Hate, hate, hate. How sick I am both of word and of emotion. All I have done in these past months is hate, and look what I have accomplished with it: the death of my father, of Tavia, of all my people.
Everything gone, sacrificed to hate.
Even my relationship with Brutus. I had bound our marriage with parameters of hatred, and if now I had come to regret it, then I could blame no one but myself.
As Brutus stalked off I sat back, closed my eyes against the contempt of all the Trojans about me, and succumbed to a fit of shivering that I could not control. I could not despise Brutus for what he had said. I suppose it was the sum of all I had said to him, and all I had done to him, over the past months. All the viciousness I had flung at him reflected back to me. Tavia would have tut-tutted and reminded me that all our words and actions return to haunt us eventually.
The thought of Tavia threatened to make my tears flow, but I stilled them as best I could. Ah, Hera, no wonder Brutus thought me a snivelling child! All I seemed to have done when around him was weep. I had tried so hard in the past weeks to be what Brutus expected in a wife, but obviously what I had said and done in Mesopotama was as yet too great a sin for him to forgive completely.
Or even slightly, come to that. I shouldn’t have asked Brutus about the woman, but I couldn’t help myself. I’d wanted to know. I needed to know who my rival was.
I opened my eyes, daring to search out Brutus.
He sat with Membricus, and both men were laughing and chatting lightly with two young women.
A nasty knot of jealousy in my chest tightened so painfully I could barely breathe. The two women smiled and laughed at Brutus, and tossed their hair, and pulled back their shoulders so that their breasts strained against their sea-dampened robes. Although they talked with Membricus, their attention was all on Brutus.
And why not? I was patently no threat to them, and Brutus was…well, Brutus was a highly desirable man. He had an aura of maturity and strength and command about him that was almost magnetic in its pull. The sun had finally crested the horizon now, its light catching his body, and I saw the muscles in his chest and upper arms ripple as he stretched out in the welcome warmth of the sun.
And what was that gibe I had once thrown at Brutus? That Melanthus was so much more athletic, so much more desirable than he?
Gods, what overweening arrogance to have said such a thing!
Poor, dead Melanthus. He hadn’t deserved to die in the manner that he had, but his death in no way made him the virile, athletic lover with whom I’d taunted Brutus. He’d been but a boy, naive, artless, inexperienced…and I’d been a stupid, conceited girl who had imagined herself in love with him.
I shifted uncomfortably, the baby heavy and burdensome within me.
The two women were still laughing, their attention solely on Brutus. He reached out, and touched one of them on the cheek, then ran his hand back through her hair as he leaned forward and whispered something in her ear that made her eyes widen and the breath catch in her throat.
I closed my eyes, trying to forget what I had just witnessed. It was too painful. I tried to turn my mind to other things…to concentrate on the dream of the stone hall and the daughter who waited within.
But it didn’t work. Even the peace and happiness of the stone hall could not distract me from the idea that Brutus was now no doubt kissing the woman, gracing her with what he would never give me.
Perhaps he was pretending she was this woman of whom he dreamed. Perhaps she was the woman of whom he dreamed.
Alarmed, my eyes flew open and for an instant I could see neither Brutus nor the two women.
Then, my heart thudding in my chest, I saw that the women were stepping slowly over legs and bodies towards the back of the ship while Brutus had turned to lean over the deck railing and look out to the ocean.
My heartbeat slowly returned to normal as I confronted the startling knowledge that I was not so much concerned at losing my life when this child was born, but at losing Brutus.