by AM Kirkby
***
Faustus was happy, for once. And that meant Tarquinius was, for once, not uneasy.
The war against Apiolae had been a success, and not only against the obvious enemy. To be honest with himself, Tarquinius thought, Apiolae was a scapegoat rather than an enemy of Rome; any Latin town would have done. Or Volscian, or Umbrian, or Sabine, even. He didn't know, really, why it had been Apiolae that they selected for conquest. Some town had to be conquered, and Apiolae fit the bill. Casting his mind back to the councils before the war, he seemed to remember one of the older men who knew it pointing out that it lay in the plain, that its defences were inadequate, that two nearby settlements could be taken to give Rome a foothold. Was that the only reasoning, he wondered? Well, it had been reason enough; and Apiolae was conquered.
He'd given the Romans what they wanted; victory. They thought they had the right to take the whole world; and that made them easy to manipulate. It was as simple as leading a duck into a trap with a trail of corn; show them a war, and they'd go, and not wonder what were his reasons for it, or why he wanted them to fight. It was all too easy, he thought suspiciously; but it had fooled Faustus, and that was the point. Or at least, part of it.
He pulled on his purple toga; the golden braid of the hem scratched his neck, and he shrugged it away irritably. Victory had been declared; and victory meant a triumph, and a triumph meant games.
He could hear the scuffling feet of boxers sparring in the courtyard; they wouldn't land a blow in practice, jabbing and leaping and dancing out of each others' way. He'd brought them from Tarchna; the elegant arts of boxing and wrestling weren't known in Rome, it seemed, where an ugly flat blade decided any quarrel. He'd announced a prize for the chariot race, too, a golden krater made by one of the Tarchna workshops. It looked munificent on his part; not tasteful, perhaps, but then the restrained style of his youth seemed no longer to be the fashion in Tarchna. Goldsmiths had better taste in the old days, he thought; and almost as soon as he caught himself thinking that, he recoiled, shocked. Only old men thought like that.
The thought of his apparent munificence, though, brought satisfaction. Tanaquil had found one of the goldsmiths swindling her; he'd made earrings of silver, then gilded them, but sold them to her for the price of gold. Tarquinius couldn't have told the difference; but Tanaquil knew instantly, by the weight. Half the weight, she'd said, and a quarter of the value. She was the wrong person to try to cheat. She'd said nothing to the goldsmith, but a few weeks later, she'd advised Tarquinius to order a golden krater, and to be very sure to say he wanted it pure gold, not silver gilt, for once. The goldsmith got the message. The krater was delivered, pure gold as ordered, and without any mention of payment.
That should bring them in - the best contenders from all the Etruscan cities. They'd run four at a time; he hoped they'd have enough for at least five heats, winnowing out the competitors till they had a final quartet for the climactic race. The Romans had learned the use of a horse, but they had no great gift for it. This would be a magnificent display; an Etruscan one.
But the details of the event were a bore. Ten years ago he would have loved the work; planning for the scaffolding to be erected for the racetrack, twelve feet high; marking out the track, level and straight. Now, he was tired. He thought back to those happy days in the saltings, working on the land with his men; it seemed to him now that he'd known them all by name, that he'd dug alongside them, his hands crusted with the mud of the marshes and his face stung by the salt spume. But it all seemed distant, as if the mist had come in from the sea. Strange how feeble memory was sometimes, and yet other things protruded sharply through the haze of time; he could still feel every clod of dirt the boys had flung at him that day in Tarchna.
It was time. It must be time. He turned round to check that the fabric was draped properly at the back, reached for the circlet of gilded silver laurel leaves and fitted it on his head, pushing it down firmly till it held. Outside, a horn ripped the air with its groaning call. Time to go.
Egerius
Egerius wasn't surprised when he was called to the Palatine. Nothing Tarquinius did surprised him; they had the easy telepathy of brothers, he sometimes thought. And in any case, Tarquinius often called on his skills as scribe or historian, or even geometer; though Egerius' knowledge of surveying wasn't the equal of Tarquinius', the king needed an impartial third party for court cases involving land. Or as impartial as you could get in Rome, where the Etruscans suspected the Faliscans of duplicity, the Faliscans thought the Romans were pulling a fast one, and everyone was suspicious of the Greeks.
Still, the call, when it came, was something of a nuisance. Folding up the four copper leaves he'd been reading, Egerius placed them neatly in a stack on the left of his desk, ready for the evening. He'd be reading the new poems to a small gathering in a few evenings' time, but he wanted to make sure he had the scansion right; these freer, ode forms were tricky, and the Greek wasn't quite the same as he'd been taught. He sometimes regretted the heroic days; he daydreamed of the clear skies of Ithaka and the wine dark sea, the simplicities he found in the blind poet's ringing voice. But that regret was the luxury of a spoiled scholar; and though he felt smaller for it, he had to admit that he was glad he didn't have to get his verse by heart, but only read it out.
