by AM Kirkby
****
Autumn had arrived, and the olive harvest was well under way; this year Demaratos had trusted him to manage the operations himself, and had, at last, taken the trip to Athens he'd wanted to make for so long. For the first time, his father's shadow didn't fall over him. He wondered it had taken so long; nearly thirty, and only now was he free of that feeling of being weighed up, measured against some ideal Hellene youth he'd never quite managed to be.
Just as he was about to depart again for the hill farm, Tanaquil sent him an invitation. He intended to ignore it; but then he thought he could put off the meeting with the farm manager for a couple of days - he hadn't been needed to start the harvest, after all, it was the processing of the olives and the accounting for the yield he was needed for - and since he'd be away for a few weeks, it would be good to see Tanaquil before he went. He'd expected to see a couple of the younger traders there too, and he could see whether it would be possible to participate in their next voyage with some funds of his own; if he'd managed to set up a separate business by the time Demaratos came back, he might manage to gain a little grudging respect from his father. (Love he had, he thought. But love was never enough; it only smothered, instead of satisfying.) So with one reasdon and another, he managed to convince himself that he should go to Tanaquil's dinner.
Should he perhaps have been surprised at such a young girl giving a dinner on her own account? His father would have been shocked; but Lauchme was used to having to discount the Etruscans' different attitude to women. In Greece, he knew, women never attended banquets, not even in their own houses; and his own mother obeyed Demaratos in this, though her Etruscan blood and upbringing must have rebelled against it. So, torn between the two cultures, he found he hardly knew what was normal, what was strange. In any case, it was typical of Tanaquil's impatience with Etruscan society that she would do exactly as she wanted; no doubt she'd instructed her parents, with her customary forthrightness, that she wished to manage her own affairs that evening.
But when he arrived, and found no one else there but himself, and Tanaquil, and a couple of servants, he did find that disconcerting. No doubt he was early; she must have invited other guests. They would turn up later, he told himself. They never did. Instead, when they went through from the garden where they'd chatted for a while into the house, he saw the table ready, and two couches only set out.
He must have looked startled, since Tanaquil turned to him at once.
“Couches are so much nicer than chairs, don't you think? Much more comfortable, once you get used to them. Besides, father says it's better for the digestion; he heard that from a Greek doctor in Gravisca.”
He smiled, still a little uneasy. “Father has a couch, too; but my mother always sits on a chair. More traditional, she says.”
“Well, some women still prefer their chairs, I suppose. Grandmother always used to, but I thought she was rather stiff.”
“I suppose that must have made it difficult for her to use a couch.”
“No, I meant... well, she was always rather formal; standing on ceremony. Even with me.”
For a moment he felt jealousy twisting in his mind; he'd never known his Greek grandparents, and his mother's family had given her up as if dead the day she'd married.
“Such a pity your mother doesn't come to banquets,” Tanaquil had said once. Even when Demaratos held a dinner at home, mother was absent, taking refuge in the dark warmth of the women's quarters, with Lauchme's gaggle of sisters. This wasn't the kind of place she would have felt at home - not any more; though this was her Etruscan heritage, she had given it up, given up everything that was Etruscan except her carved wooden chair, and her monthly visits to the little shrine by the river.
But now Tanaquil was talking again about her grandmother; determinedly making conversation as if, somehow, she felt the same unease that Lauchme did at their being alone in the house.
“Still, I wish I'd appreciated her more while she was alive. She was a frosty woman, sometimes; she insisted on being addressed formally, even by us. But she was a marvellous woman, you know; hard as nails, when she wanted to be. She kept a feud up with the Ancarui for years, because Lartha Ancarui had stolen one of her handmaidens. And she got what she wanted.”
She stopped, as if she expected Lauchme to ask her a question. He wouldn't help her out, though; he'd not seen her at a loss before, and he was beginning to enjoy it.
“People usually ask me what she wanted, when I tell this story. But if you're not interested...” Give her credit, she had put him on the defensive again.
“Of course I'm interested. But I know what she wanted; the lucumo. And she got him.”
That delighted her; she smiled, like a cat stretching, and stuck her chin in the air.
