat, must drink, must have something to hope for. While the hope holds, the city holds. A market that shuts its own doors does the enemy’s work for him.”

The chief officiant’s night-patrol went out every night, on time. The small lamps moved through the lanes like slow stars, and the patrolmen passed one another at the crossings without a word, the code of the night being silence. One night, patrolling the lanes of the east, a half-grown child poked his head through a door crack and asked: ”Chief officiant, will the rebels break in?”

”No.” The chief officiant squatted down, so that his eyes were level with the child’s, his robe pooling in the dust. ”The wall is ours — we built it. Outside, our soldiers stand; on the river, our boats lie. You sleep your sleep; tomorrow the sun will come up as always.”

The child drew back inside. In the crack of the door, a pair of eyes stayed bright for a long moment — and then went out, and the lamp behind the door went on, small and steady.

”Do you see that?” The chief officiant said to the patrolman beside him, rising from the crouch. ”Not one lamp in this city may be allowed to go out. A lamp is a small thing; but a city is only many small things that have agreed not to go out.”

Seb did not join in the joking. He walked the line of the ditch, stretch by stretch, looking. Every few paces he squatted and felt the wall of the ditch with his hands — the palm flat against the earth, the fingers testing. The wall had to be steep, and the earth firm — steep enough that a man could not climb it, firm enough that rain would not wash it down. One stretch of ditch wall had been loosened by the night dew; he called men over, had it re-packed, then splashed water over it so the earth would crust itself into a shell.

”A ditch fears two things.” He said to the young craftsman who followed him, a West Bank boy carrying a small wooden board at his belt. ”One is collapse; the other is being filled. Collapse is our fault; filling is their method. So the dug earth is kept piled at the ditch’s edge — when they come to fill it, our earth gets there first. A ditch is a living thing: it must be fed and walked and watched.”

The young craftsman nodded, and wrote the words on the board, in small neat characters.

When Horenheb came to inspect the works, Seb was squatting at the foot of the first tower, checking its line — the plumb string hanging before his eyes, his hands steadying the frame. The old general stood behind him and watched for a while, without disturbing him; he stood as still as the tower, his hands clasped behind his back. When Seb had finished his checking, Horenheb spoke:

”Your drawings — I have looked at them.” He said. ”Four layers of works, each layer eating the one before. Three years on the western line, and you did not squat there for nothing.”

Seb stood up and brushed the earth from his knees. His face was sunburnt black-red, the skin of his shoulders peeled, layer after layer, and the new skin was red and tender.

”General,” he said, ”the towers of the western line guard villages. Here, it is a siege. The principle is one — but in my heart, I have no bottom to stand on.” He said it plainly, the way he said everything about work. ”When I built towers against raiders, I knew what the towers would face. Against thirty thousand — I have not yet seen what the wall will face.”

”No bottom is right.” Horenheb said. ”Generals who feel solid under them die in their battles. The ground is only solid the day you stand on it.” He looked up at the ten towers, where the sentries’ figures stood straight against the dusk, and his eyes went from tower to tower along the line. ”These ten towers of yours — from now on, they are the ten eyes of the south. The smoke rises from the city, your drums answer — the two sides close in on the rebels, and they will not move. The eyes and the smoke between them will make the plain a place the rebels cannot cross without being seen.”

”Yes.” Seb said.

Horenheb walked two paces, and turned back: ”Your teacher is in the city. Across the river, you build yours and he builds his. One day, the two walls will join.”

Seb looked toward the city wall. In the dusk, the wall stood black and heavy; above the wall-head, a column of smoke was rising slowly — the day’s smoke of peace, gray-white against the darkening sky.

”I am waiting for that day,” he said.

The people of the city went up onto the wall to look, every day.

On the north gate tower, every evening, a crowd gathered. Old men, women, children, leaning on the crenellations and looking south — at the ditch, at the row of walls, at the torches of the ten towers, coming alight one by one as the dusk deepened. The children stood on tiptoe; the women shaded their eyes with their hands; the old men named the works for the young ones, teaching.

”There are people outside too now!” A half-grown boy said.

”Not ’people outside.’” An old man corrected him, his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ”The royal army’s soldiers, holding the wolves beyond the wall. From now on, this city has a wall inside and a wall outside. With two walls on it, the wolf is caught between.”

The boy did not understand what ”between” meant — but he saw that when the old man said it, there was light in his eyes, and the light was worth more than the words. He looked back out over the wall at the two lines of light, the city’s wall behind him and the works before him, and something of the old man’s meaning passed into him anyway, the way a child learns a word before he knows its shape.

The chief officiant had been up onto the wall once. He had looked at the smoke to the south, standing at the crenellation with his hands on the stone. When the column of peace rose, he stood a long time, and said: ”Smoke rising means more to the heart than anything else I know. This city is joined to the outside again. A city that is joined can be fed; a city that is alone starves even with full granaries.”

Lu Zhu heard him, and said nothing. In his own heart he thought: the smoke reports peace. But the smoke of peace is also a message to the rebels. When they see it, they will set their minds to cutting the thing the smoke stands for. A signal that tells two armies the same thing is a knife that cuts two ways.

