Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  At home there was more business to attend to; an embassy from Velx, which meant more ritual and more politeness, and without any discussion of substantive politics. That she kept for her communications with Ramtha, hidden from Servius as they were from Ramtha's own council. "Give them some flummery," Servius had said; "I don't want them knowing what we're up to."

  She'd decided Tarquin could sit in; he was gracious, and elegant, and all in all a good advertisement for Rome, without actually doing or saying anything much. And he kept his mouth shut, as she'd told him to. She could tell that he was impressed by the ambassadors, though not awed by them; Velx had chosen well, one of the Spurinnas, a distant cousin of hers by all accounts, though she'd never met him and the name wasn't familiar, a man of refined habits and elegant speech. He wasn't as well versed in current diplomacy as he might have been, though; or perhaps he was just trying to seem unaware of Rome's expansionist policies in the north, as if not looking would make the Romans go away.

  It was late when they retired. As she crossed the atrium to her chamber, she saw the glow of the lamps in the chamber where they kept the ancestors' masks. For the third time that day she thought of her dead husband. Third time's the charm, she thought.

  His mask regarded her silently. No thunder came from the heavens, no voice from the grave. It wasn't a good likeness, she'd thought at the time, but now she could hardly remember what he had looked like; in all her memories of him, the mask had come to stand in for his face. And he'd grown old, old and tired. She tried to remember him in those early days, days of hope and optimism and long rides in the Tuscan sun, and it was like summoning up a dream, in those few moments after waking when you can almost do so. But like a dream, it had become faded, blurred.

  She laughed mirthlessly. At least the mask was no threat. He was buried with all due ceremony, and no ghost had come to disturb her, nor ever would.

  She was aware, suddenly, of the slap of bare feet on the stone behind her, so quiet she knew their owner by the stealthiness.

  "Tarquinius," she said. Let him know he still lacked the ability to surprise her.

  "Mother."

  "You have something to say?"

  "Manius is dead."

  "Yes."

  In the silence she could actually hear the tiny hiss of the lamp burning, the slight hiss of her breath over the dry folds of her throat; could hear Tarquinius move one foot forwards, uncertainly.

  "They found his body in the forest. He must have fallen from his horse. The fall killed him."

  He was dead when he hit the ground, she thought. Another death, another secret. And there was blood, still, on the hem of her tebenna.

  Tarquin

  It was good to be out of Rome, he thought. Good to be away from Servius and the implacable thing Rome had become; away from the greyness.

  It was good to see the sun. There hadn't been a lot of that in Rome recently. Up here; this was real Etruria, a land golden with sunshine and corn, and even at this early season the sky was cloudless, and though the air was chill, he was warm where the sun fell on his shoulders.

  He laughed, and pushed his horse into a gallop, turning his head to look back and see Tullia, surprised, kick her horse on to try to catch him. She rode almost as well as his mother did; but where Tanaquil was cool, commanding her mount with almost imperceptible touches of rein or heel, Tullia was all fire, throwing herself into the motion of the gallop, pushing her horse onwards.

  She'd have hated the cull. He hadn't dared mention it to her; she'd heard from one of the others, and if he found out who it was... He'd never thought to see it, their best chariot horse destroyed. It was another of Servius' commands. The horse was too keen, he said. (Too keen? How could a horse be too keen? Breeders spent their entire lives manipulating bloodlines in search of greater courage, horses more eager to run, brave and free in their running, as this one was. How could that be wrong?)

  Servius had changed. The old Servius, the horseman, the old soldier, would have loved that horse despite its vices. Fair enough, it was a vicious beast, it tried to take a bite out of you any time it could. Tarquin hadn't loved it, nor had anyone else; but they'd mourned for it. It was a good horse, fast, a born leader; it would pull the other horses with it, into a battle or round a tight corner. He'd seen it fall, poleaxed; it stood for a few moments, its legs beginning to wobble, before its body swayed, and it fell slowly, pitching over one shoulder, nose first to the ground.

  Tarquin wondered how long it would be till Servius would try to have him killed. Just as well he was out of the way, now, and so was Tullia.

  She'd almost caught him, now, and he wanted to be caught; but just letting her overhaul him was too easy, so instead he let in his rein, pulled his horse's head in on the left, forcing him to wheel roundh - that had to be nicely judged; too much angle and too much speed, and the horse would stumble, and throw him - and rode in a great arc, heading back the way they had come. She'd missed his move, and had ridden on for a few heartbeats before she realised she'd lost him as he veered off; she yelled, though he couldn't hear the words clearly - bastard, that was one, anyway - and he slowed his horse further, laughing. She was too easy to fool, sometimes, was shrewd Tullia. They'd played this game before, quite a few times, and still she wasn't smart enough to work out that he was going to play her false... unless, of course, she enjoyed being caught as much as he enjoyed catching her, which wasn't impossible.

