During the morning hours, he worked quickly and efficiently with a minimum of conversation. Only one man tried to engage him in small talk, an old gnarled fellow who looked to be his age or a trifle older. His name was Nasaris. His thin white hair was arranged in several looping braids over his brown scalp.
His smile was friendly. “Looks like we’re the only snow-tops here.”
Doc nodded a silent, smiling affirmative.
Nasaris touched one of his braids. “You know, for safety’s sake, you ought to do your hair like mine. You don’t want to get it tangled up in an axle or something and have yourself snatched bald. Almost happened to me once.”
One of the other men overheard the comment and laughed. “Funny as hell, too.”
“That’s ’cause it didn’t happen to you, Zophren!” Nasaris snapped. “I’m trying to give our new pal here a little safety tip—don’t need to have you butting in.”
Nasaris returned his attention to him. “I’ll be glad to do it for you.”
Doc thought it over for a moment, not particularly relishing having the old man style his hair for him, but also knowing he needed an ally and a source of information. He agreed.
During the noon meal break, he submitted to Nasaris’s tonsorial ministrations, allowing the man to twist and plait and loop his hair. He felt a sharp sense of the ridiculous, but he was able to engage the fellow in conversation, in much the same way he used to pump his barber for local gossip.
Nasaris was garrulous, if not necessarily precise in everything he said. As he had halfway expected to hear, Nasaris was one of the first citizens of Aten, one of the first acolytes of Pharaoh Akhnaton. He yammered about the difficulty of excavating the city, telling tedious stories of heat, endless broken tools and days of thirst and hunger.
More to interrupt the flow of chatter than for any other reason, Doc said, “Shouldn’t you be retired by now, on a pension from Pharaoh for all of your contributions?”
Nasaris fell silently, his hands and fingers stopping in midtwirl of a strand of Doc’s hair. In a quiet, strained voice, he said, “There was a problem a while back. I made something I shouldn’t have for Pharaoh’s daughter. This is my punishment.”
His voice brightened as he continued. “But what the hell. It’s better than being dead, and at least I have something to do with my time.”
“What did you make?” Doc asked.
Nasaris cleared his throat self-consciously. “Just a little piece of jewelry. See, I was one of Pharaoh’s chief craftsmen. When Nefron asked me to make some little doodads for her and some of her friends, I didn’t ask questions. I should have.”
“What happened?”
Nasaris sighed. “I’d rather not say.”
As his fingers busied themselves with Doc’s hair again, the old man asked very quietly, “Did Nefron give one of these little doodads to Osorkon?”
The old man’s fingers twitched, pulling Doc’s hair painfully. He stepped away, and Doc, rubbing his smarting scalp, turned to look at him. The fellow’s expression was commingled fear, guilt and grief.
“I’ve said too much. I’m old. My head gets mixed up. Forget what I told you.” With that, he scuttled out of the shed.
Doc followed him, but Nasaris had decided to observe a board game between two of the other men. When the noon meal break was over, Doc decided he was tired. He hadn’t slept very soundly the night before, so he hung around the shed doing as little work as was humanly possible. His deportment was an education in laziness.
The other three men labored on refitting a chariot’s drive shaft and paid him no attention, so he went for a little stroll around the compound. No one hailed him as he passed among the workers in the yard stirring a puttylike substance in metal-walled cubes.
He found a back entrance into the palace and after walking down a hallway, he followed his nose to a huge, well-equipped and very hot kitchen.
Squinting through the steam and smoke rising from open grills and sinks full of hot water, he saw Mildred arranging food on a tray. She looked up as he sauntered over to her and she burst out laughing.