Hades Daughter (21 page)

At night, when the palace was quiet, he knelt before an altar to Artemis he’d found tucked away in a chamber just off the megaron and prayed to her for guidance and the wisdom to direct his orders. He could barely wait until the fleet had sailed and he could reach the island where Artemis had promised to meet him. He’d included a pure white goat in the cargo of his own ship, meaning to take it to the island and sacrifice it to the goddess in thanks for her aid and blessing.

Then, much later at night, when he had returned to the chamber he shared with Cornelia and lay by her side, he wondered at Membricus’ words. Hades’ daughter, he’d called this girl. Sometimes he rolled over to face her, and placed a gentle hand on her belly, feeling his child move within her.

At those times he would also feel her muscles tense with her hatred, and he would sigh. Again and again he regretted taking her in marriage, and taking her with such pain and violence that first night, but every time he felt the movement of his child his regrets would fade, and he felt only the wonder of the new growing life.

The night before the Trojans would sail, Brutus came to his and Cornelia’s chamber very late. He had spent most of the evening on the beach supervising the loading of the last of the livestock, then the earlier part of the night praying to Artemis. Now, although he was tired, he knew his anxiety about the coming day would keep him wakeful, and when he lay down beside Cornelia, he placed his hand again on her belly, and spoke.

“Have you said your goodbyes to your father, Cornelia? Tomorrow will be a crowded and busy day, and it is possible you will be so hurried on to our ship that you will lose your chance to kiss him farewell.”

For a moment he thought she would continue her pretence at sleep, but then she sighed, and opened her eyes. “My father and I have nothing more to say to each other. All that could be said, has been said.”

“Are you angry, Cornelia, that I drag you away from your childhood home?”

“What do you think? Am I happy that my father was humiliated and destroyed by Trojans? No! Am I joyful that you murdered the man I loved? No! Am I happy that you then seized me and put this child in me? No! Leave me here, I pray you, Brutus, and I swear before the gods that I will remember you kindly.”

He laughed softly, his hand caressing her belly, then her thigh. “Everyone begs me to leave you behind, but I cannot. Perhaps we should put our hatred away, Cornelia, and play at being a true husband and wife together. Make the best of what is.”

“Why? You have destroyed everything I loved.”

Brutus bit down a sudden flare of temper. By the gods, would she never get over her resentment? It was a poor dowry indeed to bring to a marriage. “We go to rebuild Troy, sweet. Does that not excite you? I will make you a queen, and burden you with jewels, and you shall be the envy of every woman and the lust of every man in Troia Nova.”

“I want to stay
here.
I want to stay with my
father,
and I want you
gone
!” One of her small hands had clenched into a fist, and she beat it gently against her taut belly as she spoke.

“I cannot turn back time, Cornelia. For the love of the gods, girl, stop this whining about what once was, and learn to live with what is! You are carrying my child. I am
not
going to leave you behind!”

“I wanted Melanthus,” she said. “I loved Melanthus. I did not want
you.
I will never love
you
!”

Brutus moved closer to her, her mention of Melanthus stirring him to jealousy and resentment as it
always did. She might have loved Melanthus, and still love his memory, but Melanthus was not the one whom she lay with at night, nor the one to get her so large with child. Why did she not forget the boy? “I do not want your love. I do not even require it. But I
am
your husband, and that bond allows me to demand your loyalty and your service, as it binds me to your protection and care.”

He began to make love to her, gently as he always did, and she averted her face and pretended indifference, as she always did. And, as so often, he felt her body respond to his; Cornelia could pretend many things, but she could not hide from him the involuntary responses of her muscles nor the raggedness of her breath.

Much later, when he had done and had felt her body shudder in its own release, he moved back from her, intending to withdraw and lie by her side, holding her until she slept.

But as he moved, she turned her face back to him and opened her deep blue eyes, and said, “Did you know that whenever you lie with me I imagine that you are Melanthus? That the reason I respond as I do to you is by repeating Melanthus’ name as a mantra over and over and over in my mind?”

