Egerius Read online

Egerius

  By A.M. Kirkby

  a chapter from Etruscan Blood

  Text Copyright ©2011 A M Kirkby

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, events, and locations are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons or events, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

  This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

  Short stories

  A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads

  The Tin Heart

  Sword of Sorcery

  Sacrifices

  Novellas

  Walsingham Way

  Green Land

  Doppelg?ger

  Novels

  Etruscan Spring forthcoming

  Etruscan Blood - forthcoming

  Children's books

  Kasbah cat

  Pagliaccio the opera cat

  Egerius

  He couldn't remember his father at all; not his face, not his voice, not even a looming presence far back in his childhood. Just nothing.

  Sometimes, just sometimes, he thought he could remember a tiny detail, an impression, nothing more. But even of these vague feelings he was suspicious; he wasn't sure if he'd really begun to remember, or whether he'd heard his mother talking about his father so often that he'd begun to weave her stories into his own memory, as if they were real.

  “You remember when your father came back from Tarchna?she'd ask, and he'd have to make some little sound of assent, before she'd launch herself on the story. He'd said ?oonce, and he couldn't bear to do it again; she'd become desperate, trying to prise a memory out of him, any little detail, it didn't matter what. It was like trying to get a splinter out of your finger; the more she tried, the further it seemed to become embedded. So now he murmured gently, and let her words wash over him without listening.

  He knew the story almost by rote now; how his father had come to Cisra as a trader, how he'd fallen in love with Sesanseia, how he'd died before they could be married, of a marsh fever. He knew his father's name, Arruns, and that he'd come from Tarchna; but it was his grandmother Ramutha Vestiricina who had given him her family name when she took her daughter's son as her own.

  It wasn't a rich house, where he grew up. Ramutha, like her daughter, had been a widow for long years, though unlike her daughter she never spoke of him. His mask hung in the forecourt; a stark terracotta face, blank eyes and hollow mouth. It was impossible to tell what he'd really looked like, Aranthur thought. In his dreams, hollow faces with only darkness behind them pursued him down long corridors of silence.

  And today the new tutor had arrived. Ramutha had insisted on it. Mother was crying again. Ramutha was taking him away, she'd never see him again, and he was too small, too small to go to a tutor...

  He thought with the heartlessness of a child that she was making too much of it; he'd be back with her by midday, after all. He wasn't to know that this was the beginning of the end of his childhood; the gradual cracking apart of their closeness, till in a few years he'd look back and see his mother very small, as if from a great distance, and never be able to close that gap again.

  And now she was grabbing him to her breast, half smothering him in that sweaty, milky smell and her puffy flesh. He could feel her sobs; her tears soaked his sleeve, and he felt irritated that he'd go to meet his tutor wet and dishevelled. ?y little man,she called him, and he resented it, stretching his back to try to stand taller, stretching his mouth flat in what he hoped was a look of immense dignity. She only clutched him tighter to her too soft breasts.

  “Aranthur?”

  It was Ramutha, come to take him. His mother, surprised, slackened her grasp, and gratefully he ran to his grandmother; then stopped, just before he got to the door, and carefully smoothed down his hair, and rubbed his face where his mother's tears had dampened it. Then he looked up at his grandmother's hard black eyes, and put his hand in hers. She inclined her head; the corner of her mouth twitched, the nearest to a hint of a smile she ever came. Ceremoniously, they made their way across the courtyard, past the shrine where his grandfather's mask looked down at them. His mother's voice, thin and breathy, followed him; ?on't leave me, Aranthur... my little man.”

  That was something he would like to forget.

  The man was already standing at one end of the room; Ramutha must have shown him in there, then come to fetch Aranthur. It was the room she kept for best; newly swept out, but the hangings smelt of damp and he could see, in the sun that shone through the single unshuttered window, that there was dust hanging in the air.

  The Greek was not an attractive man, with his thin, unkempt beard and bulging forehead. He looked at Aranthur without curiosity, his face giving nothing away. ?his is Aranthur,he said. Whether he'd meant to, or whether his Etruscan was not quite good enough to make it an interrogative, it came out as a statement. Aranthur looked back at him, his lips tight. He would not smile at this man.

  “This is Aranthur,Ramutha said. ?ou'll teach him every morning; writing, the poets, that thinking stuff you have.”

  “Philosophy,the tutor said.

  “Yes, that.She looked severe. ? want him stretched; he'll do well, if you don't let him be lazy. His mother pampers him. I think I told you already.”

  “You did.”

  “Well,she said, and turned her back.

  So this was his first morning. Mornings were all she could afford, his grandmother had told him. In the old days they would have kept a slave tutor, and he would have worked all day with the boy; now half the rooms in the house were empty, like this one.

  “Come,said the tutor, and the boy went to him. ?o you speak?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, that's one thing. You don't write?”

  “Write?”

  “I thought not. We'll start you on that tomorrow, then. I'll bring the doings. Today then. That thinking stuff, as she calls it. How did the world begin?”

