by AM Kirkby
***
“Be still, Tarquinius!”
She'd had problems with the boy's tebenna, and he wouldn't stand still for her to put the heavy gold brooches that held it in place.
“Why do I have to wear the tebenna?”
“Because your father is having a dinner, and he wants to show you off to the king.”
“The king will be here?”
“Yes. I already told you that. Be still!” She'd pricked her finger on the long pin of the brooch; she pressed it, and saw a droplet of blood well up darkly. Sucking it away before she could smear his white and gold tebenna, she grabbed his thin shoulders and held him down while she finished, despite his squeal of outrage.
“But why do I have to wear this?”
“Because you are an Etruscan prince. Because you will show the Romans what an Etruscan prince looks like.”
He scowled. “Romans are bad.”
Tanaquil said nothing.
“When I'm grown up I'll kill lots of Romans.”
“Not tonight, dear. Tonight I want you to show the king what an Etruscan looks like. I want you to show him just how much better we are.”
“Can I tell him?” His face was eager.
“No! Absolutely not!” She looked at his disappointed pout, and tenderness stirred in her. He had the right instincts, this boy, but he was too young to understand the need to dissemble. “He has to find it out for himself,” she said. “Don't make it easy for a Roman. They need to learn.”
Tarquinius nodded. “If they don't learn, I'll kill them,” he said, sticking his jaw out with determination.
One of the girls laughed softly. Tarquinius scowled.
“I will, you know.”
Tanaquil patted him on the head. “I'm sure you will. But tonight, nice smile, hm? And don't trip on your tebenna.”
“Aren't you coming?”
“No,” she said shortly, and pushed him towards the door. It was unfair, she thought, that a child barely more than a toddler could attend the dinner, and she was barred. But that was Rome; city of prohibitions. There was no man more jealous of his women's honour than the man whose grandfather had been a rapist; and that was most of them, she thought, if you believed that story about the Sabine girls. A man's town, this had been, set up by the lawless and landless; women for them were a commodity, bought for sex or for posterity, and like all property in a lawless town had to be guarded, locked up, hidden away. To them she was just a thing; it soured her days, as if someone had poisoned the air.
Warm voices sounded in the hall, the over-enthusiastic greetings of men trying not to be merely polite. That was typical of men, the way they had to create a fug of comradeship by shouting, thumping each other with their voices. No elegance, but this masculine butting like bulls at each other. She turned from the noise with a movement whose very delicacy was a reproach.
She'd known it was going to happen, she'd known for so long, but nevertheless when at the third hour Lauchme had accompanied her to the door of her rooms, and kissed her on the forehead, she had felt it deeply; for the first time in her life, she was locked in, restricted, a prisoner, forbidden to pass this threshold till the Romans had gone. And then she'd looked at her two maidservants, and shrugged.
“What shall we do?” she'd asked.
“We could spin,” the younger said.
“We're not Romans,” the elder corrected.
“Thanks gods!” Tanaquil said, and then: “Dice?”
It was quickly agreed that wasn't the worst idea, and so as soon as young Tarquinius had been spruced up and sent out, they began the game; dicing for small stakes - a golden pin, a few amber beads, a hair-ring. Tanaquil began to win, slowly; the game wavered and went away from her for a while, but came back before she'd lost all her winnings, and the pile in front of her began to grow again.
“Three and two. No throw.” That was Hecla's throw, the elder of the women. The younger to go next.
“Four and one. Nothing.”
“Two ones.” Lowest throw wins. Tarquinia swept the stakes towards her, unsmiling. Never gloat when you're winning, it distracts the mind.
She could smell the pig roasting. It'll be sausages for the next six months unless we're lucky, she thought. That was another of the things she'd grown to hate about Rome, the insistence on thrift. At least now Tarquinius had so many clients coming to the house to take instructions, they'd be able to give some of the left-overs away, instead of eating pork, cold or cursorily reheated, for the next week. (And today she'd be lucky to get leftovers, after the men had eaten their fill; the flabby bits of pork fat, without crackling, or the pickings of the bones.)
“Four and two. Does that count?”
“No, Hercla. It's a lousy throw. Hell, four and one again.”
