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

Tiye pitied him in that instant. His heir dead, dead too his second son who was not fit to follow him.
Aging, obese, without male issue, knowing that the greater part of his days were surely behind him.
And sadder yet, she thought, because he knew that neither of his sons could have borne up under the
weight of his legacy.

"There is a man," she said. Silence fell and she became aware again that her second son lay dead in the
room with her, near enough to touch. She waited.

Amenhotep gazed long at the body of his second son. In his eyes Tiye saw the sickness of mortality, his
and his sons', like a creeping Nile fog -or the crocodile that hid within. After a long silence of moonlight
creeping across the stones of the floor, he spoke. "Would you have a co-regent, then? What sort of a
man?"

"No," Tiye said in answer to his first question. Then her mind began to stumble over the many things she
wanted to say about the stranger sequestered in the harem. The stranger who had learned to speak the
language of Egypt, who had become first her confidant, then her lover and now, if she had her last desire
....

Who had spoken to her of Aten, of the sun. Who had spoken of the distance between stars, and the
sources of life. Yes, Aten, she had said. Pharaoh worships Aten, and the people worship Aten in him.
She had in mind a wall of the palace, carved with rays of the sun that ended in human hands bringing gifts
to Pharaoh her husband and to the people of Egypt. The gods created the sun to give us life.

The stranger had shaken his head, his marvelous, elongated, shining head. You misunderstand, he said.
Men of Egypt, he said, fed on the grain of the fields, and the grain fed where.? Fish of the river fed on
smaller fish, and those smaller fish on smaller still, until the smallest fed on what but the plants of marsh
and bank, and those plants fed where? The wind, he said, like the man and woman of Egypt, rises in the
morning and falls at evening -- what does it follow.?

She had gone to her brother Aanen, the high priest of Ra, and said to him, There is a man who asks
questions I cannot answer. What would you have me say to him.? Aanen asked, and his eyes widened as
she whispered in his ear. Aanen left his vestments and put on simple linens, and she smuggled him past
the eunuchs into the harem. To his credit, he betrayed no fear at meeting the stranger, did not even wait
for introductions, but immediately began. You have spoken of suns and stars, he said, and fish and rivers
and men. What of the gods

Tiye had found herself suddenly mindful of the Hebrew maid with her brawling pantheon, and as if
reading her mind the stranger had said, From whence comes the light that you may carve these other
gods?

Aanen nodded and understood. He turned to her, his eyes bright as ii the stranger's gaze had left sunlight
there. He spoke, and in his words Tiye could hear the scorching heat of revelation.

She had begun to believe the stranger then, and to carry the priest her brother's words inside her like
faith. And she believed him now, in this chamber with her dead son and dying husband, and her belief lent
a quiet strength to her voice as she freed her brother's words once more. "He has come from the Sun."

And thus it was that Amenhotep's second son did not die, but came forth from the palace at Thebes the
next morning. If the viziers and eunuchs whispered, the keenness of Pharaoh's ears kept them from doing