Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Servius was invited to dine with them a few days later; he was staying in Rome, at least for the time being, and Tanaquil guessed he might be looking for better opportunities here. What exactly qualified as a better opportunity, though, she was unsure; from what she'd heard, he was close to the ruling family of Velx, ran the city's army and most likely its intelligence, and had been used on a number of confidential missions. She wondered whether his presence in Rome was part of some subterfuge on Velx's part, or whether he'd fallen out with the Vipienas.

  Tanaquil had worried that Servius's dour bluntness would make him poor company at a banquet, but she was surprised; he turned out to have the makings of an excellent raconteur. He told the story of his first pair of horses and his first victory, which prompted Tarquinius to remember that long-ago drive from Tarchna to Rome; the blazing blue skies, the peewit's call, the huge emptiness of the land.

  "The third day of our journey," he said, "I was wearing a cap; the sun was strong. An eagle swooped and took it from my head," he said. "It was an omen, of course. The king of birds took my cap, and gave me a crown."

  It hadn't been like that at all, Tanaquil knew; but no doubt after so many retellings, Tarquinius had come to think that this smoothed-out version was the truth, and not the terror, the suddenness, the confusion of the moment. And what she knew, and had never dared to say aloud, was that the same eagle that brought a crown could also take it.

  That led to a round of story-telling. Elissa, the half-Phoenician, had a tale that was both scabrous and oddly touching about a one-legged Phoenician sailor and a seventy-year-old Egyptian temple dancer; Tanaquil, once she had stopped nearly snorting her mouthful of wine over the tablecloth at the dirty but apposite conclusion, put on a straight face and told a mournful story of human sacrifice she'd learned from an augur in Velzna. There was a brief silence when she finished; it was like one of those moments in the country when, suddenly cold, you realise a chill wind has started to blow, and blacker clouds are shifting over the softer white of the sky, and where you were in sun, you are now in shadow.

  "I can't match that tale," Manius said; "but if it's not presumptuous, I can offer a story of the ghost at the wedding. It's an old story, a story that came to me from my grandmother who came from Curtun, a story of ancient Etruscan lore, and..."

  "Get on with it." Elissa sounded sharp, but she was grinning.

  "Wait for it," Tanaquil said. "He's got to tell us how his grandmother got the story from a one-eyed priest in the grove at Velzna on a midsummer morning, and what that's got to do with the family's Etruscan looks."

  "Go on," Tarquinius said, leaning forward. "Ignore the women."

  It was a good story, though Manius told it rather hesitantly – a story set in a time of war, when families and friends were separated, and news was hard to get. Looking round the table, Tanaquil realised almost every guest had lived through such times; it was the way things were, even though Manius told it as if such days were past.

  "Arnth and Urfe had grown up together; they were inseparable friends. Nothing ever came between them, until, early in Arnth's eighteenth year, he fell in love with a young woman from the next village, and so did Urfe.

  "Now neither of them would give up his claim, and Arathia – that was the girl's name – wouldn't decide between them. Grandmother said it was because she wanted to be scrupulously fair; I think it was because she enjoyed playing them off, one against another. But perhaps my grandmother didn't know the women I know.

  " They held little contests for Arathia's sake – who could bring her the best game from the hunt, who could bring her the finest jewellery, even if nowadays we'd look at it and just see a few glass beads. Sometimes they would race against her, or they would compete in the dance. It was good-humoured, but there was always an edge to it.

  "Then one day in the cornfields where they had been reaping she asked them what they would do for her – how far they would go to please her. Arnth said he would give her his house, his horse, and his armour. Well the horse, she said, would please her; but as far the armour, it wasn't her size, and she knew the house belonged to his mother. Urfe said he would keep his armour, then, but he had an orchard his great-grandfather had left him when he was only a baby, and he would give her the orchard and all the fruit from it for ever and ever. But she said that while the orchard was fine, his horse wasn't as good as Arnth's.

  "And so it went on, with the boys bragging and the girl laughing and denying, until Arnth said he would bring the stars down from the sky for Arathia, and she laughed at the idea, and Urfe said he would come back from the dead for her. She didn't like that, and stopped the game – it was unlucky to mention death, she told him, and it was getting dark, and cold, and time to go in.

  "War split the two inseparables in the end; Arnth managed to get himself taken prisoner in a raid, and he was ill for some time, and two years later when he came back to the village, as an exchange for a prisoner of the other side – otherwise he would have been sold – Urfe had gone, off fighting in the north to give aid to Curtun against the Celts. And Arathia had grown up, in those two years, or perhaps had just done the calculations and worked out that she was better off marrying Arnth than losing both of them.

  "So Arnth and Arathia were married, and held a feast, and invited the village. It was a pity, Arnth said, that Urfe could not be there, but these were times of war, and no one knew when he would come back, or – gods forbid – whether he would come back at all, and there was no point their waiting. He had waited long enough.

  "The procession started from Arathia's house as night fell."

  "Night was falling over the Palatine, too, and the wind sighed in the poplars as he spoke. Even the minimal noises of wine cups picked up and set down, bodies shifting on couches, were stilled as they listened in the half dark.

  "It wound up through the woods, where the road curved deeply hidden between steep banks, and the drifted leaves muffled all footsteps. They traversed the plateau, where their torches strung out in a long line of fire, stumbling in the ruts that generations of carts had carved in the limestone. And at last, past the yawning black gateways of the houses of the dead, and across the river, they came to Arnth's village and to Arnth's house.

