Etruscan Blood

by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Servius was not the only problem. Tarquin, thank the gods, was back in Rome, but that posed as many problems as it solved; not least, pacifying Servius. Thank the gods, too, that Tanaquil had found Tullia before news of her return got about; she'd advised the girl to leave Rome at once, and head for the shrine of Menrva in the hills towards Cisra, where she knew the priest, a Spurinna girl who, at seventeen, had unexpectedly chosen the wilderness and solitude of this shrine above the luxuries of priestly office in the great temple at Tarchna, and marriage to one of the zilaths. If only Tanaquil could get everyone to believe Tullia had been there all the time, they'd get away with it; and meanwhile she'd sent Elissa round to Aglaia, asking her to dye her hair, and make sure she was seen openly with her hair dyed, so that if reports of Tarquin with a red-head came from Velzna, Servius could be put on the wrong track. Gods, though, Tanaquil hated being put on the back foot, having to conceal stupidities that should never have been committed, when it would have been so much easier, had Tarquin confided in her, to find some way of achieving his ends that didn't involve running off so blatantly with his dead wife's sister.

  Tarquin wasn't even grateful. He seemed to think he was entitled to have his mother spend her entire effort on keeping him out of trouble; first the army trouble, and then Strephon, and then the abduction of Tullia, and now here he was again, telling her he had some kind of plot in action with Tarchna, or at least, with Teitu, and demanding her complicity.

  "Why should I help you?" she said coolly.

  "You're my mother. Isn't that everything?"

  "You presume. First, I am also responsible for Rome."

  "That's Servius' job."

  "And I am responsible for him. Second, did you not consider that I have other plans, that they might not agree with yours? And I do. And they don't. Third, I have no confidence in your success. Some plot you hatched with Teitu because he has a sweet face, and I dare say a sweet backside. And fourth, what are you offering me as a price for my support? Because all things have a price, Tarquin, and it's time you learned it."

  "Oh, I know it." He seemed amused at her sternness; he was almost laughing at her.

  "Well then."

  "So, shall I tell you my price? Or shall I tell you a story, first? A story about a woman who had a faithful friend. A friend who was always with her. A friend who knew everything."

  "If you're trying to blackmail me," she said, "you're wasting your time. I don't have a lover."

  "I never said a lover, mother dear. A friend, a good friend, a friend called Manius."

  Important, now, not to put on the airs of a tragic queen, not to dab at her eyes, but just to sit, eyes very slightly more open than they would otherwise be, and remind Tarquin that she was still mourning for her friend. Vanth takes us all, she said; Vanth takes us all.

  "Vanth takes us all, but sometimes she gets additional help," he said sourly. "This was a friend who ate with you. Who died a few hours later."

  "I never denied he was with me that day. He rode back to Rome; he wanted to be in the city before night fell. And somewhere on his way his heart failed him, and he fell from his horse. He was dead when he hit the ground."

  "He was dead when he left your house," Tarquin said.

  "Dead men don't ride far."

  "This one did. And you know your poisons, don't you?"

  Of course; he'd been hanging round the Vestals. Whatever the reason he first went to the temple, he'd found a spy among the virgins, who had listened to her conversations with They both took feverfew for headaches, and lately, she had recommended Tanaquil a cold sage infusion as a tonic; but she couldn't remember talking more generally about medicine. Irrelevantly, she remembered her visit to the class in Velzna, and her interrogation of the girls on the uses of foxglove... and then she remembered; she'd been talking to young Fabia about her studies, about the herbs that both healed and killed. That was so long ago, she'd nearly forgotten it; but Fabia clearly hadn't.

  "Fabia," she said.

  Tarquin looked at her coldly. He didn't reply.

  "You can't prove... a girl's word."

  "The word of a Vestal. The Vestals; keepers of the testaments. The only women Rome allows to bear witness. I would have thought that was pretty good proof."

  "So I know about poisons. That's no proof I killed Manius."

  Tarquin said nothing. He simply sat and looked at her again, and nodded to himself without once taking his eyes off her, and his grim mouth began to bend slowly into a thin smile. She'd wondered when he would learn the uses of silence; she hadn't thought he'd ever use it like this.

  "So," she said, grudging every syllable of her concession; "Teitu."

  Tarquin explained the whole plan. Teitu already had his men and women in place; it was a question of picking the right time. Once Teitu was firmly in control of Tarchna, he would bring his army to support Tarquin in Rome.

  "When?"

  "In due course," he said smugly. She wondered how Teitu had managed to teach Tarquin the art of patience; he'd never shown much before, not since his infancy when he would grab at the tit, or punch her with his pudgy little fists if she refused it.

  "And Thresu?"

  "He's out of it completely."

