The Augur

The Augur

  by A.M.Kirkby

  Copyright 2015 A.M.Kirkby

  ***

  Other titles by this author:

  A Ghost Story of the Norfolk Broads

  Sword of Justice

  Green Land

  Doppelganger

  Walsingham Way

  The Tin Heart

  Sacrifices

  Egerius

  Wake the Dragon

  Rise Above

  Not a Ghost Story

  Haunted

  Westminster Chimes

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  It's difficult to get respect these days, at least if you're an Etruscan.

  I could pass for Roman, to look at. I wear the toga, I pay my respects to the Roman gods, I'm what you might call assimilated, I am a citizen despite my Etruscan roots, I even have a place in one of the priestly colleges; but as soon as they find out my name, they know what I am. The Spurinna spring from a line of princes, but who cares about that? And the Cilnii, or the Kfelne as they used to be; rulers and priests, but the two I know are a horse-tamer and a goldsmith. We used to rule Italy, now we're curiosities in our masters' peepshow, playing the flute, the fool, the prophet - the roles we're allowed.

  Cneve told me it's different in the north, where the Romans are the minority. But here in Rome, we have our parts to play, just like the white-clad Phrygian eunuch who wails for the Great Mother (no one ever asks him about the wife and children he deserted when the goddess called him, or his thoughts on the Latin Rights) and the leopards imported from Africa to be ripped apart at the better class of games.

  Cneve - Cnaeus, the Romans call him, but we use our true names among the People - is a piper, a player of the double-pipe, the great aulos the Greeks call it. There are stories of men back in the early days who could pipe up a storm, or a demon, or a god, but now people hire him for feasts and he doesn't even get to eat, unless some food has been kept for him back in the kitchen, or someone gives him the leftovers.

  I'm lucky. I trained as an augur. Romans have their own haruspices, their own fulgoratores, but they still prefer Etruscan augurs to do the readings. Romans buy the oxen for sacrifice, and Romans cut their throats, but when it comes to plunging your hands into the steaming entrails and finding a liver to prophesy, we Etruscans still have an edge. A Roman looks at a liver and sees something to fry up with onions and sage; I look at it and see the death of armies, the fall of cities, the election of a consul.

  Same with birds. You'll hear two Romans arguing about what they see. It's a woodpecker, says one. No, it was a crow, that was just a flash of sun on the feathers, says the other. Think I don't recognise a crow? the first one will reply. You never hear them arguing about which way the bird was flying, though to an augur that's the first and most important thing you notice; the quarter of the sky.

  It's an art, not a science, but like all arts, you don't come to it fully formed, even if you have something of a gift for it (and I'm not sure I did); you learn it, with some pain, at some cost. I'm quite good at it; people have been known to ask for me by name, rather than just take whichever augur is next in rotation.

  They ask a question. I give an answer. Nothing strange or uncanny or mystical, nothing to be afraid of, and Romans, I'm afraid, are very afraid. They don't live with their ghosts the way we do; they run screaming away from them. Perhaps that's why they put up such a stern front, all deeds of arms and closing ranks and Stoic, tight faces. They ask, I tell; simple.

  But recently I've been having intimations of doom.

  I saw three ravens yesterday flying from the Capitol. They flew over my left shoulder and away towards the Tiber, towards the unlucky west. Later, I heard the hoarse rattling gurgle of another.

  ***

  Every election demands an augury; a very simple question, which the omens will answer either yes or no. We have a new consul, or rather, an old one, re-elected, and as always the question is: do the heavens approve?

  We were on the highest point of the Capitoline, before the new year sunrise, the new consul and I. We each had our task; he to observe, me to interpret. I've always liked the hollow silence before dawn, a silence full of promise and portent.

  "Why are you smiling?" the consul asked me.

  "I'm thinking it will be a good day."

  "We'll see," he said, grimacing slightly.

  "The omens were auspicious last time."

  "That was last time. Take nothing for granted."

  I realised he was a little nervous.

