by AM Kirkby
***
The ceremonies began some days later. In between were more days of winter sun, more nights of feasts and dancing, fights with Tullia and making up with Tullia, conversations that might have been diplomacy and might not. And then the ceremonies.
For the whole day before, the town was restless. In every street small children practised waving banners, trailing long ribbons that undulated like snakes, or whirling them in circles; girls broke their step to try a few dance paces, before recollecting their errands. Last-minute panics disturbed the vast spaces of the Tlesnasa house, like mice scurrying above a ceiling; one of Seianti's best pair of earrings could not be found, a good tebenna had been holed by moth and needed patching, a filament of gold thread had unravelled and trailed from the hem, a tune long unplayed had been forgotten, and needed working into the fingers again. Floors were swept, and swept again to fill the time; some of the girls spun to pass the hours, but the spindles were put away after the winding filaments broke too many times in their stiff and clumsy fingers. In the gardens, fitful gusts blew up tiny whirls of dust, and slammed a badly fastened shutter against the house till someone went to secure it, the sound like a dead man knocking on the gates of Hades - or so Tullia said, for once nervy, and biting at a broken fingernail.
Night came. Night, and at first, silence. And then, slowly, the noise began; a slow tread, the noise of many feet in rhythm, and far off, one pipe playing a fragmentary little tune, a question without an answer. People were coming out of the houses into the streets, silently joining the slow river that flowed from the plains, from the fields, from the walls, inwards towards the temple. Another pipe played, closer this time, the same wistful shard of a tune, and a shout answered it; and then silence again, and the sound of feet passing.
The night was glorious with torches and fires; in every square, great bonfires and braziers threw shadow into the corners, lit the walls with glare and blaze. Still the great Tlesnasa house waited in silence, and Tarquin and Tullia stood with the rest of the family in front of the household shrine, and the ancestors looked down on them with dark and vengeful eyes.
Then at last they heard the thin sound of the pipes in front of the great door, the same never completed melody that stopped without ever reaching its end. It stopped, and Tarquin counted two heartbeats of silence, and the air was chill despite the hissing torches, till the great gates swung back soundlessly on their hinges, and one of the men struck a single great clout on the shield that hung by the door, which echoed brassily from the walls, and dazed the ears; and then - he couldn't say who had started, whether anyone had led them, or whether some instinct drew them on - they were moving forwards, into the street, and through the silent flicker of the flaming square, uphill towards the temple.
Past the square, there was another street, narrow, between high walls; they heard the pipes two or three streets over, calling out another house, and at the corner of another alley they were joined by another silent procession, which filtered into theirs, dividing Tarquin from Tullia and Seianti, so that as they went along, he saw them carried further and further away, like leaves on a fast-flowing stream. At the place of the great well, more processions were arriving from the slopes below, and they began to slow, and the path turned back on on itself and began to rise again.
Now the temple could be seen, at the end of the already crowded street. Tarquin kept trying not to lose sight of Tullia, but she kept disappearing, only to appear again a little further away; he would find a gap in the crowd, or push himself sideways aslant the stream, towards her, and as he did he would lose sight of her again. Still in silence, they were approaching the temple, its great columns glaring red in the firelight, and between them only darkness.
The crowd kept pushing forward, and soon, they had reached the forecourt in front of the temple. Their movement was checked by the mass of people in front, who were no longer moving, but they were still being pushed onwards from behind; the crowd became denser and more closely packed, yet despite the jostling and pushing, the occasional surge of movement backwards or forwards as the pressure grew, no one spoke, so that the only sound was that of thousands of feet treading a slow rhythm, and the occasional crack of resin spitting from one of the torches, and the distant crackling of the great fires.
He caught sight of Tullia again, separated from Seianti now, and pushing towards the front as he'd known she would be; he followed her as best he could, turning into every small gap that opened, angling his body to squeeze between two others, feeling the warmth and press of bodies. Once he felt someone behind tread on his heels, and once, he felt himself lifted quite off his feet as the crowd surged forwards, for a single nightmare moment; and once, someone he must have pushed turned, sucking his teeth, and stared at him angrily, but said nothing.
He had almost reached the front. In front of him were only three or four more people, and then the temple steps, white and clear where no one dared to tread, and guarded not only by gorgons but also by the temple youths, dressed in white, with peeled willow wands in their hands. And there, so close he could almost have touched her if only he could have extended his right arm, caught close to his side by his neighbour's flank, was Tullia, shaking her hair loose in the firelight.
