Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  One of the girls showed the goldsmith in; a man prematurely old, who stooped and squinted a little, though, she knew, he was several years younger than she was.

  "Lady," he said, and waited for her command. (Ah, that was civilised behaviour, so different from the boomtown rough manners so prevalent in Rome, now that Servius was in charge.)

  "Cuffs, I think."

  "Lady?"

  "A pair of cuffs. Heavy gold cuffs, with beasts. Lions."

  "Lions rending an antelope?" he offered. "Though it's a rather dated theme. Most of my customers now..."

  "Just lions," she said. "The pride of Tarchna."

  He nodded. "So. Lions. How many?"

  "That, I leave up to you."

  He seemed surprised. "Most ladies specify exactly."

  "I'm not a smith," she said. "You'd know what looks best. I leave it to you."

  He smiled, and with that smile the years seemed to fly up from him like scattering goldfinches, his face almost boyish for a moment.

  "Just... not too many small ones?" Tanaquil suggested. He looked shrewdly at her. "I'm not telling you... but larger designs do look better on me. And I want the cuffs good and heavy."

  His frown disappeared. "No, if you want heavy cuffs you're right, a filigree treatment would seem too light. Two larger beasts on each cuff, then, and perhaps I can hide some smaller ones in the decorative background. You wouldn't see them, unless you looked."

  "A secret for those who know."

  "Exactly so." Then the creases laid themselves again over his face, and his voice was hesitant. "I had better get to work; I may not be able to make many more pieces."

  "Is that so? Are the mines drying up?"

  "Rome is taking it all," he said. "They say it's for the army."

  "You want to scare me into buying new earrings too? No – you're serious, aren't you?"

  "I don't know what I'll do if I can't get the metal," he said. "I have enough work in hand, it's getting the materials worries me. Oh, and I have a piece to make for Tullia."

  "What does Tarquin's wife want with new jewellery?" she said crossly.

  "No. The other one."

  "Arruns' widow?" He hadn't wanted to say her dead son's name, obviously; it was no sacrifice to say it for him. "Well, what is she getting?"

  "A whole set; diadem, earrings, hair ornaments, one large pendant, four sets of bracelets, and a laurel wreath, in gold. But that's not for her, that last."

  "It isn't?"

  "Her head's the wrong size."

  "So who is that for?" she mused, and saw the smith's face close up. "I'm sorry" – the easy, insincere apology of the ruler to the ruled - "I shouldn't be asking. No, you're quite right not to tell me."

  It was interesting that a widow would make such a large order; unless perhaps she was considering a new marriage. Did that, perhaps, have something to do with her recent difficulties with Tullia? They'd always been friends, which Romans considered odd for a woman and her daughter-in-law – well, Etruscans knew better ; Tullia seemed, sometimes, a little like Tanaquil's younger self, bright and personable and a little headstrong, not like her lumpish sister, who was nothing but a nuisance (but fortunately was easily distracted by giving her some spinning to do, or some weaving, as long as it was neither delicate nor a complicated pattern, though what the point was of having a princess spin when you could get a slave to do it, she couldn't fathom). But recently she seemed to have set herself against Tanaquil somehow, quarrelling with her father when it was least helpful, supporting Tarquin against his mother.

  She'd fallen in with a younger set; inevitable, perhaps, that she would, that an older woman like Tanaquil wouldn't interest her as much as the company of those her own age. But she'd fallen in with Tarquin's set, who, for all that she'd defended them to Servius, Tanaquil regarded as, in the main, wasters; wasn't Tullia smarter than that? They claimed the values Tanaquil had fought for – Etruscan civilisation, the freedom of women, art, nobility – but all subtly changed, like a parody of Tarchna; sexual licence, luxury, drunkenness, arrogance. They'd lost the refinement and subtlety her generation had possessed; and not one of them had studied augury. They flaunted their difference.

  (That word; she remembered Tarquinius, once, angry with her when she came back from a hunt, telling her not to flaunt her Etruscan pedigree; and she wondered: had she ever been that flagrant?)

  Still, young blood was hot blood; youth was a time for sudden spite and as sudden changes of heart. Give it a few weeks and there would be a tearful reunion, like the last time Tullia had burrowed into Tanaquil's arms and sobbed for some dream lost or betrayed.

