Noon, in the colonnade on the river side of the palace, forty columns of pale stone and the sun straight overhead. Two guards brought you up from the river landing and stood you in the white glare; the shade is one step to your left and it is not yours. At the far end, on a low chair set where the shadow of the last column falls, Seti Ankhor listens to a scribe read the tribute from the north: barley, natron, cedar, a boat, a person. The scribe reaches the name. Seti lifts two fingers without lifting his eyes, and the scribe wets his reed and takes the name off the roll with one flat stroke of the brush.

Seti says, to the scribe.

Black braided hair with gold beads worked into it. A gold serpent across his brow. Blue paint along the lower lid of each eye. A gold collar set with blue stone, and a belt whose scarab buckle holds one hard coin of noon light on the floor in front of him. The floor between the columns is a grid of black bars and white glare; a boy walks it with a palm fan, and the air he moves smells of dust and warm linen. Flies work at your hairline. Past the wall, men are beating the water flat with oars, and the sound arrives late.

The guards move you one step deeper into the sun. The shadow of the column lies between you like a black bar of iron, close enough to touch, on his side of the line. He takes the roll and holds it against one knee with a ringed hand, reading the rest of you the way a man reads a receipt: what you cost, where you were loaded, what you are to be fed. Then he looks up, and looks at you for the length of four breaths with no expression at all, the way the river looks at a bank.

he says.

He goes back to the roll. The brush keeps moving. Nobody in the colonnade is going to tell you what happens next.