***
There was another feast in the evening. Tanaquil sent word that she was ill; she wanted to eat alone. She'd have an early night. A good excuse; when they wanted to send someone to look after her, she pointed out that she was as well trained in medical sciences as anyone else in the city. If she needed anything she'd ask; meanwhile, she was over-tired, and an infusion of camomile and an early night would sort her out.
She'd spoken again with Ramtha; they understood each other, or so Tanaquil hoped. Not for them the ways of violence, but the patient weaving of personal alliances, the calling in of favours and allegiances, a life of waiting in shadows. Every woman had a bright face and a dark face; the bright, tight face that surveyed the banquet placidly, and the dark side that planned, that waited, the dark implacable fate.
The mingled noises of the banquet were thinned by distance to a gentle murmur of chatter, hints of music in which no tune could be clearly identified, only the feeling and recurrent rhythms of the dance. It was strange how distance lent things an attraction they didn't possess at close quarters; physical distance, or the distance of memory, the effect was the same. Tanaquil let her thoughts wander back, to days searching the cliffs for plants, nights of wakefulness at the valley shrine, to departed friends...
"Lady?"
She looked up. A girl had come with a basket and a jug. Tanaquil roughly remembered the face. The girl unpacked the basket; spelt cakes, figs, cheese. Simple food for an invalid.
She remembered who the girl was; the student who'd answered her question that morning. She looked at the figs, and remembered they'd been speaking about poison. The nightshade, the foxglove, the hemlock.
"I'm not hungry," she said, waving one hand to dismiss the girl.
"Lady?"
She looked up. The girl was waiting, not forward enough to speak, not obedient to go.
"Speak," Tanaquil said.
"Lady, they say you studied here."
"Only for a few years. We all did, all of us from Tarchna. Some for longer, others not so long."
"Were you lonely?"
Tanaquil couldn't remember ever asking herself that question. She'd never thought she was; though if she thought back, she couldn't remember any of her friends from that first year, only her teachers, and a few friends who had arrived later; she'd missed Hanuna, left back in Tarchna (not for her the training, her future as a lauchum's wife had already been mapped out), missed her dogs and hunting the coastal marshes, though the teaching had excited her from the first day and Spurinna's question, "What did Tarchies say when he sprang from the furrow?"
She must have had more friends than that, but she could hardly count more than a few before her memory failed. Places were carved deeply in her mind - the temples, the groves, even the sky and the track on the day she'd seen the eagle carry off Tarquinius' cap – but people were harder to recollect. Sometimes she remembered odd phrases in the particular intonation of a voice long unheard; Spina saying drily "Just being alive isn't living," or her father's sad stern admonition, "We all die, but we do not all die unremembered," or her mother's "If you don't look after the cats, the rats will take over the house." But apart from these few flashes, remembering became harder the longer she lived; her childhood had become dark, like looking into deep water.
"Lady?"
Tanaquil tried to remember what the child had asked. Lonely? Had she been lonely?
"Only sometimes," she said. She wondered whether she should make the girl share the food; at least then if it was fast-acting poison, she'd be warned.
"They don't like me," the girl said.
"The teachers?"
"And the other children."
"They won't. Children are little tyrants."
The girl's face twitched; it wasn't quite a smile.
"Arunthia," Tanaquil said, remembering the name, "You'll find when you get older..."
She saw in that moment she'd lost the girl's precarious trust. Arunthia must have heard that line too often, threats and promises alike deferred. You'll find your match when you go to Velzna; you'll change your mind when you're grown up; you'll understand when you get older why we made you do it, why we sent you away, why we beat you, that it was all for your own good...
"Well, maybe you won't," she said. "But I always found children were the most cruel. Adults have too many other things to worry about."
The girl's eyes shone again, though she still didn't smile. Perhaps she never did.
"They don't like you. Why? Because you're a northerner?"
Arunthia nodded. Soundless, as if she were used to hiding.
"Well, do you like them?"
"Not much."
"Hold on to that. You don't like them. Why should you care for their good opinion?"
She could see the girl beginning to think it out.
"You're smart," Tanaquil said. "You don't like to show it."
"They don't..."
