Much later, when he had done and had felt her own 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.”
I6G ‘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.
sevejsi coRnelia speaks(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 him 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 lay 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 have to 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 reenslaved into such bondage it would be the ruination of all their hopes.
Tomorrow night I and my father would again be supreme within Mesopo-tama, laughing together as we surveyed the destruction we had wrought.
Tomorrow night I could prevail upon Tavia to feed me those herbs that 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 even 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 in sleep, 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 who had come to me in dream and told me what to do (Hera might be weak beyond telling, but her distant sister was proving more than beneficial), I sat up carefully and looked at Brutus’ face.
He was deeply asleep, his face slack, his chest moving in slow, lumberous breaths.
I slid from the bed and reached for a loose gown to pull about my bulky nakedness.
eigbcHE INSTANT CORNELIA 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… and to repay him with such vituperation… Membricus was right. Deimas was right. Everyone who had spoken to him 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 standing 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 usually 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 long since 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, then leaving that in turn for a staircase that wound down through several levels into 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 that 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, about 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 amphora 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 toward him or the voices drew closer, Brutus crept down to the turning. He thought of peering about, 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.”