But there was somebody on the steps, where there was meant to be nobody; an old woman - no, a woman not much older than Tullia, but her movements crabbed and halting like an old woman's, and her eyes turned up, sightless. She was blind, and yet she was making directly for Tullia, limping sidewise down the steps, till she faced Tullia, and squatted like a spider in front of her. Tarquin shivered; he'd never seen one before, but he recognised instantly the oracle - the prophecy and the madness. The words came, a thin keening that he could hardly make out, that made no sense and too much.
"It's the womb life in the green tree. Thinks you aren't looking. And the dead head with its open eyes. Watching you bleed."
"She's mad," he hissed at Tullia, and she turned at the sound of his voice, but the prophet started again, and Tullia turned back, transfixed, like a child seeing a pig killing for the first time and not able to look away.
"You think the heads aren't watching but they are, all the deadheads and their dead eyes, waiting in the dark. It's a clever father knows his own daughter..."
Light seemed to strike the edge of his vision, and he looked up to see a thin sliver of moon frosting the edge of the inky clouds, slightly yellow like a bruise.
"When I was a girl I was a fish flashing in the silver water, but now I'm grown I know the world is darkening and the water is murky. It's the ghosts who take the children, you know, the ghosts who take them away. It's always the ghosts. They think we don't know but we do."
Her eyelids were lazy, the eyes wallowing the way blind eyes always do. He saw them reflect the torchlight, and for a moment saw a skull with embers glowing in its eye sockets, and then he blinked and she was just a mad blind woman again, looking frail and puzzled and sad.
She looked up again as if something had astonished her, and said to Tullia, wondering: "Your hands are red. Your hands are red." Then she put her hands over her mouth and began to scream, "father, father," and huddled herself into a bundle, wailing and rocking like a hurt child, till one of the temple youths came and led her gently away.
At last, Tarquin was able to push away the man next to him with one shoulder, and grab Tullia's hand, pulling her towards him; her face was rigid, her eyes wide and unblinking, and for a moment she seemed not to recognise him.
Still the crowd was silent. There was something disturbingly strange about that silence; it wasn't the deep, rigidly held silence of a phalanx standing immobile and alert - he could hear the scuffle of feet, a woman coughed somewhere, a child cried out once and was hushed, all the small sounds of everyday life magnified and somehow ashamed in the face of the gods.
He thought of the goddess waiting, inside the temple, in the darkness; the goddess who was never seen by any eyes but her priest's, the single priest vo
wed to her service, who was appointed for life, and succeeded only on his death, the same priest who would drive the year-nail tonight. Seianti had told him that only the priest knew the goddess's secret name, the name that could not be spoken, the secret name of the city itself that could never be written, and spoken only once, in a whisper, to the priest's appointed successor; and if the name was ever lost, Velzna would fall, and with it the Rasenna and their gods.
Everything waited now; the goddess, and the vast dark void of the temple behind its huge oak doors, the doors that glistened from the sill up to the height of a man's head with bronze nail heads, hammered roughly into the wood, one every year since the temple was first built; before that, in fact, since the door of the oldest, tiny shrine had been set as a panel in the doors of the new temple, and so on, through rebuilding after rebuilding, till the wood of the original door was jewel-hard and black with age. And still, every year, a new nail was driven in. How many years had it taken to cover those doors with nails, Tarquin wondered; how many more years would it take for the nails to spread across the remaining bare wood? He felt almost breathless at the immensity of the unimaginable ages. He could hold thirty years of nails in his own two hands, he thought, and that was already as long as he had lived, longer than he could remember.
Then suddenly it was as if everyone had drawn breath at the same time; there was a sudden stillness, and three priests with high hats and thin faces mounted the steps of the temple. Two turned, half way up, to face the assembled people, but the third of them proceeded to the great door of the temple, where he was swallowed by the shadow between the great pillars.
It could not have been that loud, but Tarquin would always remember the three blows of the hammer as great drumbeats resounding across the sky; the thunder would pursue him in his dreams, but he could never see where the lightning would fall before he woke, sweating, and feeling guilty of some undefined great sin, and judged. Once, twice, and a third time the priest drove the bronze nail into the door, and the world was still, waiting; and then the third blow had been struck, and the new year had come, and the world breathed once more and began afresh, and the silence was broken at last with a great shout.
