Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
***
It was only when young Fabia had left that she gave way to her temper. She hit her fists against the wall – knew she'd regret the bruise and the tenderness once her rage had cooled, but didn't care. She snatched up a bucchero cup and threw it at the wall. She'd regret that later too but right now she had to let out her rage or choke on it. She gulped air as if she were trying to drown herself with it, felt the heat of her anger burning the skin of her face and neck. The dregs of wine splashed a sprawling star on the wall. She took another cup and crushed it in her hands, and felt it slash her skin, wine dregs stinging. So thin, the bucchero, so delicate, so vulnerable when it looked so hard.
She couldn't do anything. Couldn't think, couldn't sleep, couldn't eat. Couldn't even cry, though breath racked her like sobs; her eyes were dry, burning. She was clenching her fists so tightly she felt a nerve in her knuckles jump. Fuck Tarquinius. Fuck him and his games and his fucking betrayal.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Rage in her head was as red as the wine stain. She was drunk on it, clumsy with it. She ripped a piece of bread again and again, into smaller and smaller pieces. The crust scratched and cut at her fingertips but still she kept tearing it till there were only crumbs. She shoved a handful into her mouth as though she wanted to choke herself, chewed them angrily, spat them out; she couldn't swallow. It was stale, anyway.
The worst of it was she'd known he wanted to move on Velx. She'd been sure of it, absolutely sure. And then he'd wrongfooted her, talking about a move on Velzna till she started believing it, and only when she was expecting him to move on Velzna did he pounce. Like a cat that wants to be sure you're looking the wrong way before it leaps up on the table and starts dragging the fish by the tail...
She kept picking away, repeating in her mind each council meeting, every word he'd said, every moment of the last two months; trying to work out just when it was she'd got it so badly wrong. But things blurred; or she'd remember one thing that he'd said, quite clearly, and repeat it aloud to herself, again and again, but she was unable to pin down just when it was that he'd said it, and whether, at the time, she'd believed it, or not. This was just picking at scabs; it would make things no better, but she kept doing it, till her mind was tired, her rage cooled.
She felt sick, the kind of empty nausea she got when she fasted too long; sick and dull. That was what came after anger; she scowled at herself. She should know better. Anger never helped. Everyone she'd known all her life had told her that, but that never helped, either.
She sat at the loom; she'd started weaving a new pattern, lozenges in blue and red and white, that when you looked at them made boxes, but boxes that shifted, depending on which colour you decided was the top, or the bottom. It was a fine illusion; not as fine as the gold threads that seemed to dance in Servius' tebenna, but she knew that was a pattern that belonged only to him, and she'd never weave it again.
She shot the shuttle through. White. White. Then blue. But her fingers were clumsy with the aftermath of rage; she couldn't get the tension right. She wove the first few threads too tight, and the fabric began to crinkle up, pulling out of true; and when she tried to correct it, she overcompensated and the weave went baggy, too loose to hold. No point persevering; she knew she'd only make it worse.
She sat, shuttle in hand, not weaving but thinking. Once or twice she tapped the shuttle on the beam of the loom, and her mouth twitched. The room began to darken; not quite evening yet, but the sun had started to decline, and the ray that had slanted across the floor had gone.
At last she heard footsteps; the councillors were leaving. One quick scurrying step; someone wanted to take the news out to the streets, or to their allies, to twist it or make use of it. She suspected those footsteps; too mouse-like, too confidential, too anxious not to make noise. Another set of footsteps, strolling, confident, relaxed. Someone wanted to convey a total lack of excitement or surprise; their steps said they had known everything that was being discussed, and they weren't surprised. Two went out together, talking; Manius was one, she thought, but she didn't recognise the other voice. Come to think of it, she wasn't certain that was Manius.
It was nearly dark by the time Tarquinius came in. She'd really thought her rage had cooled; the sight of him set it flaming again. That face she'd always thought too transparent, closed against her. She found what was nearest to hand, and threw it at him; missing him, it dug a chunk of plaster out of the wall and fell, the bronze gleaming dully in the red sunset glow.
"I thought that was your favourite mirror," he said.
"Bastard!"
His face was carefully blank. When had he learned to do that? she wondered. (Give him his due, he'd always been able to do it with anyone else; but not with her. Not with her.)
"You lied to me," she said. Only four words. Wanting to say more, afraid to.
"I lied?"
"You let me believe you were invading Velzna."
"What you believe, Tanaquil, is your own affair."
"You led me to believe it."
"I never had that intention. You have to stop thinking that everything done in the palace is done for your benefit. If you believed it... well, it was a bluff to keep Velx from arming against us. It was never directed at you."
"And you didn't see fit to inform me of your real plans?"
"I was sure you would inform yourself. You're usually well informed."
Which was true; but it didn't excuse him.
"But you signed a pact with Velx. And broke it."
"Only so they wouldn't suspect my plans."
"A broken oath."
"That's politics."
"It's an oath broken, whatever clever Greek words you use to disguise it."
"And oaths are sacred. I know, I know."
He never used to be so dismissive. Boundaries, oaths, the Hidden Ones and the Consenting; you couldn't have called him pious, but he'd always paid due respect. No more. She looked at his face and saw not the half-Greek, not the half-blood Etruscan, but only Roman; solid, unimaginative, running to fat, where she was sharp as ever, so sharp she'd cut herself as her mother had always said. Yet he held power, and power was what she'd always been interested in; only now, he seemed to be wandering further and further from her. Was that the nature of Tarquinius, or the nature of power, or was it simply, which she felt increasingly often, that Rome spoiled everything it touched? She'd loved him once; it seemed so long ago, he'd changed so much. All gone...
