As Cornelia, naked, lay back to 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.
Cb&PGGR FOURG66>1 coRnelia speaks
SLEPTBETTERTHATNIGHTTHANIHAVEFOR… THAN forever, so it seemed to me. Surely, partly it was 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 Siangan.
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 gray-blue sea, with mountains and meadows, rippling streams and raging Whitewater 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 farther 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 toward me.
I laughed, and ran to him and, as his arms encircled me, lifted my mouth to his and drowned in his kiss.
CbAPGGR FIFGeejM,’>^|. RUTUS 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 rigors of a sea voyage.
These delays normally would have made Brutus impatient, but he found himself intrigued by what Siangan taught him of Llangarlia. The land and its people appeared wild and uncivilized, 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 honor 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 Siangan’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 traveling 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 become fast 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 great and 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 perfectly rounded 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 columns, and Cornelia—utterly naked—walked out into the open space of the hall.