Tanaquil was still winning when young Tarquinius came back. He was dragging his tebenna, treading on the hem. One of the brooches had come off, and he held it in one hand; the golden lion's head was so large he could hardly wrap his fingers round it.
“Father said I should come back with the women.”
“Yes, of course he did. Did the king see you?”
“Yes.” He was scowling.
“Well then. That's all he wanted.”
“To see me?”
“Yes. “
Tarquinius thought with that utter seriousness children apply to the smallest things, squinting with concentration.
“So has he learned what an Etruscan looks like? Or shall I have to kill him?”
Tanaquil looked at the girls, who were trying to stifle their laughter.
“I think he might have learned, don't you?”
Tarquinius didn't look convinced. But Hercla managed to distract him by giving him a doll she'd made of a couple of crossed sticks, and telling him it was a fine Etruscan warrior, so that he sat happily on the floor with it, occasionally shouting as it killed an enemy. But most of the time he sat with intense concentration, wriggling it along the floor or muttering secret commands, and letting the women continue with their gaming.
But now Tanaquil was finding it difficult to concentrate on the game. She miscalled a throw, and paid the penalty; and then she threw two sixes, the worst and losing throw, and lost two gold pins on it. The aulos player had started up; she looked at Hercla, who made a sour face at her.
It was usually Hercla who played, but of course that wasn't allowed either, tonight. Tanaquil hadn't known when she brought the girl into her household that she played aulos; she'd known only that Hercla was distantly related to her, through her cousin Arnth, and that she'd been left in Rome alone and without support after her husband's death, and so she'd taken her on, partly out of a sense of family piety, but also because she'd instantly taken to her. It wasn't till a few weeks later that she found Hercla's hidden talent, overhearing her playing quietly on a little reed flute she'd brought with her. Now, she'd ordered a good aulos made for Hercla, and the girl had learned how to breathe continuously, so that the second pipe sounded an incessant drone to accompany the bubbling, stuttering melody of the first. Hercla didn't have the grandeur of the best players, perhaps, but her music was infectious, developing tiny minor mode motifs into strange stuttering melodies that circled around, that leapt and skipped beats, that insinuated themselves into the brain and seemed to play on after Hercla had stopped.
This aulos player Lauchme had brought in wasn't that good; he knew the standards, 'Goatboy king', 'Tinia's oath', 'Minrva's bath'. He knew them all right, but he didn't make them live; there was no impulse behind his playing, no incessant beat, no fantasy, just the dull technical accuracy you'd expect of a Roman. Tanaquil knew why Hercla looked sour. It wouldn't improve Lauchme's temper, either, she thought.
“Dead! Dead! Dead!”
Tarquinius' voice was high and savage, startling Tanaquil; she realised, as the dice left her hand too early, that it was going to be a bad throw, the third in a series of bad throws. And it was; double six again.
The younger girl
had bent over Tarquinius and was asking him what was the matter; it appeared that Tarquinius' little warrior had killed a Roman, or possibly three Romans, it wasn't quite clear.
“Your throw.”
The girl looked up, then shrugged.
“I won't bother. I'm losing, anyway.”
“So am I,” Tanaquil said; but the girl shrugged again.
“You can have all I've got left,” she said, and went back to playing with Tarquinius, though when she tried to take the doll out of his hands, he howled, and then freeing it, slashed at her with it.
There were only two amber beads left on the table in front of her; no wonder she was quitting. Tanaquil scooped the beads up to put on her pile, and waited for Hercla to throw again.
The noise from the hall was getting louder; keen as the aulos' sound was, it was muffled by the voices. There was an occasional shout of laughter; someone must be telling dirty stories, she thought bitterly. She wondered how Lauchme was getting on; whether he'd managed to impress Faustus, or on the contrary whether the magnificence of the banquet, women or no women, had alienated the austere Roman.
She was losing still, and she'd had a long sequence of throws that gave her nothing, nothing at all, but Hercla wasn't getting any decent throws either. She passed her next turn, thinking she might change her luck if she did; at least she couldn't throw the unlucky double six if she sat it out; and then Hercla threw twin aces, and she thought damn it, I'd have had that throw if I'd stayed in the game. Of course you could never know that, but it felt just as if she'd been robbed. She pushed the stake over to Hercla with bad grace, and stood up.
