“Cornelia? How so?”
Hesitatingly, Cornelia told Blangan of how she’d plotted with her father to kill the Trojans as they left Mesopotama, and how it had all failed, and her city, her people and her father had been horribly killed as a result.
“And yet if I’d left well enough alone, they would all have lived. Blangan, it was my fault.”
Blangan put down the comb and went to kneel before Cornelia, who was now crying, her face in her hands.
“Wait, Cornelia,” Blangan said, pulling the girl’s hands away from her face. “What of this goddess who came to you and proposed the plan? Is she not to blame?”
“Perhaps she was no goddess,” Cornelia said. “Perhaps she was just my own hopes and hates assuming dream form.”
Blangan frowned. “Which goddess was she? What did she look like?”
Cornelia spoke, describing the woman who had appeared before her, and as she spoke, Blangan felt a chill sweep through her body.
That was no goddess, that was Genvissa!
“Cornelia,” she said urgently, “I cannot now tell you why I know this, but know it I do. That was no goddess appearing to you, but the greatest of Darkwitches. You were pushed into doing her own will, Cornelia. It was not your fault! Blame lies elsewhere.”
“You try to comfort me, Blangan, and for that I thank you.” Cornelia’s tear-streaked face twisted ruefully. “Apart from you and your husband, not many people have tried to comfort me recently. But I must take the blame for what happened to my people. If I was a tool, then I was a willing tool.”
Blangan lifted a hand and stroked the girl’s cheek. Brutus, she knew, thought of Cornelia as a wayward child, untrustworthy and self-obsessed, but that was not the woman who sat weeping before her now. Most people would either have blamed others or, if they initially took the blame themselves, would then have willingly grasped an excuse to blame someone else.
“I think,” said Blangan slowly, “that you will grow to be a very great woman indeed, one day.”
“I cannot think my husband could ever agree with you.”
“Ah, Brutus!” Blangan grinned and waved a hand dismissively. “He is but a man.” She rose, and, taking Cornelia’s hand, led her to the bed. “This will be more comfortable for my ageing bones, my love. Here, sit with me.”
She cuddled Cornelia close as they sat, pulling the girl’s head on to her shoulder, and stroking her hair.
“In the land towards which you journey,” she said softly, “Brutus will be but a man in a world where women are revered more than men.”
“Women? Revered?” Cornelia sat up straight, her face amazed. “How can this be?”
Blangan laughed and, apologising for her intrusion, rested her hand on Cornelia’s swollen belly. “For this reason, my love. Women hold the mystical ability to grow children within their bodies. We call it the Mag within our womb, for Mag is our mother goddess, and most revered, and it is her influence within our wombs that grants to us the ability to bear children. Men are respected and loved and adored, as the case may be, and it is their feet which tread the forests, but within the home, family and village society it is the women’s voices which are listened to first.
“Women in Llangarlia,” she added, grinning, “do not even take husbands.”
“What? Then how do they breed their children?”
“Women take whomever they want into their beds, but never make formal unions with such lovers. Children born to women always stay within their mother’s house, whether daughter or son. If a woman decides to take a man as her lover and to breed from him, she lies with him either in the blessed groves of the forests or the meadows of the sun, or she allows him into her bed for a few hours at night…but he must be gone back to his own mother’s house by morning, lest he irritate the woman’s own mother with his presence.”
Cornelia had her hands to her mouth as Blangan said all this, her eyes wide. “You mean, that if I were Llangarlian, I could take men as it pleased me, and not them?”
“Aye.”
Cornelia was visibly shocked. “And a woman desires daughters more than sons?”
“Always.”
Cornelia fell into silence, staring incredulously at Blangan who eventually laughed, and pulled Cornelia into an embrace.
“Who knows,” Blangan said softly. “Llangarlia may be the haven you seek.”
“Membricus says I am carrying a son, but I hope for a daughter. Can you tell?”
