Etruscan Blood by AM Kirkby
***
Egerius had been a bit wary of Kallirhoe at first; she was sharp, she would fly off into anger, but just as often into an enthusiasm that was tinged with insanity, and she abominated all constraint. She'd never said why she'd come west, and never talked about home; though he guessed, from a few things she said, that her family was wealthy. He wondered, too, how she'd managed to negotiate her way out of the usual domestic slavery, the darkened rooms of the women's quarters and the smothering veil; though the Greek families of Italy were, it was true, more liberal than those who had remained in Greece. He would have asked, but she had a cold edge to her that didn't invite such intimacy.
Yet he realised he'd started to spend more time in her company; though they arrived at the symposium each morning separately, he'd often wander away from it with her, down to the river below the town, or into the woods. There was always the sound of birdsong; sometimes a deep whirr, throaty and congested, or a sharp cheeping, or a sudden crescendo of loud squeaky exclamations that stopped as quickly as it had started.
That day he'd startled a bird out of a thicket; it screamed as it flew, then, perched invisibly nearby, continued its tirade, a repetitive, nagging rhythm of three scolding notes.
"I've upset it, I suppose," he said to Kallirhoe. "Any idea what it is?"
"Karite can tell every bird by its song. I'm not sure. A blackbird, I think."
"Oh." He laughed. "I don't know a single birdsong. Karite told me, once, some bird or other, and while I was listening to it, it was so clear, all the characteristics of its song, I was sure I'd remember it; but the day after, I walked here in the woods, and the first bird I heard, I realised I'd forgotten completely."
"You must know one or two, surely?"
He shook his head. He knew what they were meant to sound like – as a child he'd been told so many times what each bird said, the one that cried 'teacher, teacher', the one that said 'soup with a spider and a fly in it please', or the one that senselessly repeated 'few, few, few' – yet when he listened to the real thing, he heard just noise.
"Ducks," he said. "Chickens. I can recognise chickens."
That brought a half-smile from her, one side of her mouth turned wrily up, a slight creasing of her eye that wasn't quite a wink.
"Look," she said, lifting up a branch heavy with dark green leaves; "here's why you upset it."
There was a nest, an incoherent straggling mass of twig and straw on the outside, but inside, a hollow of mud as smooth as the feathered breast of the bird that had rounded it out; and in that hollow, three eggs, pale greenish blue, a blue he'd never seen in sky or sea, a blue that was somehow sad, and unique to these microcosms glowing against the dirty brown-grey of the nest. He brushed Kallirhoe's arm as he stepped back, and saw the branch bounce a couple of times after she'd dropped it, and felt the unexpected and disturbing warmth of her skin on his. He turned to go ahead on the narrow path.
"She'll come back, I suppose?"
"Probably," Kallirhoe said, "they do, most of the time."
"You seem to know a lot about birds."
"Not much, really. More than you; but that's not difficult."
"So where did you learn..."
"Oh, you pick these things up, here and there."
Perhaps, he thought, when the city was established, everyone would be like Kallirhoe, educated in all the different ways that the world had to offer – able to perform calculations, knowledgeable in the ways of birds and beasts, interested in philosophy and poetry alike. Practical like the Romans, subtle like the Greeks, there was no reason you couldn't combine both; talk about the gods, or about the habits of chickens, or how to calculate the right lengths for roof beams, or even – which she'd suggested, a few nights ago – the distance from Collatia to Olypmus, using the same method, though he wasn't sure whether that was a joke or not. You never could tell, with her.
Another day they were sitting on one of the old drystone walls around the former citadel that hadn't yet been cannibalised for building materials; they could hear the silvery chink, chink of stonemasons' hammers and chisels from across the valley, and sometimes they would hear shouting as one of the larger blocks was levered into place, or a beam hauled up to a roof. Here, though, everything was still; from time to time a dry leaf rustled as a momentary breeze picked it up and tumbled it a few times before letting it drop, or a lizard would scrabble across the dust, holding its legs high like a parody of a dainty girl holding up her dress to cross a stream.
