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

wondered. "When men no longer come to your bed, must you throw your scorn at the gods?"

"Is every star Aten?" she asked again, with a rushing in her head that battered against her mind like a
flood. Beginning to understand. Her eyes came back into focus and she saw him looking at her. Starlight
streaked his eyes as it had the eternal surface of the river.

"You see," he said. "I do not know if every star is Aten, but I do know that he comes to me through the
sun. If other eyes look up at other suns, Aten looks down at them as well."

Tiye thought of that night many years later, when while looking for her Hebrew maid she turned a corner
and ran hard into another Hebrew, a young man. He looked at her and for a moment she felt as if she
must be in two places at once, as if she had been overlaid onto herself. The stone corridor fell away and
she smelled the salt marshes near the mouth of the Nile, saw the contorted body of the young man who
lay in the mud looking up at her. This young Hebrew had the eyes of a fanatic, a gaze touched with
knowledge of the infinite. A gaze like the one the man who would become Akhenaten had fixed upon
Tiye, so many years ago.
"Who are you?" she asked, at once quavering and imperious.

He held her gaze as he walked around her at a respectful distance, but he did not answer her question,
and when he walked away she did not follow.

Tiye found her maid Miryam in the washing room. "Who was that who was here just now?" she
demanded.

Miryam ducked her head. "Please," she said. "I cannot tell."

Tiye slapped her hard on the ear. "It is that Moses, is it not? Who stirs up the Hebrews? He believes,
does he not?"

"We all believe," Miryam said, crying only a little.

Tiye thought for a moment. A Hebrew named Moses was, incredibly, preaching Aten against the
Egyptians. One of the priests said he was Miryam's younger brother; others said he had been born to
Levite slaves. Akhenaten paid no attention. As long as Aten's name rang in the streets of his cities,
Pharaoh paid little heed to what was said. Tiye softened. She had been harsh out of discomfiture from
her encounter in the hall and the memories it provoked.

"You mustn't fear me," Tiye said, although fear was part of what she wanted. "I know how your tribe
believes. It isn't so different from how we believed before Akhenaten. When I was a girl, every
household had the gods it preferred. But now some of you are uncertain, aren't you? And some of you
have become like this man Moses. He has found Aten."

Miryam touched the corner of her eye and flicked the tear away. "He has gone farther than that. He says
now that even to name the god is to blaspheme. He says that if Aten is supposed to be a thing beyond
the sun, an idea only, then how can it be named? This is foolishness. He says that Egypt is headed for the
same doom that awaits all of the other peoples who know not the truth of the invisible god, the He
Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. He says that naming god Aten is like naming a man Worm."

"Where has he goner"