  She agreed, in the end, to meet with Teitu, secretly; it would have to be in neutral territory, somewhere deep in the back country between Rome and Tarchna, where they could ride out on an extended hunting trip from their respective cities, and meet as if by accident.

  "You'll have to choose your party carefully," Tarquin said; "you don't want word getting back to Servius."

  No, she thought; she didn't want word getting back to Thresu, with whom she had her own understanding. She'd agreed to meet with Thresu; she had agreed to nothing else.

  Tarquin went. Lack of patience, she thought; he didn't push me as far as he could have, as far as perhaps he should have. He thinks the game is won when he's not seen that I have soldiers waiting in reserve who can take his pieces; he's played the obvious front-running game, like the player who launches an attack directly on the king in the first ten moves, but it's the player who slowly, steadily accumulates territory on the board who more often wins. Oh Tarquin, Tarquin, how very easy you are to outflank. Yet she felt proud of him, prouder than she ever had been of fine fierce Arruns, when she considered his careful blackmail. Yes, he took after her; he'd learned the lessons she had to teach, all except one, patience and the long game.

  Her mirror was lying on the table; the mirror she'd been given as a bride gift, with the story of the weaver Arachne with her loom. An odd choice, she'd thought then; Turan, the goddess of sexual passion, or the queenly Uni, would have been more appropriate for a royal wedding. Now, though, she understood; it had taken her long years to learn the path of the patient weaver.

  She looked at the burnished surface. The room behind her glowed dim and empty in the bronze circle; slightly blurred, slightly greyed, as reflections always were, imperfect, flawed, and in this, much like what they reflected. Far to the back a single ball of brightness flared where the sun shone through a window, like a tiny globe of mellow fire; she half-closed her eyes and let it warm her, letting it suffuse her, dreaming of a bright world where winter and age never came...

  She put the mirror down; she didn't need it to show her how thin she had become, her skull evident beneath the papery skin. Her nose sharp and pinched, her eyes sunk in darkness. Servius, too, was growing old, and suspicious, the way Tarquinius had been at the end. Was that inevitable, a long slow dying reserved to kings? It was as if their bright future was gradually used up, like a bright cloth worn too often, bleaching out, becoming ragged; and instead they turned inwards, with a long slow poison that rotted them from the inside, and eventually everything around them was poisoned with their breath.

  Where did the girl go, that girl who set her heart on Rome, on Lauchme? (Where is Thanchvil now, Tanaquil?)

  She yawned once, and shook herself awake. Things had to be do
ne. Nothing could be done now about Teitu, except to send warning to Thresu; Thresu who, she'd hoped, could bring the League together under Tarchna's leadership, even if he had to use a threat to Rome to do so. Did she want to warn him? That might depend... She'd have to choose, eventually; choose between Servius and Tarquin, her adopted and her true son; between Teitu and Thresu. She had thought she'd created a plan that avoided the choice between Rome and Tarchna; Thresu would lead the League against Rome, whereupon she would negotiate a handover to Tarquin, and Rome could join a League led by Tarchna, to rule all the subservient cities of Etruria and Latium together. Had she been dreaming? Had she been asleep? Now that plan seemed simply foolish, foolishly simple; and she wondered whether in trusting Thresu, she'd been mistaken; she'd seen an intelligent man who let himself be seen as a blustering fool, but he was actually the fool he let himself seem to be.

  In the meantime, Tarquin was blackmailing her; but he had made a bad mistake. She knew who had given him the information, who was the lynchpin of his case; and if she wanted to maintain her own freedom of action, something had to be done about Fabia.

  Ramtha

  Sometimes Ramtha felt as young as a foal when it first stands on unmanageably long weak-jointed legs, or a lamb when it first springs in the air, with brave and inexhaustible energy. Other days she felt empty, as if the wind blew through her, and she drifted through her life like a ghost, pale and soundless.

  Something had changed in her; a long, slow change like the dripping of water on stone. She had lost a husband, and a city, and a lover, but it wasn't that which had changed her; it was what she had found in the ruins of her former life, in the revolution that changed the city. She could remember every child born in Velx that first hard winter, in the hastily converted sheds and stables of the great mansions; every one of them survived, she remembered with fierce pride, and every mother but one, who took a fever that burned her up in three days, shrivelling her like papyrus in a fire. Vel and Velthur, Seianti and Nerinai, Arnza, Avle and Caile, and a trio of little Ramthas, who still brought wild flowers every year's day to their namesake; nearly grown now, her children.

  The world had served her; she had been given all the blessings the lasa had to give in the stories - beauty, wit, wealth, and the hand of a prince of the city. But it was that hard winter that she found the limits of what had been given her, and sloughed it all away, and found, beneath it, something vital, strong, tensile.

