Hades Daughter (78 page)

Although we could wash the redness of her blood from our skin, its stain never left our souls. Brutus and I might have left Og’s Hill that dreadful day still breathing, but we were in many ways walking corpses, waiting only for death, and the battle to be renewed in a later life.

The years passed, cold and lifeless. The city grew, as yet unsoured by the lack of completion of the Game. Brutus continued as its king (no longer Kingman, for his golden bands had mysteriously disappeared), apparently joyous and content in his power and the beauty of Troia Nova, inwardly cold and dying,
yearning and angry, using the years left to him in this life only to punish me.

We had two more sons. Two years after Brutus had commanded me back to his bed I discovered myself again with child. I could not believe it for several months, until the hard swelling of my belly left me in no doubt, for I thought my womb had been entirely destroyed when Genvissa had murdered my daughter.

But then I had Mag, didn’t I. I smiled, and put a hand over my womb.

She lived there still, sad, sorrowing as much as me, but with eyes for the future, and the struggles that lay before us.

Brutus considered my unexpected pregnancy a triumph, a further mark of his conquest of my spirit, and when another son followed two years after that, he could hardly contain his malicious glee.

I could not love either child very much. I did not hate them, nor resent them, but rather I regarded them with nothing but indifference. Besides, as sons, and as happened with Achates, they were absorbed completely into Brutus’ world, removed from mine almost as soon as they were born, for Brutus would not allow me to suckle them.

“I shall not have them imbibe her hate and malevolence,” he remarked to the midwives who attended me. “Take them from her as soon as they leave the womb, for my sons will have no dealings with the witch that bore them.”

Oh, to call me a witch, when it was his sorceress lover who had set us all on the path of destruction.

He had other children, daughters as well as sons, with women he took as concubines. Their laughter rang up and down the corridors of the palace, their every footstep and joyful shout a stab wound in my heart.

I missed my daughter, my beloved daughter, with every beat of my heart and with every breath I drew for so long as I lived. She had been my only hope for love.

The
only
hope…in this life, at least.

Twenty-seven years after that dreadful day, Brutus lay dying on his bed as a cancer ate out his throat. He had lived out his time, and none truly grieved, save, I think, for me. I loved him, in a sad, terrible way, and I sorrowed for him, and for me, and for Coel and Loth and all that might have been.

Achates would take Brutus’ place as king, his younger brothers supporting him. He knew nothing of the Game. Brutus had told him nothing, had taught him nothing, remarking to the air one morning as he rose from our cold, hateful bed (he would not speak to me, but he was much given to speaking to the air as if it were a beloved companion) that there was little point. There was no Mistress of the Labyrinth, no hope of completing the Game save when Genvissa’s magic (her malevolence, more like) could pull us all together again to finish what I had interrupted.

“My son will be the lesser man,” he said, fastening his belt and striding from the chamber, “for the evil that walks as his mother.”

And yet still I could not hate him. I cannot truly say why, given the cruelty with which he treated me, but still I could not find it in myself to revile him. I often recalled that day we stood above the hill behind the Altars of the Philistines, and the love that had almost blossomed then. I remember how he had bent his face to mine, his hair blowing about me like a swarm of wild bees, his mouth and tongue tracing lines of desire across my flesh…and yet never laying that warm, wonderful mouth to mine. Teasing me with its closeness, its wantonness, but never laying it against mine.

Never
had he laid his mouth against mine.

Apart from my daughter’s death, this was the greatest regret of my life—that I had been so filled with folly and pride as to swear before him on our wedding night, when all vows and words were binding, that I would never allow his mouth to touch mine.

What would have changed had I allowed him that? What folly and murder and madness would have been avoided had I allowed him to kiss me? Would we have been real lovers before we ever set foot in Llangarlia, too close even for Genvissa’s ambition and magic to tear us apart…or was this only wishful thinking? Had she sunk her claws into him long before we ever reached Llangarlia’s shores? When I had wasted so much time in childish hatred of Brutus, had she been even then comforting him, tempting him, offering him a woman, where I had offered him only a girl?

