by AM Kirkby
***
It was a bright spring day when Tarquinius went to the Palatine to meet the king's four children, but for some reason a sudden squall blew up just as he arrived at the palace. The green landscape turned suddenly black as clouds choked off the sunlight, the silver Tiber dulled to a smear of grey. He felt the first smack of raindrops on his face before he was able to dodge under the portico. Tanaquil had come with him; she threw the hem of her tebenna over her hair, to keep it dry, but even so her face was spattered with what might have been tears.
The children were drawn up in a line in the hall; they stood awkwardly, knowing they were under inspection, except for the youngest, who was sucking his thumb with the unselfconscious avidity of infancy. Tanaquil shrugged her tebenna back down around her shoulders, shaking her head to dispel the few drops of water that trembled on her upswept hair.
Marcus Ancius named them. Marcus Robur was the oldest, a musclebound youth who might have had a slight squint, Tarquinius thought, or else he was scowling. Tiberius, next in age, was a slight boy of about eleven, very much in his brother's shadow, who looked up when he was named and blinked at them. Secunda smiled shyly at them, and Brutus looked at them from behind his tiny curled fist, took his thumb out of his mouth with a small sucking sound, and then changed his mind and put it back.
“So you're Tarquinius,” Marcus Robur said. He growled roughly; his voice could only just have changed. He looked at Tanaquil, gloriious in her bright yellow tebenna.
“She your whore, then?”
“Sorry?”
“She your whore?”
“She's my wife.”
“Dressed like that?” Robur jerked his head. “Decent women don't go about in the street. Decent women cover their hair.”
“Etruscan women don't cover their hair.” Ancus Marcius' voice was like oil, smoothing over the roughness.
“They're whores, all of them. Everybody knows that. She's in Rome now, anyway.”
“That's enough.”
“And you're Tiberius,” Tanaquil was saying softly, bending her knees a little to bring herself closer to his level.
Tiberius looked sideways at his older brother, who was staring straight ahead; then turned back to Tanaquil, and focused his worried eyes on her.
“Do you like riding? I'll take you out riding, if you like.”
“Silly,” he said, his voice very small. “Women can't ride. Robur says so.”
“Well this one can,” she said, and smiled at him. “Do you have your own horse yet?”
“You can ride? Really?”
Tarquinius heard her laugh, high and thin. “Of course I can. And I have the best pair of horses in Rome.”
“No you don't.”
“Oh?
“My father's are the best horses in Rome. So.”
“Except your father's, of course. But they're very nice horses, all the same.”
“Can I see them? Can I?” He swung round to appeal to Ancus Marcius.
So that was one conquest made by Tanaquil, Tarquinius thought. She always amazed him; distant with their own children, she'd found her way unerringly into Tiberius' affections. Of course, it was a direct affront to Robur; she'd done it partly out of spite, partly out of the need for an ally among the children.
The rest of the meeting didn't go too badly, though Robur hung aloof and refused to talk to Tanaquil. Secunda and Brutus were too young to realise what was at stake, but Robur evidently realised that by calling Tarquinius as guardian, his father was admitting his own mortality; equally clearly, Robur didn't share his father's vision of Rome as a cosmopolitan (Robur would have said an Etruscan) city. Something in Robur's intransigence reminded Tarquinius of his father. (He hadn't thought of him for ages; that solid, intemperate man, who'd left Greece and doggedly made his way in what he must have seen as the far west - a man who refused to give up his Greek values and his Greek name, despite his years in Tarchna and his Etruscan wife.)
When they talked about the meeting that evening, after the table had been cleared and Tanaquil had mixed the wine, she didn't mention Robur, and for whatever reason Tarquinius also felt disinclined to say the boy's name. They both knew they hadn't made a friend there. They could not ever have made a friend of him; someone had got there first, Faustus perhaps, or another of the Old Romans.
“Secunda,” Tanaquil said, savouring the syllables of the name. “A second daughter, then. What happened to the first one, I wonder?”
“No one's ever said anything.” He held the wine in his mouth a moment, feeling the heavy tannin like fur on his tongue. It was sour. Many things were sour, and always would be.
“But Tiberius is sweet. Even if he's named after a river, which is stupid.”
“He's a bit wet, perhaps.”
Tanaquil didn't get the joke. “He might make a good husband for Tarquinia.”
“He's eleven.”
“And you're his guardian.”
Her ambition sometimes irritated him; what was more irritating was that she was so often right. A marriage would link them to the royal family, and that could be useful, particularly given Robur's evident Old Roman leanings. The king might even welcome it; if, as Tarquinius supposed, he was increasingly coming to see Tarquinius as the guardian of his heritage, then he would see the marriage as a safeguard against the opposition.
“I am that.”
She smiled. “I used to wonder why we'd left Tarchna.”
“You know why we left.”
“Yes; but Rome was so ...” she screwed her face up.
“Dirty?”
“Yes, but ... so small, I was thinking, so limited. People were happy to live like that; they wanted their poverty, they seemed proud of it. And now; I'm beginning to think Rome really could be everything we always wanted it to be. A real city, a city that could wake from its dreams of grandeur to make them real.”
“You'll have to convince Faustus' crowd of that.”
