Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Amazingly, Tullia got on with Aglaia. And she brought Elissa with her to Aglaia's house – a friend of Tanaquil's, which is how Tullia had got to know her, and a friend of one of Aglaia's friends. Tarquin had never thought those two worlds, the palace and the brothel, had any point of connection; but now he found these women had their own society, a complex weave of threads that ran through Rome, over and under and beside the world of men. He wondered how he had been so blind to it.

  People talked, of course. Aglaia's house was no place for a decent woman, in Roman terms; but Tullia's position meant she could do as she pleased. She answered only to Tanaquil. And though Aglaia kept doing the same business, the oldest business, as they said, there was never any sign of it when Tullia was there. Aglaia's girls were called on only to serve wine, and sometimes by Kallisthenes, who tended to excuse himself half way through the evening, when the talk got more interesting, or, as he'd said more than once, more dangerous.

  Strephon came less regularly, Sethre more often; Sethre seemed to have formed some kind of alliance with Elissa, despite the difference in their ages and races. Tarquin found himself wondering how they would look together, dark skin against pale; perhaps he should tell Tullia, one day, once they were lovers, or perhaps before. He wondered what she was waiting for; for all her talk, she'd still managed to avoid more than a few snatched kisses, or his lazy caress of her bare arm when she sat close.

  They talked. Gossip: who was betraying whom, who had called Servius the Drumstick General, whether the Tarchna team that was currently sweeping up all the prizes could win at Velzna, too. Strephon had the most informed gossip; but Tullia kept her eyes and ears open, and sometimes surprised him with the things she'd noticed. Postumus, for instance, his mother's little rat, was talking to Servius, the little traitor; and a Greek exile who had arrived in Rome recently was claiming to have been Robur's lover while he was in Capua. Art: the new style of vase painting from Athens, Vulca's new commission for Velzna, a bronze-caster who had arrived from Arretium with a bronze wolf he'd made, the latest marvel. And they talked about the gods; when Strephon was there, he sometimes remoulded the myths into cynical stories of an Olympus where every god was cheating all the others, and all of them were caricatures of greed, or lust, or pomposity. Sometimes Thesanthei would tell tales of the spirits of wood and field and marsh from the Etruscan north, unpredictable spirits that might kill, might cure, might help, might simply lead a man astray in the marsh for their amusement. Other times, Kallisthenes or perhaps Mamarke took them in a more philosophical direction; what the world was made of, how the gods had come to be, how augury worked, and indeed, whether it did work.

  Of course Kallisthenes was interested in the dance of the Salii and the hunted Mamurius; in Greece they had the pharmakos, who was royally treated for a day, and then exiled, taking the city's evil fortune with him.

  "Just exiled?" Mamarke had asked, and Kallisthenes had to admit that wasn't always the case; the Greeks were civilised, but their gods were not, and sometimes they had to comply with the will of the gods. Or sometimes they used the will of the gods as their excuse, believe what you liked. He'd seen the pharmakos thrown off a cliff in one of the islands, he said; the man flailed his arms as if he was trying to fly, but he never cried out.

  "And you, Tarquin," he said; "do you really believe in the blood ritual?"

  "I do it."

  "You believe it?"

  Tarquin shrugged. "Other people do."

  "Meaning?"

  "If they believe it, it keeps them happy. They're happy, they're less likely to stir up trouble. So it works, whether I believe it or not."

  "Just like the gods." Kallisthenes was triumphant. "The gods we made for ourselves, that justify any number of sins, as Strephon is always reminding us."

  "That explains your love life?" Aglaia asked. "You're trying to keep up with Zeus?"

  "I was thinking of the Iliad, actually. Sacrificing your daughter. Dragging corpses in the mud. Killing and enslaving an entire city. You're in the clear, as long as Zeus told you to. Or Hera. Or Apollo, or whoever."

  "I think you'll find," Mamarke said coolly, "that the gods had a punishment in view for Agamemnon."

  "It's not all bloodshed, though," said Tarquin. "Aglaia's right about Zeus. Shagging women, boys, sheep, bulls, swans."

  "Actually," said Mamarke, "he was the bull."

  Tarquin shrugged. "Those gods shagged anything."

  "Whereas you would draw the line where, exactly?" Tullia asked.

  That caused a fair amount of laughter, as she must have known it would, though her face was severe.

  But Thesanthei's face was serious. "You 'aven't really thought it through," he said, obviously suggesting that thinking it through was exactly what he had been doing for the last ten minutes. "All those Greek myths about curses. Nasty deaths, blindings, blood in the bathroom."

  "What does it matter, as long as it keeps people behaving themselves?"

  "And paying their taxes," Tarquin added.

  "On which you live."

  He winced, and twisted his face up, but he didn't deny Tullia's assertion.

  And he wondered: what did he really think about the gods? Thesanthei's words had struck something in him that had long been submerged, that surfaced sometimes in dreams; a Vanth waiting, her face putrescent green, in a room at night, sometimes lit by the fitful flicker of sheet lightning, and then plunged into darkness, so that his eyes seemed to retain a ghost image shining against the black. Seeing his own hands gleaming wet as the lightning flashed again, and he knew it was blood. The gods were a fiction, he was sure, tales told to children, but still he was afraid of that recurring nightmare.

  And he wondered now, as he hadn't at the time, about that last panicked flight of the Mamurius. Had he really thought he could get away? Or had he just run instinctively, as cornered animals do, like a mouse that had got into Tarquin's room once and that had kept running the length of the wall, from one corner to the other, till his father hit it with the broom and broke its back?

  "You know the Sabines have dancing gods?" Tullia said. Typical of her to know odd things like that. "Their gods danced the world into being, and they'll dance the world out of it. And everything in our world is part of the gods' dance."

  "Oh, nice," said Sethre. "That's almost poetry."

  "It's only poetry," said Tarquin.

  "Even so."

  "Dancing gods or shagging gods," he said. "What a choice."

  Yet as he said it, he slid his right thumb between two fingers of his right hand, making the fig-sign to keep the waiting demons away. Vanth was waiting for him, waiting for them all, if only in dreams.

  "Your mother is a great believer in augury," Kallisthenes said. "And yet you don't believe?"

  "It works for her," Tullia said cattily.

  "You mean it works for some people, and not for others?"

  "She never foretells anything that doesn't serve her purpose."

  "You mean she makes them up?"

  "Well," Tullia said, and bit her top lip for a moment, while she thought. "Maybe she does. Or maybe the prophecies that she doesn't like, she doesn't tell."

  "Maybe I should know more about prophecy," Tarquin said, and they all laughed. But he felt something deep calling to his blood. Then he looked at Tullia, and felt the same lurch in his heart, and forgot about prophecy and gods and demons.