Hades Daughter (29 page)

I smiled, and nodded, and hoped they did not see through my eyes to the fear beneath. I could laugh and
gossip with the best of them when it came to saving my life.

At night Brutus came to lie beside me, but he rarely spoke to me and made no demands on my body. I was not surprised; in the past two weeks my belly had swollen most hideously, and I doubted that even the most lustful of men could climb it.

He did, nonetheless, disturb me, for when he slept he dreamed of such strange things that he tossed and turned and murmured. Among the night-visions which passed through his mind was a dream of a woman. I know this because, as I sat wakeful and watching, I heard him murmur to her, and reach for her, and twice I noted that his member grew hard and erect.

Then I drew back in horror, not only that I feared he might wake and use me to sate his longing for another, but that he actually dreamed of someone else.

Someone to replace me once I’d fulfilled my purpose and delivered him a son? Someone he preferred to me? Someone he…
liked?

Those hours, when I sat there and watched Brutus dream of another woman were among the blackest I’d ever known. It seemed, then, that any hope I had of gaining his regard was very slim indeed.

Sometimes I tried to remember Melanthus, but under my current trying conditions—the burdensome weight of another man’s baby within me, the strangeness of shipboard life, the constant worry that Brutus would abandon or murder me once I’d given birth (an even greater fear now I knew he dreamed of another woman)—I found Melanthus’ face ever more difficult to recall.

Besides, he belonged to a life long gone.

On the morning of the tenth day at sea the forward fore-looker cried out and pointed, and, between the scores of craning necks between where I sat on the aft
deck and the stem of the ship, I could see a faint line on the horizon. It was an immense land, Aethylla’s husband, Pelopan, told me, towards which we sailed. Vaster than could be imagined, and filled with creatures stranger than the wildest fantasy.

“Is this where Brutus leads us?” I asked, hating it that I had to ask Pelopan and so reveal my own complete ignorance of my husband’s intentions. “Is this where he will build the new Troy he speaks of so often?”

“Who can know?” he said, then turned aside to his own wife, holding her hand and smiling with obvious care at her.

I felt a sudden surge of ill will towards them. There they stood, simple, untutored folk, at ease and in love with each other, while I…
I
, who had been bred to such luxury and such privilege, and who should have had love aplenty for the asking, was condemned to a husband I feared and a child I resented. Unbelievably, shamefully, I began to cry again, and had to stand there, enduring Aethylla’s deep sighs and condescending pats on my shoulder, as I wept for all the love I’d lost.

At least Brutus was not there to witness my continuing humiliation. He spent most of the morning shouting and gesturing; doing what all men must, I suppose, when they direct a fleet so large towards a suitable anchorage point. By noon all the shouting and gesturing had paid dividends, for the entire fleet had anchored in shallow waters off a long sandy beach that appeared to extend for a lifetime to either side of our ships. Beyond the beach rose a low range of hills, covered with brush and topped at one point with two strange stone pillars. These, Pelopan informed me, were what was known as the Altars of the Philistines.

When I asked why, he shrugged, but said they were well known among sailors for the natural spring at their base.

The entire afternoon was spent in rafting people to the shore. The word was that this was, indeed, only a temporary stop. We were to camp here and be able to stretch our legs, replenish our supplies both with water and with fresh game, and to hear what Brutus had in store for us.

Many of the adults and some of the older children would not wait for their place on the rafts, and jumped overboard from their ships to wade through the shallows to the beach, but I, naturally considering my dignity and my pregnancy, waited for my place on a raft.

I was surprised when Brutus came to me and indicated he would aid me to the first of the rafts.

“Will you behave yourself?” he asked me.

“Do I have much choice?” I said.

He did not smile, and regarded me a moment with uncomfortable speculation, but then he nodded as if I’d somehow answered a question in his mind and helped me down the side of the ship to the raft with a little more consideration than the manner in which he’d bundled me aboard.

Membricus and Deimas were already waiting on the raft, and Deimas stood and aided me, stone-faced, to a clear spot. I murmured my thanks, and prayed that my plan to win Brutus might actually be having some effect.