“I'm sick of playing,” she said.
“It's no fun with only two,” said Hercla, and the young girl looked up with a don't-blame-me face, but no one was looking.
“I'm going to torture the Romans,” Tarquinius said into the bad-tempered silence.
“Bloodthirsty little beast!” Hercla said, laughing.
“I'm going to stick pins in them, I'm going to kill them and then I'm going to stick pins in them.”
Tanaquil smiled. “You'd think he might get better results if he tortured them before he stuck the pins in them.”
“He's still a bloodthirsty little beast.”
Tarquinius was making mysterious movements with the rudimentary doll, waving it around and then sticking the point in the floor and twisting, crooning to himself and muttering. Tanaquil couldn't distinguish his words; imprecations, or instructions? Or it might be nonsense words, she couldn't tell. His face was happily ferocious, his mouth turned up in the cruel little smile all her family possessed, a smile of self-possession as if he had a secret you couldn't guess.
“Look! They're bleeding,” he said.
At least he enjoys it, she thought, looking at his savage grin. I couldn't bear it if he grew up cold, efficient - but his blood runs as hot as mine in his veins. He has that spark of ambition, that special energy of the Tarquinian line. If he inherits his father's subtlety, too, he might be king of Rome yet.
Of course Arruns was the elder; but Arruns had always disappointed her. He was the kind of boy who did what was expected of him, but nothing more. He had been no trouble to bring up, no trouble at all. She'd wished, sometimes, that he would misbehave; that he would bite her instead of suckling, or bunch up his little fists and strike her, hard. Later, she'd wished he would fight the restrictions Tarquinius imposed - don't go out after sunset, don't get involved with the Cilnii, they're a bad lot, don't get your tebenna dirty; but Arruns did what he was told to do. Now in his first year of military training, he fought well, but he'd never get into a fight; he treated her with respect, but he was distant. He seemed to know neither love nor hatred; for him every day was the same, and he was the same every day.
Tarquinius, on the other hand... Tarquinius had that restless, contrary spirit. He'd raged, as an infant, screaming himself red, and she could still see that anger burning behind his eyes.
Like her own anger, being caged here while the men feasted. She paced the room, shaking her hair loose so that the hair rings clattered, feeling against her scalp the pull of the heavy braids swinging. She went to the doorway, couldn't stay, stalked away, approached it again; and listened, standing as close to the curtain that hid the hall as she could.
Fragments of shattered conversation, odd words and phrases.
“How goes the work with the Sabines?”
“Slowly, slowly, as these things always do...”
What work, she wondered, but her ear was distracted by a braying laugh, “He got a Greek slave to suck him off...” and a chorus of hisses and laughter; it must have been the end of a joke, but she'd never heard the set-up so she couldn't see the humour in the punchline, just the obscenity. She thought of two or three possibilities, but none of them quite tied in; it was one of those things she'd never be able to piece together. And what was she doing anyway, wasting her thoughts on recreating a tired joke? She realised she was whistling, or hissing perhaps, a slight stream of breath exhaled between her tongue and her teeth.
“And he said, they might not want to, but they need to...”
“...against the gods, and I do really think, against the customs of the city, and if you're going to say 'It's all relative' again I shall...”
Suddenly furious she hit her hand against the wall; the splitting of one knuckle brought blood, a tiny smear of damp red on the dry plaster. And uneasily she became aware the room had fallen silent. A draught stirred a little dust on the floor. She wondered if they'd heard her striking the wall; but something seemed to be happening, there were those low murmurs you might hear when something not quite expected happened, and no one was quite sure what to do. Then slowly, hesitantly, the conversation resumed, and when she heard a sudden shout of laughter from the other end of the hall she realised the interruption, whatever it had been (and she would find that out, see if she didn't) was over, normality, such as it was, resumed.
