Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
***
Riding back, Tanaquil wondered whether, if she'd been born in Rome, she would have become a Vestal. At least these women were free from ownership; they held their own fates, their own lands. They were even allowed to drive; something that would have been dear to her. Yet somehow, it was typical of the Romans to allow a woman to become a priest only by cutting off a part of herself, forcing her into chastity, into powerlessness. No Etruscan woman would ever accept that, just as she'd never accept a husband who insisted on what the Romans laughably called fidelity, even if a woman was faithless in every other way. Perhaps she would have done what she'd done with Tarquinius, choosing the right man; though she wondered if there were any men of the right sort in Rome. Maybe not.
Tarquinius had changed; power had made him negligent, age had blurred his keenness, bleached the colour from his hair, rubbed the gilding from him. She wondered sometimes if he'd drifted into Roman ways, even without realising it. He'd become lazy; once, he'd kept his own informants, gone out into the city to find out what people thought. Now, he relied on her spies, if he was clever, and on his little coterie of yes-men, if he wasn't. When she thought of him, she was conscious of her own superiority; and it was that, not age or familiarity, that killed love.
She looked at her son Tarquinius sometimes and saw in him a certain energy and vague ambition not unlike what his father had possessed at that age. But the boy was wild and proud, where his father had been earnest; he took Rome as his birthright, expected subservience and praise as his father never had, and that, she thought, blinded him, and left him vulnerable. As for Arruns, he had been a dull child, and had become an even duller man, as if his parents' qualities had burned out, leaving only the ashes of their fire.
But when she looked at Servius – it was then that she saw the same bitterness, the same ambition she'd once seen in Lauchme, all those years ago, when he'd had a different name and a different city. Servius had the same intelligence, too, though he was cynical in a way Tarquinius had never been.
Servius was much in Tanaquil's counsels now; his contacts among the Etruscan military were useful to her, sometimes, in planning her diplomatic strategy, or Rome's (he'd grown to realise that the two were not always identical). Alliances were made and broken, grew tenuous and thin, or were reaffirmed and strengthened, according to the intelligence they had from the cities. It wasn't the easiest game to play; the Federation was not a state, but a web of shifting allegiances, many of them not explicit, but understood. There were the politics of Rome, too; and friendships made in Rome might prejudice relations with Etruscan cities, or vice versa, so that Robur's links with the Campanian cities, for instance, had to be kept in mind, or her own relationship with Tarchna. Art, music, sex, family were just political tools for Tanaquil; except, he thought, for her love for Tarquinius. That, he thought, was the one thing she would never give up; the love for which she'd sacrificed her homeland and her royal status. He wished he had ever had such a thing in his own life. Would he be a different man now if he had?
"Then we have to marry Tarquinia off," Tanaquil said.
"But who? She's worth more to us unmarried, surely. If our position changes from day to day..."
"Then the situation becomes much less fluid if we marry her. Yes, I understand that; once we've allied to one house or another, or to one city or another, we lose the advantage of flexibility."
"Right now, it's not worth it. None of the cities are a safe bet right now."
"You weren't a safe bet when I made it."
"That was a bet to win or lose in an afternoon. This is a much longer term game."
She shrugged. "Robur?"
"Make him safe?" Yes; Robur, married to Tarquinia, would be brought under control; and that would bring all Ancus' old supporters into the fold. "I haven't heard much of him recently. He was in Campania, a while ago, maybe a couple of months, but it's gone a bit quiet."
"What was he doing?"
"Making friends."
"And you have two daughters?"
"Yes," he said, a little surprised by this turn in the conversation.
"Brought up in Velx?"
"Yes, at the general's and in my own house."
"And they're Etruscans?"
"Not of the full blood. Their mother's a Gaul."
"A Gaulish wife? How unusual."
"Not my wife. I bought her."
"Slave?"
"Freed, now." As he was, though he didn't say so.
"Well. Well. Of course my husband isn't pure-blooded either. And I suppose... if she's not your wife, you would be free to marry?"
