Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Tracking Cacus down proved difficult. He was a throwback to the old days; a man who took the ancient trackways, who claimed to talk to lasas and the fading hinthials who wandered aimless, forever banished from the cities of the living. He had no house, no family, few belongings; he would deliver a prophecy in the streets of Curtun or Persna, then slip away, almost as if he too were a hinthial, a drifting shadow. Tracking a man like that was like trying to grasp water in your hand, or weave a rope of mist.

  They'd got a lead, though; a guest of Vipienas' who had just arrived from Aretna said he'd been seen up there. Well, that information was a good few days old, Master thought sourly; but then Cacus was travelling by foot, whereas the aristo had been riding fast, so that evened things up a bit. It was off to the north then, packing light and taking the fastest horses. He'd force the pace, and change horses at Clevsin and Curtun, and at the waystations if he could; Vipienas' golden token was good over the whole country, for everyone knew the wealth of Velx.

  He was only taking two men; Larth Ulthes and Marce Camitlnas. Marce was a good man, quick on the uptake and quick with his weapons, too, though he tended to be a little too quick sometimes, jumping into a fight before the word had been given. It was easy to be fooled by his drooping grey hair and diffident nature, but he was one of the most efficient fighters Master knew; and nasty with it, at times.

  Larth was a good man too, solid and efficient and unimaginative, the kind of man who wouldnt go to pieces if a prophet called the Underworld down on his head; but Larth had been master of the household once, and serving Master was a demotion, so they had never been on easy terms. Still, Master would rather have Larth than any two of the other men, particularly given the nature of the job; he knew Larth never got spooked.

  Vipienas had told them to start in Aretna, but Master was sharper than his lord, for once, and started asking around as soon as they got to Curtun, in case Cacus had been heading south from Aretna. They'd taken quarters with an old colleague of Larth's, who had stayed on here after a campaign in the marches; their changing of horses had already attracted notice, and Master thought it would be better if they made no mention of their business, but stayed as veterans with a younger colleague.

  It was a crowded bivouac; all four of them bedded down in one room, which soon stank of dirty feet and sweat, the male smells of any barracks. Only the military habits of tidiness and self-containment made it bearable. Soldiers came in two types, Master thought; the ones that went to seed, drank too much, sank into squalor without a CO to shout them into shape, and the ones who lived their lives as if they were still on campaign, everything in their lives precise and ordered. Laris was one of the latter. He didn't even drink, though he was happy to send out for a jar of wine for the others.

  Laris had heard nothing about Cacus beyond what everyone knew; that he was foretelling the end of the Etruscans, that he said the world was changing, that doom was here. Laris hadn't given it much thought; madmen appeared from time to time. There had been one, last winter, he said, who had foretold the coming of the Age of Gold, but two days later they found him frozen to death in a cowshed.

  Master took to the streets, telling Larth and Marce to do the same; listen to what people are saying. Try to draw them out. He just needed to find that loose thread in the tapestry that he could pull on, but he had no idea where to start; it might be anywhere. Marce headed for the agora; Laris was going to take Larth into the guardroom; and Master headed out to the streets of the town.

  Curtun wasn't a gracious city; the streets were narrow and damp, the houses closely packed. On the main street that ran aslant the city, people scurried past, or slipped into dark doorways; no one stopped, no one loitered. On the side streets, so steep they were almost staircases, he saw one woman shelling beans, who glared at him as he went past, and a small naked boy pulling a toy horse and sucking a dirty square of old blanket. Nothing more.

  The street turned a corner on to a tiny open space, spattered with the purple of fallen mulberries. On one side, the ground fell away, and beyond the walls of the town the bright fields shone pale in tenuous sunlight, and then the darker marshes spread to the horizon, featureless and brooding. Still no sign of anyone in the streets; he went on, descending now towards the edges of the town. Roughly laid stones tipped under his feet; the alley turned sharply round the corner of a house, then back again, but always running downwards, sometimes steeply, sometimes less steep.

  At the bottom, he found a barren square, where two old men sat, one each end of a low wall, selling olives and local wine. At least, they must be trying to sell them, but in the absence of customers they simply sat. he wondered wondered how many years they'd done this, every day, coming into the town in the morning, going back as the sun sank behind the hills; there were not enough people passing to make it worth their while. An entire life spent not making a living.

