"Smith, Wilbur - [Egyptian 03] - Warlock(txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

Tanus and his triumph over the armies of bandits who had almost
choked the life out of the richest and most powerful nation on earth.
The monument was a bizarre pyramid of human skulls, cemented
together and protected by a shrine made of red rock slabs. A thousand
and more skulls grinned down upon the boy as he read aloud the
inscription on the stone portico: ‘Our severed heads bear witness to
the battle at this place in which we died beneath the sword of Tanus
Lord Harrab. May all the generations that follow learn from that
mighty lord's deeds the glory of the gods and the power of righteous
men. Thus decreed in the fourteenth year of the reign of the God
Pharaoh Mamose.'
Squatting in the monument's shadow Taita watched the Prince as he
walked around the monument, pausing every few paces with hands on
hips to study it from every angle. Although Taita's expression was
remote his eyes were fond. His love for the lad had its origins in two
other lives. The first of these was Lostris, Queen of Egypt. Taita was
a eunuch, but he had been gelded after puberty and had once loved a
woman. Because of his physical mutilation Taita's love was pure, and he
had lavished it all on Queen Lostris, Nefer's grandmother. It was a love
so encompassing that even now, twenty years after her death, it stood at
the centre of his existence.
The other person from whom his love for Nefer sprang was Tanus,
Lord Harrab, to whom this monument had been erected. He had been
dearer than a brother to Taita. They were both gone now, Lostris and
Tanus, but their blood mingled strongly in this child's veins. From their
illicit union so long ago had sprung the child who had grown up to
become the Pharaoh Tamose, who now led the squadron of chariot that
had brought them here; the father of Prince Nefer.
‘Tata, show me where it was that you captured the leader of the
robber barons.' Nefer's voice cracked with excitement and the onset of
puberty. ‘Was it here?' He ran to the broken-down wall at the south
side of the square. ‘Tell me the story again.'
‘No, it was here. This side,' Taita told him, stood up and strode on
those long, stork-thin legs to the eastern wall. He looked up to the
crumbling summit. ‘The ruffian's name was Shufti, and he was one-eyed
and ugly as the god Seth. He was trying to escape from the battle by
climbing over the wall up there.' Taita stooped and picked up half of a
baked-mud brick from the rubble and suddenly hurled it upwards. It
sailed over the top of the high wall. ‘I cracked his skull and brought him
down with a single throw.
Even though Nefer knew, at first hand, the old man's strength, and
that his powers of endurance were legend, he was astonished by that
throw. He is old as the mountains, older than my grandmother, for
he nursed her as he has done me, Nefer marvelled. Men say he has
witnessed two hundred inundations of the Nile and that he built the
pyramids with his own hands. Then aloud he asked, ‘Did you hack off
his head, Tata, and place it on that pile there?' He pointed at the grisly
monument.
‘You know the story well enough, for I have told it to you a hundred
times.' Taita feigned modest reluctance to extol his own deeds.