This was strange. Was Tanaquil was trying to make him a pawn in one of her regional power plays? To marry him into a ruling family in a small hill town – one of Clevsin's satellites, perhaps, or even up north into the oligrachy of Spina? He nodded, slowly. He was free, after all, but he wasn't eager to lose that hardly won freedom.
"Tarquinia, now," he said, heading Tanaquil off his own affairs and back to the safer matter of foreign alliances. "Marry her into Velzna, into the priesthood there. That's a powerful alliance; Velzna itself, of course, and that's a strong town and a rich one. But you bring the priesthood on side, too. And that can swing some of the other cities behind it."
"I have greater ambitions for Tarquinia."
"What could be greater than Velzna?"
"Queen of Rome."
"But... won't her brothers..."
"They're too young, still. Arruns is dull, Tarquinius is immature. They won't be ready in time. And you know, our kingship is still elective."
"That can be fixed."
"Yes, and I intend to fix it. But first; Tarquinia. If you want her."
Egerius
Collatia was growing; Egerius had brought colonists from Rome, other Etruscans and Greeks had come too, outnumbering the native population, and he'd started laying out the new city, on a hilltop opposite the old town, which was being razed. Some with their families; some without, leaving wives and children behind till things were more stable, till they'd carved out their place in it. A new start, Egerius had said; a new start, and new gods, though he'd propitiated the old ones with sacrifices, just in case.
Some of the Collatians had come across to the new town. Others had disappeared, into the countryside, or to other Latin towns where they had family. Kallirhoe reckoned half of them had gone, their place taken by the incomers. There were teachers, surveyors, architects, artists; but they'd lost many of the farmers, and they were always short of hands for building. Still, they made do.
Egerius could have ruled as a king, like his half-brother. Instead, he made the very concept of ruling moot; it was up for discussion, as were the laws. Who should rule? A king? A council? The people, directly, by vote on each issue? Gaius argued that votes should depend on an individual's contribution to the city, power apportioned to those who worked the hardest; but as Kallirhoe pointed out, it was difficult to measure it. "If five men build a house, but one man designed it, and a woman plays the flute to encourage the builders, who did the most work?"
"The builders, of course," Gaius had said; but Simonides had disagreed, and no one view carried the day. The debates continued, but around them the city was being built (since whatever you thought of the philosophical problem concerned, pragmatism cut in once people realised they had nowhere till live until they had constructed it); though it took faith to see in the rough rubble and skeletal timbers the agoras and atria of the new Collatia. Only Egerius' house stood proud, its maze of rooms around two great courtyards; and even though most of his co-founders of the city had moved into it with him, it was still only half-done, some rooms unroofed, the kitchen still open to the air, the entrance, for the moment, on the short side as the great columns of the main door hadn't yet been fitted.
"There should be no compulsion," Kallirhoe had said. Egerius tended to agree with it, as he agreed with many of the things Kallirhoe said, even if he also saw how difficult her ideas might be to bring into
"Encourage free thought," Simonides said, "and people will start denying the gods."
"Well, there may not be any gods," Egerius said, though it might have been wiser to keep quiet. He felt rewarded by Kallirhoe's smile, sudden and radiant and momentary as it always was; but he realised from Gaius' scowl that he'd upset more than one of his council with that statement.
"Oh, it is true," Simonides said, "very true that there may be no gods. That is possible."
Gaius started to speak, but Simonides raised a hand, and continued smoothly.
"There may be no gods. The world may be made of tiny motes of dust, congealed for a moment into the forms of men or beasts or plants, before they fall back to dust again, and there may be no gods. It is possible. But it is only the gods that make us honest. If I was certain there was no god, I could take what I wanted,take whoever I wanted, rape, murder, perjure myself."
"You couldn't do that," Gaius said crossly. "You do that rhetoric stuff."
Simonides looked at him sharply.
"I think he means...." That was Karite, her voice so smooth you knew she meant trouble. "He means that if everything you say is ambiguous, how could you ever be pinned down to a statement so unambiguous that a court could decide it was perjury?"
"Anyway," said Gaius, "rhetoric man, I don't care what anybody thinks. But with no compulsion, how will you get your agora built, tell me that."
"It's getting built," Simonides pointed out. Gaius grimaced.
"It's getting built because people can see that their cooperation will achieve mutually beneficial aims," Kallirhoe said. "Without compulsion. People are free to work on it or not. But they choose to work on it because it is beautiful and necessary."
"So do they work because they think it's pretty or because they want somewhere to buy turnips?" Gaius asked.
She shrugged. "Does it matter?"
"And how do we make sure another bunch of people don't decide to build a second agora somewhere else?"
"We don't."
"Let every flower in the field bloom," Egerius said.
"Some are weeds," said Gaius, but Simonides nodded slowly.
"Some will thrive, and some will die," he said, "but let them all bloom. That is wise. There is so much energy in people, that in most cities is worn away, and wasted; here we can use it. All the energy, like the wind that blows and the rain that falls."
Gaius grunted. Poetry was not to his liking. But Egerius smiled, and Kallirhoe clapped her hands three times, and Karite nodded her head and grinned and said "And if we could harness the wind, like Pegasus, we could conquer the world!" Then she realised what she'd said, and reddened, and said rather quietly "without compulsion, of course," and covered her face with her hands as the others began to laugh.
"No marriage or giving in marriage, either," said Kallirhoe then, and that surprised them all.
"No marriage? How then do you get children?" said Melkart, the Phoenician who had come with the first settlers.
"Rather typical," said Gaius, "that the first time Melkart speaks it's about women."
"Hush," said Egerius. "That's not what she means."
"Thank you, Egerius, but I think I can speak for myself." Her voice was tart. "I mean no marriage. No contracts, no property, no compulsion. Women and men free to give themselves to each other, not to be given or forced or sold."
"And whose are the children?" Gaius said.
"Their own."
"The father's? Or any man to whom that woman decides to give herself?"
"Why do children need to be owned?"
"Because a man wants to know he's not bringing up another man's bastard."
"But isn't that about ownership? And didn't we decide there was to be no ownership, but common ownership by the people?"
"So every woman is to sleep with every man?"
"A woman is not property. Children are not property. Men are not property."
Simonides coughed gently. "You are proposing that men and women enter into an arrangement only for as long as they both desire it?"
"Indeed."
"So once desire wanes..."
"Then the arrangement is concluded."
"Ah," he said sadly. "The heartlessness of the young."
"Heartlessness? You call that heartless! And a father selling off a girl of thirteen to some old general – what do you call that?"
Simonides shook his head. "Desire is like flame, or wind, or water ruffled by the breeze. It comes and goes. And when you're my age, my dear, it goes more often than it comes..."
Gaius guffawed at that, but he'd got the wrong end of that particular stick, and quickly realised his mistake from the silence around him.
"So the beloved walks away, and the lover is broken. Shipwrecked, alone, however many vows you made each other, however many times you said you loved each other to death, to Hades, to distraction. And you think that isn't heartless."
There was something in his voice that they all felt – something raw, pained, and something that (as if he'd realised he was suddenly naked in the agora) he closed down decisively, his face suddenly hard.
"You can't legislate people into virtue," Karite said, but no one felt like picking up that conversation from where it had been before Simonides spoke.
Egerius had learned from Lauchme the sort of tact required of a host. Quickly, he clapped his hands to bring one of the servants, and whispered for the dancers; not a singer, he thought, but dancers, a spectacular display to take everyone's minds off Simonides' admission and smooth over the uncomfortable moment.
It wasn't the Etruscan dance with its forceful rhythm, the harvest-dance that hypnotised with its slow stamped beat; it wasn't the Greek dance, artful and mimetic, not the Roman shield-dance with its acrobatic leaps and martial posturing, but a mix of all of them, melded together into a varied choreography that contrasted frenzied passages with slower, more fluid movement, till at the end the two dancers accelerated into a duel, each leaping the other, higher and higher till at the end, they joined hands and spun around each other, faster and faster, their bodies leaning further and further out, their movement dizzy, their limbs now a blur of speed. Then at last they dropped, with the suddenness of a hawk stooping to its prey, their legs and arms and heads tucked in to a ball.
