Hades Daughter (25 page)

Asterion’s belly contracted in a sudden, almost sexual, flare of excitement. The Game was powerful beyond belief. Better he control and wield that power than destroy it.

Once Genvissa was brought under control…and once he had those kingship bands.

Asterion’s eyes narrowed and the knife fell still in his hands as cunning consumed his mind.

S
kelton walked very slowly towards Genvissa, unable to sort out the confusion of emotions within him at the sight of her.

“My,” she said as he stopped a pace away, “that uniform suits you well, Brutus. What are we now? A captain? A lieutenant?”

“A major,” he said. “Jack Skelton.”

She smiled. “A major. And an American. Always the foreigner, eh?”

He studied her, taking his time about it. She was, as always, a few years older than himself, but she looked tired now, and worn out. Desperate. Yet still that magnificent black hair curled about her face, barely restrained by the clip at the base of her neck. Still her seductiveness shone forth, even cloaked as it was by her heavy, green woollen coat. Still her beauty radiated, touching him deep within.

“Look,” she said, pointing with a gloved hand to where the Thames curved away south before them. “Does this embankment not remind you of that beach where first I came to you?”

“I have not come to lose myself in memories, Genvissa…ah, dear God, what name do you go by this time?”

“Stella,” she said. “Stella Wentworth.”

“And the others?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t play your games with me. I’m tired of them. Where are the others?”

She looked to the dome of St Paul’s. “You can find Loth in there,” her mouth twisted cynically, “wearing the cloth. I find that quite amusing.”

“And…?”

“And…? Oh, do you mean
Cornelia?”

“Where is she?”

Stella shrugged. “I have no idea.”

“Dammit, Genvissa…
Stella.
You
must
know—”

“I do not! If she is here, then I have not yet discovered her.”

Skelton stared at her, wanting to shake the truth out of her, but knowing it would do no good. “Does Asterion have her, Stella? Does he have
her,
as well?”

I
f you had let all be, if you had merely allowed my people to walk out those gates and sail away, none of this would have been necessary! You are death incarnate, Cornelia. It stains your soul.
I knew it, I knew it, and hearing it said so baldly and cruelly added no more pain to the guilt that was already coursing through me.

Oh, Hera, if only I had let it be, if only I had not pestered my father into asking the king of Nichoria for aid, if only…

All I had wanted was revenge for myself, my father, and Melanthus, and a return to the life I’d had.

What I had
accomplished
was the murder of my entire people.

Why had it gone so badly, when the unknown goddess had said it would all work so well?

Brutus’ arm tightened even more painfully about my midriff and he dragged me through the streets of my home. I did not resist, nor protest, and made all the proper movements with my legs that were needed to propel me forward. But my mind was back with my father, mired in the stone with him, enduring his agony.

Ah, that is foolish! A girlish stupidity. How could I “endure”, even
imagine,
the agony my father must have gone through in his dying? How can I know what it feels like to have my back and legs and arm
swallowed by stone? To have my bowels and lungs and brain surrender to rock? To take a breath and then to have it caught, unable to draw more…and yet all the while remain aware of my suffering and dying?

No, I cannot imagine that, even though it was all that consumed my mind as Brutus hauled me along streets choked with my people’s struggling bodies, and littered with the debris of collapsing buildings. Fleeing Trojans buffeted us from all directions, but I felt not their bruises, nor heard their cries to
hurry, hurry!

All I saw was my father, his hand held out to me in mute appeal, his eyes agonised.

I wish I had suffered with him. I wish the stone had swallowed me, too, but it did not. It did not because of this burden I carried in my belly, this Trojan child.

Isn’t that what Brutus had said?

I did not understand it, and for the moment I did not want to even try. All I wanted to do was die to escape my overwhelming guilt, and yet I knew that Brutus would not allow that…all for the sake of this child.

