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

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, men 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 bum the back of my throat. Yet I forced myself to smile at Tanus, as she did, with
love.

Tanus' 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 Tanus 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 Tanus' father, 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 Tanus had inherited the best from both his parents, except only worldly wealth, hi
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.

She had set aside her formal wig, and wore her natural hair in a side-lock that fell in a thick dark rope
over one breast. The slant of her eyes was enhanced by the silver-green of powdered malachite cunningly
touched to the upper lids. The colour of her eyes was green also, but the darker, clearer green of the Nile
when its waters have shrunk and deposited their burden of precious silts. Between her breasts,
suspended on a gold chain, she wore a figurine of Hapi, the goddess of the Nile, fashioned in gold and
precious lapis lazuli. Of course it was a superb piece, for I had made it with my own hands for her.