Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
***
It was a month of marriages, for now the two girls had been married off, Servius himself was to take Tarquinia as a wife. So Tarquinius' father-in-law became his brother-in-law; and some said that the slave who fucked the mother got the daughter, though no one dared say it to his face.
But this wedding would be private; there would be no great procession, no feast, no rites other than the simple saying of the words. There would be no ancestors to greet Tarquinia; only Servius himself.
Tanaquil ordered him to her rooms, two weeks before the wedding. Tarquinia still knew nothing about the arrangements; it wasn't necessary for her to know, Tanaquil had said. She'll do as she's told.
"Like a Roman girl?" Servius hadn't been able to resist asking. Tanaquil glared at him, then sighed.
"She's too much like a Roman, in some ways."
Tarquinia was weaving, under the peristyle at the back of the house. She seemed a blurred copy of her mother, as if all Tanaquil's sharp edges had been smeared blunt by a potter's finger; and she was sullen, too. Looking back at Tanaquil, he could see she was no threat to her mother, and yet something in that sullen mouth made him want to stop it with his own.
"I know what you're here for," Tarquinia said, as soon as her mother was gone.
"You do?" He was amused. He hadn't expected this forthrightness; it seemed she did take after her mother in more than just her looks.
"You're old." That was forthright. He shrugged.
"Not that I hold that against you. Better old than a brute."
"Who's the brute?"
"Who isn't?... well, Robur, anyway. He's a brute. I think they'd meant to marry me to him, before..."
Before his exile, she must have meant; before Robur had fled south, and declared his opposition to the new regime.
"And they say you'll be king," she said, flatly. He wondered for a moment if Tanaquil had set her daughter to spy on him; it wouldn't do to admit his ambition, even if Tanaquil seemed to assent to it, and he demurred – young Tarquinius and Arruns would share the rule...
"Why does everyone put them in that order?"
"What?"
"Tarquinius and Arruns. No one ever says Arruns and Tarquinius."
"Fair point. I don't know."
"But you're not from Rome, are you?"
Let her report back. He'd give her nothing to report.
"You had a wife before?"
"A concubine, yes."
"Oh." Her pout was rather sweet, he thought; in her mother, it turned to temper, and in her, to cuteness. "What happened to her?"
"Happened? Nothing."
"Then..."
"She's still my concubine. In Velx. Where I haven't been... for a long while now."
"Oh."
She sat still then, like her mother unafraid of the long silence that draws confidences out. But he'd had that treatment before. He shrugged, and stretched his legs out, yawning a little.
"You'll be my wife. First wife I've had."
"Not the first woman, though."
"No," he said carefully, unwilling to go into precise detail. "Not the first woman."
"Good." She smiled quickly, the kind of reassuring smile you give a small child afraid of the dark. "You know what you're doing, then. I'd hate to have to lose it to another virgin. The fumbling, the clumsiness. What a humiliation that would be."
Tanaquil
The visions had left Tanaquil alone. No more eagles, no more auguries, no more ghosts or trailing mists of oracle; no dreams to disturb her sleep, or at least, nothing more than the ordinary drunken thoughts of something forgotten or left undone, which woke her worried and tense. Those were common dreams, nothing portentous about them; they could be forgotten as soon as sunlight and fresh air had dispelled their miasma, didn't need the patient attempt to recollect and untangle that god-sent dreams always did.
People who didn't know often thought you became more likely to experience the gods as you grew older. Well, that was partly true; she still remembered old Thanchvil, for whom she'd been named, a woman worn paper-thin by time till her skin was transparent, fine, her hair spun like gossamer, her voice a thread of whisper. They said old Thanchvil had lived past her lustrum, the allotted time of any human; she was ageless, no longer part of the world, a sort of living ghost. And old Thanchvil had seen things; packs of wolves ravaging the Etruscan cities; the ghosts of past Spurinnas walking the moonlit streets; Tanaquil crowned and resplendent; Tanaquil with her hands bloody. She could still feel old Thanchvil's talons clamped around her forearm, the old woman's hissing breath on her wrist.
But few ever got to be that old. For most, as they aged, the visions dispersed like mist. It was the withdrawal of a privilege; but it was also a relief. So it seemed to be for Tanaquil.
She bloomed, as roses do in a late summer. Servius might have had something to do with that; he was always around, now he was married to young Tarquinia. The girl had been a disappointment – insipid, truculent, with not the slightest touch of the augur's knowledge in her blood – but she'd been useful, at least, in securing Servius' loyalty. Tanaquil found herself less annoyed by the girl, now she'd been useful; even loved her, a little, though nothing like the way she loved her dutiful Arruns or wild Tarquinius.
She loved Servius as a son. At least, she told herself so. He was, what, fifteen years younger than she was? (Looked like ten, but then, he'd lived the hard soldier's life. He was wiry, rough, hardened, where most Etruscan nobles were slender, fluid. So, she thought, he wasn't as old as he looked. Or as old as he sometimes sounded.) At last Tarquinius had accepted him into the family, now he had married their daughter; and, of course, now both the sons were married to Servius' daughters.
She'd never have let her father marry her off, the way these girls had been married off. But then, she was Tanaquil; none of those three girls had her character, though she'd noticed the red-haired Tullia had the occasional flash of fire. You couldn't defend their rights if they wouldn't defend them, after all. And it was convenient to bring the families together. Now it only remained to get Tarquinius to adopt Servius as his son and successor, on the understanding that the crown would revert to Arruns or Tarquinius later.
She remembered, sometimes, the men she'd known in Tarchna. She was proud she'd picked Tarquinius; he'd justified her faith in him, he was a king now, and a good one. Rome was growing, by conquest and by trade; she dreamt of the day it would join the Etruscan League, though that might not be in her lifetime. People would look back, under the rule of her son Tarquinius perhaps, or of Arruns, and know it was Tarquinius the Elder and Tanaquil who had laid the foundations of this new, great, Etruscan city. Already, it had grown, and as it grew, took on form and poise; from a rough scattering of settlements to a city dominated by the fine temples of the Capitol, whose streets ran straight in accordance with the cardinal points, whose buildings were fine, whose gardens fertile and abundant. And under the surface, all the Etruscan water-channels and drainage and wells and cisterns, all the subterranean web of infrastructure that regulated and distributed its life.
Tarquinius. Not her first, not surely her last, but her greatest love. Now, with the serenity of middle age, she could look back; remembering, for a moment, Arnth, with his thin face and thin fingers. Arnth who had known just how to use those elegant fingers. Arnth the lyre player. Arnth the tweaker of nipples. Arnth whose voice was breathy and low; after all these years she could still hear the way his voice would suddenly lose all depth, all projection, dipping to a hushed murmur that was really only a sigh in disguise, and it still made her flesh prickle. She wondered sometimes what life would haver been like with Arnth, if she'd given in to him, if she'd married him and lived with him in Tarchna, which she must now call Tarquinia in thin, whining Latin language. Arnth had never had Tanaquil's ambition; but he was noble through and through, bright with his heritage like a golden statue, everything he did fine and elegant and right. He'd not have run to fat like Tarquinius.
She d