"Alex Irvine - Akhenaten" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

AKHENATEN
Alex Irvine




SHE FOUND HIM HALF-SUNKEN in the Nile marshes, tangled in reeds and rushes like a
shipwrecked sailor amid the wrack of his raft. Or, she would later think, as if the great river itself had
birthed him from its banks, and whenever she had that thought as an old woman she would shiver and
glance up expecting to see the hands of the sun reaching out for her. The sun: he claimed the sun for his
own, he claimed all Egypt for the sun. When her bearers wiped the black mud from his face, there on the
banks of the Nile before the city of Thebes, the sun blazed from his eyes. Blinded, she ordered him taken
to the palace, hidden in the harem of her husband Amenhotep Nebmaetre, bathed and fed and hidden
from the sun.

When next she saw him, he looked only as a slave might: spindly of arm and leg, shrunken of chest, his
belly protuberant like a hungry child's. But he was not a child. Neither, perhaps, was he a man. His face
tapered from high cheekbones to a jaw like an arrowhead; no hair grew on his chin, and his skull lay
oblong on the silk cushion in her private chamber. His eyes opened, and she caught her breath.

With a gesture, she dismissed her Hebrew chambermaid Miryam, who left breathing prayers to that
tribe's pagan gods. "I am Tiye," she said after a moment. "God-wife to the Pharaoh who is the third to
bear the name Amenhotep."

He whispered in reply, and she bent close to hear his words. "Again," she commanded, and again he
spoke, but she did not understand his words. Only then, with the strange sounds of his language in her
ears, feeling as if from a distance her own lips haltingly repeat those opaque syllables, did she ask herself
why she had brought him up from the marsh. One deception was rarely enough. How many was she
prepared to undertake?

Amenhotep knew nothing of the stranger until his son Thutmose died and the question of succession was
thrown open to debate. Viziers and eunuchs furrowed their brows; fishermen and scribes found
themselves flinching at the passage of clouds across the face of the sun. Amenhotep himself worried, and
spoke long to Tiye. Was the second son, Amenhotep IV, fit to bear the double crown of the Kingdom of
the Nile? Tiye had no answer, and then that question too was swept away when Amenhotep the son
followed his older brother through the gates of Anubis.

On the night of her second son's death, Tiye stood vigil with her husband. Egypt slept on the banks of the
Nile, unaware that its future, docile as a kitten six days before, now crouched to pounce.

She found herself speaking before she had entirely decided what to say. "They must not know," she said.
"The succession must not be questioned. How many of your generals, how many priests of Amen, are
even now imagining their own accessions.? A second death .... "

Amenhotep nodded, his many chins rippling. He leaned heavily on a staff as he settled his bulk onto a
raised platform of cushions. In him Tiye saw the cares of kingship, saw the way he had gorged his body
as if the spread of his girth might set an example for the borders of his nation. He wheezed heavily as he
sat, and for a moment could not get his breath to speak.

"They must not know," he agreed, "but they will. What are we to tell them?"