Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby

  ***

  The Curia was half full today, and that was more than usual; there was enough room on the benches for those who had come to spread out or even sprawl. Three men in the corner were playing knucklebones while they waited; another was giving instructions to a servant, or perhaps a son, in an urgent whisper. It felt as if those with anything useful to do were doing it elsewhere; here only timewasters, the toothless or shiftless, men at a loose end, congregated.

  Towards noon, though, the benches started to fill up. A stern, jowly man whose clothes were edged in purple strode straight to the centre of a front bench and sat, rigidly straight; but his eyes moved from one end of the Curia to the other, as if he were memorising every face, enumerating those attending. Three younger men arrived, pinkly clean from the bath, squabbling over some news or other.

  At the back a scarred veteran had arrived with a swarthy looking friend, both of them muscled and tense, real fighters. There was a new sense of expectation; one of the knucklebones players went over and asked the man with the scar what was up, and was told, curtly, that Servius was going to be saying something.

  "He'll be here, then?" the knucklebones player persisted.

  "Bit difficult for him to say anything if he isn't."

  Rumours started. Servius was expanding the plebiscite again. Servius was allying Rome with the Greeks. Servius was doing a deal with the Phoenicians. Servius was demoting Tarquin. Servius was promoting him.

  "A Greek alliance? Balls. Tarquinius, now, he was half a Greek, he might have done that kind of thing; but Servius is up-country Etruscan, he doesn't understand Greeks, and he won't trust them as far as he can throw them."

  "Ach, it's probably nothing after all, probably some monument commemorating another hero of the assault on Veii."

  "Some bugger stupid enough to have stabbed himself with his own spear, like Maximus?"

  "Oh shut up," said a tetchy voice which presumably belonged to the said Maximus.

  It's odd how quiet spreads, like when a cloud drifts across the sun and the darkness moves across the landscape, hills that a moment ago blazed with gorse and light turning grey and lifeless. No one could say when it started, but suddenly the Curia was silent, waiting, everyone looking at everyone else; then the lictors came, and behind them, Servius.

  He walked to the chair set for him at the other end of the house, turned, and sat, turning his head slowly to view his audience from one side of the house to the other. He set his hands on the ends of the chair's arms and drummed his fingers three times, and sat back a little before he spoke.

  "None of you," he said, "will be unaware that under Tarquinius, and under myself, Rome has pursued the policy of taking individual cities, undefended cities. Like a carrion crow, we've pecked out the eyes of those that were already foundering. We've brought the Latin cities under our rule, and a few Etruscan ones.

  "But the Etruscans are waking up. They've seen how we divide in order to rule.

  "You all recognise the fasces that the lictors carry. An axe in a bundle of sticks. Some say the axe is tied in the bundle to make it harmless. Others that the axe is destruction and the sticks are creation, bound together as they have been since the gods first came to be."

  One or two of the older men were nodding wisely at this. Time to wake them up.

  "Ah, balls to all that. Anyone ever broken an axe when they were chopping wood? What breaks? The head or the handle?

  "And I remember the first time I broke a stick over someone's head. It didn't stop him; he kept on coming. Well, that's what daggers are for. I'm here today, as you see.

  "The fasces is strong because the axe handle and the sticks are bundled together, because they stay together. So far, the Etruscan League has been weak, every city for itself, every city betraying others and betrayed by them. But now they're learning. I have spies in Velzna.

  "You think I don't?"

  This to one of the knucklebones players who had incautiously whispered an opinion to his neighbour.

  "Or am I just boring you?"

  Knucklebones stuck his hands between his knees, and leant forward on them, looking down at the floor. Good, Servius thought. No one else wants to be handed out that treatment. It's sneaky and underhand and you have to be a bastard to pick on someone like that; but it works.

  "It may not happen this year. It may not happen next year. It might not happen while I'm alive, but I think it will. Tarchna wants to pull the League together, to pull all their armies into one, to set up against Rome. If that's possible. It isn't now. It might not be for some time. But it will be.

  "And when it happens, when Etruria comes against us, we will lose."

  Servius sat back. The Curia hissed with whispers. The lictors stood in a line across the back of the hall, unmoving.

  "So we attack Tarchna now."

  That set them off. He couldn't hear what they were shouting, only the rhythm and the mood and the sheer volume of it. Some of them had their blood up - there were always some who loved a war, any war, as long as it gave them a licence for hatred, or for pillage. But there was more opposition than he'd expected. Were they afraid? Or had they been worn out by his campaigns, and Tarquinius's?

  "Can't we stop?" one asked, and he shouted back: "We have started, we have to end it." And he truly did believe that if he tried to turn back now, he'd be overrun. (When had the Etruscans become so afraid of Rome that they began to plot its downfall?) The world must spin, must keep spinning, or everything would fall.

  He had to shout now, and he felt his throat raw with the effort. For a horrible moment he saw himself and knew he was becoming a caricature, a parody; all the time he'd led armies he had never shouted - they used to saw the quieter his voice, the more you had to fear - but now he was reduced to screaming like a trainer of dancing bears or an incompetent schoolmaster.

  "We must defend ourselves!" one man shouted.

  "Defence is defeat," he roared back; "We must keep going. We must keep fighting. The day we stop is the day we die."

  The doors of war stood open, and they could never close. In that moment he realised he had made the world his enemy; and there was only one thing to do with enemies.