  We waited in silence, after that, as light gradually suffused the air around us. I watched our breaths cloud and drift away in the cold. We saw the Tiber burst into flame for a moment as the sun came up, and heard the throttled cries of roosters and a few dogs startled into barking; and I nodded to him to draw up the grid.

  He took his staff and drew a line across the sky.

  "Let the boundaries be as I declare them to be," he began, naming each stroke as he made it, to the east, to the west, behind, in front. "Let these be the boundaries, o Jupiter, whom I ask, if it is good and right that I should be a consul, to send a sign clear and certain within these bounds."

  We waited a long time, chilly at first till the sun rose high enough to warm us. The city was still, the air calm, slow tendrils of smoke rising vertically from a few hearth fires.

  Then the eagles came. Two eagles, on our left, soaring high and lazy in the air, wings completely still. I heard him sigh gently in relief. He didn't need me to interpret that omen; an eagle is auspicious, doubly auspicious with a pair.

  But at that same moment my eyes caught a sudden flash of brightness, and a little later a dull rumble, away over the river towards Ostia and the coast. A storm in the house of death; I don't think he had seen it, and I wasn't sure myself, though the thunder confirmed it. That was no good omen, and I would have said something, if a third eagle hadn't flown directly over our heads right then. Three eagles trumps anything.

  He smiled ruefully. "Another year as consul, then," he said, and I could almost have believed he didn't want it, if he hadn't then grinned at me, and winked.

  Despite the three eagles, though, I worried about that distant storm. The gods could hardly have been clearer that his appointment was approved, but something was out of kilter; the clouds were gathering.

  ***

  There were more bad omens. Freezing ice fell from the clouds; a sparrow fell dead from a branch in the atrium, and when I picked it up, it was frozen quite hard. There were reports of strange flickerings in the marshes along the Tiber, though that, I think, may have been only marsh gas.

  The year turned, and out of the brown and grey of winter sprouted the fresh green of vine tendrils and budding leaves. The first sweet taste of tender vine shoots, that I'd looked forward to after a winter of getting fat on pulses and cheese that got harder and stank more the longer it kept, and the long weeks of crisp weather and hesitant sunshine, put bad omens out of my mind. But one of the stones for the foundations of the temple of Venus Birthgiver cracked right across as it was laid, and the cattle that grazed along the river marsh caught a wasting disease, so the pastures seemed full of shambling skeletons.

  Those are not omens, I told myself. Some things just happen; there is no great plan. They symbolise nothing; they just are.

  Then late in the year, I was up in the Alban hills, taking a few days away from the city. The autumn sun shone ripe full gold, bringing warmth to the landscape - russet leaves, oc
hre earth, yellow grass, the vine leaves huge and blotchy with purple and saffron - and it was not yet cold, nor was there any moistness or mist in the air. It was as if summer had stretched itself as late and as thin as it could. I sat with friends, and walked the small paths of the villages between the vineyards and the pinewoods, and at midday I sat on a sun-warmed rock and ate thin shreds of wind-cured ham, and hard old cheese with slices of a thick plum jelly, and drank a tannin-laden red wine from a wineskin that left my teeth furry and my lips aching.

  The grapes were huge, heavy with juice, on the verge of splitting. The wine would be strong this year, I thought; strong enough to take my cares away for a while, to soak away old memories and pains.

  I was puzzled, though, to find one vineyard unkempt; the wall had fallen, and the vines had not been pruned, so that the trailing foliage rioted, and the grapes were hidden and, when they could be found hiding under the huge leaves, small and acid.

  I slept in my cousin Velthur's hayloft, and I slept well, the sweet breath of the cows below and the murmur of their breath lulling me into a childlike contented slumber. When I went to sleep the last pinkish glow of sunset was still on the horizon: red sky at night, drover's delight, a child's weather-telling that wasn't an augury, nor an oracle, but a simple charm. I'd never known it not to work.

  I was woken by an intense white glare that seared and flashed and ripped the sky open with a crashing roar; and then I heard a worse sound, the smash and rattle of hail.

  I ran out into the yard. I don't know what I'd thought I was going to do, for there was nothing that could be done; by then the grapes were already irretrievably ruined in that first fierce freezing onslaught. Hail stung my face and slapped my shoulders; the cold was bitter.

