Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  After they'd caught the horses and harnessed them again; after they'd caught up with Camitlnas, and he'd confirmed one of the riders, at least, was a Latin speaker ("though that doesn't mean he was from Rome," he added, which was true, though not much comfort), they struck out over the rise, still keeping to the goat paths and villagers' trails. Master wondered if he'd made the right decision, hiding in the rough country rather than choosing the high road and greater speed; if the Romans had overtaken them, as the lost day would have enabled them to do, Clevsin might not be safe. But those Latins might not, after all, have heard the news from Velzna; they might be travelling south from trading in Felsina or Spina, or the horse fairs of the northern plain. Risks and chances, risks and chances, that was everything in war; Master wondered for a moment if he was over-committed to this plan of heading for Clevsin. Couldn't he change it? Wasn't it sheer foolishness to head into Clevsin now? These were the worst odds he'd ever faced.

  "Wondering if we stick to the plan?"

  Caile was too sharp, sometimes. Master's face tightened. He nodded briefly.

  "I don't see any alternative. Unless we bypass Clevsin and head up north, to Felsina, even into Gaul. We'd be safe, but that would put an end to our dreams. No return to power, no new Etruria, no challenge to Velzna."

  "Life in the shallows," Avle said. "Stagnant water. Drifting."

  "But it's too much of a risk. After what we heard."

  "What did we hear?" Caile asked. "A Latin accent. A bit of laughter at Camitlnas' expense."

  "And they rode south."

  "And if they'd been pursuing us, they would have ridden north."

  That was a fair point.

  "If you want to save yourself," Avle said, "you can keep heading north. You had a Gaulish woman once, I remember. Head for Gaul. Be safe. We'll wait a day, then give ourselves up to whatever Clevsin and the hidden gods have in store for us. You've done your job. Go. Take your men with you. Go safely."

  But when they breasted the rise, and saw the city ahead of them, and the gates open, Master and his men were still with them, and they entered the city together.

  Tarquinius

  Grief bit at him, clawed the softness of his organs. He felt himself almost fainting from pain, from weakness, from the emptiness left when tears have dissolved and ripped away the whole of what you used to think was your self, and there is nothing left inside. Arruns was gone. Arruns my son, Arruns my prince, Arruns the king of Rome that would never be. Arruns the good boy, who had always done what his father wanted; not like the recalcitrant, the obstinate, the wilful Tarquinius – named for his father, but so unlike him, except for that wildfire intelligence which came as much from Tanaquil as from him. Arruns who, sometimes, seemed to have had no life but what was given him by rank, by title, by duty; who was conscientious to a fault, who conformed to what was demanded of him, who had the solidity you needed to command Romans, which Tarquin would never understand. Arruns, dark handsome Arruns with his hair cut short the Roman way, quarter greek, three-quarters Rasna, all Roman.

  He wished he'd spoken to Arruns more. Wished he'd known him better, without the distance that always came between a commander and his man, the distance Romans kept between omnipotent father and subservient son. Wished he'd made him co-ruler last year, when he first thought of it, or at least mentioned that thought to his son. Wished he'd not let Master come between them. Words unsaid could never now be said. There was always time, he'd thought, but now time had run out and there was only death, and emptiness, and a new mask in the atrium in whose waxy lineaments he could not recognise any likeness. Arruns, best of them all.

  Tarquinius felt Arruns had been ripped out of his body, like a woman birthing a child to death. He felt himself diminished in his son's death; his blood ran more thinly in his veins. And the whole operation in Velzna had gone wrong. Manius had betrayed him; Servius had disappeared; Tanaquil had gone into a sulk, and barred her doors, and sent the message that she was weaving a funeral sheet, though for whom she didn't say.

  And Gaius was dead, dead at no man's hands but through a sudden chill, a quick fever that had eaten him in three days. The one man he'd known he could depend on had let him down; died without sending word from Velzna, died without finishing the job. The Vipienas were free, and all the men he trusted were either traitors or dead, and Tarquin had gone off to Capua, in a sulk. Sulking like his mother.

  "You always loved Arruns," Tarquin had said. (Not "loved Arruns more," the usual whinge of second sons. Was that Tanaquil's doing, turning the boy against his father?)

  "Arruns did what he was asked to do," Tarquinius said, and as he said it realised what a paltry epitaph it made.

  "So did I. And more. You never even came to give me the cup when I won the chariot race that first time."

  "We were at war. Have you forgotten?"

