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

"Meaningless number," he said. "I have counted them. I have good eyes, and I can only count three
thousand."

Tiye tried to imagine counting the stars. No, she tried to imagine not losing count. Counting was easy, if
one could begin over and over again. But to move one's eyes across the sky, weaving every star into the
fabric of memory and giving each its own number...this was impossible.

"Three thousand?" she said. "Is that all there are?"
"No. There are thousands of thousands of thousands. Some of them I have seen and you never will.
Others neither of us will ever know except in the telling." He turned to her, ran a long finger down from
the point of her chin to the hollow between her collarbones. "Tiye, you have been all that stood between
me and the loneliness of the mad. Now I have taken a wife; will you not reprove me?"

"Pharaoh must take a wife," Tiye said. She was certain that his finger had left a blazing trace down her
throat, and wondered before she mastered her silliness why she could not see its glow in the sloping
hollows of his face. "A young woman will give you children, and a man with children need never worry
about loneliness."

"A man with children," Amenhotep IV whispered. She tried to speak to him again, but he seemed not to
hear.

HE MOVED the capital upriver a year later. The priesthood of Ra pressured him not to, and he threw
them from his chamber, screaming after them that Pharaoh would move very Egypt if he chose. Did not
the Sun move? And was not Pharaoh the Sun of his people?

The next morning he arose and came out of his chamber bearing papyrus scrawled with strange symbols.
Nefertiti followed, her eyes strange as the shadow of current cast on the bottom of a pool. Her first
daughter squirmed in her arms, a lively child with her father's elongated head and her father's habit of
looking at the stars. Thebes was sick with the infestation of Amen and Mut, he declared to the
early-morning servants sweeping the throne hall. He had been sickened by proximity. He sent them to
gather the important figures attached to the court. When they arrived, heavy-eyed with sleep, Pharaoh
gave them these words: "Amenhotep is dead."

They brought Tiye, and he said to her, "I am no longer named for the man who came before me, but for
the god who comes before us all. I am the god walking on Earth, I am He Who Is For Aten. I am
Akhenaten."

Late that night, Tiye awakened with the aches of age. Stiffly she walked to him, mouth leaping with a
question that had plagued her dreams for years before surfacing just this night. The way a dead man
returns from the river, bringing with him the tales of his sojourn in the weedy depths of the dead, she
brought Akhenaten the question of her dream and put it to him under the moonless sky.

"I found you in the reeds," she said. "Where did you come from?"

"Not so very far away," he answered, and it was no answer.

"Where?"

"When I was a boy," Akhenaten said, "I learned the stories of Egypt. I used to look across the waters of