Hades Daughter (75 page)

If Membricus, Brutus’ friend and one-time lover, had still been alive and witness to this scene, he would have recognised it for the vision he had wrongly attributed to the birth of Achates and the death of Cornelia.

She sat bolt upright in bed, her hands on her belly, breathing in harsh, heavy breaths.

“What is it?” Brutus said, rousing to wakefulness at the sound of Genvissa’s distress.

“Asterion,” she whispered. “He is reborn.”

“In Poiteran?”

“Aye. Son to Goffar.”

He laid one of his hands over hers. “We are almost there,” he said. “The walls are almost ready. He cannot touch us.”

Very slowly, she relaxed. “Yes. Of course. You are right. He is too late.” She smiled, and leaned over to kiss Brutus. “He’s too late.”

Far away, Goffar looked to where he’d laid the knife.

It was gone.

One cold, wet night, when winter had given way to an equally cold and brutal spring, Genvissa left Brutus’ sleeping side and went, completely naked, not even a cloak about her, to stand on the balcony. She stared over the Llan and the Trojan settlement (now rapidly emptying as Trojans moved inside the city walls) to Llanbank, where Cornelia slept in her house.

Save for the crippled, useless Loth, Cornelia was alone. Genvissa knew that this night, unusually, Cador and Hoel had gone back to their mother’s house after settling Loth. There would be no one to summon help.

No one, save Loth, to hear Cornelia’s screams.

Genvissa smiled, sure of herself and her power. She rested her hands on her swollen belly (she was five months gone with this daughter, and it was time,
finally, to remove any threat to herself, her daughter and the Game), and began the first of the incantations that would see both Cornelia and her daughter die in agony.

Genvissa
could
have done it quickly and cleanly, but that was not in her nature.

Genvissa’s hand tightened on her belly, then she tipped back her head, closed her eyes, and pushed down with all her might.

I
woke barely an hour or two after I had lain down, the horrifying pain ripping through my entire body. I grunted, curling about myself, protecting my belly, refusing to believe what the pain told me.

My daughter was being born.

It was far too early. She needed to grow another two months at least in my womb.

Panicked, grunting with the pain—the contractions were coming so fast, and yet they had barely started—I sat on the bed, gathering my breath and my strength, and then stood up.

I should have to summon help.

Damn it! That this should happen on one of the few nights that Cador and Hoel were not here. I had gone to bed grateful to have a night spent without their constant rumbling, now I would have given anything to be able to merely reach across the hearth and shake one of them awake, asking him to fetch his mother.

“What is it?” Loth’s sleepy voice said from across the darkened house.

“The baby.”

“But—”

“I know! I know!” I tried to keep the panic out of my voice, but couldn’t manage it. It was too early…even with the benefit of a skilled midwife like Erith, it was way too early.

Far
too early.

“Genvissa,” whispered Loth.

“No!”

“She will not want your daughter to threaten hers, Cornelia.”

“No!” But at the same time I remembered what Mag had said to me:
I can give you all you want in your daughter, although it will do you no good now. It will be many years, Cornelia, before you hold your daughter in your arms. Many years and many tears…

“Yes! Ah, curse my legs. Cornelia, you must get help. Fast. If Erith or Tuenna can come, and bring their pouch of remedies, they may be able to stop the contractions. Cornelia, you must get—”

“I know it.” I struggled to my feet, then screeched as a jolt of pure agony swept through my body.

Achates’ birth had been bad enough, but it had never been like this.

“Gods, Loth, I cannot—”

Yet another pain, this tenfold worse than the last, and I screamed, and fell to the floor, clutching my belly. The baby had shifted brutally, almost as if she were being pushed into her birth journey by a vicious hand.

She was tearing me apart internally. My body wasn’t ready to give birth, my pelvis hadn’t relaxed, my birth canal was still closed…and yet something—
Genvissa
—was pushing this baby down with such force that—

I screamed again, writhing in agony.

