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

the sea and think, Egypt is there. Someday I will travel there."

Assyria? she wanted to know, and then, Canaan? Persia?

None of those, he said, but nearest Canaan. She thought about travelers' tales of Canaan, of its fine rivers
and sweet olives. "Is it not on the ocean?"

"Yes," he said. "When I was a boy, we lived on the ocean, and the world was the blue of water and the
white of stone. Now I see the black of night and what color are the stars?"

For a while Tiye had nothing to say. Then she asked him the question behind the question. "When I found
you, were you fleeing the place you were born?" "No."
"Why, then, do you wish to move upriver, away from the ocean?"

"Because," he said, "I want to travel through time."

Tiye had words to answer this. "All men and women travel through time," she said. "There is no other
road."

"I want to travel back up that road." Akhenaten pointed at a gleaming streak on the river, where the
reflection of a single star elongated into a shimmering ribbon on the water. "See; the river flows only one
way until it reaches the sea. Time flows only one way as well, and no man knows what sea it fills. But
there is a way to go against the current."

"Against the current to what?" she asked. "To yesterday? You are Pharaoh. Egypt cannot look always
toward yesterday. I learned this the day you broke the sculptors' studies."

"All men can spend their lives looking toward yesterday," Akhenaten said. They regarded the river in
silence. Tiye knew she should withdraw, but she was old enough that Pharaoh's annoyance no longer
frightened her, and she was still sleepless with the complaints of her body. "You said once that Aten is the
light by which we can know the other gods. I heard you say this, and saw my brother Aanen. Did you
look at his face as he began to believe? I think I would not want to see a face like that very often." Aanen
had become militant in his priesthood of the new Aten, destroying temples to other gods. Three times he
had killed a priest of Amun, and once a priest of Ra. His acolytes had begun hacking images of the other
gods out of temples and stelae.

"Aanen believes in belief," Akhenaten said. "I believe in the search for it."

"Which of you believes in the gods?" Tiye said, and he had no answer.

"I have taken my name for Aten."

Tiye nodded. "And yet you spend your nights looking at the sky when he is not present to caress you
with his rays. You worship the sun, but all your life you watch the stars."

"Every star is a sun," Akhenaten said.

"Is every star Aten?" she challenged him.

He chuckled then, a sound like the scraping of scarabs on stone. "Must old women blaspheme ?" he