The evening dragged. Hecla tried to get her to play dice again, but she wouldn't unless the girl would, and the girl wouldn't, so there was no game. Tarquinius, tired of sticking pins in Romans - and tickling them till they screamed, apparently an even worse torture - started to grizzle, and had to be put to bed, and then screamed because he didn't want to go. Tanaquil could feel the numbness behind the forehead and over the ears, the back of her neck tight with its usual warning of a headache just beginning. She poured a cup of wine and drank it down quickly; it was stale and acid. Still, she poured another, and took it back to her chair with her.
It was late when the last guest went; Hecla and Cafatia had already gone to bed. The cleaning up would have to wait till the morning. She drew back the curtain and stepped over the threshold of the women's quarters, into the catastrophe men had made. Dark blotches of split wine, the sharp stink of it. Bones tumbled on the tables, a woollen throw left crumpled on one of the couches, stew spilt and spattered on another. The lamps out, all bar three, and one of those guttering; as she came towards him she saw Lauchme bend and cup one hand behind the flame to blow it out.
Then she noticed that there was still one man left, waiting in the shadows behind her husband, and she thought for an instant that she'd come too early. She'd already started to open her mouth to apologise, and was turning to go, but Lauchme caught her hand.
“It's all right; he's family.”
She looked again at the shadowy figure. Family? She knew she'd never seen him before, though familiarity of a sort was prickling at the back of her mind; something in those features that reminded her of someone, yet she couldn't think who it was or pin down the resemblance.
“He is?”
“Aranthur.”
“There's no Aranthur in my family,” she whispered, and thought; none in yours either, I'm pretty sure.
“It seems I have a nephew.”
“One of your sisters' boys then?”
“No... my brother's.”
“But I didn't think...”
This hissed, covert conversation could only have lasted seconds, yet they both felt they'd stood there for far too long, embarrassingly long. Tarquinius half-turned towards the stranger.
“Aranthur. This is my wife, Tanaquil.”
Even speaking to another Etruscan, she noticed that he used the Roman form of her name. She smiled thinly at the newcomer.
“I'm sorry I arrived at such a time. I hadn't expected...”
“No reason you should have,” Tarquinius said quickly, and Tanaquil realised it must have been Aranthur's arrival that had caused that uneasy silence during the banquet.
“I should have sent a message. But I didn't want you to hear from someone else.”
“I'm glad to know I have a nephew. I always knew my father had had another son. But I never knew what had happened to him. So your news was welcome. And all the better coming from you.”
“That wasn't the news I meant. And I couldn't tell you with the others there. It would have been wrong.”
Tarquinius seemed puzzled. “There is other news? Besides your sudden arrival?”
“You don't know? Then I was right to come.”
Tarquinius shook his head. What news could come from Tarchna now? The vineyard harvest for the year; a sister's marriage; surely nothing that warranted this duel of politenesses, the serious face Aranthur seemed to have put on.
“Your mother; I'm sorry, Lauchme, I'm sorry.”
Tarquinius stood still, with that exceptional stillness you see in a cat when it has seen a mouse, or a dog when it's scented a fox. He didn't have the time to ask the question.
“Two weeks ago. I'm sorry, Lauchme.”
Strangely, Tanaquil thought, Aranthur looked more genuinely sorry than Tarquinius; his face was hollowed with grief, his eyes anxious. His lower lip trembled as he gazed at Tarquinius; he must be doubting his welcome now, she thought.
Tarquinius
It would have been wrong to blame Aranthur for the news he brought, Tarquinius thought. He could only blame himself; he suddenly realised how estranged they had become from Tarchna and their families, over the years. The stories they'd heard in the first couple of years, of one sister's marriage, a cousin's victory in a footrace, the youngest's mishaps and absurdities, had become the myths they returned to time and again when they wanted to remember their past, but the present had slowly drifted away.
He'd heard, through one of the Greek houses he traded the produce of the vineyard with, that his father had died, but he'd heard too late to attend the funeral or even the funeral games, and when he wrote his condolences to the family, he received no reply, neither by letter nor any spoken message. Tarquinius hadn't been there; but Aranthur had been at the ceremony even though Demaratos had never known him, never even knew that he had a grandson. That cut him, a keen short pain that never let up.