The thing the smoke stood for was grain, and arrows, and medicine, and men.

And the road of the West Bank.

That night, Lu Zhu transcribed a fresh copy of the new account from the defense map.

The map was sheepskin, marked thick with charcoal: which stretch of wall had been newly rammed, at what hour each gate was barred, how much water the city’s wells gave in a day, how long the granaries’ grain would feed the city. He wrote the copy in his own hand, the characters small and even, and when the copy was done he dried the ink and rolled it, and sent for A-Tu.

”This river,” Lu Zhu said, ”is our message road from now on. The map goes over at night; the answer comes back at night. Whatever the rebels do to the roads, the river is still ours in the dark.”

”Rest easy.” A-Tu wrapped the sheepskin in three layers of oilcloth and tucked it inside his coat, against his chest. ”My boat is small, and the river soldiers’ boats are large. A small boat goes through the reed beds; they cannot see it. I have been running this river at night since before the lockdown; the water knows my oar.”

The small boat left the shore in the dark. The oars were very soft, as soft as a water bird striking its wings once — the boatman had wrapped them in cloth, and the water closed over them without a sound. The boat slid into the reeds and was gone, as if the river had swallowed it.

That night, A-Tu’s boat came back late.

On the return, he saw the river soldiers’ boats from far off. Two large boats, the torches at their bows burning bright, the oars splashing in unison — like two water buffaloes walking side by side up the channel, their wakes meeting and crossing. A-Tu tucked his boat into the reeds, man and boat pressing into the shadow, the oars shipped, his hand on the gunwale, still as a heron. The reeds stood close around the hull, and a kingfisher perched on an overhanging reed a hand’s breadth from his shoulder, and neither of them moved. When the two large boats had passed, and their torchlight had gone on down the river, he came out of the reeds again, and the kingfisher went with him, as if it had been riding the same watch.

”From now on, the messages go at this hour.” He said to Lu Zhu. ”The river soldiers change at every watch; around the Zi hour — the last watch of the night — the river is emptiest. Their boats are farthest apart then, and the dark is deepest.”

Lu Zhu nodded, and wrote the words in his notebook. In the notebook, a line of small characters appeared: the Zi hour — the river is emptiest.

On the seventh night, something went wrong.

The place was on the official road thirty li west of the city. It was Horenheb’s grain road — the West Bank’s village granaries sent their grain south along this road, the carts running by day and resting by night at a few sheds at the roadside. The sheds were plain things — timber and reed roofs, enough to keep the rain off the sacks.

At the third watch, a company of cavalry slipped out of the rebels’ south camp.

They carried no torches; their horses’ hooves were wrapped in cloth. They looped down to the shallows below the river, waded across in silence, and made straight for the grain sheds by the road. The man at the head had an earthen jar hung from his saddle — and the jar was full of oil.

Near dawn, smoke rose from the direction of the west.

Not the smoke of peace. Black smoke, thick and coarse, driving straight up into the sky — the kind of smoke that is not made by a cookfire.

Lu Zhu was woken by the shouting on the wall-head. He threw his coat over his shoulders and went up onto the wall, looking west. Thirty li to the west, the black smoke stood like a black nail driven into the sky, holding there against the wind.

”The grain road.” He said.

Kamon came up too, his coat over his shoulders, his hair still flat from sleep. The two men stood on the tower for a long time, and neither spoke. The wind came from the west, carrying the smell of burning — the smell of straw and barley and burning oil, carried across the water.

”They have changed their way of war.” Lu Zhu said. ”They do not attack the city, and they do not attack the ditch. They are squeezing our throat.”

His gaze crossed the river and settled on the place where the black smoke rose. The smoke was still rising — thick, black, like someone had set a giant stick of incense burning on the horizon, and the smell of it came to them on the wind.

That noon, a grain convoy from the West Bank reached the smoking place.

The cart drivers stood before the ashes for a long time without a word. The sheds had collapsed, the timber fallen in, the reed roofs burned away; the grain carts were burned down to their axles, the iron rims lying in the ash; twenty cartloads of barley had turned to black charcoal, the grains fused together in black clumps. An old hand squatted down and dug a fistful of scorched barley grains out of the ash, worked them in his palm — and the grains crumbled, like a fistful of dirt, the black crumbling away between his fingers.

”The boss always said,” the old hand’s voice was hoarse, ”the western line’s grain is for the army to eat. The army goes hungry a day, and the siege lasts a day longer.” He stood up and scattered the scorched grains back into the ash. ”They burned twenty cartloads. The West Bank still has more. Go back — load twenty more.”

The drivers re-hitched their carts and turned west. In the wheel ruts behind them, the ash was mixed with the earth, and the tracks ran west until they were lost in the distance.

And across the river, in the rebels’ south camp, a company of cavalry had just returned. The man at the head swung down from his saddle and threw the empty oil jar on the ground; it rolled twice, and stopped by the campfire, the firelight running along its glazed side.

”Burned.” He said. ”Seven sheds, twenty cartloads of grain.”

The campfire threw his shadow on the tent, leaping and jumping with the flame — like a beast sharpening its teeth.

(End of Chapter 3)