Now madness broke out; dancing, cheering, two youths in the middle of the crowd kissing each other, children riding on their fathers' shoulders, or pushing through the thickets of adult legs in a mad chase; girls throwing handfuls of wheat over the crowd, young women playing tiny two-note whistles that shrilled and squealed, old men singing songs even older, impromptu circle dances that grew like whirlpools, sucking in more and more dancers as they spun, young men shouting out some kind of question-and-answer song. Even here at the very edge of the crowd they were being pushed and pulled around by the currents of the dance, and he felt Tullia's hand grabbing his tightly as she was pulled away, pulling hard on his arm before finally her fingers slipped from his, and he lost her; he kept his eyes on her face for a moment, but then he was jostled, and half-turned, and when he turned back, she was gone, whirled away from him.
Grains of wheat stung his cheeks - a girl had dashed a handful at him - and he grabbed her, and half playfully slapped her arse; another woman grabbed him and spun him round three or four times before moving on in the dance, and he found himself being passed down the line, dancing with all the women and not a few of the men, before the dance spat him out half way across the square. He kept looking for Tullia; there couldn't be that many red-headed women here, surely, but in the light of the torches, it was difficult to tell. Once, he was sure he'd found her, but when he took the tall red-head's hand and she turned he saw she was old, her face blotched by a huge red burn. He shuddered, hoping that was no true prophecy, and turned away.
A hand caught at his, and he turned again, but it was a limping, meager man who apologised inaudibly and disappeared. He must have mistaken Tarquin as Tarquin had mistaken that woman. Or perhaps he was a thief; yes, there'd be thieves in any crowd of this size, with everyone wearing their best jewellery. Tarquin felt the bracelets on his wrists; all there, thank the gods, none missing.
He felt panicked, lost without Tullia; people were bumping into him, everyone was standing too close, he was cold, a spark from a torch flew into his hair and singed it, and the stink of burning and sweat and smoke was making him nauseous. At the last moment he recognised the panic, breathed deeply - felt his breath come raggedly, his ribs tense against the breath - thought; Tullia can make her way back, she knows the city, she is not lost, and if she is not lost, I'm not lost...
Just as he felt the fear leave him, his body almost limp with relief, he heard his name being spoken, and it was Tullia. "I've found you!" she said, "I looked..." but he never heard the explanation, if she ever had the chance to give it, as he was pulling her to him, gripping her tightly enough to hurt, saying her name, kissing her.
She laughed and broke away in the end, but she kept his hand in hers. The crowd was thinning a little; some people were going home, others had moved to streets where they had more space to dance. The little whistles had been joined by pipes and flutes, and the thrum of lyres thumping out the rhythm beneath the wailing tune. In one street two women threw torches from hand to hand, tossing them up high in the air, catching them neatly and turning to throw them back; sparks showered everywhere, the buildings seemed to sway and melt in the changing light.
They saw Arathenas, standing on a table, holding up five torches above his head, and Seianti dancing with a young girl in a wolfskin, and a dance in two long lines where the dancers had to leapfrog their partners, and then throw them up in the air, as they crossed over. But Tullia seemed restless and abstracted, so that they found themselves heading home, through the gradually dispersing crowds, earlier than he'd thought they would, and without having joined the dancing.
"I thought it would be more impressive," Tullia said as they came to the square of the old well.
"It wasn't?"
"The sound," she said. "I expected a great booming noise as the nail was hammered, and all I heard was a little tap, tap, tap. And I thought how surprising, at the centre of all this ceremonial is something so very ordinary. But if you do something ordinary tens, hundreds, thousands of times, then it becomes something else."
He thought he had heard something else; but he said nothing, and they walked on, as the sounds of music and the shouting died away.
"Imagine," Tullia said, "how many people have stood and watched this, and how many of them dead, more dead than living."
"All the more reason to live now," he said, and saw that crooked smile of hers, one side of her mouth twisted up and the other not.
It was over. Nothing had changed; everyone was a year older, the Etruscan League a year older, the Etruscan race one year closer to the end of its life, as foretold so long ago; the world had added a year more to its endless years, and tomorrow people would remember the nagging present - things left undone, or not started, procrastinations, necessities, excuses, apologies.