Six for Gold

Chapter Fifteen

How strange, thought Peter. Every passenger was disembarking at the same place.

He had risen early, before coils of mist swirling over the river had dispersed as the sun strengthened. Now the acrid smell of cooking smoke drifted from a settlement strung out beside the landing place.

Already shadufs rose and fell. On the journey up the Nile, they had become a familiar sight, buckets at the end of sapling arms dipping into the river and rising, dripping, to empty their precious cargo into channels watering narrow patches of cultivated land.

Peter was not the only early riser aboard.

First he had run into the rosy-faced traveler Thorikos, arranging his small mountain of baggage on deck. Then Porphyrios the charioteer had appeared and commenced pacing up and down, flexing his muscles-limbering up for the land journey, as he put it. Finally, Apollo had begun to laboriously roll beehives to the ship’s rail nearest shore.

They had been on the Nile for days, the north wind at their back a stronger force than the lazy, southern current. Peter soon lost track of the number of villages they had sailed past, each a nondescript straggle of mud huts clustered beside the river whose annual inundation brought them life each year. Beyond, beginning at their back walls, a vast emptiness stretched as far as the eye could see.

The river was busy and their passing boat caused little notice, other than an occasional hail from a child running along the steep bank paralleling their vessel, hoping for a coin or a piece of bread to be tossed ashore.

Reed boats of an ancient pattern bobbed here and there on the slow-moving water as fishermen cast their nets in the broiling heat, but most of the shipping was commercial. For a while they had journeyed behind a boat hauling a cargo of large blocks of sandstone, doubtless destined for an imperial monument, church, or other official edifice.

At sunset the boat had tied up in the shallows. Like his master, Peter slept with a blade close to hand. He had been ashore only once since they left Alexandria, accompanying John to a small riverside market where they purchased several portions of smoked fish, a small sack of raisins, and a handful of shriveled figs to augment the meager fare provided on board.

“Are you going to Mehenopolis too, Peter?” asked Apollo, pausing in his work. He was dressed like the laboring peasants Peter had seen everywhere on their journey, being clad in nothing more than a loincloth.

“I stay there for a time every year,” the beekeeper continued. “See that smudge over on the horizon to the right? That’s the rock marking the oasis.”

Peter peered in the direction indicated. “A rock? In the middle of the desert?”

“There’s a lot of them. More importantly, there’s water there.”

Peter asked if their destination was large.

“It’s not a big settlement, but it’s popular with pilgrims.”

“Pilgrims?”

“Surely you’ve heard about the snake oracle? That’s why that outcropping I pointed out to you is called Tpetra Mphof. It means Rock of the Snake. I thought your master and mistress were on their way to see it, like Thorikos.”

“No, the master is traveling for business reasons.”

“I’m here on business too. As I told you, it’s one of the settlements I visit every year. I graze my bees there. The headman, Melios, is very fond of honey. I suppose he could hardly avoid that, with a name meaning sweet.” Apollo laughed. “Melios runs the settlement, or tries to at least. He’s the largest landowner there. Talk has come down the river he’s offended someone who wishes him ill, someone who’s using magick against him.”

Peter gazed at his companion with astonishment. “It can’t be possible to harm anyone that way, can it?”

“Then how else could it be his are the only sheep who have beheaded themselves?”

There was a splash. Apollo pointed in the direction of the sound. “Did you see the size of that crocodile? They’re attracted by the prow of our boat. Remember what Porphyrios said about them, Peter! Be careful!”

Keeping his distance from the dangerous side of the vessel, Peter left the beekeeper, who resumed his task. At the stern, John and Cornelia waited to disembark. The boat had approached as near to land as was prudent. Now several smaller craft bobbed toward them.

“That looks most unsafe to me, master.” Peter eyed the low craft that arrived first, steered by a weathered ancient whose long white garment was soaked to the waist after he waded into the river to launch his vessel. “I should imagine a crocodile would have no trouble at all leaping into it. Or it might even capsize!”

“Never mind, Peter,” Cornelia put in quickly. “Even if it does, we’re close enough to shore to be able to get safely to land.”

Peter nodded absently, staring at a large dog standing on the bank, eagerly lapping up water.

“You’re all disembarking here?” asked a booming voice.