The relationship between Tanaquil and Aranthur was still strained, but Tarquinius had grown used to Aranthur's presence and his hesitant ways, and found he had a quick mind; more, he was a quick study. Show him a procedure, or a line of reasoning, and he'd have it committed to his memory; he learned Latin quickly enough, and one evening when Tarquinius came looking for him in the back yard he found him talking with one of the Faliscan horsemen they knew, asking him the Faliscan words for grain, spelt, oat, barley, wheat.
So when Tarquinius left for the salt workings, he took Aranthur with him; both to benefit from the young man's quick brain and steady hands, and to relieve Tanaquil of his presence. Manius would come, of course; he'd become an increasingly useful lieutenant, and could manage the small force of men they'd need to assist in the survey, and whom they'd leave to get on with the digging of the salt ponds when they returned to Rome.
Of course Tanaquil had wanted to come, and of course she couldn't. He understood that; she wouldn't believe him, but he wanted her presence, too, yet he knew it was impossible. The Roman world was divided, it was two worlds; a male world and a female world, a world for men and a world for the women and children. He knew it to be wrong; he felt its wrongness, like the tearing apart of a segmented fruit, ripping the pith and the membranes apart to expose the fleshy pulp dripping with juice. And yet he understood it, too, perhaps from his upbringing in his mother's cloistered quarters, the mother who had closed herself up in Demaratos' house when she married him and never went out of it again, except to her grave.
She wouldn't believe it, but he would miss her. She sparkled like light on the water, sometime light in her wit and sometimes ferocious like a lioness; no one he knew could amuse him the way she did. Manius never joked, nor Aranthur; and Faustus joked, but heavily, like bread that wouldn't rise. He missed the strangest things; the mole under her left armpit, the sight of her painting her mouth in the mornings. And he'd miss the feel of his head between her breasts, the smell of her body.
Still, there were women everywhere, and if there weren't women, there were men, and any Etruscan knew there was no shame in relieving your desires with another. But who else would say, afterwards, “Not quite Olympic standard,” or “not bad,” and lift an eyebrow the way she did?
They were already setting the camp up; some of the mules had been unloaded, others were still loaded so high you could hardly see the animal under their bulky cargoes. Tarquinius and Manius arrived had arrived ahead of the main party; the high sun of mid-afternoon and the clarity of the blue sky and sea put them in high good humour, and they urged their horses into a fast gallop along the levels. Tarquinius had walked his flashy chestnut, the one with the splashy white blaze and one white foot, to cool it, and Manius' steady bay mare was already hobbled, her head down, shaking her neck so her mane flopped over from one side to the other, then back again.
Tarquinius slipped the rope hobble over his horse's forefeet, and stretched lazily, feeling his tired muscles tighten, then relax. He'd wandered over to one of the dunes then, scrambling up the slope, his feet sinking into the soft sand where it wasn't anchored by the sparse patches of grass. He'd looked out to the sea, a milky turquoise that gradually darkened towards the horizon. To each side stretched the dunes and marshes, devoid of any landmark except the broad waters of the river flowing into the sea; a bare land on which to inscribe the glyphs of civilisation. From here, the camp site, the horses were hidden by the slumping dunes; he was alone, utterly alone. He thrilled to it, hearing the wind in his ears, one of those primal sounds like a heartbeat or the slow retreat of a wave over gravel.
After a while, he knew the feeling would diminish with familiarity; so he turned his back on the sea and walked back through the slipping marks that showed where his feet had been, their ridges already dulled and half blown away by the wind. And by then, the others had arrived, and Manius had them already marking out the perimeter of the camp with a rope laid on the ground.
It was the standard Etruscan plan; a square perimeter, a grid formed by two crossing alleys. In the hills, of course, the plan was adapted to the requirements of the terrain; here, though, there was no need; there was nothing to disturb the evenness of the pattern. Here, as in none of the Etruscan cities - not even in Rome, constrained by its hills and marshes - the great pattern could be incised on the waiting earth, completely regular, ordered according to god's demands and the geometry of nature.
