Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
***
Yet another banquet. Life in Velzna was turning into a round of suppers, each more luxurious than the last, the days only vacant spaces of waiting till the next banquet, which were filled with desultory and meaningless activity, so that life only seemed to begin once the sun was already declining, and the lighting of the lamps was the signal for the beginning of the real business of the day.
There was too much food, claiming too much attention. Too many different birds; larks, perhaps, or thrushes, very small, with purplish grey meat, and some kind of game bird with rich dark-fleshed thighs, and geese dripping with fat, pheasants that would have been dry if they had not been wrapped in lard before roasting, and duck breasts stewed with honey and vinegar. And fish, speckle-scaled, pink-fleshed trout, and a kind of carp that tasted of nothing so much as mud, but everyone thought was some kind of treat, almost as if the more disgusting a food tasted, the greater the connoisseurship of those who ate it; little dumplings stuffed with bland pike, and chunks of eel in highly spiced stew. That was without counting the different cuts of pork, of beef, of tender veal or mutton richly spiced and cooked long in clay to disguise its toughness, the venison, the hares and boars and rabbits, and then the cakes, the thick wheat or lentil stews, the soft messes of onions or leeks and roasted roots, the dried and candied and pickled fruits of last year, so that you kept eating, and kept on eating, beyond fulness, till eventually you felt surfeited and sick; it was a heaven for the gourmet and a kind of hell reserved for the glutton, Tarquin thought, only Thresu, clearly, did not feel that way.
Then there was the chitter-chatter, which more and more came to resemble a posturing game, in which one made a statement not in order to assert any meaning, but simply in order to prove one's superior intelligence or taste. It was like watching roosters strutting; and he thought angrily, I'm a fighting cock, I should be fighting. This was not the great game he thought it was, in which the fates of nations were made; it was just a fight between self-discipline and gluttony, that Thresu had already lost. For Tarquin, these days of disillusion were made bearable only by his game with himself, to pursue Arathia without pursuing her, to come as close as he could to touching her without ever openly doing so; and that, gods knew, was a poor game, compared to the thrill of the chase he'd enjoyed in the old days in Rome.
And yet, and yet; even though he was stuffed full of banquets, even though he was beginning to tire of doing nothing, he kept seeing flashes of what life could be, in a city that wasn't run by outlaws, that wasn't poor, and striving, that wasn't Rome. There was the time when Thresu said, looking at yet another sumptuously laid table, "Noble life is the availability of good things," and Arathenas (right, though obnoxiously self-righteous), looking at the four trails of scab down Thresu's cheek, disagreed: "Nobility," he said, "is knowing how to use retraint when all good things are made too much available."
Then there was that conversation, after the formal dinner had broken up, and some of them were playing kottabos battleships, trying to sink floating saucers in a fountain by throwing the dregs of wine from their wine cups at them - success demanded a neat overarm throw, so that the wine flew in a dense, tight stream to its target - and a few people had wandered outside in a warmer than usual night for the Tuscan spring, into the gardens where the darkness afforded privacy, and that unmistakable moan of ecstasy came from somewhere out in the darkness, and someone, he couldn't remember who, had asked: "Are things the same in Rome as they are here, between men and women?"
"Not exactly," Tarquin said.
"A Roman would feel he owned you," Tullia said.
"It's only slaves you own!" Arathia said, shocked.
"I don't belong to anyone," said a woman with a viciously reddened mouth and too much nose, who had just destroyed one of the kottabos 'ships' with a ferociously accurate throw. "Certainly not to Larth."
There was some laughter at that, and an easy-going older man, who must have been Larth, said "That's true enough. I've lost count of the boys she's brought home. But they never stay long. Funny, that."
That got more laughter, and a scowl from his wife, till he took her hand and swung it in his, and grinned, and said, "Probably because they lose to her at kottabos."
Thresu passed them, on his way out.
"Never trust a Roman," he said; "they want to own everything. Not just the women."
Tarquin had been a stranger to shame all his life; now it clamped its constricting hand on his heart. He'd always felt Etruscan; but his own people rejected him.
"Well of course," he said, and felt his heart beating too fast and his voice trembling, "Romans need to be educated."
And even so, he felt inspired by this society, in which a woman could be on easy terms with her husband, in which the joy-denying ordinances of old Rome had no place.
It was shortly after that evening that they met Lars Porsena, in the house of the Velianas, one of the ruling families of Cisra. He was talking to Arathenas and Thresu when Tarquin met him, and jerked his head up slightly, and said "Lars" - no family name, no name of father or mother - in his clipped, laconic way, and then turned back to Arathenas and continued his conversation.
"No knowledge is ever wasted," he said.
"Really?" Arathenas raised an eyebrow with a movement that never got quite as far as becoming a shrug, suggesting that knowledge, like so many other things, was just too much effort.
"Of course," Lars said, "that's not quite true. Is it?"
Tarquin began to laugh. That was a stupid way to make conversation; state a fact, then contradict yourself. But Lars simply put his head on one side for a moment; his tongue crept out and licked his top lip, and then he took up the theme again, almost as if he was talking to himself.