He closed the shutters against the late afternoon light. "Wait," he called to the servant who'd come to fetch him, and slipped the little knife he used to peel his fruit into his belt. You never knew. (And that was different from the heroic days, too, when there were good men and bad men and you knew which side each kind was on.) Looking quickly round the darkened room, he ascertained that he had left everything in good order, and went to join the servant at the door.
When he reached the Palatine he found Tarquinius in expansive mood, every inch the Etruscan nobleman, his hair neatly braided and oiled. There was no one else in evidence; perhaps Tarquinius wanted to talk to him before the others arrived. That was not good news; it would be a long night if that was the case.
"Have some wine. It's freshly warmed."
"I won't, thanks. I'll need a clear head."
"Not today you won't."
"Oh?"
"You're not here for a court case or a council meeting. Truth told, Egerius, I've been over-using you recently. I feel a little guilty about taking you for granted."
"It's nothing." Egerius shrugged. "You're family." And now he really wondered what was coming, and whether he would be able to get away. Still, he took the wine; the honey made it thick, so that it coated his mouth with warm sweetness, too much sweetness really. But he smiled, and took another mouthful.
"I miss having time to read," Tarquinius said, and for the first time Egerius could hear a genuine note in his voice. "Tanaquil used to read me some of the Etruscan poets, but she doesn't any more."
"I've been reading some Greek lyrics recently."
"I only know the Odyssey, and the Theban poem."
"These are new. A woman on Lesbos has been writing. They're rather good."
"Hm?"
" 'Some say an army of horsemen, or a line of infantry, or a fleet of ships is the loveliest sight on our dark world, but I say, it is whatever you desire.' "
"That's forthright. And good. They're all on that theme?"
"All. Though she sees love in different ways; shared pleasure, beauty, desire, possession, obsession."
"It's all of those," Tarquinius said, and sighed. "The fire in the blood. The worm in the apple."
"You should write yourself."
Tarquinius laughed sourly. "No time. And to be honest, the way things are in Rome at the moment, I'd rather see an army of horsemen than any lover; as long as they were on my side."
"You have no time to read?"
"I tried, a couple of weeks ago. I cleared some time, shooed the servants out, unrolled my Homer. I hoped to spend an hour or so with the brave Achilles; but I couldn't settle to it. I kept thinking about Veii, and the war, and the
floor plans of the shops they're building on the edge of the forum, and my mind skated away from the verse. I found I'd read twelve lines and yet I couldn't remember anything that had happened in them, not a single word from them. I must have re-read it, I don't know, five or six times before I finally gave up."
"I'm reading the new verses to a few friends next week. You could come."
"I doubt it. There's always something. And Tanaquil says I have to be careful what I get involved with; there's always some way Faustus' lot have of turning an innocent interest into a political manoeuvre. Coming out pro-Hellene, they'd call it."
"But you are half Greek, after all," Egerius said, and then wished he hadn't.
"Half. And half Etruscan. Both halves hated by Rome. And Tanaquil doesn't really understand the Greek half. I don't think she ever did."
Tarquinius seemed about to confess something; Egerius had been the recipient of such confidences before, and he could always tell when they were coming. It was a certain earnestness of tone, he thought, and a hint of tears in the voice, or the strain of keeping them out of it. Then the moment was gone.
"I haven't even had time to finish the temple I vowed to Tinia, up on the Capitoline. And I can't pay the workmen till I get the spoils from the next city we take. It's a treadmill; a war to pay for my projects, then a war to pay for that war, and never any sight of an end to it."
There'll be no end, once these Romans get their teeth into the world, Egerius thought; but he was too canny to say so. And besides, he didn't want the discussion; he wanted to get back to those poems, the wreaths of hyacinths and violets in a girl's hair, the moon that looked distantly down on lovers and was the same to lovers and to the unloved.
"And I need to get that last acquisition productive. Which brings me on to the main subject; Collatia."
"Isn't that done and dusted?"
"Conquered, yes. But now we have to set it to work. You're in charge."
No. No really. That was a very bad idea. Sent to the back of beyond to manage some wretched little town and make it, as Tarquinius said, productive. Not civilised. Productive.
"Of course, I'd expect you to do a little more than simply producing the right amount of tribute. Of course we need the money. But we need to make Collatia part of the Roman world, properly. Which means..."
"Which means soft soap, spin, a few cheap slogans, and tax."
"Not at all. Well... partly. But I thought we could do better than that."
Egerius refused to be drawn. He could smell the emollient in Tarquinius' voice like a rotten tooth on the breath.
