Читать книгу Mistress of Pharaohs. Daughter of Dawn онлайн

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“Would you like to go hunting with me in Shedet?” He suddenly suggested.

“What’s so special about Shedet that you would offer a glimpse of it to a deity?” All Alais knew was that the Libyan desert stretches around the oasis where Shedet is located. She herself rarely flew there, but her servants lived near the city.

“The best waterfalls and Lake Mer-ur are there.”

“Are there plenty of crocodiles there?” Alais remembered that one of her demons, who loved to subdue reptiles, had settled there.

“There are also hippos there. Do you know how much fun it is to hunt them?”

“I prefer to hunt humans,” Alais said. Menes might have thought it an insult, but he didn’t.

“Hunting humans is called war,” he said from his own experience.

“It is not always.”

Alais had a different experience. After the war in the sky, there was a long hunt on earth to survive. One demon, whose name was Sokar, caught travelers in the desert and skinned them alive so he could wrap it around his burns like bandages. It made him look like a living mummy. As far as Alaïs had learned from Menes, it was in honor of Sokar that the Egyptians began to make mummies out of the dead. The demon had taught them something. And Sokar was now revered as the god of the dead and of necropolises. It was quite his path. Alais herself would have called him the god of death, but strangely enough, in addition to his grim merits, he was also revered as a god of fertility. Apparently, the corpses he left behind served as excellent fertilizer for the land. Alais had noticed that the earth, on which her angels had fallen, greedily fed on all the remains of life.