by AM Kirkby
***
"Here," she said.
He picked up his crowbar. It clinked as he slipped it into the crack between two paving stones; a cold sound. The torches flickered; his shadow and hers stretched huge on the wall, outlines wavering. He levered up the slab, and held it for a moment balanced on the iron bar before slipping his foot under it, so that he could grasp the slab in both hands.
"This the right one?"
She nodded. The slab grated as he pulled it aside. Under it, the ground was rough, damp, full of rough stones.
"Dig."
He wasn't a slave, he thought grimly. He was a king. He did as he was told. He scratched the dirt away. One stone stuck in the dirt and he had to lever it out, like pulling out a decayed tooth's stump stuck fast. Slowly the depth of the hole increased, from shallow scrape to inverted dome to shaft, until it was the length of his forearm deep and he heard Tanaquil say: "Enough."
She brought a small chest and set it on the edge of the pit. There was a thin smell on the air; insinuating, sweet, but with a rank undertone, something rotten, like the sauce Ramtha had served that was made from fermented fish guts.
"We bury it?"
"Wait."
She'd brought herbs; rosemary, the broad leaves of sage rough as cats' tongues. He wished she'd get on with it; whatever she was burying, she wanted it to be secret. Women often did bury some of their wealth, he'd been told, so that if their husbands cast them off, or died, if their sons would not support them, if they were left childless – all the accidents of unknowable fate – they would have something left; though in Tanaquil's case, he thought, she'd already have put some of her assets in other hands... and he thought few women would bury a few pieces of gold in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, in front of the great image of the god which regarded them steadily and blindly from the darkness of the cella. But this was Tanaquil... Still, they needed to get their job done and get out of there; the longer they stayed, the likelier they were to be discovered.
She'd tied the sage leaves together in bunches, and lit them from a torch, and they were burning damply, smokily; the dry scent of the plants mingled with the stink of burning. She held one out to him.
"Take it."
He wanted to ask why; but he knew better. Some arcane ritual, he supposed; no doubt they'd have to walk round the box three times counterclockwise, too.
"Take it. Hold it close to your nose."
She opened the box. The rank smell that had underlain the sweet reek hit him at once; putrefaction. He'd smelt it too often before; gangrene in wounds, the smell of corpses on the battlefield. That was what the sage was for; he held it so close he singed the hair in his nostrils. It helped, a little.
Tanaquil bent to take something from the box; something that trailed dark strands that trembled in the torchlight, like a spider's legs, or some ancient and malevolent squid. Then he realised what he was seeing; a head, a human head, half rotted away, hair matted with gore hanging down in damp streamers mingling with torn remnants of windpipe.
The jaw hung to one side; the shrinking of the skin had drawn the lips back over the teeth, making the skull grin gormlessly. The eye sockets were dark and blind, the skin blackened. It took him another moment to recognise it, and his mouth breathed the name: Avle.
Tanaquil inclined her head very slightly.
"Let's get it done," she said, bending over the small pit, laying the head on its damaged neck, the face towards the doors of the temple. She laid a wreath of rosemary on its brow, and stood up. She was poised, as always, but Servius noted she kept her hands well away from her body, away from her clothing. He started filling in the hole; sifting a few handsful of crumbled dirt over the head before he began to push the excavated earth back in more quickly.
Probably he should have made some sort of farewells to Avle. He might have whispered to him, might have bowed his head for a moment, or tried to remember a particular moment. No use; no earthly use. He tamped the dirt down well, and levered the slab nearly back into position, holding it for a few moments with the crowbar under it, balanced tenuously.
"Shall I?"
Tanaquil nodded. He let the slab fall.
They cleared up cursorily; the excess earth went into the box; Tanaquil swept the area quickly. He could think of so many reasons their work would be discovered; the stink, the loose earth subsiding, a little chip on the edge of the stone where his crowbar had slipped. This was all too risky; and why?
"You think I'm mad," she said, and he said angrily, "No," though that had been, probably, where his thoughts might have led next.
"But you do," she said, quite evenly, "and perhaps I am. Or perhaps it should be Tarquinius' head buried here. - Shall we go?" She motioned to the box. "Bring it. - The head of a king. Avle was a king, after all. He'll do as well as Tarquinius, and it was easier."
"Easier?" (How the hell had she managed to get Avle's head? And without him being aware of it? He began to think he might have underestimated her.)
"I think if we'd delivered Tarquinius to the flames minus his head a few people might have noticed, no?"
"There was another head..."