"Rome is... Rome is difficult. I wonder sometimes if I shouldn't have stayed in Tarchna. There's something wild and dour about this city that won't change, no matter how many peoples it swallows up."
"I don't know," Egerius said softly. "There seem to be enough of us. Etruscans, Greeks, men and women with open minds and some culture. Rome might amount to something yet."
Tarquinius shrugged. "It might. I have to hope for that. But I look at the Tarpeian rock sometimes, and I look at the Black Stone in the forum, and I think the roots of Rome go too far back in blood and in darkness for it to change. I walk through the Forum sometimes at night and I can feel the wolves pacing besides me, the spirits of the unhappy dead hissing like waves on a dark shore."
Egerius knew what he meant; there was something grim about this city. And yet living on the Aventine, where rose blossom blew in summer, and there was always the scent of rosemary in the air, Egerius thought he'd put enough distance between his life and the dourness of the Romans. And here he was dragged back into it again.
"You'd have a free hand in Collatia."
"No," Egerius said levelly, "I wouldn't."
Tarquinius was half surprised, half angered by the contradiction. "You would."
"Only if the town produced the tribute you demand. That's not a free hand. Not really."
Tarquinius laughed. "Technically, I suppose you're right. But as long as you deliver what's needed, you can choose your own ways and means. I'd like to see what you make of Collatia. Take your books, take your scholarly friends, your artistic young nobles, your poets and pipe-players. See what you can make it."
That was a temptation, even if Tarquinius seemed not to take it wholly seriously. To create, in Collatia, a blended culture, part Etruscan, part Greek, part Italic; to fuse the different nationalities in a way Rome never had, to create a space of freedom and experiment; that was a heroic challenge, something to be taken on with fear and yet with desire. Despite himself, Egerius warmed to the idea.
"But don't forget civilisation needs wealth to underpin it. That's what I learned from Ancus Marcius. First the wealth, then the civilisation."
"But wealth without culture..."
"The culture will be there. But I'm relying on you to make sure the city produces the economic inputs we need."
Economic. Oikonomia. A fine Greek word. Tarquinius might have tried to live up to Tanaquil's Etruscan aspirations, Egerius thought, but his merchant father's attitudes showed through that veneer. Fifteen rough terracotta amphoras for every finely painted krater.
"You can't push it too hard. Freedom of thought demands leisure and security."
"And security takes armed men, and armed men need to be paid. Or fed, at least."
Egerius still struggled against the alluring prospect of cultural experiment. There would be too much work in it; too much administration and accounting. He might be able to establish a place in which artists and philosophers could think freely; but he might leave himself no space for his own thoughts. He frowned; what was most important for him - to write his own lyrics, tame as they were beside Sappho's magnificent fervour, or to create a free city, a place where both his Greek and his Etruscan heritage could find expression? He looked at Tarquinius; was that really what you'd wanted to do with Rome, he felt like asking, to mould a place where you could be whole?
"I'm useful here. I have things to do in Rome."
"You have your little coterie of poets."
"That's unfair."
"No, it's not. You have your little poetry readings. And for me, you do nothing another translator couldn't do. I'm giving you the chance to create your own city - another Romulus, another Tarchon - and you'd rather read some Greek girl-poet."
Egerius felt his face blazing. It was unfair; and it was completely justified, this insult. And he knew it.
Tarquinius must have thought he'd pushed him far enough; he softened his voice to nearly a whisper, as deep as a lover's.
"You understand what I'm trying to do."
Better than Tanaquil would, Egerius thought, isn't that right?
"We have the same blood, you and I."
Egerius recognised the old soft soap for what it was, but even so, it was working. Tarquinius' mellifluous voice, stroking down his prickles, like oiling down your hair after a bath. He really didn't want to go; but the temptation was too great. Before he realised it, he was agreeing to the secondment, and Tarquinius was congratulating him, as if it had all been Egerius' own idea.
They had some more of the wine then, and lazed on the couches watching the sky slowly turn from deep blue to a hazy rose pink, darkening to purple like a bruise. Egerius looked across to the Capitoline, where the marble stumps of the interrupted temple stood stark, like shattered teeth. One of the household cats wreathed round Tarquinius' legs, rubbing its chin against him; then, suddenly too proud to be seen with a mere human, leapt on to the long table, and stalked to the other end, from where it glared at them.
Tanaquil had her dogs, which lay quietly curled at her feet or looked up at her with unthinking loyalty and wet mouths; Tarquinius had only the half-wild cats that came and went as they wanted, and gave him the purely conditional love of the hungry and untame. The cat's eyes gleamed green and amber in the light, uncanny, as if there were a light shining from inside it. Egerius shivered. Night was coming.
He was reaching for another cup of wine when he real
ised he'd forgotten all about the lyrics waiting on his desk. Ah well. He wouldn't be reading them next week, anyway.