Etruscan Blood

  ***

  The day broke gloriously, the sun swimming in a melt of pearl and pink, the shadows shrinking from the plain back to the narrow valleys and the verges of woodland; streaks of clouds glowed golden on their lower edges against the lightening blue behind them. Tullia rode ahead, down the steep cliff road,under branches now furry with catkins and speckled with the faint but vivid green of young leaves. It was a day for beginnings, Tarquin thought, not for partings.

  He rode out of Velzna as a prince of Rome; and he knew now he would be a king, if he played his game with patience. Teitu was on his side; Teitu, the heir to Tarchna, and Porsena, heir to nowhere, for what that was worth. He dreamed of the day he could bring Rome into the League; and Rome could carry on growing, could continue Servius' policies of making the city rich on the spoils of war, as long as it took the war to the Greeks, or the Gauls. Somewhere in his dreams Rome led the League over the Alps to the cold north, lands rich in amber and furs, and in the south to the rich lands of Great Greece and the ripening sun.

  Tullia had hardly spoken all morning. When they got to the bottom of the slope, Tarquin caught her up; he was surprised she hadn't pushed her horse on, for a race now the ground was level, the track clear and wide past the great inscribed stone that marked the boundary between the city and the plain.

  "You waited for me."

  "I'm not in a hurry to get home," she said.

  "There's no choice."

  "For me there were never any choices."

  "There will be," he said, although he wasn't as sure as he sounded.

  "You should know," she said, "I loved every day we spent in Velzna. I love you. You should know that now, in case I never have the chance to tell you again."

  "I know it won't be the same as here. But we'll still meet, at Aglaia's, or perhaps..."

  "You think we'll still be able to do that?" She was angry with him now, and her horse, sensing it, had started by stamping a front foot, and was now beginning to dance sideways, shifting its weight from foot to foot nervously. "You think my father will let me out of his sight after this? He'll probably try to have me killed; you know he could, in Rome."

  They both knew those rules; that Roman children (and Roman wives) were the mere property of their fathers; that a father could put a child to death with impunity; that, indeed, he might even be considered to have a duty to do so, in certain situations. A repugnant custom that they'd never considered Servius, as an Etruscan, would ever follow; but Tarquin suddenly felt the wind cold on his neck. He'd come to Velzna after Strephon's death, feeling Rome might not be safe for him; and now, without any settled plan other than waiting for opportunity, he was heading back. He tried to believe Tullia was safe; he'd put his faith in Tanaquil, but he wondered, now, how much Tanaquil really cared for this difficult and vicious-tempered woman he happened to love.

  "We marry, then."

  "You forgot. Another thing Servius won't allow. He probably has me saved up for one of his dour obedient Romans. Although..."

  "What?"

  She fixed him with what wasn't quite a scowl or a smile, as if she was weighing up whether he deserved to be told, or not. He must have passed her test, but she still looked angry when she spoke, and he hoped it was with her father, and not with him.

  "Think, Tarquin, think. Servius married a king's daughter, and became king. And now you want to marry a king's daughter. Don't you understand how he'll see that?"

  "Odd, that's what Arathenas thought, and you disabused him."

  "You think he believed me?"

  Tarquin looked down at his hands, lying on his horse's slack reins. All the confidence he'd felt as they came down the slope had gone, dispersed like the glorious sunrise into shreds of mist and damp cloud.

  "There's only one way we'll be safe," she said, "and you know it. We have to deal with Servius. Just as you dealt with my sister."

  So that was out in the open now, the thing they'd never dared to speak about. He'd never told, she'd never asked. He didn't bother to deny it.

  "We have to wait," he said. "Teitu has ideas."

  "Ideas! So does Lars Porsena. Lots of them."

  "That's hardly the same. Teitu speaks for half of Tarchna."

  "The half Thresu doesn't speak for? Or his brother?"

  "Give Teitu time. Have patience."

  "Bugger patience!"

