"Wilbur Smith - Egyptian 03 - River God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

RIVER GOD



Wilbur Smith




This book, like so many others before it, is for my wife, Danielle Antoinette.



The Nile that flows through this story has both of us in her thrall. We have spent days of delight
voyaging together upon her waters and idling upon her banks. As we are, so is she a creature of this very
Africa of ours.



Yet this great river runs neither so strongly nor so deeply as my love for you, my darling.




THE RIVER LAY HEAVILY UPON THE desert, bright as a spill of molten metal from a furnace. The
sky smoked with heat-haze and the sun beat down upon it all with the strokes of a coppersmith's
hammer, hi the mirage the gaunt hills flanking the Nile seemed to tremble to the blows. Our boat sped
close in beside the papyrus beds; near enough for the creaking of the water buckets of the shadoof, on
their long, counter-balanced arms, to carry from the fields across the water. The sound harmonized with
the singing of the girl in the bows.

Lostris was fourteen years of age. The Nile had begun its latest flood on the very day that her red
woman's moon had flowered for the first time, a coincidence that the priests of Hapi had viewed as highly
propitious. Lostris, the woman's name that they had then chosen to replace her discarded baby-name,
meant 'Daughter of the Waters'.

I remember her so vividly on that day. She would grow more beautiful as the years passed, become
more poised and regal, but never again would that glow of virgin womanhood radiate from her so
overpoweringly. Every man aboard, even the warriors at the rowing-benches, were aware of it. Neither I
nor any one of them could keep our gaze off her. She filled me with a sense of my own inadequacy and a
deep and poignant longing; for although I am a eunuch I was gelded only after I had known the joy of a
woman's body.

Taita,' she called to me, 'sing with me!' And when I obeyed she 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: