Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
***
By midday, Master reckoned, they'd got about half way to Arretna, and he reckoned they could take a short rest. The captive looked all in, which didn't stop Larth from retying his feet and tightening the bindings on his wrists.
He realised his idea of Cacus' philosophy was still vague; Vipienas hadn't told him much, and it was interesting that while the men in Curtun seemed to think Cacus was a social revolutionary, Vipienas hadn't dwelt on that - though you'd have expected him to. What did Cacus really stand for?
He took a sausage out of his pack and started to cut a piece off it. He looked over towards the captive.
"Want some?" he asked.
The captive looked up.
"Sausage." He held it towards the captive. "It's not bad." He finished carving off a slice, put it in his mouth and began to chew. It was tough. You had to chew it for a while before the flavour started to emerge; slightly iron-like, like blood, overlaid with dry herbal aromas. Sage, he thought, or one of the mountain herbs that grew around here. He looked again at the captive. Don't be too eager, he thought; give him a silence to fill. Strange how often people would fall for that trick.
"Pork?"
One word, but it was enough; he'd drawn him in.
"Beef. Here."
He sliced a piece off the top, held it towards the other man's mouth, and watched him lean his head forward to take it with his teeth.
"It's tough at first. It gets better."
The captive chewed for a moment, then parked the half-masticated meat in one cheek in order to speak.
"It's food, anyway. Thanks."
Master sat back again, waiting. The other man chewed, swallowed.
"So." Master considered his next words carefully. "You're a follower of Cacus."
"Not really."
"Mmmm."
"Cacus doesn't have followers."
"A lot of people seem to want to hear him speak, nevertheless."
"But they don't follow him. Well... they try to, but he just wanders off. He won't lead them. He doesn't want followers."
"I don't understand this very well. He speaks in public. But you tell me he doesn't want people to listen."
"He wants them to listen; he just doesn't want them to follow him. There's no organisation. He tells people to follow their own hearts. That's the whole of his message."
"So what if their hearts tell them to follow Cacus?"
The captive sighed, exasperated. "That's not the idea. He ... he's evasive. He talks about the freedom of the spirit; the freedom that comes from trusting only your heart."
Larth snorted. "Ridiculous. How would society function at all if people did that?" Master looked up at him, held his hand up for silence, and Larth obeyed, though the set of his mouth was surly.
"No, that does interest me," Master said smoothly, "the social message, but I assume it's not as simple as Larth suggests? And what about the end of the Rasenna?"
"It's not the end of the race he means." The captive spoke slowly, like a man finding a way across cracked river ice, tracing the lines of the cracking before advancing a foot. "I think, but this is only what I think, mind you, that he's talking about the state of ecstasy, when we are not Rasenna any more but pure being, pure spirits, and at that point, we no longer need a society, we will all be free, but because we are listening to the spirit, we will know how to work together. That's what I think, anyway."
"It's not the most practical message," Master said tactfully, and heard Larth spit on the ground behind him. "Still, it has its appeal." But not to him; he'd never wanted that kind of freedom. It seemed aimless to him, without the stimulus of an objective. And the best objective was getting others to do what you wanted; to conquer them, force them, make them recognise you.
"And you see he's just wandering," the captive said; "he comes, he goes, he never says where he's going. We don't know where he came from; some say a village in the forest, others a place in the marshes east of Felsina. I've heard them say he came out of the earth itself, that he grew like a tree or a river, not a man."
"You don't believe that."
"No. But then, with most men, it wouldn't be even vaguely credible. Whereas with Cacus, you can almost find yourself believing it. He's elemental, in a way; always flowing, like river or wind."
Master gritted his teeth. He'd already begun to feel he was following a fairy tale, a myth, a figment, something made of air; and this confirmed it. He wondered if Vipienas had sent him on a fool's errand merely to get him away from his wife; he could almost believe that Cacus didn't exist, that the prophet was a mass hallucination, a rumour that had taken on life. He realised, as he thought it, that this was in its own way a strange and unreal thought; that was the nature of the nightmare in which he was engaged, that the whole world had come to seem unsubstantial, or at least strange.
They were always a step behind Cacus. He was supposed to have been in Curtun, but they hadn't seen him; and the intelligence that he was headed to Arretna might have been wrong. Such slender hints on which to base their progress.
That night, they arrived in a grove where the priest, a young woman just out of her sacerdotal schooling, told them a man had passed earlier in the day, but not stopped.
"He wasn't local?"
"I don't think so. I couldn't place his accent, but I'm sure he wasn't from around here."
"What did he say?"
"That it was hot. And he was hungry. And... we talked about horses."
"Horses?"
"You know, the way a horse always knows when it's going back to its stable, and once it turns its head that way, you'll have the devil of a job getting it to go any other way. I don't know why we got talking about that, really; he hadn't got a horse, I haven't, it was just one of those things that comes into your head. Perhaps he meant he was headed home... but I don't think so."
"So what else did you talk about?"
"He asked me about the work I was doing... about my time in Velzna... I think, really, it was me talking, he just listened, most of the time." She seemed a little disconcerted; Master thought of the way people he'd interrogated suddenly realised how much they'd told him, and there was always a difficult moment – if you got it right, they carried on talking, but if you mis-stepped, they'd clam up altogether. She'd been drawn out, and she'd only just realised it. He wouldn't mind betting that it was indeed Cacus she'd spoken to, and that Cacus was another master of his art, like himself. That would make him no easier to find; and no easier to control, once found. A challenge, then. Master smiled grimly.
It was getting late, but they decided to press on; they were six or seven hours behind the man they thought was Cacus, and there was only one track he could have followed, across the pass at the head of the valley. Larth grumbled, and the captive was looking weak, but they made reasonable progress over the more open land. They kept going through the dusk; the colours of the country faded into grey, then black, outlines blurring into a soft darkness, till at last they were following only a rough direction in blackness towards the horizon, where the shapes of the hills were still vaguely sketched in a junction between the brownish dark of the land and the bluish dark of sky. It had been full dark a half hour or more before Master let them stop at last, and they started off the next morning in the star-shot grey before dawn had come.
Yet still Master felt they were falling behind.
That morning the captive stumbled, again and again. He wasn't used to this life; it wasn't so much his body as his mind that couldn't cope, Master thought, couldn't cope with the need to keep awake, alert, such long hours. Towards mid-morning, as the heat began to rise from the plain, he decided to leave the man behind.
"He knows nothing," he said to Larth and Marce; "we'll go faster without him."
Larth took his dagger out of its sheath, looked towards the man. Master stopped him wordlessly, showing him the flat of his hand, frowning. If anyone was going to kill him, it wouldn't be Larth, he thought; he'd do his own killing. Bu
It might be a kindness to kill him. And for the first time in his life, Master wondered whether killing could be a pleasure; whether cutting the man's throat, slowly, in cold blood, would delight him. He'd killed men before, in battle, in beserk panic or cold need; but he'd never toyed with the decision, never thought it would take a hold on his mind in this way. He looked again at the captive; bone tired, he thought, but he'd kept going, hadn't just given up.
The man looked up at him, his eyes cold. He knows I'm thinking of killing him, Master thought, and in that instant he knew he couldn't do it.
"Get back to the grove," he said; "you're no use to us now."
He dispatched Larth forwards to spy out the land; they were coming down now towards the other side of the hills, and they'd have to be more careful of their direction. But he with Marce for half an hour, watching their former captive stumble downhill again towards the stream, towards the grove, until his form disappeared among the sparse bushes and rocks far below in the valley.