  Tanaquil thought back to her own youth. Who of all her friends were left? Tarquinius dead; Hanuna, her best friend once in Tarchna, dead in childbirth, twenty years ago now; Larthia, who had gone to Spina with her second husband, and last time Tanaquil heard, was a fat grandmother of a tribe of little northerners – was it six daughters she'd had, or seven, and all of them with their mother's fertile nature; and there was Lecne, who'd gone to Greece with his father and never came back, and if she knew anything was probably half-ruling some small city-state – either that or dead; and Metli Spitu, who had won the girls' long distance race one year, had died of fever last year. Thresu Spurinna, of course, lived, and ruled in Tarchna now; little fat Thresu who'd made her laugh with his face-pulling, and his ability to spout fluent gibberish, and his stupid practical jokes.

  It was only in Velzna that she still had friends from the days of her training; Nerinai, Kaisie Spitu's daughter, two years younger than Tanaquil, and her cousin Venel, had never come back to Tarchna, but stayed in Velzna. Nerinai staying had been no surprise; she was one of the most talented of that generation. But Venel should have taken up his father's position as zilath; he only needed enough knowledge for that, and he wasn't considered particularly bright, though he didn't disgrace the Spitu name. Some said he'd stayed on in Velzna because of Nerinai, that they were lovers; Tanaquil had never been sure whether she believed that. Whatever the truth, perhaps it was time she visited Velzna.

  She was missing Tarquinius. It was his time, she said to herself, the owls had told her that; but even so, he had been her choice, her partner for so many years. He'd been, almost, her equal; even if she had pulled the wool over his eyes a few times, even if he lacked poise, until he'd set foot on that long, downhill slide, he'd been worthy of her. When she woke alone in the morning, she regretted sleeping in a cold bed, without another body to keep her warm, without the morning pleasure of rediscovering wakefulness alongside another. The days she'd watched him sleeping, wondering where his thoughts wandered, whether he dreamed; sometimes when he slept, he looked like a boy again, his face relaxed and open. People wouldn't believe you could have killed someone, and still miss him, and it surprised her, too; grief sharpened her life, like vinegar.

  She could have slept with one of the slaves; there was always a slave who could be relied on. But while a slave could warm a bed, a slave wasn't company; you can't play games with someone you own, can't fight with someone who gives in, because they don't dare to anger you. It would be like a stag-hunt she'd seen once, when she was a girl in Tarchna, with an old stag, worn out, and the hounds had him at bay; she'd wanted to stop it, there was so little dignity in murdering that sad and ancient creature. They had killed it, just the same; and it taught her another lesson, a little afterwards, when her father told her the Spitu, who had organised the hunt, had failed to get Venel's father reappointed as zilath for the next year. She learned: never be associated with failure.

  She had never had time for daydreaming. You could daydream or you could do; not both. But now, after so many years of effort, she allowed herself to drift a little into the comfort of nostalgia, thinking back to those first days with Tarquinius, with Lauchme, before he got fat and she got bony, when they were golden of skin and dark of hair and in love...

  She was startled by a shadow falling across her face. She'd only
closed her eyes for a moment; she should never have closed them at all. How long had she been dreaming? For a second she was confused, blinking into the light.

  It was Manius. He looked determined; not quite angry, but as if he'd decided he was going to get something from her, and he wouldn't leave without it.

  "Have you heard what he's done?"

  She had no idea what he meant; and he was almost too angry to explain, but she managed, eventually, to find out that it wasn't only Tarquinius who'd been upset by the changes in the army, and that Manius had lost his command, and been demoted, or rather, that in the merging of two centuries, someone had forgotten to ensure he was given a place in the new entity, so that he was left on the strength, but without a posting, and, if you took the rules literally, subordinate to a man vastly his junior.

  And the worst of it, he said, was that he'd thought Tanaquil was going to make him king, and now he was nothing, nothing at all.

  "But I tried," she said. "I did try."

  "It didn't look like it."

  "It was obvious the army wanted Servius, you know. What could I do against the army?"

  "You could have spoken up for me."

  "You never asked me."

  "The years I spent doing your business in Velx, in Tarchna, in Cisra. All the work I did against Faustus' faction, for you and Tarquinius. For you, even, I killed Tarquinius."

