by AM Kirkby
***
It took them two days to make their way back towards the great mountain; they'd walked in a huge curve north from Curtun, and now they were heading south-west again. This whole mission they'd been walking in circles, Master thought. He was used to the skirmish, to the frustrations of war – the only difference between success and failure was that success was a matter of two steps forward, one step back, while failure was one forward and two in retreat. But this was different. At least in war, you knew where you were going, forwards or back, you knew who the enemy was.
He dreamt of Ramtha in the night, angry-faced, curling her fingers into talons to strike at him. Her face was greenish blue, her teeth long, she was Vanth, the goddess who brought death; when she scratched his back in ecstasy she tore his soul out with it. And then in another dream she taunted him with his failure; angrily, he threw her to the couch, and hit her, and tried to take her, but he could not get hard, and when he woke he felt empty, his mouth sour, his eyelids heavy as if he had not slept.
At least they could move faster now since they had no need to try to track Cacus, or cast about for traces of his presence. They knew where they were going, quite precisely; Marce knew the place from his childhood, where the youthful river Fiora had scoured out a round pool in the gorge. You could tickle trout there, he said; and there was a cave above it. The young woman they'd met had claimed this was another of those coincidences that were not coincidences, of course; and Marce had brought them up through the narrow valley, in the sudden cool below the chestnuts.
Cacus was there; an ordinary looking man, not anything Master had expected. Even the trained eye would find it difficult to pick out any distinguishing factor. Typical, Master thought; his philosophy gives me nothing I can get a grasp on, and the man himself seems to evade me, almost as if his face is pliable, always changing. And yet as soon as they spoke, Master liked him.
Everything Cacus did, he did simply. The word 'elegant' wouldn't do, Master thought; it implied a certain self-consciousness, a certain artful quality that just wasn't there with Cacus. He knelt to place the bread and salt by the three men, in traditional greeting, and the gesture was not rough, not hasty, just right in some indefinable way. They sat companionably in the sun, breaking the bread and dipping it in the salt for taste, and watching the light shimmering on the pool below. Sometimes a leaping fish broke the surface, and the ripples spread out long after it had gone, slowly, lingering.
Master never could remember quite how the conversation had gone. He'd tried to draw Cacus out on that matter of a king's blood, but somehow instead they ended up talking about how you could never feel quite solitary in nature, and how on the other hand you could end up feeling completely alone in the middle of a city, and how, however high you climbed, however far you went, there would always be some peak unconquered.
"We are a people made of boundaries," Cacus said. "Yet we need to exceed those boundaries. Man is made of the land, and yet we must be more than the land."
"Is that why you believe in the new age?" Marce had asked.
"There will be a new age, whether we want it or not, whether I believe it or not."
Larth had been silent till now, but this was the kind of talk he responded to. "You're right we need to break out. Gauls to the north, the Rrumach, the Greeks – we let ourselves be encircled by enemies."
Cacus said nothing, merely looked at Larth, a look which carefully said nothing; not interest, not inquiry, not contempt.
"Life is just conflict, from the day we're born. Some wage war, others just shout. You win or lose. Nothing else."
Cacus smiled. "Nothing else? Life is... look at the circles on the stream. Close your eyes and feel the sunlight. Tell me life is nothing else."
"Light and water. And then?"
Cacus smiled again, and did not answer.
Marce was frowning. "But nothing changes."
"Exactly."
"But you said it will be a new age."
"Yes."
"So how..."
"Everything changes, nothing changes. Look at the ripples in the water; same water, new ripples. Why does anything have to happen? And then, there is always something happening; the river passing, the sharp iridescence of a dragonfly."
"How do we know who we are if we don't act?" Larth was getting angry. "We need war. It makes a man."
"Makes him what?"
"Makes him what he is."
Cacus sighed. "So what makes us Etruscans? The land? Our traditions? Our language?"
"At least we're not Gauls. Not barbarians."
Master smiled. "That's what the Greeks call us."
"We're not Greeks either."
Cacus smiled again, but there was something sad in his eyes, Master thought. "It's easier to see yourself in a mirror, it's true... those who want change will possess it; those who want enemies, will have them. And that will never change."
