Nile Builder: The Architect from the East

Chapter 95: Chapter 3: The Rebel Tide Turns — Morale Sinks Day by Day

The first deserter came at first light.

He came alone, out of the grey edge of the world — a scarecrow of a man with nothing in his hands but his own life.

He crept up along the reeds beside the trench, threw his blade down on the ground, and raised both hands, shouting: ”Do not shoot! I have come to surrender!”

The guards brought him into the earthworks. He crouched on the ground, shaking like a man with the ague, his voice so raw he could not get a whole sentence out. His lips were cracked, and his clothes hung on him as if they had been made for a bigger man. They gave him half a gourd of water before he could speak, and he drank it as if it were the first water of his life. ”Inside... the grain has run out. One meal a day, half a bowl of thin porridge; a man can hardly walk on it. The High Priest kills men every day — men caught trying to flee, men caught sighing, men caught saying one word too many. None of us want to go on dying for this.”

”Kills men every day?” The squad leader said. ”Say that plainly.”

”I... I only heard it from others.” The deserter’s voice sank. ”But word in the camp is, more were buried yesterday. Where — they would not let us see.”

The squad leader asked nothing more — he had heard worse in four months of sieges, and he had learned to tell when a man was lying; this one was not. He had the man taken below and given a bowl of hot porridge first of all. The deserter held the bowl in both hands, and his shaking spilled half of it; when he had drunk it he asked for a second bowl. When the second was finished, he crouched against the wall-foot with his knees drawn up, and fell asleep where he sat. In sleep his hands still curved around the bowl, as if even the dream of food had to be guarded.

When Horenheb heard of it, he asked only one thing: ”Was he fed?”

”He was.” The squad leader said. ”Two bowls of porridge.”

”From now on,” Horenheb said, ”the first meal a deserter gets is a thick one. Let them see that the road this way has food at the end of it.”

The surrender point was set up the same day.

The rule had been learned in four months of siege: a hungry man runs toward the first warm thing he sees.

At the east end of the earthworks, three thatched shelters were raised, and before them a great pot. The thatch was new and still pale; the pot was black with use, and the fire under it was never allowed to sink. The porridge in the pot was kept hot from morning to night. The wind came from the west, and carried the smell of the porridge east, toward the enemy camp — the wind direction had been chosen on purpose, and the cooks kept the fire low and even so that the smell would not burn away. The squad leader in charge stood by the pot and said: ”This pot is our mouth. We do not have to shout; it speaks for itself.” The pot’s mouth never closed; it spoke in steam and smell, in the language every stomach understands.

On the slope, the deserters who had come first were already digging ditches — the ditches of the next ring of siege works, dug by men who had been on the other side of the last ring a week before. They worked side by side with the guards, one man to a spade. At noon the meal was brought, and they ate from the same bowls, the same porridge. One deserter squatted at the edge of the ditch, eating, and said suddenly: ”Over there, I got two thin meals a day. Over here, three thick ones.” He looked east. ”My brother is still in the camp. Could I... go and call him over?”

”There is no need to call.” The foreman in charge said. ”The smell of the porridge will call him for you.”

The deserter looked east again, and went back to his ditch.

The hailing began on the fourth day. Three days had been enough to prove that arrows could not stop the desertions; the fourth day tried a different weapon.

The earthworks lay a little more than an arrow-shot from the East Camp’s trench. The hailers hid behind a chest-high wall of earth and shouted through megaphones rolled from iron sheets, three times a day — at sunrise, at noon, and at dusk. The hours had been chosen as carefully as the words: a man is weakest just after he wakes, just after he has eaten, and just after he has watched the sun go down.

The words they shouted had been chosen with care, and worn smooth by repetition, the way a path is worn by feet: ”Brothers in there! The porridge in the city stands a chopstick up in it!” ”Men who were pressed into service — surrender, and no one will be punished! Those who farmed may go back to their farms; those who worked a craft may go back to their craft!” ”The fields at your homes have lain fallow for two years! Your fathers and mothers are waiting for you at the landing!”

On the first day, no one in the camp answered. Only a few stray arrows came over, sparse and half-hearted, and all of them struck the earth wall. Each shaft had been loosed without aim, as if the archers were only going through the motions of a war they had stopped believing in.

On the second day, even the arrows were fewer. The camp was listening now; the silence itself was an answer.

On the third day at dusk, when the hailers called out ”Your fathers and mothers are waiting for you at the landing,” a row of men sat down along the enemy trench, a ragged line of shoulders against the evening sky. No one spoke. No one moved. They only crouched there, listening; none of them moved to break the spell, and the guards at the camp gate stood as if they had seen nothing. A centurion came running with his blade out to drive the men back into the camp. He drove them two steps — and stopped himself, his blade still half raised, as if his own arm had refused him.

”Centurion!” One of the hailers knew him, and shouted at the top of his voice: ”Your family’s fields are in Upper Egypt, are they not? When you left, had the wheat been harvested yet? Count the years you have been gone! What is growing in your fields now — grass, or graves?”

The centurion stood at the edge of the trench and said nothing. After a long time, slowly, he slid his blade back into its sheath, turned, and walked back into the camp — walking the way a man walks when he is carrying a decision he has not yet made.

That same night, he slipped out across the trench with seven of his men.

When Panhesy heard of it, he moved the archers up to the forward trench and gave the order: ”Anyone caught listening to the hailing — shoot them.”