Blangan hesitated. If Cornelia had been Llangarlian born then, yes, it would have been easy, for she would have carried the Mag within her womb, and that would have spoken to any Llangarlian woman.
But she was foreign to everything connected with Llangarlia, and there would be no possible way she could…
“Please,” Cornelia said, looking at Blangan with yearning eyes and placing Blangan’s hands on her belly, “try. I dream of a girl…I am sure I am carrying a daughter. Membricus must be wrong.”
Blangan sighed, then closed her eyes, and made the effort, even though she knew it would be—
She jerked back, her eyes almost starting from her head. “By the gods, Cornelia!”
“What?”
Blangan swallowed. Mag was strong within Cornelia’s womb. Stronger than Blangan had ever felt it.
“I am but surprised,” Blangan said, composing herself, “for as it happens I could feel your child easily.” She paused. “You carry a son, Cornelia. I am sorry.”
Cornelia’s face fell. “Brutus will be pleased, at least.”
“But you will love him, too. You will, surely. Remember that I, too, bore a child that was forced into me. I thought to hate him when he was born, but when I took him into my arms, and I held him to my breast, it was as if all my doubts and hate had never been. I adored him.”
“I cannot think so,” Cornelia said, grimacing as she placed a hand on her belly. “I cannot think I could ever adore this.”
“You will be a good mother, Cornelia,” Blangan said…and she said it in her native tongue of Llangarlian.
“Maybe one day, perhaps,” Cornelia replied, and she also spoke in Llangarlian as if she, too, had been born to it, “but not with this child, I think.”
She stopped, and frowned. “What did I just say? Oh, Blangan, I must be overtired if I babble nonsense! I am sorry.”
Blangan had been stunned by Cornelia’s easy response in a tongue she should not have known, but hid her surprise well. “I will leave you to your rest in a moment, my love, but tell me, who was your mother? A stranger to Mesopotama’s shores?”
“No. She was a Dorian Greek, as was my father.”
“And her mother before her?”
“Also Greek. Why?”
“Mag’s mysteries are deeper than I thought,” Blangan said. “Here, let me help you off with this robe.”
As Cornelia, naked, lay back on the bed, Blangan once more laid her hand to her belly. “Sleep well,” she said, and pulled the linens over Cornelia’s body.
Once Blangan had left Cornelia and closed the door behind her, she leaned against the corridor wall, shaking, her hands to her face.
“Mag?” she whispered. “Mag?”
There was no answer.
The icy wind whistled about Asterion’s naked form as he sat, still and cross-legged, in the now barely discernible outline of the labyrinth. He had not moved nor eaten for months, but he was so wrapped in magic the deprivation had virtually no effect on his body.
“Well, well,” he said. He had paid relatively little attention to the stone hall surrounds of Mag and Hera’s meeting, but now he realised what it signified.
He had also been aware of Cornelia—and the tangle of emotion that bound her, Brutus and Genvissa—but had ignored her until this point.
Now he knew what she might come to signify, as well.
“What an interesting little girl you are, Cornelia,” Asterion said, wondering how best he might increase the tension between Cornelia, Brutus and Genvissa.
CORNELIA SPEAKS
Islept better that night than I have for…than forever, so it seemed to me. Surely, it was partly because we were once again on dry land, and partly because I slept in a comfortable bed, and partly even because the child seemed to sleep well himself, but mostly it was because of Blangan.
I had been cross when she’d entered the room and sent Aethylla away. I was tired, and did not feel like passing pleasantries with Blangan, however agreeable she had appeared in the few short hours we’d been in Locrinia.
But Blangan surprised me. She talked to me as woman to woman, not as woman to tedious spoiled child, nor even as noble-spirited Trojan slave to hated Dorian slave-mistress.
She treated me as an equal. Just as Corineus had.
And then, atop that, I discovered that she too had been through much of what I had—the rape and forced bearing of a child, and the loss of a home. Blangan knew what I felt. Knew my loneliness, and in a few short moments I came to regard her a friend.