"They don't like a smart girl? I thought so."
"They don't like a smart northerner."
"Well, come to Rome, when you're ready. You might like it better there."
Arunthia looked at her steadily, no doubt trying to work out whether this was an invitation or simply advice of a disinterested sort. Tanaquil thought better of asking the girl to try the food; she wasn't hungry. She was feeling slightly sick, as if the lie she'd told had become truth.
She dismissed Arunthia again, and this time the girl went. Would Tanaquil ever see her again? Would the girl remember her words, perhaps as a talisman, a spark of light in the wild night?
The flutes were still playing, high over the rustle of sistra, as Tanaquil wrapped herself in her tebenna against the coming chill of the night. How many times the round dance had been danced, hand in hand through the ages; someone dancing tonight would have danced with old Spurinna, and he might have held the hand of one of the older masters, and she in turn might have danced as a young girl with one of the elders next to her in the ring, that hands interlaced, and so on to the dawn of Etruria, in one great circle of dance back to Tarchies and Tages...
Servius
He sat in the house of the Curia he'd had rebuilt, wondering why it was so easy to build up stone and timber, so difficult to build a city.
He shivered. He'd caught some kind of fever at Veii, he thought, that night in the field. It was cold in here, too; the walls too thick, the roof too high. The old Curia's homely intimacy had been replaced by size and grandeur, and he regretted it; but the admission of the plebeians to government had forced him to increase the size of their meeting place, that was just simple logistics.
There was a huge amount of business to get through. The building of new granaries at Ostia, promotions in the army to fill dead men's offices, support for the families of the men killed at Veii, purchase of metal from Aithalia. None of that would be contentious; in the nature of things, there would be some tussling over the promotions, plebeian and patrician factions each keen to gain more than the other, and every family having some young nephew or grandson needing a leg-up, but that was the way things were, and he'd dealt with that often enough in his career as a soldier. You sat back, you let the argument run, and then when the shouting died down, you made the appointments you had been going to make anyway. Everyone wasn't satisfied of course, but then they never would be.
Then there were the proscriptions. That might be a trickier subject. Too many of Rome's great families had hedged their bets going into the war with Veii; some had opposed Servius openly, while other men restricted themselves to snide comments about what happened when slaves became masters and the world turned upside down. You could never tell when snideness might slide into treason. All the more reason to strike before it did, and strike hard, and without warning.
They were in the middle of the shouting bit right now. This had all been better managed in Velx, where the Vipienas' word, or the General's, once, had been final; but everyone wanted a say in Rome, argument being part of the price you had to
pay for meritocracy. (And it was strange how in a system that everyone said rewarded merit, by pure coincidence the sons of the great families had always been more meritorious than anyone else.)
"What has Gnaeus ever done?"
"He did what he was asked to."
"He stood still and waited!"
"It's what he was asked to do."
"Not much, is it?"
"Lentulus hunted down Robur."
"But he had no place in the battle."
"Well, he did what he was asked to, then. You can't have it both ways."
Dust motes shifted in the light, in the narrow space between the tall walls. The black stone of the floor shone greasy and wet. Servius frowned; the black stone covered the great pit of ghosts, that was opened once a year, and as he looked at it he felt the pull of his own ghosts, the dead Vipienas, the head buried below the Capitol. There was something wrong about this city, something that had turned Tarquinius rotten; it was an abode of death, and its ghosts were vindictive, thin, and rapacious.
The voices were becoming quieter, apart from two red-faced men who were still yelling at each other. Time to get started. Servius stood.
"Enough!" he shouted.
Instantly the place was still.
"I have heard what you have to say. It is, as always, useful. You've made some good points."
Flattery, but they sucked it up.
"Tarquinius obeyed his orders. His men were valiant; Mamarke, Titus, Sextus."
"And Strephon!" someone shouted, but he ignored.
"I confirm them in their offices. Gnaeus did well. Him I also confirm. Among the hoplites, promotions for three men distinguished by their bravery; Lecne Apatrui, Decimus Camilius Felix, Marcus called Baldy."
