Kitabı oku: «And His Name Is Dennitza. Daughter of Dawn», sayfa 3

Scary holiday

A strange chomping woke him up. These are two magnificent birds, which he noticed in the trees during the day, pecking pieces of fresh meat on the ground. They did it so aggressively and viciously that they no longer seemed so beautiful. Drops of blood sparkled on the plumage.

Interestingly, but human meat? Taor could not understand the reason for this thought.

He had just had a strange dream – that golden winged creature that he was looking for was sitting opposite him on the ground by the pond and performing some terrible ritual. It cut black birds and whispered something, and then buried winged corpses right in the ground. All around were symbols inscribed in blood and lighted torches. Taor saw neither one nor the other now. The ground was untouched, torches burning only in brackets on the walls behind the garden. The hymn to Aton sounded somewhere again. When he fell asleep, he heard him too. The singing hurt the ear unpleasantly.

«Glory! Your greatness is eternal, beautiful Aton. You shine over everyone, but all your secrets are known to only one Akhenaten. Nobody knows you the way he did».

A strange hymn. Taor raised himself on his elbows. In the darkness, the palace garden did not look as pretty as it did during the day. The gloom closed over the lotus ponds almost perceptibly. The heat was everywhere, not a breath of breeze. Who would have thought to line up torches stuck in the ground in a dense ring and cut birds in their circle? But that was exactly what he saw in half asleep. He probably just imagined it. Everything happened in an eerie silence, the birds did not scream, because their beaks were pulled together by something metallic. The ritual knife, which was commonly used to cut the mouth of mummies, dug into their plumage, slicing through the flesh. The golden winged creature did not raise its head from its occupation. It did everything mechanically and somehow obsessively, as if someone’s life, or more, many lives were veiled from this.

«Many lives of someone’s enemies», these were also the words of the hymn to Aton, or someone pronounced them right into the silence. «You can only slaughter black birds, and the warriors on the battlefield will die by themselves. Or, on the contrary, rise from the dead. What I wish. My choice is everything, and yours is nothing».

Taor looked around in bewilderment. The dream was eerie, and now it left a heavy impression. It seemed that graceful fingers, tearing apart the carcasses of birds, and then digging graves for them, would never leave his memory. A beautiful creature in a dream moved itself somehow like an animal. So predatory!

Somewhere in the distance the rhythmic beat of many drums was heard, after a while the sounds of lyres, flutes, flutes and zithers joined it. It looks like a holiday. At a time like this? It’s deep night now.

Taor got up with difficulty and walked in the direction from which the music was heard. It was now gloomy, now solemn. With such sounds, they were escorted to the tomb of the pharaohs. There was more of a funeral hymn here than of idle mirth. Maybe someone died? Taor was somehow all the same… One ruler, another ruler. The young man is used to not getting attached to anyone. He was a lonely person, not tied either by family or by any material values. His duty was to serve the one who is currently occupying the throne of Egypt. And who exactly, it doesn’t matter… But the thought that that beautiful golden creature, which he took for the princess of Egypt, could be buried with such celebrations, echoed with an unbearable blow in his mind. He clearly imagined how a winged body was lying on a luxurious stretcher, his hands with claws were folded on his chest, and a real live snake with a golden skin was twisting on his forehead instead of the royal ureus.

He hurried. The premises of the palace were empty, as well as in the dark gardens. Nobody! No servants, no guards, not a single person… But judging by the sounds that reached him, a large crowd had gathered in the throne room. Taor rushed there, and then an unpleasant surprise awaited him – two Nubians with halberds, who remained on guard at the entrance, blocked his way.

It was useless to argue with them. Behind the drawn curtains, Taor did not even manage to see what was happening there, beyond the passage that they so vigilantly guard. The guards in the palaces were silent, like statues, and very executive. You can’t slip past them. Taor was about to come to terms with this, but then he noticed a strange man in a Horus suit. Isn’t it now forbidden to worship this god or keep a reminder of him? Taor even doubted the new statutes. The stranger was so confident. He beckoned Taor to follow him, and the young man suddenly realized that he could not disobey.

