by AM Kirkby
***
Round the hills of Rome, the Salii danced the boundary, sang the city's bounds. This year as every year, marking out the city's space, as every Etruscan city would; as the wolf-men already had, running around the hill in the February fogs, baying and shouting. It was important to commemorate the boundaries, the divisions between places and times and nations; each thing had its place, and if you didn't know what that place was, how would you know when you'd ended up somewhere else, somewhere completely different? Though Tarquinius kept having the feeling that he had ended up somewhere else, a place that only looked like Rome but that he didn't quite recognise, peopled by hinthials that looked like the people he knew, but weren't; he had a dream one night that he'd caught a struggling Tanaquil in his arms, and tore off the haughty mask she was wearing, but under that mask her face was just another mask, and beneath that another, so that he wondered if she had a real face at all, or was hollow all the way through till there was nothing left but air and whispers.
The Salii were leaping, all young men, all tall young men, all leaping, their feet together, into the sun. There was no music for this dance, only the rhythm of swords beating on shields, and the sound of their feet on the ground, and shouting. It was a dance of power, aggressive, wild; but it was also graceful as a cat's sudden spring. It stirred Tarquinius in a sway he'd almost forgotten. As he grew older, he was often moved to easy tears – by a view in the sunset, by a glimpse of a woman's shoulder, by a small act of kindness – but rarely did anything move him this way, so that his guts leapt and his heart missed a beat.
And there was Tarquin among the young men leaping his own length in the air, tucking his legs up under him, turning as he leapt, the golden stitching on his cloak flashing in the cold March sun. He clashed his sword on his shield, dull iron on polished bronze, and leapt again, his stomach tight, eyes gleaming.
"We might have to defend the bounds in earnest," Tanaquil had said to him when they spoke. She hadn't added "thanks to you," but long marriage left Tarquinius able to read her silences; silences that could be more potent than words. Peace held, for the time being, though every day brought further reports of negotiations and alliances between the Etruscan cities.
Tarquin's muscles shone polished bronze, slick with sweat and sweet oil. Tanaquil was admiring him, Tarquinius saw, and for once he wasn't jealous; she'd told her son to join the Salii, and though he'd ignored his father's wishes in the matter, one word from his mother was enough. She'd told him not, for once, to leap higher than everyone else; and for once, he'd seen the point of her advice. But he still shone; the magnificent prince.
"The prince Rome was meant to have," Tanaquil breathed, her pupils huge with drunken joy; for once not cool, not controlling her diplomatic mask.
She didn't say "and not Arruns". She didn't need to. Tarquinius felt diminished in his love for his first-born; dour, dumpy, diligent, all the things Tarquin wasn't. All the things Rome was, and would be, unless they leavened it with Etruscan lightness – quickened it with Etruscan seed. (And that last, of course, was something young Tarquin had chosen as a personal mission.)
"The prince to defend our borders?"
She didn't let that rile her. "If we have to."
However much some of the old Romans liked to dismiss the Salii as acrobats and entertainers, leaping for five hours, resting only during the walk from one dancing place to the next, deserved respect. These youths would fight as well as they danced, their shields and swords were heavy steel and bronze, not wood and leather fakes. But the banquet afterwards was pure Etruscan luxury; Tarquin came resplendent, having washed, and gulped seven large cups of water, and put on the purple tebenna of royalty, and a garland of laurel leaves modelled in pure gold, shining with the authentic dull gleam of the real, soft metal. The aulos, strident, animated the air with the rhythmic bleating of its drone against a lively melody with a chromatic twist that caught the ear, that you knew would somehow infect every musician in Rome within a month or two, that you'd hear again and again till you were sick of it; but now, the first time, it was still startlingly original, like a touch of vinegar in a sweet cake.
Now there was more dancing, though not for the Salii, who held court on their couches; and not for Tarquinius, at least not after the first circle dance.
"Do I have to?" he'd asked Tanaquil.
"You do."
"But it's a completely archaic ritual. Gods know, we never even bothered with it in Tarchna."
"We didn't need to. Real Etruscans" – Tarquinius was no longer sure whether she counted him as one or not - "don't need perfection in the rites. But Rome is still learning. If we don't make sure that the Etruscan rites are performed, they'll be doing something else; and whatever that something else is, it's not likely to be civilised."
"It's still archaic," he grumbled, but he allowed himself to be led into the dance with only as much protest as a man growing older, who'd already drunk a little too much, could be excused for making; and after two rounds of the circle, he excused himself, linking the hands of those on either side of him and taking to his couch.
Tanaquil sat on one side; Tarquin lay on a couch below his father's.
