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

more. Amenhotep IV lived, and would succeed his father.

THE STOOD SOMETIMES, during that last year of his father's life, watching the sun set in the hills west
of the great river, and then he stood watching the stars wheel across the sky. Tiye came to him, always,
unable to help herself, and always he softly wished for solitude, and always she went away with her heart
strangely broken and uplifted by the starlight caught in the depths of his eyes. It seemed to her at these
times that he spoke in his old language, the language of the starving nameless man washed up on the
banks of a river that had no beginning. And it seemed as well that she understood, and that in the
silhouette of his head blocking the stars was written knowledge of things whose names she lacked the
words to ask.

This and more she remembered, when during solitary nights of her own Tiye would chew over the errors
of her life.

Amenhotep IV rose to power amid whispers. The sounds of the wind in stone, river in sand, leaf against
stem, all began to sound tones of apprehension. The artists came to sculpt him, and showed him their
heroic studies. "Destroy those," he said, and rose to his feet. With a flourish he swept his cloak off and
unfastened his tunic. Naked he stood on his throne, and even the palace cats stopped in their tracks and
averted their eyes. "The sun is as the sun is," he said, "and the body is as the body. The skies are full of
suns and the worlds full of bodies." Amenhotep IV flung away his garments and raised his spindly arms to
the shaft of sunlight that fell through the topmost window in his chamber. "See me as I am," he
commanded. "Carve what you see."

He turned then, and looked out the window into the square. "Bring me the most beautiful woman within
sight of this window," he ordered, "except the ones in the shade. The most beautiful woman in sight of this
window will be my wife in sight of the sun."

The sculptors ran from him, and the architects of the new monuments at Karnak looked at each other.
What madness was this, to marry as monkeys might?

"Aten looks down," Amenhotep breathed as his soldiers spread through the plaza. "Aten sees, Aten
gives. From Aten we have come."

Her name, when she came through the door dressed in simple linen, was Nefertiti. She was thin like him,
and next to her he looked even more girlish than his advisers had thought. He caught her gaze and held it.
"Aten has chosen well," he said, and the soldiers looked elsewhere as the greed in his eyes rose in his
body. "Leave us," he said, and Nefertiti became his wife.

This much Tiye saw, but it wasn't until she heard the Hebrew maid gossiping that she heard of Nefertiti's
naming. Neferneferuaten, Tiye thought. Is everything to be for Aten now? Shall we no longer remember
the gods of our fathers, Isis and Anubis and Osiris and Amen-Ra who...

Who shines in the sun, she had been about to think. What was the truth now? Was Aten something
outside the sun, something that used the sun as a means to spread his power to the Earth? This is what
Amenhotep IV said, and when she asked him, but what did it mean? Either a god was, or wasn't. What
did it mean to say a god used the sun or the river, if it didn't mean that the sun or the river were the god?
But Amenhotep IV said this was not so. "Look into the sky," he said, when Tiye found him out on the
balcony at night. "How many stars are there?"

The astronomers said there were one hundred thousand, so that was what she said to him.