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them carefully in a strip of linen. “One of these chisels is worth about six of those bags of wheat.” He jerked his head in the direction of the food stores. “That’s three months wages for you.”
    A boy was stacking sacks of grain. He was one of the boys whom Ramose had seen playing a game outside the village.
    Ramose took the chisels from the storeman. He walked out into the hot air again, pushing the chisels into the belt of his kilt. The other boy hurried out of the storehouse behind Ramose and knocked his elbow so that the chisels fell out of his grasp and onto the rocky ground. He didn’t stop to apologise. He kept walking, turning for just long enough to give Ramose a glare full of hatred.
    Ramose called out to the storeman. “Did you see that? Did you see what he did?”

7
A LETTER FROM HOME
    The storeman shrugged and went back to his work. Ramose was furious. He took out his anger on a nearby rock. All that achieved was a bleeding toe. He collected up the scattered chisels. Three of them were damaged. He knew he’d get the blame for this.
    Paneb was very angry about the damaged chisels. Ramose showed him the stone flake on which he’d recorded the workers who had received new chisels. Paneb wasn’t very happy about that either.
    “Is that the best writing you can do?” he said incredulously. “I can only read half of it.” He turned the stone flake around, making a big show of how difficult it was to read. “You’ll have to rewrite it. In fact you can rewrite the whole thing ten times to make sure you get it right.”
    Ramose didn’t complain. He was glad to have an excuse to get out of the tomb. He found a tiny wedge of shade outside the tomb entrance and sat down to rewrite the details about the chisels. He remembered the stories that Keneben had made him write out about how wonderful it was to be a scribe.
    “Ramose!” Paneb’s voice echoed up the tomb shaft. “Come here, boy.”
    So far Ramose couldn’t think of anything good about being a scribe. You might get to sit down a lot of the time and you didn’t have to lift blocks of stone the size of small houses, but it wasn’t much fun. He trudged back down into the darkness of the tomb past the sculptors, his heart already starting to race at the thought of being shut off from the light. Fortunately, Paneb only wanted a cup of water and Ramose was soon climbing back up the sloping corridor again. The back of his legs ached already.
    By midday Ramose had walked up and down the tomb shaft at least ten times. It seemed that every time he got to the bottom of the shaft, Paneb remembered something he wanted from above. Every time he found a patch of shade to sit down in above ground, Paneb’s voice would echo up the shaft and he was needed down below.
    The other workers gathered in groups to eat their midday meal. Ramose ate his gritty bread, dried fish and figs by himself. The other apprentices sat in a group of their own. He caught them looking at him a couple of times, but none of them came over to talk to him.
    By the end of the day Ramose’s legs ached so much and he was so tired that he just wanted to go to sleep.
    “Where do we sleep?” Ramose asked Paneb when the scribe came panting up the shaft.
    Paneb pointed to some piles of rocks on the valley floor opposite the storehouse. Ramose looked closer. He’d thought that they were more discarded rocks. Now he could see that they were actually low huts made from the sharp rocks that lay around on the valley floor stacked up on top of each other. The huts were roofed over with dead palm branches that must have been carried all the way up from the river.
    “You can sleep with the other apprentices,” Paneb said. “I can’t have you in my hut. I don’t sleep well and the sound of unfamiliar breathing would keep me awake.”
    The three boys were sitting outside their hut.
    “Scribe Paneb said I should share your hut,” Ramose told them.
    No one replied. Ramose went inside. The