"Oh, did Tarquinius tell you that? Or were you there... I don't remember you being there. Yes, this is the second. And there will be a third. - You shiver? A soldier? All empires are built on blood. You should know that."
He thought he was beginning to understand whose that third head might be. He rather hoped he wasn't. He'd thought after the Vipienas were killed that Tanaquil had begun to trust him – that she had to trust him, that she needed him; perhaps he'd been outsmarted after all. And a small and deeply nasty suspicion was beginning to form in his mind like an abscess in a soft dark mouth; that Avle could have lived, that Avle hadn't been killed to decapitate the Etruscan rebellion, to defend Rome, to punish treachery, or to leave Velx leaderless, but simply to provide Tanaquil with the head she wanted for her magics.
"You do know that, don't you?" she asked impatiently.
"Oh, yes," he said.
Tanaquil
Another year had turned, the days swinging out again to earlier dawn and later dusk, the hours expanding; another year turned, with the year-fires burning in the valleys between Rome's seven hills, wolf-guarded, and now guarded by the wall Servius had begun to build, part turf, part tufa. Another year, her first without Tarquinius; an absence that she felt, sometimes, like a cold wind at her back, when she looked for him in the hall, despite herself.
She looked at the city, and saw peace, prosperity; the bonfires burning high, the vividly painted pediments and blazing terracotta roofs of the temples, the hillsides green with gardens. Ships were drawn up on the Tiber beaches, bringing amphorae of olive oil or wine, fine textiles dyed with bright Phoenician purple or carmine red, or pigs of metal from the mines of Aithalia; across the Tiber, past the Tiber island, the trees of the Janiculum orchards stood bare and black, but the stores were full of their fruit – cherries in spirits of wine, plum butters, apples chopped into rings and dried, or pickled in honey and mustard, lying dark and cool in the great earthenware jars; or apples packed in straw in the musty space above the rafters, slowly drying till their skins wrinkled and spotted with brown, but sweetening as they dried till, as spring came in, they burst their sugars on the palate darkly, almost dry.
She looked at the city and saw order. The orderliness of fruit trees in their regular ranks, of terraces carving the hillsides, the Sacred Way running straight as a thrown javelin towards the Capitol, the focus and axis of the city. Where there had once been scattered shepherds' huts and straggling, wandering paths, streets like sword slashes now divided the city neatly, as if writing an alphabet across the landscape. Marshes drained, rivers and streams tamed. The lakes of the Campus Martius glinted, sharp accents of silver gilded by the pale midwinter sun, till a passing cloud obscured the sunlight and turned the water to a dull pewter grey.
And yet underneath this all, the worm turned, maggots gnawed at Avle's sunken eyes;
at the heart of the Forum was darkness and death, the mundus, the swallowing pit. Order and prosperity grew from the dark, and the dark was always threatening to take them back. Two months now, and they'd send the wolfmen on their yearly round of the boundaries, running the sparkling line that divided savagery from the city; but what use to guard it, when the darkness was already inside?
The passing cloud passed; the sun shone again. A girl came in with a brazier; it was still that time of year when the choice was between too cold without, and too hot with. She smiled at Tanaquil; a happy, open, guileless smile.
"The sun's come out," she said.
"So I see."
"I love it when we get a little sunshine. Everything looks so fresh and new when there's a little sun."
Tanaquil nodded, allowing a small smile to tip the corner of her mouth. (Had she ever been so innocent when she was young? Possibly not.)
"Oh! Manius is here, but I told him to wait."
"Quite right. Let me give you some advice; always make men wait, whether you need to or not."
"Oh!" The girl put one hand in front of her mouth, as if she was afraid of Tanaquil seeing her smile. "Why?"
"Because you need to get them used to it. Otherwise they just take you for granted."
Sometimes Tanaquil wondered why she bothered. The girl so clearly didn't really understand what she was being told; didn't, perhaps, even have the capability to understand it. She'd end up with fifteen children and a life of universal greyness, and no more sunshine, but you simply couldn't help some people; and that was a piece of wisdom that had taken her over forty years to learn.
Manius turned out, for once, to want nothing but the pleasure of her company. No decisions to make, no action to take, nothing but a companionable afternoon. At least, that was what he said; and she was generally inclined to take Manius' words at face value. Though she wondered, too, whether perhaps he'd heard that she'd bought some of the latest shipment of Greek wine, resinous and strong.
They talked about the latest Saturnalia; how one of his men had got so drunk he decided to jump into the water tank in the courtyard.
"That's pretty ordinary stupidity, though," Tanaquil said. "One of my boys does it every year."
"Ah, but the tank was frozen, so he lay down and pretended to swim on top of it."