I cheered considerably, and did not even mind when Aethylla dropped aboard so inelegantly the raft rocked and I was splashed all down my right side with a wash of sea water.

She was the last to board, and so, waving a goodbye to Brutus who was staying aboard to supervise the loading of subsequent raft-loads, I turned to this strange new land where we were to rest for some days at the least.

I was glad this was not where Brutus meant us to stay permanently. Although the beach itself was pleasant enough, the wind that blew from the interior of the land was hot and dry, and carried with it the stink of hardship and toil. I walked slowly up the beach, enjoying the coolness of the water that swirled about my ankles, my hands in the small of my back, trying to ease some of the discomfort of the child. About me groups of Trojans, clearly relieved to be on dry land, were moving tents and cooking pots a short distance into the low hills beyond the beach to set up sheltered camps.

I stopped, and closed my eyes, and sighed in pleasure. Even the hard soil of this land would prove a more comfortable bed than that damned sleeping pallet on board ship.

“Cornelia.”

I opened my eyes and turned, a twist of discomfort in my stomach.

It was Membricus, Brutus’ never far distant friend. I feared him more than I did Brutus. I sensed that where Brutus might be swayed, Membricus was implacable.

There were no charms I could use against this man, and so I employed none.

“Yes?” I said.

“You are needed,” he began, and his cold eyes slid to my belly, reminding me of
exactly
why I was needed. “Brutus has landed with the last of our people,” not
my
people, “and is now asking that you join him at his side while he speaks to the assembled gathering.”

My eyes widened slightly, and I smiled spontaneously. Brutus wanted me at his side while he stood and addressed his people?

And it was
Membricus
who must bring me this news, when he undoubtedly would prefer to be the one standing at Brutus’ side?

Ever mindful of the precariousness of my position, I repressed my smile, nodded, and followed Membricus back to where the Trojans gathered.

“I am graced with the will of Artemis,” Brutus said, his voice clear and strong. I stood slightly to one side of him on a small rise that faced the beach; before us spread the assembled mass of the Trojans. Although it looked as if I had my eyes on the crowd, I was surreptitiously watching Brutus. Even though I feared him greatly, I had to admit he looked magnificent as he stood in the last rays of the afternoon. Even my father had never commanded so much authority, nor exuded so much confidence. Brutus had apparently waded or swum ashore, for his waistcloth clung to him wetly, and his skin gleamed with droplets from the sea.

About his limbs the golden bands glistened, and for no apparent reason I remembered how, when Brutus lay with me, those bands had always felt hot against my skin. I shuddered, and saw Brutus’ eyes shift my way momentarily, and I dropped my eyes too quickly.

“We are to travel far to the west,” he continued after a moment, “to a land of great beauty and riches. It is called Llangarlia.”

Llangarlia!
At the articulation of that one word it was as if I were back in that strange stone hall of my vision listening to my daughter’s laughter, staring through the stone of the arches into the wondrous landscape beyond.

And this is where we were going?
No wonder I’d dreamed of the stone hall so often since leaving Mesopotama.

I felt a surge of excitement. That wondrous land…where I’d felt such a sense of “home”. And it was no vision at all, but reality? It must be, surely, if that single word recalled the dream so vividly.

Llangarlia…I rolled it silently about my mouth, and found it wonderfully sweet.

Brutus was talking of how this Llangarlia occupied the southern part of a white-cliffed island called Albion. As he spoke I allowed myself to dream a little of this new land—my visionary land—and every time Brutus said the name of “Llangarlia” I felt another small surge of excitement. One of my hands strayed to my belly, and, as Brutus’ voice spoke on, my mind drifted even further, dreaming of what it might be like to stand as queen beside Brutus in Llangarlia.

I was vaguely aware that under my hand my belly was unnaturally hot, and that my fingers and palm were throbbing with that heat, but that awareness did not distract me from my train of thought. Supposing I could make him care for me enough not to kill me when this child was gone from my belly: could I then endure a life with him?