  "No one could say when Urfe joined the procession. Some said he had been there when they had started out; some claimed to have seen him making his solitary way across the fields towards them. One man said he'd seen him hanging around near Arnth's house earlier, though no one believed him. What was strange was that though Urfe had always been much liked, no one remembered having spoken to him at all, or even seeing him speaking to anyone else.

  "When they got to the house the moon was up and full, though it kept slipping behind clouds, so that sometimes the whole village was silvered with light, and sometimes lost in a pool of blackness. There was music, and good humoured scrapping, and dancing, and it wasn't till late that the priest was summoned to make the libation so that Arnth and Arathia could join hands.

  "It was then that Urfe walked out of the crowd towards the threshold of Arnth's house, where the bridal couple was standing.

  "The dance stopped. Everyone wanted to see what would happen. Would Urfe congratulate Arnth on his victory? Would he try to stop the marriage? Would he attack his former friend? No doubt there were people in the crowd who wanted to see punches thrown, a little drama to go with the wine and dancing.

  "Urfe stood there for a moment, swaying slightly. Arathia had stepped back; her eyes were too wide, like a horse when it's about to bolt. Arnth had put his arm around her, and stepped forward, between her and Urfe.

  "At that moment the moon came out from behind clouds, low in the sky. and shone full on them. Suddenly, Arathia fainted, and Arnth staggered under her weight, and where Urfe had stood, there was nothing but a drift of smoke.

  "Two days later, the few survivors of the army rode in from the north. They were tired, hungry, two of them wounded. Most had lost their
armour.

  "Urfe had led the assault. Urfe had fought with the desperation of a wounded tiger. And Urfe had died, a week ago, in the bloody slipping mud and rain.

  "My grandmother always called that story 'the ghost's revenge', though some people called it 'greater love'. I was never quite sure what she meant."

  Manius had reached the end of his tale, and took up his winecup to refresh himself. It was Elissa who broke the silence.

  "It would have been a better story if you hadn't already told us it was about a ghost."

  That was true, of course, Tanaquil thought; ghost stories were always predictable; but Elissa's sneer had broken the mood. Tarquinius clapped his hands; the servants brought lamps, Tanaquil refilled her cup, Elissa was reaching out for the honeyed nut pastries, Manius was drinking.

  The conversation seemed to divide after that, as if people were bored with the story format; Elissa and Tarquinius were discussing some kind of new game with Manius, which seemed to be all the rage, though Manius maintained it was only slightly different from fox and geese, and that was so old-fashioned even seven year old boys would be ashamed to be seen playing it. Tanaquil turned to Servius; she might get to know him a little better, after all.

  "Elissa's right," she said; "ghost stories are predictable."

  "Most of them are lies, too. If not all of them."

  "Oh, you don't believe in ghosts?"

  He laughed. "I know you're an augur, so you must believe in spirits, or gods, or omens. But ghosts? No; no, I don't think so."

  "You don't think so," she said, her voice as smooth as the surface of a quicksand, and as dangerous. "So why is it you say only most of them are lies?"

  "Well," he said, "you never can be quite sure;" and suddenly serious, he began to tell her about his search for Cacus. How he searched for Cacus the prophet, and found him, and realised that there was a traitor among his men; and in the darkness of the night, found who the traitor was, and cut his throat, and killed Larth, his second-in-command.

  Tanaquil was impressed despite herself. She could feel her eyes were wide. Quite deliberately, she opened them even further, turning to lie on her front and look up at Servius from slightly under her lashes. It worked; he flushed. She could still use that magic when she wanted to, even at her age.

  Then he surprised her. He laughed grimly, and sat back. "Of course when I woke," he said, "I found I'd done nothing of the sort."

  "What?"

  "Cacus must have put some psychotropic drug into the flames. Or perhaps he drugged the wine. Larth was asleep on the floor next to me, snoring like a sow in mud. He didn't wake for two hours. I'd not laid a hand on him. And Cacus was gone, of course."

  She got the impression he'd made this into a finely crafted story, a performance; he was hiding something, something that made him uneasy about the episode. Something that made him wonder if just a few ghost stories might actually be true.

  The party broke up shortly after; Tarquinius was tired, Manius was drunk, and Tanaquil knew if she didn't pack them off, things would go wrong in one of two ways – either the men would get drunk and argumentative, or the rest of the evening would be punctuated by long, embarrassing silences when no one could think of anything to say and half of them couldn't remember what they had just been talking about, either. Manius went first, a morose drunk rather than a fighting drunk, thank the gods; Servius made business-like excuses, and Tarquinius reeled off to bed on the shoulder of one of the younger servants. He'd probably sleep with him, she thought sourly, though he probably hadn't enough energy to bother him much.

  The servants had all followed Tarquinius; she had to find Elissa's mantle herself.

  "That will keep off the chill from the marshes," she said as she draped it round the younger woman's shoulders.

  "There's always a chill in Rome."

  Tanaquil laughed without much humour.

  "You were a bit mean to Manius."

  "Hm. Yes. I don't know why, but whenever I'm sleeping with a man, it makes me mean to him."

  "If you slept with Tarquinius you'd have good reason."

  Elissa, wisely, ventured no comment, and kissed Tanaquil lightly before departing.