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this morning so I walked along the river path as one by one the birds began their first songs and a few sleepy servants appeared to sweep the steps and clean the river craft.
    The General’s estate was not far, indeed no destination was far in Pi-Ramses. His gates opened just beyond Takhuru’s home. I glanced into her garden, for sometimes if she woke early she would take her fruit and bread onto the roof and wave at me as I passed, but there was only a servant shaking a hanging from which a cloud of dust spewed and hung glinting in the new light.
    Once within the General’s precincts I sought out the officer in charge, then received the report from the man I was replacing. Nothing untoward had happened while I had been gone. Stowing the box under a bush by the entrance, I took up my station in front of one of the pillars and settled contentedly to watch the lush garden fill with life and warmth. This week I guarded the General. Next week I would take up residence in the barracks for weapons drill. It was rumoured that my company might be going out onto the western desert for manoeuvres. By this evening the nagging problem of the box would be solved. I was a happy man.
    My watch passed without incident. Two hours after dawn a litter arrived and carried away a pale and yawning woman who emerged tentatively from the house escorted by the General’s Steward and an attentive maidservant who immediately unfolded a parasol and held it over her mistress’s tousled head as she approached her conveyance, although the sun was far from its full force. The woman climbed onto the litter, giving me a glimpse of one taut calf, and the maid closed the curtains hurriedly, whether to shut out the sun or the few eyes fixed on the scene I did not know. Nor did I care. The litter was lifted, the maid walking by her invisible mistress’s side, and disappeared towards the river.
    A short time later the traffic into and out of the house began in earnest; fellow Generals and lesser officers, Paiis’s household servants, an occasional boon-seeker, Heralds and minor messengers, and I watched them all, challenging the faces I did not recognize, greeting those I did, until it was time for the noon meal. One of the men under me took my place while I went to the kitchen behind the house for my bread, cold duck and beer which I consumed sitting in the shade in a secluded corner of the garden, then I resumed my duties.
    In the late afternoon I made my report to my replacement, retrieved the box, and entered the house, asking the Steward if the General might see me on a personal matter. I was in luck. The General was still in his office, though he was due to leave for the palace soon. As a member of his household staff I knew the layout of the premises intimately and did not need an escort to arrive at the rather forbidding double doors leading to his private domain. Knocking, I was bidden tersely to enter and did so. The room was not strange to me. Large and rather pleasant, it contained a desk, two chairs, numerous chests bound in brass, an ornate brazier and a shrine to Montu before whose likeness an incense cup smoked. Because the few windows were cut high in the wall, the light was always diffused, an advantage, I reflected, for a man who often began the work of the day with burning eyes and a pounding head. Paiis was a man of sensual appetites, less a field officer than a strategist and military tactician, and I often wondered how he had managed to survive the years of rigorous physical training followed by an obligatory apprenticeship in the ranks of the army before being promoted. Not that he was soft. I knew that he spent a considerable amount of time swimming, wrestling, and drawing the bow, but I suspected that he did so in order to continue to pursue his real interests—vintage wine and the delights of sex—and his excesses in both were beginning to tell in spite of his discipline. Handsome and vain, he was nevertheless a good superior,