“You don't know the half of it. She wanted him - but she wanted his vote for the alliance with Cisra, too. And of course his father was dead set against it. It took her three years, and she was still only seventeen when she married him. Women of this house start playing politics early, you know.”
Indeed he did know. But what Tanaquil wanted, he couldn't say. Her horizons were broader than her grandmother's had been. Of course the world had changed in three generations; the Greeks had colonised the south, the Celts were pressing in the north, the Etruscan cities had made the Federation into a reasonably effective political machine, and Rome had become - a nuisance, you might say, not quite a new power.
“Your grandmother carried on playing politics, too, didn't she? I forget where I heard it, but wasn't she the prime mover behind the attack on Veii?”
“Father was all for applying economic sanctions,” Tanaquil replied evenly. “He was right; at least, he was right in saying they would have worked, given time. But my grandmother always preferred the most direct way of doing things. Of saying things, too.”
“I don't like that smile of yours.”
“I was just remembering the day she met your father. She ... she didn't like his beard.”
“That's not what I heard she said.”
“Well. You've heard it then.”
“That he looked as if he had a cunt stuck on his face, hair and all.”
He'd expected her to blush, but instead she clapped her hands together lightly, and grinned.
“I'm glad you see the humour of it. I'd thought you might be upset, that's all. I know the Greeks have a different idea of what a well kept beard ought to look like, and... not that I have anything against Greeks, you know...”
“But you think they look like they have cunts stuck on their faces. Very funny.”
She laughed again, and reached out to touch his smooth cheeks. “And you don't. Thank the gods. Maybe you're an Etruscan after all.”
Then, turning from him, she clapped her hands twice, summoning the servants; a dark-haired young woman in a blue and white chequered robe, who sat on a cushion at the end of the table and played the flute, and a lad Lauchme thought might have been Celtish, from his braided blond hair, who mixed the wine and water, and filled their cups.
It was already getting dim; out in the garden, the air was cooling, and Lauchme could hear a thrush's song, liquid and high. Swinging his legs easily up on to the couch, he looked across the corner of the table at Tanaquil; her eyes were hidden in shadow. One of her braids had come untied and dangled between them. She tossed it back, then reached again for her cup.
“Doesn't life in Tarchna ever irritate you?” she asked, then took a mouthful, and swirled the wine in her mouth a couple of times before swallowing it.
That wasn't the right word, he thought. Sometimes life here was glorious; sometimes, downright miserable. And at all times, uneasy; he could never be quite unconscious of his divided heritage.
“Sometimes,” he said diplomatically. “I wish I could travel more. To see Carthage - that would be something. Or to see Greece.”
“Of course you'd want to see your father's city. I can see that.”
“I don't feel particularly Hell
ene. My father doesn't really understand that. But because of him I don't quite feel Etruscan, either. If I could see Athens... well I suppose I'd know just how much of me is really Greek.”
“And how much isn't?”
He nodded, and reached for his cup, then having lifted it half way to his mouth, set it down again and rested his chin on one hand.
“It's not just that though. Tarchna seems increasingly small. When I'm speaking to Arnth about Massilia, for instance, and Spina, and I think that apart from Velzna and one week in Cisra, I've never even seen the other Etruscan towns, I begin to feel provincial.”
“It's the other towns that are provincial,” she said with a mocking acerbity, “and that you know very well, Lauchme son of Demaratos. But I must admit I should like to see something of Rome.”
“Provincial in the extreme!”
“Yes, but exciting. Think of it; a city with no rules, a place where you could do anything.”
“Barbaric and undeveloped. I can't even sell our best wine to the Romans; they won't take it. They're only interested in the cheap stuff.” He remembered that last negotiation with distaste; he hadn't got the price he wanted, not even near it.
“Yes, but what an opportunity! You really could do anything there. No ruling families, no established priesthood or leadership; it's wide open.”
“I suppose so,” he said doubtfully. “I might think of it. At least the Romans don't care whether I'm more Etruscan or more Greek; they just care whether they can squeeze a bit more wine out of me for a bit less bronze. But what's in it for you? You're a king's grand-daughter; you could hold Tarchna in the palm of your hand if you chose.”
