***
It wasn't a day for prophecy, he thought; clear sunlight on the Palatine, the noise of the city, even the hammer blows of stonecarvers at work on the great temple heard clearly across the Forum. A donkey brayed somewhere. Woodsmoke drifted up from below, the smell harsh, yet whenever he smelt it, he thought of homecoming. The brush crackled as they began to descend the southern slopes; a charm of goldfinches flew up, the bright yellow flashes of their wings flickering. Tanaquil still hadn't told him where they were going.
Pine roots snaked across the path, raw yellow where feet had rubbed them. The path twisted around a spur, down into a tiny gorge. He'd raced the track in the valley below enough times, but he'd never seen it; a crack in the hill, narrowing,half-hidden by pines and the lie of the land. On one side, a stream ran, coldly clear, from a spring, a mere seeping of water from a split in the rock.
He'd only realised at the last moment why she'd brought him here, where they were headed; the wolf-cave, the secret heart of the city. It was hidden in plain sight. Tanaquil was there one moment, gone the next. A wall of hanging foliage closed the end of the gorge; she'd simply stepped through it. He followed.
This was the cave where the she-wolf had brought the twins. He'd heard that story, of course; he'd seen the wolf-runners, boys dressed in the raw skins of the sacrificial victims. Everyone knew that the cave existed, that it lay under the Palatine; no one he knew had ever seen it, or if they had, their mouths had been closed.
It smelt of earth; he could feel the damp on his skin. He'd never liked caves; certainly not since that night when he'd captured Cacus, or perhaps Cacus had captured him. The light in the cave was tinged with green from the leaves that filtered it; Tanaquil's face was discoloured by it, corpse-like.
"Get the fire lit," she said brusquely.
He didn't obey commands. He was the Master, he was the one who commanded; only three men had ever given him an order he would obey – the old general, Vipienas, and now Tarquinius. But he felt for the flint and steel.
The wood was ready piled on a stone hearth; when he'd got the curls of dry bark tinder to light, and the flames had touched the first smaller twigs, he sat back on his heels, and saw the cave whole for the first time. It was not large; it held him, and Tanaquil, and the fire, like an inverted cup, and while in the centre the roof was high, further out there was barely room to stand as the walls sloped down to the dusty floor. It was dry, though,
"Sit," she said. She'd never commanded him before – always flirted, cajoled, laughed; now this was the second time since they'd come to the cave. Her eyes glinted flint-like in the firelight, and he thought it wasn't just the fire that made them shine; there was something in her he'd not seen before, a demon or a god. He sat.
He sat, and waited, and sat till his arse was aching and his left leg, that he'd folded under him, was numb. He sat.
"Don't move," she said.
An itch troubled him. He tried not to think about it. This at least he could do, he'd done before, sneaking through no-man's-land or waiting in ambush. It still troubled him. Eventually it went away. He started to hear his heartbeat, the sound of rushing blood in his ears. The fire crackled. Tanaquil, sitting opposite him, her eyes never flickering, but the flames were always shifting on her face.
"Tell me," she said.
What was to tell? His eyes were getting prickly and dry. Both his legs were numb. He'd lost sense of time. It had been late morning when they came into the cave, but here it was always dark time, blood time, the time of the womb or the grave. The world was spinning, the fire was dancing, he felt the pull of tides, of tenses. Was this prophecy, was it tiredness, was it just staring at the fire that had stupefied him and muddled his senses?
"It's inside you," she said, guiding his thoughts. "The real Etruscan heritage. Not bronze or gold, but dreams and thoughts."
"That's a heritage?"
"Vecu put those thoughts and dreams in Arruns' mind."
"But that was Arruns. And how long ago was that?"
"Long, long ago," she said, her voice caressing, like a mother starting a fairy tale; long, long ago, and very far away... "Since Arruns, every child is born with the seeds of those thoughts."
Seeds. Another woman's thing. The idea of something growing inside him; he resisted it. It was like a cancer. And the way she had him think; it was like probing a wound, hard metal in the softness of raw flesh. Or like sticking your tongue into the hole where a tooth had been knocked out. (A sudden flash of memory; holding the stub of a milk tooth in his hand, looking at the pink inside of it, raw, and feeling the gap in his jaw, huge as things always are bigger when felt than seen, and knowing that again, he'd been betrayed by life. What had he been then; six or seven?)
Look into the fire, she was saying. He was looking into it anyway but that hadn't stopped her telling him. She'd put a handful of herbs on it; a resinous scent with something rotten and sweet under it.
"Did you never look in a fire and see things in it?" she asked him.
"When I was a child?"
"Perhaps."
"I saw cities, forests, lasas dancing."
"Let your eyes half-close."
That was easy; he was beginning to drowse with the heat of the fire.
"Half closed," she said; "but keep looking. Look through your lashes at the blur. At the movement. Let your eyes lose focus. See what's between the flames."
Nothing. Nothing more than the purplish gold of light through half closed eyelids, like a bruise. This was trickery, cozenage, cheating.
"Wake up!"
He felt fuddled. Drunk. The fire seemed to be burning inside his mind, a fever behind his eyes. He was prickling with sweat.
"Ask the question."
"What question?"
"You will know the question. The question to which you need to know the answer."
He sat for another unguessable length of time, wondering what that question would be. There were many questions he might want to know the answer to; too many. Would Rome invade Tarchna, would Rome invade Velzna, why did Tarquin hate him, what was going on in Velx, why wouldn't Tarquinius answer a straight question any more, why was Tanaquil trying to teach him prophecy, why couldn't he seem to desire Tarquinia? But that there was one question, one great question, he couldn't believe. Someone told him once that the hedgehog knew one thing, the fox many; he was a fox, for sure, wily when he needed to be, and fast, and knowing many things. You could never know too much. And yet Tanaquil had told him there was only one question. Some piece of mystical obfuscation he'd bet, what was a man, or whether ghosts could dance, or where the gods came from.
The fire crackled. A spark spat into the dust next to him.
"Ask the question," she said.
"What bloody question?" he shouted, or rather heard himself shout, as if he'd been asleep and the scream had been drawn out of him by force of nightmare.
"Only you know," she said.
No help. A great teacher she'd turned out to be. So many questions, so many he couldn't count; and he was so bored with the game, the confusions, meandering, hints, intimations, subterfuges, misdirections; the trying to keep everyone off balance, the bluffs, double bluffs, triple bluffs. Everything precarious; the danger of saying the wrong thing, of acting on the word and not the covert significance; he should have loved the danger, but instead he felt bogged down, slowed and fatigued by the effort of exerting all his strength to go absolutely nowhere. Never knowing clearly where Rome was going, what Tarquinius had decided, what he had to do.
He felt her eyes on him as an aggression, as if she'd struck him. She was waiting. And he still had no idea.
He wanted clarity, wanted a clear objective, wanted to be on the move, not these games of whisper-and-run.
"You must bring the question to birth," she said. Her voice was patient and measured, but her eyes burned.
Birth. Another woman thing. Raw flesh and blood slopping, like butchery but worse. The thought made his guts lurch as i
f he were going to vomit, like that time he'd got drunk after his first daughter was born, and the bile surged up through his nose, through the fingers he'd clamped over his mouth. He felt as if his innards were dropping out of him, as if he were falling from a height. Breathless, about to pass out, he felt his body sway.
"Will I be king?"
He heard his voice and realised he had spoken. The question made words.
"Will I be king?"
The fire blazed up around him. He felt it burning through his veins; his skin flamed with it. It crowned him, whirling round his head; he breathed it in, drank it down, it consumed him.
He was the power of thunder. He held the lightning in his hands, and wondered at it.