Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Manius was surprised they didn't make a quicker start on marking out the salt plans; but Tarquinius' first job was to determine the course of the feeder channel, and so the measurement was put off by several days, despite Tarquinius' apparent eagerness to get the land marked out. It would have been easier to take the water directly from the sea, as they did in other places; but Manius' objections were reasonable. The dunes afforded little protection; they'd shift over time, and weren't to be depended upon. So that meant a feeder channel had to be cut; and it had to have a gradient very slightly, and very precisely, downhill for the whole of its length, if they were going to make this work. But then at the same time the filtration pond couldn't be lower than the salt beds; so managing the different levels was going to be tricky. That was where his surveying and setting-out skills were invaluable; he'd always dreamt of setting out a new city, a city where half-Greeks were as welcome as pure-blooded Etruscans, but it was here at the edge of his world that he needed to put his lessons into practice. A bit of a come-down, he thought ruefully, from city building to digging a pond. But at least Ancus Marcius found it useful.

  Once the canal and the filter pool had been planned, work on the rest of the saltings could start; and by the end of the first week the salt ponds had been marked out with tall stakes and rope slung between them, and the canal was being dug, earth thrown up on both banks and tamped down to make them stronger and higher against the river's potential damage. Tarquinius had carpenters working on the sluice gates already, huge gates that sat in the slots between two massive pilings on each side. He'd doubled the sluice, too, so if the first one broke, there was still a second standing between the force of the river and the salt ponds. No need for such masterful carpentry between the salt ponds, though; the slope from the first pond to the final saltings was so gentle, they could simply dig through the banks from the central canal to fill them, and use a rock wedged in the hole to dam up the water once the salting was full.

  The Romans had no idea how to measure gradients, Tarquinius thought; they just wanted to start digging, and he'd had difficulty holding them back till the whole area was staked out. The land looked level, marsh and sand, but you couldn't take anything for granted.

  He'd had one of the carpenters make up a huge trough for him, every side of it trued up and square, lined with black pitch to make it watertight. The Romans had laughed. That was often the way when they didn't understand things; and they never did seem to understand the importance of measurement. It was as if their gods didn't care about the boundaries of the world, as if they didn't see that all things had measure, and needed proportion. Now, the trough was stood firmly on sturdy legs and filled with water, and he'd had it brought to the centre of the site and levelled till the water was exactly flush with the surface all around. It was a finicking process, moving one corner up with a shim under the leg, pushing the other end down, and every time the trough was moved correctly on one axis, it would be out of true on the other, so that it took a whole morning to get it perfectly level, and the water flush with the sides, not even a hair's breath of space between. In fact, if he bent to look at it, he could see the tiny curve where the water bulged up above the edge of the trough, something he'd never understood. It was as if the water had some kind of strength in it, to pull itself upward and inward, like the way a drop of water gathered on the end of an icicle in the thaw.

  Manius looked on, his respect for Tarquinius clearly struggling with a lack of conviction that this strange Etruscan flim-flam would achieve anything at all. Tarquinius wasn't explaining; let Manius wonder. He'd see what this all signified soon enough.

  “Aranthur?”

  The youth stepped up to the trough, careful as if his very breath might disturb the silvery surface of the water.

  “Take this staff. Go to the further salting. Stand there. Stand by the tall post.”

  Aranthur wasn't used to this laconic side of Tarquinius, but he obviously thought better of questioning that command. He made his way to the final rope mark, and turned round to face Tarquinius. He was almost out of earshot now.

  “Hold the staff up,” Tarquinius shouted.

  Aranthur cupped his ear.

  “Hold the staff up!” Tarquinius said again, and added “Bugger you” under his breath.

  Aranthur shook his head. This wasn't going to work. Tarquinius beckoned over one of the men, and walked a little way further off, away from Manius. He explained, quickly and concisely, just what he wanted Aranthur to do, and sent the worker trotting off towards Aranthur with the instructions.

  Manius was clearly annoyed to be left out of the conversation; it was obvious, too, that he was intrigued by the procedure.