The archers acknowledged the order. Their mouths said yes; their hands remembered otherwise. But the next day, when the hailer stood up to shout, the archers could not draw their bows to the full. A young archer threw his bow down on the ground and said: ”I enlisted to shoot the king’s army, not men pressed into service like me.” He crouched behind the arrow-screens with his head in his hands, and would not move. No one touched him; the camp had begun to treat its own small acts of defiance with a strange gentleness, as if punishing them would cost more than letting them be.

Panhesy did not press him. He stood at the camp gate and looked west. The hails from the west still drifted over on the wind, sentence by sentence, like nails being driven into the camp one at a time.

And true to the pattern, from the fourth day the desertions grew day by day. They came in twos and threes, in the grey hours before dawn and the grey hours after dusk, and the earthworks learned to expect them. The registration clerk learned their faces first, and only later, slowly, their names. On the fifth day, a dozen or more; by the tenth day, more than three hundred in all.

”They have all been asked.” The clerk in charge of registration said. ”Their stories are much the same: hungry, afraid, homesick.” He paused. ”The first few cursed the High Priest. The later ones have not even the strength to curse — they only ask one question: ’If I surrender, will I truly not be killed?’”

”They will truly not be killed.” Horenheb said. ”Nor will they be locked up. They are registered, screened, and put into the work-teams. The same rules as inside the city.”

”Do they believe it?”

”No.” Horenheb said. ”That is why the first batches have to see it with their own eyes — the men who surrendered before them working on the slope, eating from the same pot.”

In the East Camp’s cookhouse, the porridge had grown too thin to stand a chopstick up in it.

A great pot, a few grains of barley sunk at the bottom, a film of grey scum floating on the surface, and around it the smell of a meal that had been stretched past the point of being a meal. The smell of it was the smell of water that has forgotten it ever held grain. The cook sank his ladle to the bottom and brought up half a ladle of water. The soldiers queued with their bowls, filing past one by one, saying nothing. No one looked at the pot; looking at it only made the wait longer. There was a boy soldier among them, no more than fourteen or fifteen; when he held out his bowl, his hand was shaking. The cook gave him an extra half ladle — just half a ladle, and every eye in the queue turned on him.

”Why him?” Someone said, low.

”Because he is small.” The cook said.

”Must the small ones starve so the big ones can live?”

The cook said nothing. He thrust the ladle back into the pot and squatted down beside it to smoke. The smoke of his pipe rose in the still air, the only thing in the cookhouse that was not thin. In the end, no one got the extra half ladle — the boy soldier poured half of his own bowl into the bowl of a lame old veteran standing beside him.

”Uncle,” he said. ”Your foot is hurt.”

The veteran did not refuse. He took the half bowl and drank, and then said, suddenly: ”This war has stopped making sense.” He looked at the northern sky. ”My home is in Upper Egypt. I was pressed into the army. The fields have lain fallow for two years. The High Priest said that when we won, everything would be well. Now...” He did not finish.

”I was pressed in too.” The boy soldier said. ”I want my mother.” The boy said it to his bowl, and for a moment the cookhouse had no other sound in it.

As they spoke, the hailing started up again from the west. The dusk wind was strong, and the words came over clear: ”...Those who farmed may go back to their farms! Your fathers and mothers are waiting for you at the landing!”

The veteran’s bowl stopped halfway to his mouth. He listened. Then he drank the last of the porridge, slowly.

”Do you hear that?” He said, low. ”Go home and farm.”

”I hear it.” The boy soldier said.

”My fields have lain fallow for two years.” The veteran looked west. ”I do not know if they can still be farmed.” He set his bowl straight on the empty grain stack and said: ”Stay with me. The day I go, you go with me. I am lame; I cannot walk fast. But I know the road.”

The boy soldier said nothing. He only leaned a little closer against the veteran’s side.

The two of them sat against the grain stack. The stack had long since been emptied; the wind whistled through the cracks between the timbers, wailing, like the thousands of mouths of this camp sighing together in the night.

Before the little shrine of Amun at the corner of the camp, two men knelt that night.

The shrine was a niche of mud-brick, its roof patched with a broken pot-sherd, and the two men knelt before it with their backs to the wind.

One was a young believer; the other, an old one. The young man asked: ”If the god protects the righteous army, why does he let the righteous army go hungry?”

”Blasphemy.” The old man rebuked him, and said it quickly, the way a man says a thing he has begun to doubt. ”The god is testing us.”

”He has been testing us for four months.” The young man said. ”If the god could see, he would have seen long ago.”

The old man’s mouth opened, but no words came. He looked up at the shrine: the image of Amun within it was made of clay, and one corner of it was broken off. It had been carried out of Thebes, knocked and bumped along the whole road, and this half-ruined shape was all that remained of it. The incense had long since been cut off. The offerings had long since been taken by the famine.

”The god does not eat.” The old man said at last.

”But men must.” The young man said. He stood up, brushed the dust from his knees, and walked away. The direction he walked was west.

The old man watched him go, and did not call out. Then he knelt on alone. He knelt for a long time; then he reached out and touched the broken image of Amun, and said: ”God, it is not men who have abandoned you. It is this war — it has scooped the bellies out of men.”

The incense burner before the shrine had no ash left in it. The night wind came around from behind the shrine, and blew away the last of the dust. The old man stayed on his knees until the wind died. When he rose at last, he did not look at the camp; he looked west, where the young man had gone.

