Perabsah led his attendants into a landscape stippled with crude mud-brick domes shaped like giant breadloaves. This was a village of the dead. Khnemes had heard of this place: the Plain of the Loaves. Few tomb-robbers ever tarried here, for only lowborn peasants were buried in this place. A few of the domes displayed crude hieroglyphs etched into the clay above their lintels: daubed by a finger when the bricks were still wet from their moulds, and left to bake hard in the Egyptian sun. Now Perabsah pointed to the inscription above the lintel of a dome that seemed no different from its neighbours. Khnemes was unscribed, and could not read, yet above this dome's sealed entrance he recognised the familiar glyphs identifying the ancestral household of his master Perabsah. So this dome had been built here by order of one of Perabsah's forefathers.

At a nod from Perabsah, his trio of slaves raised sharpened adzes and broke the mortarwork beneath the lintel. Bricks which had lain undisturbed for a century were now seized, torn loose from their mortar, and flung aside by the slaves.

Khnemes cringed at his employer's sacrilege. Khnemes was Nubian-born, yet he had lived in Egypt long enough to know the customs of this land. To defile a grave was always a serious crime ... and made even riskier now, due to the recent political upheavals caused by the long famine known as the Year of the Hyenas. Officially, this was Year Eight of the Repeating of Births in the reign of the aged king Re's-Abiding-Truth ... but the old king's power had dwindled, and now Egypt was divided into two kingdoms ruled by rival god-cults. Perabsah owned property and wealth in Aneb Hetchet ... but that was in Lower Egypt, and now here he was across-river from Thebes, defiling a grave in Upper Egypt, where Perabsah's titles and estates were too distant to protect him.

Khnemes glanced round nervously as Perabsah's slaves enlarged the hole in the broken dome, and now Perabsah spoke a challenge to Khnemes:

"Most excellent servant, you have often impressed me with your cleverness. Let us see if your wisdom extends into the realm of the dead." Perabsah's three slaves downed their tools and clambered over the heap of shattered bricks, while he continued: "Within that residence sleeps a bondsman of my household, entombed here more than a century ago. I know nothing about him, save the fact of his existence. I challenge you, Khnemes, to unriddle the stranger who is entombed here. Let us see if you can read the pattern of his life ... or the chapters of his death."

"I accept your challenge, heri sa'ur," said Khnemes, flattering his employer. Perabsah preened at this compliment, and daubed himself with a few drops of scented oil from the vanity-phial he always carried. Khnemes often addressed Perabsah as heri sa'ur, or "wisdom-master" ... not because Perabsah was wise enough to deserve this title, but because Khnemes was wise enough to know that there is more than one way to oil a conceited man.

As the slaves emerged from the shattered loaf, Khnemes was astonished to see them bearing an earthenware coffin. The Plain of the Loaves was a burial-ground for paupers: most of the dead in this place were not even properly embalmed. How came this one corpse to possess a coffin? When the grunting slaves set down their load, Khnemes was astonished again: for this was a child's coffin in the sands before him. A coffin too small to contain a grown man.

The coffin was oval-shaped, unglazed, with no inlays or inscriptions. "Whoever this coffin contains," observed Khnemes, "he received only the most meagre of death-rites. His mourners were swift to send him on his journey."

Perabsah tucked the small white alabaster vanity-phial back into its pouch on the waistband of his shent kilt, and rubbed his hands eagerly. "Because the coffin is unadorned, you mean?"