  Tarquinius went back to the end of the trough furthest from Aranthur, and bent down till his eyes were level with the water. Closing his left eye, he sighted along the water. Without moving his body, or taking his eye off the water, he raised an arm, and gestured; up, up, pushing the air upwards with his palm.

  At the other end of the saltings, Aranthur raised the staff. Tarquinius flapped his hand again; up went the staff, the white blaze painted on it gleaming clear in the sun.

  “Damn,” Tarquinius said, and turned his hand, pushing it down towards the ground, below the level of his shoulder. After a moment's pause, the staff descended, till Tarquinius held both his palms up level with his body.

  Aranthur was still holding the staff; beside him, the other man was cutting a mark on the post with his knife.

  They carried on like this the whole morning and most of the afternoon, and at the end of it Tarquinius sent round a man to paint bright white lines around the poles at exactly the level of the notches made by the knife. Suddenly, the white stood out vivid against the dreary landscape of saltmarsh and dunes, confusing the eye into seeing a shimmering level plane of light hovering above the ground.

  Now that the level had been established, all that was left was to dig each pond to a given depth below the level, gradually increasing that depth to encourage the flow of water. The stakes were left standing proud in the excavations, supported by rough islands of dirt. They usually dug those out last; but the soil here was so poor that Tarquinius wondered whether that was needed. The water they let in would just wash the already crumbling bulwarks of earth away.

  As for the banks, those would need reinforcing; either with pilings, along the main canal, or with mats of reeds along the banks between the ponds. But that would all come later, once the ponds were dug. It was a nice decision whether to have men making the mats in advance, or get the digging under way; in the end, he looked at the huge sky and the bleak landscape and thought it might be best to dig while the weather lasted. This was no place to work if the wind got up, and the rain drove in from the sea.

  He never recaptured that feeling of solitude he'd had the first evening, standing on the dune looking out to sea; but every day he woke to that vast blue sky, he felt a tug on his heart. Under that sky, he felt himself a tiny speck on the huge earth, in the long low marshes where every landmark fell into insignificance. Each clump of grass, each dune, each mazy channel of brackish water, as soon as you walked past it began to recede into an undifferentiated flatness and bleakness; you could lose yourself here so easily, without those white markers and the ropes with which he'd bound the landscape. He was at the mercy of the gods and the weather, with nothing to defend him from rain and wind and self-doubt and the ever-gnawing sea.

  Yet at the same time he felt light, almost drunkenly inspired by the great emptiness and the vaulting arch of the sky, clear deep distant blue with sometimes a single cloud or a smear of misty nimbus high up, where you could not imagine even an eagle flying. There was a freedom here that he'd never known before. Then came a day of rain, and having set the men to work on the reed matting in their camp, he came out alone to walk the banks of the ponds, feeling the rain fall fat and heavy on him. The sky was slaty gray shading to black, the whole heaven rent in two by a dark diagonal
band where the rain slanted down. The water shone silver against the darkness, still, as if waiting for something; there was no wind, and he could hear the incessant noise of the rain, he could almost, if he listened hard enough, distinguish the individual percussive note of each tiny drop that fell on mud or in water within the swishing roar of the mass.

  He smiled, innocently surprised by sudden joy; he couldn't remember being happier since the day when he'd ridden in the cart with Tanaquil across the plateau towards Rome. As he thought of it he missed her, with a great and again sudden pain from which he almost flinched, but it didn't dislodge his joy; on the contrary, it sharpened it, so that his hair stood on end not with the cold of the storm but with the acuity of his feeling. It was as if he had been reborn without his skin, every sense more powerful and more wounding.

  The storm came hours later, a savage wind whipping up both sea and rain, the men miserable under the dripping canvas of their tents. But after that single day of storm, the good weather returned, and the rest of the work went quickly. Unlike the work on the bridge across the Tiber, it went well; not a single problem disturbed the even tenor of Tarquinius' days. Aranthur proved to have a hitherto unsuspected taste for hard work; he was always to be found shovelling earth into the great leather baskets the men used to carry it, or bent almost double with a basket slung across his slender back.