In the tent for the wounded, the smell was worse than ever. The air was thick with rot and old blood, and the straw under the men was black with both.

The men who had fallen back from the South Camp were wounded in every way a man can be wounded — by arrows, by blades, by fire, by falls. The medicine was long gone. The one old army doctor bound their wounds with strips torn from his own clothes. He squatted among the wounded, looking at them one by one; where a wound had festered, he cut it open with a small knife and pressed a handful of grass ash onto it. The ash was the last medicine the camp had, and the doctor rationed it the way the cooks rationed the barley.

”Bear it.” He said. ”The ash will stop the blood.”

”Doctor,” a wounded man gasped with the pain, ”can I keep this leg?”

”That depends on fate.” The old doctor said. ”With medicine, it can be kept. Without medicine...” He shook his head, and wrapped the last clean strip of cloth around a child’s arm. His own tunic was ragged to the waist where the strips had been torn from it.

”They have doctors up north.” Someone said, low. ”And in the city too. Their wounded get medicine, and doctors, and hot water.”

”Then go and surrender.” Someone beside him said.

”I...” The man’s mouth opened, and closed again. But his eyes kept turning west, past the tents and the palisade, to where the earthworks lay. West was the direction of the earthworks. The wind came from that way, and with it, a very faint smell of porridge. He breathed it in, and did not know that he did.

Old Sun came on the eighth day. He had waited eight days — long enough to be sure the surrender point was not a trap, and short enough that his nerve had not yet run out.

He crossed two ditches, carrying a pot lid hugged to his chest — a lid black with use, its grip polished smooth by months of lifting. When the guards barred his way with their spears, he set the lid down on the ground very carefully, like a man setting down a sacred object, and said: ”Easy, easy. I am from the cookhouse. I have come to surrender, and I have brought the pot lid with me — I hear this is the very thing you are short of.”

The guards stared at him, and then began to laugh. It was the first laughter at that end of the works in days, and it drew a small crowd. Someone went to ask Horenheb; Horenheb said: ”Take him in. The lid goes on the pot, and the man goes into the kitchen. He has minded the rebels’ pots for months — no one knows better than he does how to stretch a pot of porridge.”

Old Sun was at the stove the same day, sleeves rolled, ladle in hand, as if he had cooked at this pot for years instead of for hours. He stood before the pot, hefted the ladle once, and let out a surprised ”Eh?” — ”Your porridge has three-tenths more grain in it than theirs did.”

”What if it does?”

”More grain has to be stirred.” Old Sun said. ”Leave the extra grain unstirred and it burns to the bottom of the pot. Burn the pot, and three-tenths becomes two.” He took the ladle and stirred, round and round, until the smell of the porridge drifted east on the wind, over the trench and the berm and into the first tents of the enemy line. The porridge turned slow and thick under the ladle, and the smell of it stood over the works like a flag. ”From now on, this pot is mine. The first mouthful a surrendering man gets has to be hot, and thick, and not burned. What this pot brews is people’s hearts.”

The conscripted porters were set free by the cavalry.

When the third grain convoy was intercepted, the men guarding the carts were more than forty conscripted porters from the south. The soldiers drove the grain carts back to the army camp, and the porters stood by the roadside with their legs trembling, waiting to be cut down. They stood very still, the way men stand when they are trying not to be noticed by death. Horenheb came up on foot with his sword sheathed, and said, in the flat voice of a man announcing a decision that has already been weighed: ”No one is killed. You were pressed into service too. Each of you takes one dou of grain and goes home. If you meet any of the rebels on the road, carry them one sentence: the road that brings grain is already cut. Rather than wait for grain in Upper Egypt, come to the west side of the city a day sooner.”

The porters walked away with the grain on their backs, turning back to look every few steps. The sacks sat high on their shoulders, and they carried them the way men carry a thing they have not yet dared to believe in. When they reached the top of the slope, one of them suddenly turned around and knocked his forehead heavily against the ground, toward the camp. The others stopped and looked back at him; then they went on down the far side of the slope, walking a little faster, as if the sacks on their backs had suddenly grown light.

”General,” the old centurion said, ”will they truly carry the message?”

”It does not matter if they do.” Horenheb said. ”The men go back, and the grain goes back with them. The moment they reach home, the villages of Upper Egypt will know: this war, the rebels cannot win. When one village knows, ten villages know.” He watched the retreating figures until the last of them dropped below the far slope, and then he turned back to his camp. ”The hearts of the people — let loose, they work harder than they do locked up.”

Panhesy could not sit still in the East Camp either.

His shoulder was bandaged and his arm hung in a sling as he walked the camp on his rounds, the sling knotted high so that the arm could not swing. He wore it the way other men wear a badge of office, and the men read it the same way. Wherever he walked, the camp went quiet — not out of respect: out of avoidance. When he asked about the rations, the answers were evasive. When he asked about the wounded, evasive. When he asked how many had run the night before, every man looked at the ground. He had commanded these men for a year, and they had never once looked at the ground when he asked them a question.

”Speak!” He barked.

”General,” a centurion said, bracing himself, ”last night the East Camp lost forty-seven. Old Sun of the cookhouse went too — and he took the pot lid with him.”

”The pot lid?”

”He said, ’Where I am going, they will need it.’”

