by AM Kirkby
***
Their first experience of Rome wasn't encouraging. Though Lauchme had dealt with a few Roman traders who had come to Tarchna, they were difficult to track down, and when he found them, uninterested in his business. Tanaquil visited the other few Etruscan women in town, but they warned her Rome was very different from Etruscan society; a woman couldn't go out on her own - Roman men wouldn't stand for it. As for any idea she might have of playing politics, she could forget that; she would never even met any of the men who mattered.
“I tried to break out of that myself,” said one of the women, a woman of about forty with a tight mouth around which the wrinkles were already clustering. “But it just isn't possible. And anyway, I think it's better this way, really.” Tanaquil wondered who she was trying to convince.
“Don't you even take an interest?” Tanaquil had asked.
“Not much point, since I can't do anything about it,” the woman replied; Tanaquil conceded she had a point. “So I concern myself with other things; we serve the best food in Rome, and my flute playing has improved markedly.”
And though it sounded trivial, playing the flute was indeed one small subversion of Roman life; it was a tiny piece of Etruria in Rome, that giving up of oneself to the wildness of music, the giving up of time to something most Romans saw as purely incidental to the great struggle of their lives. But Tanaquil bit her lip, and narrowed her eyes, and made herself a promise that she would not become some toy woman; that when she saw a chance for greatness, she would take it. She suspected none the less that she might have miscalculated when she brought Lauchme to Rome; it was hard for them both, in those early days.
Rome was a sad place, a scatter of huts and homesteads on the hills, and marshland below. A single black stone marked the centre of the desolate forum; no one could tell her what it meant, though there were stories that it marked the grave of Romulus' foster-father, or the place where he had fallen in battle, and others said the gods had marked the centre of Rome's rule with the fall of a star, blackened and polished by its fiery fall. By the marshland the Tiber rushed and foamed, a savage and grey river.
The Romans were a dour people, dressed in homespun wool; the dirty grey of their clothes seemed appropriate to their character. There were no feasts, there was little jewellery; apart from their religious rites there were no festivals, no games, and no music except for the great war trumpets that boomed across the bleak flatlands by the river. Romans had no time for elegant conversation; they were always doing something. The women spun or wove, and when Tanaquil once tried to chat to a couple of them as they span, she was shushed, and cold-shouldered. Work, it seemed, was too serious for amusement. The men worked the outlying fields, or built - there was always building work going on, nothing was ever finished; or they practised fighting, a hundred men together. The clash of shields, the hissing thrust and clanging block of swords, kept time for the city.
This was a city being built. Nothing was ever finished, nothing was ever well begun. One day, there would be men working next door, smashing down the existing house and starting on a new one; then a few days later, they would have gone elsewhere, leaving a half-built wall behind them. Mud tracked everywhere, and in summer, the fine grit got into the clothes chests, into the bedclothes, so that it was always a struggle to beat it out of the fabric, and you ended up getting scratched by it anyway. Everything was provisional, even most of the thoroughfares; in this city with no history, and no rules, a new house might appear in the middle of what had been a road, and the traffic would simply divert around it, making a new road perhaps through what had been, till a couple of months ago, someone's back yard.
It was a hideous straggle, Tanaquil thought. Everything changed all the time, but nothing improved; the city surged and oozed like mud trodden by too many feet. The only thing you knew would be the same tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, was the noise of saws, and chisels on stone, and workmen shouting. Lauchme told her, one day, how he'd passed a house he always remembered from the figure of a sphinx carved above the door; the whole thatched roof had fallen in, and a team of men were dragging the roofbeams out to use them in another building. He had no idea what had happened to the family who used to live there. (That was typical of Rome; you got to know people, then they left, and it was it if they had never been.)
When she learned that Rome, like every Etruscan city, had a mundus, she was not surprised. The rock-cut shaft connected the worlds of the dead and the living; it was a darkness that saw light only three times a year, when the ghosts were allowed to walk. It was a hole, a vacancy, an absence; the absence that gave life its sharpness and its joy. Typical that Rome was be a city with a hole at its centre; but unlike the Etruscan cities, Rome had only the hole, and nothing but the hole.
Those first years Tanaquil had little to do. She threw herself into weaving; not homespun, such as the Roman housewives prided themselves on, but the fine tapestries of nobility. She wove golden threads into transparent linen, so that it shimmered like cobwebs spattered with dew on a spring morning; when she wore it, she knew Lauchme could see her body through the linen. When she wove wool, it was not for rough clothes, but for hangings in rich colours, decorated with sphinxes and proud horses stepping high. Every time she moved the shuttle she felt herself recreating her Etruscan culture; every thread she wove tied her to Tarchna, to the land of her birth. She wove into her tapestries the whole Discipline, the eagles of augury, the cardinal points with their gods; and when Roman or Sabine ladies looked at them and commented on how vivid they were, how rich Tanaquil's imagination was, she smiled, and nodded, and kept her contempt to herself.