Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  His mother had grown old in the past couple of years and he had hardly recognised it, till one day he saw her with Tullia, his red-haired Tullia. It was like seeing her with her younger self. Tanaquil had faded; the gleam in her eyes, the shine of her hair, had gone, and her cheeks had hollowed, leaving her nose sharp, her bones showing. Her cheeks were still red, her hair still black, but the flat colour of her hair, and the powdery softness on her cheeks, betrayed the means she'd used. Both women looked at the world with slight disdain, both carried themselves proudly straight; both had the same smile, slightly cruel, slightly amused, slightly insincere.

  "You've been giving horses away again," Tanaquil said.

  "Only to the right people."

  "And who are they?"

  "Useful ones," he said. She frowned.

  "Servius knows what you're doing."

  "I'm sure he does. Does he know what you're doing?"

  Tanaquil didn't show it, except for a momentary hardening of her eyes, but he knew he'd angered her.

  "Why don't you give swords?" she asked.

  "It wouldn't be any cheaper."

  "But it would be more effective; particularly with the common people."

  "If they can't afford their armour, they shouldnt be in the army," he said. And he saw that Tanaquil more than half agreed with him.

  "He knows what he's doing," Tullia said, drawing on herself an angry look from Tanaquil.

  "He does, does he? He never did before."

  But that was before, and this was now. Before, he'd enjoyed the luxuries of nobility; now, he held up that nobility as an ideal. He'd thought his mother would be proud of him; she'd taught him to be proud of his nobility, of his Etruscan origins, of the luxury and artistry that set his race apart from the Roman mob. Yet she'd backed Servius; and Servius had thrown his lot in with the slaves and the commoners, with the rough unfinished people.

  "Servius," he said, "wants to keep us poor for ever. Everything we have that's dear, he wants to take for the army. And his army grows and grows, and sucks and sucks, like a monstrous child, till Rome will all be sucked away."

  His mother looked at him coldly. It was not quite the expression that had always portended punishment, when he was younger, and that he'd only rarely seen, but always remembered; it was disapproving, but in a way proud, as if he'd passed a test.

  "I hope at least you will remember not to say such things openly," she said. Coming from Tanaquil, that was as good as her complete agreement with what he'd said.

  He took Tullia out riding that day, braving his mother's coolness. She must have known what was going on; she couldn't have missed the fact that they were both of them more around the palace than they used to be, and anyway, he thought, she had her informers. He wouldn't have been surprised if Strephon was one of her spies, or perhaps Sethre; when he thought about, there was only one person he could really trust, and that was Tullia.

  He'd expected her to be merely an adequate rider, but she seemed to have the same innate understanding of animals as his mother; pushing her horse out, matching his speed over the hard dirt, on which the horses' hooves sounded hollowly. If only he could do this every day;if only he could take this wonderful woman to the army drills with him; if only his mother wasn't insisting he should get a child on the other Tullia.

  He looked across at her; hair streaming, face flushed with the exercise, just as it was flushed when they made love, and that aloof smile on her face. He felt his heart turn over, as if it had stopped and then suddenly started again, and was so faint and dizzy with it that he felt he was falling from his horse, and had to bite his lip to bring himself back to wakefulness.

  Suddenly he thought of ridding himself of the other Tullia. It was strange he hadn't thought of it before. To be free of her; if only, if only she would catch a cold, or a fever. Life was so fragile. Well one day, then a cough, an ache, a pain, and then suddenly, an absence, a face missed, a voice you didn't hear any more.

  He'd daydreamed before of life without her. But why wait; he could push her. Or suffocate her in bed. Or have her stabbed, when she was out of the house; Servius had been complaining about lawlessness in the streets, and every day saw men pouring into Rome who had no work, and nothing they knew how to do but kill, and the army, even Servius's army, wouldn't take everyone.

  From the city they galloped into the hills, away from Servius, and the palace, and responsibility; away from his mother's expectations, away from his wife's sullenness, away from the limitations of her widowed life and his subordination. But this freedom was only temporary; he dreamed of freedoms more complete and lasting, and he would work to win them.

  Now he had to think whether he should tell the Tullia he loved of his new idea. It was, after all, her sister he proposed to remove from his life. But he thought yes, she would approve; she would do it herself, if she needed to, because she was a real Etruscan woman, who would take her life in her own hands. Tanaquil would have done it, if she had had a sister, if that sister had stood in her way, he was sure.

  She still hadn't slept with him. She had a way of standing very close to him, nearly but not quite touching; she let the hem of her skirt brush his naked shins, she brushed his cheek with hers when she left him, she had even, once, let him see her almost naked as she rose from her bed, having sent her slave out of the room for some wine. They were still playing that little game of maybe, maybe not, he thought, despite her having said that the best games came later.

  There was a pool in a wood, he remembered, a distance from the road, where a flat rock caught the sun, and the water was clear and still. His mother had taken him there once, hunting, and he'd swum in the water to cool off, and watched the wet dogs rush in, and shake a shower from their sodden fur afterwards. He'd found it again some time ago, and recognised it instantly. (It was strange how the past blurred and became grey, so that if someone had asked him what he'd done on this day just two years ago he would have forgotten it, but there were some moments, some places and people that seen just once, remained, and recalled, still shone bright in the mind; this was one of those places, though some days it seemed duller, flatter than the sun-bright, overwhelming memory of it had been.) He'd never brought any of his friends here. The memory was so bright he feared to share it, as if that would flatten it out and thin it down; he hugged it to himself, unshared and sacred.

  As they neared the place where a narrow track ran off to the north of the road, he slowed his horse, and heard Tullia's horse slowing its pace; in a few moments she came level with him.

  "What's up? We're not going on?"

  He told her about the pool; left it to her to choose which way they went now, into the woods of desire, or along the broad and open road. His horse trampled nervously next to hers, now they were stopped, pulling against the bit while he held it on a short rein.

  Without saying a word, she brought her horse round, and dug her heels into its sides, so that it leapt forwards. That was it, then, he thought; he'd offended her. Or perhaps she was going to pretend that he had, just in order to torment him. But then he realised her horse had started up the path towards the woods, and smiled triumphantly, and let the reins loose.