Panhesy’s face went white, then red, in the firelight. He seized his blade and started for the cookhouse — walked two steps, and stopped. Slowly he slid the blade back into its sheath. ”Report the numbers of every company. Not one man is to be hidden from me.”

”General, they cannot be hidden.” The centurion said. ”The men of this camp are counting their days by single grains now. One grain is one heart. When the hearts scatter, no rope can hold them.”

”Then tighten the rope.”

”Tighten it,” the centurion said, low, ”and what breaks — the rope, or the hearts?”

Panhesy did not answer. He looked west. The western sky was black, except for one place where a patch of warm light glowed faintly — the cook-fire of the surrender point. He watched it for a long time — the way a thirsty man watches a well he is not allowed to drink from — and then he said: ”Saddle my horse. I am going to the river bend, to see the High Priest.” He did not say what he meant to ask for; perhaps he did not know himself.

In the tent at the river bend, Nekhem heard Panhesy’s report to the end.

The lamp between the two men burned low, and neither reached to trim it.

”How many have run?” He asked.

”More than four hundred in half a month.” Panhesy said. ”Even the cooks have run. Cut the rations of every camp any further, and the men will be nothing but skin.”

”And military law?”

”Five were caught and executed.” Panhesy said, his voice flat, the way a man’s voice goes flat when he is counting out his own failures. ”Kill one, and ten run that night. Now...” He paused. ”I dare not kill any more. Kill more, and the blades in this camp will begin to point inward.” He said it to the floor of the tent, because saying it to the High Priest’s face would have been another kind of mutiny.

Nekhem said nothing. He sat before the table, the old scroll of scripture open upon it; his finger moved back and forth over the edge of the page, as if he were looking for a line — or avoiding a line.

”High Priest,” the man in the white robe said, low, ”could the rations not be... loosened a little? Starve them much longer, and the enemy will not need to attack — the camp will scatter by itself.”

”Loosen them?” Nekhem said, slowly. ”You know better than I how much grain is left in the camp. And grain is not the only thing running low. Loosen them for three days, and on the fourth the whole camp goes without. We besieged the city for four months and failed to starve it out — and now we have penned ourselves inside our own ring.” The words were quiet, but in the silence of the tent they sounded like a wall falling. He raised his head. ”Panhesy. How does the grain get into the city now?”

”Openly.” Panhesy said, and the word came out bitter, the way a word comes out when a man has been outmaneuvered in the open. ”The boats come to the beach by day. The carts come out through the south gate by day. Our river-patrol boats do not dare go near the West Gate any longer. They... do not even hide anymore.”

”Do not even hide.” Nekhem repeated the words. He rose and walked to the tent’s mouth, and lifted the curtain. The night wind came in, carrying the damp of the river — the smell of the whole river on one breath: reeds, mud, and the cold that comes before snow. He looked west — through the darkness, at the city that had held against him for four months, its wall-top torches joined into one quiet line of light. The line did not flicker; it burned even and unhurried, the light of a city that has stopped being afraid of the dark. Four months ago that line had been ragged, half its lamps hidden and the other half burning through terror; now it burned the way a man breathes after a long illness — without thinking about it.

”Four months.” He said, low. ”I cut off their water — they dug wells. I burned their grain — they hid it among the people. I broke their walls — they mended them. I blocked their roads — and they built the road right up to my gate.” He paused. ”This war was not lost on the blade. It was lost on the road behind them. While their road lives, the city cannot die. It is our road that is cut — and a camp with a cut road cannot live long.” He stopped there, as if the sentence had cost him more than the four months of siege.

”Then...” Panhesy asked, ”what are we to do now?”

Nekhem did not answer at once. He watched the line of torchlight for a long time — the longest silence of the interview, and Panhesy let it run its course. At last he said: ”Tell the men in the camp to wait a little longer. In the north, it will soon snow.”

”Does the High Priest still put his hope in the Hittites?”

”I do not put my hope in them.” Nekhem said. ”I am waiting for an outcome. If the north moves before the snow falls, this game can still be turned over. If it does not...” His voice sank. ”Then we must find a road to live on, for the people who followed us.”

The words ”a road to live on” fell in the tent, light as a sigh. No one in the tent dared to pick them up.

On the ride back, Panhesy turned once in the saddle and looked back at the camp at the river bend. The lamp in the tent was still burning, and it threw Nekhem’s shadow, long, across the tent cloth. The shadow did not move — like a stone statue sitting in meditation through the night.

”General,” his attendant asked, low, ”what does the High Priest really mean to do?”

”I do not know.” Panhesy said. He gripped the reins, tightened and loosened, tightened and loosened. ”He sees farther than any of us. What is far is not always the road to living.” He spurred his horse east, into the dark.

Halfway back, he reined in suddenly.

The night was deep, and the wind off the river was cold enough to bite. He looked back: west, the lights of the city lay in one sheet; east, his own camp lay dark as a stretch of wasteland. Two directions. Two fields of light. He had ridden between those two lights every night for months, first as the hunter and then as the hunted; tonight the road between them felt like a blade’s edge.

”General,” his attendant asked, low, ”are we still fighting?”

Panhesy did not answer. He sat in the saddle a long time. Then he said: ”I am a man who commands soldiers. The thing a commander fears most is not losing a battle. It is seeing that the light has gone out of his soldiers’ eyes.” He paused. ”Tonight, I saw it.” The words stayed in the dark after him, the way words stay when a man has finally said the thing he has been carrying.