He moved for the best copy of a god that, perhaps, only a mortal could recreate. Horus moved, dancing slightly, and incessantly beckoning Taor with him with slightly feathered hands.

Taor noticed on the wall a new modified image of Aton, vividly reminding that there is only one god now. And yet Horus was here. Either this is just a joker, if you pay attention to his cheeky postures, or today is the very night when traditions can be violated for some reason.

Some kind of incense smoked on the tripods in the corners with an unusual smell, intoxicating the mind. Maybe it only seems to him that the dancing Horus in front of him is the real god, and the shimmering costume on him is actually an integral part of his body.

Taor felt himself suffocate. He reached up to his neck to rip open the nonexistent collar, but instead tore open the necklace he had worn for a long time – the final reminder of his mother who died. Oddly, he didn’t even feel the slightest regret. The beads rolled across the floor. Taor stepped over them and followed Horus, now beckoning him away from the palace.

So they went out into the street. The crowd was buzzing here. The pleasant nighttime freshness was dispelled by smoking torches. Taor looked around in amazement. How many people gathered in the square in front of the palace. The whole city did not sleep at night? He did not remember anything like that. Those gathered were noisy. Someone expressed delight, someone fear. Taor alone did not understand what was the matter. He followed Horus, before whom the people parted without hesitation. No one recognized him as yesterday’s hero. Or people were just overly involved with something else. He looked in the same direction as everyone else – at the dais in front of the royal palace. It was possible to get there only from the balcony of the throne room, nevertheless, the guards in atypical red robes gathered below. Torches blazed high in the brackets, snatching from the darkness a magnificent image of Aton. Next to him, everyone seemed insects, even the pharaoh, but not the golden creature with luxurious wings, proudly occupying the center of the dais. Everyone came to look at him – a living deity. It looked just like that.

It was performing some kind of ritual. Golden claws took blood from several priests directly from their wrists and mixed with something in a precious goblet. From here, a column of sparkling sparks could be seen, separated from the mixture, and also, like the urey on the head of a winged deity, turned into a real golden snake. She slid down the girl’s body and wrapped around her slender wrist like a bracelet.

Do others see her too? Taor tried to look into the eyes of those next to him to determine. Maybe yes. Otherwise than they are all so intoxicated.

«Alais!» it shouted someone from the crowd. That must be her name. He had never heard such a name before, but if this is the name of a deity, then there is nothing surprising.

Alais’s hand with long golden claws immediately pointed to the one who had called her.

«She points to the victim».

It was said by someone disguised as Horus. He stood next to Taor, as if he had grown out of the ground. The eyes under the bird’s mask sparkled like sapphires.

«But he called her himself.» Taor looked at the man who had already been seized and dragged to the dais. It seems that it was one of the priests who refused to remove the marks of the old gods.

«It always seems that way, because the victims themselves call her some careless word or deed».

Horus’s hand fell confidentially on his shoulder, but Taor threw it off. The touch was very unpleasant, as if a dead bird had touched you.

The seized one had already been brought to the dais and brought to his knees before a new deity with two magnificent wings and a living snake on his wrist. Alais refused to accept the ritual knife, bent down slightly and tore at his throat with her nails. They turned out to be sharper than a knife. Ten knives. Five on each hand. Or did she have more fingers? From this distance, he could not accurately see and count. And she substituted the bowl under the stream of blood, which poured in many streams from the numerous wounds on the neck. The man under her feet was dying in agony, and the golden snake from her wrist smoothly crawled into the glass and wrapped around the bow with some kind of bizarre symbol.

The hymn sounded again, but not only to Aton. Her name was there too. Taor could not understand some of the words and expressions, and the crowd watched in fascination. It seems they have seen this not for the first time and wanted to see it again. Alais clenched her hand into a fist, as if collecting the remains of blood, and then opened her palm, showing the audience some symbols traced in scarlet on the skin. They flashed before Taor’s eyes, instantly reviving the memory of a circle of torches and slaughtered birds, hiss and burial. It seems that there were such symbols too.

For a second, it seemed to him that Alais’s eyes found him alone in the crowd, and a smile like a snake ran across her lips.

He felt bad.