"Pretty amusing, I admit."
"So he did that for just long enough for the joke to wear off, but then the ice started to crack, so he decided to get up and jump back on to dry land. Of course, that was exactly when the ice broke, so he was left with one leg out of the ice, and all the rest of him in the freezing water, and yelling like a pig with its throat cut."
She'd told him how they celebrated midwinter in Tarchna; with rather more decorum, though as much alcohol. How every year, another nail would be knocked into the great tree trunk that stood for each of the hidden gods in the sanctuary. The gods were so old that there was more copper than wood in the images now; they were running out of places to put a nail. She told him about the recipes she used to make with her mother for the feast; the dried fruit cakes, sweet but hard on the teeth, bound up with flour and honey; the honeyed meats, the meat stew in wine with puffy, herb-laden dumplings; the spiced, heated wine, for which each family guarded its own secret recipe that went back to the beginnings of the family and of Etruria itself.
He sucked in the tiny fold of lip just under his nose, and bit it, and thought for a moment, and said; "I think those recipes are perhaps the real thing that binds Etruria. Not your gods, not your prophecies, not your politics and noble houses, but your families, your secrets, the small things – a cake, the ways your workmen make gold filigree, the secret patterns in your weaving."
"How do you know about those?" she asked, but he smiled and spread his hands, and for once he had her beaten.
"You know, the Phoenicians have some very interesting midwinter traditions," he said; and that began a discussion of Greek and Gaulish customs, and another story about his servants and how odd it was that so many girls had babies due around September, and so she never did find out how he knew (and how much he knew) about Tarchna's family secrets. And all the while, she thought, he knew as well as she did what stood between them now, the one thing they weren't talking about.
But he surprised her again, a little later.
"I wonder sometimes why people want power," he said; "they seem so devoid of any idea what they want to do with it."
"Are you talking about anyone in particular?"
"Not really," he said, but he looked down at the ground as he said it.
"Power is all there is," she said.
He looked up at that, questions behind his eyes. She laughed.
"Love. That doesn't last. As you know. Luxury; well, that's one way to spend your life, look at Tarquin, you can make taste and opulence and youthful spirit go a long way, but what's it really worth?"
"I had wondered that," he said dryly.
"And wealth, what do we really want it for? Beyond the first few gold bracelets, the first couple of good chariots, what more can you do with it? No, Manius; power is all there is."
"But to do what?"
"Anything. To do anything."
"To make the city strong? Or beautiful?"
"And more. Strong, and beautiful, and ours."
"What happened to equality before the laws? When did you stop believing in justice?"
"You think without power there will be any justice?"
"You've grown cynical in your old age."
"Old?" she said. "Some women would poison you for that."
"You'd never use poison, Tanaquil. A knife in the back, maybe."
"Oho," she said; "watch out for a knife in your front. I'd hate to be predictable."
He grimaced at that, and chuckled, but then his face grew serious again.
"You know Robur is down south now?"
"I thought he was still trying to worm his way into the northern cities? Velathri, Viesul..."
"None of them would take him."
"You did your work well, then."
"Well enough. He did some of it for me, to tell the truth."
Tanaquil's eyes widened.
"A rape. Rather a nasty little episode. That was in Curtun."
"I never heard anything about that."
"They tried to keep it quiet. It never works. Wickedness seeps out somehow."
"Well for us that it did."
"He's trying to raise a force to invade Rome."
"Does he have a chance?"
"No. I don't think so. There's nothing in it for the Greeks; they trade with us, and they're well paid for it, so what would they gain by changing us for him? All Robur is to them is a cost. It's bad business; they can lose, but they can't win. And they've heard the rumours."
"Well, good," she said, but felt it was anything but good.
The girl came in again with some more wine; oh, what was her name? They all looked so much the same these days, all with the same hair, severely tied back but with a single ringlet escaping, as if accidentally; the same clothes, the same hemline, the same faience beads around their necks, even the same faces as if they'd all been moulded by the same potter, their thin noses pinched out between thumb and forefinger. Sunshine, indeed.
"And Faustus," Manius said, as soon as the girl had gone (and he'd confirmed that with a quick glance, Tanaquil noticed: he was being careful). "He... knows something. I'm sure of it."
"He knows nothing."
"He's started up that old chorus again – Tanaquil's plot to put the Romans out of Rome. People listen, you know."
"To put the Romans out of Rome? Who were the Romans?" she said acidly. "There's no such thing as Roman. Mongrels, the whole damned lot of you. There's not a Roman can recite more than five generations of family back to a rapist and a fratricide whose own father wanted to kill him, and that's the noble families."