  Everyone else must have had the same mad desire to do something, anything, that I felt, for Velthur, and his cattleman, and his wife, and I were all standing there uselessly, and Velthur shouting at the white confusion of sleet and sky, "Come on then, come and strike me dead, come on you big bastard, you bully, you, strike me dead if you dare," till the cattleman put one huge hand on his arm and gentled him back into the house, just as he'd gentle a frightened heifer.

  None of us slept much after that. As a pale sun struck cold glints from the hail that lay thick on the ground, we ate the porridge Velthur's single slave had prepared, with honey and crushed nuts. Velthur had warmed some wine thickened with grape must, kept so long it felt like syrup in the mouth and tasted sweet and heavy, and strong.

  "You should have kept that for a celebration," I said; "it's too good to waste."

  "There won't be much celebrating this year."

  "The cattle..."

  "..are all very well," he said, "but it's the vineyard makes the money. And without a vintage this year, I wonder if we'll be able to keep on; this farm's too small. Like Rutilius'."

  I remembered the derelict vineyard I'd seen the day before; and suddenly I remembered the thickset man with a dense fringe of shaggy dark hair and shoulders like a bull's who used to keep it. So many times I'd seen him trudging along the lanes with a bundle of vine-stakes on his back. Yes, what had happened to Rutilius?

  "Sold up," Velthur said. "He's in Reate now."

  "But the place is abandoned."

  Velthur shrugged. "Some patrician family bought it. They own more land down towards the river from here. They buy up whatever comes on the market. It's too far from their farm for them to bother with now, but eventually, they'll buy whatever's next to it, and then they'll start making it pay."

  It was too depressing, in that dismal dawn, to talk any longer about the prospects for Velthur's farm, and I knew how much debt he'd taken on last time there was a bad crop, and still had to pay off; it was the cattleman who changed the subject, telling us about the time he'd been out in a worse hailstorm than this, looking for a lost cow, and found it, eventually, with a tiny black bull-calf with a white star on its forehead.

  "The little fellow could hardly walk," he said, "so I carried him wrapped in my cloak, all the way down the hill in a white-out, following the lie of the land quite blind; but I got back to the farm in the end, and he was the best stud bull we ever had. That was the winter the old miser at Wood's-End froze to death for want of a fire, do you remember?"I didn't; but what I did remember was that it was Velthur's land that lay next to Rutilius'.

  ***

  I struggled against the omens. There had been bad harvests before; there had been hailstorms before; they weren't all portents. We're trained to see prophecy within a formal context; we ask, gods answer. If no question has been asked, how can there be an augury? Even so, I was beginning to feel uneasy.

  Since my wife died I've kept up one of her little customs, feeding the birds that come to our yard. Not birds of omen, eagles or ravens or the great hawks, or the owl of misfortune, but the small birds that fly low, below the notice of the gods, the black-hooded sparrows and the tits with their neat moustaches, and the different finches which strike sudden fire with the gold and red flash of their wings. One or two of the birds come to my hand; most are too wary.

  There are crumbs of bread for the robin, who comes usually on his own, and scolds me if I don't have something for him, and seeds and grain for the other birds, and a few dried seed pods from meadow flowers hung up for the flightier finches.

  Towards winter the migrants come; great vortices of starlings, three or four flocks at a time flying spirals that interlock with each other, filling the sky with swirling flecks of black, a blur of charcoal or ash. Their high random chatterings crowd out the lovelier sound of blackbird and thrush, or even the insistent robin's song, but they rarely come to the garden, preferring to roost in the high trees.

  I have never before seen them kill.

  They fell on the yard suddenly, blacking out the sky. When you hear one bird's wings, you hear a small rattle or rustle; there were hundreds of them, and the noise of their wings was a crackling roar I've never heard before or after, and they screeched at the same time. I flinched at the noise, and threw an arm up to defend my head; but before they reached me, they half-turned, and I saw them crowd into the centre of the flock, so thickly it boiled and seethed like liquid. Then as suddenly as they had condensed, they flew apart again, flying outwards and up from the yard; but behind them they left the limp bodies of a dozen birds, their feathers draggled and their eyes pecked out. Two of the dead birds had their claws buried in each other's eyes, head to tail in a vicious circle of death.