  "You did not," she said; "I did."

  "I helped."

  She nearly said, then; "If it hadn't been you, it would have been someone else." And she nearly told him, too, how the man who killed Tarquinius could never become king; how she'd had to keep Servius away from any breath of suspicion, how she couldn't have done that for Manius. But she was too canny to let him know that; and too canny, too, to try to seduce him, this time, to flatter him or flirt with him.

  "Manius," she said, "it simply wasn't possible. We would both have fallen. And Servius... he's surprised me. I thought he would be just a figurehead, a general. War is his game, I didn't think he wanted to be a king."

  "He's making too many decisions, changing too many things."

  "I thought we could control him. We might still."

  "We won't. But even if we did, he has the name of king. History will remember him."

  "History has strange ways of remembering," she said. "It's not always the kings we remember. Tarchies, for instance. Every Etruscan knows Tarchies, but he was never a king. But he made the Etruscan cities, with his prophecies. And we're making something here – a new Rome, a new Etruria, a new Italy."

  Manius shifted uneasily. "You make things sound so simple," he said. "It's only when I get home that I start wondering why everything is so difficult."

  "Trust me," she said. "Servius goes to war soon."

  "So do I."

  "Without a command?"

  "I'll get one. Or you'll get one for me."

  "No," she said, and put up her hand when Manius started to bluster. "You don't go to war. You stay here in Rome, and we run Rome together, the way we were always going to. And if, by some chance, Servius were not to come back..."

  Manius nodded. He seemed thoughtful, but he was smiling. Now he understood the plan. Or rather, he thought he understood the plan; but there were plans within plans, and lies hiding more and better lies, and paths that forked in directions Manius would never guess.

  "Trust me," she said.

  Master

  Hoplite armour; the smell of greased leather, straps pulling tight, the reassuring feel of leather around his wrists, around his calves. Stale sweat in the headband of a helmet. That dent, he'd forgotten now what battle he'd acquired it in, and every time he put the helmet on he vowed to have it beaten out; but now he probably never would. The sharp smell of metal, which reminded him of the taste of blood, which was the taste of battle; his own blood from a scalp wound, or from having bitten his tongue or his lip, stumbling, or another man's blood on the hand he'd raised to wipe his mouth, mixed with his own sweat and spit. There was always blood.

  He heard the dull clank of bronze, the grunts of men tightening straps, the swish and snap of a sword thrust into its scabbard. The usual armour, and one extra piece of equipment, today; the usual, familiar sounds. The world telescoped in, as it always did, to the immediate tasks of preparation, the few men around him.

  He dreaded the fight, any sane man would, but in a way, he was never happier than when he was actually fighting. It was honest. You lived or you died; you won or you lost. Words and destiny didn't worry you.

  "Way I look at it," one of the men said, "we're either fucked or we're not, and worrying won't change anything."

  He looked around to see who'd spoken; an old soldier, he thought, with grey hair chopped short and a square stubbly jaw. Their eyes met; Servius grinned.

  "Amusing you, am I?"

  "Well, yes." He waited till the other man was simmering nicely, and then said, quite softly; "better make sure it's us do the fucking rather than the getting fucked."

  "Especially if they've got chickens," someone else said. Servius made sure he was the first to laugh, and the joke spread, as he'd hoped it would (though, perhaps, without the chicken bit).

  There were his kind of men: good, ordinary soldiers. Most had bought their own armour; one or two, he'd sponsored, even before he opened up the treasury to buy weapons for the new troops. That was something Tarquinius wouldn't have done. Something young Tarquin wouldn't have done either. And Tarquin wouldn't be sitting here, with the footsoldiers; he'd be ordering some poor groom to make his chariot ready. Still, today Tarquin would fight under the orders he was given, for once, or take the consequences.

  It had gone quiet again. It always did, at some point, and that was the dangerous time, when men started thinking. What if my neighbour in the line falls, or runs? What if I can't keep up? Does it hurt, dying?

  But Servius couldn't help thinking again of Tarquin. Remembering again that conversation.

  "Not my fault she died," Tarquin had said. "Anyone could have slipped on those steps."