  Tullia kicked her horse savagely on, and Tarquin would have followed her; but at that moment he saw a litter descending the last stretch of the cliff path, and heard the great horns that accompanied it. He wouldn't clear the path before it arrived; and there were twenty armed men marching with it, and a mounted forerunner bearing the rods and the great double axe. This was a lucumo, a king; and since Thresu wasn't a lucumo, and there were no other kings in Velzna, only envoys and princes and zilaths, this could only be the hidden king that Tarquin had sought for so long.

  "Make way!" one of the armed men shouted, and Tarquin backed his horse off the road. They were coming fast, faster than he'd wanted to on the steeper parts of the track, with a swinging stride; already they were nearly level with him, only the horn players were falling back, now that they were approaching the boundary marker.

  He had no chance to approach, to make any request; but at least he'd be able to see this hidden ruler, since the litter's curtains were open. He waited, steadying his horse, wishing he hadn't backed under a tree that was still dripping with dew, and dripping down his neck. Then the bearers were running past; they were holding the litter high, so he could see clearly the white and purple robes that distinguished the ruler; and his eyes met hers, Arathia's, the king hidden in plain sight.

  Tanaquil

  "So, you like the new chairs?"

  That question had Tanaquil worried. She hadn't noticed the chairs at all; she'd simply sat down with Fabia to enjoy the late afternoon with a cup of wine and a little gossip. And yet Tanaquil had always been observant; she'd been a great patron of the crafts, in her time. In her time, and with that thought came the anxiety that she'd been superseded, and was already a shadow and a nothing, long before the fires were readied to make her ash - a shadow, living like a ghost in a Rome that was no longer hers. Sad thoughts; when she looked at Fabia, she saw the way Fabia had arranged a shawl so that it covered her neck, now corrugated with the approach of age, and noted the subterfuge, and thought, we've grown old together. She should have noticed the chairs; a few years ago, she would have.

  "I hadn't really..." she temporised, but not quick enough for Fabia.

  "Once, you would have noticed. You used to care about such things."

  "I've had things on my mind."

  "Tarquin?"

  "Oh... and things."

  "Tarquin is a problem. He's been spending quite a bit of time here since he got back."

  "After the younger vestals?"

  "I wouldn't be surprised. I don't like it."

  Now Tanaquil looked at the third of the new set of chairs, it was rather lovely; the chi of the cross-struts elegantly elongated, and the arms curved outwards, and then inwards again, ending in rounded volutes. An untrained eye wouldn't notice, but the clawed talons of the feet were intricately carved, the claws inlaid bronze; there was brass inlay on the scissoring curves of the legs and arms of the chair, and the joinery was exactingly precise. And yet that in itself wouldn't be enough; there was one more important thing that the craftsman had got right. The chair looked inviting; its curves seemed to welcome the imposition of weight, the balled ends of its arms seemed made to be caressed with the palms of the sitter's hands. It was a chair that wanted to be sat on.

  "Yes, good, isn't it?" Fabia sighed. "Some young snapper told me I wasn't entitled. Only the king and the flamen dialis get to sit on these, and magistrates sitting in judgment, apparently."

  "So?"

  "I said, I think I outrank the flamen dialis. I certainly outrank the magistrates, young man. And as for sitting in judgment, a Vestal is always sitting in judgment. She never stops."


  "Ha."

  "Yes, he went away rather quickly after that. And I have my chairs. Well, an old woman needs her luxuries."

  Tanaquil smiled. No young man would ever dare take on Tanaquil, who had always cultivated a certain hauteur, a deliberately imposing presence; but those who didn't know Fabia saw a grandmotherly woman with a broadly tolerant smile. Tolerant and grandmotherly she was, up to a point - with the children who were always running around the temple, making up for the fact that the vestals, of course, had none of their own, and with the younger girls, and with anyone who asked for her help - but there was iron in her backbone, and a surprising edge to it, which it didn't do to underestimate.

  "Luxuries," said Tanaquil. "There aren't many of those left in Rome."

  "You can still get good cakes," Fabia said; "and good wine. Speaking of which; more honey cake? Or the chestnut?"

  "No more. But you might get my cup refilled."

  Fabia motioned for one of the girls to fetch the wine from the hearth. "You're worried?"

  "This surrendering of jewellery is getting too fashionable," Tanaquil said. "Sexta of the Junii started it, and now the more excitable women are making a great show of it, and a few less excitable ones are being talked into it by their husbands. I'm determined to hang on to mine..."