Master felt doomed to failure. How could he win, in this world of shifting visions and fragmentary meanings? He could see so many endings to this mission; he could, quite simply, take his knife and cut Cacus' throat, or have Larth do it (and Larth would do it with pleasure). Though that would not silence the rumours, the cloud of ideas Cacus had set swirling like a dust devil through the Etruscan cities. Or he could try to win Cacus over, to have him spreading a more acceptable message; but then, he thought, Cacus didn't even have a message, just questions that could never be answered. No, that wouldn't work either; there was no way to hold this man fast.
Cacus hadn't even asked their names or where they had come from; he'd greeted them without surprise or suspicion. Did he realise that even now, Larth was assessing the right trajectory of a thrown knife, Master weighing up the likely success of assassination?
As the afternoon wore on, shade fell over the pool; the conversation flagged. Larth tried to catch Master's eye a few times, but Master turned, pretended not to have seen. Marce seemed pensive, struggling with some thought he couldn't straighten out; and Cacus sat, quietly, watching the water.
Nightfall found them in the cave; more properly, the shelter of an overhang in the soft rock. They shared a simple meal, of spelt cakes and a couple of fishes Marce had caught in the still deep water, and a rich brown cake scattered with poppy seeds, that tasted of sweetness tainted with rot. Not unpleasant, Master thought, that touch of sourness.
He grew tired; not honest tiredness, after physical labour, but the sort of lazy deadness that steals over you on hot afternoons, when fingers grow too heavy to lift and you want to close your eyes and drift into the dark of complete surrender. He struggled against it; he tightened his hands into fists till he could feel his fingernails digging into his palms, a tiny point of sharpness against the fog of fatigue.
At some point he began to realise it wasn't just tiredness. Snakelike trails of thought wound through his mind, but he couldn't quite catch hold of any of them; some dim sense that he was in a maze, that he was himself a maze, made out of glaring light and dense darkness and sweet clinging honey that pulled at him and would not let him move. He had forgotten where he ended and the world began; he was the darkness inside the cave.
He bit his cheek savagely, hoping the pain would bring him back to himself. It did, for a moment; it must have been the poppy seeds, and the darkness was lit up with flashes and smears of fire, and the echoes of humiliation. I couldn't get hard enough, last night's dreams running through his head, his impotence, the failure of his mission. The world against him.
Pain no longer an answer. Larth's figure looming through the fog, his shadow huge in the firelight; kill him, kill him or we won't be safe, he didn't know whether it was he who had thought it or Larth who had spoken. Larth who knew his failure, Larth who mutinied, Larth who laughed at him, the cruel mockery of the rich boys who'd never been fucked. Then he got up, shaking off his fatigue like a hunting dog shaking glittering water from his fur, seeing the sparks fly from him in the hot dark, and took his knife, and slashed, a
nd caught Larth's throat, and saw, as if time had slowed, the fan of blood spreading from the cut he'd opened, spraying in crystal geometry droplet by droplet, pulse by pulse, and Larth's throat opening wide like an evil mouth.
Tanaquil
Tanaquil never really understood Roman culture. In Rome, the king's wife became a priestess; but it was a strange kind of priesthood, a matter of prohibitions and taboos. The priestess of Jove, for instance – or rather the wife of the priest, it came to the same thing - undertook to wear her hair uncombed, to wear a veil, never to mount a horse or a staircase, never to touch a dead body, nor dogs, beans, or ivy. And from what she heard they were forbidden to eat cakes in bed, though that might have lost in the translation. Fortunately there was no such extensive list of prohibitions applied to her, only a few restrictions on her dress and the requirement to offer sacrifice on particular days, for which she was grateful.
This whole 'priestess' thing was strange to her. In Tarchna, a priest was a priest was a priest, whichever sex, and a zilath was a zilath; and though female zilaths weren't common – there hadn't been one in Tarchna for five generations – still it was not unknown, and little girls were allowed to dream, even to aspire. She remembered how at four, she'd proudly declared she wanted to be an augur and a zilath and a priest and a dancer and a chariot racer, and it was only the last that had drawn a smile from her parents – she'd been a clumsy toddler, it wasn't till she got into her second lustrum that she'd changed; she still remembered how it felt, as if over the space of a few weeks she'd grown into the body that had been there, waiting for her. An augur was someone who had the sight, and who had trained it; and a priest was someone who offered sacrifice and did the will of the gods, and that was the same whether they were man or woman. But the Romans divided the world so that a priestess and a priest were not just different words, but different things.