  One of the men looked up towards him, his face crafty.

  "Red wine? White wine? Very sweet." A whole sales pitch reduced to six words over half a century, like a stew boiled dry. Master strode on.

  He took a road now that led upwards, not steeply towards the middle of the town but slanting across the slope of the hill, between gardens and rough houses. The path was rough earth, worn out of the hillside by the passing of feet. A cockerel called, untimely, from a back yard. A wall ran beside the path for some distance, too high to see over. At a sharp corner, the path ran upwards again, now between walls. It looked very like the road he'd taken previously; this would be an easy town to get lost in, he thought.

  He was beginning to get discouraged; two old men, a child, a dog, a solitary woman. No way to eavesdrop on a conversation; he didn't want to be seen asking questions. It felt wrong, as if a plague had devastated the town, or as if this was the city of the dead, and the living had gone to live in the graveyard. It was too quiet.

  At the next turn in the road, there was a small temple in the angle of the corner. Two sphinxes and a god looked blindly down at him, red terracotta striped with white, which looked like glaze but he realised was pigeon shit. On a whim, he went in.

  There was no one there, and nothing; no statue of the god, just a truncated pillar for an altar, and an unswept floor that showed traces of sacrificial blood or wine, he couldn't tell which. He realised, after a moment standing there, feeling conspicuous, that he didn't know how to pray; he could no longer remember the words. And after all, he thought, it was just a draughty room, with a wooden roof that let the light in where a tile was missing.

  It was only as his eyes became accustomed to the darkness within the temple that he realised he was not alone. An old man was sitting in the shadow, his back to the wall. He sat erect, his hands gripping the arms of his chair, as motionless and dignified as a god.

  His head jerked suddenly towards Master.

  "Who's there?"

  "Oh... I ... just dropped in. I was passing." Master realised two things as he said this; first how lame the words were, how meaningless; and then that the man was blind, or half-blind, anyway. Looking closer he could see how the old man's eyes were filmy with age.

  "You come at the God's bidding, then."

  No, he thought, his flesh crawling, I came at no one's bidding. Only my own.

  "The God calls to him those he wants to serve him." The priest got up, fumbling a little to pull his robe clear of his feet. His head on one side like a blackbird listening, he made his way crab-like towards Master.

  "Do you have a gift? Coin? A cake? Gold?"

  That's your game, thought Master. And mine is; do you have information? But yours is every bit as dirty as mine. He turned for the entrance as the priest reached his arms out, feeling at the air, and almost knocked him over as he strode out. On the threshold, he blinked at the light, shook his shoulders free of the nastiness.

  "Sir! A gift, something for the God." A whining voice, wheedling him. Quickly he turned the corner; anything to get away from the old man. He hadn't
looked before him, and ran straight into someone else. He smelt sour wine on the other man's breath; pulled back, apologies in his mouth but his fists curled, ready for trouble.

  "Consenting gods! Master! What on earth... I haven't seen you since the races in Vipsl. You remember? You'd just won your first couple of races, and you were the favourite to win the krater that Karkanas had put up, but one of your horses ran lame in the second circuit. You must remember..."

  He couldn't remember a thing.

  "And I was racing for one of the Tarchna houses, and came round the last corner wide, and lost the race to a Felsinan who came up the inside."

  The name swam up from somewhere in the darkness of his mind. "Ranazu."

  "Yes, that's me. And they all said you'd thrown the race, but I don't see how you could have. I saw how your horse came off, stumbling on three legs... Let me get you a drink. My friends are at the races, like half the city, but they'll be back afterwards, and meanwhile we can keep ourselves amused. I've got a nice little wine from down south, you'll like it, I think..."

  Master let Ranazu witter on. This was just what he needed, he thought sourly; then realised it was indeed - a local man with no discretion at all, who was already half cut, and would talk about anything without remembering what he'd said. And if everyone was at a chariot race, that would account for the city's deserted feel. (A couple of years back, he wouldn't have missed the races here; but he was in a different league now, and Curtun was too provincial for his patrons.)

  Ranazu was talking about some local potentate now, a story of skulduggery in the purchase and immediate resale of a Gaulish slave; Master cut in.

  "That drink you mentioned..."