***
It was strange, Tarquinius thought, how his reign was now defined by war. He thought of his successes; the saltings, the port of Ostia which was beginning to thrive, the creation of the neatly colonnaded lines of shops around the edges of the Forum. Rome was beginning to define itself; it looked like a town now, rather than a few scattered clusters of houses. High above, a slash of white on the Captoline Hill showed where he'd begun the foundations of a temple to Jupiter, massive blocks of stone being levered into place. Rome was becoming a civilised city; one he wouldn't have to apologise for when he received ambassadors.
But it was only war that people were interested in. The ambassador from Velzna hadn't been impressed by Tarquinius' plans for the Capitoline; he'd only wanted to probe his intentions as regards Tarchna, and the likelihood of a further thrust northwards by Rome once the Sabines were subdued. Tarquinius had no plans for Velzna - he had his hands full with the Sabine townships - but it wouldn't do to let that fat diplomat get too comfortable; he'd said that Tarchna would be interested in any overtures made by its rival, thrown out a slight suggestion of a pincer movement on Veii - knowing full well Velzna's dislike of the southern city - and then taken the ambassador to see the new Fourth division of Horse on an exercise. (He hadn't pointed out that its numbers had been swollen by riders seconded from the First and Second divisions; let the ambassador earn his keep by finding that out, if he could.)
What did he owe the Etruscans anyway? They'd thrown him out, in a luxurious way admittedly, with his vineyard and his chariot and his high-blooded wife, but they'd thrown him out; or rather, he thought, they'd never really let him in, not in any way that mattered. His mother was dead, his sisters married, one gone to Greece, another to one of the new northern cities; there was no one left in Tarchna he much cared about. And of all the Etruscans he had loved, there was only Tanaquil left now. Tanaquil who had advised him on this latest triumph.
"Impress the Romans," she'd said. "They don't know what a real triumph looks like."
"They fight well enough."
"Yes. But give them a proper triumph; chariots, a parade of the spoils, sacrifices, games, the playing of the aulos..."
"They'll call it an Etruscan innovation. You know them. Anything new, they hate it."
"Not this time. You've won them a war. Show them some Sabine armour piled up, throw a bit of silver around, they'll be eating out of your hands."
So he was holding an Etruscan triumph and an Etruscan games in order to inspire his Romans to fight against Etruscans. Because that would, inevitably, be the next step, once the Sabines had been conquered. Etruscan culture would be its own undoing. He wondered why Tanaquil couldn't see that.
There'd be boxing; sinewy Etruscan fighters, stocky Greeks, stinking of olive oil, their hands bound with strips of cloth or leather. Wrestling, too, at which the Greeks excelled, and the horse and chariot races which marked every turn of the year in Etruria, in which the nobles only would compete. (They used slave drivers now in Velzna and Curtun, he'd been told; the noble owners no longer risked their own necks. But he'd stick to the old traditions, for once; owners racing their own teams, taking all the risks themselves.)
But his mind kept coming back to how his rule had been defined by this war; and now there were calls for more wars, more conquests, fresh campaigns. He hadn't meant it to be like this; like Ancus Marcius, he'd wanted the port, the salt, ready wealth and ease, a civilised life. He'd built temples, paved the Forum, brought the games and the augurs to Rome; he and Tanaquil had brought Etruscan culture - fine weaving, the arts of the goldsmith and the bronzecaster, the elegance of a well turned line of poetry or the infinitely varied ornament of a piper's lament. But to defend the new city, he'd had to increase the size of the army; he'd had to extend the arm of the state. New laws were needed to trim excess, to ensure the success of his programme, to defend it from opponents. Somehow he'd become something other than what he'd intended, an enlightened ruler among his striving equals; Egerius said he'd become a basileus, a king, but turannos was as good a word, and perhaps more accurate. Tarquinius, tyrant of Rome, was not what he'd sought to become, but he had grown into the name as a fig tree grows into a crevice, and ends up twisted.
Even now he thought the Romans would call his bluff. They respected him, as far as Romans ever would respect a king; they were stubborn people, rebels by nature, like dogs never happy to obey unless you'd beaten them first to prove you were their master. There were rumours in Rome that his name had been Lucumo, that he had been a king in Tarchna, that divine fire had flamed around his head when first he came to Rome; and he did nothing to stop those rumours. Let them believe, if they wanted. But still he felt fraudulent, somehow; the half-caste boy pelted with mud still hid, trembling, under his purple mantle. He envied Tanaquil her ease, her confident assumption that she had been born to rule; Tarchna, if not Rome.
