Читать книгу Wildcard - Rachel Lee - Страница 6

Akhetaten, Egypt

1329 B.C.E.

Tutu watched the wanton destruction with a heavy heart. His ruler and patron, Akhenaten, was dead, along with the Pharaoh’s beautiful wife, Nefertiti, savagely murdered in a religious coup, their bodies hacked to pieces and fed to desert jackals.

Tutu himself had escaped the bloodletting, thus far, only because he had been out of the city at the time. But when they found him, they would kill him. Of that, Tutu had no doubt. The royal chamberlain could not be allowed to survive. Tutu had studied too much, learned too much, even if he had not been at Akhenaten’s side to make use of that knowledge when it most mattered. He must die, and what he had learned must die with him.

Tutu cared not for his own life. He was an old man, and death would claim him, one way or another, soon enough. But the knowledge must live.

Hiding amidst the rocks above what had once been the workers’ village, Tutu could not help but chuckle at the irony of it all. Had Akhenaten not grown up with a Hebrew, he might well have kept his birth name, Amenhotep the Fourth. Like his father and his grandfather before him, he would have ruled in the city of Thebes. He would have remained in the good graces of the priests of Amun. He might still be alive.

Instead, Tutu and young Amenhotep had grown up and played with a boy whom Tutu’s mother had plucked from a reed basket in the Nile. Tutu and the young prince had hidden in the shadows as his Hebrew friend listened to the wisdom of his people. Afterward, the three would sneak away together to discuss in secret what they had heard that day. Secrets had shaped Akhenaten’s life from childhood, and in the end they had consumed him.

Perhaps it had been all his fault, Tutu thought, not for the first time. Would young Amenhotep and his friend have tumbled onto the hidden codes by themselves? Probably not. Writing and its mysteries were Tutu’s gift—and his curse. As fluent in Hebrew as he was in Egyptian, even as a child, Tutu had transcribed from memory the stories he had heard. The Egyptian stories he wrote in the royal picture script. The Hebrew stories he wrote in their own language. That had been both his triumph and his downfall.

For once Amenhotep had ascended to the throne, Tutu no longer had to conceal his fascination with the Hebrew scrolls he had written down as a child. The scrolls that had begun to reveal coded mysteries beyond Tutu’s wildest imagination. The scrolls that now lay in a leather bag at his feet. Tutu had shared those mysteries with his two boyhood friends, and their fascination had spurred further study and the discovery of more mysteries.

It was those mysteries that had led Amenhotep to abandon the priests of Amun, change his name to Akhenaten and build the city that was even now being laid to ruin.

The mysteries of the Light. Tutu was now their sole surviving guardian. Akhenaten was dead. Their childhood friend had vanished into the desert, a fugitive wanted for murder. If the mysteries were to be preserved, it was up to Tutu.

With a sad sigh, he took a last look at the once beautiful city that had been his home for the past decade. Then he picked up his precious leather bag and the lone waterskin he had been able to scavenge from the home of a long-departed workman, and crept around the northern rim of the city. It would be a long walk down the Nile to the camps of the Hebrews. But they would offer him sanctuary in his last days.

And, perhaps, he would find among them a young man or two whom he could teach. If only the Light would grant him the time.