”Then...”

”Back to camp first.” Panhesy said. ”Go over the ration accounts again. Whatever can be saved, save it for the men’s mouths. What cannot be saved...” He did not finish. He only spurred his horse forward. The hoofbeats went on in the night, beating a man’s heart into unease.

Late that night, Nekhem left his tent alone.

He took no attendants, and the guards at the tent ropes straightened when he passed, not knowing whether to follow. His white robe clung to his body in the night wind as he walked, slowly, from the east end of the great camp to the west end, past the tents of the cavalry, the sheds of the smiths, and the lines where the horses stood asleep on their feet. In the cookhouse the fire had been pressed low, and a pool of clear broth stood in the bottom of the pot. From the tent of the wounded, the groans rose and fell like water welling up from under the earth — without rhythm, without end, the sound of men who have forgotten that morning exists. At one tent mouth he stopped: a soldier was asleep inside, curled small as if trying to take up less room in a world that had no room for him,, holding an empty bowl to his chest, a rim of grey ash around the inside of it. The bowl was dented on one side, the way bowls get dented when their owners have nothing else to hold.

He stood there a long time.

In four months, he had seldom looked at his soldiers like this. He had looked at them in ranks, at drill, at the ration queue — but not like this. He had looked at the city, at the sand table, at the snow line that hung over the north and would not fall. Tonight, he looked at an empty bowl.

”High Priest.” The man in the white robe had come up behind him without a sound, holding an old cloak.

”I am not cold.” Nekhem said. It was true, and it was also not the point, and both of them knew it.

”It is for the men of the camp to see.” The white robe said. ”If the High Priest dresses warmly, the men’s hearts will only grow colder.”

Nekhem said nothing. He took the cloak — and laid it over the sleeping soldier. He did it without looking at the white robe, and walked on.

He turned and walked north through the camp. In the north, the dark mass of the great temple of Amun crouched by the riverbank like a beast lying in wait. He climbed the stone steps one by one, his feet finding the worn places without looking, the way a man’s feet find the steps of a house he has entered a thousand times, and pushed open the half-closed door of the sanctuary. There were no lamps inside. Only the moonlight came through a high window and fell across the knees of the god.

The god’s image stood very tall. Its face could not be made out — the dark above the shoulders was simply dark, patient, without answer.

”God.” Nekhem stood in the middle of the sanctuary, his face raised, his voice pitched to carry up into the dark. ”You have seen it. For four months I gathered these men, and I told them we were guarding the backbone of Egypt. The backbone is still there. It is the backs of the men that have given way first.” His voice struck the empty walls and came back to him from every side. ”In your name I gathered the men. In what name am I to keep them in this camp now?”

No one answered. Only the wind came through the door and sent a few dry leaves spinning at the god’s feet.

”They tell me,” he said slowly, ”the grain of the city comes in openly. Their road is built to my very gate. Their porridge smells its way into my camp. God — this is what you taught us: pharaohs may change, dynasties may fall, but only order must not break. Yet the order I have kept cannot even divide one bowl of porridge fairly now.”

He knelt. His white robe spread over the cold stone floor, like a small patch of snow, and the moonlight fell on his back while the god’s shadow lay across him, enormous and indifferent. For a long moment the man and the god kept their positions — the one asking, the other not answering, as they had kept them for many years.

”Give me a little more time.” He said. ”Before the snow falls, I must find a road for these men.” The words went up into the dark of the sanctuary and came back empty, the way words come back in temples that have stopped answering.

Outside, the wind was rising. The clouds in the north hung very low, like a black quilt soaked full of snow. The snow was not far off now; the whole camp could feel it, the way a field feels frost coming.

When Nekhem came out of the sanctuary, the man in the white robe was still waiting at the foot of the steps, in the same place Nekhem had left him; he was a man who knew how to wait.

”High Priest,” the white robe said, ”the men from the north have returned.”

”Speak.”

”The Hittites say: on the day of the first snow, their army crosses the border wall.” The white robe lowered his voice. ”Only... they want us to keep the fighting in the south going until that day. And they say, once they have crossed the river, the northern lands are to be divided three ways...”

”Enough.” Nekhem cut him off.

He stood on the steps a long time without moving, his hands clasped behind him in the old habit of the sanctuary — the habit of a man waiting for an answer in a place where answers come slowly. The wind lifted the hem of his white robe, and let it fall.

”I raised this army,” he said at last, ”to cleanse the court of the wicked and restore the old gods. I am a priest of Egypt, not a scout for the Hittites.” He looked up at the sky. ”They wait for the snow because they want to eat Egypt. I wait for the snow because I want to leave Egypt one breath to live on. What we are waiting for was never the same thing.”

”How shall the men from the north be answered, then?”

”How answered?” Nekhem said. ”Tell him: if the snow must fall, let it fall on its own. Egypt’s war is fought by Egyptians.” He paused, and his voice dropped until it was almost to himself: ”If we lose, the sin is mine alone. The sin of bringing the wolf in — that I cannot carry.”

The white robe withdrew. Nekhem stood alone on the steps, and did not move until the clouds of the north had swallowed the last thread of sky.

At the city’s screening table, a most unusual man came that day.

He was a deserter of twenty-odd years, and when he was registered he gave his home as Reed Village. The warden writing the register heard it, and his brush stopped: ”Reed Village? The people of your village arrived days ago. All of them are in the Haven of Settled Lives.”