  He tried to imagine her with Arruns, and failed. His brother had never really known her; had possessed her only in the dry meaning of the law, and even the law, Tarquin thought, would not have been enough to give him authority over her, not an authority, anyway, that she'd have respected. It was a good thing Arruns had managed to get himself killed.

  "Bastard!"

  He was right, that was certainly one of the words. He ducked, but too late to avoid the slap, open-handed and free-swinging, that landed on the back of his head, and heard her laugh as he swore.

  "Vicious bitch, am I?"

  "Wild-cat."

  "Only a cat? I thought I was at least a tiger."

  "Tigress."

  She rode closer, and angled her head away cutely with a pretty and rather coy smiles, and said, "A pussy-cat, you know, but only for you." The horses had slowed to a walk now, and she dared to put an arm round his waist and lean towards him; but when he leant over to kiss her, she pushed him back, and slapped him hard, and rode off, and when she reined her horse to a stop, yelled at him; "Even pussy-cats have claws, you know."

  "I wonder sometimes," he said, "if you're on my side."

  "Whose side would I be on?"

  "Your father's, for instance."

  "I have something to prove, do I?"

  She had an edge of temper like a blade, and suddenly was ugly with it, her face sharp and vixenish. He hadn't meant to goad her; he didn't really doubt her, or rather, he hadn't, up till now. She'd come willingly with him, though she knew Tarquin's trip was a venture Servius wouldn't approve of, and he'd doubly disapprove her accompanying him; she'd ridden half way on an excuse, something about hunting, or a visit to one of the old Etruscan shrines, and joined him, at a shrine not far from Nepet, where there were mineral springs and a small grove. Yet her sudden anger had him wondering whether she'd come with her father's connivance; was that why she'd been so furious at his joke?

  They were within sight of Velzna now, and here all the roads from north and south began to bunch together into a great skein of bare trodden tracks; for the first time since Nepet they sighted other travellers, some on foot, some with mules and horses, some in the huge slow ox-carts that carved great corrugations in the dirt. Ahead, the great cliff rose from the plain, abrupt and forbidding; he thought it would easily overtop the Capitol, put Rome in its shade. He felt a thrill in his blood; his people were made to live on the heights. This was what he had been born to.

  The road ascended in broad zigzags, first through thickets of slender trees with shim
mering bark, on which only a few dry, brown leaves remained; under their horses' hooves the fallen leaves rustled restlessly. A little further on, the dark winter green of prickly-leaved holm oaks closed in on the path, shimmering as if with fear or rage. Tombs were cut in the rock face to one side of the road; a great carved sea monster, painted bright green, guarded one, a tall griffon another. The laurel wreaths that garlanded the altars had dried; when the wind blew, they rattled and shook. Occasionally the plain was visible through the trees, but it was not till they came to the cleft in the rock through which the road climbed steeply into the city itself that they realised how far up they had come.

  For a few tens of paces the stone reared up on both sides, and the road was in shadow, grey and cold, before it levelled out and came once more into the sun. Here the city started at once; there was no hinterland of scattered shacks and fenced yards, as in Rome, but instead the first shrines flanked the road, and neat walls of crumbly sun-coloured stone or white plaster. Further on there were arcades, supported by massive timbers. Every roof glared with tile; from every roof ridge, gorgons and griffons looked down, and the bright colours of painted terracotta flowers edged the eaves. Gaudy gods strutted and flirted on the temples' pediments. The streets were busy, but not full; children played in front of one house, and in front of another three women were slapping flatbreads between their hands to stretch the dough, and singing as they worked.

  Said Tages to the ploughman,

  The field is not yet tilled,

  The flint lies in the furrows,

  When will the wheat be milled?

  The ploughman said to Tages,

  When the white ox is killed.

  Half a dozen mules ambled under their loads towards the gate, followed by a thin boy with a thinner stick, which he whisked through the air occasionally; despite the pathetic ritual of goading, the mules seemed to lead the boy, rather than the boy driving the mules. He grinned as he passed the two riders, and threw his stick up, where it spun two circles in the air before he caught it again, and went on his way.

  The sound of flutes reached them from a large house where two servants were sweeping the road outside, timing each stroke of the brush to the music, and laughing at some joke one of them had made; far off, a reedpipe whined its grievance to the world - sooner or later the player would start into a dance rhythm, but not yet - and a great trumpet groaned from one of the temples up ahead. To all this, the soft slap of sandals on sand and the puttock, puttock of hooves added another layer of rhythm, so that the city seemed to be breathing a single great music.