"Whereas you..."
"...can recite my ancestors from the first lustrum of the Etrusc
an race, yes. I know you've heard it before. And is he saying anything else, or just having a good whinge with a new king as his excuse?"
"He's been saying power slides too easily from one place to another. From Ancus Marcius to Tarquinius. From Tarquinius to Servius. And you're always in favour, always running the show."
"Well, nothing wrong in that. He's not saying anything more specific?"
"He doesn't need to. Look, Tanaquil, you sent me to get Robur thrown out of Etruria; I know exactly how rumours work. If they're specific, at least you get a chance to deny them; it's the shadowy stories, the ones that blur and melt away – the suggestions and hints which never quite become statements or assertions – it's those which do the damage. Oh, and he says it will be Tarquin next, Servius won't last..."
"I'm tired of it," she said. "All I've ever wanted..."
"Is what, Tanaquil?"
"Oh, nothing. But I'm tired of all this. And it won't be Tarquin next, not if I have any say in the matter; he's too young, he's too frivolous, he's too headstrong."
"And you left him out of the succession."
"And he's sulking."
"And meanwhile, what do we do with Faustus?"
"Let him be," she said. But she lied.
She knew she'd have to do something. Faustus was too close to the truth. Too many people knew there was something wrong about Tarquinius' death, even if all they knew was that she'd lied about it for two days, and that the palace had been quarantined.
She wondered whether this was the way Tarquinius was feeling when he talked about the owls – how one thing led to another, one death necessitated another, and though you'd taken the first step for a good reason, or good enough, anyway, before long you found yourself tied up in knots of the logic of necessity; like treading on stepping stones into the middle of the stream, where you found, at last, only one stone you could possibly step on, and it was a long stride, a slippery rock, a footing that might tip under you, and yet you had to take the step, and hope it was secure. Security was all she wanted; it was all anyone wanted, but it became more and more difficult to find the higher you climbed. She'd killed the old king to win a kingdom; she'd killed Tarquinius not to lose it; and now she faced another death, simply to hide the others.
"I'm not sure that's wise," Manius said.
"Faustus has always been a problem, and he always will be."
"I still think you should do something."
And what does something mean, she wanted to ask; but instead she said, "I'm tired, Manius."
"I'll go, then," he said; but he looked disappointed in her, as if she'd let him down somehow.
And the truth was that she was tired. She was tired of dealing with guilt, the little crack in the world that let the hinthials in. Tired of dealing with doubt; and suddenly she reflected this is how Tarquinius must have felt, every day of his life, and wondered whether doubt was a living thing, like some insidious kraken that stuck to people with its needy suckers, and as soon as Tarquinius died, it had lassooed her in, and hung its tentacles around her neck. Tired of seeing the darkness beneath the brittle sunshine; tired of thinking through every footstep, every word, every look, before she did it, tired of reckoning the multiple, ever-branching threads of future, seeing everything she did infinitely reflected and refracted in those futures. Tired of the responsibility. Just plain tired.
Servius
"It's growing."
"It is not."
"Look. That's a bud."
"It isn't."
"It is."
"It's dead. Dead, dead, dead, and never going to grow."
"Just wait and see."
Servius shrugged. "Okay, so it's going to grow, and next year you'd better have something better than this rotgut to serve up."
"It takes more than a year to make wine, you know. Let the poor thing grow first," said Rasce.
"If it does."
"It will."
"Anyway," said Servius, "since when have you been a gentleman farmer?"
"It's a long story. Long enough to justify another bottle of..."
"Rotgut? Why not."
Rasce had a good fire going inside, and the mud of the vineyard soon dried and started to flake off their boots, and the rotgut was a little tastier warmed in a pot and poured over honey.
"When did I last see you?" Rasce asked, and laughed when Servius nearly answered. "No, don't worry, my mind's not gone; I do remember crashing into your headquarters during the battle. And you didn't know the general had gone. And you had other things on your mind. He left you more than the horse bit, you know, but there wasn't time to tell you then, and there was no time at all afterwards, after the..."
His voice fell. Servius nodded.
"Anyway. I was with the general all my life. All his life, pretty much, too."
"You're a lot younger, though."
"My parents worked for the household; I was working as soon as I could walk. And then they discovered I had, what did they call it, an affinity for horses; and that was my life. From the day I entered the stables, I could see my life, always working for the general, always working with the horses, all the way to the end... I'd won a clean sweep of the big races for him, for seven seasons we were invincible, and I suppose he must have remembered it, for a few weeks before he died he wandered over to the stables and told me to remember he'd done something for me, and if anything ever happened to him to go to the priest of Selvans. All a bit mysterious."
