by AM Kirkby
***
The auspicious day had arrived. He'd waited two years for this; two years of patient clearing of the ground. Smashing down houses, felling trees, burning the scrub. Two years of splitting, gouging, levering out the great blocks of tufa, soft as cheese till it hardened in the air. Two years reducing the rugged ridge of the Capitoline to flat land. He'd changed the city forever, already; and now the great temple could at last be built, the temple that would stamp Etruscan civilisation on the skyline.
He'd been waiting two months since his foremen told him the site was ready. That was easy to see; the ground scoured clear everywhere, the rock raw. Only Tanaquil had insisted on waiting for the auspicious day; the day set by the gods, the day of beginnings. All things in their time, she said, and all things in their place.
They were bringing the victim now. The horns were blaring as the procession wound its way up the path from the Forum. It was a sound that always made him shiver; like a thing in pain, an ancient creature from the dark before man rose from the furrows of ploughed earth.
He would mix the victim's blood with the mortar; it would be forever part of the temple.
He shivered again. The air was cold up here on the hill's top; he looked down towards the bend of the Tiber, its surface ruffled by a gust of wind. He thought of the head they'd found, buried right at the centre of the hill under a mound of rocks, entombed in a rough kist made by stone slabs. It looked almost as if it was cast in bronze, the delicate pathways of wrinkles and creases still precisely etched on the leathery surface of the face, the hair tightly curled. The eyelids were closed; it bore an expression of great resignation; and it sat upright, staring through the stone in the direction of the Tiber mouth, on its neatly severed neck.
He'd shivered when he saw it. It was uncanny, like the blaring of the horns. He'd wondered if he'd been right to build his temple here, on ground where before Vegoia gave the Rasenna their land, before Athens and Corinth, some barbarian tribe made their sacrifices, or sorcerors their oracles. He'd seen the head brought up, and wished immediately it could be buried again; but it was too late.
Tanaquil had whitened when she saw it; then, suddenly, laughed.
"Go ahead," she'd said. He winced at the implicit pun.
"What does it mean?"
"What does anything mean?" She was in a spiteful mood. She let him dangle, then shrugged. "If you want a meaning, it's a head. Get ahead. Head of state. Dead ahead. Heading up. Caput, capitol, capital. Meaning you are the head of Rome, Rome the head of an empire. If you like."
"And if I don't?"
"Then make something up yourself."
They never found a body to go with it.
He'd put about what Tanaquil had told him, that Rome would be the head of an empire; a great Etruscan empire, he'd said, but Tanaquil sniffed, and told him the Etruscans already found the compromises involved in confederacy hard enough to manage. What chance was there the cities would agree to be subsumed in his imperial project? Rome would be head of the world, he said, and left the question of exactly how and in what form vague.
The trumpets blared again. The procession had reached the turn in the path. One day he'd build a staircase here, Tarquinius thought; steps which led straight up to the front of the temple, not turning in those two tight twists between rugged outcrops of rock. He closed his eyes, seeing Rome, his Rome, the Rome that was to be.
They hadn't wanted this temple. He was spending wealth his soldiers wanted themselves. The loot from Apiolae, from Corniculum and Nomentum, snatched back from the army's hands to pay for the works. Men were drafted to work in the dust of the quarry who thought they should be fighting. He'd had all the gold from his conquests melted down; he remembered a pair of filigree earrings, tiers of tiny lions' heads growling, encrusted with the dusting of granulated gold. He'd seen them nibbled away by the heat in a matter of moments, reduced to a skeleton which then itself dissolved into the melt. Hours of a master's patient work, gone in a few heartbeats.
Tanaquil was laying out the plan; walking the walls that had not yet been built, with her augur's crook in one hand, and the spiked hat of the augur on her head. She'd called him a hypocrite. Raping the wealth of Etruria to build a pseudo-Etruscan state.
"I thought we were on the same side," he said, and knew as he said it how lame it sounded.
She'd raised an eyebrow, and said nothing.
He thought of those earrings he'd melted; they would have looked right on Tanaquil. Lions for a lioness. There was no going back; the gold was melted. It would become something new, as Rome would become something new.
