Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  They ate the funeral banquet outside the tomb, once Demaratos' body had been taken and laid on the stone bed inside. Two aulos players wove skeins of sound round each other's piping, the wild reedy notes flying faster and faster till some of the women threw off their mourning dress and began dancing. One, in a sky blue dress stained with her own blood, brought a cup of wine to Aranthur, and he felt her breath on his neck as she bent towards him; then she was gone, throwing up her arms wide in the abandonment of the dance.

  It wasn't till the guests began to drift back towards the city that Venel took Aranthur towards the widow and her family; the youth, and six young women, the youngest still chubby-faced, one with a fat baby held on her hip. It wasn't the homecoming Aranthur had dreamed of, but they were cordial, though the widow seemed brittle, like the thin skein of ice over melting snow.

  “You must stay, of course,” she said: “Demaratos wanted you to come home.”

  “And father had to be obeyed,” one of the older girls said, with a sideways look at her mother.

  “Are you my new brother?” the youngest piped up, rewarded with a vicious elbow from one of her sisters, who hissed “Nephew, silly,” and flared up bright red.

  “You might let Venel look after you for a few days. Things are... disordered. My husband...” She broke off, and Aranthur could see how she pressed her lips tightly together, to stop herself breaking.

  He nodded. He wanted to ask; who was Demaratos? What was my grandfather like? But it would all have to wait; perhaps he would never know.

  The young man approached him as he was going back with Venel. “You must stay. Really you must. I know it looks like sheer politeness on the widow's part, but I think they are genuine; they really do want you. She loved Arruns so much; and you look so much like him. She told me, last night. Just like him.” He seemed at a loss for a words for a moment, and reached out for Aranthur's hand. “

  “But you're the heir.” He hadn't meant to say it, though he'd thought it. To his surprise, though, the youth simply laughed, throwing his head back and tossing his crisply curled hair.

  “No,” he said, when he could manage to stop laughing. “No,” and he laughed again. “I'm so sorry. Really. I'm just the nearest man at the moment. I'm Thanchvil's brother.” Seeing that Aranthur still looked blank, he went on; “Thanchvil; she's married to Loukios. And they're in Rome.”

  Tarquinius

  Summer came to Rome, and the bridge had stood against the spring floods, though the Tiber was full of debris washed down from further upstream; denuded tree trunks, dead animals bloated and pale. The water was brown and milky with mud. But the bridge stood.

  Ancus Marcius had found more work for Tarquinius; the saltings at Ostia. The Roman army had taken Ostia two springs ago, and with it, the seacoast, sparse flat land flayed by the wind.

  “I've told everyone you're working on the saltings,” the king had told Tarquinius.

  “Am I not, then?”

  “You are. But something else besides.”

  Tarquinius thought. “Gravisca. Pyrgi.”

  Ancus Marcius smiled. “You're quick. You're right, too. Rome will never be a great city as long as she has to import through Tarquinia or Caere. They charge us too much for a start; you'd know, you're an Etruscan.”

  “Only half.”

  “Well, half Etruscan. Which side is it, by the way?”

  “My mother.”

  “And your father? He was Latin?”

  “Greek.”

  “Oh. Slippery people, the Greeks. Mind you, maybe that's where you get your intelligence from.”

  “I assure you,” Tarquinius said, and he was thinking of Tanaquil as he said it, “I assure you there are Etruscans who can out-think me. There are some very smart Etruscans indeed.”

  “And some of them are women,” Ancus Marcius said.

  At which Tarquinius was, for a moment, silent.

  “No matter; we need a port. So while you're surveying the saltings, have an eye to where we can make a wharf; and it had better be defensible.”

  “So we can bypass the Etruscan ports, and capture the margin from their traders.”

  “You understand so well.” Ancus Marcius sighed. “Some Romans can be so short-sighted. I dream of leaving Rome great; not just through military conquest. A prosperous city; a city of luxury.”

  Tarquinius allowed himself a tight smile. “Some Romans think if they ever stop wearing rough wool, they'll turn into Greek pederasts and implode in a stink of perfume.”

  “There's something in their purity, though. It's admirable. Not very lovable, perhaps; and wrong; but admirable.”

  “So much easier to live that way than have to think about things. Your policies are too ... too nuanced for them, you know.”

