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

"I killed my daughters," Akhenaten said again. "They were beautiful, and they loved me, and I killed them
by giving them life." Something lit up within him then, and he straightened. The old language and the new
spilled together from his mouth until with great finality he said, "The next generation. Yes." With that he
left the terrace in great purposeful strides.

Tiye followed him, fearing the worst, and by the time he had reached the bedchambers she knew what he
intended. "You must not," she begged, holding onto his arm with all of her old woman's strength. "They
have not yet bled."

He threw her away as if shrugging off a robe and she fell to the stone floor. Her knees made twin sharp
cracks and pain flooded from them. Tiye tried to stand, but her legs would not bear her. "Pharaoh!" she
cried.

Strong hands bore her to her feet. "Hush now, mother," Nefertiti said softly into her ear. The quiet
strength of the queen's voice checked Tiye's struggles, and seemed even to still her pain. Nefertiti led her
to the queen's bed and laid her there until the pain in her knees began to subside.

"How do you bear it?" Tiye said. "Is this not the first time?" She recalled his face, flashing suddenly with
revelation, and thought, Surely it is. Surely he has not done this before.

"First time for these girls, yes," Nefertiti said. "Not for the others."

Egypt, Tiye thought. Turning inward, losing interest in the world just as its Pharaoh was turning inward,
defiling his own family. Because of me, she thought. I raised him up from the mud and reeds, and now
Egypt will fall with him. A desire to confess surged in her, reached as far as her mouth and stopped there,
at her old woman's thin lips that would not pass the truth of her betrayal.

"He believes it will save them," Nefertiti said. "He believes that they were poisoned by his seed when it
made them, and that they can only be saved by receiving it again. At other times he says that their
children will live, and it is true. Tutankhaten is healthy."

This secret of Pharaoh's only son stopped Tiye's mouth more tightly. Tutankhaten, King's Bodily Son,
begotten upon one of his sisters? It was a story one might have told about the old gods. It had no place in
the modern Egypt of Aten.

The dam in Tiye's mouth broke. "What is he?"

"A man," came the reply, hushed almost to a whisper. "Only a man. But he says he has gone too far up
the river, and looks different than those around him. He never explains." Nefertiti caught Tiye's chin,
guided it around until they were facing. "Do you know what this means?"

"He said to me once that rivers only flow one way," Tiye said, and might have said more, but Akhenaten
returned then, slick with sweat and his eyes alight. He brushed past Tiye and caught Nefertiti in his arms,
burying his face in the swanlike curves of her neck. "I will save them," he said, and said it again, and said
it again. Tiye got stiffly to her feet and left without a word.

Akhenaten's daughters, with their strange heads and their strange deaths, hung over Egypt like a plague
of the mind. Tiye watched herself grow older, watched Akhenaten too begin to hunch and walk slowly.
More and more rarely she met him on the terraces late at night.