  ***

  That morning confused Aranthur greatly. Every time he thought he'd answered the question, the Greek asked another one; or he'd circle back to that first question, ?ow did the world begin,and assert yet another opinion, before picking it into tiny shreds of meaning and discarding it in its turn. Every answer he gave was wrong, or his tutor said it was interesting, and then proceeded to show him it was wrong.

  At first he was confident he knew the answer. The hidden gods made the world, Aranthur said. Ah, said the tutor. So who made the hidden gods?

  Aranthur thought for a moment. He'd always thought the hidden gods just were; but it was possible they had been made. There was a god above them after all.

  “Did Tinia make them?he hazarded.

  “So if Tinia made the hidden gods, did Tinia make the world?”

  “I suppose.He was frowning with the unaccustomed need to think through everything he said. ?r Tinia might have made the hidden gods and then the hidden gods made the world.”

  “So. Who made Tinia?”

  And so it went on. After a while, his tutor moved the ground of debate from 'Who made the world' to 'Was there a time before the world?' Suddenly, everything shifted; the idea of huge emptiness opened his eyes, tasted like cold air on a frosty morning in his mouth. He had taken the world for granted; it was there. And suddenly it was not there. Instead, inside his head he felt a huge darkness, an open space that he had to fill with the tenu
ous streamers of his own breath, his own thought. Life changed for ever in that one second, and he opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out. Not even breath, for a second.

  Ramutha's arrival at midday surprised both of them in the middle of a teasing thought, the idea of infinite worlds divided only by a single chance - a world in which men had not come to be, a world in which the Greeks had been overcome by the Persians, or a world in which everything was the same, except for the window that Ramutha had left open that morning.

  The tutor - he remained the tutor, or 'master', or sir, and Aranthur never learned his name - simply stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and looked up at her. Aranthur never did find out what would be different tomorrow, or after-tomorrow, or in his grandchildrens' lifetime, as a result of that window being left open, but when he thought about it later, he realised that was why the worlds had to be infinite; there would be one world in which he shut the window, one world in which Ramutha had already shut it, or would shut it, and another in which the window stayed open, and perhaps a sparrow flew into the room...

  “Has he been attentive?his grandmother asked the tutor. When he nodded, she turned to Aranthur. ?hat have you learned?”

  He wanted to say so many things. The world, and the gods, and the vastness of fortune. The swirl of eternity, the reflective shards of an infinity of possibilities, the dizzying precipice of humanity. The words were not there. He said, simply, ?ome of that thinking stuff,and winced inwardly at his tutor's disapproval.

  “You will be here tomorrow, punctually?Ramutha's attention had moved back to the tutor. He assented; perhaps he had not noticed the implied criticism in her question.

  “I have nothing against this thinking stuff. But I hope you will start him on his letters tomorrow.”

  “I shall. But I can't do that without the tablets and wax. Which I will bring. Tomorrow.”

  And then he stooped a little, turning to Aranthur.

  “So tomorrow, letters. And then, having asked ourselves how the world came to be, we will look at what we mean by 'the world'.”

  ***

  He was silent at lunch. It was cold; they never heated this room, and darkness lurked in the corners. He felt he'd disappointed both his grandmother and the tutor. He'd disappointed his mother, too; but that went without saying; every time she looked at him, she remembered Arruns, and wanted the child to make up for the father's absence.

  They ate the same as every day; spelt porridge, with dried fruit from last season crumbled into it. There was no meat; there never was any meat, unless one of the chickens had stopped laying, and then Ramutha would have it strangled by the one servant they had left, who was kitchen maid and bodyservant and errand runner, and everything else, and would have left, only (like Ramutha) she was too old to change. There would be roasted chicken on the first day, then the stringy remains boiled with the spelt porridge the next, and the bones left in a stock with beans the day after.

  The silence between them grew until he felt it would burst his eardrums. He'd never been so aware of the sounds of his own eating; the clamping of his jaw, the liquid sound of food moving about his mouth. He was amazed that his mother and grandmother couldn't hear it. No one said a word.

  Every afternoon till now he'd sat with his mother, but today he couldn't bear it; he needed to be alone with the thoughts swirling in his head. He knew the house, perhaps better than any of the women; he had found his way into every locked room, except one, and through the disused passage to the outhouses, roofs half fallen into ruin. It was to the furthest of these that he made his way, clambering up over a fallen beam to the small loft. No one would find him here. Through the roof, he could see a small patch of grey sky.

  He wanted to think about the idea of the world not being there; of there having been something before the world. And for a moment, he considered the idea of what there had been before he had been born; had the world existed before then, or had it been born, bright and new, when he opened his eyes? But as he wriggled further and further into the age-paled straw, and began to feel the warmth, his thoughts slipped away from him like writhing elvers, and he started daydreaming of those other worlds made by chance or coincidence, those infinite worlds.

  In one of those worlds, he thought, he had a father. In one of those worlds, his father would turn out to have been not a poor trader from Tarchna, but the son of a lucumo, a resplendent prince. In one of those worlds, perhaps, his grandfather would send for him; a messenger would arrive, a young man as beautiful as a god, on a fine horse, with rich presents for the house, and would carry Aranthur off to his father's palace.