  I had the bodies swept up and burned. The next day, the robin and the sparrows and the titmice were back, and the goldfinches charmed me for a minute with their song and their colourful fluttering; but their innocent playfulness no longer gave me the usual pleasure.

  Again I tried to take refuge in my training. The starling is not a canonical bird; this could not, therefore, be an omen, or so my teachers would have insisted. I had not drawn the quarters of the sky, I had not asked a question, I had invoked no god or demon. But when birds turn murderers, something is askew; the sky swings on its axis, and the gods speak without our asking.

  I wonder if it was like this in Tarquin's time - not the first Tarquin, but the second, the one they call The Proud One; if there were omens like this for the People, when the Romans were running out of patience and we were running out of time, and the age of the Etruscans was about to end for ever.

  ***

  I sold the little orchard on the Celian which belonged to my wife's family. I used to like sitting in it with her, and the apple trees were good ones - the fruit would store almost all winter, and the harvest never failed - but I admit I've neglected it; the trees need pruning, and the ruffles of fungus on one suggest it is rotting from the inside, and there's nothing to be done about it.

  When we were first married, this area was still half countryside; we'd walk out there, and see no one all day but a couple of drovers, a mule driver, and a boy chasing the crows off the fields. But the city caught up with us; now there are houses on al
l sides, and a patrician's villa towering over the little trees. (He gave me a good price, though I hated selling to him, an arrogant man who'd once hired another augur after my reading didn't please him, and then hired a third when the second told him the signs were still inauspicious.)

  I thought I might leave Rome. I have friends in Felsina, far in the north, in the foggy, fertile lands where they eat fat geese and brown lentils, the flat land of baking summers and misty winters and mud and clay and the great winding Padus river. In Felsina I'll be well away from whatever is going to happen here, whatever it is the portents want to tell me.

  I told Cneve I'd half decided to leave Rome.

  "You're mad," he said, and to his wife, "Tell him he's mad, will you?"

  "You're mad," she said, and grinned as he pulled her back against him, and bounced her on his knees.

  "You need a woman," he said. "How long has it been..."

  "Nine years."

  "But you're insane. Really, really insane. It's the Golden Age here. Never before has so much wealth..."

  "Been owned by so few," I said.

  He shook his head. "Mad, mad, mad. Gold from Egypt, grain from Africa. The streets are flooded with Greek wine. It's an age of liberality and public hand-outs; no Roman citizen even needs to work."

  "But we're not citizens."

  "We could be," he said, laying one finger against his nose. "I have connections."

  He bent his head to nuzzle into Thupeltha's neck, and she wriggled, winking at me.

  "He's mad, too," she told me.

  If he did have connections, they were news to me; as for wealth, though he had some good wine, Thupeltha's jewellery ran only to a couple of glass bead necklaces and a single gold ring, and though she kept the house clean and fresh, it was small, and entered through a common yard where the neighbours' pigs kept the mud churned up all winter. I thought of Velthur and his troubles, too, and the way that only the patricians prospered, but I said nothing.

  ***

  When I was younger, I decided to do a thing, and I did it. I met a girl at the Apollo Games in Quinctilis one year and by September I'd married her; two months, more or less, from losing a bet with her on a horse race (I still remember the name of the horse, Silverwhite) to the day we exchanged gifts. I still have the bronze mirror I gave her, though the fine tebenna she gave me has long since been eaten by moth and age. Now, I think about doing something, and the thinking takes the place of the action. I had sold the orchard, but I dithered about moving north, and life carried on the same way for another couple of years; in between my work, and tutoring two of the younger augurs, and making a copy of one of the older haruspicy texts, I forgot about the evil omens, or rather, they formed a continuous rumbling as of thunder, that you forget to listen to until the lightning strikes a tree in your own orchard and you wish you hadn't let the continuity of the sound fool you into ignoring it.