"I'm glad to see you using a chair, mother," said Tarquin; "that's a return to the old ways of Etruria. A pity father prefers to laze."
Tanaquil smiled sourly, and shifted her weight in the chair.
"That's not the point," she said, "and you know it isn't. It's another of these little Roman ways of making women uncomfortable."
Tarquin's smile was as false as hers; all teeth and knowingness. "Of course father should have a chair," he said.
"And so should you, come to that."
But Tarquinius was talking now, about his election. Why should he remember that today? His mind seemed to wander more, recently; strange things would pop into his mind, or he'd find himself reliving some experience from years before. Or did he just feel the need to remind Tarquin that kings were made by gods, not human impatience?
He wasn't even sure he remembered it that well any more... He'd retold the story so many times, and every time felt it growing more distant. The words he used to tell it were closer in his memory than the reality; as if the words had replaced the thing, and the story had become the man. And now he was telling the story of how the bird had stolen his cap, and laughing at the superstition – it was a bird, nothing more, but even as he said it he knew that no one would believe that disingenuous modesty, that the Romans would claim him as that divinely elected king; but he got the laugh, anyway. “And Tanaquil says it's all because I got a kick in the head from some overgrown pigeon.” Part of the privileges of being a king was that people laughed at your jokes, once they realised they were jokes; or to be cynical, that people laughed a couple of seconds after you laughed. There had been a time when he knew his jokes were funny; now, he could never be sure. But this time, at least, the roar went up before he began to guffaw himself, so the joke must be a good one; or else they'd been well trained to recognise that particular joke by now.
Only Tanaquil didn't laugh, and he saw her eyes narrow.
Tanaquil
So he'd become a Roman now. A Roman and a clown, courting the favour of the wolf-descended sheep-shaggers by jeering at the gods he'd deserted. The fool, the utter fool. As if the gods wouldn't punish him for it. And if they wouldn't, she would...
She hardly recognised the man she'd pursued, the man she'd married. Age wrought changes in them both; but it wasn't time that had made him lazy, that had made him value the approbation and applause of commoners and outlaws above his race, his city and his gods. He'd been chosen by those gods; his youth had been golden. He had transformed Rome, from a muddle of outcasts' earth-walled huts to a well-ordered, fine city; but Rome had transformed him, from a golden child to a poison-skinned toad, coarsening and dulling him, bringing him down to the level of the lowest of his subjects. Would that have happened if they'd stayed in Tarchna? Couldn't he have become lauchme after
all? Things did change, sometimes; one of her cousins had married a Gaul – not taken her as concubine, a real marriage – and the rest of the family had taken the flame-haired, slight woman to their hearts. Perhaps in Tarchna he'd have been happier; Arruns would have grown up less dour, Tarquinia less sullen, he himself would have retained that interesting moodiness she'd always rather liked, as well as his looks.
No. No, that was all behind them, and that had been the way it had to have been. She'd managed to cling to her Etruscan way of life and the old gods, and to the prophecy that had been shown to her; and Tarquinius had failed. Now he was hearing owls; that decided it. She knew, now, that the gods had marked him for death, as they'd once done for kingship.
She'd listened, when he first mentioned the owls. She'd heard nothing. There was nothing to hear. They called only for him.
Where did the time go? She wondered sometimes, keeping vigil through a long night. Sleep came so rarely now, her hours of unconsciousness so exiguous, condemning her to wakefulness and thought. Long bleached hours, melancholy like the smell of dried roses. She wished she could sleep; she never felt tired, but it would have stelled the restlessness of her mind. Time went so slowly in the night, without the sun to tell it, only the wick of the lamp burning down slowly, needing to be trimmed, a solitary landmark in the wastes of the dark. Yet time had gone so quickly; how had so many years gone? When had she seen that first white hair in her braids, detected that faint crepiness to her skin?
Life was like a badly told story. It seemed long at the time, but when you thought back, there were only disconnected episodes, flashes of vision, loose ends. It was the things that were lost that she remembered best; one of Demaratos' kraters with a glossy black squid in the bowl, that she'd dropped one day. Or a lion-headed bracelet she had seen in Tarchna once, and not bought, and dreamt all night about; then when she went back, late the next day, after her father had her translating Greek all morning, it was gone, and she never saw another one like it. Earliest of the memories that broke her heart; the bright crimson blanket she'd sucked as a child, that was taken away from her when she was four. Time for her to grow up, her father had said.