I heard him, eventually, gasp something to his friend Membricus. His voice held immeasurable relief, and it stirred me enough to look around. We were beyond the gates now, on the road that led between the rows of vines towards the bay. Fleeing Trojans still crowded us, but their efforts were less now that they were free of the city.

Brutus stopped, again spoke to Membricus, and then turned about—me with him, still clasped tight in his arms—to stare back at Mesopotama.

“Look,” he said, and then again, more forcefully: “Look!”

I raised my head, and I moaned and would have fallen, had not Brutus still held me so tight.

Mesopotama was crumbling. It appeared as if an indistinct grey cloud hung over it—it might have been
the dust from the collapsing masonry, but somehow I knew it was something far more vile and evil—and under the weight of that noxious cloud the city was collapsing into itself. Towers imploded, tenement buildings tumbled, palaces slid ignominiously into gutters, and the city walls turned to the consistency of sodden pastry and merely folded in upon themselves in resignation.

“The evil swallows it,” Membricus said.

What evil? I thought, but did not dare ask.

What evil had my husband conjured?

All of my initial terror of Brutus, which had faded away over the past months, now returned to me a hundredfold. I had once feared Brutus as a murderer and a rapist; now I feared him as a sorcerer. Oh, Hera, Hera, had he known all along what I planned, and let me continue, just so I could damn myself?

How could I have been so foolish? How could I ever have thought to best him?

How could I so callously have gambled with the lives of everyone I loved?

And lost?

“Did all our people escape?” Brutus asked Membricus, and I shuddered in his arms.

“Aye,” Membricus replied. “All those not murdered by the swordsmen’s initial attack. The last groups ran out the gate well before the final destruction.”

Brutus breathed deeply, held in some consuming emotion—I could feel it course through his body where it pressed against mine.

“And now,” he said. “Troy.”

I closed my eyes. His dreams lived, mine were dead. As we stood there, his strong arms holding me tight against his body, I watched Mesopotama fall into ruin, knowing that somewhere in there my father—perhaps still aware and screaming with his mind—was being finally entombed by the stone.

Melanthus…my father…Antigonus…all my people. All gone.
Everything
I had loved was gone.

The child stirred within me, and I began to cry with deep racking sobs.

Trojans thronged the shoreline as they waited to board the ships lying at anchor some fifty paces out in the bay. A score of rafts ferried them out in groups of thirty or more.

The mood was calm, some people even managed to laugh, while the sun shone overhead, its heat alleviated by a cooling northerly breeze.

I found it strange that the world continued as if little of consequence had passed.

Undoubtedly sick of my weeping, Brutus handed me into the care of a broad-faced woman with a child slung in a blanket over her back. He told me her name was Aethylla, and that she would watch over me for the time being. It was, I think, the final humiliation: he thought so little of me—whether as a wife or as an enemy—that this simple peasant woman sufficed to either comfort me or guard me.

At that moment I suddenly remembered Tavia. Tavia! Tavia was entombed in Mesopotama’s destruction.

Ignoring Aethylla, who was watching me with ill-concealed disdain, I sank to the sandy ground and buried my face in my hands, my shoulders heaving with the renewed strength of my wretchedness. Tavia was gone, consumed with everything else I loved, and never again would she curl up with me in my bed, and sing me to sleep.

Aethylla sighed, stroked my brow and said numerous things which I suppose she thought might be comforting.

Her efforts made me sob all the harder.
Stop it!
I wanted to tell her.
Go away!
I wanted to shout at her,
but none of these phrases came to my lips. Instead I sat there in the sand, my legs sprawled most ungracefully, my belly bulging between them, my robe half ruined, its hem rumpled somewhere about my thighs, and I cried like a child.

Aethylla eventually sat beside me, and held me, and soothed me and when I had calmed down somewhat, wiped my nose with the hem of my robe, sat back a little and lifted the child from her back.

I was vaguely aware that it had been crying for a little while, itself.

