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The foreman's voice rose over the clamber of the quarry.

He always sounded hoarse, like there was a cat trying to claw its way out of his throat,

and Wepemnofret had come to dread the sound during his three months here working on the labor day.

Weepam Noffret didn't care much for the place or the work.

Cutting and hauling these huge blocks of stone up the hill to the building site was harder than farming,

which Wepemnoprette wasn't particularly fond of to begin with.

To make matters worse, much worse, the beer tasted odd.

It was much thinner than they made in his village along the banks of the Nile far to the south.

At least the beer was plentiful, even if it didn't have Wepemnothret's preferred consistency or flavor.

It was strong, too.

His head buzzed a bit more after his third bowl than he was used to.

It helped to pass the long nights in the barracks with his fellow workers, all of whom had come just as far from home as he had.

Some were from the reed choked delta in the north, and he could

barely make out their words. A few he couldn't understand at all, and others in the barracks

told him that they were from far to the south, where the river crashed and roared through its rapids.

The foreman was yelling again, and Webemnolfet realized that he was the intended target of the cat-scratched

vocal cords. It was his turn to handle one of the copper chisels, his turn to shape yet another

of the endless succession of limestone blocks that dominated their days. As long as the sun beat down,

which it seemed to do for even longer than at home, the chisels never stopped chipping into the stone.

There were so many quarry workers banging their mallets on the chisels over and over that the sounds melded together in one continuous note.

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