“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?”
He did not answer, not with words, but he drew me in close to him, our bodies pressed hard against each other, one of his hands buried in my hair as mine was buried in his.
I found my breath short, and my throat dry.
His hair whipped about me like a swarm of barbarous, biting bees, devouring me in its wildness until there was nothing but his warmth and the scent of his maleness and his hand hard on the back of my head, and over and above all of this there were his dark fathomless eyes, centering my universe. His mouth was parted, and I could see the glint of his tongue, and smell the sweet musk of his breath.
My own breath grew even shorter, and I relaxed in his arms and against the entire length of his body.
His face drew closer, and I felt his lips brush my forehead and my cheek, and then the rough wetness of his tongue sliding along the line of my jaw.
“Sometimes you can be so sweet,” he whispered. “Why not always, Cornelia? Why not always?”
As his mouth moved very close to mine, one of his hands rubbed deliciously at my breasts, tugging at the nipple through the thin linen of my gown, and I pressed myself hard into his hand.
“Brutus,” I whispered, and raised my face to his.
Our mouths grazed, I felt the warm slipperiness of his tongue as it slid briefly, tantalisingly, between my lips, and I relaxed completely, utterly, and opened my mouth to his.
And almost fell to the ground as, abruptly, he let me go and stood back.
“What?” he said, and I quailed at the harshness in his voice. “What? You would allow me to kiss the mouth vowed only to Melanthus?”
I held out a hand. “Brutus—”
“I thought I repulsed you…or was it that the only reason you co
uld bear me so close just now was because you were screaming Melanthus’ name over and over in your mind?”
I sobbed. “Brutus…please…”
“You bitch,” he said. “Did you think that your sudden display of wantonness would fool me?”
I was crying hard now, scared, desperate, my hands shaking. “I never meant those words, Brutus.”
“Yes! Yes, you did! Those words must be the only truths I’ve ever had from your mouth. Look at you, a snivelling, cowering child. Do you think that now I could possibly want you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, so desperate I risked all by placing one of my trembling hands on his arm. His muscles tensed at my touch, but he did not throw me off, and I drew a little closer. “I’m sorry.”
“Do you think I am going to kill you? Do you?”
“Yes,” I sobbed.
“Good,” he said, and the coldness in his tone was horrifying. “I think you can only be trusted when you are terrified.”
I lifted my hand from his arm, and placed both it and its companion over my face, hiding it from him as I wept. How could I have been so stupid, so arrogant, as to taunt him in that manner?
We stood there a long time, he completely still, his eyes on me as I cried.
Then, finally, he sighed, stepped closer, pulled my hands away from my face and, with his own hands cupped gently about my cheeks, tipped it up so that he might look me in the eye.
“If you had loved Melanthus that much, and he you, then why were you still a virgin when I took you to bed?”
He waited, and I fought desperately for the right answer.
“I…” I said, wondering where this was leading. Was he not glad of the fact? Didn’t all men desperately desire virgins?
What did he want me to say?
“If I had been the oh-so-virile Melanthus,” he said, “I would not have left you a virgin for another man’s conquest.”
I remembered that embarrassing fumbling in the storeroom, the awkwardness, the haste, the sudden, unexpected spurt of wetness against my thigh, his gasping of relief, and mine of horrid embarrassment.
“Ah,” he said. “He tried, didn’t he?”
I nodded, too scared to lie to him any more.
“What happened?”
I closed my eyes one more brief, humiliated time, and told him in as few words as possible.
He gave a short bark of laughter. “He had no control at all, did he? No wonder he pissed himself when I killed him. He’d probably dribbled his way through his entire, short life. And it was with this that you taunted me? It was with this that you dared to compare me?”
His hands were still about my face, but they had lost their gentleness. He lowered his face close and said, his mouth barely above mine, his breath hot and forceful, “I will never kiss you, Cornelia. No matter how much you beg me, no matter what you say, no matter how desperately you offer yourself to me. Never. Never!”
Then he was gone, walking back to the camp without me, and I was left to sink to the sand and weep and mourn, but for what I did not know.
CHAPTER SIX
Brutus kept his people five days in the hills surrounding the Altars of the Philistines. Each day hunting parties ventured into the wild lands beyond the hills, bringing back fresh kills of stringy hare and the small antelope that fed off the shrubs.
The fresh meat was welcomed. Most of it was dried in the sun for eating once the fleet put to sea again; some of it was consumed within hours of being brought back to camp, roasted on open fires with the herbs and oils the Trojans had packed in their ships.
On the sixth day, at dawn, Brutus gave the order to re-embark. The loading went quickly—people were now used to the rafts and loading procedures—and by late morning the fleet was under way again, sailing due west.
Artemis kept her word to Brutus, for as soon as he’d given the order to weigh anchor, a stiff easterly breeze sprang up. Ship captains raised their square, linen sails, and the oarsmen stowed their oars and reclined on their benches, enjoying the feel of their ships slicing through the blue-green waters of the great central sea.