Then everyone seemed to have forgotten Simonides' admission – everyone except Egerius – and the conversation became general; they talked about dancers they had seen, from the brothel dancers of ***Piraios*** to the dancing priests of Carthage, the mimes of the Greek theatre or the great Nepos who danced the **Salic*** dance as no one had before him and no one ever would again, leaping nearly twice his own height over the shields. The disappointment of seeing the celebrated Agapos of Mitilene, years after his prime, when his movements were stiff with age and only the focus and precision of his acting were left, like the faintest echo of pure song in an ampitheatre after the audience has gone. And then talk of port brothels across the islands and the seas, of architecture, of landfalls seen from the sea – the white mirage of Ibosim's cliffs, the stagnant spreading marshes of Spina, the towering cliffs of Thira. According to Simonides, none of these could compare with the view of the Acropolis from Piraios, but Karite flatly gave him the lie; "You can't see it from there," she said; "Well, I never have. And I'm Athenian." Which he, evidently, was not, and there was a bit of good-humoured squabbling about the relative age and importance of Sparta, Athens, the Ionian island kingdoms, in which Karite, Kallirhoe and Simonides, naturally, were the main disputants, but even the Carthaginians and Romans joined in. (Gaius, naturally, thought Sparta the best of the Greek cities, for its military discipline and its regular methods of government, though when Simonides informed him that the Spartan women exercised naked alongside the men, Gaius almost accused the Greek of lying, he was so shocked at this licentiousness, as he termed it. Sometimes, Egerius thought, people conform to the stereotype so well that you wonder whether they
These symposia went on till the small hours, usually, and tonight was no exception; even Gaius unbent a little with the consumption of a wine less watered than usual, and Melkart taught them all a Phoenician clapping game that was ridiculously, childishly simple until you speeded it up, and then forced the most ridiculous mistakes. And through it all, Egerius' Persian slave, Daryush, continued to bring wine whenever it was wanted, and shrunk back silently when he was not needed, discreet as good servants should be.
Egerius was on his way to his bed, feeling modestly happy with the way the evening had gone; not that it was a particular celebration, not that it would create a good omen, but he did feel it was important for his first little band of settlers to know each other well, to create some feeling of community. It wasn't easy, with Romans, Etruscans, Phoenicians, Greeks, all mixed together – and a few of the Collatians, too, though there had been none there this evening. And it was good to discuss the basic philosophies on which his new city of Collatia would be founded, whether it was, as Karite had maintained, an enlightened tyranny, or as Simonides suggested, a republic. His way from the dining hall to his bedroom should have been a simple walk through an arcaded corridor, but this being Collatia, and half-built, he had to detour around a pile of dumped sand and a couple of massive roof beams laid across the corridor, waiting to be slung up above the columns that were already in place, and then out and through a dimly lit yard, and then back into the house by a rear door. He was about to come out into the yard when he heard voices – angry, though hushed – and stepped back into the darkness, waiting.
"You said no marriage and no giving in marriage."
"Which doesn't mean I'm sleeping with you."
That was Kallirhoe, but he didn't recognise the other voice for a moment.
"No marriage, so you're free to sleep with me."
"Yes, and I'm free not to."
"Free love," said the other voice, which he now recognised as Melkart's. "Isn't that something we believe in?"
"I think we have different ideas of freedom," Kallirhoe said, and there was a sound of something soft hitting a hard surface, and a scuffing of feet in the grit of the yard, and a grunt, then footsteps heading towards the door where Egerius was hidden. He shrank back into the darkness as someone passed, so close he could feel their mantle brushing his feet. He couldn't tell which of them it was. Someone left the yard at the other end. He should have been able to tell from the sound of the footsteps, he thought; surely they would walk differently? - and he tried to recollect the way Kallirhoe walked, tried to visualise her moving, but he couldn't, nor could he remember how Melkarth walked; all he could see was their faces. He couldn't even remember what they had been wearing at dinner. Strange how the human mind is so limited; at dinner, Simonides had been praising the power of man's thought, little less than god-like, and yet when you came to it, memory was so tenuous, thought so uncertain.