”All of them?” The deserter sprang to his feet. ”My mother... is my mother there too?”

”On the register there is a widow from Reed Village with a granddaughter.” The warden turned the pages. ”Her son was pressed into service by the rebels, and no word of him has come. She asks at the landing every day; she asks every person she meets.”

The deserter’s mouth hung open. After a long moment his legs gave way and he crouched down on the ground. The warden did not help him up; he only sent a clerk to take the man to the Haven. The deserter walked stumbling, as if the roads of four months had all flooded at once into his two legs.

At the gate of the Haven, a woman was hanging out washing. She heard the call, and turned. The wet garment in her hands slapped onto the ground.

”Mother—”

The woman stood still. She raised her hand and wiped her face, once, twice. Then she walked over, slowly, and slapped the deserter’s face, hard.

”Where have you been all this time!” She said. And then she threw her arms around him, and held on as if one embrace could make up four months of holding.

”I am not dead.” The deserter said, his voice shaking. ”Mother, I am not dead. I ran back.”

”Ran back,” the woman wept, and laughed, ”that is good. The road back is harder than the road out. That you could walk it — that is worth more than anything.”

A ring of people stood around them, watching, no one speaking. Some wiped their eyes on the sly, and the ones who had no tears in them looked at the ground, the way men do at a thing too bright to look at directly. The half-blind old man stood outside the ring with his dog; the dog wagged its tail gently toward the mother and son.

”Look at that,” the old man said to his dog. ”However long the road, it is never longer than a man’s legs. Walk and walk, and everyone comes back along it.”

His eyes were on the east, and in the half-blind eyes there was light. The dog wagged on beside him, patient as its master.

The deserter from Reed Village went to work the next day.

He was put into the clearing-and-hauling team, hauling timber south with A-Shi and the others. On the first day, he fought to carry the heaviest beam. A-Shi stopped him: ”You went hungry on the road. For the first three days, take the light loads. A life that has been borrowed must not be spent too soon.”

”I...” The deserter said. ”I want my mother to see that I came back, and that I am not eating the city’s food for nothing.”

”Whether you eat for nothing is written on the work-tally.” A-Shi handed him a new wooden tablet with one fresh notch cut in it. ”One notch is one day of your strength. Your mother’s shelter, your brother’s rations — every notch you cut is on it.”

The deserter hung the tablet around his neck and gripped it in his hand. As he gripped it, he looked north, toward the Haven — smoke was rising from its cooking fires.

”My mother,” he said, low, ”must be going for her porridge now.”

”She is.” A-Shi said. ”Work well, and from now on your mother drinks it thick every day.”

The deserter nodded, bent, and lifted a beam onto his shoulder. He walked slowly; but every step he took was solid.

The deserter’s account was entered in the books that same day.

It was not a separate account — it was one more line under the ”work-grain” column: ”Deserters’ rations: counted from the day of surrender.” The porridge at the surrender point came out of the official granary; the work the deserters did was cut into the work-tallies. Mery worked his counting-rods and said: ”What they eat and what they do must balance. Let a man eat one idle day, and his heart floats for a day. Let him do one real day’s work, and his heart is solid for a day.”

”And those who can do less?” Woser asked.

”They who do less, eat less.” Mery said. ”But there must always be a bottom to the bowl. That bottom is the city’s face.”

The chief officiant heard this and said: ”Those words belong on the peace boards.”

”What words?”

”Eight words.” The chief officiant said. ”’Those who come have a road; those who remain have work.’ Four months ago the rebels shot surrender letters into this city, promising that all who gave in would be forgiven. Not one of us believed them. Now our porridge pot does more than their letters ever did — why? Because we speak the truth and do real deeds. A letter is worth less than porridge; porridge is worth less than work.”

”So,” Mery said, ”this pot of porridge must be kept hot.”

”Kept hot,” the chief officiant said, ”until there is no one east or north who still needs it.”

That night, the chief officiant’s night patrol carried one more thing than usual — lamp oil.

”From tonight,” he told the men of the patrol, ”every lane in the eastern half of the city keeps a door-lamp burning through the dark. The oil comes from the official granary; the lamps are the households’ own.” He paused. ”The men out east run to us by night. They run along a black road. They cannot see the city — they can only see the lights. Where the lights are, the road is. Every lamp we light gives one more man out there a little more courage.” He said it the way he said everything — as a thing already settled.

On the first night, more than eighty lamps were lit in the eastern half of the city. They swayed in the wind, running in a crooked chain toward the East Camp, flaring and dimming like a hand waving. The city’s east side, which had been the darkest quarter through the siege, was now the brightest.

”These lamps,” Lu Zhu said from the wall, looking down at them, ”are worth more than torches. The torches are for the men who hold the city. These lamps are for the men coming home.”

”Chief Builder,” the chief officiant asked, ”do you think they can see them?”

”They can.” Lu Zhu said. ”A man in the dark can see one point of light from three li away.”

The medical stall at the surrender point was set up by Imset.

It stood at the west end of the works, in the lee of the thatched shelters, close enough to the pot that a wounded man could smell food while he was being treated. It was one table and one medicine box; the box had been Imset’s through the whole siege, and its corners were worn white. The wounded among the deserters were treated first, and only then assigned to work. On the first day he saw more than thirty — arrow wounds, frostbite, knife cuts that had festered half a month; every kind there was. The frostbitten came with their fingers wrapped in rags, and the festered held their own wounds away from their bodies, the way a man holds a thing that burns him. Imset looked at them one by one. What could be cured on the spot was cured on the spot; what could not was sent on to the field hospital in the city.

