Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby

  ***

  Rome

  They were taking the Vestal across the waste. They had dug the tomb already, and put in it the couch and the lamp, and the bread and wine, so that she might eat, and no one could say they'd put a dead woman into the ground.

  It was still half dark, the moon set and the sun not yet risen, and the mists thick. A dog howled somewhere. The landscape was unreadable; what looked like a stump of a bush might be the altar of a tomb, a dab of dirty white was a rock until it moved, a trail of dark might be a stream or a path or a shadow.

  There was the sound of feet, treading in unison. The litter was coming, slowly in the half dark, with no torches, soft-booted feet on the soft dust of the path. One lictor in front: the Vestal's entitlement. A few men behind. Postumus, bringing up the rear, out of step, dragging.

  One man watched them come, one man saw them arrive. His mattock on the ground in front of him.

  "No senior Vestal?" he asked. He kept his voice low.

  "She took it hard."

  The bearers set the litter down next to a dark cone. It smelt, here, of damp earth, of bare rock. Like a wine cellar. The kind of smell that made Postumus think of spiders.

  Fabia was motionless. She seemed not to realise they'd arrived. Her breath clouded in front of her in the cold air.

  The men waited in silence. Fabia was staring into the distance. (What could she see? Postumus wondered. Was she seeing her death, the hinthials holding their papery hands towards her? Or her life, now it was over?)

  The sky was beginning to lighten. The landscape of mystery was becoming a trivial, everyday wasteland; deep night waited to be brutalised and cheapened by the day. It was time, it was more than time. The lictor coughed, once, thickly.

  Fabia turned her head to look up at him. Her face held no expression. Without a word she rose, refusing his outstretched hand. She looked towards the darkness. He nodded.

  She pulled up her skirts to clear her feet. White, soft feet, and bare; all she was allowed to take with her was her simple white dress. The seven locks of her hair hung loose; they had taken the fillet that bound them and the veil that hid her head. She took a step towards the pit, wincing as her bare foot touched sharp stone.

  "A pity," said one of the litter bearers.

  "She knew the rules," answered another. "They all know the rules."

  She came to the edge of the pit. They had made steps for her, a strange form of pity, so that she needn't, at the last, climb down a ladder, or perhaps fall. She stood looking down into the darkness for a moment, so still, so quiet.

  Then suddenly she began to sob, huge sobs retched up from the depths, great gulps and moans; yet her body stayed still, only her head moving very slightly. There were tears on her face, snailtracks of dim light.

  The lictor approached. He looked into her eyes, but he would not touch her.

  "You must," he said, very gently, as if to a small child afraid of some dark passage.

  She sobbed again, and again, but each time a little less, and then she gave him a strange, fleeting smile, that was gone as soon as he saw it, like the froth left by the waves of the sea; and she went down into the dark.

  They worked quickly after that. Two of the bearers took the wooden board and threw it across the mouth of the pit; the noise was sudden and loud, and the men recoiled, then remembered what they were there to do, and stooped to ensure it was well in place, pushing one corner down where it had rested on a clod of earth, levelling the board roughly.

  "Has she lit the lamp?" one asked, but there was no answer, and there was no way to see.

  The lictor looked for the man who had waited for them. His mattock was in his hands now. Their eyes met. The lictor nodded.

  The hiss and spit of the blade in the earth. The spatter and bang of dirt and stones on the wood, a sounding board, a hollow sound. How much space was there under it? A whole room, a room with a couch, and a lamp, and a meal. A room for dying.

  And the thin line of red on the horizon.

  "Hurry up," Postumus said. "We've only got half the job done."

  "You'd know," said the lictor.

  No one loves an informer. No one loves an accuser; even less when it's a young girl who has to die. But Tanaquil had told him what had to be done, and he had done it, as he had done things before which she needed him to do.

  The easy part was over.

  There are worse deaths, Postumus thought, but not many. How much pain can a body take before it surrenders? How much flesh can you lay bare, how much blood can you spill, and a man still live? He flinched at the thought, but he could not stop thinking of it; how many times could you flog a man before he stopped screaming? Before he stopped feeling?

  The noise of shovelling had stopped. The newly turned earth showed as a damp stain on the land. In a few hours, it would have dried.

  Back in the temple of Vesta, an old woman wept.