There was a murmur at that, and a solitary cheer. Not so much that Lecne was an Etruscan; Servius had been waiting for a post to open up for him, and the appointment was expected. But Baldy – the absence of family name and patronymic was telling. And the Romans didn't like it.
"And among my slingers: Lentulus. I'm putting him in charge of his own century."
The few cheers for Lentulus were drowned out by protests. Servius had broken the rule that a man had to buy his own weapons for the slingers, and now one of them was being made an officer. Well, that was out of the way now, and there was one easy way to calm this crowd. One of the Cornelii, two of the Gabii, young Sextus Valerius, Marcus Junius. Some of them would be adding those up; five, six if you included Gnaeus, against three outsiders. That should keep them quiet.
"What about Strephon?" someone called. He ignored it.
There was still some commotion; Baldy was at the centre of a noisy celebration, and a couple of men none of whose relatives had been picked out were complaining in deliberately penetrating voices. It died down at last, and Servius smiled.
"Lictors," he said; "stand forward."
They knew. He'd told them moments before the meeting began; they'd had no chance to tell anyone. He started reading the names.
Aufidius. Faustus. (The son, that was. Innocent, perhaps, but too dangerous to let remain.) Rufinius.
He saw Tarquinius scrambling to his feet, Mamarke – bless Mamarke for being in the right place at the right time – pulling him down, whispering urgently to him. He remembered; Rufinius was Strephon's uncle, and Strephon part of Tarquinius' coterie. These things couldn't be helped.
Kalkas. (Even-handed; a Greek among so many Romans. That would help the medicine slip down, even if Kalkas hadn't done much more than spout a few imprecations when he lost rank in the army reorganisation.) Rutilus. Appius Clodius. Strephon.
Immediate uproar. Tarquin was on his feet and shouting, now, and Mamarke looking desperately unhappy, and some (Servius' slingers, and some of the infantry) were applauding, their voices were almost drowned by the opposition – cavalry, friends of Tarquin, the younger members of the house.
“All of these I now declare enemies of Rome,” he said, forcing his voice to be heard above the din.
“Enemies of Servius, Friends of Rome,” someone shouted. He couldn't see who it was.
Gods, that was a dangerous slogan. He hoped it didn't catch on. Not like the chicken thing.
“Enemies of Rome. They have one day to put themselves beyond our boundaries. One day, after which their lives are ours."
All done without blood, he hoped, as long as they saw their own interest, and fled. All done quickly, efficiently, striking like a viper in the long grass, before anyone saw what was coming. Without blood, without guilt.
"Their property goes to the treasury of the city. The city they betrayed.”
“Not true!” Tarquinius shouted. “Strephon was with us in the attack on Veii. He was one of the best of us. One of the bravest.”
“He's been plotting with enemies of Rome.”
“Damn you. I'd know if he had.”
“Would you? An actor as good as he is?”
Tarquin drew breath. Suddenly he was on the back foot.
“It's an act. A marvellous act. Getting close to you. Your greatest supporter. He had you fooled. He was always a friend of Robur's.”
“He was only a child when Robur was exiled.” Tarquin still thinking, but the doubts had begun.
“He was still a friend to Robur. He still is.”
“And what about Robur?”
“What about Robur? Indeed. Because we have him. We have him, now. And what do we do with him?”
That had changed the subject. Not for the better, really; he'd dreaded that it would come to this. But he needed something more to give them; something to silence the doubters, something to make his supporters rejoice, to make his detractors fear. He needed blood. He'd feared this for so long; he'd feared making Robur a martyr; he'd feared what would happen if he slid from being a popular king, a king of the people, a king with open hands who offered arms and wealth and opportunity and, yes, roast chicken, to a king whose hands were dirty with blood and whose business was the business of fear. Yet now he'd taken the step, he felt an overwhelming relief.
“Kill him! Kill him!” they were calling, not a single voice against. He remembered Tarquinius talking about a triumph. Even in this moment, he felt impelled to speak for mercy, and it wasnt completely a sham.
He was shouted down, of course.
“Kill him! Make an end of him!”
“Well,” he said, “Robur will await our justice.”
But he thought to himself; it's not just me who's changed. Today the people have got the taste of blood, and like hounds gone rogue, they might turn on their master.