***
Ramtha and her entourage stayed in Rome another three weeks after the treaty was signed. Though while it was being negotiated they'd been kept out of the public eye - apart from that first reception on the Palatine - suddenly they were being feted; Rome's new allies, a new source of wealth, of gold, of oil, of good taste. Ramtha was everywhere, always flanked by one of the tall young men who made up her household, and whom Master found supercilious in the extreme. He noticed gorgons appearing on the walls of Roman houses, though the workmanship varied in quality - some were no more than coarse daubs of red paint in congealed spirals surrounding a circle with a slash for a mouth, others were clearly the work of a highly trained artist whose gorgons all had the same goggling eyes and stuck-out tongue. Every night there was a feast, on the Palatine or in the Aventine house,
He slept with Ramtha a few times in those mad weeks. All those tall young men on her staff, but he still had something she wanted; the smell of horse, he thought, that will never wash off; the stink of work.
But he was just rough trade. He realised that now. It turned her on, that smell of the stables, but she didn't understand what it meant to have nothing, to have to earn even the right to serve. She'd been born into the purple and her life was burnished like gold, and the light shone where she walked; nothing was ever refused her, and perhaps, he thought, she had the sense never to ask for the few things that might be refused. (That twisted the knife; he realised her seduction of him was never any risk at all, she never even risked polite disinterest; as the General's servant he could never have refused her, no more than her languid young servants could, if she asked, and he thought she probably did.)For him, his sweat was the currency he paid in for everything he had ever bought - a chariot, good opinion, influence; for her, it was an exotic counterpoint to the rich smell of incense and spiced wine and power.
That realisation gave him a new coolness, an icy confidence he'd never had with her before; it was as if he remained distant, mentally uninvolved while his body went through its paces. She sensed it, somehow, and found it intriguing. He became cruel, which he'd never been before, and she found that interesting, too. But it hardly satisfied him, and he felt glad when the Etruscans left, leaving behind them only hangovers and ended affairs and the painted Gorgons.
Tarquinius
The owl had shat on the vine again.
Gods knew why the unlucky bird had decided to roost here, under the roof of the atrium. It was too high to be dislodged easily; he'd shouted at it, but it just turned its head sleepily, and blinked once at him with its uncannily cat-like eyes. He threw a stone, but it just stuck its head down between its wings, as if it had no neck at all, and sulked. He threw another stone, which bounced off the wall and came back and hit him.
None of the Roman servants would have anything to do with it. They said it was a witch, and if they chased it away it would take its revenge.
"They suck your blood, you know," one old man confided.
And the Etruscan servants wouldn't do anything, because they didn't want to upset the Romans.
He might be a king, Tarquinius thought sourly, but he still couldn't get what he wanted in his own house.
At least he'd got his children married off. Servius' loyalty had been secured, and he'd kept his options open with regard to alliances. Tanaquil would be happy, too, not to have had to marry the girl to a Roman. He'd have hated to think Servius might go back to the service of the Vipienas. That couldn't be allowed; Servius knew far too much about Rome and her plans, and about Rome's resources, too. If he had practically made Servius his heir, putting him on an equal footing with Arruns and Tarquin, well – that would sharpen the boys up. Both of his sons were spoiled; Arruns leaden, humourless – he thought, sourly, a fit heir for the mud of Rome – while Tarquin was... Tarquin was Tarquin. The heir to Etruscan lightness and elegance, clever but ill-advised and worse disciplined. Perhaps he should have beaten him, as the Romans beat their sons.
He'd not been quite sure about marrying Tarquinia to Servius, all the same. He'd talked to Tanaquil; as always, she infuriated him by her obscurity, her willingness to consider that a course of action might be both right and wrong at the same time, or at least (as she was prone to equivocate) have aspects of both rightness and wrongness about it.
("Why the hell don't you give me a straight answer?" he'd asked her once.
"When did the gods ever give a straight answer?" she'd replied.)
He'd thought she'd argue on Servius' behalf; Servius was her find, after all, even if Tarquinius had come increasingly to depend on his services. She'd agreed with Tarquinius that neither Tarquin nor Arruns was ready to take power; her partiality to her younger son hadn't blinded her to his faults. She thought Servius was a good choice; an Etruscan, but a soldier, not a noble but a man who had carved his own way out, like Rome itself. A man with the roughness that Rome demanded from its leaders.
"Even from me?" Tarquinius asked.
"But you have me on your side."
"Doesn't Servius?"
Yet she had also pointed out that making Servius an heir apparent gave him a reason to plot against Tarquinius' sons, or even have them killed. Of course, Servius was an honest man; Servius subscribed to the same code of honour that they did... (That in itself, of course, was an admission from her that Servius was as dishonest as she was; they both knew how much honour remained in them after their years of struggle and of rule, and it came down to this, that either of them would fight on the other's behalf, that the two of them would face down the world together. Most of the time.)
He heard the owls at night, answering each other across the Palatine; who, who-who, always a question and never an answer. He wondered when they'd arrived; he never remembered having heard them before. He never slept well, these days; perhaps it was just part of growing old. The poets had a lot to say about love and war, but nothing about age. (He wished he'd asked his father; what was it like to grow old? As so often, he had to find out everything for himself.) His sleep grew every night more fractured and shallower; he'd wake in the early hours just as dawn was announcing itself, or sometimes in the dark middle of the night, and not be able to sleep again till he had tired himself out with trying. Perhaps he'd simply slept through the owls' colloquy, once, when he still slept soundly; perhaps they had always been there. Perhaps not.
Some nights he never got to sleep at all. Once the first owl started, he would lie there, listening for the next call, and even if it didn't come, he would still be tense, imagining that it would come as soon as he relaxed his attention. He felt as if they were converging on the palace from their haunts all over Rome. What then? When he did sleep, in nightmares they hunted him down and tore his flesh.
He had stopped looking at himself in mirrors, but he knew his eyes were dark and puffy with lack of sleep. He was so tired his body felt numb, as if the links between it and his volition had been stretched so thin they had frayed and broken. He found himself missing what was said to him; his mind would just close down, as if he was asleep with his eyes closed.
He mentioned the owls to Tanaquil. "Birds of bad omen," she said. He didn't like the look in her eyes.
There was the one sitting under the eaves, that no one would get rid of. She'd seen it, of course.
"Can't we get rid of it?"
She shrugged. "Yes, I suppose. They're nasty when they're cornered, though. You could poke it with a stick, but that would upset the servants. Probably best to leave it where it is."
She asked where he heard them. Everywhere, he said.
"No," she said, as if to a child she was trying to teach something eminently simple, and yet which the child found too difficult; "that can't be right. Which quarter of the sky?"
He thought hard, and said; "West. And north."
"That is bad."
He knew. The west; the place of bad luck. The north; place of death.
"Bad luck," he said. "Bad sleep."
She shivered; was she c
old?
"It's not the bad fortune that worries me," she said. "It's the ones you hear in the north. The souls of the dead calling for you to join them. You are marked for death, Tarquinius."
"How do I avoid it?"
She smiled thinly. "In the end, you don't. None of us do."
Was that meant as condolence? How far away was "in the end"?
"I'll order a sacrifice," she said; "that may avert the bad luck. With any luck."