No, no, gods, no, not my daughter! Please, please…Mag, anyone, save my daughter…

She was all I had left.

Something ripped apart within me, and I felt hot, thick blood gush from between my legs.

Then a thump, and some part of me realised Loth
had pushed himself from his bed and was crawling towards me.

More blood, more agony.

I think my womb had ruptured.

I was incapable of speech, incapable of releasing my foetal crouch about my belly. I think I thought that if I curled myself tight enough about my daughter, then somehow I could save her.

Loth reached me, grabbed at me.

I shrieked, and hit out at him—more in my agony, I think, than in any sensible thought of keeping him at bay.

“Cornelia,” he said, and I heard that his voice was breaking. “Cornelia…”

And at that moment that black-hearted witch pushed with all her might, and my daughter and womb both were torn from the walls of my belly and expelled from my body.

There was a moment when I lost all sense, and when they returned to me all I could feel was the continuing agony in my belly, and Loth’s hand scrabbling between my legs, trying, I think, to aid my daughter in any way that he could.

It was hopeless. I knew that. There was a cold rock that had once been my heart, and it told me that Genvissa had murdered my daughter and probably me as well, for I could feel the hot blood pumping out from between my legs.

Loth was shouting, at what and at whom I do not know, and I cared not.

My daughter was dead, and I was dying. There was no point to life. Not any more.

The next moment I lost all my senses, and I knew no more.

I died.

I walked through the stone hall, comforted that I should have come here in death.

The small, dark woman I had seen with Hera in this hall so long ago was here again now, and she folded me in her arms, and hugged me, and loved me.

It was Mag. She’d been with me all this time, and I’d not known it.

“Hush,” she said, leaning back and taking my face in her hands. “Do not succumb to that dreadful guilt of yours again.”

“My daughter…”

“Your daughter lives still, in this stone hall. Do you see her?”

Mag’s hands fell from my face, and I looked about. Ah! There she was, playing with some dolls in the shadows of the aisles. I made as if to go to her, but Mag stopped me.

“Not yet,” she said, and I wept.

“There is something more for you to do,” Mag said, and she took my hand and led me to the very centre of the hall where, to my disbelief and dismay, lay carved into the floor the very same labyrinth that Brutus had caused to be constructed on Og’s Hill.

“This is your future,” said Mag.

“No.”

“This is you.”

“It can’t be.”

“Sweet Cornelia.” Mag kissed me, and then she spoke, very low, very fast, for a very long time.

When she had done, and I was more numb than I thought possible, she said, “Will you do this?”

“It is such a long way,” I whispered.

She was silent, regarding me.

I sighed, and looked to where my daughter still played.

She was far away, but nevertheless my daughter felt my eyes upon her, and she looked up from the dolls in
her hand, and saw me, and cried a most strange word: “Mummy!”

Although I did not understand that word, it nonetheless brought joy and comfort to my heart.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I will do it.”

Mag had my hand in hers, and she gave it a squeeze. “Look,” she said, and pointed into the heart of the labyrinth.

There lay a knife with a curiously twisted horn handle.

L
oth sobbed with fear and shock and hatred. He should have foreseen this, he should have
known
that Genvissa would murder Cornelia and her baby. Genvissa could not afford to let Cornelia live; even if she was not precisely aware of the “why”, Genvissa knew that Cornelia must die.

The house was dark, the oil lamp usually left burning through the night was dead, and Loth wondered if somehow this was part of Genvissa’s plan as well. After all, what was the murdering of an oil lamp flame when she could accomplish the death of a woman and her child with so much ease?

He patted at Cornelia’s body, trying to discover if there was anything left he could do.

There was a steaming, bloodied mess between her legs—what was left of the baby, as well as Cornelia’s womb and, for all he knew, half of her other pelvic organs as well. Loth lifted his hands away in horror, wiping some of the thick blood that coated them on his bare chest. Then he felt up Cornelia’s body to her chest.

She was not breathing.