  "We were at war when Arruns drilled his first command, but you made time to take his salute."

  "That was different."

  "That was Arruns."

  "It was the army."

  Tarquin had just scowled, and turned his back on his father.

  So. Sulking. Sod it. He'd never liked Tarquin's moods. Even the infant Tarquin had bitten his mother's breast for spite when her milk failed; he had screaming fits that lasted for hours, and unlike most children he wouldn't cry himself to sleep, but relapse into a sullen silence, turning his back on everyone in the house, refusing any comfort. This was just another of Tarquin's tantrums, Tarquinius reassured himself, despite an uneasy feeling that he'd done something wrong, that this time there was no going back to the hostile silence that passed for peace between him and his son.

  Under the sharpness of his grief he perceived a dull ache, a sense of wrongness like a rotten tooth that you realise too late was there in the first small tight headache. It had been growing for some time. Tarquin's friends; Etruscan wasters, the kind of aristocrats with pretensions who judged you on your earrings or your bloodline and were incapable of calculating the return on a merchant voyage or leading a line of hoplites into battle, but still felt the world belonged to them like a ripe apple ready to be bitten into. They'd core you and throw you away if you didn't belong to their clique; the kind Tanaquil and he had hated, had fled Tarchna to escape, and now here they were in Rome and his son was best friends with them. No, was in bed with them, if he knew Tarquin, in bed with the whole fucking lot, the women and the men and the smooth ones and the hairy ones.

  (He did Tarquin an injustice. There were no hairy ones. They were all smooth, smooth as yoghurt beaten with oil. Which Tanaquil had always said was inedible without a dose of salt.)

  He tried knocking again on Tanaquil's door. She must have known it was him. He listened for a minute; no sound inside, but he was sure she was there. Not even the sound of breathing or the odd scuffle of an uncomfortable body shifting position.

  "Tanaquil?"

  Silence again. But he was certain she was inside.

  "Tanaquil. Please."

  "That's an improvement on 'Tanaquil you bitch'."

  She was behind him; he'd been wrong. He was too often wrong these days.

  "I never saw you go out."

  "You weren't watching."

  He thought he had been. He must have dozed, or been sitting head in hands weeping when she crept out; and she could creep, like a cat on its belly.

  "Tanaquil, how do we put back together..."

  "We don't."

  "I had to do what I did."

  "No. You didn't." She put her hand on the door, not so much, he felt, to open it, as to prevent him from doing so. She laid claim to her own space; a step forward would be invasion, a battle deadlier though less bloody than the events in Velx.

  "You didn't even shed blood for Arruns."

  "How would you know?"

  She looked at his forearms, slashed where the knife had spilt his blood in mourning. His scabs itched; one had cracked, blood seeping through again, smearing when he
moved. Her long sleeves might hide her scars; then again, they might not. She'd never loved Arruns the way he had. She'd mourned the invasion of Velx as if it had been a death and not a necessary deception; she'd cut herself then.

  There was no speaking to her now; nothing he could say would placate her, anything he could say would humiliate him. She looked at him as if he were already dead. He turned, and went, half stumbling, his eyes misty with age and hurt.

  There were enemies everywhere; he'd known that for so long and now they were coming out of hiding, declaring themselves. And he was still sleeping badly, owls or no owls. Just age, Gaius would have said; but where was Gaius now with his practical good sense? He drank too much, in an attempt to drink himself into sleep or stupor, but then he'd wake suddenly, needing a piss, and be unable to sleep again. He stank of stale wine, when he smelt himself, and he couldn't sleep with the stink. Or he dreamt of his days in the marshes, digging the Cloaca Maxima, days that had been bright and full of joy, but in his nightmares he was caught fast in the mud, sinking helplessly into it, or lost in an interminable tunnel with no light at either end and the walls closing in on him.

  One night he heard scratching against the wall. He spent that whole night sitting up, his sword resting between his knees, in case they burst in on him. The darkness was full of fear and enemies. Full daylight woke him from a light slumber; he'd cut his finger, not on the sword but on a fastening of the scabbard that had come loose. In the light, it was easy to see it had only been the crooked fig tree's branches twisting against the rock. He had the tree cut down. (Later, he remembered the pleasure he used to take leaning out of his window to pick the ripe figs in summer, a pleasure he would never have again.)

  From then on he slept with a guard lying outside his door in the atrium, and another posted under the window. He would have slept with a guard in his chamber, but he no longer knew who to trust.