He saw Tanaquil stop, stop and turn, turn and start walking again. The western corner. Behind her, a line of livid cinnabar red marked the boundary line; powder scooped out of a bag with one hand, laid down at every step, her arm trailing in a languid arc. She paced evenly, slowly, her paces the measure of the temple; as accurate laying it out as Tarquinius could have been with rope and pegs and sighting board.
The tufa blocks were ready on their sledges; they'd move them over tomorrow, to make a start on the massive podium, as tall as a man; the temple's foundation would be higher even than the hill had been, before he'd flattened it, higher than a man, soaring above the city. That would be this year's work, just building the base, and the great stairs that led up into the temple; and then the temple itself would rise, great columns capped by a pediment, and the quadriga and the statues of the gods topping the pediment, and the great golden statue of Tinia in the dark of the cella.
Tanaquil had reached the northern corner. Stop, turn; pointing one foot at an exact right angle before she turned her body, sighting down the line she would walk; and then having turned, walking again, easily, evenly, a measured pace.
Head of the world. Rome everywhere. He imagined Celtic amber, Greek ideas, the wealth of Phoenicia, all brought to Rome; imagined the lands beyond the Pillars, the rich cornlands of Africa, ancient Egypt with its cats and hawk-headed gods, the fire and silk of Persia, lying open to his armies. There would be no land that was not Rome. Rome would be head of the world; Rome would be the world.
Tanaquil stopped; the line of red was now continuous, before her and behind.
The victim was here. He heard a scream of trumpets one last time, before the call for silence.
In a moment he would cover his head; he would take the cup of wine and pour it on the white ox's gilded horns. In a moment he would scatter grain and salt on its back, and run the knife of execution along its back from its forelock to its tail. All this he had done before, so many times, but every time he still shivered with fear before he took the hammer from his acolyte. In a moment, he would swing the hammer at the victim's head, just between those gilded horns where the red wine stained its white forelock. He would not look at the man who cut its throat, but he would feel its blood splash his feet, as he always did; and it would be warm, as it always was, but it cooled quickly.
They were waiting. This was the time of beginnings. Let it begin.
He covered his head.
Tanaquil
She would always remember that huddled, shrouded form. The silence in the forum. The slow, slow pace of the procession; the lictors, the bier, the straggle of mourners.
Six men carried the bier. On it, what looked like a doll, swathed in linen; a body, sitting as if enthroned, its head nodding slightly with the sway of the bier. Such a tiny body, such a pitiable body, she thought. The head was shrouded, the face invisible; all identity swallowed up in death. And yet, Tanaquil knew, the woman was still alive.
Out across the Quirinal, down to the scrub below, on the fringes of the marsh. A pile of freshly dug earth was their destination.
Men had been here since morning, digging out the dirt. An excavation six feet by six feet by six feet, already beginning to collapse under the weight of earth as the soil dried out; trickles of dry crumbly dirt fell like miniature landslides. Next to it, a dozen long planks were stacked, raw wood still pale like a scar. <
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The bearers set their burden down. The woman sat still; Tanaquil could see her eyes, the only part of her visible, staring blankly. Two of the lictors approached. They took the woman by the shoulders and pulled her up; she hung limply, didn't struggle till she saw the pit in front of her, and then she just raised her hands, scrabbling at the air, but the thick shrouds smothered her movements. One of the other lictors leapt down into the pit, made his arms ready to catch her.
She began to scream then, a thin, high wail that seemed to have no breath behind it, that sounded like the wind or a marsh bird in a storm. It wasn't human; it was the cry of someone already dead. There was no more struggling; she collapsed into the arms of the lictor in the pit, who sat her down against the foot of one of the walls. He reached up, to take a small beaker, a lit lamp, a half loaf; he put them by her side, and patted her absently on the head as he waited for a rope ladder to be thrown down to him.
She was still crying as they laid the planks across the top of the pit. The lamplight could still be seen in the gaps between the boards, for a while; then the men began to shovel earth over the wood. The bigger clods stuck, sealing the pit; but trickles of dry earth fell through the gaps – Tanaquil could hear the rustle and rattle of dirt and stones hitting the floor below. Each spadeful of dirt was thrown across, scattering it. After a while the wood could no longer be seen, only a patch of dug earth, like a scab, and they could no longer hear the woman.
"That's it," the lictor said – the one who had leapt down into the pit; "you can go."
Only two of the lictors stayed, guarding the execution site; they would stay there for three days, till it was certain the woman was dead.