“Cornelia,” he cried out. “Cornelia.” Absurdly furious with her that she should have died so easily, Loth grabbed at her shoulders and shook them as hard as he could.

He felt her head flop about, but there was no response.

There was, however, the faintest echo of a laugh in his head, and Loth knew that it was Genvissa, returning satisfied to Brutus’ bed.

“Cornelia,” he whispered, feeling in her cooling, dead flesh the final loss of everything he had tried to save: Mag and Og, Llangarlia itself.

Everything gone, lost to Genvissa’s Game.

“Is there warmth left in her womb? There must be, for I can speak.”

Loth’s head, which had dropped to Cornelia’s breast, jerked upright.

There was the faintest of luminescences rising on the other side of Cornelia’s body. As Loth watched, it resolved itself into the faint outline of a small, dark woman.

Mag, but a Mag so weakened she was almost gone.

“Is there warmth left in her womb?” Mag whispered, her every word an agony of effort.

Loth stared, then fumbled a hand back to the mess between Cornelia’s legs. He could feel the womb, hard taut muscle, still stretched with the baby it contained.

It was warm, but only just.

“Yes,” he said. “There is a little warmth left.”

“If there is warmth left, there is life,” Mag said, her voice fading in and out so that Loth had to strain to hear her. “It must be returned to Cornelia’s body. It is my,
our,
only hope.”

“How? How can I put it back inside?” Loth’s voice broke in horror.

“The baby is lost this time. Poor Cornelia, I had tried to tell her. We can do no more for the baby. But Cornelia we must save. Tear the baby from the womb, Loth, my son, and then take the womb in your hand and slide it back inside Cornelia. You must do this.”

Appalled, Loth stared at the apparition. Even now it faded, almost gone, and Loth knew that if he didn’t act
now,
then not only Cornelia but Mag would be lost as well.

Hauling himself into an upright sitting position, carefully balancing his weight on his dead hips and legs, Loth put both his hands about the solidness of womb and baby. “Tear her out?” he said. “
Tear
her out? I will destroy the womb if I do that.”

“What can be torn can be mended.
Do it!
”

Taking a deep breath, and closing his eyes even though he couldn’t see what he was doing anyway, Loth dug his fingernails into the walls of Cornelia’s womb, and began to tear.

It was brutal, horrible work. The womb was strong, banded with muscles that not only bore the weight of Cornelia’s baby, but had the strength to then push that baby out when it was time for it to be born. Loth had to use every ounce of strength he had in his arm and shoulder muscles, and the feel of his fingers tearing deeper and deeper into the smooth muscles of the womb made him retch, once so violently he had to momentarily stop what he was doing.

But in the end it was done, and he had made an opening large enough to pull the baby through into his hands.

“Is there nothing we can do—”

“There is nothing we can do to save the baby,” Mag said, now barely visible, “but everything we can do to save Cornelia and this land. Put it back. Now!”

Loth laid the limp baby gently to one side, his heart breaking for the loss of its life, then collected the now flaccid weight of the womb in his hand. He paused, his face muscles clenched against what he had to do, then pushed the mass back inside Cornelia’s body. He pushed hard, poking at the mass with insistent fingers, but the womb seemed intent on bulging back out again
every time he thought he’d managed to push it just that little bit further inside Cornelia. Eventually, his eyes now screwed shut, he took the womb in his fist and, murmuring prayers against darkness and hurt, thrust the horrid mess as deep inside Cornelia’s body as he could.

He was glad she was insensible (
dead
) for he knew that had she been conscious, then he would not have been able to do it.

But eventually it
was
done, and the lips of Cornelia’s torn vulva closed in upon themselves again.

Loth pulled his trembling hand away from Cornelia’s body, and held it to his chest.

He opened his eyes again, and stared at Mag’s apparition. For a moment it flared strongly, and Mag smiled. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Then, in a voice that strengthened even as the apparition faded back to nothingness, Mag said, “Genvissa must be stopped, Loth, stopped until we have the strength to fight against her. Cornelia will know what to do. Poor Cornelia…”