Strangely, impossibly, I wondered if that might not be too difficult at all.

How odd the difference a single word could make…

It was only when I heard the sound of another man’s voice that I blinked, and came back to the moment, dropping my hand from my belly. Brutus had apparently finished his address, and was now answering some questions from the crowd.

One man asked if the people of Llangarlia would welcome the Trojans, and Brutus hesitated before answering.

“It is possible they will not do so,” he said, “but we have the gods with us, and we will prevail.”

There was a murmuring at that, but from what I could see most people seemed reasonably accepting of what Brutus had told them.

I was not surprised. Brutus had seemed almost god-like as he’d talked to the crowd…I shook my head slightly. He’d even had me dreaming of him!

Brutus must have seen my slight movement from the corner of his eye, for he turned to me and told me to make my way down to the campfires, that I should eat and rest, and not weary myself overmuch in this desert air.

I ate sparingly of the raisins and figs, washing them down with healthy draughts of the barely watered wine, justifying the wine as being an antidote to the effects of the hot wind that blew continuously from the interior of this land.

When I had done, and had drunk enough to slake my thirst, I rose, and told Aethylla to leave me be, as I needed to relieve myself at some distance among the scrubby bushes of the hills.

She subsided, nodding sympathetically and remembering, I suppose, her own pregnancy.

Sometimes it helped to be a breeding woman among breeding women.

I did indeed take the opportunity of the relative privacy to relieve myself amid a thankfully dense (but scratchy) patch of shrubs but then, instead of returning to the fireside, I walked further into the hills, drawn as if mesmerised by the hot wind that blew in my face. The wine I had drunk throbbed in my blood, and I shook out my hair from its restraints and let it blow free.

I climbed to the top of the first hill, and stopped to catch my breath. Once I would have been limber enough to run up this gentle slope and not need to pause for breath at all…but not now. I drew in deep, grateful breaths, gazing over the hills rolling into the distance. In this evening twilight the shrubs that covered their slopes gave the hills a purple aspect, and I stood entranced by the sight, my imagination wondering what lay beyond them in this strange land.

I breathed in deeply once more, and found it easy, so I walked down the far slope of this hill and towards the next, pushing my way through the shrubs, tilting back my head and letting their thorny stems catch at my hair.

It seemed like freedom, somehow.

This next hill was steeper, its footing more slippery and stony, and I took far longer to climb its height.

Yet when I did so, and stood, hands on belly, gasping in the sweet night air, the view seemed even more entrancing, the successive rolling waves of hills even more seductive.

I wondered how many people had been seduced deeper and deeper into these hills, and where their bones lay, and if they had been picked clean by strange beasts, or left to be scrubbed white by the sun and the wind.

“Cornelia,” said a voice, so gently, and a soft hand caught at my elbow.

I turned, but did not pull away my arm. I was somehow not surprised to find him behind me.

“I had not thought you the one to be so entranced by such wildness,” he said, smiling, and I, still under the spell of the hills and the wine and Llangarlia, that single word he had spoken hours ago, smiled back.

Brutus drew up to my side, and let go my arm, standing to look over the hills, now almost invisible in the darkening night. His own body, virtually naked save for the waistcloth, was dark and exotic, the linen of the cloth gleaming very white against the darkness of his skin.

A sensation of heat flowed down the length of my spine and I realised, without any surprise at all, that it was desire.

“Were you running away?” he asked, still looking at the hills.

“Where to?” I said. “No, Brutus, I was not running away.”

Without thinking too greatly about it, I reached up a hand to the thong tying back his own heavy hair. It was a mystery to me, this hair, with its tight black curls, blued with the sheen of the herbed oil he rubbed through it every few days.

I tugged at the thong, and pulled it loose, and as his hair flew free in the wind he turned to look at me, his eyes dark and unknowable.

Any woman would have given one of her breasts to possess such magnificence.

“Is this the hair of the goddess?” I asked, wanting to know something of the god-blood that ran in him. “Is this Aphrodite’s bequest to you?”