Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  It worried Servius that the princes had fled; he knew from dealing with Robur that a ruling house could always find support elsewhere, from cities opposed to Rome, or which thought they could play a game of favourites to achieve their ends, whether those were improved trade, or military protection, or simply a little private arrangement between two princes.

  At least the princes' flight had left the palaces and temples empty; that made life simpler. He remembered cities where he'd had to fight through the streets. Here, he set up his headquarters in the lucumo's house, using the same room, the same bed, the same slaves. (Freed slaves, he reminded himself, but his meal came, just the same.) Him, and Tarquin, and an always changing number of junior officers reporting in. It was easier when the room was full; when he was alone with Tarquin, he felt constrained and uneasy, even though he knew his gamble had worked.

  As his men brought Veii under their sway, he calculated how much plunder would flow into Rome. There were golden pectorals, gold bracelets for the men, gold fringed tebennas. Even the Latins hardly objected to the new wealth, though he'd noticed the Romans tended to wear less delicately worked ornaments than his own Etruscan people, as if it was no shame to carry your wealth on your chest, only to have expended effort in making it look elegant. It was almost a pity he'd freed the slaves; but there was so much wealth in Veii, not just in its people, but in the granaries, in the treasury of its temples, and what he valued more than gold or grain, cold steel, the weapons of the defeated army to equip his own men.

  He was still looking at the tally in the deepening dusk when he heard a scuffle. In the courtyard, a dark squirming mass slowly separated into two of his slingers dragging a limping, yet still struggling man between them.

  "We've found someone you might want to see."

  "Have you really?" Tarquin said coolly, but Servius narrowed his eyes to see better. A bruiser, he thought, looking at the half-destroyed face; scratched and grazed all over as if he'd been dragged on the gravel outside, one eye puffy and almost swollen shut, a bruise on his cheek already blue and darkening in patches to almost black, and his lip split and bleeding.

  "We bust his foot," one of the slingers said proudly.

  "It was his third shot," said the other.

  The prisoner turned his head to one side so that he could see Servius better with his one open eye, and spat. That truculence seemed familiar; the face, under the swelling and the cuts, he felt he should know, but searched hopelessly for the name, like scratching an itch he couldn't quite reach.

  "Sodding Vanth!" Tarquin hissed. "Do you know..."

  He realised, before Tarquin could say the name; it was Robur. Older, of course, much older; fat had rounded out the solid squareness of his jaw, but he still held himself head forward and shoulders up, like a bull about to charge.

  "Well," he said. "I hadn't expected..."

  "Where's the king?"

  "Gone," Tarquin said, before Servius could shut him up. Giving information to the enemy; never a good idea, even if it wasn't going to be useful to Robur, who was, quite obviously, going nowhere, with his smashed foot dragging.

  "Bloody coward."

  This could get tiresome, Servius thought. It was like watching two roosters strutting and scratching, and gods help them if they started using their spurs. He looked at the two slingers; good, he thought, they hadn't slackened their grip. He nodded to them, let a grim smile cover his weary face, told them to take him away. Even now, Robur struggled, lurching from side to side to shake them off, but they gripped like mastiffs, dragging him out. They knew where to take him; there were fewer prisoners than Servius had hoped to take, but even after the princes had flown, a few of the wealthier Veientes had stayed, some of whom he thought he could talk round to assisting Rome in exploiting the cities' resources, while others might be ransomed.

  "A triumph!" Tarquin smiled; Servius wondered if he was thinking of the climax of the triumph, the execution of the defeated king.

  "That's what you want?"

  "Isn't it what everyone wants?"

  "Gods, are your desires really as simple as reddening your face and jamming laurel on your head?"

  Tarquin flinched at that, and he wondered if he'd spoken too roughly. Mamarke could smooth it over; but Mamarke wasn't here. When Tarquin was involved, he always seemed to say the wrong thing; and he was a man who had always been able to say the right thing to his men, before a battle, or after it.

  "You're entitled to it," Tarquin said.

  That was an interesting word, 'entitled'. He'd never been entitled to anything. It had been hard labour to win a word of kindness; his whole youth he'd walked the edge of a precipice, never sure whether he'd pleased the General, never certain he wouldn't be turned away. And Tarquin, what

  "My men are entitled to it."

  "Even the slingers? They didn't even fight."

  Servius didn't bother to answer. He simply sat, and waited till Tarquin realised, and grimaced slightly, and turned away. The slingers might not have fought, but it had been two of them who had brought Robur in; and it had been his slingers and his footsoldiers who had, already, set up the army's quarters in the surrendered city, organised the kitchens, started logging the contents of the temple treasuries; the horsemen too drunk with the suddenness of their victory to think about strategy.

  "Well, a triumph," he said at last. "I think the men will enjoy that."

  Tanaquil

  All her teachers were gone.