  He'd asked Ramutha about his father, a few times, but she didn't know much about him. He came from Tarchna, he was a trader in metalwork, he would have been handsome if he hadn't had a mole at the corner of one eye. He was well spoken and elegant in his ways.

  “He must have been a prince,Aranthur said, pleased with his deduction.

  “If so, he was a poor one.”

  “He must have hidden a great treasure somewhere,Aranthur insisted, thinking he would go and look for it among the rambling outhouses and in the dust-ridden rooms that hadn't been used since grandfather Vestiricina's death.

  “He probably had nothing.

  .

  “Mother says his father was a great man.”

  “He'd hardly seduce her by saying he was a pauper.Her voice was acid. Then, as if she realised she had hurt him, she reached across and grasped his shoulder with one bony hand. ?'m sorry, Aranthur, but that's the way it was. He had very little; a few bronze items, nicely made, for his trade, and some old bone dice.”

  “Bronze!Aranthur jumped up, knocking her hand off his shoulder. ? sword! A helmet!”

  Ramutha smiled, but it was a twisty smile, one that could become a frown if you looked hard enough. ? half-made dagger sheath, and a little bronze horse. You can have them if you like.”

  The scabbard was a poor thing, shaving-thin slips of bronze each side of the wooden body; but the little horse was a lovely thing, its neck arched proudly and its mane standing stiffly up, as if it were about to buck and leap in the air. Aranthur kept it by his bed; as soon as he woke, his hand would steal out of the covers to caress the cold bronze till it warmed, and the bronze gleamed as if polished. He might have no memories of his father, but he had this; the only horse he was ever likely to own.

  As for his mother, she was always talking about his father, but nothing she said made any sense; she was either crying or raging, and she kept trying to drag up those memories that wouldn't come. He thought sometimes that he felt them, like worms wriggling in his stomach, and if he didn't stop her, his mother would plunge a hook into his guts and pull them up.

  “Your father's parents didn't approve. They killed him, you know. They killed him. He'd never have come to Tarchna if it hadn't been for his father. He told me once that he could never do enough for his father; so he'd come here, to make a life on his own. The man was a slave-driver. Imagine! To kill your own son!”

  He'd started off believing everything his mother said; now he was not so sure. Had he become more aware of her myth-making as he grew older, or had his mother's madness grown with time? He wanted to know about his real father; how tall he was, what he liked eating, how he spoke and laughed and walked. He didn't want her stories of the man killed by his tyrant father, or poisoned by rivals (that was another version).

  He wanted above all to know whether his father had loved him; whether his father would have been proud of him. And that he'd never know.

  In another world, somewhere in the multiplicity of universes his tutor had spoken of, another Aranthur had a father. Here, he had a bronze horse and a scabbard that had never been finished. But he could still dream that this might be the world in which his grandfather was a lucumo, in which his grandfather sent riders to scour Etruria looking for him. And in the warm glory of the daydream, and the warmth of the straw around him, his eyelids began to droop.

  *
**

  The learning of letters began the next day, as the tutor had promised. It was easy to see how the symbol could stand for the sound; easy, too, to draw the letters with his stylus in the soft wax. But it was less easy to remember which letter was which. He muddled them sometimes; alpha and gamma were the same forked figure turned on one side, and lambda was a gamma upside down, and then there were sigma and ksi which were just serpentine squiggles and he could never quite tell apart.

  Then there were two o's, and two e's, and he could never remember which was which. His tutor, normally placid, began to show evidence of temper.

  “Omega, not omicron, boy!he yelled, one day, and Aranthur thought for a moment he was going to throw the tablet and stylus at the wall. Instead he turned suddenly on his heel, his breath hissing out in a violent sigh. Aranthur struggled on, his head bent over his work to disguise the hot shameful tears that were pooling on his eyelashes.

  Philosophy, though, he loved; he felt as if he were exploring the unused lumber rooms of his own mind. Huge vistas opened before him, as if he'd been living besides some great precipice all this time, and only now looked over, and seen the virgin plains spread out below, the rivers and valleys that led to the sea, the dizzying height of the air and the depth of the gorge. Infinite worlds were the least of it.

  “How do you know that I am the same tutor who taught you yesterday?”

  He had no answer for that; it seemed obvious, but he'd soon learned that what seemed obvious was anything but.

  “I have changed. Look; I tore this nail on my chiton this morning when I put it on. My beard has grown as I slept. I am a day older than I was yesterday. So I am not the same person.”

  “But you are, obviously.”

  “In what way?”

  “You have the same memories, the same thoughts.”

  “Ah. But I have new memories too. Like how the fingernail I caught in my chiton hurt. Or how you just answered my question.”

  “Is this something else to do with infinite worlds?”

  The tutor's eyes narrowed, and he leaned his head forward on his skinny neck. ?n what way?”

  Aranthur realised he'd said something that surprised the tutor; interested him, maybe.