  For a moment Tarquin almost forgot where they were headed; not up to the great temple of Aplu, as they would be if he were here officially, for the ceremonies, or as an envoy, nor to the schools where his mother had stayed last year, but to a private house, "my humble abode" as Sethre had called it. (If only Strephon had come here, instead of staying in Rome. And that thought led to another, which was that perhaps Tarquin was wiser than he knew to have put himself out of Servius' way.) A great painted gorgon on a house wall reminded him of Sethre's instructions; "by the house of the Medusa, opposite the old olive tree." True enough, there was the ancient olive, a mass of twisted, fissured trunks growing from a single root, a huge scar on one where a branch must have snapped off; the road divided around it, and beneath its leafless shade passers-by had left small clay figures, and a couple of oil lamps burned.

  A side street led them past tall and windowless walls, into quiet squares where only the insistent cooing of doves echoed; as they passed one house they heard the click, click of a loom, and a woman singing - "Where is the child who will bring me the moonlight? Where is the man who will bring me the sea?"

  "It's a honeycomb underneath here," Tullia said, as they turned a corner. "All the rock is hollowed with tunnels and shafts and wells, wells that go down a hundred yards till they reach water."

  "How do you know that?"

  "Father said, once. He knows that kind of thing."

  "I bet he does." All those little details in Servius' retentive brain, and he'd never know which of them would be important till the moment he needed to know. Probably had never thought the tunnels under Velzna were more than a colourful local detail, till Tarquinius holed up the Vipienas under the rock. There was a lesson there; never overlook, never forget.

  "Not just the shafts," Tullia said. "There are wells, and caves, and whole hidden shrines down there. People disappear sometimes and no one knows whether they've been murdered, or sacrificed, or fallen down a shaft, or simply wandered too far and never been able to find a way out."

  "Maybe they're still down there, wandering," he said, and saw her shudder.

  Three lefts, a right at the house shrouded by an ancient rambling vine, to the third open space; and there, a high green-striped wall, higher than he'd expected, and a great arch in the centre leading into a quiet court with a still pool. Humble abode, indeed.

  They were expected; the horses were taken, their exiguous baggage placed in the hands of silent, white-robed servants, and they were taken to wash, and to change their clothes for fresh ones, provided by the house; and only once they were refreshed and presentable were they taken, at last, to meet the lady of the house, the mother of the Tlesnasa.

  Sethre's mother was older than Tarquin had expected, her hair already grey at the temples, though her eyes were young and her voice rich. Tarquin felt an instant of shock; she was happy, in a way no one at Rome ever was, with an uncomplicated contentment like a cat in the sun. His parents, Servius, the Roman youths he knew, always seemed to be searching for something that, the more they sought, the more surely escaped them; but Seianti was content as an old cat lying in the sun, and she welcomed Tarquin and Tullia with warmth as well as ceremony.

  She took them to the gardens behind the house, through tall rooms with coffered ceilings of dark wood shining with gilded stars and flowers; the perfumed smoke of incense drifted through the halls, while braziers slumbered in the corners. In one great hall, a huge bronze candelabrum hung from the central beam, unlit, heavy in the darkness; they passed a ceiling-high niche where the whitened masks of a hundred ancestors regarded them flatly. The floors shone gloomily, their surface undulating gently where generations of feet had worn the softer, whiter stone away between the higher, harder black and green marble. This was the deep patina of ancient wealth, everything rubbed smooth by the ages, not the shallow glitter of Rome. It was the birthright he'd been robbed of, the princeliness of Etruria.

  Then, suddenly, the view of the plains; you felt like a god here, it was higher even than the Capitoline, and it was the whole world, not just the shallow valley of the straggling Tiber, that stretched below.

  "Everyone has that reaction at first." Seianti smiled tolerantly.

  Tarquin's face was dark. "The light's too strong," he said.

  Seianti made no reply, but jerked her chin almost imperceptibly; in the same heartbeat, a servant appeared from behind them, bringing wine. (Like all the best servants he was unseen, unheard, till the moment he was needed, appearing as if whisked into existence by some enchantment; had he not moved so smoothly, he would have startled Tullia.)

  "You're here privately?"

  "I am," he said, though it was not quite true; he needed to find friends, to ally himself with interests that might back him against Servius, or at least to support him when Servius fell from power, deposed, abdicated or dead. But they'd be his friends, not friends of Rome. "And in any case, Rome has no place in the council here." Which was true enough; Rome was no member of the League.

  "You'll find people interested, none the less," Seianti said; "you may not speak for Rome, but you can talk about Rome, and that's a subject that gets a lot of airing."