One night she'd been woken by a commotion in the palace; a scuffle, shouting, the shifting glare of a torch in the dark. Tarquinius was struggling with two armed men, yelling "Murder! Murder!" as they tried to smother his screams. One seemed to be trying to put a cloth over his face, while the other held his arms behind his back, but such was Tarquinius' desperate energy that he was dragging the two men across the floor, like a bull attacked by small dogs.
She'd squinted against the glare, hidden behind the curtain that hung across her door. It had looked bad, very bad; she calculated how far it was to the window, whether she could get there and climb out before the assassins reached her. How had they got into the palace? Where were the guards? And why were these assassins so incompetent at their trade? If she'd been one, Tarquinius would already have been dead, and quietly, too. There was something wrong about the whole thing...
Then the torchlight fell on one man's face and she understood exactly what was wrong.
She marched out, angry, clouting one of the two men across the head, not caring that her hastily caught up tebenna was falling from one shoulder, exposing her naked breast.
"What the hell are you doing? Idiot!"
"Lady Tanaquil..."
Useless. She turned to the other guard. "Explain! Or are you tongueless as well as gormless?"
"He was breaking out of the king's rooms."
"Well?"
The second guard, with his hand still clamping a gag across Tarquinius' mouth (which might have been a good thing), decided to be helpful.
"We thought... someone's been up to no good, maybe it's an assassin, maybe a thief, anyway, we'd better grab him."
"You'd ascertained his identity?"
Silence. Gods, they were stupid. Words of one syllable, then.
"You found out who he was? You know who he is?"
"Well..."
Stupid-but-talks could see Tanaquil's foot tapping dangerously with barely suppressed temper; he helped his once more speechless colleague out.
"Whoever this guy is, he shouldn't have been in the king's rooms."
"The king shouldn't have been in his own room?"
The man looked stupidly at her. A single word came out of his mouth: "But..."
She found out later that the two men had never done guard duty before; they'd been in Rome for two weeks. Not their fault really that they were so stupid; but who in Vanth's darkest hell had assigned them to this duty? Things were falling to pieces, and whose fault was that? Tarquinius didn't seem to care any more. He'd got used to Servius taking all the decisions from day to day, and now Servius was gone, couldn't get things back under his own control, or perhaps had got too used to the ease of having someone else do everything; so a series of commanders of varying degrees of competence and effectiveness came and went, with varying tenures depending on their competence or lack of it, or in one case on a decided lack of diplomacy when dealing with Tarquinius, who – despite his lack of interest in running things – tinkered and interfered, once too often for that commander. (And that one, of course, had been the best; the one real professional, the one left from Servius' high command. The one you really didn't want to lose.)
Tarquinius was livid about the incident, but once the men had been punished (which she wouldn't have done, or only by assigning them to a task commensurate with their abilities, which only a clever man would have regarded as punishment, and they weren't smart), he lost interest in tracking down who had ballsed up on the rostering; Manius, prompted by Tanaquil, did find out, and asked for the officers who had let the two Stupids into the Palatine to be reassigned, but his orders were countermanded by Tarquinius, whose friend the father of one of the officers had been.
So nothing was done. And Tarquinius kept hearing the owls; and she heard nothing, only the wakeful silence of the Forum, and a vixen screamed, once, in the distance.
Rome was sliding into chaos; worse than chaos, into farce. She'd not have believed the two Stupids if she'd seen them in the mime, faces chalked and half-masked.
She remembered teaching Servius augury. He'd so nearly understood what she had offered him; she felt he must have, once, been close to the gods, however sceptical he liked to seem now.
She'd told him augury was always difficult. She knew he found it so; he was afraid of it, as perhaps men always were, afraid of losing themselves, the precious selves they invested so much of their lives into constructing, instead of simply being, as women knew how to do. For her, it was a difficult in another way; so vague, inchoate, unformed, imprecise, that it was hard to pin down, hard to mould it into the meanings that everyone wanted.
But not this time. As if the early morning mists over the Tiber had cleared, first in tiny steam-like tendrils lifting, then dispersing more generally, till the hard lines of reality could be seen, the branches and the twigs and the smallest buds on the trees etched in black with glittering highlights of dew; so now she knew the meaning of those owls, and she knew what the hidden gods needed her to do.
Tarquinius
It was a couple of days after that banquet that Tanaquil told him she was leaving Rome.
"There's a place in the country," she said.
"One of your temples?"
"No, actually. A small villa. Up near Veii."
He didn't ask how she'd acquired it.
"You don't have to go. Stay and be queen of Rome."
"I don't trust you. More to the point, you don't trust me."
Which he didn't, of course. What could he say? While he was thinking of something to say that wasn't a cliché, or a lie, or beside the point, she had turned to go.
