by AM Kirkby
***
Tullia was out late, without him. Tullia seemed sulky when she came back.
He'd already gone to bed, making himself a nest in the wool blankets like some small animal, turning and pulling the blankets over till he was comfortable, and the cold didn't seep in from the side of the bed. He'd been slowly letting himself fall into a doze, day-dreaming of how Velzna must look to an eagle, imagining himself soaring above the plains, under the warm sun of summer, and thinking how good was the eagle's life, drifting, wings extended, on the wind's support, without ever having to beat its wings, when Tullia came in.
"Where did you get to?"
She hadn't answered at once; she'd gone to the other side of the room and started taking off her jewellery. First the hair ornaments had to be teased out, and then the great hooped studded earrings had to be put aside, and the necklaces, which had to be laid out in concentric loops, so as not to tangle; and though many women, Tarquin thought, would have taken their bracelets off first, she left her rich gold cuffs till last. All this she did in silence, and when she came to bed, still not speaking, she pulled the blankets across roughly, and despite the cold, didn't push towards him for warmth.
"Dancing?"
"Hmph."
That was yes. Or maybe no.
Well, let her sleep. She'd talk tomorrow.
They lay there uncompanionably. The room was tense with silence. He felt one arm numb, wanted to turn over, but didn't want to disturb her; didn't want, either, to give her the idea he was surrendering in some way. He was a prisoner of his own pride. He wondered if she was asleep, or lying there in the same silent prickly rage, rigid as he was, hating the body that wanted to soften and yield.
It was late; it became later. He could not hear her breathe, couldn't hear the slow, deep respiration of restful sleep; she must be lying awake, as he was. Was she listening for his breathing, wondering why he wasn't asleep yet?
He saw time had passed; the moonlight falling through the shutters across the floor had fallen straight towards him when he came to bed, and now slanted thinly away. The moon had flown, and the sun under the earth must have been galloping hard towards dawn, as he lay still, and for a moment the thought of an entire cosmos spinning around him weakened him, made him clench one hand against vertigo as he'd had to do the first time he ever rode a horse. Then he realised the bed was, in fact, moving, shaking almost imperceptibly. Soundlessly, Tullia was sobbing.
That undid his resolutions and his pride; he reached for her, wrapped his body round hers, held her gently in the warmth of the blankets and felt her rocking as she wept.
He asked her nothing then, and she said nothing, and after a while, they slept.
When he woke she was up already, combing her hair, pulling at it viciously to get the knots out. Her face was turned away from him; in the pale light of a misty morning her hair's fire was subdued to dull russet, all the life gone out of it.
"Where did you get to, Tullia?"
"Nowhere. Lost."
"You weren't..."
"With Arathenas? No."
"I didn't... I meant, you weren't angry with me? You weren't looking for a reason to leave me?"
She turned. Her face was wet, he saw.
"I was lost," she said.
"But you know Velzna now; how were you lost?"
She looked at him, her eyes dull. "Even you don't trust me."
"Gods!" He spoke more loudly than he'd meant to, and saw her flinch.
"I was lost," she said again, and bowed her head, and let her hands fall to her lap.
There was something strange about this, he thought, and his skin prickled, though that might have been merely the chill of the morning air. Her listless eyes, her flat voice, were like his mother's, after one of her visions; something too great to deal with, that left her depleted and lacking.
He went to her then, and held her, and stroked her hair, and murmured things that might have been nonsense, gentling her as he would a horse, and in the end she sighed one great, deep sigh, and he felt her trembling in his arms. He thought he heard some great dark thing fluttering in the roof, and then he heard the cock crow outside, towards the rising sun, and knew from that omen things would be all right.
"I don't understand," he said.
"I was just lost," she said; "just, suddenly, miserable, and lonely, and I looked at you, and saw you with Teitu, so much a part of things here, so much a prince, and I felt so far from that world you live in, as if I was seeing it from a long way away, as if I were a hinthial watching you from the dry lands."
He thrust his thumb through two fingers in the sign against evil. "You've no need to feel like that. You're as Etruscan as I am. You're the daughter of a king."
She twisted in his arms to look him in the face, suddenly showing a little of her usual spirit. "You have no idea! You know what he was like as a father? Always reminding us we were half barbarians. Always saying that he could turn us away, and our mother, or sell us. And he did sell us, you know he did, me to Arruns...
"He used to tell us how he'd been brought up with nothing, and why should we deserve any different. I hated him; I dreamed of killing him, taking the great spear he kept in his room and stabbing it into his belly. One day I found a potsherd on the floor, and I slashed my arm with it, where the skin was fleshiest. I watched the blood come welling up, the first tiny jewel-like drops, and what I felt wasn't pain, but relief, a wonderful emptiness. I thought I would die, and it was wonderful."
"It didn't hurt at all?"
"Not then. I felt nothing. Later, it did. The wound festered. It scabbed over, eventually. The next time I did it, I washed the scar in vinegar."
"Gods," he said, "why did I never trust you? I've loved you, Tullia, but I never trusted you because I thought you were your father's daughter, and when it came to it, I thought you'd choose him over me, because you loved him."
"You think I'd love a man like that? A man who gave me to your brother like a good meal or a golden bracelet?"
He tightened his arms around her again, and this time she took his face in her hands, and kissed him, desperately hard, the kind of kiss that left no room for breathing or thinking. Empire and victory collapsed into airy dreams, the whole world condensed into the fire of their bodies and the blaze of their love. No father, no king, no god could tear them apart now; they were all they had, and for once that was enough.