Hades Daughter (59 page)

I wept. Who was I compared to
her?
A foolish girl who had surely destroyed any chance she ever had to make Brutus love her. Maybe Brutus would set me aside, maybe not. But even if he did not, I doubted I would be anything more than an irritating and occasional distraction.

I would be the butt of everyone’s jests, and pity.

I remembered Brutus once saying that he would make me queen of this new land to which we sailed, and I wept yet more. I would be an empty husk of a
queen, sitting forgotten to one side while the
real
queen, Genvissa, basked in the adoration both of my husband and of legend.

I was nothing, and it had taken me all this time to realise it.

Brutus came back several hours after dawn, brimming with excitement. He spared me a glance, dismissive and cold, then clapped Hicetaon and Corineus on their shoulders and drew them into discussion.

I heard
her
name mentioned, many times, and with that same hunger and admiration he had used when she had come for him during the night.

In the end, driven to distraction by Brutus’ mutterings with Hicetaon and Corineus, and by Aethylla’s barely concealed amused glances in my direction (did she revel in the knowledge of Genvissa, then?), and not able to hear my husband say Genvissa’s name one more time, I wrapped myself and Achates warmly against the cool grey of the day, and escaped the house.

Would Genvissa take Achates, too, when she took my husband?

I suppose at some level I knew where I was going, who I was going to. I had only one friend, one person I could talk to, and that was Coel: Corineus had become ever more distant with me since he realised I had witnessed his beloved Blangan’s death. In the end, I did not have to find Coel at all, for, as always it seemed, he waited for me in the shadows of a house some twenty paces distant.

“So,” he said, “you have met Genvissa.”

I said nothing.

“You must not judge us all by one woman,” he said, and I looked away, determined not to succumb to weeping again. What must this man think of me?

“Have you eaten this morning?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I am not hungry.”

He
tssked
softly, but did not comment further on the subject of food. “Would you like to meet my family?” he asked. “My mothers and sisters and aunts and their children?”

Some part of me knew what he was doing—offering me an antidote to Genvissa. “Thank you,” I said, and he smiled and, a hand gently on my elbow, guided me through Llanbank.

Llanbank was larger than I thought, and I said as much.

Coel explained that Llanbank was the largest settlement in Llangarlia, catering as it did both to the trade routes that crisscrossed Llangarlia and to the proximity of the Veiled Hills, the sacred heart of the land. He explained a little about the Veiled Hills, pausing briefly at a crossroads within Llanbank so we could look north across the Llan to where the hills rose in the distance.

“Where is the mist?” I said. “Every day that I have been here thus far the hills have been veiled in fog.”

“Sometimes they wish to hide themselves, sometimes to reveal themselves,” he said. “Perhaps, because we are close to the Slaughter Festival, they have decided to—”

“The
what
?”

He grinned at the expression on my face. “The Slaughter Festival,” he repeated, “that most sacred festival of the year when we seize all strangers within our midst and sacrifice them to the gods Og and Mag—”

He saw the horror on my face, and burst out laughing. “I jest only, Cornelia. The Slaughter Festival is the autumn festival where we give thanks to Og and Mag for the harvests of spring and summer, and also slaughter the stock we cannot keep over winter. Despite its name, it is a celebration of joy, and much good-hearted mischief. Ah, I am sorry, Cornelia, I did not mean to scare you.”

To my shame, the tears were now flowing freely down my face (I cannot
believe
I was spending all this time weeping in Coel’s company). It was not his ill-timed jest as such, but that the scare it had given me had brought to the surface all my fears about Genvissa.

“Did she frighten you that much?” he said, very softly. Then, very slowly, very gently, he gathered myself and Achates in his arms, and held us tight. He rested his chin on my head and, as I sobbed the harder, rocked me tenderly back and forth, as if I were the baby and not Achates.

“Genvissa is not overmuch loved by many among my people,” he said eventually, once my sobs had quieted somewhat. “You are not the only one she terrifies.”