"I thought you'd at least stay to look after Tarquin," he said, but that moment of hesitation had lost him whatever was left in their marriage.
"Tarquin is his own man now," she said, without looking back.
>
She really had given up, then. Not even to defend her son, her so much loved Tarquin; that was the clearest sign he could have wanted. He didn't need to look at her face; he knew her eyes would be blank, like men wounded in battle who know they're dying. Her country retreat posed no threat to him; the villa would never become the centre of a clique of exiles, the focus of plots. There were no plots left in her. And even so, he thought he ought to stop her, even just for form's sake. A last desperate attempt.
"But who will take the omens?"
She shrugged, as if she couldn't hear the rawness he was sure was in his voice. "That's all you care about? You have plenty of augurs. Plenty of people who can look at pigeons' guts."
She left. The air in the room seemed to whirl for a moment, and then was still.
Master
Velx had changed. If Master went out at sunrise it looked the same as it always had, before the city began to stir; only some of the houses were streaked with red paint thrown at their whitewash, where whole families had been proscribed, and the gates of others stood open, torn from their hinges in the riots. But as the day progressed the changes became more visible; the tents and shelters set up in the courts of the great mansions, the kitchens at the corner of streets where cooks splashed ladles of spelt porridge into chipped earthenware, and soldiers and the indigent sat in the street to consume it. Velx had wanted to be a city where all were equal, but now it was a city where all were equally poor.
Well, it was convenient for him, in one way; he was just another veteran, as far as anyone knew; another soldier without an army, whose possessions ran to a sword and a bedroll and for whom even a razor represented impossible luxury. That was convenient too, in its way; his old acquaintances wouldn't know him now, wild bearded and with his hair cropped close, so close the scar of an old wound showed, raised and pale, through the stubble.
Ramtha had walked past him in the street yesterday, so close he'd felt the air stir as she passed, and she'd showed no sign of recognition. Once or twice, on the faces of men he'd known, he saw a vague querying expression, as if they'd recognised something in his features, but couldn't remember what it was. Or it might have been that they were simply trying to remember something else, where they were due to meet someone or whether their wages would last the month, and when they did remember, their faces relaxed, and one of them shrugged and smiled to himself, and they passed on.
The rich were no longer rich, in Velx. But the poor were poor. But there were no children in the gutter, shouting for money or food, as there were in Rome; everyone was fed, the same utilitarian slop, but they all got it, and all waited patiently for their turn. And another thing; there were no slaves.
The Romans had left Velx alone, pretty much. The Roman detachment hadn't taken over the Vipienas' mansion, but camped outside the city, defended by walls of earth and wood; they rarely came into Velx, and when they did, it was armed, in numbers, as if they were afraid.
One day he'd seen ten Roman soldiers smashing a shrine. Hadn't realised what it was about till they'd gone, and he read what was left of the words "father of the city"; Avle Vipienas had become a god, then. Gods weren't worth much if they could be smashed so easily. Then again, gods, like words, might be made of nothing, but they could break men and empires. 'AVLE' scrawled on a wall, a splash of wine dried dark on the road below; that would have meant nothing to the Romans, but it was another sign of resistance.
He'd been here for two weeks now, leaving the Vipienas brothers in the north to collect more forces. They'd had some luck; Felsina had joined, and Spina – "though what the hell do we need ships for?" Avle had asked – and Arretium was getting closer to making a full commitment, and had sent a few volunteers, good experienced men, well armed, which was a good omen for their future support, if you believed in omens. Velathri too was coming over to the Vipienas' way of thinking, though that was a hard slog; and if they got Velathri, they'd have access to the mines, and that meant better weapons and more of them. But in the south, Velzna stood with Rome, and Cisra and Tarchna were looking the other way, like bystanders pretending not to see a rape for fear they'd be the next targets. That left only two possibilities; first and best, the chance that the Southern League could be brought into play. Then they'd have forces both north and south of Rome, and they could smash it like a crab shell between two rocks. But the Romans had never posed a threat in the south; and ***Capua's*** lauchme was a hard negotiator, and wanted too much out of a deal, so that might not happen. Second possibility, and a long shot as well, was that Velx and some of the other Roman held cities might rebel, if they knew an Etruscan army was approaching from the north; but Servius was running a fearful risk sneaking back into Roman territory.
He was still unsure whether Velx would serve the purpose. Should he have started elsewhere? The Avle-cult, and he was sure now it was a cult, was a good sign; the will was there. But the city was so desperate, so poor; many veterans, few weapons. They'd have to be supplied with arms from the north, and unless Velathri came in, that wasn't going to be easy. But at least with Velx, he knew where to start; with Ramtha.