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

"I beg you, Mother," Miryam said, tears springing once again from her eyes. "Let him speak his mind.
Egypt is huge and Hebrews are so few. He hurts nothing."

"Pharaoh will judge," Tiye said, and Miryam slipped away down the corridor.

Tiye stood in the washing room, thinking. Perhaps she should have all of the Hebrews out of the palace,
out of the harem. They were too quick to anger, too eager to seize on new ideas. What Egypt needed
now was stability, and nothing could be stable as long as the royal household simmered with dissent and
wild heresy.

But the look in the young Hebrew's eyes. She had seen that look in Akhenaten's eyes, so very long ago
by the marshy banks of the Nile.

In the next year Akhenaten's daughters began to die. One after the other, as each of them approached
the age at which she might have expected them to bleed for the first time, they began to complain of
headaches. Strange fits followed, marked by a turning inward of the limbs as if the girls wished to swim
back up the river of time until they found their mother's womb again. Then, just like fish that stop gasping
bit by bit, they died.

Nefertiti bore sorrow as quietly as she had borne the children. Still her beauty stole the gazes of men, but
it was the beauty now of sunset rather than sunrise. Still her voice charmed Pharaoh, but her spell was a
shared dream of the past.

Akhenaten held each of his daughters as she gave up her body, stroking the beautiful long head and
crying out in the language he still spoke in his sleep. As his children died, something in him broke. He paid
less attention to Egypt, worried less about border incursions and trade difficulties, ignored completely the
building program at his city Akhetaten. Even his tomb stood unfinished, its workmen idled to play dice
outside the sculptor Thutmose's workshop. Only his nights remained constant. Shunning Nefertiti's bed,
he stood watching the stars from sunset until dawn, weeping to himself in his strange cold language that to
Tiye seemed like the language a river would speak if it wished to be heard by men. She took it upon
herself to approach him one night, walking slowly on knees that ground like mortar and pestle, touching
the walls when her failing eyes lost the way. When she took her place next to him and looked up to see
what he saw, she realized that all but the brightest stars now hid from her.

"I believed," he said softly, "that I would live in them."

Tiye touched his shoulder. "You yet might in two of them."

"I have no great faith," he said. In the darkness, she thought a corner of his mouth tensed in what might
have been a smile. He turned to look at her. "You said once that a man with children would never know
loneliness. But here I am. My daughters die, and I am lonely."

"Sorrow and loneliness are not the same things' Tiye said.

"I tell you I am lonely. I knew children might die, but you were right. I believed that seeing myself in them,
seeing them in myself, I could forget that once I came alone from the sun." He kept silent for some time
then, and when he spoke again his voice was twisted. "Instead I killed them."

"Every father kills his child," Tiye said. "To have a child is to set it on the road of time."