  And now Tarquin wanted to marry his other daughter, though from what Servius heard they hadn't let the absence of a blessing over the grain and the fire get in the way of their mutual attraction. It was amazing they'd managed to pull the wool over Tanaquil's eyes, though; perhaps there was some truth in the old saying that the greatest augurs could never forecast their own wives' faithlessness, and the closer to home you got, the less you saw. But Tanaquil was usually smarter.

  Tarquin. A problem. And Tullia might be a good bargaining chip, if there was a man he needed to have on his side, Gnaeus, or Mamarke, or more likely the head of some Latin town... Well, it might not be a problem after today. Tarquin might die; any of them might die. Or he might disobey his orders. Or they might lose. Or Servius himself might not come back...

  Gods, this was dangerous thinking.

  "You've all gone a bit quiet," he said, looking round at his men, all bar a few now fully armour-clad, except for their helmets. "We can't have that. They'll be saying we crept up on them and took them by surprise. And that's not the idea."

  No, really, it wasn't.

  "Doesn't anyone know any good songs?"

  "The one about the chicken?" some wit shouted; he couldn't see who it was – no doubt the man counted on being out of Servius' sight, he'd not be so brave otherwise.

  "If you insist," Servius said, and almost straight away wished he hadn't; there were several verses he hadn't heard before, with ever increasing elaboration and exaggeration and a number of things he would never have thought of doing to a chicken if some bored soldier in the seventh century hadn't made it up. Still, it kept morbid thoughts away, that was the thing; and they loved him the more for letting them take a crack at him every so often, so when he needed them most, they'd be ready.

  Take a good look at Veii, he thought. A difficult city; perched up on rock. They don't need walls.

  "Ready for the ladders?"

  Mamarke had arrived;
a cavalryman, with Tarquin, which made him a useful go-between for the orders he didn't want to give Tarquin directly.

  "The ladders?"

  "Sorry," Mamarke said, "I thought you'd get the joke."

  Servius let a tiny grin twitch the side of his mouth. "Not a very good one."

  (Infantrymen were only good for a siege, Tarquin had said at one of their meetings, and then he'd stormed out, when he was told the cavalry would be held back. Then Mamarke, trying to dampen down the tension, had said gently, "Well, if we have to, there's this chap on the Celian we could ask," and let Servius ask him what they needed, before delivering the punchline – "he's taught his donkey to climb a ladder, maybe horses could learn to do it too." But Tarquin wanted a pitched battle fought the old way, and it was difficult to bring him round to Servius' ideas; a new kind of battle, an addition to the usual armour, a more complicated plan.)

  "Ready, anyway?"

  "I think we are." Servius raised his voice: "Are we ready, boys?"

  That got the response he wanted; and he said to Mamarke after the cheer died down, "Well, pretty much. We had the sappers working all night. They've made some interesting little traps; spikes in ditches, to catch the chariots coming out from the city."

  "The new methods of warfare," Mamarke said, with a smile.

  "Not that new. Velx had hoplites when the general's grandfather was in charge, and his father used them, and the general was a past master when it came to using a phalanx, and it was …"

  "...the general who taught you," Mamarke said, a beat before Servius could say it.

  "Bugger," said Servius with a scowl that was mostly but not all pretence; "you've heard it all before."

  "Some of it."

  Servius snorted. That was diplomatic. What it meant, of course, was that Servius was turning into an old bore. "But it really isn't new," he said.

  "I know." Mamarke had a tendency always to try to smooth away differences, though it was like trying to smooth away wrinkles; they always came back. "Tarquin only calls it dangerous innovation because he doesn't like it."

  "His old style warfare. It's not a glorious tradition, you know that? The Celts still do it."

  "Anyway," said Mamarke. "You've got your men ready to draw the Veians out?"

  Servius nodded. "You know the orders?"

  "I do."

  "Help me get this breastplate on, will you?"

  Mamarke slipped behind him as he raised the breastplate to his chest. It was Mamarke who pulled the leather straps through the shoulder buckles.

  "You're done."

  "Not yet. There's the backplate to come."

  Mamarke raised an eyebrow.

  "You think it's cowardly?"

  "It's unusual, anyway."

  "They all came home with spear wounds in their breasts; not one had shown his back to the enemy... that's the heroic thing, but since when did heroes have anything to do with war?"

  "You'll be running, then."

  Servius laughed. "You damn well know we will. As soon as we've got them interested."