Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  She was still living in the palace, though the palace had changed since he was last here; bare dirt paths crossed the unwatered lawns, and half the trees had been broken down, and the stillness that had once reigned here had been broken too – dirty children chased each other through the corridors, and scrawny old men squatted under the colonnades, each with his few possessions, canteen and water pot and in one case a grubby, half-unwound scroll, set out neatly on his bedroll. The slaves had taken over the palace, and sent grandeur and taste packing. (He thought at first that was the Romans' doing, rubbing privileged Etruscan noses in the dirt; but it was Ramtha's idea, people told him, opening the palace to the families of the war dead, to the veterans and the needy.)

  Getting to see Ramtha would be easy. Meeting her secretly would be more difficult; she was surrounded by gatekeepers. Her own guards, her own women; he knew them all, had trusted them all, back then. But these were new times. Any of them could be taking Roman money. Or one might by pure enthusiasm lead the watchers, and no doubt there were watchers, to him.

  At least she'd not been imprisoned or executed. Probably just typical Roman blindness; Roman women being what they were, the Romans didn't think any woman could be a political power. (Strange, that, when you considered; couldn't they even work out what Tanaquil was doing?) And there were no Romans in the palace; no new faces among her bodyguard, among the servants. He thought, though, she had a new lover; well, it wasn't the first time she'd taken the commander of her bodyguard to bed. That ruled out what had been his first thought, that he might wait in her rooms till the household retired. Everything she did, she did publicly; never alone, always surrounded by a whirling, glittering flock of servants, or by petitioners, dependents, the grateful and the adoring. If Avle had become a god, she was on her way to managing her own deification. (How could the Romans be so blind?He waited. He observed. He wished there was anyone he could trust.

  He kept looking for that tiny gap in the household's timetable, an interstice in the routine where Ramtha would be on her own. There was none; she might be alone at some points, but there was never a certainty that she would be. And he needed certainty, on this one point, since he could be certain of nothing else.

  Days passed with their gods' dedications, that luckiness or unluckiness, though each day was alike to him a waste, the shrivelling of hope. Each day gone saw the Romans consolidate their power, the Vipienas look less and less likely to challenge. The worst of it was that there was no deadline, no certain day on which he'd know his mission had failed; just the inevitable erosion of time, the continual expectation that further delay would discourage the Vipienas' allies and see them defect to Rome. He had to keep trying yet he knew his chances were withering away.

  Then one day when he was in the kitchen court, listening to the cooks' conversation as the flute played and they pounded and kneaded and mixed, things changed.

  "Full moon tomorrow," one of the servants said, and he thought; nearly a full month I've been here, and I've achieved nothing, nothing but eat, sleep, shit. Are the Vipienas waiting for news? Or have they given up hope? Do they even, really, expect me to come through with anything, or have they sent me here out of kindness, to give me something to do even though they know we Etruscans are a forlorn hope?

  Then suddenly, he realised he had his chance. Full moon. The full moon that governed women; the moon that Tanaquil watched all night on this one night of the month, alone in the temple. Alone.

  "You do the same as in Tarchna?"

  "What's that then?" The servant kept pounding the meal in her mortar.

  "Oh, you know.... women...." he said, deliberately vague.

  "And men? Huh!"

  "I didn't mean..."

  "I bet you didn't." He watched the muscles in her big arms as she pounded, in time to the flute's relentless music.

  "Well, maybe a bit. But don't you go to the temple?"

  "Ramtha does."

  "You don't."

  "Don't have to," she said, looking up for a moment. "One for all. She does it. I've got better things to do than watch the moon all night."

  "One for all?"

  "Just her, yes."

  "Turan's left tit," he said. "Easy life. In Tarchna they all do it."

  "That so?" she said incuriously, and tipped the pounded spelt out of her mortar. He shrugged.