by AM Kirkby
***
Seianti was right; all Etruria wanted to know Tarquin - an Etruscan Roman, or perhaps a Roman Etruscan, since no one knew quite where he fitted, and his assertion that he was in Velzna purely as a private person was another puzzle that was endlessly debated, with some maintaining he was Servius' spy, others saying he clearly had some alliance to conclude, and very few believing the story he told, which was that he had simply decided he needed to acquaint himself with his Etruscan heritage. Staying at the Tlesnasa house, they were in any case at the centre of the life of the city; they met Sethre's father a few days later, when he returned from a visit to one of the country estates, and it was clear he was something more than the fair-to-middling farmer and trader Sethre had always claimed him to be. A big-boned man with a gaunt face, he had a disconcerting way of bringing home some half-pissed drinking companion who turned out to be the ruler of one of the northern cities (whose husband came looking for her half way through the evening), or the head of a Volaterran war band (who had a fine light tenor voice, and refined taste in lyrical song), or a high ranking zilath of one of the port cities (whose taste ran to bawdy, and engaged Seianti in a bantering duet).
Life became a round of banquets and feasts and visits, the incessant demands on his time that his mother had warned him against; it was seductive, it pulled him in. At last came the invitation he'd been waiting for; the great banquet that started the Commemoration of the League, the patronal feast of the whole Rasna people. He had thought he'd have to find the right people, to talk someone round to inviting him, to promise favours in return; and because he was staying at the Tlesnasa house, he and Tullia were invited as a matter of course, even perhaps as an afterthought.