He froze, shocked and angry, and furious at himself for allowing her words to sting so deeply. She was lying, he knew it…surely? No woman could have one man make love to her and yet keep another man’s face and name at the forefront of her mind…could she?

Cornelia watched him carefully, and as she saw his reaction her mouth curved in a cold smile. “Of course, Melanthus would have had more stamina than you,” she said. “He was so much younger. So much more athletic.”

He pulled away from her, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and sitting, head in hands, trying to bring his temper under control.
Witch!

“Far more desirable,” she whispered, and he heard her shift on the bed, as if in an agony of wanting.

It was too much. He swung back to her, grabbing one of her wrists in his hand, and jerked her across the bed to him.

“You wouldn’t dare,” she hissed. “I carry your son. You wouldn’t dare.”

“Then beware of the day you no longer carry that child, Cornelia. Beware the day.”

“On the contrary, beloved,” she said, the word an insult, “I look forward to it greatly.”

Then she rolled away from him, made herself comfortable with some ostentatious fuss, and pretended to fall into sleep.

O
h, his expression! I had wanted to say that to him for months, to taunt him, to
insult
him. And to watch his face redden as my barbs hit home; to watch the hurt in his eyes…it partly repaid me for all the humiliation he’d put me through in the past months.

Another day, and he would be dead.

Brutus took some time to lie back down to sleep, and I wondered if I’d been as clever as I’d initially thought. I couldn’t afford to have him awake
all
the night through. Should I turn and say something sweet to placate him? The thought made my stomach turn, but if I had to…No, praise Hera. Eventually I heard the deep regular breathing of sleep.

To be sure, I lay awake for many hours, enjoying the sense of happiness and anticipation that flooded through me. Tomorrow night Brutus would be gone, and all the other Trojans either dead with him or re-enslaved into such bondage it would be the ruination of all their hopes.

Tomorrow night I and my father would again be supreme within Mesopotama, laughing together as we surveyed the destruction we had wrought.

Tomorrow night I could prevail upon Tavia to feed me those herbs which would cause me to birth this hateful baby before its time. Then neither of us would need fear Brutus’ wrath at the murder of his son.

Tomorrow night I would sit and watch the horrid thing between my legs, bathed in its birth blood, gasping for—yet never gaining—air, and I would laugh with delight as it died, as Brutus’ hopes would die during this coming day.

Within the week my belly would be flat again, and I could forget all the horror of these past few months. My father would again rule from his megaron, and I would again stand beside him, clad in the most wondrous of linens and the rarest of silks…and no one would ever dare to think of that time that Brutus and the Trojans had humiliated us.

These past months would vanish as if they had never been…and perhaps the gods would be generous enough to allow Melanthus to rise from the dead and take his rightful place beside me and in my bed.

Tomorrow night…tomorrow night…tomorrow night all these things would come to pass.

But first, as Brutus slept, I needed to spend the darkest hour on one last task to ensure that tomorrow night was indeed all that I could hope.

Silently sending my nightly prayer of thanks to that strange goddess with the black curly hair with its peculiar russet streak (Hera might be weak beyond telling, but her distant sister had proved more than beneficial), I sat up carefully, and looked at Brutus’ face.

He was deeply asleep, his face slack, his chest moving in slow, lumbrous breaths.

I slid from the bed and reached for a loose gown to pull about my bulky nakedness.

T
he moment Cornelia had slipped from the room, Brutus’ eyes flew open. He rose, snatching at his waistband and cloth, then trod silently to the door.

What was she doing?

He had not slept. Instead, Brutus had lain seething beside Cornelia, controlling his breathing and muscles so she would not know he was awake, wondering how he could rid himself of her once she’d borne his son.

Her vicious words had upset him beyond knowing—and he was angry that he
was
so upset. He had gone out of his way to be kind to her over these past months, only for her to repay him with such vituperation. Membricus was right. Deimas was right.
Everyone
who had spoken to him their wary words about the bitch he’d taken to wife was right.

