by AM Kirkby
***
Arnza had been charmingly naughty again in Velathri, but it hadn't worked the trick this time; negotiations had been sticky, and Ramtha had made promises she wasn't quite sure she'd be able to keep, and even then, the four zilaths had asked for a night to think it over. There was luxury here - separate rooms for some of them, entertainment, and a fine dinner - but she felt the chill of the poor relation realising, for the first time, that the welcome their wealthier cousins gave them was not unequivocal, and less warm than it seemed.
She was tired, staring dully into what ought to be, but might well not be, her last cup of wine before bed. When she saw Kavie standing at the other side of the room, gazing at her, she thought he must have been there some time; she'd been too tired, too distracted, to notice.
"You're quiet," she said.
"I suppose."
"It didn't go well."
"No."
He came towards her, sat on the couch beside her.
"Where's Arnza?"
"With the girls."
Silence was thick between them, scented with wine and honey. She filled a cup of wine for him, but as she passed it, he managed to catch one of the handles in his sleeve, and it spilled, warm and sticky and red, over her hands, over her robe.
"I'm..."
"It's nothing," she said, and wiped it down with a cloth from the table, but Kavie sat sullen and silent.
Then he smiled.
"The first time I saw you," he said, "your hands and clothes were stained."
How odd, she thought, that he should remember something like that. "When..."
"Those days after..." He was searching for a softer way of saying it.
"After my husband was killed? You can say it; it's stopped hurting now." Which wasn't quite true; but the raw edge of rage and loss had been worn smooth.
"You came out of the stables with your hands bloody, up to the elbows in blood."
"When Arnza was born?"
He nodded. "I thought you were a goddess."
"Do you still?"
She was joking, but she saw from his face that for him it was nothing to laugh at. She reached out, and touched his cheek gently.
"The gods don't have hearts," she said. "But women do."
When she woke, and it was early, she lay still for a while, listening to his breathing, even and slow. He'd curled up in his sleep, one hand under his face, the palm pink and open.
And then the noise started. Voices at first low and urgent and then rising in pitch and volume till she heard running, shouting. Kavie moved, opened his eyes, looked up, seemed for a moment not to recognise her; and she was on her feet, but naked, facing the lauchum of Velathri in his purple tebenna, the golden wreath askew where he'd jammed it hurriedly on his brow.
"Servius is dead," he said, "and Rome is in flames."
Tanaquil
Blood, blood everywhere, the seething and boiling of hot blood.
The intestines oozed and slipped under her fingers. They were still warm, but cooling fast as the knots of life untied. Somewhere under the coils lay the liver, dense and dark. She reached for it, feeling the organs slide softly around her hands.
She remembered the feel of Servius' mantle, sliding under her fingers, slippery with half-congealed blood as she washed it, to decorate the effigy at his funeral rites. She'd washed the body, too, with Fabia; trampled, rolled in the dust, so many bones broken, it sagged like an unwieldy doll. It was ironic that after all that work, the king looked like a bloody puppet, and it was only the puppet, dressed in the tebenna she'd woven, that looked like a king.
The funeral procession had made its way down the Palatine, a line of torches flaring into the evening sky. There were no ancestor masks for Servius; his ancestors, whoever they were, were in Velzna, not here, and they were only slaves. There was only the effigy, crowned with the golden wreath, the massive gold amulets hanging on its chest, a beaten gold mask staring out; and beneath it, the crushed body, wrapped and shrouded and scattered with fresh herbs and nailed into the cypress-wood chest as Tanaquil had demanded.
"It's too unsightly," she'd said, the poor battered ruin of a king; but what no one knew, even Fabia, was that his body went to be burned without his head, which was now stuffed roughly into a jar full of boiled wine and wormwood in Tanaquil's locked clothes chest, and would join Avle's on the Capitoline. (Twenty-one and seven: twenty-one slabs from the door of the temple, seven from the left-hand wall. Three times seven, and seven.)
She'd watched the procession all the way down the hill, down towards the base of the Capitoline, and then turning tightly, down to the broad floor of the forum, down to the great pyre that reached up, four great storeys to it, higher than the temples. It was full dark by the time they lit the pyre, and she'd seen the flames streaming in the wind, a blur of yellow and red, and the sparks flying up, and dying as they flew.
Now the sun was high, and the stink of blood was in her nostrils. Daughter of a king, wife of a king, mistress of a third, now she had to read the auguries again for her son; the last time, she thought, and she was weary.
She had lived beyond her lustrum; she was the oldest of her generation, the last. Lauchme was dead, Macstrna was dead, Manius and Faustus. Even her eldest son had gone before her to the whispering shades. She was alone, a ghost; even the gods could no longer see her. She felt somehow that the world lay bare before her, motives and secrets open to her like a house to an invisible spirit. Not much had the capability to move her, any more; not even the sound of the aulos or the sight of a proud young man, or wine. Only the lone song thrush that she heard sometimes as she lay sleepless in the grey hours of early morning.
But Tarquin had asked her to take the omens for him. So here she was, standing at the altar with her hands dabbled in the blood of the ox, up to the elbow in the warmth of ebbing life.
When she'd looked at Tullia and Tarquin she saw the same feeling she and Lauchme had shared, for a time. They were like lions, bloody-mouthed and roaring. True Etruscans with their violence and passion, not the cold duty of Rome. They had stepped together to the dais on the Capitol, splendid in gold and purple, through the file of the lictors whose axes were smeared with blood. She'd failed with Lauchme, she'd failed in the end with Macstrna; perhaps in this golden pair, the pride of Etruria would be reborn. Rome, at last an Etruscan city, purged of its fratricidal darkness.
She knew as soon as she touched the liver that there was something wrong. The surface was blistered with bubbles of hard tissue, as if it had been burned. When she lifted it out, it was black, riven with bloody gashes that looked pink, not healthy red.
She looked up at Tarquin and Tullia. Her eyes must have shown the emptiness in her mind; the bleak vacancy where hope had been till a second before. I have lived beyond my time, she thought; they are all dead, all the bright youths and golden girls are dead, and fallen to ashes.
Then she turned to the senators below, and smiled, hailing Tarquinius king.
***