And this Llangarlia! I swear I must have smiled in my dreams—gods alone knew what Brutus made of it. A land where women did the choosing, and men made do as best they could with that choice.
I dreamed, twice, and both dreams were most wonderful.
My first dream was of a jewel. A great emerald jewel in a grey-blue sea, with mountains and meadows, rippling streams and raging white-water rivers, and where a magnificent white stag with blood-red antlers ran wild through the forests.
This land was Llangarlia, and it was to be my future.
Then, unsurprisingly, I dreamed again of the great stone hall that stood within Llangarlia. I walked through its vast spaces, happier than I could ever imagine.
I heard the tinkle of a child’s laughter, a girl, and I turned about, trying to see her.
She was there, but almost indiscernible, always just at the corner of my vision, laughing and playing. I cried out to her, calling her to me, for I knew this girl was my daughter, and the child I had always wanted.
But all she did was laugh, and slide further out of my vision.
Then her laughter died, and I knew she had gone, but I was not bereft, for someone else was within the vastness of the stone hall.
A man who loved me dearly, perhaps my daughter’s father, although I was not sure.
I called out a name, although it was indistinct and I could not tell whose name it was, and he stepped out from under the shadows of one of the arches and walked towards me.
I laughed, and ran to him and, as his arms encircled me, lifted my mouth to his and drowned in his kiss.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Brutus kept his fleet in the bay of Locrinia some five weeks. It was far longer than he had planned, but it took time to find the right trees to cut down for masts, and then to trim the new masts into their keel beds.
There were also several score Trojans who had serious injuries caused in the straits of the Pillars of Hercules: eight of these people died within a few days, but the others needed time to heal before they set off again on the rigours of a sea voyage.
These delays normally would have made Brutus impatient, but he found himself intrigued by what Blangan taught him of Llangarlia. The land and its people appeared wild and uncivilised, but imbued with the deep wisdom of a power so archaic that Brutus began to suspect it predated even the gods of the Greeks and Trojans.
The Llangarlian gods Og and Mag both repelled and intrigued Brutus. They were ancient—as old as the land itself; Blangan said the entire land was dotted with stone monuments built to honour Og and Mag by people who had lived so long ago that the Llangarlians had no idea what purpose the monuments originally served. When Brutus asked about their power, Blangan merely shrugged, and said that she could not believe that they would welcome Brutus’ plan to build a new Troy on Llangarlia’s wild shores.
Brutus was perturbed less by what she said than by the fear in Blangan’s eyes every time she talked about her childhood gods. He wondered what it was that worried her, but she refused to respond to his pressing, and always turned the conversation to other things.
As Blangan had said, the Llangarlian language was relatively easy to learn once Brutus had mastered its basic structure. Brutus had spent the greater part of his life travelling about the lands of the Mediterranean, acquiring new languages as he went. To acquire one more took little effort. Within two weeks of his arrival in Locrinia, Brutus had mastered the language’s basic constructions; after that it was the far simpler task of acquiring new words for everyday meanings.
As Brutus learned, so too did most of his officers and those men of authority within the Trojan people. Deimas, Assaracus, Idaeus, Hicetaon and all their immediate subordinates learned the basics of the language; Corineus already knew the tongue well enough from those bedtime conversations passed with his wife throughout their years of marriage.
Surprisingly—stunningly, given that she’d shown no hint of any talent save childishness and treachery to this point—Cornelia proved the most adept at learning Llangarlian. Every day she acquired more and more words, and, so Blangan said, spoke with scarcely an accent.
This troubled Brutus somewhat. Not that she was finally actually doing something useful, but the “how” of her learning. Who was she learning it from? True, she and Blangan had fast become friends, and true, they spent time together most days.
But not enough to learn so fast or so extensively.
Was she learning from Corineus? Brutus could not keep track of everyone within the household, not when there was so much to do elsewhere…were Cornelia and Corineus spending time together that Brutus was not aware of?
