Etruscan Blood

  ***

  That morning confused Aranthur greatly. Every time he thought he'd answered the question, the Greek asked another one; or he'd circle back to that first question, “How did the world begin,” and assert yet another opinion, before picking it into tiny shreds of meaning and discarding it in its turn. Every answer he gave was wrong, or his tutor said it was interesting, and then proceeded to show him it was wrong.

  At first he was confident he knew the answer. The hidden gods made the world, Aranthur said. Ah, said the tutor. So who made the hidden gods?

  Aranthur thought for a moment. He'd always thought the hidden gods just were; but it was possible they had been made. There was a god above them after all.

  “Did Tinia make them?” he hazarded.

  “So if Tinia made the hidden gods, did Tinia make the world?”

  “I suppose.” He was frowning with the unaccustomed need to think through everything he said. “Or Tinia might have made the hidden gods and then the hidden gods made the world.”

  “So. Who made Tinia?”

  And so it went on. After a while, his tutor moved the ground of debate from 'Who made the world' to 'Was there a time before the world?' Suddenly, everything shifted; the idea of huge emptiness opened his eyes, tasted like cold air on a frosty morning in his mouth. He had taken the world for granted; it was there. And suddenly it was not there. Instead, inside his head he felt a huge darkness, an open space that he had to fill with the tenuous streamers of his own breath, his own thought. Life changed for ever in that one second, and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. Not even breath, for a second.

  Ramutha's arrival at midday surprised both of them in the middle of a teasing thought, the idea of infinite worlds divided only by a single chance - a world in which men had not come to be, a world in which the Greeks had been overcome by the Persians, or a world in which everything was the same, except for the window that Ramutha had left open that morning.

  The tutor - he remained the tutor, or 'master', or sir, and Aranthur never learned his name - simply stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and looked up at her. Aranthur never did find out what would be different tomorrow, or after-tomorrow, or in his grandchildrens' lifetime, as a result of that window being left open, but when he thought about it later, he realised that was why the worlds had to be infinite; there would be one world in which he shut the window, one world in which Ramutha had already shut it, or would shut it, and another in which the window stayed open, and perhaps a sparrow flew into the room...

  “Has he been attentive?” his grandmother asked the tutor. When he nodded, she turned to Aranthur. “What have you learned?”

  He wanted to say so many things. The world, and the gods, and the vastness of fortune. The swirl of eternity, the reflective shards of an infinity of possibilities, the dizzying precipice of humanity. The words were not there. He said, simply, “Some of that thinking stuff,” and winced inwardly at his tutor's disapproval.

  “You will be here tomorrow, punctually?” Ramutha's attention had moved back to the tutor. He assented; perhaps he had not noticed the implied criticism in her question.

  “I have nothing against this thinking stuff. But I hope you will start him on his letters tomorrow.”

  “I shall. But I can't do that without the tablets and wax. Which I will bring. Tomorrow.”

  And then he stooped a little, turning to Aranthur.

  “So tomorrow, letters. And then, having asked ourselves how the world came to be, we will look at what we mean by 'the world'.”