He woke often in the night now, which he never had before. He found his head swimming with words, Etruscan or Latin or Greek, which buzzed incessantly at him, stealing his sleeping hours from him. Eagle, battle, blood. Fire, conquest, love. Blood, love, blood. His thoughts whirled; a word mistook, an alliance left in the balance, a plan that hinged on another, and might fall apart, worried at him until he felt empty and bleached as a gnawed bone. Sometimes a sense of embarassment kept him awake, as when he once asked an ambassador a question he'd already answered, and he kept repeating the question to himself all night, he wasn't sure why.
When he did sleep, he fell straight into nightmares; not the kind that had you wake with a sudden lurch, your heart beating fast, but more insidious nightmares in which he wandered the streets of Rome with a companion, but when he turned, his companion had disappeared, and the streets were empty; or one in which he stood alone in a huge temple, lit only by a single brazier by which he stood, and which was dying, the darkness gathering in the corners of the great cella, and voices of dead cities whispering from the dark. He woke limp, his eyes baggy and a heavy ache on his brow that he could never quite shake off.
Tanaquil brought him a herb infusion some nights, when he'd given up turning in the bed and trying to sleep, and had got up to pace the room. He never asked what she put in it. It helped, sometimes.
"Why me?" he asked her one night, in the fearful stillness between late night and early morning, when the hours to go till dawn still seemed interminable. She turned, surprised.
"Why what?"
"Why me? Was I simply your escape route from Tarchna?"
Her eyes were cold. "Why would I want to escape? I could have ruled Tarchna. My father did."
"And your grandfather."
"For a while." She scowled; she never liked being reminded of her exiled grandfather. Political failure was not something she wanted to run in the family.
"But you wanted Rome."
"No. I wanted you."
He stopped, shook his head. She needn't lie so transparently. He didn't need to hear that.
"You were different. When the pure-blood Etruscans looked at me I could see in their eyes how they thought they could own me; I was something they deserved, something they were entitled to, like their chariots and their horses and their fine family tombs with the paintings of their horses and chariots and slaves. But you never seemed to feel that; you always treated me as if I were incredibly precious, as if you had to beg even to be allowed in my presence. It was heady stuff for a girl."
"I must have looked ... ingenuous... naïve..."
"Yes, you were sweet. And you were handsome."
Thankfully she didn't stress the past tense. He knew he'd got fat, and his thin frame didn't carry it well; he felt somehow less alive than he used to, with so much dead weight, and his muscles so loose on him. He couldn't remember when he'd last exercised; there was never time for it. There wasn't time for a lot of things now. He turned again, still pacing restlessly, putting a hand up to scratch the back of his neck where one of his hair ties had come undone. "Sweet and ha
ndsome. Sweet and handsome. Do you have any idea how trivial that makes me sound? Sweet and handsome."
"But it was more than that. You thought about things differently. You actually did think about things, and that was more than anyone else in Tarchna ever did. And you had an ambition that blazed in you."
"I did?" That did genuinely surprise him. His response seemed to surprise Tanaquil, too.
"Of course you did! I could see your bitterness, right from the first - that you weren't allowed to take your place in Tarchna. But you wanted so much; to know everything, to rule, to take everything the world could give you, or that you could take from it. That's what I loved."
"And you still do?"
"I still do."
He smiled at last. "For the same reasons?"
"Of course. You still want everything. Just... you seem so tired, sometimes."
"It's hard work running things here. So much opposition."
"You don't have to meet it head on."
"It meets me. Navius, for instance. I had no idea that was going to happen."
"That he was going to die?"
"No," he said. She raised an eyebrow at him. "I had no idea he was going to oppose my plans for the army."
"Ah," she said. "He was a strange one, that Navius. Touched by the gods, you might say. Touched, anyway."
"I can deal with the obvious suspects. Faustus, for instance. Give him a job to do, keep him happy, keep him occupied, keep his mind off the deeper meaning and the greater strategy. Let him think he's being efficient, when all the time he's working for me and against his own objectives. That, I can deal with. But when something like Navius happens, it shakes me; that a single accident, one man who's seen a vision or heard a voice in the night, could bring down everything I've been working for. Everything feels too precarious, too dangerous."
"Even so, having Navius killed was going too far."
"Perhaps."
"It was obvious."
"Like something Faustus would have done."
He couldn't answer that, but looked away, wondering, really, why he had done it. Navius had lost his credibility; he had no faction, no supporters. He was a distraction, not a threat. But he'd had him killed, anyway.
"Did you enjoy it?"
He couldn't work out the expression on her face; didn't know whether she wanted him to say yes or no. He'd got into the habit of not tolerating opposition, that was the way of it; and he'd not given a thought to the implication of that command.
"Well, did you?"
"No," he said. And he really believed it was true.