  She had no regrets. She lived each day for what it brought; wild flowers clutched in a small fist, the sun shining on frost, a harvest she had to help gather in, the sight of blood on her hand where the sickle had cut her. In Velzna, she'd hidden her hands beneath her tebenna, so Tanaquil wouldn't see the scar. Wealth had come back to Velx, slowly, but that first year the Romans had taken everything, even the gods; they'd broken the house-gods up to melt them down, and people said they could hear the ancestors wailing on the wind.

  Only the betrayal rankled. She thought of the long years she'd spent with Macstarna, and the way he'd betrayed her at the end. He'd called himself 'Master' when he was a servant, and now he was a king he called himself the Slave; the kind of acerbic irony he'd always liked. She wondered, idly, whether he had slept with Tanaquil? There were rumours, of course, but there were always rumours about any woman.

  Two women, Tanaquil had said, will change the history of the League. They'll remember us, long into the evening of the Etruscan race, when Troy has been forgotten, and Romulus is only a name. So, between them, they planned the death of a king.

  The yard was busy even though the sun was hardly up; the grooms currying the horses, harnesses being rubbed with oil till they shone, bags being brought out and mules led in. Some of the boys were sitting round a brazier, toasting small cakes; two of the girls had brought leather buckets of water up from the cistern, and were filling a trough for the livestock.

  Ramtha drew her tebenna tight around her, though the morning chill still found its way down her neck, and along her forearms. It was time to start, she thought. She stepped towards the brazier; waited for the boys to make a space, and squatted down beside them, reaching her hands to the heat.

  "Where to?" one of them asked.

  "Suana, first; Staties, Satres. Then Cusa,Tlamu, up the coast to Velathri."

  "Herkle! We'll be gone months."

  "Weeks," she said; "we'll be back before there's any work to do in the vineyards."

  "Not further than Velathri?" one of the older youths asked.

  "No," she said. There was no point in it; Felsina was too far from Rome. Felsina would watch Rome take Tarchna or Cisra, and do nothing; in fact, if she knew anything, Felsina saw the advantage in Rome keeping its southern neighbours preoccupied.

  A younger boy came over; little Arnza, who she'd pulled legs first out of his mother's womb, that hard winter.

  "You're not coming," she said. "I've told you that already."

  He stuck his chest out, head up, legs planted solidly. "Coming."

  She sighed loudly enough for them all to hear. "Not."

  "Am."

  "Kavie?"

  One of the youths got up; stocky, like a little bull, bright eyed under his dark brows. "Arnza," he said, and grabbed the boy around the waist, lifting him kicking and wriggling to his shoulder; "come on, Arnza, it's no use." But the boy continued to writhe, beating his fists on Kavie's back, and kicking in the air.

  Kavie turned round; Ramtha could hardly see his face over Arnza's mobile little backside and the blur of kicking legs. "Let him come," Kavie said.

  "We have a delicate mission. So I take my best and most trusted people, and a noisy child. Sensible."

  "He's what we're fighting for. It might not be so bad to remind ourselves of that."

  Ramtha shook her head, and muttered "Stupid, stupid."

  "Take me! Take me!" Arnza yelled.

  "Bring him here," Ramtha said. Seated, she was just at his level, once Kavie had put him down; she gave the boy a hard stare, the kind of look she gave any of the children when they'd been caught fighting or stealing.

  "You know we will be doing a lot of big people talking, about boring things."

  "No swords? No fighting?"

  "No swords. No fighting. You'll be very bored."

  "Still want to come." He looked down, but his fists were clenched.

  "Sometimes you have to be very quiet. Can you be very quiet?"

  He looked up and nodded silently.

  "Well," she said, "Kavie's got a point."

  She was surprised by the silence. She'd expected objections. She looked round; the two girls had joined the circle now, and were sharing a cup of wine. They must be in love, she thought, seeing the way their fingers touched as they passed the cup between them. Good; there should always be lovers in any court, the Spartans were right about that. Lovers have a future, they have a softness, they pull you back from the hard black-and-white of tyranny, from the loneliness of ruling.

  "No one has anything to say?"

  One of the girls looked up. "It's a good idea," she said; "we're looking for people who will take a risk, we show them what they're doing it for. Little Arnza is our future, after all."

  "A farting, unwashed, grubby little future," Kavie said, but his grin took the sting out of his words.

  When they mounted up, Ramtha held Arnza in front of her, one arm round him and the other holding the reins; he wasn't a born rider, bumped up and down at the trot, and his legs weren't quite enough to give him purchase, but he seemed happy enough, singing to himself, and occasionally announcing the presence of interesting phenomena. "There are cows lying down," he said, and once, "there's an eagle, look!" ("The augur speaks," Kavie said, and they laughed; but if the augur had spoken, it was a good omen.)