«Let’s go!» someone in a suit of Horus supported him and helped him to leave. Taor did not want to touch this man. The feeling that the suit was part of his body was all too real. Perhaps it was so. After seeing, he began to believe that sometimes gods descend from heaven to walk on earth.

«Then I will go alone», Taor moved away from the obsessive companion. He did not show his resentment in any way.

The sky above the square lit up with golden flashes of sparks, just like in her glass of blood. The guards in red snatched out some people from the crowd, at which Alais at times pointed with her hand, first at one, then at another. And no one objected, no one resisted, although they all faced the same fate as the priest who had just been sacrificed. Someone was robbed of children, someone of wives… but there was not a word of objection. The creature at the top seemed to have hypnotized people, forcing them to give their lives for granted.

Life and blood. Alais took both. And it seemed that over the square, along with sparks, many winged snakes, created by someone’s creepy imagination, were flying. Taor was not even afraid that they might seize him. For Alais, there seemed to be no titles or ranks during the sacrifices. She just told people to give her life, and people gave her. With humility.

Taor felt a burning sensation and nausea.

«Glory to the daughter of the sun», so they called her. The anthem became more and more gloomy. The terrible holiday continued, and he ran away, and yet he wanted to suddenly turn around and once again look at today’s deity. There, on the dais. Alais was no longer alone, someone dark and gloomy, huge, like a black cloud, bent over her, as she herself had recently over the throne of Akhenaten. He behaved just like her, predatory and arrogant, to match the king himself. If the whole world had a king, it would be him. Only from afar it seemed immaterial, more like a dense shadow. And this shadow also had black wings.

Demon pact

Nobody has visited this place for a long time. No one was allowed, because everything here remained as before.

Hall of the Gods. He called it the hall of sculptures. Round as a sanctuary, it always seemed half empty. The oppressive size accompanied the feeling that people here are insects. Along the perimeter of the circle between the columns, majestic bronze figures occupied their niches. Seth, Anubis, Hathor, Isis, Basted are deadly deities around a single living thing that appeared as if out of nowhere.

Alais could enter through one of the aisles between the columns, which looked more like empty niches, but he knew for sure that she did not. She seemed to be born out of nothing right here. In a room full of sculptures of gods that seem to be gone. Anyway, not a single person on earth has ever seen the statues move. Unlike them, Alais was alive and mobile, but even more powerful than if the heavy statue came to life and came down from the pedestal. He was afraid of her.

He is the high priest of Amon-Ra. At the sight of the statue of his god in the niche, he guiltily averted his eyes. He, like many priests, long ago realized for himself one truth. The gods are more a symbol of strength than strength itself. Alais completely turned this performance upside down. The sun god seemed to come to life in her. Here, in the dim hall, he was real, alive. He had a slender female body, held on too self-confident, wings behind his back, glowing golden skin and even more golden hair. It was as if it was entirely sculpted from liquid molten gold, which for some reason, having taken shape, did not solidify, but continued to burn, continued to move, and inside this amazing creation some kind of evil all-crushing force suddenly awakened by itself.

Before her, the pharaohs were considered gods only symbolically. But many in the palace were not from the common people, for example, the priests, realized that the pharaohs are mortal, like ordinary people, they can be killed, you can arrange a conspiracy, no god will come down from the pedestal to protect them. With the advent of Alais, the concept of divinity suddenly became literal. She was not flesh and blood like all Pharaohs. She could not be injured or killed. But she herself can do arbitrariness with everyone. Absolute deity! Not a human! Without feelings. Emotionless. No weakness. Invincible. Merciless. Not knowing pain and compassion. She will never grow old. Will never die. What will happen then with Egypt.

Essentially nothing. One immortal ruler will replace the mortal dynasty. That’s all. But darkness will come with her. Rivers of blood. Dark wonders.

«Whoever dares to kill her will commit suicide, the one who dares to raise his hand against her will immediately lose his hand,» said the winged creature in the sands. Why did he dare to check these words.

