Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby

  ***

  The House of the Vestals slumbered through the afternoon; Fabia had the curtains drawn against the glare, so that the hall was dim, and cooler than the air outside. A cat was rolling in the dust by the door, crooning to itself quietly.

  Tanaquil raised herself on one elbow; the couch had already become unpleasantly warm where she had been lying, and her dress, where she'd lain on it, felt slightly damp now it was exposed to the colder air.

  "They're only masks," she said.

  Fabia frowned. "They are the ancestors."

  Tanaquil sighed. This wasn't Tarchna, where her ancestors surrounded her everywhere. She'd seen her great-great-grandfather, seated on the great chair cut out of a single tree trunk, beneath the painted sky of his tomb, and made the libation to him the day she completed her first lustrum, as Spurinna children always did; every time she went out of the city, she passed the tumuli of her mother's family. Here, the ancestors were gone to sifted ash; they kept the masks, as they did in Tarchna, but that was all. Fabia saw a flat and colourless world where Tanaquil's was shot through with gods and ancestors and spirits and signs; Rome was a place where the roots had been cut away, where the past was incinerated daily and only the future seemed to matter. She'd loved this city for its possibilities, but now Tanaquil was seeing how much she had lost.

  "Well then, they're the ancestors, I'll admit that; but even so, Rome seems to me a very young city."

  "I've never known another," Fabia said. "So to me, it seems old, since I was a child here. I remember seeing the great Vestal Anna, when I was only three – long before I was chosen as Vestal – and she seemed as old as the Tarpeian rock, and as solid, a woman made of rock and iron. There was the Black Stone, and the great pit where the dead spirits lived, that we opened once a year, and the great scar of the Tarpeian Rock; mother used to threaten to throw me off it if I was bad. And there were old women, old even then, who said they could remember Numa, and told tales of the kings of Alba Longa, twenty generations of kings before Rome."

  "It's changing too fast."

  "Everything changes," Fabia said gently; "the river flows and takes us with it."

  "Not me," said Tanaquil; "the river can flood, and I'll still be the one swimming upstream," and she smiled a thin and mirthless smile.

  "I'm sorry. I'm getting too philosophical for you. It's a tendency in ageing Vestals."

  "I started it," Tanaquil said. "I suppose it's a tendency in ageing queens, as well. You get to a certain time in life when you begin to wonder where everything goes. Where everything went. I looked at Tarquin the other day and thought to myself; how did he get to be this splendid princeling, when I remember him grabbing at my legs to haul himself up, when he could hardly walk? Where did the years go, Fabia?"

  "It's not just where they went, is it? You're wondering whether it was worth it?"

  "Something like that."

  Fabia shook her head, but she was smiling. "Some of us, she said, have always wondered whether it's worth it. And you only just started. You were very sure for a very long time, Tanaquil."

  A jagged line of light flashed suddenly into the room as the curtains lifted, and a thin girl slipped through the fabric.

  "Mother," she said, and looked down shyly, "the goats have got in the garden again."

  "Well, chase them out of it!" Fabia said, and laughed.

  "I asked the youngest to."

  "That was a good thought. Did the goats eat anything?"

  "No, I caught them in time. Your flowers are safe."

  The older woman smiled, and the younger, too, for a moment; but it was a hesitant smile, that flickered and was gone, as if smiling was something not usually permitted.

  "I have to remember she isn't youngest any more," the senior vestal said. "And she has her studies to attend to. Well, so do we all; it never stops, for us."

  "What are you studying?"

  "Many things," the girl answered, "as Arkhilokhos says of the fox."

  Which, Tanaquil thought, Arkhilokhos hadn't meant as a recommendation, probably distrusting people who showed off their education in just the way the girl was doing now; but she smiled at the witticism, and asked for specifics, drawing Fabia out.

  "History; well, that is, the Greeks – and the Iliad, and the works and days. And then the stories of early Rome."

  "That's history, also."

  "Well, maybe not," the girl said. "Everyone thinks they know the stories, everyone thinks the stories are true, but when you look more closely, they unravel. Nothing is what you think it is. Aeneas lived in the time of Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus – so there must have been twenty, thirty generations of Alban kings, but their names are lost; and Romulus, they say, died in his sixth decade, and became a god, but the Sabines have a different story, that he was torn to pieces by the people. Already, in four generations, the truth has been forgotten. People forget."

  "People invent," Tanaquil said.

  "That too." The older Vestal sounded distant. "Tales that poets make up sound more true than the truth."

  "Now I see how old Rome is. Not just old enough to have a history; old enough to have falsified that history. How careless, though" – she spoke lightly, the hint of a smile on her lips – "how very careless to mislay your history in just four generations."

  "And useful things, too." The girl seemed eager to please, eager to distract Tanaquil from the subject of Roman history, or the lack of it. "Medicine, the healing plants, the poisons - some are both. Hemlock, for instance."

  "But that's a poison!"

  "Mainly, yes. But in very, very tiny quantities, we use it against pains in the joints."

  The older Fabia nodded. "I'm old enough to need that pain numbed occasionally, though it has to be a bad pain indeed for me to take the risk of hemlock."

  "You might tell me how you use it, then," Tanaquil said to the girl; "I'm as old as your mother. My joints ache too in the morning sometimes."

  They talked a little about plants, after that; the use of willow bark against inflammation, the culinary herbs, those that gave visions – "false visions," Tanaquil said, "and no prophecies" – the mushrooms, good and evil. Then the girl surprised her.

  "We study the markets, too," she said: "commerce, the trade with Greece and Great Greece, the prices of things, of slaves, of produce. Land and the price of land."

  "That's something new," the elder Vestal said, looking warmly at her protegé. "I started to consider that, but young Fabia has a gift for such studies."

  "I thought you lived apart from the city?"

  "We do. But you know we are the witnesses for Rome. We witness wills, we witness contracts. And so we see the values of farms, of properties, what people are importing and how they pay for it."

  "With what we know," the girl said, "we see how things are changing. The value of land, for instance; it's doubled as the city has grown, since my mother has been following it. And the trade in oil; every year more being brought in, from the south, from Greece."

  "And you don't use it?"

  "That's not our place," the older Fabia said.

  "You could build a temple bigger and far more splendid than Tinia's."

  "We could. But then..."

  Then, Tanaquil thought, everyone would realise just how much the Vestals knew. Not for the first time, she wondered whether she'd met her match in the older Fabia; a woman with as much cunning as the fox, but as single-minded as Arkhilokhus' hedgehog, the creature which knew not many things, but simply one.