And this idea of married couples being priest and priestess; quite ludicrous, she thought. If your husband became king, that made you a priest; with no training, no self-searching, no retreat into the uncompromising place where nothing existed but gods and the dance of time and space, the dance that picked you up and went on, and had always gone on, and always would go on, washing you up on the bank as a broad river leaves a wrecked tree on the shallow mud of a meander. A dance was joy, but it was inexorable, it made its demands. But what did the Romans know about that? They thought you became a priest just because the man you married became a priest, and he became a priest simply because he was king.
Look at Tarquinia, for example; she'd be a priestess, if she married a king of Rome. It was impossible to think of anyone less fitted for the role; she was a beautiful girl, but her head was as thick as a tree stump when it came to augury. It was impossible to teach her to float, to swim, to drift into the augur's place; she was rooted, firm, clenched into the world she felt and saw. But the Romans would make her a priest, none the less, though she had no idea of the numinous, couldn't tell an omen if she'd seen a man aflame with crazy lightning or found an oak sizzling and bleached where the thunderbolts had struck.
Even so, Tanaquil was a priest, in both the Etruscan and the Roman sense; and so when Tarquinius held his games, she officiated, dedicating the games to Tinia, to Uni, and to her own patron, Menrva. She poured the half-milled spelt from a clay dish into the flame; the flame flickered, the stink of burning fouled the air. She was half aware of the crowd below the podium, watching her, and half aware of the track laid out in the great bowl between the Aventine and the Palatine hills; but when she smelt the burning grist, she seemed to be back in Tarchna, making her first offering as a girl, aware only of the presence of her father and of the god. (At three, they were much the same thing. She felt her mouth flicker in a brief smile at the thought.) The dish was the same simple clay; she handed it to the boy server as she'd handed it to her father then.
(Out in the crowd, Faustus and Manius were watching. As Tanaquil turned away from the altar, raising her hands to the crowd to show the successful completion of the rite, she realised she was smiling, and recomposed her face to the solemnity required. Her eyes seemed to lengthen, and her mouth moved from wistful to cruel; for a moment, Faustus believed he'd seen into the true wickedness of the foreign woman, and then all emotion was wiped from her face, so that it was like an ancestor mask, unfigurable.)
It was always difficult to come down from the altar, to switch from the swimming ecstasy of the sacrifice, and the excitement that always played through her nerves when she was up there, in front of so many eyes, to come down from that and rejoin the ordinary world, on a level with the others. From the altar she had seen the whole land laid out around her, the vault of the sky above and the basin of the earth below; and now she couldn't see over the shoulder of the man who blocked her way, couldn't see the start of the first race for the crowds. She made her way through the crowd, looking for the charioteers' corral; she might not be racing, but she still wanted to check out the horses.
There were a couple of greys from up north, Felsina or Atria or one of the smaller towns, with sturdy legs and muscled shoulders; shortish, but they'd turn well, she thought, compared to the leggier piebalds Tarchna had entered.
She saw one driver picking up his horses' feet to check them. He was wiry and hard, but that wasn't what attracted her attention; it was a certain quality of stillness in him, when he'd finished, the ability to wait motionless in a field of movement.
"He's trouble, that one. Look at his eyes."
Tarquinius had found her; he must have know she'd be here, by the horses, not with the sociable crowd. She looked again. The driver stood, and not even his eyes moved, or shifted to track the bodies in the crowd.
"He's angry," she said. Tarquinius nodded.
"I'll bet on him, mind you," she said; "men like that win."
"Or die."
"Sometimes. But I think he'll win."