“Get the first tent up,” Manius was shouting; the poles were up, unsteady till the ropes were pulled taut. Tarquinius hoped they wouldn't be here long; in the afternoon sun the plains steamed with haze, but at night, with the wind blowing in from the sea, a chill would set in. And there was salt, salt everywhere; salt taste in his mouth, salt drying scratchily on his clothes, salt encrusted in his hair, even salt like a white scurf on his arms where he'd sweated and it had stuck. But his blood was still fired with his sense of what could be achieved here; saltings, and a port on the river, and a city even etched on the earth by the toil of his men.
Aranthur came late; he'd guarded the back of the baggage train, and he'd been delayed b
y a mule which had managed to throw off its load - or perhaps, he thought, the man responsible for it hadn't tied it securely, it was difficult to be sure.
Manius for some reason couldn't manage to pronounce Aranthur's name; and after a while, he'd decided to nickname him Egerius, the pauper, the man whose father left him nothing. Tarquinius thought bitterly that it might as well apply to him, left nothing now by Demaratos' death, since his sisters had partitioned the fortune between them; true, he'd been given that marriage gift, but he'd made himself, neither Etruscan nor Greek and even less a Roman. He was his own creation in the absence of an inheritance. And Aranthur could make himself too, though he had not yet.
They were three landless men in Rome; two etruscans, and Manius, a Sabine by birth. Tarquinius knew he'd come to Rome from Sabine Reate; and later, in the evening as the camp fire burned low, and they finished the spelt cakes they'd cooked in the embers, he asked Manius what Reate was like.
“Poor,” he said. “The kind of place where no one ever has enough food. When you have it, you eat it; there's never anything left over. No sense of anything but just surviving, day to day.”
“I thought Sabine territory was fertile,” Aranthur said.
“It used to be, before the wars. But half the terraces have crumbled, and the irrigation channels have fallen in; and so many of our trees were burned. I remember when I was a child, once, I saw a whole hillside of charred olive trees, their black branches twisted and dead.”
“So you came to Rome. That wasn't a rich town either,” Tarquinius said.
“But with Rome came the idea of achieving something - something more than just survival. Surely you see that in Ancus Marcius?”
“I do, I do,” Tarquinius said.
“I'd probably have as much in Reate now, if I'd stayed, as I do in Rome. But Rome is going to be so much more than Reate ever was.”
“But if Rome fights the Sabines again,” Aranthur said, “on what side do you stand?”
“Rome,” said Manius without hesitating.
“Really?”
“I'm not the first to make that decision. You must have heard of the Roman rape?”
Aranthur hadn't, yet, so Manius told him.
“Rome was made of outlaws, refugees, masterless men. It was a city of men, men whose trackless wanderings brought them to it, exiled from their own cities by justice or by poverty. It had a king, Romulus, and a council, but it was a city bound to die, with no women to bear the next generation. Or else it would always remain a city of outlaws, more and more men drifting in every year, and how would they ever create a civilisation if the men who came were uncivilised, used to the solitude of the unwanted and the selfishness of the loner.
“Romulus foresaw the dissolution of the city - hardly a village, as yet - before it could achieve its destiny; an abortion, formless, dead before it was born. Women were needed for civilisation, so women would be got. He took a raiding party and went hunting for women, just as he'd earlier raided for cattle and horses, rounding them up and herding them back to Rome.”
That was the kind of story that always made Tarquinius doubt whether he should be in Rome. He wondered whether Tanaquil had heard it; yes, he thought, she must have. She made it her business to know these things.
“So you approve of that?”
Manius sucked his top lip in, shook his head once. “That's not quite... you haven't heard the whole story.”
Tarquinius waited.
“My grandmother was one of those women. She was married already, with a young daughter, but they took her, along with three of the unmarried girls from her village. But when the Sabines came to claim their women, she pleaded to be allowed to stay with the Roman husband she'd been allotted. She bore him three children, all boys; and she never saw my mother again.”
A woman who actively sought her own slavery; that surprised Tarquinius, and he thought drily how little Tanaquil would appreciate that story.
“Women want to be mastered, anyway,” Manius said.
“Do they?”
“Everyone knows that.”
Tarquinius tightened his lips, but decided it was not worth replying. It wasn't much of a game, mastering a woman; what he and Tanaquil enjoyed was the duel, the perpetual game, even if he did sometimes suspect that he came off worst rather too often.