”This wound of yours,” he said to a deserter whose arm had gone bad, ”wait three more days, and the arm is lost.”

The deserter stared a moment — and then dropped to his knees with a thud. ”Priest, over there I queued for half a month and never reached the front of the line. The old doctor said the medicine had to go to the officers first.”

”Get up.” Imset said. ”Here, the critical come before the light — there is no officer and no private.” He bent to the work of cleaning the wound, his hands steady. ”Remember this: from now on, your arm belongs to this city. When the arm is well, spend its strength on the city.”

”I will!” The deserter said through his teeth. ”I will spend my very life on it.”

”Keep your life.” Imset said. ”Keep your strength. This city does not lack men willing to die. It lacks men who can make a life go on.”

Shafi kept the records beside him. For every man treated, she wrote a line: what the wound was, how many days it had gone, what medicine was used. By dark, her roll was full — three full pages, and the inkstone had been refilled twice; her hand had not stopped since the stall opened.

”Teacher,” she said, lighting the lamp and turning the pages for Imset, ”these wounds are not the same as the wounds of the men in the city. The city’s wounded are mostly fresh arrow and blade wounds. Half of these are hunger wounds, and half are wounds that were left to rot. The medicine is different too — a hunger wound has to be fed before it can be cured.”

”So,” Imset said, ”when this war is over, the most important thing is to set down in order everything these months have shown us, and used, and saved. What kind of war wounds what kind of man; what kind of wound consumes what kind of medicine. Write that law on paper, and every medical house in Egypt can measure itself against it.”

”I am writing it.” Shafi said. ”Not one day has passed without a line, since the first day of the siege.”

”Good.” Imset said. ”When the south is settled, gather the accounts together. These numbers are worth more than medicine.”

Horenheb came into the city on the thirteenth day, in from the works at first light, with the dust of the night ride still grey on his shoulders.

This time he brought a company of men, and a roll of names with him. The roll had been built up name by name at the surrender point, in a dozen different hands, like the camp it had come from; the count for the half month stood at four hundred and twenty-three. He sat down at the stone table in the back courtyard of the official granary, laid the roll on the table, and said: ”This war is near its ending.” The roll was tied with a cord that had been untied and retied many times in the saddle; the names inside it ran to four hundred and twenty-three.

”How do you read it?” Lu Zhu asked.

”Their men count out their days by single grains now.” Horenheb said. ”Our men count out their days by notches on work-tallies. One side is wasting; the other is growing. In this half month, the East Camp and the North Camp have lost more than four hundred men. From now on, they will lose more every day.” He paused. ”My men have stood on the east slope and shouted: surrender and no punishment; those who farmed may go back to their farms. After ten days of shouting, the soldiers in the camp squat along their trench to listen, and no one dares to drive them away.”

”They cannot be held any longer.” Lu Zhu said.

”They cannot.” Horenheb said. ”That is why I have come — to settle the plan for the last battle.” He rose and walked to the map on the wall. On it, the East Camp and the North Camp were being hemmed in, little by little, by two newly drawn lines. The lines had been drawn in red pigment, and they curved toward each other like the jaws of a closing vice. ”The ring is to be tightened for twenty more days. Tighten it until the men run out of their own accord — we may take three-tenths of them that way. The rest will still need a hard fight. When that day comes, grain, medicine, bridges, and gates all have to be made ready anew, to the measure of a decisive battle.”

He pointed at the new marks on the map. ”The trench already runs to within one li of the East Camp. On a still night you can hear them coughing in their camp — the cough is the camp’s true weather report, and it tells of hunger and cold better than any scout. I have had one great pot set on either side of the surrender point — porridge by day, and a fire by night. That firelight works better than all our shouting. At night the fire sets the pot’s shadow dancing on the berm, and the men of the East Camp have begun to know that shadow by heart. The men in the camp watch it all day and think about it all night.”

”This is a war on the heart.” Lu Zhu said.

”It is a war on the heart.” Horenheb said. ”But what the heart-war cannot take, the walls must. In twenty days my works will reach the very gate of the East Camp. By then, even if they want to fight, they will not be able to step out of their own trench. I held the western line for thirty years, and I learned one thing there: to pen a man in until he wants to come out himself saves more lives than to force him to fight.”

”We can be ready.” Lu Zhu said. ”The south line’s boats now run three trips in seven days. Open a list of what you need, and it will be filled.”

”The list I will open.” Horenheb said. ”My cavalry has been doing one more thing these days — the convoys hauling grain north from Upper Egypt for the rebels: we have taken three of them. More than three hundred carts of grain, all of it now in the storehouses of the army camp. The porters we released were sent home with one dou of grain each, to carry the word south.” He pressed his hand on the hilt of his sword. ”Their lifeline is nearly gone. Twenty days from now will be the right moment — the first time since the South Camp fell.”

”Twenty days, then.” Lu Zhu said. ”In twenty days, I will feed the city a little fatter.”

”Do not feed only the city.” Horenheb said. ”Have the bridges ready, and the gates ready. And —” he looked north of the city, ”— make room for more surrendered men. In twenty days, no fewer than a thousand more will come in. When they come, the work of them will be yours.”