  The pattern he'd scratched out on the sand gradually became the larger grid dug into the earth. He'd looked forward to it, but strangely, he was disappointed; the dream had held grandeur within it, while the reality was just mud and dirt and puddled footprints, nothing really to be proud of or inspire.

  Manius noticed Tarquinius' increasing abstraction. He'd kept himself to some extent out of Tarquinius' way, handling the work on the ponds while Tarquinius applied himself to the trickier business of getting the gradient of the feeder canal's bed precisely graduated, a dip of two inches every hundred feet. (Enough to get the water to flow; not enough to create a surge. The difference was crucial, and you could measure it in inches. Nor could you afford inconsistency; a bottleneck, a lip or a ridge, could create a countercurrent that would, soon enough, undermine the banks.) Aranthur too had seen little of Tarquinius; he'd been too involved with the work. The men loved him; an Etruscan princeling who was willing to put in some hard work. ('Like a Trojan', one of the men said, and another replied jokingly 'At least he doesn't work like a Greek, we'd be here till the Greek kalends'...) They called him Beanpole, not Egerius, and got him drunk with some regularity.

  But they were getting close to the end of the work, letting in the water for the first time, and the three men seemed now to feel the same need for each others' company. Besides, Tarquinius was still suspicious of Manius; he wanted to keep him within sight, though he realised that it might have been better to let Manius incriminate himself. If he didn't allow Manius to undermine the salt scheme, too, he'd never be able to fix his guilt; while Manius seemed to have some interest of his own in this work, so that his fidelity here didn't clear him of sabotaging the bridge.

  At last the day came when the last earthen barrier was to be breached. The huge wooden sluice gate was already half-open in the empty channel of the canal, a single bank holding back the Tiber's flow in front of it. Even though he knew the land had been completely levelled, even though he knew every sluice was open, Tarquinius realised he was holding his breath as two of the men smashed open the top of the embankment with their mattocks, and leapt away quickly as the water began to flood over it.

  At first the water lapped over, just half an inch of slow dirty liquid; a few crumbs of earth detached themselves from the edge of the bank, and fell. Then the waves' foamy tongues began to lick the dirt, running crazily in all directions wherever they could find soft earth, checked by rocks or roots. Then suddenly a huge split ran down the middle of the dam, and a whole slab of earth slid away into the water that was pooling below, dissolving into silt. The river was pouring through now, and the sides of the bank started collapsing inwards.

  Turning, Tarquinius saw the gate holding firm, breaking the onward rush of the water to allow it to spread slowly down the canal and into the ponds. Slowly the grid plan of the saltings began to emerge ina shimmer of dull pink and silver in the low sun.

  They stayed another two moons after the flooding of the fields, the great gates closed once more against the Tiber's waters. They stayed as the water in the ponds evaporated in the sun, watching the pools turn from muddy grey to dark green, to bright red, and finally to white tinged with pink. They stayed till the men were already raking up the salt into great mounds of dirty, sparkling crystal.

  This is wealth, Tarquinius thought. Not the gold earrings of the Etruscan nobles, not the painted halls of the Roman king, but this salty scum raked from the baked mud. He thought of the stink and tang of fish guts, the split halves of anchovies caked in salt, the soft slosh of brinetubs full of cheese, and smiled, knowing the whole of Italy would be carved open by salt roads, like scars carved in skin. The golden wheat of the central plains would flow to Rome, in return for the salt of Ostia; a bad bargain for the Italic tribes, selling their open skies and plains for a pinch of salt. But through that trade Rome would bind the whole land together, more tightly every year.

  And Tanaquil would be delighted, he thought; to see Etruscan civilisation burning brightly in Rome, flickering into life in Umbria and the Marches, in Campania and Latium. Sometimes he wondered whether she had ever really accepted Rome for what it was, for the freedoms it offered; she seemed to be rebuilding Tarchna in Rome, only a Tarchna in which she could rule with a half-blood king she'd chosen to suit her own ends. But they both knew, like Ancus Marcius, that Rome had a destiny far beyond the rough wild town they'd first come to; and for the time being, that common purpose would have to do. They could fight over the details later.