Aethylla smiled at me conspiratorially as if we were somehow made sisters by the shared fact of our maternity, and cuddled the child to her. She pulled aside the bodice of her robe, and offered her breast to the baby.

Its mouth latched on to Aethylla’s nipple like a starving dog snatches at meat, and I winced, instantly vowing to find a wet nurse for this load within me.

She saw me frowning.

“Do not think the feeding of a child is a burden,” she said. “There is no sensation a woman loves more than the feel of her child at her breast.”

I looked away. I didn’t want this child at all, let alone have it grub for sustenance at my breast.

“When you birth your baby,” she continued, her eyes watching me with a faint and highly irritating degree of condescension, “you will want to snatch it up and place it at your breast. All women do.”

“I don’t want this child!” I said, balling up a fist and striking it against my belly. “I don’t want it! I don’t want it! I don’t—”

To my shame, I began to sob again, and Aethylla sighed—again—and looked away.

Aethylla, her baby and her husband, Pelopan, were to accompany myself, Brutus, Membricus and Deimas (who showed not a single sign of grief at the destruction of the city which had sheltered and nurtured him) on a raft to Brutus’ lead ship.

Apparently, Brutus had decided that Aethylla would be good company for me.

I didn’t care one way or the other. I was weary beyond belief; both my sadness and the physical effort I had been forced to undertake in order to escape the destruction had taken their toll on me. I just wanted to sleep, and some small part of me hoped that when I woke it would be to find that this entire day had been a nightmare—that this last seven months had been a nightmare!—and I was once more home with my father and a life to look forward to with Melanthus.

Membricus aided me to the centre of the raft—I hated the feel of his hands on my flesh, but I did not complain—while some twenty or twenty-five other people crowded about me.

Brutus was the last to leap on to the raft—his energetic leap causing the craft to rock alarmingly in the water—and he shouted to the men with the poles to take us to the ship.

At this I raised my head, and looked ahead. All of the ships bar one had raised anchor and were under oar towards the mouth of the bay. The ship remaining was a sleek warship, its black hull sitting low in the water, its prow and stern curving gracefully in arcs at either end. I could see the heads of the men who sat on their oar benches, waiting for us.

I looked behind.

There was no one left on the beach. Somehow I had been so absorbed in my grief that I’d not noticed we were the very last to leave.

Something went cold and hard within me.

I was leaving.
Leaving.

I cast one more glance at what was left of Mesopotama and it was nothing but a small hump of rubble that was still collapsing into itself; in a week’s time there would be nothing remaining to tell anyone that a proud and glorious city had stood on that hill by the Acheron.

Brutus had apparently seen where I looked, for I heard him say to Membricus: “Mesopotama no longer. Necropolis now, I think.”

“A fitting city for the river of Hades, my friend,” Membricus replied.

Oh, Hera! How I despised them both. I might berate myself for my part in Mesopotama’s destruction, but that did not stop me loathing those men who had pushed me to it.

The raft journey was brief, and soon we were at the ship. Most of the others boarded first, and then I had to suffer the indignity of having Brutus and Aethylla’s husband, Pelopan, lift me into the ship as if I were a loosely tied pile of goatskins.

What am I thinking? Brutus would have handled even those goatskins with more care than he did me.

I had never before been aboard one of these warships, even though many had docked in the bay of Mesopotama before. Once aboard I forgot my exhaustion for a moment to stare with some curiosity about me.

The body of the ship was open-hulled, a row of benches for the oarsmen on either side of a gaping chasm that went down to the keel. This space was now filled with people, all turning themselves around and around like dogs as they arranged their blankets in the limited room available to them. Here and there chickens squawked, dogs barked and, I could not believe it, several goats farted happily.

For one appalling moment I thought Brutus expected me to bed down in this chaos, but he put a hand to my elbow and nodded towards the back of the ship.

“There is a small cabin on the aft deck,” he said, “where I have arranged a sleeping space for you.”