He tipped my face up to his, and kissed me without lust, or passion, or even love, but deep with reassurance and comfort, those two things I needed most.

Again he grinned. “I would not have done that if I had known I would make you weep again,” he said, and I managed to wipe away my tears, and return his smile.

“Now,” he said, “my mother’s house is not far from here, and I can feel you shivering from both cold and hunger, so it is to my mother that I must take you.”

As he led me down the road, I realised we were in the heart of Llanbank, and that we’d been standing there, close together, embracing, while around us people walked and gossiped. The circular, stone-walled houses were crowding us on either side of the roadway, and while some people were idling about, gossiping over outdoor cooking fires, others were making their way down the street with baskets of produce or herding small flocks of sheep or goats.

I blushed for shame at what Coel and I had been doing, and then realised that no one had taken much notice. Many people called out greetings to Coel, or
stopped him for a word or two, but there was no derision or mockery in anyone’s voice, and only a simple curiosity expressed about my presence.

To everyone who stopped, Coel introduced me as “Mother Cornelia”, the head of my household, and I smiled at the thought of Brutus being relegated to the status of the breeding stallion kept in his stall most months of the year and only allowed out when he was needed for mating purposes. People smiled at me, and said welcoming words, and blessed Achates, and treated me as one among many…as one of them, which the Trojans had never done.

As we progressed (now somewhat slowly) down the road towards Coel’s house, I began to cheer up considerably.

Coel’s home was as most other houses—a circular, thick stone-walled house with a conical roof of thatch. There was a woman standing outside, watching our progress down the road towards her, waiting patiently for our arrival.

I glanced surreptitiously at her the closer we came, curious, and somewhat nervous, at what she would make of me…and of her son bringing me into her house.

But I need not have worried. Coel’s mother, Erith, was a tiny woman, almost birdlike in her manners and movements, and possessed of such a mischievous sense of humour that every third remark made me grin. She was much older than me, and I thought that Coel must have been a child of her later years, but she was possessed of so much life that I wondered, despite her lines, if she was still producing children even now.

She welcomed me at the door of her house with a hug and a laugh, gently chiding Coel for taking so long to bring me to her, then led me inside.

I stopped the instant I stepped inside the house, stunned by its beauty.

The house that Coel had given us on the outskirts of Llanbank had been bare inside, save for the necessary furnishings and blankets needed for our comfort, and, with the experience of the isolated and functional hamlets we’d stayed at on our travels from Totnes to Llanbank, I’d thought that all houses must be the same.

But this interior, this was a miracle of colour and life and movement. Like our house, there was a second level, a wooden platform resting on the inner circle of posts that supported the top of the conical roof. Suspended from this platform were a series of woven banners and ribbons in every hue of nature, that moved on every breath of air. Among the banners and ribbons hung pieces of carved antler and bone, as well as tiny pieces of quartz hung on slivers of almost invisible gut, pieces of hide and fur, carved seashells and what I thought was probably dyed seaweed. All these strange things had been hung so cunningly, and with such understanding, that even though the effect should have been that of an overcrowding of completely incompatible objects, they all merged to create instead a sense of grace and light and movement.

It was as though Erith and her family had managed to hang all that was most beautiful and wondrous in the world of nature from the central raised wooden platform.

Erith saw my face and, in what I was realising was her normal reaction to most things, laughed. “This is our living house,” she said, a soft hand in the small of my back guiding me towards the central hearth. “We have a smaller house at the back of this one in which we cook and weave and do all the snarling at each other that all families need to do.” She grinned. “No one dares snarl in this our living house.”

There was a bench of stone built about the hearth, and I sat down, still staring about me. The house was
much larger than the one I shared with Brutus and our companions, with sleeping niches for at least fifteen people, and room for many more about the hearth.