  Tanaquil

  She'd thought when she had her ears pierced, and the heavy gold pins threaded through, she'd felt the worst pain it was possible to feel. She'd been wrong. This was worse.

  She was being wrung out, cramp after cramp, squeezed and torn and pulled, till her eyes stung with pain and the sweat that fell into them. Sometimes she heard her own screams as if from a great distance, sometimes she felt her throat raw and aching from them. The pain was purple, with yellow edges, stabbing, tearing hot behind her eyeballs. Her body tensed, rigid with effort, then as suddenly sagged into passivity. She was carried on waves of pain; the world spun about her.

  It hadn't been like this when Arruns was born. Or had she forgotten the pain?

  Then suddenly she let go of it all, it surged away from her, and she was left empty on the shores of a sea of blood. She saw blood on her thighs, smeared on her stomach by the woman who had taken the child from her. The smell of blood. That, she remembered.

  She must have dozed then for a while, drifting in and out of awareness. Sometimes she thought she saw her father, and sometimes Lauchme, and other faces stared inquisitively at her from the bottom of her dreams. Then she was properly awake, and hearing her name, Thanchvil, Thanchvil, her true name and not the Roman one.

  Lauchme was sitting behind her, his shoulder propping up her head, his arms around her and his body warm against her nakedness. He'd pulled her body up to sit against him, but she had slept through it. She shivered slightly; how long had she been asleep? That hadn't happened last time. Nor had the dreams.

  “Where's father?”

  “What?” He looked worried. “In Tarchna, I imagine. Did you think he'd be here?”

  “Doesn't matter.”

  She was aware she should have asked about the child, but it didn't seem important; nothing did, except the warmth of Lauchme's body and the slow beat of her heart. She closed her eyes again and let herself sink.

  “Shall I send the woman home?”

  She felt a moment of irritation. She wanted to let go of everything, to float in the warm dark world of her own sensations, and Lauchme was asking her to thin
k, to talk to him. She shook her head, blinked hard, feeling the tightness at the corners of her eyes. “You do what's best,” she said, hoping he would stop talking.

  “She said it wasn't easy this time. You were bleeding for a long time. I might keep her here.”

  Then keep her, she thought, and don't ask me what to do.

  “You have a daughter.”

  She nodded limply.

  “I thought I would call her Tarquinia.”

  Suddenly she was awake and blazing. “That's a wicked name. A Roman name.”

  “Well this is Rome.” He was all sweet reason and calm, this man, defending his wickedness. Almost as if he hadn't realised how wicked it was, this suggestion of his.

  “It's no name at all. She's not just your daughter; she's mine.”

  “Well, you know, according to the Romans, she's mine, and I can do as I like with her.” He shouldn't be joking with her now. Then again, if he wasn't joking... she didn't want to think about that. She sat straighter, seeking for that authority she'd once had over him, in the sunlit days of that Tarchna summer.

  “She will be her own woman, as I am mine. So give her a proper name.”

  “Tarquinia is a proper name.”

  “It is not. To say every time she's called, she belongs to you. Tarquinia, belongs to Tarquinius, like his horse or his house or his shitty arse; it's wicked, it's wrong, it's...”

  “Ssssh.” He'd taken her wrists in his hands, to stop her beating at him with her small fists; she noticed he was stroking the back of her hand with a finger. I would have loved that once, she thought sourly, and now I watch him doing it and I think he's gentling me, like a horse, like the bull before they sacrifice it. He looks at me now as if I'm an animal, not a woman; as if I have no thoughts, just momentary childish fears and tempers. Was it him changed, or was it me?

  “You can't call her Tarquinia.”

  “All right then, all right. Call her what you like.”

  “Thania then. After my mother. A good Etruscan name.”

  “Be sensible. You know the Romans can't pronounce that.”

  “She's an Etruscan, not a Roman. Even if she's a quarter barbarian.”

  “Hellene.”

  “Barbarian. I know what you Greeks do to your women.”

  “Thania.”