The instant she’d birthed his son he would rid himself of her. The very instant…

Brutus had been lost in a fantasy of tipping Cornelia over the side of a ship for the giant marine worms to consume—he watching as he cradled his newly born son—when he felt her rise.

At first Brutus thought she was just using the chamber pot, or perhaps washing away the traces of their sex, as she sometimes did. But instead she slipped from the chamber, and his mind instantly flared with suspicion.

There was no need for her to leave the chamber at this hour of the night.

At the door Brutus peered carefully up and down the corridor’s length. It was the main thoroughfare of the royal chambers of the palace, and silent and still at this hour of the deep night.

Save for the soft tread of Cornelia’s feet.

Brutus slipped silently into the corridor, following the sound of Cornelia’s footsteps, and thanking Artemis that she was so awkwardly pregnant now that graceful, silent movements were unachievable and that the small oil lamp she carried threw flickering shadows that he could follow at a safe distance.

Still, she moved quickly enough for her bulk, and Brutus had some trouble keeping her in view, yet staying hidden himself. She left the main corridor for a narrower passage used for servant access, leaving that in turn for a staircase that wound through several levels to the basements of the palace.

Brutus was sweating now, not from any effort required to keep up with Cornelia, but because of the increased risk of discovery in this narrow, winding stairwell. He could keep out of sight of his wife, for the glow of her lamp guided him, but of necessity he had to climb down in the dark, and Brutus was concerned lest he should trip and so alert Cornelia to his presence.

But the gods were with him, and he reached the bottom of the stairwell without mishap.

He looked slowly, infinitely carefully, around the corner of the stairwell.

There was a flash of blue linen—Cornelia’s gown—in a doorway that had been so cunningly concealed within racks holding a legion of dusty and cracked amphorae that Brutus would otherwise have walked straight by it. Even so, by the time he’d worked out
exactly where it was, several minutes had passed, and Brutus was worried Cornelia would have slipped away completely in that time.

Again the gods were with him. When Brutus stepped carefully through the door, he saw that Cornelia’s lamp glowed not far distant, around one turning of a short corridor.

There was a soft murmur of voices, and Brutus’ heart beat harder.

With the utmost care, tense and ready to flee the instant the lamp glow moved back towards him or the voices drew closer, Brutus crept down to the turning. He thought of peering around it, but his innate caution won out, and so he pressed himself against the stone wall, and listened.

“You came safe?” he heard Cornelia say.

“Aye.” A man’s voice, deep and confident. “Although the tunnel to this place was damp and running with filth. You could have told us it was a sewer.”

If Brutus had not been so consumed with anger, he might have smiled at that.

“How many?” Cornelia said.

“All you requested.”

“And you have arms?”

“Aye, more than enough to equip three times our number.”

“Good.” Brutus could hear the satisfaction in Cornelia’s voice, and it was all he could do to keep his rage under control. A daughter of Hades indeed!

“You will follow me up these corridors,” Cornelia said, and Brutus tensed, ready to move, “and I will show you the way to the streets outside. Hide yourself until it is time. Now, be quiet, for the palace sleeps about us.”

By the time Cornelia arrived back in her chamber, no doubt tired and anxious lest her husband had awoken during her absence, Brutus was back in bed, his face slack, his chest drawing in the long, slow breaths of deepest sleep.

“
Y
ou were right to warn me of Cornelia,” Brutus said, his voice dangerously expressionless, “and right to think that some Dorian mischief is planned.” Treachery aside, her vicious words regarding Melanthus still played over and over in his mind.

He took a deep breath, and looked around at the men in Deimas’ house: Deimas himself, Assaracus, Membricus, Hicetaon, Idaeus, several other of his senior officers, and Trojan men from Pandrasus’ former slave community. Brutus had risen just before dawn, murmured to Cornelia as she mumbled a query that he wanted to check the final preparations for the boarding and that he would send for her later, and come to Deimas’ house, shouting that he wanted his senior commanders and leaders of the Trojan community here within the half-hour.