"Nine out of ten pieces of information probably are a waste. Truth told. You'll never need them. The tenth thing you know will save your life. Trouble is, you can never tell which is which."
"Well that's true enough," Thresu cut in, with a wide grin. "There was a man up Suana way – well, you know what they're like in the back country – who knew all sorts of odd things, like how to dry fish skin, and all kinds of old stories, and what horses were scared of, and how mares got pregnant by the wind."
"That's a load of shit," Tarquin said rudely.
"Of course it is. But that's what he believed. Can't say his horses were ever particularly distinguished in the races, so he'd have been better off getting them served by a decent stallion like everyone else. Anyway... where was I?"
He broke off to pick a stuffed prune from a youth who was passing with a platter, and gnawed on it speculatively.
"Oh yes," he said, his mouth still half full, "that old chap in Suana. Well, he came across a story that there was a hidden treasure somewhere up the Fiore. One of those stories you hear, and think it's probably all imagination anyway, and forget as soon as you've heard it. But he didn't. He thought about it, and asked Phoenicians about the rocks in their country, and started splitting rocks and looking at them, and then a few months later off he set, and found a dried up waterfall, and flakes of gold in the dust. Tiny sparkling flakes, no bigger than a white speck on your fingernail, but gold all the same. He collected up the dust, and had the gold melted out, and made himself rich."
"Rich beyond the dreams of avarice!" Tullia said.
"Not exactly. But he could have afforded to get better horses."
"So why isn't everyone headed up the Fiore?" Tarquin asked.
"Oh, this fellow went back a year later, with a few men he'd recruited, and they started digging for the gold a bit further up river. But they never found anything. And now in Suana, if they want to tell you you're an idiot, they ask if you're related to Arnza Achu."
"In the far east," Lars said, "near the Inhospitable Sea, they put fleeces in the river to catch the gold."
"Nice story."
Lars looked levelly at Thresu. "As good as yours."
"As good as mine! As good as mine!" Thresu cackled, slapped Lars on the
That was when Tarquin realised he was talking to the fourth son of the king of Clevsin. Lars was a soft man, short rather than tall, of middling build; he was in almost every way quite unmemorable, but his deep brown eyes, extravagantly lashed, like a cow's, were startling.
Tullia said afterwards, "He's smarter than he looks."
"He'd better be smarter than he sounds, as well."
"I bet we'll find Clevsin getting richer, and no one will know where it all comes from, but it'll be somewhere up the Fiore."
Tarquin grunted. Another of Tullia's infatuations, he thought. "He's a fourth son, anyway. No chance of him inheriting."
"I don't know," she said; "it doesn't always go to the oldest, nor to a son, nor in the male line. And you were a younger son, after all."
"You like it here, don't you?" he asked - anything to change the subject.
"I do," she said. "And not for the reasons you think."
"Which are?"
"Teitu, and Lars, and Arathenas, for three."
He scowled.
"I just told you they are not the reason. Aplu's balls, you're hard to love sometimes, Tarquin. I like... the freedom. The air. Here I can go to banquets, I can feast, I can play kottabos."
"Badly."
"Fair enough. I can lose at kottabos. They were my earrings, not yours, anyway. And in Rome? In Rome I can sit in a room spinning. Or weaving. Or weeping."
"Or you can come to Aglaia's with me."
"And nowhere else. No, I like it here."
She wanted to stay, he thought; but there was no question of staying. Another week, another month; but later or sooner, they must leave Velzna. If only, he thought; if only he had been accepted as the Etruscan he was, not the half-barbarous Roman ogre that naughty children were warned about; if only he had any prospect of getting his own wealth here, but however indulgent Seianti and her husband were, their welcome for him would eventually run out, and everything he had was his mother's, or his father's, and was tied up in Rome; if only he was achieving anything here, if only he had a purpose here. And even so, to be free of the greyness of Rome...
"I have to go back to Rome."
"Why not stay here?" Tullia's lower lip stuck out, a sign she was beginning to sulk already at his lack of compliance with her wishes. That was a dire warning; from sulking it was never far to fighting.
"I have my horsemen. I have my friends. I can't afford to lose my place in Rome. Not like you; you have nothing to lose..."
"You'd go back without me?"
"Only for a time. We'll be together, Tullia, that I can promise you, but there are things I have to do."
"You're in danger as long as my father lives."
"A prince is always in danger. It's like swimming in a river in flood; there are always dangerous currents. Whirlpools and riptides."
"You'll spend your entire life waiting, Tarquin. Waiting and wondering and trying to work out the rules of the game."
"And if I stay here, I'll just be waiting somewhere else."
"You could make yourself a prince here. Work with Teitu. Or go to Clevsin with Porsena; he's hungry."
"He's weird."
"Wouldn't you rather be a prince in Etruria than a king in Rome?"
Of course he would, of course. But Etruria could not last. Rome was too big and too greedy; Servius would choke all the cities one by one. Tarquin could live as a prince here, but in the end, he'd be an exile, driven from city to city by the fortunes of war. Like Robur, he thought, and formed the hand Tullia couldn't see into the sign of the forked man. "Have patience," he said.
"Patience," she said disgustedly. "I want to live."