"Smith, Wilbur - Egyptian 01 - River God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

smiled with pleasure. My voice was one of the many reasons that,
whenever she was able, she kept me near her; my tenor complemented her
lovely soprano to perfection.

We sang one of the old peasant love songs that I had taught her, and
which was still one of her favourites: My heart flutters up like a
wounded quail when I see my beloved's face and my cheeks bloom like the
dawn sky to the sunshine of his smile From the stern another voice
joined with ours. It was a man's voice, deep and powerful, but it
lacked the clarity and purity of my own. If my voice was that of a
dawn greeting thrush, then this was the voice of a young lion.

Lostris turned her head and now her smile shimmered like the sunbeams
on the surface of the Nile. Although the man upon whom she played that
smile was my friend, perhaps my only true friend, still I felt the
bitter gall of envy burn the back of my throat. Yet I forced myself to
smile at tonus, as she did, with love. tonus" father, Pianki, Lord
Harrab, had been one of the grandees of the Egyptian nobility, but his
mother had been the daughter of a freed Tehenu slave. Like so many of
her people, she had been fair-headed and blue-eyed. She had died of
the swamp fever while tonus was still a child, so my memory of her was
imperfect. However, the old women said that seldom before had such
beauty as hers been seen in either of the two kingdoms.

On the other hand, I had known and admired tonus" lather , before he
lost all his vast fortune and the great estates that had once almost
rivalled those of Pharaoh himself. He had been of dark complexion,
with Egyptian eyes the colour of polished obsidian, a man with more
physical strength than beauty, but with a generous and noble heart-some
might say too generous and too trusting, for he had died destitute,
with his heart broken by those he had thought his friends, alone in the
darkness, cut off from the sunshine of Pharaoh's favour.

Thus it seemed that tonus had inherited the best from both his parents,
except only worldly wealth. In nature and in power he was as his
father; in beauty as his mother. So why should I resent my mistress
loving him? I loved him also, and, poor neutered thing that I am, I
knew that I could never have her for myself, not even if the gods had
raised my status above that of slave. Yet such is the perversity of
human nature that I hungered for what I could never have and dreamed of
the impossible.

Lostris sat on her cushion on the prow with her slave girls sprawled at
her feet, two little black girls from Cush, lithe as panthers, entirely
naked except for the golden collars around their necks. Lostris
herself wore only a skirt of bleached linen, crisp and white as an
egret's wing. The skin of her upper body, caressed by the sun, was the
colour of oiled cedar wood from the mountains beyond Byblos. Her
breasts were the size and shape of ripe figs just ready for plucking,
and tipped with rose garnets.