by AM Kirkby
***
The gates of Veii were still barred when Servius rode up to them the next day, but a brief parley saw them open, the thick wooden gates grinding on their massive hinges. Three massive stone heads looked down from the archway, so erorded you could hardly see if they had eyes; they must have been centuries old already, Servius thought. Veii was already old when Velx had still been young, or so they said. But whether those heads had always been there above the gate, or whether they had been brought from some sanctuary in the woods, he did not know.
They rode up through the fate, up to the plateau at the centre of the city. Below, on the plain, the great pyre was still smouldering, its trail of greasy smoke dirtying the sky. A small temple stood at one end of the great open space; lower buildings crowded three sides. In front of the temple, still and silent, stood the people of Veii, or what was left of them; the women, and those too old to fight or too young to bear arms, and those who had run fastest. The rest lay lifeless on the battlefield below, or burned along with the Roman dead.
One boy with shorn hair gazed at Servius with sullen, huge eyes; slave, or orphan? Girls with unbound hair, still unmarried, stood silent, watchful. No one moved.
"Who's in charge here?"
Silence. Some of the Veientes shuffled uneasily. No one met his eyes.
"They're all slaves," Tarquin said softly.
"Where the hell are the others?"
"Dead. Or running."
The whole place abandoned. The princes, the golden ones, must have valued their lives above the fate of the city; and they'd sent even their male slaves out against Rome, to fight in a war that was not their own. And they'll mourn for the princes, he thought; but the slaves who died with borrowed weapons and third-hand armour, or none, died without lament, without monument or renown. And were no more and no less dead for all that.
Servius raised his voice. "You're free," he said. "All of you. Free."
They were still staring at him, silent, unmoving. He looked for the one face he wanted to see, the one man in the whole of Veii who meant something to him. He saw an old man with a withered arm, with an angry face and wispy beard, and a girl whose body trembled like a poplar in the wind, and was, from time to time, convulsed by soundless sobbing; and then, at last, he found the face he was looking for. So Vulca was all right, anyway.
Not one of them met his eyes.
"Don't you want your freedom?" Tarquin shouted. (But that, Servius thought, was a provocation, not a question.) "We are giving you your freedom."
But Servius knew in his heart you can't give freedom to slaves. He'd had to earn his own; and still, even in this moment of victory, he felt small and dull next to Tarquin's glorious assuredness.
A small cheer started, none the less, in one corner of the square; but it died, and left an embarrassing silence in its wake.
"You see," Tarquin said, "at least a few of them know what freedom means."
But it turned out the men who cheered were Romans, and they'd stopped only when they found no local enthusiasm for their action.