  Old Spurinna, who was so old and dry everyone thought he was a hundred even when she was a girl, had died five years ago; he'd made it through the hard winter, but one spring morning he'd gone to sit in the orchard in the first sunshine of the year, and fell into death like a gentle sleep. The woman they'd called Spina, after her town – so many years later, Tanaquil could remember her reedy thin voice, but not her true name – had gone back to the watery margins of the Other Sea, and no one had heard from her since the spring before last.

  Nerinai was here, still. But she sat immobile, hunched beneath her blanket, and looked at Tanaquil with empty eyes. A girl brought her out in the morning and settled her by the hearth, and there she stayed till it was time for another girl to put her to bed. When a spoon was pushed at her mouth, Nerinai ate, without greed and without enjoyment; but she said nothing, and hardly moved, and her hands lay still and limp on her lap.

  Venel had died, about the time of the vintage last year, and Nerinai had run wild for two days with grief. She ran into the shrine of Talna and ripped the image of the goddess from its place – two strong men couldn't have done it, they said; then she ran down from the city, among the crags, dancing the edge of the precipice, and they thought she was sure to fall. No one dared follow her, but they saw her run down to the place of the tombs below the city, and into the forest, and then no one saw her for those two wild days of storm till she turned up, blank eyed and shivering, at the hearth in front of the temple.

  Some said the gods had blasted her for her blasphemy. Others said it was the vengeful gods who had kept her alive when she clearly no longer wanted to live, shrivelled, like the Sibyl at Cumae in her bottle. (Tanaquil had always imagined the Sibyl in an Egyptian bottle in bright blue glass, like the one her favourite Spurinna uncle had brought from the Delta, with the stamp of a black beetle; but this was the truth of the myth, the shrivelled body and the claw-like hands, and the whispering breath of a body that had no soul left to keep it alive.)

  And this morning the visit to Aplu's temple, another disappointment. Tanaquil wondered why she'd come; nothing seemed to live up to her memories. The portico of the temple seemed smaller than it had been, and less beautiful. The lumpish Aplu on the pediment brandished his bow like a baby with a stick of bread in his hand, not clumsy with the powerful roughness of antiquity, but simply badly made. The steps were cluttered with gifts; bronzes, tripods, vases. The priest insisted on showing her every one.

  "That tripod," the priest told her, "was give
n by Sostratos of Aegina."

  "Really."

  "A magnificent gift, but then Aplu had been good to him."

  "Indeed."

  He didn't get the hint. She heard how this or that thing was given by a trader from Tarchna, by a noble of Clevsin, the women charioteers of Felsina, a zilath of Spina.

  "They're very generous, the northerners," he said. "Some of the older cities could learn from them."

  "I'm sure."

  She remembered the temple spacious and white and cool. A space of simplicity where she'd learned that power could come from renunciation as well as possession; where she'd learned how bareness could be more elegant than opulence. It took her aback when she saw the great doors closed; they'd never been closed all the time she had studied in Velzna. But now visitors had to enter through a low and narrow door in the side of the temple, blocked by a table behind which sat an old woman with a squint, who stretched her hand forwards till she saw the priest accompanying Tanaquil shake his head.

  She squeezed through the space between the table and the wall, expecting at every moment to see the great space of the temple, with nothing between her and the figure of the God. But between the pillars that supported the great roof, wooden barriers had been set up, and small shrines erected, gaudy with painted pottery gods, each with its own attendant, who as they passed stretched out a hand for offerings; there was no way to go but between the barriers, which marked out a confused and zigzagging path. In one place a shoddily built wall hid the altar; in another, a railing kept the people away from the sanctuary, where six priests hid their heads in tebennas while they made libations, coming to the bar to take offerings, of which, Tanaquil noted, they poured out only a few splashes on the altar before putting the vessels to one side. She could hardly breathe in here, hemmed in between the railings and the mass of pilgrims, with the smell of spilt wine heavy in the air. The whole place was busy and hucksterish as a market. Only the god remained unchanged, his sharp-featured face wooden as it had always been, his eyes narrow slanted almonds, his mouth thin. He had always been a disapproving god, faintly distressed by the randomness and indiscipline of humanity; an exigent god, one many of Tanaquil's contemporaries had been afraid of. Now he had more to disapprove of than mere unruliness. This was not religion; this was begging, fraud, extortion.

  If she'd had to pray it would have been to Vanth; Vanth who wanted blood, not offerings, who wanted the dead on the field of battle, the blood of mourners flowing as they cut themselves in anguish or ecstasy. She'd bitten her own tongue often enough, or clawed at her thighs till the pinched flesh bled, to make the visions come when prophecy would not flow; she'd tasted her own blood on her fingers, knew the taste and stickiness of it intimately. She looked at the prating priest and thought of blood, and smiled at him.