Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  That thought was one that recurred whenever he was least expecting it. He tried to banish it; she was sleeping with Manius, he was sure. She was, too, his wife's mother, and his own adoptive mother. And she was Tanaquil... He woke in the morning with an erection; it was years since that had happened, and never with Tarquinia. He let himself daydream dangerously, of different approaches, different meetings, but never let himself get beyond a first touching of the hands, a first tentative stroking touch; it was all right, he thought, if he left it there, a wish unformed, a spell not cast.

  He'd looked at himself in a mirror, considering. It was too small and too blurred to see himself whole. What had he seen? A taut face, hard eyes, tight wrinkles at the bridge of his nose where he'd frowned too often, too hard, that seemed to have been burnished by the bronze mirror to a fine tanned sheen, like a gilded statue's face, distant and unguessable. He'd grimaced, and the mask distorted. Relaxed his face, and it had flattened again. It remained a mystery to him how others saw him, what they saw; this face seemed to have nothing to do with who he was, who he felt himself to be.

  There were rumours about Robur. There always were. He was never quite sure what to do about them. There were those who advised him to chase down Robur, or have him killed, or push him into making overt war; Tanaquil, and Tarquinius, and Manius, and so many others that when he thought about it, he couldn't remember any who had dissented. Yet he felt obscurely that this was the wrong course to take; that he should forget Robur and the other sons of Ancus Marcius, let them live their lives in the margins – and that this should be Rome's glory, that it could afford the luxury of forgiveness or at least forgetting. It was the more practical course, too, he thought; let the Marcians drift into irrelevance, without the glamour of sacrifice or the excitement of rebellion. Already, he'd heard for some time now, Robur was impatient with the indignity of exile, as he exhausted the welcome of one noble, one city, after another. But the new story, that Robur had finally agreed with Clevsin and was raising an army, might force him to change his mind; if it was true. He thought it wasn't; but he had no proof one way or another, and in the edgy, suspicious times that always followed the death of a king, he needed certainty.

  He slept on it, and slept badly; not something he was used to. He knew Tanaquil would press him to solve the Marcian problem; as if killing one or two of the brothers – and they were dispersed now, one in the south, one in Greece, another in Felsina or Velathri or Curtun, depending on who you listened to – would solve anything. If you couldn't cut off all the hydra's heads at once, he thought, you were better off letting it alone... Solving the Marcian problem, she called it. He'd killed enough men in his time, most cleanly, some nastily, but he still found her elegant euphemism worrying; if you were going to kill someone, give your deed its right name, at least.

  Waking the next morning, he ran his hand down his left side and felt the scar of a wound from a long ago battle, impressively long through it had not been dangerous. There were other scars, smaller ones; he could tell the story of each one – where he'd sliced his own arm open to dig out an arrowhead, a burned patch on one shoulder where a flaming lintel had crashed down on him in a village his men had fired. Some men were ruined by their scars, others ennobled; he fancied himself in the latter category. He hadn't run to fat. No longer scrawny, he was still lean; he could pinch the flesh around his waist and feel no more than a slight give where the skin was taut, but no flabbiness under it. He knew he'd never been good-looking, but he wasn't bad-looking, and by his age so many men were; the golden youths, the languid nobles, all ran to fat or wrinkled up or sagged, so the scrawny lads could inherit, if not the earth, at least a good number of its unattached women. (How old was Tanaquil now? Forty? Fifty? He'd never asked what age she'd borne her children. She must have been a young mother; younger when she bore Arruns than the still childless Tarquinia was now. But those were thoughts he didn't need now. He had to think about the Marcians, and the army, and trade with Tarchna...)

  Some mornings he'd get up and exercise naked in his room, stretching the sleep out of his body till he felt properly alive. Each toe clawed, he felt his shins tighten; lunged, and felt the fronts of his thighs stretch and fill with weight. Drill, on a bad day, was only drill, but when it was good, he seemed to tune himself, mind to body, his body to the world, till everything rang with rightness. Today, though, it was drill; routine after routine, competently executed, repeated, working each muscle in turn. Nothing wrong with that.

  He finished; he bent, reaching to grab his clothes. He felt warm, but when he touched his skin with his fingers, it was icy cold. Inside and outside didn't match; man and king, king and man.

  Before he dressed, he stretched once more, and absently jiggled his prick in one hand; it was satisfyingly heavy. There was something comforting about the feel of it; maybe that was why so many soldiers reached for their cocks as a reflex action whenever they were afraid, not touching themselves in any sexual way but just to check everything was there, in its right place, the one thing they could count on. (Others, of course, had their gods.) Strange, too, how it was so heavy, yet as soon as you got into water, your prick and balls floated like strange pink jellyfish. Inside and outside, a confusion of difference.

  Those too were thoughts he didn't need, and he pushed them away, pulling on his tunic. Another day begun. Another wearisome day.