Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Somehow there seemed to be far too much to do when she got back to Rome. Half of it was ceremony, and she felt herself getting impatient, wishing it were all over. Increasingly she wondered whether the gods had stopped speaking to her; sacrifices were just blood and noise and screaming, and the crunch of the mallet on the beast's skull made her wince and narrow her eyes as she had never done when they simply slit the animal's throat in the old, Etruscan way.

  Even the temple of Menrva seemed to have been taken over by savagery; Diana, as the Romans called her, was a different god, or a twisted shadow of the god to whom Tanaquil had made her vows. Menrva was a god of the open heath, a god who wielded her thunderbolts in joy; she was the god of the foot-race, the horse races, of the lovers in the woods. She was a god for women who loved to run or ride, a god for girls who danced till they felt giddy, a god also of weaving and making, of crafts, of healing and the arts of the mind; everything about her was expansive, generous, noble. Menrva hunted words down the lines of a poem, wove philosophies and omens into the life of a city. But this Diana was something else; a thin god, mean and sour.

  She wondered by what right the Romans changed the gods. Sometimes they didn't; on the Capitol, Menrva was still worshipped as herself, with Tinia and Uni, though they had romanised names; and the doctors of Rome had recognised her as the healing Minerva. But her temple on the Aventine had been taken over by Diana; not the same god at all.

  Tarquin had told her that the Romans denied Diana had anything to do with healing, or with poetry or music.

  "I suppose they have their own man gods to do manly things?"

  "Of course," he said smoothly. "There's Apollo for singing and dancing and poetry, and Asklepios is the god charged with healing and medicine."

  "Romans can't bear women to be doing anything other than breeding and spinning wool," she said. After all these years of living with them it still made her angry.

  "They're, ah, Greek gods, actually."

  "Greek, Roman, they're all the same," she grumbled, but she held her anger back; she could see how it had unnerved him. His father, now, he'd liked her angry; that was one of the things she missed about him; but the boy had become afraid of her, and if it weren't for his affair with the spirited Tullia she would have wondered if the Romans had got round him after all, and made him into one of those brittle woman-haters they called men.

  "I don't mean to shout at you," she said, and that was as near as she'd come for some years to apologising to anyone.

  "It doesn't matter," he said.

  "You think it doesn't matter, but it does," she told him; "you can't live healthily and have unhealthy gods."

  "Oh, let them believe what they like. It's not as if we have to believe it, after all."

  There was something wrong about their religion, though. She wondered sometimes if she'd made a dreadful mistake that day in Tarchna when she seduced Lauchme, the half-Greek, when she planned to come to Rome, seeing it as her freedom. She'd wanted freedom from the simplicities of life in Tarchna; from the way life was, the way it always had been and always would be, a life that was rightful and good and boring, gods damn it, and she'd wanted excitement. But now she looked at Rome, the Capitol squatting above the festering marshes, and felt there was something evil in the very ground, some festering wound in the rock.

  "They'd like Phersu," Tarquin said. "He's a good god for Romans, with his mallet for bashing out the brains, and his leering mask. Let them have Phersu!"

  She hushed him quickly; when she was a girl, no one ever spoke of the demon; it was unlucky. But Tarquin, in the full splendour of golden youth, didn't care for superstitions any more than she had in those far off days of her pride; and she shrugged, and thought first that the damage was done, anyway, and then wondered at what point she had changed, at what point she had begun believing those folk tales she'd once have derided.

  "They take all the bloodthirstiness and all the violence they can get," he said. "They love it. You know they've got a little man dressed up as Phersu at the games now? He's some kind of defective, not just a dwarf, an idiot of some kind... they make him butcher the dead horses in front of the audience."

  "Have you ever thought," she said, and saw from the blankness in his eyes that he hadn't, "how Rome was founded on a fratricide?"

  "Oh, that old story," he said.

  "Exile and fratricide, that's what's at the root of this city."

  "Exile? That's rich, coming from you. We're all exiles here, mother, and you know it. Exiled Etruscans in a barbarous city."

  "Exiles? We own this city, Tarquinius."

  "No," he said, "that's the trouble; we don't."

  "Etruscans rule here; you, me, Servius. Hadn't you ever noticed how all their kings came from somewhere else?"

  "What, unlike your great-great-great-however-many-times-fucking-great-grandfather, who pushed his way out of the dirt in the middle of Tarchna?"

  Tanaquil turned at that blasphemy, ready to let her wrath loose; but Tarquin was grinning, the whole thing a jest, as everything was to him, and it was impossible to be angry in the face of that easy charm.

  "Isn't that the point?" she said, and was rewarded by a frown. She'd made him think, for once.

  "Isn't that the point of the myth ? Granted, it's only a story, but none the less, the tales we tell are what make us ourselves. And we tell stories of men rising from the earth, but Roman earth is barren. They are men from somewhere else, murderers, men on the run."

  "So? Father was always telling us how Rome was started by outlaws. No man would come here who had a choice."

  "We had a choice."

  "Father didn't."

  "Tarchna was probably begun by exiles. How does anything ever start? But we wanted to belong to the land."

  "Romans want the land to belong to them."

  "Exactly."

  "So I don't understand your problem. Romans want to conquer, and we rule the Romans. Quite simple."

  And how sure are you that you'll be the one doing the ruling? she wanted to say, but she realised he had no doubt , no doubt at all. Perhaps it was that very lack of doubt that drew supporters to him; the golden youth offered them a golden age, a return to the heroic, when all her generation seemed to offer was drudgery and the difficult. He was so unlike his father; and for the second time that afternoon she found herself missing Tarquinius, who had doubted everything, and most of all himself.

  "You've got blood on your hem," he said. It was true; she had. She shrugged. It was hardly worth stooping to try to brush the stain away; it would most likely make it worse.

  She poured a little water on her hands, dried them on the cloth that her son held out to her. She faced the altar and began the ritual words, as she had so many times before. Tarquin handed her the ear of wheat, and the cup of wine to pour on the ground; the only sacrifice she would offer today; but he didn't repeat the words of the ritual, and when she had poured her libation, he offered her his arm to leave the temple without pouring his own.