Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby

  ***

  The crowd was dispersing, but the veiled woman was still watching. Tarquin wondered for a moment why she seemed so familiar; that erect bearing, that stillness. Then he realised, as he saw a curl of red hair that had fallen outside the veil, it was Tullia, Arruns' widow.

  He'd hardly seen her since his brother's death. Had she shut herself away? Perhaps not; he had to admit to himself that he'd been spending less and less time in the palace, finding Servius wearisomely patronising and his mother annoyingly inquisitive about how he spent his time.

  "Tullia?"

  She turned, and for a moment stood very still; then she lifted her veil, and he saw her face, and for a moment was disappointed. She was ugly; that nose, too much of a nose, as if she had been born sneering, and eyes that seemed to droop at the corners. And she was too tall, really, for her thin body. And yet, as soon as she looked at him, he felt that same fascination he'd felt when he first saw her, and felt himself hot and cold all over, as if a fever had crept into his bones.

  "Tarquinius," she said, her voice slightly over-projected, a little nasal. No one ever called him Tarquinius now; it was his father's name, not his. Yet her formality pleased him.

  "You came to see the Mamurius?"

  "I was out walking."

  No, he thought; you weren't. Women never went out without a reason. Or was she like Tanaquil, a law unto herself? Perhaps she was; there was that temper he'd seen, that Arruns hadn't known what to do with, that anger in her eyes. And he realised, at that moment, that this was the woman he should have had, not the other Tullia he'd been given; that she was not like any other woman - other men's wives whose beds he'd crept into, the whores he'd had with Kalisthenes and the others (that one he'd fucked at the same time as Kalisthenes: gods, that had been a night!), not even Aglaia – that she was a fire in his blood, a splinter under his skin, in short, that he loved her.

  "Oh, walking," he said. "I've been known to do that myself, when I can't find a horse."

  She laughed. "Idiot," she said, but she clearly was amused.

  "Walking. Anywhere in particular or just walking in general?"

  For a moment he thought he'd angered her; she frowned, and looked away from him. But then the cloud passed, and she smiled in an arch way, lowered her voice a little, and said, "Meeting a lover."

  "Really?"

  "Meeting you, anyway."

  He smiled, slowly, realising what she meant. That was fast, he thought. And now we're going to play games; parry and riposte, I-didnt-mean-it, but-you-did, skating around the edges of what was implied without ever making it explicit. It could take days. It could take weeks. But he knew, and she knew, where they were going. The joy was all in the game.

  "You're thinking that the joy is all in the game, aren't you?"

  That was uncanny. And with any other woman, he would have denied it. And any other woman would have believed that denial. But with Tullia he just smiled. And she answered her own thought:

  "It isn't, you know. That's only the beginning. The best games come later."