There was too much to do that morning to pay much attention to the games; there were ambassadors from some of the nearer cities, there were traders and musicians and painters and engineers and augurs applying for Tarquinius' patronage, or sometimes for Tanaquil's, who had to be spoken to seriously and flattered and allowed to present their projects, even if there was no intention of bestowing either approval or patronage. (One was quite made, Tanaquil thought, with his idea of turning the slopes of wild Soracte into hanging gardens. Still, such men were touched by the gods; and what an idea it was, though impracticable. She gave him a laissez-passer to the palace and arranged a meeting with one of Egerius' poet friends, a half Phoenician, half Roman girl with huge hooped gold earrings and the stride of a javelin thrower.) Tarquinius' pick, the northern team with its greys, started too quickly – Tanaquil thought the horses had bolted before the starter actually called the start of the race – and the chariot turned over on the second bend; but Tanaquil's driver came through all his heats, competently though without excitement.
They had meant to see the wrestling, in which one of Tanaquil's younger cousins was going to compete, but half way there, realised the crowd was too thick to see both that event and the final of the chariot races, and started to make their way back to the scaffold from which they would watch the race. They were still stuck in middle of the crowd when the chariot race began, so they didn't see the drivers take their teams down to the start, or see how quickly Tanaquil's champion began the race. When Tanaquil got a clear view of the track, the chariots were already half way down the opposite straight, the whole line level across the track. They'd started fast, flat out; no one was prepared to lose ground, to wait their time.
"It'll be fun when they come to the turn," Tarquinius said.
But all chariots made it round the first turn safely, though one of them ran wide, losing a couple of lengths. Was that deliberate, Tanaquil wondered, or had the horses taken the easier path despite their driver's urging? When she saw the driver, she had her answer. Along the nearside straight, he started to make up ground; his horses were t
ravelling easily, despite the hard pace, with room all around them and a clear space ahead. By the end of the straight, he had already overhauled one of the other chariots, and just at the turn, he swerved in behind the leaders to take the inside. The chariot behind him was forced to turn wide, the horses throwing up their heads as they nearly caught the back of his vehicle with their forefeet.
Two in front, one behind.
Tanaquil looked at the last chariot. One of the horses had broken rhythm, its ears flat; it wouldn't be a threat. Two more to take.
The leader's horses were beginning to falter; they were stretching out their necks, their heads nodding at each stride, looser and looser. She could see the effort in their legs, the heaviness building up in the muscles, the way they were losing their easy rhythm, and every step was more of an effort than the last. And she realised the charioteer at the back must have seen this, too, as he steered a line that curved gently and took him outside the leaders, boxing in the second chariot which had nowhere to go. She could see its driver reining in his horses, trying desperately to stop them smashing into the now struggling leader. At the next turn, back into the home straight, the man with the angry eyes was in front, and he took the turn tightly, sweetly.
But now, she saw, though two of the chariots had fallen back, the one that had been fouled earlier was fighting back. The nearside horse was tossing its head, angry, but none the less, the chariot was making headway, slowly reducing the other's lead.
She wondered if she was going to lose her bet at the last. The leader was belting his horses with the end of the rein, but they weren't picking up; they weren't flagging, but there was no acceleration left in them. The other chariot was coming up fast. The leading driver glanced behind him; and before he was eyes front again, he'd already twitched the reins. The chariot began to swerve, dangerously hard, to the right, cutting in front of the second team; but quickly, the other driver switched to the inside, his way to the finishing line clear and his horses still full of running.
“You've lost your bet,” Tarquinius said.
Tanaquil laughed. She knew what was coming. She'd recognised that man's way of thinking; it was her own.
And sure enough, he jerked his chariot back to the left, cutting off his rival again within a few strides of the line. It was a dangerous tactic; these racing chariots were light and tough, but they weren't built for this kind of manoeuvring. Before he'd brought his horses down to a canter, one wheel had started to wobble on its axle; the peg must have come loose. He'd got them trotting by the time it finally fell, slewing the whole chariot on to its side. He must have known it would happen, and loosened the reins ready from around his waist, for he was able to jump out, running alongside his horses till he could catch their bridles and pull their heads down. He stood, covered in the grey dust that the horses had raised, only his eye sockets pale where his natural skin showed through. The horses' flanks were covered with white foam, and their nostrils were flaming red. He stood there still, and held them till they had stopped fighting for breath, and he did not even smile.
But he'd been past the line before his chariot fell apart.