“Oh, we never will,” she said lightly. “But we'll achieve it in spite of them.” And she smiled that little catlike smile, and walked over to kiss him lightly on the brow. “Just the two of us.”
Tanaquil
Tanaquil didn't always have things her own way. Rome was changing, and yet shreds of the past clung about it still. The look of the city was changing fast; she saw young girls in bright, clinging linens, youths flashing golden bracelets and white teeth, walking side by side in the streets. New temples were being built, gleaming white stone and red tile like the temples of Tarchna; the bright colours of their paint clashed in the sun. And yet beneath the city's spring gaiety she could feel the old frost, the chill of the unforgiven and unforgiving men who had made it.
And so she might ride her chariot along the Sacred Way, in defiance both of their mores and their gods, but she might not attend a banquet in her own house.
“I don't see why,” she said sulkily, for once not noticing how ugly she had made her face or Tarquinius' delicate flinching from her.
“Because the dinner is for men, only. As is quite normal in Rome. As you know.”
“It's our house. We make the rules.”
“That's not the point.”
“So what is the point?”
Tarquinius shut his eyes, shook his head slightly, sighed. “I told you already. I have to neutralise the Old Romans, and I can only do that if I can convince them we are, well, as Roman as they are. Which means keeping you in the background, as they'd expect in any well run Roman house.”
“This is not a Roman house.”
“I know, I know.” He shrugged. “But if we want Rome to become what we dream of, then we have to go gently.”
“Why? Let them think their way of doing things is right? Pretend we agree? How can you change them if you insist on behaving like them?”
“Tanaquil, I...” he spread the palms of his hands out to her, beseeching silently. “I don't believe you can't understand. You were always so smart about politics in Tarcha - gods, you taug
ht me everything I know! And now you don't seem to be able to see the point of a little caution.”
“A little cowardice.”
He put a hand up to his forehead, pinching the bridge of his nose, and covering his eyes as if to hide from her fury.
“It won't help you.”
“Look, Tanaquil..”
“Why don't you call me Thanchvil any more?”
“Look, Thanchvil”; but it was no use, she couldn't help detecting a hint of a sneer in the way he said her Etruscan name now, even if he hadn't intended it.
“If you want to be a Roman, go ahead and be a fucking Roman. Just don't involve me in it. It's not my city. They are not my people. And if you don't manage to make them civilised...” She pulled herself up short. They both felt the unspoken threat hang between them like the hot air before a storm, and then she exhaled softly and the moment passed.
She nodded wearily. “Very well. But I'm not happy.”
“Nor am I. But I do believe it's what we have to do. At least now. Later...”
“Later it will be different?” She smiled, but it was more of a scowl really, a sort of sarcastic pleasure at detecting his little lies.
“We'll make it different,” he said.
She ignored the hand he held out to her. The storm might have passed over without breaking, but there was no reason she should let him off lightly.
“When we've made Rome into a properly Etruscan city, you'll be able to live as you like.”
She felt hope stirring within her uncertainly, but kept it back from her face, as she had not managed to keep back her anger. Quietly and evenly she said, “I shall live as I like with or without Rome.”
“I'm not going back to Tarchna.”
“Did I threaten you with that? We burned our boats when we left.”
“They gave us our wedding gifts. Neither of our families had to do that, and you know it. I thought it was very reasonable of them.”
“Yes, they gave us our gifts, and hoped we wouldn't stay to enjoy them. I wonder who works the vineyard now. I wonder what margin they make on the wine we get from our own grapes.”
Ha! he hadn't thought of that. She could see the shock in his face; how enjoyable it was to manage to shake him a little, to slide a knife under that conviction he sometimes had that he knew best, that he was the smarter of the two of them. Had he been like that before they came to Rome? She couldn't remember exactly, but her memories were of the hesitance of the half-caste Greek, the uncertainty even of his slender body; and now he'd grown stockier, and bull-headed, like the men of this city.
“I wonder how my sisters are. And my mother.”
“You still miss her?”
“Sometimes.” She couldn't define what she heard in his voice; a yearning for something lost, a kind of weariness. He could still surprise her, this strange Greek. Smiling now at her own prickliness, she stepped towards him, holding a hand out to him. And now he, on his side, was not ready to make peace, but looked coldly at her.
“Yes, I do miss her. I used to put my head between her breasts, and the whole world would cease to exist for me; just me, and my mother's heart beating, and the warmth of her.”
Only one thing would end this argument. Did she want it to end? She looked at her husband, and thought back to the shy young man she'd first known, and his sense of wonder at her. She'd never thought he might be her master; and now he'd tried, and she had only just come through unmastered. And perhaps, in his raw admission of longing, she could see for a moment the shadowed eyes of the young man he had been; so that when she reached up and brought his head down to her breast, her smile was genuine.
So the rest of the afternoon was wasted; or at least, the Romans would have said it was wasted, and so did Lauchme. Not a lot of work got done, it was true. But then, to an Etruscan, she thought, making love was one of those activities that proved you were civilised, like listening to poetry; and if you wanted to be civilised, you put some work into learning exactly how rhythm and pace and precision could improve it. (And that was true of poetry as well.) Whether their philosophical truce would last, she couldn't tell; but there was still enough heat in their sexual encounters to smooth over those small distances, at least for now.