Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
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Even if Tanaquil couldn't attend the dinner, she still had to make the arrangements for the food and service. A pig had to be procured, brought to the house and slaughtered; a couple of extra male servants borrowed from one of the other Etruscan households, to replace the women who could not serve on this occasion; and the whole house decorated with laurel, ever green, and the few flowers that could found in the dreary Roman spring.
The pig had already been quartered in one of the little rooms off a yard at the back of the house, where normally the sacks of grain were stored, and the horse harness hung on the walls. Its eyes gleamed in the darkness with hot malevolence. It seemed a concentrated bulk of male power, a threat. She found herself fascinated and repelled; somehow she seemed to find herself passing that room again and again, and every time, she would look into it, and see its eyes glaring at her.
She'd never had to kill a pig in Tarchna; they had servants for that, and the whole business was handled away from the house, almost out of earshot (though it was amazing how far a dying pig's squeals could carry). But now, in Rome, their household was too small for that luxury; she'd have to do it herself, with her two maids. It had been one; it was two, now they had a little more space. Both were Etruscan; “I can't stand Roman girls round the house,” she'd said to Lauchme; “They have no life of their own.” They just stood there, waiting for you to tell them what to do, or worse, spinning, always spinning the scratchy grey wool. So Etruscans had to be found; a woman from Tarchna, who'd been left in Rome when her trader husband died, and a young girl from a settlement south of Veii.
She was looking forward to killing the pig; or rather, to the pig being dead. In the week it had occupied the dingy little storeroom, not a moment had been free from its grunting and scraping. She felt its evil eyes on her every time she walked past, full of menace as its sharp tusks; it unsettled her.
The girls had already hobbled it to lead it out into the yard, and now they pulled its front legs up and tied them. It scrabbled with its back legs for a moment, till they trussed those too, and then it lay rocking on its side, screaming already as if it knew what was coming. Its bristled sides heaved with its breath.
Tanaquil took the knife she had sharpened that morning, remembering the hiss of the knife on the gritstone; she tested the edge against a fingernail, feeling it bite. Good. Taking the knife, she went and stood over the pig, one foot each side of its bulk. As she turned it ready for the blow, she saw the glare of its eye like hatred. A shadow moved on the wall. She grasped the bristly mane between its ears with one hand, pulling back, and quickly opened its throat with a single long stroke of the knife, hearing the blood spatter the dirt floor.
Under her, the boar struggled, at first violently, and she held it down with both hands, jettisoning the knife now its work was done. The blood kept spouting, first one great gout of it, then a lapse, then another pulse of blood, but each wave was lesser than the one before, and the pig's struggles subsided, too. At the end it just twitched weakly, as if a fly had settled on its skin. It seemed to take an incredibly long time, and still she held it, and felt its life lurching out of it. She wondered for a moment if this was how Thefarie had died, after the priest had cut his throat - if it had indeed been Thefarie who had died a sacrifice on the bridge, and Lauchme had always told her he couldn't be sure. To struggle, and still struggle, and even in very death to be still struggling; she shivered. But then, a man and a pig were different things. And at last, the pig was no more moving. She let her breath out. She hadn't been aware she'd been holding it.
Then came the dirty job; burning off the hair, with brands they'd brought from the hearth. The hair stank as it burned, filthy and acrid, and collapsed into a clump of congealed nastiness before it flamed away entirely. Then they scraped the flesh clean, or as clean as they could get it, and singed it again to get rid of whatever had been missed, till eventually the boar lay white before them in the pallor of death, stripped of its blackness. Its eyes were still open, now sightless.
They washed out the blood with three, no four, flushings of water, running red at first, then pink, and finally almost clear, with just a few thin strings of already congealing blood in it; after that, it was time for the butchery, and she picked up the knife again to slit the hide and rip off the fat in huge lumps, before plunging into the ribs. Turned over, spreadeagled out, its mysteries lay open to the daylight; the organs laid out, bulging white and gray and pink and liquid, and she thought of the danger in its little evil eyes and laughed to herself as she saw its power dispersed.
She looked at it with the experienced eye of an augur; a fat liver, plump intestines. Her hands were covered in blood; this was normal. She almost felt tempted to take the omen; but this was not the time, nor was this a sacrificed victim. Odd. She thought, how sometimes we read the message of the gods, and other times we make chitterlings.
But when she turned to go, and one of the girls showed her the pig's severed head, its skin strangely thick and yellowing, she felt its burned out eyes looking far down into her from some place she feared, and flinched from it.