Indeed, there were already some eight other women and two men seated who, as Erith introduced me, all came up to me, took my hands between theirs, and kissed me a welcome on my cheek. Most of their names fled my head as soon as they were spoken, I was still so overcome with wonder at both Erith and her house, but I retained enough wit to understand that they comprised two of Erith’s elder sisters (and if I’d thought Erith tiny and birdlike in her age, then these two women looked as if the merest breath of wind might shatter their fragile bones), three of her daughters (two of whom were noticeably pregnant, and one of whom—a woman named Tuenna—had two toddlers playing at a safe distance from the hearth), one a cousin visiting from the north, and the final two were grown granddaughters. The men, both older than Coel, were his brothers, and I was given to understand that there was another brother as well as two uncles who, in the Llangarlian manner, still lived in the house of their maternity, but who were currently minding the family’s flocks of sheep and goats.

One of Erith’s daughters, the one furthest forward in her pregnancy, brought me a bowl of broth that, despite what I’d told Coel earlier, made my mouth water with hunger. Erith took Achates from me—I found I did not mind in the least her presumption—and bade me eat.

And, as I did so, the warmth and laughter of Erith’s family flowed over and about me, warming me through as the fire and the food never could, as they chatted about family matters and the gossip of the town.

The entire mood and sense of the house was unarguably feminine, yet neither Coel nor his two brothers seemed out of place nor even uncomfortable.
They melded perfectly into the discussion, much of which was about Coel’s sisters’ pregnancies, as if conversing about such things was as natural to them as arguing about the strength and sharpness of a sword.

I was fascinated. I’d known of the matriarchal nature of Llangarlian society, but this was the first time I’d been so exposed to it: Ecub’s house had been too riven with underlying tensions for me to feel as much at home as I did here.

Eventually I realised that the family was discussing the sisters’ yet-to-be-born children as if they already knew the sex and even the personality of the babies the women carried.

Intrigued, I put aside my now empty bowl (thanking Erith and her family as I did so), and waded my way into the conversation.

“How is it,” I asked, leaning forward, “that you know the sex and character of your unborn children?”

Erith, handing Achates to Coel, took my hand, and held it between hers. “It is Mag’s gift to women,” she said, and explained—as Blangan had once explained—how Mag graced the women of Llangarlia with the knowledge of the sex and character of the child they carried.

“All Llangarlian women feel Mag in our wombs,” Erith went on. “It is where she lives…although in the past year her presence has been but a whisper.” Her voice was indescribably sad, and for a moment she paused, as if collecting herself.

Then Erith glanced at Coel, and when she looked back to me one of her hands shifted, and rested on my belly. “Do
you
feel her within you, Cornelia?”

I opened my mouth to deny it, for how could I if I were not Llangarlian-born? But then I remembered that night I’d spent in Mag’s Dance, and the dance that I had done without ever being taught, and I was no longer so sure of myself.

“I don’t know,” I said.

Erith lifted her hand from my belly to my face. Her own face was puzzled, all her humour momentarily gone. “You
do
have the feel of her about you,” she said. “How odd, for a stranger…”

And again her eyes met Coel’s.

I was now feeling most uncomfortable, as if my flesh were being assessed for market, but Erith laughed, and my uneasiness subsided.

“But then you are a mother who loves her child,” Erith said, “and perhaps that is what I feel.”

We talked then of many things: a strange spring where women could beg Mag’s aid in choosing a caring soul for their child; the meaning behind the dangling decorations above our heads; the blight that had struck Llangarlia in the past generation; Coel’s children, and those of his sisters and brothers; the men whom Erith had taken to her bed in order to get her own brood of wonderful children; Erith’s mother, who had been one of the strongest Mothers in Llangarlia when it came to weaving Mag’s magic.

At this last subject the mood grew sombre.

“I doubt any Mother will ever again know Mag in the same manner and depth that my mother did,” Erith said. “Mag has faded away in this past year. Her power has all but gone. Perhaps as her lover Og’s power waned, so did hers. No one knows. But no Mother has been able to use Mag magic to any great degree since last autumn. We can still touch her, barely, but not as once we could.”

“Many of us,” Tuenna put in, “wonder if that is Genvissa’s doing.”