  “Yes. They want enemies, for instance. I have to try to deal with the Faliscans, the Etruscans, the hill tribes; it's a thicket of sensitivities, half-baked policies, parochial patriotisms and envies. And it's only made more difficult by the fact that half the population of Rome is Faliscan, or Sabine, or Etruscan.”

  “Like me,” Tarquinius said drily. “And look how many enemies I have.”

  Ancus Marcius looked at him levelly. “You know, they want enemies so much that the whole world becomes their enemy. Just because it exists without Rome, they think it's there to be fought, conquered, trodden into submission.”

  “It's a rather limited view.”

  “Not necessarily wrong, though. But we can't do anything about it at the moment, of course. First things first. First a port, for instance.”

  He stood up, and wandered over to the terrace. From here on the Palatine they could see the whole of Rome spread out below the massive twinned peak of the Capitol; the scattered houses on the hills, the Tiber silvered with sunlight, the gold and green of a young spring landscape. Rome seemed full of promise like a budding wheat ear. How strange that the Tiber, surging with brown mud, looked so bright with distance, Tarquinius thought, and even the dull grey stone of the houses glowed creamy in the sun. Did everything, with distance, acquire grandeur? It was only when you looked more closely that you saw the dirt, the accumulated grime, the little evasions and hesitations. Only when you looked more closely that you saw betrayal in someone's eyes.

  “I can understand their feelings,” Ancus Marcius was saying. “Rome's a new city; hardly a city at all by your standards, I suppose. Just a scattering of houses on the hills, and all the space between lying fallow, marshland and rough pasture. A collection of refugee camps, outlaw villages. No wonder they're afraid of everything, suspicious of anything that's not as simple and plain as their lives used to be. But once they become prosperous, that will change.

  Look, the place has changed already, you know it has. Stone houses instead of wood, and the bridge instead of a ferry.”

  “You remember the early days?”

  “Oh, I remember the time before Rome.”

  Tarquinius raised an eyebrow. There was a surprise.

  “I'm Sabine by ancestry, though I think most people have forgotten that. Numa Pompilius was the first Sabine to rule here, and he was my grandfather. But he was a gloomy man, with severe gods... what gods do you have in Tarchna?”

  “The hidden gods, and the consenting gods, and Tinia of the thunder. But ask a woman and you'll get a different answer; they have different gods.”

  “Goddesses,” Ancus Marcius corrected him.

  “No, gods as well... and there is terminus, who is the king above us all, and sets the boundaries of our lands.”

  “You have boundaries then.”

  “Yes, too many,” Tarquinius said shortly. “Too many for a half-caste.”

  “Too many for your own good. At least the Romans see their enemies outside, but you Etruscans fight with each other. It'll bring you down in the end, you know.”

  Tarquinius shrugged. “I'm a Roman now.”

  “With a Roman name... I heard Tanaquil call you lauchme. Were you king
in Tarchna, then?”

  “Good gods no. That's one of the boundaries; no half-caste kings. Not like Rome. Lauchme was my mother's name for me; but my father named me Loukios.”

  “Greek?”

  Tarquinius nodded.

  “What does it mean?”

  “The shining one.”

  “Oh, very splendid. None of that Roman dourness about you Greeks. Or etruscans, for that matter. And you're Lucius here, Lucius Tarquinius.” Ancus Marcius turned towards him, looked hard at him as if trying to make up his mind about something. When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly low.

  “I've been meaning to talk to you seriously. I'm getting older.”

  “You're a young man,” Tarquinius said, and meant it.

  “Hm. You might think so. I know better. I'm short of breath sometimes these days, and I dribble instead of pissing. Who knows? I might last years. I might die tomorrow.”

  “Surely not.”

  “You know what I'm trying to achieve here. For Rome. For my children, too. I need someone to guard my heritage. Someone to carry on the work, if it's not finished; and it won't be. Rome won't come into her own for generations; the accumulation of wealth can only ever be gradual. And someone has to win over the Romans from living hand-to-mouth as if it's a virtue.” He grinned at that last phrase as if the whole speech had been planned for Tarquinius' amusement, but despair had curdled his voice and his eyes were tired.

  “You know I'll do what I can.”

  “Well,” and again Ancus Marcius put on that falsely bright voice, “I was wondering if you'd become a guardian for my children?”