When Brutus lay dying, he called out for Genvissa.

I knew she lurked just the other side of death’s door, waiting for him. I had no doubt whatsoever that my husband sank the quicker into death in his haste to meet her.

When he did die, drawing his last rattling breath, I cried for all that could have been. I bent down to him, saddened beyond reason, and laid my mouth on his.

But his lips were cold and stiff, and all that issued from his mouth was the stink of death.

And, as my sons (Brutus’ sons, really, they had never been
mine
) gathered about the bed, and the court pressed close, paying their final respects, I rose from the bed and backed away, walking from the room, walking to that small chamber where I spent my days sewing and listening to the gossip of Brutus’ concubines.

There, in a box hidden under layers of colourful linen thread, was the knife with which I had murdered Genvissa.

Asterion’s dagger. Oh, yes, I knew who it belonged to, and I knew of the dark alliance between him and Mag. I also knew what Mag had planned for that alliance.

It made me weep, knowing what lay ahead.

I lifted the knife from its hiding place, the bright threads tumbling about my feet.

“Brutus,” I said on a sob, and desolate, wretched, more lonely than I think anyone has ever been or ever will be, I put the knife to my throat in that same place where I had sunk it into Genvissa’s neck, and thrust it through my skin and flesh with all the strength I could muster.

The pain…the pain was dreadful and yet, somehow, merciful…

T
hey took them, the washed and carefully bundled corpses of Brutus and his hated wife Cornelia, to the well sunk deep into the White Mount from the basements of the palace. There they were lowered, and placed into a chamber that had been hollowed out in the heart of the mound.

Their mourners thought that the gods would take Brutus and Cornelia into their care, but instead they were taken by the Troy Game, and it was not into care at all.

Drawn through death, trapped by Genvissa’s curse and the desperateness of love and ambition and the need of a great city both trapped and blessed by the enchantment that had birthed it, the Game played on.

And, unrestrained as it was by the incompletion of the Flower Dance, the Game
grew.

Six months later a man led an invasion force across the Narrow Seas. He stood in the prow of his ship, uncaring of the sea spray that drenched him, staring at the faint smudge of the white cliffs in the distance before him.

Naked, and daubed with intricate swirling patterns made with blue clay, he was a young man of uncommon dark beauty, and a man who radiated strength and power and purpose.

In the belly of his ship, and in the scores of ships that surged in his wake, crouched thousands of weaponed men who would lay down their lives for him without an instant’s hesitation.

Their king. Goffar’s son, Amorian.

Asterion reborn.

They attacked Troia Nova within two days of landing on Llangarlia’s shores.

Achates and his brothers put up a brave defence, for Brutus had warned them that such an attack was likely, but nothing had prepared them for the viciousness and madness of the Poiterans.

These crazed and naked, blue-daubed warriors feared nothing, and it was as if they were protected by some dark enchantment, for whenever a Trojan or Llangarlian sword aimed directly for Poiteran flesh something turned it away at the last moment, and instead it was the Poiteran blades that sank successfully into their destination.

The Poiterans initially attacked the main western gate, and Achates concentrated his defences there, but unbeknown to him Amorian knew of the low, hidden arch in the northern wall of the city which allowed the Wal River entry into Troia Nova. Through this arch Amorian led a band of some several hundred Poiterans, and they attacked Achates from behind, surprising him so greatly that it took only the work of an hour to open the gates of the city to the main Poiteran force.

The remnants of the Trojan and Llangarlian force fought their attackers for an entire day through the streets of Troia Nova, the Poiterans slowly driving Achates and his men back towards Brutus’ palace atop the White Mount.

In the evening, when the defenders were exhausted and the Poiterans, unbelievably, appeared as fresh as
when they had first launched their attack, Amorian himself cornered Achates in Brutus’ megaron.