That worried him, desperately. He couldn’t actually believe that Corineus was truly tempted by Cornelia—he was far too deeply in love with Blangan—but it was just that Brutus had seen the way Cornelia smiled at Corineus.
He hated the way Cornelia laughed when Corineus jested with her, and the way she looked at him without reserve and without fear.
Brutus bitterly regretted his vicious words to Cornelia on the morning after the storm. He shouldn’t have been so cruel, but Cornelia’s questioning about Genvissa had touched a raw nerve. He hadn’t wanted Cornelia to be aware of her and was shocked and angered to discover that Cornelia did in fact suspect Genvissa’s existence.
And yet why should that trouble him? Membricus took every opportunity to remind Brutus of his vision that showed Cornelia dying in childbirth. Cornelia had not long to live; she would not trouble him at all in Llangarlia or in whatever relationship Brutus chose to commence with Genvissa. She was carrying a son for him, an heir, and that should be all that mattered.
The trouble was, that whenever Brutus looked at Cornelia, he saw not so much his son, but Cornelia herself.
He also regretted his taunting of Cornelia at dinner that first night on Corineus’ ship. He didn’t know what had come over him to make him behave so. Gods, how was it that one young girl could drive him to so many ill-considered barbs?
Predictably, their relationship had soured into something resembling a snowfield since their arrival at Locrinia. There was a cold distance between them, punctuated with the occasional sharp word. They shared a bed, but every night Cornelia humped as far away from him as she could, and sometimes, when he woke during the night, he heard her laugh softly in her sleep, and knew she dreamed of either Melanthus or Corineus.
Worse than Cornelia’s sleep-laughter was the vision that had gripped Brutus himself one night. He’d gone into a deep sleep when he’d woken, startled.
He was no longer in the chamber he shared with Cornelia.
Instead he stood in a stone hall so vast that he could barely comprehend the skill required to build it. The roof soared so far above his head he could hardly see it, while to either side long aisles of stone columns guarded shadowy, esoteric places.
This was a place of great mystery and power.
There was a movement in the shadows behind one of the ranks of c
olumns, and Cornelia—utterly naked—walked out into the open space of the hall.
Brutus drew in a sharp, audible breath, but she did not acknowledge his presence, and Brutus was aware that even though they stood close, she had no idea he was present.
Cornelia looked different, and it took Brutus a long moment to work out why. She was older, perhaps by ten or fifteen years, far more mature, far, far lovelier.
Brutus realised he was holding his breath and let it out slowly, studying her. Her body was leaner and stronger than it was now, her hips and breasts more rounded, her flanks and legs smoother and more graceful. Her face had thinned, revealing a fine bone structure, and there were lines of care and laughter about her eyes and mouth that accentuated her loveliness rather than detracted from it.
“Cornelia,” Brutus said, and stretched out his hand.
She paid him no attention, wandering back and forth, first this way, then that, her eyes anxious, and Brutus understood that she was waiting for someone.
Who?
Then, suddenly, she stopped and stared straight at him.
“I thought you would not come,” she said, and Brutus almost groaned at the love in her eyes and voice.
“Cornelia,” Brutus said again, taking a step forward, his heart gladder than he could have thought possible.
And then he staggered as a man brushed past him and walked towards Cornelia.
This was the man that Cornelia had smiled at and spoken to, and he was as unaware of Brutus’ presence as Cornelia was.
A deep, vile anger consumed Brutus. Who was this that she met?
The man was as naked as Cornelia, and Brutus saw that he was fully roused. Who was he? Corineus? Yes…no. Brutus had an unobstructed view of the man’s face, yet could not make it out. First he was sure that he wore Corineus’ fair features, then they darkened, and became those of a man unknown.
Cornelia said the man’s name, her voice rich with love, and it, too, was indistinct to Brutus’ ears.
“Do you know the ways of Llangarlian love?” said the man.
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