There were lizards everywhere; they were attracted by the breadcrumbs Egerius had flicked from his lap into the dirt, darting in to grab a crumb in their jaws before streaking away again. Sometimes one lizard would rush at another to head it off, and it wasn't always the larger one that won; there was a brief tangle of limbs, sometimes one or sometimes both lizards would flip over, almost too quickly to see, and then both were gone, as if sucked into the cracks of the wall.
After one of these antics, Egerius laughed; but Kallirhoe's brows met in a frown.
"You know something? I wonder sometimes how those lizards see the world."
"What?"
"Do they recognise each other? Do they have memories of each other? Or do they just see another lizard, and fight it or fuck it or run away? What does a lizard think?"
"Does it think at all?"
"It must do. It has some perception of the world. But it can't be the same as ours. How does it see us, I wonder? Do you think it realises we are living beings, or just very large moving objects, like a tree or even like the shadow of a tree?"
"You think about things like that all the time?"
"Sometimes."
He shook his head. Life was complicated enough without worrying what the lizards thought.
"The city's coming along fast," she said. "The stoa's nearly finished, and the agora's paved."
"Good to get the pavement done before the rain starts."
She nodded. They sat companionably for a while without talking; she was swinging her long legs out and back, out and back, her sandal heels scuffing the dirt where they hung loose from her feet.
He remembered all of this as he lay on the couch beside her at the feast after they opened the stoa – even though it had still not been completely roofed; a feast to which everyone had been invited, and most had come, and for which he'd ordered an abundance of dishes, even going so far as to bring fish in from the coast (though half of it was spoiled by the time it arrived, and was only good for fermenting into fish sauce). Karite was there, and Gaius, and Simonides, though Melkart had left the table – probably after one of the Collatian women – and there were new faces, too, since now that Collatia was on the rise, more and more immigrants were coming in, attracted by the freedom of the city and the opportunity to make a new life. He'd invited a few friends from Rome, too; they'd been polite about his achievements so far, though gods knew, well built as it was the stoa couldn't compete with the Capitoline temple, but they'd carry word back to Rome that the new city was a success, and that would bring new settlers and new investment.
Egerius felt the relaxation that came with wine and success, and stretched himself, and remembered the lizards, the blackbird's nest, the soft smoothness of Kallirhoe's naked arm against his; but Gaius kept talking.
"After we've roofed the stoa, I want to talk to you about the drainage system; if you don't get something done this summer, we're going to have problems when the rain starts – the whole agora is a shallow basin, the water will pool in the middle of it, we should really have done something before we paved it, but it's not too late to do something now, I'll have to dig up a channel through the pavement and then cover it over again, as long as we lead the water off we should be able to control it. We could even have a cistern fitted up, that would help with the dry weather, and if I built a further channel out to the market gardens, we'd be able to take advantage of that to irrigate..."
Only the prospect of further building work could make the normally blunt an
"How big a cistern would we need for the whole summer?"
Her eyes turned upwards; she always did that when she was thinking, even when she wasn't counting on her knuckles or mouthing numbers to herself. There was a tiny v-shaped depression between her eyebrows, that deepened with thought.
"You don't listen," Gaius said. "That's the problem with you, Egerius, you just don't listen." He pushed himself up off his couch, and raised his fists; Egerius couldn't be sure whether he'd meant to signal his impotence or was preparing for a fight, but a moment later he pushed his arms very deliberately back down at his sides, set his jaw, and turned.
"Gaius," Egerius said very softly. "Tomorrow. I've drunk too much tonight."
"Tomorrow, then," Gaius said, but he didn't stay.
Egerius turned back to Kallirhoe. "What got into him?"
"You were a bit offhand."
"It was an important question. He's always wanting to build things, whether people want them or not."
"See?"
"See what?"
"Your attitude. You don't like him."
"That's not true."
Kallirhoe shrugged. "And I'm sure he thinks I'm sleeping with you."
"Why not? … Daryush, pour the wine."
But though she never did tell him why not, she didn't sleep with him, either; and his hangover made the meeting with Gaius even more painfully tedious (both more tedious, and painful) than it would normally have been.