***
The house always seemed to be busy these days; there were Senate elections, and this time, there were a hundred new places to be filled. She remembered the debates about that; Tarquinius claimed that the growth of the city necessitated a larger Senate, while Manius objected that the new Senate would be too big, too unwieldy when decisions were needed. Neither of them mentioned the main point of the expansion; all hundred new men would be Tarquinius' men, owing their promotion to him and knowing it.
Manius was a frequent visitor; she had grown to like him, and she treated him like an Etruscan courtier, letting him into her bedchamber in the morning before she had risen, talking to him while her women robed her and dressed her hair. Once or twice she'd pushed his floppy blond hair back with her hand, and he'd flushed and looked down, confused as only a Sabine could be at a woman's touch. She wanted to tease him, but she felt there was a darkness in him that wasn't safe to touch too closely; and she saw Tarquinius brooding, too, when she flirted with Manius, and kept her voice light and her gestures non-committal, never quite touching Manius when she leant towards him.
The dark days came again, and this year they hosted a banquet at which Tanaquil presided openly, and the Etruscan women sat beside their husbands. Some of the Sabines and Faliscans brought their women, too, but the Romans almost to a man kept theirs at home, and came in the plainest garb as if to protest the purple and gold of the princes.
“Black crows and grey rooks,” young Tarqunius said. “Carrion eaters.” Tanaquil thought, let them eat dust; though her husband worried, as he so often did these days, and went to sit with them, leaving Tanaquil to hold the high table on her own.
News came from Tarchna early in the new year; her brother had become lucumo. That was the message; a single line in a letter, the bare fact, but she knew that beneath it, the political allegiances and priorities of Tarchna were shifting, like a winter pond cracking and shifting deep below the ice. She would need someone she trusted there, someone who could balance on the unstable surface and nudge Tarchna's policies towards Rome.
It was Egerius who suggested it. He'd never been quite at home in Tarchna, but he was interested in its politics, with the forensic detachment of an outsider. Veii, he said, was playing for influence, and so was Cisra; but Cisra, of course, had a long history of rivalry to overcome, and its Roman trade through Pyrgi was hurting the Graviscan seatrade of Tarchna. There would need to be some adjustment made there; Rome might, indeed, take a part in that adjustment itself, in order to sideline Veii and its northern allies.
For a moment, Tanaquil considered returning to Tarchna herself, for the first time in so many years.
“You can't go,” Egerius said.
“Why on earth not?” she flared, unused to contradiction.
“You're too committed. You have family interests; so does Tarquinius.”
“You go, then.” Her anger still flamed icy within her.
“I have family, too.”
“Half a family.”
“Enough of a tie to make me seem biased.”
Her jaw tightened. He was right, of course; even though he'd never known his grandfather, he was tied into the bonds of the house of Demaratos, as she was to the royal house, and neither of them could stand apart from the twisted currents of Tarquinian politics.
“I don't think you can send any Etruscan,” Egerius said. “No Etruscan can stand apart from the affairs of the Confederacy.”
“Even a priestess?” she asked, thinking of Thanusa at the shrine of Menrva.
“Even a priestess is bound to her own city,” he said. “We have to send a Roman. A Roman not of Etruscan blood. Manius, for instance.”
She nodded, and kept nodding, like a cat pushing its head forwards and backwards as it sniffs at the air, thinking. Manius. He had clean hands, no affiliation to any Etruscan city or tribe. Still, so did others; and she didn't want to lose him, even if it was only her own vanity that made her keep him close.
“That might work,” she said. “But Tarquinius doesn't trust him.”
Egerius stuck his tongue in his cheek, the way he always did when he was thinking, and squinted down at the floor.
“Manius knows that,” he said, not meeting her eyes. “He said something about it to me when we were working on the saltings.”
“Yes. Tarquinius complained the two of you were as close as a conspiracy.”
“No conspiracy.” Egerius laughed humourlessly. “Manius said Tarquinius thought he was behind the sabotage on the Tiber bridge.”
“Stupid,” she said. “So he tried to get Manius to sabotage the saltings?”
“Not as stupid as that.”
“I'm glad to hear it. I don't like to think I married an idiot.”
They were silent for a while. She thought, the trouble was that Tarquinius would never give Manius a chance to either damn himself, or clear himself; he'd always keep too close an eye on him. And then she thought, why not use that as the reason to give Tarquinius for sending Manius to Tarchna?
That evening, she made sure Tarquinius had drunk a couple of cups of Faliscan wine, warmed, with spice; just two cups, to warm him gently; she didn't want him fuddled or belligerent. Once, she'd have trusted in her unaided powers; and once, he would have trusted her political instincts; but they'd grown apart, somewhere in the past few years, and she needed the alliance of Fufluns, the unbalanced god of the madman and the drunkard.
“I've been thinking,” she said.
Tarquinius groaned. Maybe that had been the wrong opening; he'd been alerted already.
“We need someone in Tarchna.”
“You've got your brother.”
“Of course; but we need someone to look after the interests of Rome.”
“Won't he do it?”
She wanted to shake him; stupid, lazy thinking. Pushing down her frustration, she laid a hand on his and said lightly, “Cisra's bribing him; Veii's taken gifts. Everyone has an ambassador there, except us.”
“Well, he's your brother. You look after him.”
She shook her head, trying to look sad rather than angry. “I'd love to go. Believe me, Tarquinius, I'd love to see Tarchna again. But it won't work. The other families will never have it. You know what they're like.”
“Yes, and you're married to a half-caste. Poor Tanaquil,” he said nastily.
“Quite. I've got dirty hands, as far as they're concerned.” Her voice was crisp, too sharp in her own ears. She lowered it, made it more breathy. “We need to send someone quite unconnected with Etruria.”
“Send fucking Faustus then!” he said, pushing her away from him. “He's unconnected with anything that matters.”
“Oh, I'd love to get him out of the way. But I think he'd only upset them, with his Roman ways.”
“Who, then?”
“Why not Manius?”
“I don't trust him. I never have trusted him, since that bridge business.”
“I know.”
“So why send a man I can't trust?”
“Precisely because you don't trust him.”
Tarquinius turned to her. Shocked and disbelieving, he shook his head once, hard.
“He won't show his hand in Rome. But in Tarchna, if he really can't be trusted, we'll find it out. Don't forget, I have my brother; we have our contacts. We'll know what he's doing before he can do any damage. And if Manius behaves himself, we'll know that we can trust him.”
Tarquinius shook his head again, this time slowly, but said nothing. She filled his wine cup again.
“Did you like the cheesecakes at the feast?” she asked.
“The ones with the red berry sauce?”
“Yes. We had some dried berries left; I thought they'd make a good sauce, with a little honey. Tart, to offset the creaminess of the cheese.”
“They were good. Any left?” His face was greedy; his cheeks were fatter than they had been when she first knew him, and beginning to show the red crazing of broken veins.
/> “There might be.” She snapped her fingers, to bring one of the women. Of course there were a few cakes left; she knew how to manage Tarquinius after all these years, and if it was food now more often than sex, she still knew how to get what she wanted.