The Quest - Smith Wilbur (читаем книги онлайн бесплатно TXT) 📗

The old man lowered his eyes to hide the shadow of fear that passed behind them. What worse news could there be than they had already received? He looked up again and spoke sternly: 'Do not try to protect me, Meren. Hold nothing back. Has the flood of the Nile commenced?'

'Not yet,' Meren replied softly, regretfully. 'Seven years now without the inundation.'

Taita's stern expression wavered. Without the rise of the waters and the rich, fertile bounty of alluvial soils they brought from the south, Egypt was given over to famine, pestilence and death.

'Magus, it grieves me deeply but there is still worse to relate,' murmured Meren. 'What little water still remains in the Nile has turned to blood.'

Taita stared at him. 'Blood?' he echoed. 'I do not understand.'

'Magus, even the shrunken pools of the river have turned dark red and they stink like the congealed blood of cadavers,' Meren said. 'Neither man nor beast can drink from them. The horses and cattle, even the goats, are perishing from thirst. Their skeletal bodies line the riverbanks.'

'Plague and affliction! Such a thing has never been dreamed of in the history of the earth since the beginning time,' Taita whispered.

'And it is not a single plague, Magus,' Meren went on doggedly. 'From the bloody pools of the Nile have emerged great hordes of spiny toads, large and swift as dogs. Rank poison oozes from the warts that cover their hideous bodies. They eat the corpses of the dead animals. But that is not enough. The people say great Horus should forbid it, that these monsters will attack any child, or any person who is too old or feeble to defend himself. They will devour him while he still writhes and screams.' Meren paused and drew a deep breath. 'What is happening to our earth? What dreadful curse has been placed upon us, Magus?'

In all the decades they had been together, since the great battle against the usurpers, the false pharaohs, since the ascension of Nefer Seti to the double throne of Upper and Lower Egypt, Meren had been at Taita's side. He was the adopted son who could never have sprung naturally from Taita's gelded loins. Nay, Meren was more than a son: his love for the old man surpassed that of a blood tie. Now Taita was moved by his distress, although his own was as pervasive.

'Why is this happening to the land we love, to the people we love, to the king we love?' Meren pleaded.

Taita shook his head, and remained silent for a long while. Then he leant across to touch Meren's upper arm. 'The gods are angry,' he said.

'Why?' Meren insisted. The mighty warrior and stalwart companion was rendered almost childlike by his superstitious dread. 'What is the offence?'

'Since our return to Egypt I have sought the answer to that question.

I have made sacrifice and I have searched the breadth and depth of the skies for some sign. The cause of their divine anger eludes me still. It is almost as though it is cloaked by some baleful presence.'

'For Pharaoh and Egypt, for all of us, you must find the answer, Magus,'

Meren urged. 'But where can you still search for it?'

'It will come to me soon, Meren. This is presaged by the auguries. It will be carried by some unexpected messenger - perhaps a man or a demon, a beast or a god. Perhaps it will appear as a sign in the heavens, written in a star. But the answer will come to me here at Gallala.'

'When, Magus? Is it not already too late?'

'Perhaps this very night.'

Taita rose to his feet in a single lithe motion. Despite his great age he moved like a young man. His agility and resilience never ceased to amaze Meren, even after all the years he had spent at his side. Taita picked up his staff from the corner of the terrace and leant lightly on it as he paused at the bottom of the stairs to look up to the high tower. The villagers had built it for him. Every family in Gallala had taken part in the labour. It was a tangible sign of the love and reverence they felt for the old magus, who had opened the sweet-water spring that nourished the town, who protected them with the invisible but potent power of his magic.

Taita started up the circular staircase that wound up the outside of the tower; the treads were narrow and open to the drop, unprotected by a balustrade. He went up like an ibex, not watching his feet, the tip of his staff tapping lightly on the stones. When he reached the platform on the summit, he settled on the silken prayer rug, facing east. Meren placed a silver flask beside him, then took his place behind him, close enough to respond swiftly if Taita needed him, but not so close that he would intrude on the magus's concentration.

Taita removed the horn stopper from the flask and took a mouthful of

the sharply bitter fluid. He swallowed it slowly, feeling the warmth spreading from his belly through every muscle and nerve in his body, flooding his mind with a crystalline radiance. He sighed softly and allowed the Inner Eye of his soul to open under its balmy influence.

Two nights previously the old moon had been swallowed by the monster of night, and now the sky belonged only to the stars. Taita watched as they began to appear in order of their ranking, the brightest and most powerful leading the train. Soon they thronged the heavens in teeming multitudes, bathing the desert with a silvery luminance. Taita had studied them all his life. He had thought he knew all that there was to know and understand of them, but now, through his Inner Eye, he was developing a new understanding of the qualities and position of each in the eternal scheme of matter, and in the affairs of men and gods.

There was one bright, particular star that he sought out eagerly. He knew it was nearest of all to where he sat. As soon as he saw it all his senses were exalted: that evening it seemed to hang directly above the tower.

The star had first appeared in the sky exactly ninety days after the mummification of Queen Lostris, on the night he had sealed her into her tomb. Its appearance had been miraculous. Before she died she had promised him that she would return to him, and he felt a deep conviction that the star was the fulfilment of her oath. She had never left him. For all these years her nova had been his lodestar. When he looked up at it, the desolation that had dominated his soul since her death was alleviated.

Now when he gazed at it with his Inner Eye he saw that Lostris's star was surrounded by her aura. Although it was diminutive when compared to some of the astral colossi, no other body in the heavens could match its splendour. Taita felt his love for Lostris burn steadily, undiminished, warming his soul. Suddenly his whole body stiffened with alarm and a coldness spread through his veins towards his heart.

'Magus!' Mefen had sensed his change of mood. 'What ails you?'

He clasped Taita's shoulder, his other hand on the hilt of his sword.

Unable to speak in his distress, Taita shrugged him away, and continued to stare upwards.

In the interval since he had last laid eyes upon it, Lostris's star had swollen to several times its normal size. Its once bright and constant aura had become intermittent, the emanations fluttering as disconsolately as the torn pennant of a defeated army. Its body was distorted, bulging at each end and narrowing in the centre.

Even Meren noticed the change: 'Your star! Something has happened to it. What does this mean?' He knew how important it was to Taita.

'I cannot yet say,' Taita whispered. 'Leave me here, Meren. Go to your sleeping mat. I must have no distraction. Come for me at dawn.'

Taita kept watch until the star faded with the approach of the sun, but by the time Meren returned to lead him down from the tower, he knew that Lostris's star was moribund.

Though he was exhausted from his long night's vigil, he could not sleep. The image of the dying star filled his mind, and he was harried by dark, formless forebodings. This was the last and most awful manifestation of evil. First there had been the plagues that killed man and beast, and now this terrible malignancy, which destroyed the stars. The following night Taita did not return to the tower but went alone into the desert, seeking solace. Although Meren had been instructed not to follow his master, he did so at a distance. Of course, Taita sensed his presence and confounded him by cloaking himself in a spell of concealment. Angry, and worried for his master's safety, Meren searched for him all night. At sunrise when he hurried back to Gallala to raise a search party, he found Taita sitting alone on the terrace of the old temple.