«The man who shouted my name in the crowd at night in the square, you sent him in vain,» Alais’s voice also burned his ears like molten mercury. It was painful to listen to her, but it was also impossible to leave. If he tries, she will bring him back in one small effort. She will just squeeze her beautiful hand into a fist, and at the same time he seems to bump his forehead against the wall and fall right at her feet. This is how the gods behave. Real gods. Only insects are mortal for them. Once in his youth, he longed for the appearance of a real deity, even sought him in all parts of the world and did not find it anywhere, but now, in old age, when it appeared in the palace by itself, he felt a chilling fear. Such a creature was not worth looking for, because for all its beauty it was terrifying.

For a while he did not dare to answer her.

«It’s so easy to send your own person to execution», Alais ran her nails in the air as if they were still sparkling with blood. «People so easily sacrifice their own kind for the sake of some invented goals and at the same time consider themselves fair. Who are you after that, since the earth still tolerates you, in spite of all your minor and major sins?»

«Who are you?» he himself did not know how he dared to stubbornly raise his eyes to her.

«It’s not enough to say my name, neither on the holiday of the new moon, nor during the sacrifices, to destroy me,» she said. «I am not one of your Egyptian miracles, and even less a man born of the fruits of the earth, the name has no power over me».

«You are evil!»

«People are evil,» how naturally she said it, if he were a little weaker in reason and could not help but believe her. «People and any gods who vote to populate this land with people. Look at yourself: you send your friends to death, betray your chosen ones, go to any tricks and meanness in order to take a comfortable place, without even thinking that it will be temporary, like life, and out of envy you are ready to destroy a person in the most insidious ways… God created you evil, gave you the ability to lie, to pretend. I, for example, do not know how».

God! She always talked about some one god, even when the cult of Aton was not even discussed. He remembered well the years when Amenhotep the Fourth, the current Akhenaten, was co-ruler of his suddenly ill father, and then she appeared, at first like a spirit woven from a light shadow. At first, she was secretive and did not interfere in anything. Who would have known where her appearance would eventually lead?

In her mouth, God was always the one and only. And it was not clear whether she loved him or hated him fiercely. It was impossible to guess her feelings and thoughts at all. Alais did not deny the presence of a wide variety of higher powers hovering over the universe, did not mind the fact that other gods of Egypt also existed, but someone alone, in her opinion, stood above them all, someone whom she never named, and it was not Aton at all. Aton was a part of herself.

Is she divine? Or is there another name. The stranger in the sands called her differently, and for some reason this word seemed incredibly frightening to him. Angel! Unfamiliar sound. If you do not explain what this means, then you will not understand. For him, it was consonant with the words: murderer, seducer, altering the world in front of you, as Alais did. An angel is an evil with a cold essence and searing beauty.

It was not a name, just a name, because the stranger told him that there are still many such creatures and not all of them are evil, but one is the main thing over all. And this dominant creature was Alais. This explained her arrogance and a sense of absolute power over everyone: both people and even gods. She was sure that both physical and ethereal creatures would submit to her. She has more strength in her little finger than an entire army. And she doesn’t want to use this power for good. How not to be afraid of her?

«Merira is the former high priest of Amon-Ra, the current high priest of Aton, tell me, is there something that does not suit you with your current position? Does it have any extra privileges that you consider yourself not quite worthy?»

How easily she pronounced his name, as if she really had some secret power over him. It is worth calling an object or person by name, and you gain invisible power over it. Merira still didn’t believe it. But next to Alais everything changed. All the usual reality scattered to dust. A being called an angel overshadowed all the gods he was used to.

«Tell me if it was worth mixing them all.» He scanned the circle of statues. «Hathor, Isis, Osiris, Amon and Mut, all of them, this pile of dead stones and the living meaning inherent in them, which makes the crowds prostrate before them, and helps the pharaohs to keep their power. And all this for the sake of the appearance of a single living angel».

The creature with golden claws, an article of a deity and wings arched its eyebrows in disbelief.

«Angel!» She repeated it as if for the first time she had heard the word itself. «Do you know what this name means?»

«He … – that is, a stranger in the sands. – He said that it means a messenger, a messenger with a message…»

«For our family, yes,» the golden head nodded condescendingly in agreement. «But for you this word means something else…» an instant throw of the hand, like a snake that caught his throat, squeezed. Alais’s lips, breathing fire, tilted to his ear to hiss just one word. «Evil!»