He laughed in joy when he saw what Achates carried in his hand: the twisted-horn handled knife. A simple feint, a distracting scream, and the knife was back in Amorian’s hand.

Amorian killed Achates with it, slowly, that he might feed from the power of Achates’ life force seeping from his body.

And then Amorian raged, unbelieving, for when he cut away Achates’ clothes, he saw that the man’s limbs were bare.

Brutus was dead. Achates should wear the kingship bands! Where were they? Where were they?

What had Brutus done with them?

A shiver of fear run through Amorian. How was it he had not known that Brutus did not pass on the bands to his son? Where had Brutus put them? Where?

Infuriated, blind with hatred, Amorian allowed his men free rein through the city. The slaughter was terrible: infants were thrown to the flames or tossed from blade to blade amid Poiteran laughter; women were raped, the prettiest kept for later amusement, the older or the very young used eight or nine times before having their throats cut; men and boys were savaged, slowly and terribly, and left to die in gutters.

Amorian left the corpse of Achates and walked through the butchery. His mind was consumed with thoughts of the kingship bands, but his outward demeanour was that of the victor. His body glistened with sweat and blue clay and blood, his head was thrown back, eyes and laughing mouth screaming encouragement to his men. Sometimes he paused to take his turn with a woman; sometimes he delayed to murder a child, or its father, and drink of the blood that pumped from the death wound.

As Amorian walked, so evil followed unhindered in his footsteps.

When dawn came, Amorian began a systematic search for the golden bands of Troy. It surely would be no trouble to scry out their location, nor, come to it, that of the labyrinth.

Brutus did not have that much power, surely.

And yet a niggling memory that Brutus
was
powerful. Had Amorian not once thought of Brutus as a “fine adversary”?

Too fine an adversary, as it turned out. Once Amorian started searching, it did not take him long to realise that both the bands and the labyrinth had been disguised in such a cunning fashion that they repelled any enchantment he used to discover them. Every time he sent out his power it was reflected—
repulsed
—back to him. Where were they? By the gate to the city? Under the palace? On one of the hills enclosed by the city’s walls? Where? Where?
Where?

Nowhere that Amorian could discern.

And yet the golden bands, as the labyrinth,
were
here. Amorian could feel them in his gut…but whatever Brutus had done to disguise them had been so cunning that nothing Amorian could do could discover them. Brutus’ enchantment even confused the memories of Troia Nova’s inhabitants. No one knew where the labyrinth was, let alone the golden bands.

Finally, enraged, Amorian screamed at his men to destroy the city, to raze it stone by stone, to tear it apart.

Then, surely, he would find the bands and the labyrinth.

They could not be far away.

But, over the next few weeks as his men carried out his will, and Troia Nova fell to the hands and muscles of the Poiterans and the darkcraft that Amorian used to speed their work, Amorian finally, grudgingly,
admitted to himself that Brutus had woven such an extraordinary disguising about both bands and labyrinth that he would not find them.

Not on his own.

It would have to wait until the Gathering, until both Genvissa and Brutus were reborn and cowering before him.

Then
the blood would flow as it never had before…

“Well,” Amorian said one morning as he walked over the rubble covering the most westerly hill within the city, “I admit you have outfoxed me for this moment. But this is a temporary reprieve only. When I bring you back, when I convene the Gathering, you will grovel before me and you
will
tell me where you have hidden the kingship bands and the labyrinth. You will. You
will
!”

He turned around, and surveyed the destruction about him. The entire city was now nothing more than massive piles of masonry, stained here and there with blood, softened elsewhere with the thin smoke of the fires that still burned in buried chambers under the rubble.

Over all hung the stench of well-rotted corpses.

“No one will ever be safe,” he whispered, “not until I have those bands.”

L
ondon’s streets were cold and bitter, a mortar-and-brick echo of Jack Skelton’s heart. He strode towards St Paul’s underground station, a small, uninterested part of his mind hoping there would still be a late train to get him back to Bentley’s house.