"You think he knew he was dying?"
"No. But we're all growing old. And then he gave me the harness, for you. 'It's no use to me any more,' that's what he said; it was a long time since he'd driven a chariot, he said it rattled his old bones too much for him to enjoy it. And I don't know, I think while he might not have known that his own death was coming, he thought the old Velx was dying, and there was no place in it for him or his kind."
The fire crackled and spat a small rain of sparks on to the floor; they died instantly.
"I don't regret the old days," Servius said.
"I bet you don't, King Servius."
"When I think how my mother sold me..."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It's all over now. She must have been dead for years..."
A little silence then, each man locked in his own thoughts, till the fire spat again (green wood, he's using green wood, Servius thought) and Rasce picked up the threads of his tale.
"He died just at the end of summer, while the days were still golden. There was a fine red sunset that last night, and we sat out drinking, and he saw a falling star streaking across the sky, or so he said, but when I looked, it had gone out like a spark from the fire. That's someone's lucky star, I said, but it's not mine. You never know, he said. The night started to get chill, and we went inside. In the morning... there was no sunrise for him.
"Then later, I remembered what he'd said to me about the priests, and I thought it might concern making arrangements for the funeral - some sacrifice he wanted, or an augury taken first – so I made sure I went to Selvans' shrine.
"The second priest was there – the junior – a rather put-upon man with a thin face and a stoop, and he didn't seem particularly pleased to see me, rather frightened in fact I thought..."
"Get on with it," Servius said.
"The general had been generous to me."
"Well, I'd guessed that."
"But he'd also charged me to sell up. The house, the horses, everything; sell it and go."
"That can't have been easy. There were five, no six, families living there."
"Only three when he died. But no, it wasn't easy. And that was why the priest had looked frightened; his mother was the general's woman."
"A bit old?"
"Growing old together; he must have found something comforting in that, I suppose. She was looked after."
"By him? By you?"
"By me. But then he must have known I'd make sure she was comfortable. She decided to live in Velzna, I think; not many
of the household stayed in Velx. No one had the heart. Too many changes."
"And you came here."
"Rome is an open city. I thought, with a bit of money, I could do all right here."
"So you bought this place."
"A place on the Caelian. Fitting, really, a hill named after Caile."
"I owed him a lot. One of the perks of being king; you can rename hills."
"Rename the city, if you like."
"Maybe not that... You're well enough off, then."
"Not that well. Velx had gone to ruin; the place didn't fetch much, and after looking after the staff, and the sacrifices, and the funeral games..."
"Five days?"
"Six, and a gold prize for each event. Chariot races, horse races, footraces, the footrace in armour, boxing, wrestling and the greasy pole; a banquet each night, and a hundred dancers."
"No wonder Velx is ruined," Servius said, and snorted out a cursory laugh. Still, there had been enough left for Rasce to buy a small farm here, where Servius had set aside the land for Etruscan settlers, on the hill formerly called Oakhill, where the oaks still sheltered herds of stocky black pigs, which rooted for acorns among the roots. A reasonable sized place; enough room for a market garden and a few livestock, though perhaps surprisingly, no horses, and a tiny vineyard, not more than two rows of the vine cuttings they'd been arguing about, bare sticks poked into the dirt.
"You didn't come to me first," Servius said, with only a slight hint of question in his voice.
"I thought if it all goes wrong, he'll need a lad," Rasce said. "But this is better. To be honest, I never liked horses much. I could get them to do what I wanted, but I never liked them, really. Small minds. Stupid. And stink."
"You prefer the pigs?"
Rasce shrugged. "I prefer the vines."
"If they grow."
So Rasce, it seemed, had settled in, along with all the other Etruscans who had made the Celian their new home. This was Rome, but the lilt and lisp of Etruscan speech could be heard in the fields and lanes, and bright tebennas glittered against the bleached brown of winter plough and faded grasses; and at the field edges or in the copses, mute guardians of wood or stone kept the boundaries. An orderly part of a disorderly city, but one that was becoming increasingly ordered, as Servius settled his Etruscans here, his plebeians elsewhere, pruning away the old Roman patricians to let the newer arrivals thrive.
"You want to get yourself a woman," Rasce said.
"Got one already."
"Not doing you much good, then. You need a woman with a bit of fire in her."
He thought of Ramtha; but in his mind's eye he could only see Tanaquil, and he thought to himself; why not? It worked once, it could work again.