Absolute evil! He felt it rather than heard it. The auricle was burned. How hot her breath is! She could have set the whole city on fire if she had just died. But for now, she kept herself in a cold, regal manner. How long will this last yet?

He rubbed his neck excitedly after she finally released him. Even before that, Merira suspected that a being called an angel carries in itself an indescribable evil. One had only to look at Alais to feel this evil. Something malicious, oppressive, all-crushing emanated from her beauty… Those who looked at her felt like crushed insects at her feet. Perhaps this is how it should be, if the creature in front of you is from the angelic race. But who are these angels after all? If they are higher than the gods, and people, and earthly rulers, then where did they come from?

All the questions led nowhere, and Alais’s beautiful lips grinned coldly. When she smiled, it seemed that not a smile, but a snake ran over her lips. And at the same time, something in her inexpressibly attracted.

«Then what does your name mean? The name that you carry now?» he did not give up, trying to get at least something from her. There is something that has power over her. In any case, there is always hope to find at least one weak point.

«But this does not concern you any more».

Merira watched as she imperceptibly circled the hall, her movements were deliberately slow and at the same time seemed impetuous. The wings fluttering behind them reminded of a storm in the sands. Alais was more self-confident than any kings. She, too, looked into the motionless faces of the statues, but felt only triumph. No remorse. But it was she who drove them all out of here.

«You probably want a war to break out because of you».

«War?» Alais grinned cruelly. «War for me means an indisputable victory. The hand that has risen on me will immediately dry up, the sword aimed at me will instantly turn against its owner. I know who my father is, and this is not one of the deathly Egyptian gods, but you know his name».

She bent down and whispered in his ear. And these were the words of an angel.

The winged man in the sand seemed to be saying the same to him, but the way she said it sounded scary, almost like a snake. More precisely, she would have scared the snake with her hiss. What a stark contrast to such beauty. For some reason, this combination made it even worse.

Alais knew her own worth, and was fully aware of her own strength. She will crush the whole world, just step on him with her heel, and he will crack under the weight of her oppression.

«Maybe he’s worth it,» her eyes declared slyly. «With the pettiness of people and their intrigues, with their hypocrisy. Show me at least one infinitely kind person, and I will spare the world for his sake, as Michael (this is the name of that winged guard that you saw in the sands) is ready to do for the sake of only one believer as a whole a swarm of wicked people. He has repeatedly stated that only one person devoted to God is worth sparing an entire country of atheists for the sake of his sincere faith. He believes that the faith of one pays for the excesses of many. Let’s say I’m ready to do the same, but I need one absolutely pure soul. A person who never wishes harm to anyone and under any circumstances. If I see such a person and do not be disappointed in him, as God was disappointed in me, then I may save the human world from destruction, which the Almighty now wants. After all, he created the devil as punishment for arrogant people. He created me.» The tip of the snake tongue licked his cheek. «I am a punishing force because people have become too cruel. Rivers of blood must be shed to cleanse the world that God so carelessly created. He already regrets it, although he does not want to openly admit it. Hypocrisy is his strong point, but not mine. I speak openly, even though the truth hurts. I will not regret people, only beautiful things made by their hands, but there are already plenty of them in the world. Show me someone I can regret to stop me. Time is limited. Thirteen sunrises because thirteen is my favorite number».

Her wings flapped again, gracefully and somehow dangerously, as if they could twine around him and strangle him in a deadly embrace. Merira reluctantly retreated.

«It’s a fair deal,» he nodded. If only she fulfills her conditions…

«Just one person,» Alais repeated. «You only need to find one, but someone who will not disappoint me. He alone must be so pure as to become worthy to atone for the sins of all mankind».

The priest was afraid of her. Alais knew that. Backing away, he stumbled and fell. How awkward! Where can he find something.

But the deal was good. Just one soul! Alais had never met one like this before, although it seemed like an eternity remained behind her. Only one person, unlike all people, could change her idea of eternity.

And this man almost became a young man who uttered a strange request the other day in the throne room, but he somehow disappointed her.