She scowled. That was stupid, he thought; she's probably heard that kind of comment from men before, and she knows flattery when she hears it. Though he hadn't intended it as flattery; to him, it was the sort of truth that was simply obvious.
“Hadn't it occurred to you that life in Tarchna is just too easy?” She looked across at him, and met the anger in his eyes. “For me, I mean. Too many people ready to give me what I want. Too many people willing to be bought with a smile or a hint of gratitude, or the promise of a sympathetic hearing for their nephew's ex-wife's cousin's lawsuit. Tarchna's too small for a woman of spirit, Lauchme.”
“It was large enough for your grandmother.”
She threw back her head then and laughed, not a girl's half-abashed giggle but the full-throated laughter of a woman generous enough to know when she'd met her match. And despite his irritation with her, he began to laugh too, and soon the two of them were caught up in the contagion of amusement; he laughed at her laughing, and she laughed at him laughing at her, and so it went on till they became aware that the blond servant had come back into the room and was standing, silent, at the end of the table.
The Tarquinian aristocracy were renowned for their luxury and taste; Tanaquil had stressed the taste, rather than the luxury, with her selection of food. There was a stew of meat and dried fruit, sweet and tart at the same time, and a dish of chestnuts and mushrooms, with a single huge flatbread they had to share between them. More than once he found himself trying to tear off a piece of bread at the same time as Tanaquil, and their fingers touched for a moment.
It wasn't only politics they talked about. He'd heard a new poem by Pulenas a few days ago, and described it to her; the description of winter coming to the marshlands, and the wind rustling in the reeds, and Pulenas' image of the ghosts of the dead as dry leaves scattered by the wind. He'd found it chilling, but unforgettable; and Tanaquil listened patiently as he struggled to recall exactly the rhythm, exactly the words of the poem.
“That man is driven by ghosts,” she said.
“Aren't we all?”
But having mentioned the marshes, their talk turned to hunting; the approaching winter had brought the seafowl with it, and Tanaquil had spent four days already riding into the marshes with her slingshot. She was, as Lauchme would have expected, an expert shot, though it was unusual for a woman to take such an interest in the sport. They talked about hare-coursing, about ways of cooking hare - soused in its own blood, or roasted with olives or sour berries; Lauchme's mother preferred it slowly stewed, and the house would be full of the heavy odour for days. And so the evening drew on. As it got dark, the blond boy brought in oil lamps, and drew the curtains across the door to the garden. The room seemed more intimate in the yellow light, the edges of things blurred and uncertain. The flute player slowed her pace, from dance tunes to a long melodic line that flowed easily in a minor mode, like the river's meanders delaying its meeting with the sea. It was late; apart from the flute, the house was quiet. Their conversation had slowly run down.
Tanaquil's dismissal of the servants was not ungentle; “I expect you'd like to rest,” she said to the flute player. And when the young Celt - he was indeed Celtish, Tanaquil had told him, a slave they'd acquired through Spina, which traded with the north - came to pour their wine, a heavier, sweeter white which left a syrupy richness in his mouth - she was tactful with him. “I don't mind if I have to pour my own wine; it's late, you need your sleep, father will chastise me if you're no use to him in the morning.”
But to Lauchme, she was direct, as one equal to another.
“Come here,” she said.
He sat down on the end of her couch, as far from her as he could, dreading but hoping she might move towards him, but keeping that space between them, in case he'd misinterpreted her command, or she wanted to change her mind. And wondering, too, how it was he could be so enthralled by a girl not much more than half his age.
She leant towards him, and ran a hand down his cheek, the fingernails touching his skin with a faint dry tingle. She kept her face just far enough away from his that he could feel her breath on his skin, but not touch her; she knew what she was doing, for when his determination finally broke, it was he who reached out for her, feeling the tight plaits at the back of her head as he pulled her to him. Her lips were already open, half smiling, her eyes open and candid. But when finally they lay down together, it was her hand which took hold of his penis, her hand which rubbed him against her, which put him inside her. Her hand in all of this, he thought.
Afterwards he noticed the smear of blood and sperm, mixed, on the couch, and he could never afterwards think of her without wondering how she could have shown not only so little fear, but so little curiosity.