Hades’ Daughter. Book One of the Troy Game by Sara Douglass

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 deep once more, and found it easy, so I walked down the far slope of this hill and toward 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 behind me, 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 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 realized, 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.

I reached the hand up to that flowing, snapping black cloud and ran my ringers through its mass. It was the first time I had ever done so, the first time I had freely touched his hair… or any part of him at all for that matter. I had seen his hair, and smelled it, and felt it brush over my skin so many nights of these past seven months. I had loathed it as it smothered my face and my body as he lay upon me, but I had never touched it as I did now, and I wondered at it, this mysterious black hair.

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.

Our hair whipped about us like a swarm of barbarous, biting bees, devouring us 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, tantalizingly, 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 could 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 didl Those words must be the only truths I’ve ever had from your mouth. Look at you, a sniveling, cowering child. Do you think that now ,’ 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 store room, 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 anymore.

‘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 ,ered his own face close and said, his mouth barely above mine, his breathd forceful, “I will never kiss you, Cornelia. No matter how much you ^g me, no matter what you say, no matter how desperately you offer yours me Never.

Never.'”

Then he was gone, walking back to the camp without me, and I was left tosi nk to the sand and weep and mourn, but for what I did not know.

CbAPGGR SIXRUTUS KEPT HIS PEOPLE FIVE DAYS IN THE HILLS surrounding the Altars of the Philistines. Each day hunting ” tiff 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.