"Did Manius know?"
That would have hurt. Her trusted Manius, her pet sparrow on a string, sweet boy. (At his age, but she still thought; sweet boy.)
"Manius? No. he really did believe we were stalling for time."
"So did I."
Tarquinius smiled, but thinly, his face tight. "I thought you would have been better informed."
"Who by? Manius? Gaius wouldn't have told me anything. He was always your man."
At which Tarquinius grinned, like a dog before it attacks.
"That's why I like him."
"Now I see why you couldn't have sent Servius."
"I couldn't trust him. If he knew we were going to move against the Vipienas... he's been too much in their confidence. In their pocket."
"He would have told me."
"If he knew... he fucked Avle's wife, did you know?"
She stared him down, hoped he hadn't seen her eyes flicker upwards, a habit she'd never been able to break. "And Gaius?"
"Gaius did what he was told."
"Typical Roman."
"That's what will make Rome great. Or had you not noticed?"
She'd noticed. It didn't mean she had to approve.
"So tell me" – she was holding her temper back now. She wanted to learn how he'd done it. "You sent Gaius to Velzna with all his men. How did they get to Velx?"
"Simple bluff. I sent him to Velzna with Manius' detachment. His own men I sent up the coast road, through Tarchna. They holed up in a bend of the Fiore above Velx; with cl
She thought of Velx; the high cliffs, the river gorge, cold sparkle of water below, the city above.
"You don't just march on a city like that. How did they get in?"
"The enemy were slack, Gaius said. You know Velx?"
She nodded.
"River one side, land the other. They only guarded the land side. The river side, where the cliffs plunge down to the Fiore, they thought they didn't need to bother."
Slack. That was true. "They climbed?"
"The first twenty. Up the cliffs and in."
"No one heard?"
"Foxes. Chickens. Wolves. No one raised an alarm."
"And once they were in, they opened the gates?"
"No. Only one."
Sensible, she thought. Bring all your men through one gate, and leave the enemy nowhere to run. Push them back against their own gates, then let the slaughter begin.
"Manius will never trust you now," she said.
"It was the other way around. I can't trust him. I know he told you about the attack on Tarchna."
"Which never happened."
Tarquinius laughed. "Quite. But he told you, none the less."
"It might have been Servius."
"I don't think so."
"But it might have been. You trust him a damn sight too much."
Tarquinius' eyes were cold. She didn't push the issue. In fact, it had been Manius who told her; but she wouldn't give Tarquinius the benefit of knowing for sure. If he'd managed to keep her off balance, she'd return the favour; and anyway, it was to her advantage to let him think she wasn't backing Servius, just in case (typical man, typical Tarquinius, damn fool) he took her support of Servius as a motive for sidelining him. She was out of favour, she knew that. So was Servius, for the moment; but there was no point making that worse.
Servius was ambitious, of course. There was nothing wrong with that; it was what made him interesting. She wondered how many people knew he wanted the kingship. Tarquinius? Probably not. Manius: certainly not. Faustus; yes, he'd guessed it, she thought. But what Faustus couldn't know, and she did, was that Servius was marked by the gods and by the sacred fire; he would be king. She was sure of that, and she would make sure of that.
"I'm sending Arruns to deal with things," Tarquinius said.
There'd be a good number of things to deal with; plunder to send to Rome, to pay the army – always in arrears, so there always needed to be another conquest to pay for the last, borrowing against future bloodshed. A new government in Velx. Deciding which of Velx's rulers to proscribe, to execute, to pardon. Settling Romans there; taking over the local gods. And he was sending Arruns to do it. Once, he might have sent her.
"Anyway," he said, "that's that done." And left.
Leaving her still with the question; why had he stopped trusting her? Because she would have told Servius? Because of her links to Tarchna? Did he think she hadn't left it behind as completely as he had? And that other question; how was it she'd picked up nothing from her informers? How had he hidden his duplicity? Never, in all the time they'd been married, had he outsmarted her.
She sat there for a while, rocking gently, hugging herself for comfort, clinging to her silent misery.
Marriage broken. And history broken, too; the only other city that might have proved a true partner to Rome, another city that had embraced freedom, made away with caste and class and the pure blood. It might have been what she'd always hoped Rome would be, and what Rome had never become. A stillborn future. She'd never even dared to think what it could have become, and now, it was over before it had begun.
It was dark now. Someone had lit lamps in the atrium; the masks of the ancestors on their funeral urns glowed waxy pale like the faces of the dead. One had slipped where the excessive heat of some long past summer had partly melted the wax, so that one eye drooped and the mouth seemed slack. These were not her ancestors, buried under the floor of the house in Tarchna, but the ancestors of the kings of Rome – Ancus Marcius, Numa. One was so eroded, blackened with the dust of two centuries, that the features could hardly be made out; they said that was Numitor, Romulus' grandfather, the king of Alba Longa.
Now at last, suddenly missing Tarchna – the clean air, the light, the elegance, her hand on a warm stone, her grandmother's voice, her first cat nursing its kittens – she broke down, and wept, for all the futures never born, and all the yesterdays she would never see again.