by AM Kirkby
***
The real problem of course wasn't the Velzna priesthood. It was Tarquinius.
Caile put it most trenchantly. "If Velzna and Tarchna were lovers in one bed, Tarquinius would be the flea that comes between them."
Etruria had always been a loose confederacy; cities drew closer, diverged, and had diplomatic hissy fits or small and inconclusive wars; they kept different festivals and buried their dead in different ways; but behind it all, as Avle had said, there was a common Etruscan life. The wars never got out of hand; the risk of expulsion kept the cities in order. But now Tarquinius, with his Greek trained intellect and Roman tendency to brute force, had shoved a wedge into the cracks, and was slowly levering the Etruscan homeland apart. He was forcing cities to choose, Caile said: a new Etruria, more tightly linked, less loose and free, or the gradual dismantling of the confederacy by Rome. Things couldn't stay as they were; every city had to choose.
"But they don't see the choice clearly," Avle said.
"That's my point. That's what Tarquinius is exploiting. Everyone looks at his latest move and judges what advantage they can get from it; how will it change their ranking in the confederacy, their competition in trade, their chances of greater affluence or less insecurity. Little personal grudges, dormant for years, break out in rancour. And while they're looking at all these distractions, Tarquinius like a magician drawing eyes away from the real workings of his trick is slowly killing us all."
Caile, eyes and ears for his brother. Caile the spider, Servius thought, weaving and weaving with his spies and his stories, and his ability to sit in the corner unobserved, watching, listening. (Odd, because spiders in the stories were always female; and there was nothing feminine about Caile, except his eyes that never missed a twitch of the mouth or a flicker of the eyelid when someone was telling a half-truth.) Master wondered why he'd never got to know Caile; then he realised, Caile hadn't wanted to be known. It was only under circumstances as extreme as this that Caile had been able to trust him; circumstances that had pushed Master to make his choice of allegiance. And now he'd been bound to the brothers by blood, a third brother, slashing his skin to mix his blood with theirs; their red handprints on a tree's stripped bark stood witness to their oaths. Caile, his clever brother.
"Egerius," Caile said. "Egerius interests me."
"You've met him?"
"Once. He talked about poetry. And he said something interesting. 'Of course', he said, 'Rome won't get its own poet till it gets a history.' A past, I said, and he said no; a history, and that meant it had to understand itself."
"That's interesting?"
"For what it says about the way he thinks. He sees Rome as in the process of working out what its destiny is to be; a city that still doesn't know what it wants to be."
"The gods dictate our destiny. Our choice is immaterial."
"You don't believe that, Avle. What we tried to do in Velx..."
"Is part of that destiny."
Caile looked down. The shame of a chided schoolboy. "None the less. I think Egerius' plans are interesting. Collatia is his crucible; Etruscan, Roman, Greek, all melted in the fire. A new pouring, a new mould."
"It won't work," Master said. "He's too idealistic. And his army is Roman."
"And he's sponsored by Rome," Avle said. "Rome will pull him back, if he goes too far."
"He already has."
"And Tanaquil?"
"She's on our side." Master hadn't told them the whole truth about his mission; he'd let them think it was his idea, and his only. No point letting everyone know her involvement; she might be his way back to Rome, eventually. And besides, her betrayal of the Velzna priests was a secret he'd keep till he needed it.
"A true Etruscan," Avle said.
"Even if she is from Tarchna," Caile added.
"We all have our burdens to bear."
"Of course," Avle had said, "if the Etruscan cities had clearer sight, Rome might unite them rather than dividing them."
"I'd always thought so," Master said; "if a real Etruscan ruled Rome, it could replace Velzna as the heart of the League."
"You're proposing yourself?" Caile, sharp as a cat.
There was no sense in replying to that; a denial was as good (or as bad) as an affirmation. But Avle made propitiatory noises about Velzna's having lost its right to guide the Rasna, and how much progress Rome had made towards becoming truly civilised under an Etruscan (or at least half-Etruscan) ruler, and the difficult moment was passed, though Master would sometimes find himself thinking of it, later, when he was supposed to be thinking of something else, and wonder whether he was as transparent to others as he was to Caile, and how the general's training had never managed to smooth off the roughness he'd been born with.
"No," Larth Ulthes was saying to Camitlnas; "I don't care how hungry you are, you're not getting it. I'm keeping it back for tomorrow; and the day after, if we don't reach Clevsin tomorrow."
"But we will."
"Perhaps. But we might not."
"I'm still hungry."
"Well then, you're still hungry. Shut the fuck up about it."
That reminded Master; what did Caile and Avle not do, that impressed him? They didn't ask how long it would take to get to Clevsin, how much of the road was left; unlike Camitlnas (who should know better) they didn't complain about the shortness of rations, complain of thirst or hunger or tiredness. They didn't argue with his decisions, except that Avle, once, warned them off the better track Master had wanted to take; a good decision, since they heard the dull thump of hoofbeats heading down that trail a little later, and though it couldn't be the Romans – the horses were heading in the wrong direction, towards Velzna, anyway – secrecy was better, till they were secure. This, in men who'd been kept on short rations in the underworld of Velzna, whose wrists and ankles still showed the burns of rope, was admirable, and he admired it.
"Will we be safe in Clevsin?" Avle wondered.
"What is safe?" Caile raised that eyebrow again, a silent comment, subtle, deniable.
"No such thing as safety, anyway," Master said.
"True," said Avle; "you remember the story of the goldsmith from Spina?"
"The one who heard death was waiting for him, and ran away to Tarchna to escape?"
"And was killed by robbers on the way there."
"No such thing as safety," Master said again; "only different risks."
"I bet you eat it when you think we're not looking."
"I do not."
"What's the alternative plan?" Avle asked.
Master lifted his shoulders, let them fall; it would have been comic in another situation. "None."
"There's always an alternative plan," Avle said, but it was clear from his voice that even he was struggling to believe it. "You always told me that. Remember?"
"He learned that from the General," Caile said. And that was true. Days of working on strategy problems, in the dim quiet of the General's room, pushing counters across a table or simply talking through past battles, making plan on plan, alternate contingencies for every separate forking of the fates, so that random as battle often was, there was always something to fall back on. Days of "if... then", of "what if," of second and third guessing, and every time he thought he'd won, the General would introduce a further complication, and somewhere far on in the wearying chain of consequences, he'd find he had lost the battle for good.
"For once," Master said, "there's no alternative plan. For once. We get to Clevsin and we just have to hope they're on our side."
Avle's mouth tightened momentarily. He said nothing. And Caile raised his left eyebrow.
"It's a better chance than no chance," he said. "A bit better."