  “Thania,” he said, but she had a sense he was giving in as you did to a child, hoping you could distract it later; giving up something that wasn't important.

  “I thought you'd like Tarquinia,” he said. “After all, she'd be named after our city; Tarchna, Tarquinia. You couldn't show her Etruscan roots much more clearly.”

  “What a stupid idea! Calling a girl after a city. You want her to be like a city, is that it? Behind walls, besieged, fought over?”

  He shook his head. “Let her be Thania to us, and Tarquinia to the Romans, then. We each have two names; let her grow up the same way.”

  She knew she was beaten then. You don't understand, she wanted to say, but the cessation of pain had left her strangely depleted; she could hardly lift her fingertips, and the soft heaviness of sleep was invading her mind. So Thania was Tarquinia; and as the years passed, she was Tarquinia more often, and Thania less and less often, until Thancvil wondered if she had ever really been Thania at all.

  Tarquinius

  First the bridge, then the saltings; now the draining of the marshes, and the new buildings on the Palatine, open courts and fine high-ceilinged rooms, replacing the simple circular huts that the earlier kings had occupied. Lucius Tarquinius had become the king's right hand man; a man of influence in Rome. And Rome itself had changed; from a town of outlaws and chancers, it was becoming a place where you could dream of a good life. The raw edge had gone from it. In the street you might see men wearing fine Etruscan linens, sky blue or poppy red, as well as the undyed wool of old Rome; sometimes, the sound of a flute drifted across the open land near the founder's fig tree.

  There were still Romans of the old sort, their characters forged by hardship and contempt. They had no time for anything except war; the world had been their enemy for so long that they couldn't imagine a world without enemies. For them, life was lived for one reason; conquest. If they were not fighting, they were practising it. Every moment of their lives was dedicated to the struggle; there was no ease, no rest, no time for what they called the foreign (and that meant, enemy) arts of music or poetry. They had no time for love, only for duty; they told stories of the man who'd lost a hand rather than submit to an enemy, the father who'd put his son to death for insubordination, the woman who had stabbed her children and then herself to avoid being taken. They were hard, Tarquinius thought, but not cruel, the way an Etruscan could be cruel; they simply had no room for emotion in their lives, only for surviving and fighting.

  He wasn't surprised that Faustus had aligned himself with the old Romans, either. But the time when Faustus could have done him any damage was far in the past; Tarquinius was in the ascendant. The old Romans were on the decline, too; their sons, and particularly their daughters, found the new ways more to their taste.

  To celebrate the completion of the old palace, Ancus Marcius was holding a banquet; for the first time in Rome, he'd ceded to Etruscan custom, inviting women as well as their husbands. It was an innovation not universally approved; some of the Romans acceded to the king's wishes, while vocally complaining about his soft foreign customs, while others kept their women at home, risking his displeasure. Interesting, Tarquinius thought; normally these Romans valued obedience above all things. But then, they did elect their king in the first place; perhaps that was what made the difference.

  Tanaquil and Lucius wore the same dark red robes, trimmed with gold; gold glittered at their necks and wrists, and huge roundels of solid gold hung from Tanaquil's ears. Even their hair was braided the same way, with golden rings at the end of each plait; only while Lucius' plaits hung straight, Tanaquil had wrapped one thick braid across her temple, coiling it round like a diadem. She moved with grace, like a hunting leopard, he thought, or a smiling cat, among all the Roman women, gray and timid as mice.

  It had taken her too long to recover from Tarquinia's birth; she'd been weak for months afterwards, lacking her normal fire. But now he looked at her, and saw her as she always used to be; proud, spirited, the girl he'd fallen in love with. The girl who saw a kingdom as her rightful prize. Holding their joined hands high between them, not minding who saw, he bent his head to kiss her fingers.