They kept the line of the coast on their port beam, and many a curious eye ran over the landscape that they passed. Now desert, now more verdant oasis, now hilly, now flat, many among the Trojans wondered what lay deeper within this vast continent they sailed past. Sometimes the wind carried the howls of exotic beasts, sometimes the scents of spices strange and rare. Sometimes people appeared on the beaches, watching the massive fleet as it sailed past. They wore long, hooded and brightly coloured robes, and leaned on long staffs similar to shepherds’ crooks.
They never waved, nor shouted. They merely watched; praying, perhaps, that this fleet would continue onwards, and not stop to ravage their lands.
Brutus kept the ships at sail for eight days and nights. His people slept as best they could among the press of other bodies, bundles of clothing and blankets, amphorae of water and wine, and the constantly fidgeting animals they carried with them. During the day there was little else to do save watch the passing coastline, peer over the sides of the ship into the deep, clear waters of the sea in an effort to spy sea monsters, play at dice or boral stones, pass the time idly gossiping with their neighbours, or wonder at what awaited them in the new land.
Very few people had any complaints about where Brutus led them. They knew they might well be sailing into possible hardship, even conflict, but they were sailing into freedom, and in doing so they were reclaiming their proud heritage and nobility.
Brutus had made them Trojans again. He had handed back to them their self-respect.
Brutus did not spend his entire time shouting orders, or contemplating his future building Troia Nova. Sometimes, when he had time to rest, and sit and enjoy the sun and the sea spray that washed over the sides of the ship, Brutus followed Cornelia with his eyes. Watching her. Thinking.
He’d left Aethylla to share her bed since that first night at the Altars of the Philistines, preferring to bed down with the single men and warriors.
He was still furious with her: for those hurtful, spiteful words to him in their bed, for her treachery that had caused so many deaths in Mesopotama, and, most of all, for her false seductiveness in the hills behind the Altars of the Philistines. He’d followed her into the hills because he’d wondered, despite his words to Membricus, if she had some new treachery planned, or if she thought of escape. To have her turn to him, and touch him as if she truly desired him, and press herself against him was beyond belief.
Gods! He had been aroused by her (which deepened his anger), but he’d not been fooled. She’d spent the past seven months making it perfectly plain to him that she despised him, and that she preferred that immature child-boy Melanthus’ fumblings to what he could offer (and he knew he could arouse her, he knew it!). What was she doing? What game was she playing? Was it just as Membricus had said? She so much feared for her own life since her treacheries had gone awry that she would play any part to save it?
Well, he would not play it with her. He would not allow himself to be fooled by her. Another awaited him, a woman who could truly partner him…the true antithesis to Cornelia’s shallow childishness.
Yet Brutus continually found his eyes drawn to Cornelia. Surreptitiously, whenever she was unaware of his regard, Brutus would watch her. Cornelia’s belly was large now, ungainly, but even though she was so far into her pregnancy, she’d still found the time to continue growing herself. She’d gained a little height, and both her face and her limbs had lost much of their childish plumpness.
There was a growing grace and beauty to her movements—the tilt of her head as she laughed (pretence, undoubtedly); the languid sweep of her hand through the air as she pointed out something to Aethylla—and, perversely, that only added to Brutus’ animosity. He wanted her to grow fat and ugly, so that he could truly despise her.
He hated it that, in almost everything she did, she only made him want her more.
He hated it that,
when she turned and saw him looking at her, the light faded from her face.
He hated it that, whenever he thought of Membricus’ prophecy that she would die in childbed, he felt a sickening sense of loss.
On the eleventh day after leaving the Altars of the Philistines the fleet approached a green and verdant land on their port beam. For the next day and a half they sailed past large towns, even cities, which appeared at regular intervals along the coast or just inland.
In mid-afternoon of the twelfth day a large port city appeared at the mouth of a sluggish river, and Brutus called to the captains of the fleet to lower their sails and to set the anchors.
He, accompanied by five other men, set out in a small rowboat to the port from where he did not return until the next morning at dawn.
With him came several moderately sized sailing vessels well staffed with men who were, the Trojans were relieved to note, only lightly armed.
Brutus climbed back into his flagship, smiling at Membricus and Deimas who stood anxiously by.
Behind them Cornelia, face and body still, waited with Aethylla.
Her eyes did not once leave Brutus.
“We have made new friends,” Brutus said, grinning as Membricus, then Deimas, clasped his hand and arm. “This land is called Mauritania, and it is a rich and well-ordered and -supplied realm.”
His grin widened. “But not so rich that they are not willing to part with some of their supplies for a portion of the gold and jewels I said I carried with me.”
“Will we stop here?” Cornelia said, her eyes now moving past Brutus to the city about the port.
He looked at her thoughtfully, wondering at her motives for the question. “No. We stay only the length of time it takes the Mauritanians to ferry out to each of our ships fresh supplies of water, grain and fruit.” He looked back to Membricus and Deimas, and the ship’s captain with them. “It is too late in the summer to linger. We leave as soon as we can.”