“So you're four quarters Sabine, yet you have a Roman grandmother,” Aranthur said. Manius nodded. That was interesting, Tarquinius thought; even this pure-blood was in his way as mixed in his allegiances as either of the Etruscans.
“You're not ashamed that your grandmother was stolen property?”
“Better stolen than sold as a slave.”
Tarquinius wondered what the difference might be.
Aranthur - Egerius - went to bed early, leaving Tarquinius and Manius to rake the ashes over the fire and bank it up for the night. In the vast darkness, the camp's scattered fires glimmered faintly as they died down; a few of the workers still chatted round one or two.
“You know, I probably have the purest blood in Rome,” Manius said; “Four Sabine grandparents, two Sabine parents, no admixture of Etruscan or Faliscan blood. And yet even so, I have that Roman inheritance from my grandmother. In Rome, everyone's heritage is mixed, everyone has secrets.”
He smiled, his face open; perhaps deceptively so. Perhaps not.
“You have a secret?”
Manius grinned, and flicked his head up, so that his blond forelock bounced.
“Not much of one. I used to steal.”
“What?”
“Oh, things. My sister's doll, the one she loved the most. I gave it back eventually, but only after she'd wept for it for days. My mother's hair ribbon. A pair of dice from one of the farmers who'd got drunk.”
“Long ago then?”
“Yes.” Manius sighed. “Long ago.” Then he looked up, tossing his hair out of his eyes, and fixed Tarquinius with his question. “What's your dirtiest secret?”
Tarquinius could think of three or four small, tainted secrets: how he was afraid of the dark when he was little; how the strangled princes had haunted him in his sleep; or that time one of his big sisters had found found him pulling his prick experimentally - he couldn't have been much more than four or five - and had laughed at him. That memory still stung. But he wouldn't let Manius know his humiliation. Instead he sorted through his memories, finding something that would have the right effect on the Sabine; that would win respect. Not so much a secret as an ambiguous guilt, a threat carefully chosen.
“I killed a man once.”
“Where?” Manius' face was keen in the firelight, his eyes greedy, but he leant back, distancing himself from Tarquinius, as if he had begun to fear the older man.
“In Tarchna.” Tarquinius thought well, I might have killed him, and then again, I might not have. He shouldn't have been competing in the foot-race at his age, not against a youth like me; and I knew what I was doing when I pushed the pace on the uphill slope, changing cadence, striding out. He could have given up; he could have hung back, and hoped to make it up. But he didn't; and his heart burst so that he fell, gasping like a fish for air that had become poison to his lungs. I'd known that might happen; so did I kill him?
“How did you do that?” Manius was greedy for details now; the macabre taste that made children tiptoe into the old tombs of the necropolis, or dare each other to enter a death-chamber.
“I couldn't tell you. It would be too dangerous. There are... other interests involved.”
Manius' face was avid, hungry as Tarquinius had never seen it before. They talked for a while of other things; but Tarquinius steered him away from the subject of the man he'd killed. Let Manius think what he liked of the death; a political assassination, a passionate murder, a cold-blooded execution. It was better if he didn't know; his imagination would prey on him, till the shadows thrown by the fire on the canvas of the tent were presages of death, and the wind whipping up a guy rope cracked like a broken neck.
Later, Tarquinius lay listening to the distant rumble of the sea and the thrumming of wind on canvas, wild sounds yet strangely comforting, and he thought through that conversation again. He'd known what he was doing, putting the fright on Manius; he'd never been quite certain of Manius' trust, since the accidents on the bridge, the accidents that had turned out not to be accidents at all.
Now he realised Manius had been checking him out, too, with that story of the Sabine grandmother, of allegiance to Rome. Had Manius been sent by Ancus Marcius not to help with the surveying, but to spy on Tarquinius? It was always possible; it's what he would have done himself. Perhaps, though he hadn't thought explicitly in those terms, he'd brought Aranthur to keep Manius in his sights. He might brief him tomorrow. It would make sense, if anything made sense in that fluid, mistrustful place that was Rome.