  "Quite right. Her jewellery is a woman's wealth and safety."

  "But the goldsmiths have no work, and now Vulca's gone there are no artists left, either. War is sucking the life out of Rome."

  "It's war that brought it in the first place."

  That was true enough, but couldn't you ever stop? Couldn't you ever sit back and enjoy the fruits of peace, as Tarchna had been doing for centuries, and Velzna, and Cisra? Tanaquil had thought, when she thought about it at all, that with age would come contentment and certainty and the chance to be, at last, settled; but it was just more care, so that some days she thought it was more difficult to maintain her position as the first woman in Rome than it had ever been to win it.

  "There are other ways," Tanaquil said. "I've been thinking a lot about some of the tales my mother told me."

  "You're a bit young for your second childhood."

  "By now I should be telling them to my grandchildren." That hurt, too; Arruns had died too young, she'd given up hoping that Servius would get a child on Tarquinia. "I was thinking of the stories of Cranu of Curtun; how when he founded his city of Curtun, there were enemies on all sides, the Sicels, and Umbrian war bands; how they occupied the fertile valleys, and he had only the barren heights to call his own. And how instead of doing what everybody expected, and sending his men to fight, he gave them seed and ploughshares and oxen, and dispersed them among the fields and pastures, where they settled, and married local women, and brought up children and horses and their long-legged, long-horned white cattle; and though Cranu didn't live to see it, by his son's day every single farm in the valley was in Etruscan hands."

  "Pious dreaming," Fabia said; "of course he must have fought."

  "The story says not. The Sicels went south, most of them, and those that stayed married with Cranu's people, and within two generations, they had forgotten the difference between the two peoples. And the land was richer than ever."

  "Well that's something." Fabia sat back, pushing her hands into her thighs and stretching. "When the land's not worked, famine brings in its vengeance."

  "We should be starting colonies, not just raiding. We could have pushed hard after Veii for alliances with other cities, for colonies in the Tuscan plains; but all Servius sees is more conquests, more battles, an army that eats metal and shits death."

  "It's a transitional phase," Fabia said. "Wait and see, it will work out."

  Transitional phase: what words. It was cruelty and privation, it was destructiion and waste, it was the murder of meaning and the rape of beauty.

  "I miss Tarquinius," Tanaquil said. "For all his faults."

  "And they were many."

  "He had imagination. His world wasn't dreary."

  They were silent for a while, each thinking of the old days. Tanaquil wondered idly if her prophecies of disaster all came from the same root, the new changes in her body, as the monthly ebb and flow of her blood died away, that last sign of what had been her youth; she was tearful more often now, saw the sadness in things more than the splendour. And Fabia's thoughts turned to a spring garden under a white-blossoming apple tree, where a smiling, slight girl bent to take a child up in her arms. She hadn't thought of her mother for years.

  "Was I naïve?"

  Fabia looked at Tanaquil almost sadly, considering. "Naive..."

  "To think a city could be made great by something other than murder? Being more effective killers than the rest?"

  "Oh Tanaquil," Fabia said. "That's what men do; they struggle, and fight, and in the end, they return to the Mother."

  Which wasn't an Etruscan way of seeing things, but Tanaquil didn't correct her. She thought instead how Servius had stopped learning how to prophesy, as if he had been frightened, not so much by what he saw, as by the gift itself, by the very existence of a fate that didn't depend on the work of his own hands and brain, a fate greater than anything he could set in motion. He had the gift, that was the worst thing, even though he feared it; and the gift, undeveloped, turned sour as easily as milk in summer.

  The Vestal saw men as if they lived in a foreign country, from a great distance; but Tanaquil lived in their world, and in Tarchna, at least, and Velzna, the world of men and women hadn't been a world of iron and treachery, their relations defined by rape and murder. There was something rotten in Servius, something that would infect the whole city.

  Tanaquil rose, pulling the edge of her tebenna over her head. "I still worry," she said; "worrying is all I do, these days."

  "Make cakes," Fabia said; "sometimes it's safer." But her smile was sad, as if she was not completely convinced by her own advice.