Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby

  ***

  The Interregnum was a strange, brooding time; life was normal, nothing was changed, Tarquinius wasn't king, and yet under the surface, deep currents of unease shifted, like water under the greasy, slow moving skin of a deep river. No canvassing was allowed, now; the glittering assemblies stopped, though loose knots of men still formed in the streets, gradually accumulating and as gradually dispersing. No one talked about it, but it was as if everyone had agreed to pretend that nothing was happening, smearing a thin skin of normality over the emptiness and fear that gripped the city.

  "Do you ever dream, and then see what you dreamt of? Or have that feeling that you have been at this crossroads before, though you know you have never been there?" Tanaquil trailed her finger round the rim of her winecup.

  "Not quite." Manius frowned. "But sometimes I seem to recognise a face, though I'm sure I have never seen it before."

  "Only a good-looking one, eh?"

  Once, she thought, Tarquinius wouldn't have made that joke. But now, serious talk disturbed him, if it wasn't politics – if it wasn't something he could do, or say, or arrange. He had no time for dreams, only for plans of action and the making of lists.

  "I wonder if we're all driven by dreams," she said, and let it hang as a question in the air.

  "What makes you say that? The old man's dreaming?"

  "I had a dream once, of being a queen in Tarchna, flowers in my hair, queen of the harvest..."

  "You'll be a queen, anyway," her husband said.

  "It's not the same... not any more. And I aged, and all the gold has faded."

  "I remember how things seemed brighter when I was younger," Manius said, "and now everything is the same, and the days seem to pass so quickly. I forget things so easily, and yet I can remember my childhood so clearly – the shimmering light on the river, the taste of wild garlic, the first verse of Homer I ever heard."

  "It gets worse," she said. "And the dreams get darker."

  "Did you ever wear the flowers in your hair?"

  "No; but I did dance the harvest, my last year in Tarchna." And she hadn't danced it with Tarquinius, she thought; she'd been with one of the noble youths, a willowy, laughing boy whose dance flowed around her, whose body seemed to cling to hers in a way the gauche half-Greek never could have imagined.

  "Show me?"

  She smiled. It wouldn't be the same; and for a moment she felt the sharp pain of loss, as if everything she'd left behind in Tarchna was pulling at her guts.

  "It's difficult without the music."

  "Show me anyway." He took her hand, insistent.

  She rose, pulling her skirts tightly around her legs. She showed him the steps; one, two, pointing the toes of the right foot, step back twice; and again; and then a quarter turn, tight, leading from the hip, and then the steps again, tightly circling.

  "That's it?"

  "The steps are not the mystery."

  "It's so simple. I'm disappointed. I thought it would be something much more complicated."

  "Anyone can dance complicated steps," she said; "it's just a question of counting. It's the simple ones that are difficult. You have to dance them with style."

  "And I'm not?"

  He didn't miss a thing. "Well... you're dancing like a Roman. It's not military drill. Bend a little into the turn; bend the time, too – you can steal a little from the second step to drag the first..." She led him back into the dance, beginning to hum the tune, feeling him relax a little into the rhythm.

  "Enough." Tarquinius got to his feet; his face was angry.

  Manius staggered as he stopped in the middle of a turn, thrown off balance; Tanaquil had to put her arm out to support him, or he would have fallen against her. Tarquinius stepped towards her, lowering his voice.

  "Not in front of me. Not here."

  She felt her face burning; not with shame but with anger. And not just her face, but her whole body aflame. How dare he? No Etruscan would behave in this way, shaming his wife in front of a lover. Manius wasn't even a lover; how much the greater the shame.

  "I'll talk to you later." She turned on her heel, getting herself under control, and with a voice that flowed like oil, said to Manius; "He doesn't like my Etruscanising tendencies, as he calls them. We had better not tease him."

  She was furious, but she went and sat on the couch next to her husband, and steered the conversation to less contentious subjects; the latest pantomime (a new actor-dancer had arrived from Curtun), the chariot racing results, the best wine this season (which was not Falernian, for once, but one of the southern vintages that had benefited from better weather). Manius was something of a connoisseur, but Tarquinius knew the prices. She wondered if she would ever speak of her dreams again; the moment had passed, and she realised now she was too old to hope for change. Too old to hope for it for herself, anyway; she had lost something, intangible as the brightness of early sunlight on a haze of dew, and till today she hadn't realised she'd lost it.

  When Manius went, several cups of wine later, she thought the whole episode had been forgotten. Tarquinius was half drunk, still angry; not churlish, as a Roman would be, but cold – all charm, but icy charm, to Manius.

  "You taunted me with your dreams," he said. "We used to share every ambition, and now you won't talk to me of your dreams, only to some feckless Roman boy."

  "We still share the work," she said. "I got the old man to name you his successor – that was me, I did it, I did it for you."

  "But it's all work." His mouth was sour, and she thought, he'll be throwing up tomorrow morning, the way he always does these days after he's drunk too much.

  She turned to go to the chamber, and she thought that was the end of it, but he reached up as she passed his couch and pulled her down, his fingers digging into the flesh of her forearm.

  "Who did you dance harvest with? You never danced it with me."

  "But I chose you."

  "Later. You chose me later. Someone else first."

  He pushed her shoulders down with his other hand, throwing his weight on to her. She was too stunned to struggle, then paralysed by her pride and anger as she felt him tearing at her clothes. His face was set, not so much with wrath as with the determination to win at all costs. Not lust, but the lust for power, she thought; Rome is not enough for him. He has to tame me, too. Nothing wild but he will tame it, or kill it.

  She realised, after he'd finished, and released her arms, that her face was wet; but she felt nothing. Not anger, now, not hurt, purely nothing, the way fresh mountain water tastes of nothing.

  But later, she felt that emptiness within her like a tumour, a bleakness that would never leave her; it was a numb place, indigestible. She never looked at Tarquinius again without at least some contempt, mixed as it might be with love, or admiration, or even respect.