”Plenty of work does not frighten me.” Lu Zhu said. ”It is the lack of work that frightens me. When a man has work, his heart settles.”

Horenheb nodded. At the door he turned back once more. ”One thing more. Among the surrendered there are men who can build walls, men who can forge iron, men who can handle boats. Screen them all out and put them into the teams. They are not burdens —” he paused, ”— they want this war ended even more than we do.”

He swung onto his horse and rode out of the city with his men. At the gate he reined in and looked back once at the walls; then the road took him.

The letter from the north came that evening, brought by a courier who had ridden two nights; the dust on the sheepskin was the dust of the north road.

Old Camel’s letter was written for him by the station scribe, as always. It said: the granaries of the northern border have been raised off the ground; the supply points, more than forty of them, every one has grain and fire. Seb’s wall has grown another stretch. Only the sky is lower every day, and the snow hangs directly overhead. Beyond the wall, the Hittite camp has added tents and added horses — they are waiting too. What they are waiting for, everyone knows.

”Old Camel says too,” Mery read on, ”that when he rose in the night to add fuel to the fire, he saw a thin white gleaming line across the northern sky. He calls it the snow line. When the snow line comes down, the war in the north begins.”

”How many days?” Lu Zhu asked.

”By the pace of the seasons, the snow will come in ten days at the earliest, half a month at the latest.” Mery said, and the numbers came out of him without effort, the way the numbers of a thing come out of a man who has been living with them for weeks. ”The north line’s grain is advanced in batches, and every batch is pressed from behind by the snow’s heels.” He folded the letter and set it under the ledger. ”The south has twenty days. The north has ten or half a month. Teacher — both clocks are about to strike.”

”So,” Lu Zhu said, ”neither fire may be lit too early, and neither may be lit too late.” He walked to the door and looked up at the sky of the courtyard. It was heavy and grey, as if it held all the light in one clenched hand. The clouds were the same clouds that pressed on the north; the sky had no border. ”In twenty days, the south is settled. The grain that is left, and the soldiers that are left, all go north. That is the last move.”

”A good move.” Mery said. ”Only — not one step may be wrong.”

”Not one will be.” Lu Zhu said. He reached out and pushed the new hinge on the doorframe, gently, the way a man tests a thing he has built; the door stood firm, without a sound. ”In four months, which of our steps was wasted?”

At nightfall, Lu Zhu climbed the tower of the south gate — alone, one step at a time, the way he had climbed it on a hundred nights.

The wind from the north came hard and stiff. It smelled of the river and of the open country beyond the camps — and, faintly, of the snow that was waiting in the clouds. He looked east. The fires of the East Camp stood lower than they had half a month before, and thinner; the fires of the North Camp had dimmed too. Only toward the camp at the river bend a few points of light still burned — the lamps of Nekhem’s tent.

”Four months.” Lu Zhu said, low. ”Four months ago, the fires of this city burned down the same way, lamp by lamp, waiting out the dark. Now it is their turn to count their fires, and count their days.”

He thought of many things. He thought of the granaries of the West Bank, of the temple of the new capital, of every wall and every well of these four months. He thought of how he was a man from a strange land, from another world, who had spent half his life building houses. Now he stood here watching a war he had helped to build, walking, step by step, toward its ending — a war he had helped to build: the thought sat strangely in him, like a tool in the wrong hand.

He thought of the place he had come from. There was a river there too, and fields, and windows lit in the night. For four months he had seldom allowed himself to think of these things — think of them too much, and the threads in his hands go slack. But tonight he felt, suddenly, that he was no different from the men running in from the east. They were all men walking through the dark toward one point of light. They ran toward the city. He ran toward — he did not yet know which gate.

”One day,” he said, low, as if to himself and to the city beneath him, ”there will be a road by which every man who wants to go home can reach home.”

The wind from the north carried his words away into the dark.

”This war,” he said to himself, ”at this stage, is no longer decided by blades. It is decided by whose road is wider, whose grain is more alive, and who has more men standing behind him who are willing to follow.” He reached up and pressed a loose bit of earth on the crenellation back into place — a small repair, the kind he had made ten thousand times, and somehow the only repair he could make tonight. ”What they lost was not this city. It was that they never built a road into men’s hearts.” A road, he had learned in four months, is not earth and stone; it is whatever stands at the end of it, waiting.

Below, in the tunnel of the south gate, a few lamps were burning — the night shift of craftsmen, oiling the gate pivots. The sound of the oil flask came, drop by drop, countable in the night.

Just before dawn, another company of men came down the east slope.

They carried no weapons. Their hands were raised, and they walked one behind another in a line through the morning mist, toward the earthworks. At the head of the line walked the lame old veteran — the one from the empty grain stack, the one who knew the road. He limped, but he walked steadily. Behind him came a dozen or more men, and behind them, more still — the mist hid the end of the line, and all that could be seen was the thread of figures, moving slowly toward the place where the smell of porridge was. They walked as men walk who have made the decision and are past turning back.

The fire under the surrender point’s pot had already been lit, and the dawn shift of hailers was not needed; the pot was doing the talking now. The porridge bubbled in the pot, thick and hot, and the steam of it stood straight up into the cold dawn air, the way it had stood every dawn since the surrender point was raised.

”Another company.” The squad leader in charge said. ”Go. Set out enough bowls.”

(End of Chapter 3)