  He looked round the hall, seeing who had come. Manius, and a woman with the same floppy blond hair, who might have been his sister, or perhaps his wife; Faustus, on his own; one of the Sabines he knew from the saltings business, with two women - well, that was his own affair; Marcus Robur, Tiberius and Brutus, standing with their father. Marcus looked thicker and heavier than he used to be, and hard with muscle; he'd been out on patrol in the border lands of the Alban hills. His hair was still shaved close, the skin showing through the bristly stubble. He shifted from one foot to the other, impatiently; he'd never have his father's immobility, thought Lucius. Nor perhaps his patience.

  Couches had been set, and a single chair, its elegant curved legs crossed and carried upwards to make arm rests. The slender wood of its legs was gilded; an eagle's talon formed each foot. Lucius had assumed it would be for the king, but as soon as Tanaquil saw it she smiled, as if she knew a secret and wasn't telling. As soon as Ancus Marcius took his couch, she made her way to the chair, pulling Lucius after her, and sat, her poise defying anyone to query her right.

  He was puzzled. She'd always preferred couches; ever since that first banquet she had planned for him in Tarchna. Chairs were too old fashioned for her, and too uncomfortable; they used couches at home, young Arruns sitting on the edge of his mother's couch, swinging his short legs in the air. Then he realised the signal she was sending; a defiantly Etruscan statement. Not only that; she was asserting the prerogative of monarchy. Born a lucumo's daughter, she showed herself as a queen. />
  He couldn't say the same of Ancus Marcius' wife, a woman whose spine seemed curved, so that she sat with her shoulders hunched up and her head bowed. Ancus Marcius had grown into his late middle age splendidly, his whitening hair making his square features seem stronger, more determined; power suited him. His wife seemed prematurely old; her eyes were dull, and while she allowed the server to fill her wine cup, Tarquinius noticed she never drank from it, but set it down on the table untasted between them.

  Strange, he thought, that he'd never met her before; he'd been working with Ancus Marcius for so long. But then that was the way of these Romans; the women stayed in their quarters, they had nothing to do with the men's occupations - war, or politics, or trade.

  “You're Tarquinius?” her voice was surprisingly high and childlike. He nodded, looking at her over the rim of his cup. The wine was sour; he'd have to speak to Ancus about that. “My husband talks about you all the time. He says you're very clever.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Did you really build the bridge over the river? Was it hard?”

  “I did. No, it wasn't, not really.” He didn't want to remember the trouble that had caused him, even though it was the beginning of his good fortune in Rome.

  “Oh.”

  He smiled. “It took a long time. And it was hard work. A lot of wood to shift.”

  She smiled back, a strangely shy little smile that only took up half of her mouth. “You must be very strong, as well as clever.”

  “Oh, the men did most of the work. I just watched.”

  Her hand hovered over the table; she couldn't work out what she wanted, he thought. On his other side, he heard Tanaquil's voice, low but still audible above the hum of conversation.

  “Tarchna will be the greatest of the Etruscan cities, if it isn't already. You should see the new temples. Cisra is beautiful, but it's old.”

  “I've never been outside Rome.” Lucius looked to see who was speaking; a woman in severely cut dark cloth, her curly dark hair pulled to the back of her head and tied with a single ribbon. She grabbed at a dish with her chubby hands and looked to see what was in it, then put it back with a little curl of her upper lip.

  “What was that?”

  “Whitebait. Ech.”

  Tanaquil took the dish, picked up a few of the tiny fish delicately, and put them in her mouth. Lucius could hear the bones crunched. The other woman averted her face.

  “Never been out of Rome?” Tanaquil clearly couldn't believe it. “Don't you know anything of the rest of the country?”

  “My father comes from Nomentum,” the woman said uncertainly.

  “But you should travel! You know, when Lucius and I came to Rome, I drove the chariot half the way. And what a journey that was - the open skies, the smell of grass after rain...”

  Lucius grinned as he remembered. But Faustus was leaning over the woman towards Tanaquil, scowling.

  “The longest journey she's ever made was between her father's house and my house. And that's as far as she's going.”

  Tanaquil looked unperturbed, but Lucius saw the way her nostrils flared, and wasn't deceived. She turned, and looked at him, one eyebrow raised.

  “My father always said it was the introduction of aulos players at banquets that destroyed the art of conversation,” she said. “Apparently not.”