The charioteer was as enormous as his voice. The big, deeply lined face evidenced middle age, but the muscles in his arms resembled thick ropes. “I’ll wager you’re bound for Mehenopolis as well,” he went on. “You can’t get anywhere else from here, except further into the desert! It looks as if we’ll have quite a caravan!”

***

In fact, the anticipated caravan turned out to consist of a single donkey cart.

The travelers sat well back from the hives, giving Apollo plenty of room to lean against the loudly buzzing stack of cylinders he had piled at the front of their conveyance.

The beekeeper batted indolently at the occasional escaping insect. “I’ll find most of them waiting for their friends when we arrive in Mehenopolis,” he observed. “Melios has a well planted garden, and there’s little else to suit my beauties’ dainty appetites around here.”

It was true. The dunes began a short distance from the river settlement. There was no sign of road or track. However, the rock outcropping marking the location of Mehenopolis rose from the horizon, like Constantinople rising from the sea, and served to point their way.

John noticed Porphyrios insisted on sitting as far from the front of the cart as possible. From his nervous backward glances it was apparent the charioteer had not positioned himself there to leave more room for his fellow passengers, as he claimed. John thought there was something sad but faintly comical about such a large and powerful man being so afraid of tiny bees.

The cart driver, the same ancient who had ferried them to shore, sang to himself about his love waiting for him on the opposite side of the river. It seemed to be the only song he knew. Again and again he sang of braving treacherous waters to reach her. A hundred times, his love gave him the strength to evade reptilian jaws.

“I wish just once that would end differently,” Cornelia finally remarked to John. “Couldn’t his strength fail him? Then the poor crocodiles could have a good meal, and we’d all have some peace.”

“Even the squeak of these cart wheels, if they were without that voice accompanying them, would sound nearly as sweet as a work by Romanos Melodos,” agreed Thorikos.

“I suspect the lover on the other side of the river could use a rest as well,” the charioteer commented with a grin.

Thorikos chuckled, despite previous complaints about the damage the jolting of the cart might be doing to his aging bones, not to mention that the glare of the sun hurt his eyes and was giving him a headache.

It was nearly sunset by the time the cart drew near to their destination. The first sign of approaching civilization was a weathered man with straw-like hair sitting on a crude wooden sled. A donkey tethered to a nearby palm tree chewed contentedly at a tuft of brown weeds.

“Greetings, good pilgrims!” the man called out. “Please help an unfortunate who was lamed falling from a scaffold while helping to repair a holy place.”

Thorikos tossed a coin over the side of the cart. “Clever fellow,” he said. “I’ll wager he’s stationed himself out here to relieve pilgrims’ purses before the beggars in Mehenopolis get the chance.”

Beyond the tree shading donkey and beggar, the desert sloped into a shallow bowl filled with greenery. A thick growth of palms formed a dark, dusty sea which lapped at the base of the outcropping. Silver threads marked drainage ditches criss-crossing the area. Mud brick huts could be glimpsed here and there as the travelers rode further toward Mehenopolis, and before long a high wall came into view.

“That’s Melios’ estate, where my buzzing friends and I stay every year,” Apollo said. “The pilgrims stay in the tent camp at the foot of the Rock of the Snake. The rock is where the maze is situated.”

Declining help on the grounds his bees did not care for unfamiliar people to handle their homes, he and the cart driver began unloading the hives, piling them by the estate gate.

Peter leaned over the side of the cart. “The maze?” he asked with interest.

“That’s something else pilgrims come to see as well as the oracle I was telling you about,” Apollo replied, wiping his brow.

Thorikos broke in. “That’s why I’ve traveled so far myself, Peter. I heard fascinating stories about this maze, and the oracle sounds most curious and well worth a visit too.”

The fast sinking sun, although wrapping Mehenopolis in a purplish twilight, still imparted a golden-red tint to the upper part of the outcropping and the low, crumbling wall that encircled its flat top. A semi-ruined building with a high, dark doorway facing east was just visible through a wide gap in the wall.

“That’s the building you enter to get into the maze,” Apollo informed his fellow travelers.

A maze, John thought. How appropriate. He had begun to feel he was already deep inside a labyrinth, without a torch to light his way out.

However, now that he had at last reached his destination, he could at least get to work.