Nieth-Amun opened
his eyes just in time to see his concubine slip into his rooms holding the
wine-cup in both hands. “For me?” He sat up and smiled. “Thank you.”
Her little
ferret skittered around her and when he drank the wine she offered him, thick
and metallic, came to writhe around his neck and lap as well.
“Honourable
One,” she said. “Is it wise to make one’s
self open to the attention of the Great Goddess with the smell of blood on your
breath?”
“Uika,” he
ran one hand gently over her cheek. It
was so easy to love them. It was so easy
to be loved. It was what he craved most
as a priest, really. Even more than
power and control. After all wasn’t it
control that created love? “Amun is King
of the Gods, above all others, even his wife Maat.” He leaned in and kissed her, reveling in the
scent of her bloody times on her skin. “And
even though the Great Goddess’s belt arcs in the heavens and the Moon trails
Her crystal veil, over the stars, The Great Amun, in the form of a human man,
rules over all.”
“But…” her
eyes filled with tears that brimmed but didn’t fall to ruin her kohl
eyeliner. “Maat and Nuit and Bast –“
He cut her
off. “Goddesses yes. Powerful in Their own sphere. All bow to Amun.”
She flung
herself on him, shaking. “Ni, you deny
even Re?”
“The Sun is
the Creator of life. I deny Him nothing.” Even though he felt a shiver of apprehension
he suppressed it. Truly he was denying
the Creator God nothing at all. There
was no living avatar of Re to stop him.
The spell he’d put on the boy to keep him human until his body died and
rotted away was thinning fast. It was
proof against fire and could not be cut by any blade made of stone or
metal. No one could pull it off his
living body. No insect could clip it,
nor tooth rip it. He could feel it beginning to thin, so the body must be
beginning to rot. He was sorry that the
little boy’s soul had to be destroyed like that, but Re would have resurrected
him no matter what happened, unless there was no mummy, unless his heart were
destroyed.
Once the boy slipped into his
final sleep the jackals and vultures would destroy the body and even Re Himself
wouldn’t be able to resurrect him when He rose next.
Little Cleopatra was weeping as
was to be expected at the death of her mother, but she was a good girl and
trying hard to take up her role as Pharaoh.
He would take the best care of her as he could. She would obey him for years as her surrogate
parent.
He held Uika and soothed her
fears. She and the others in his blood
circle concubines worried so sweetly that he would offend the Gods beyond
saving but his God was the Greatest of them all and he was not afraid.
His sleeping chamber was inside
the palace and had no windows to let in heat or sand, so they did not see the
shining stars streaking across the sky toward the deep sand.
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