She Walks in Darkness by Evangeline Walton

beauty, show great promise—yet if the mother is low-born, the promise always fails.” His face had darkened; for a moment his voice held bitterness, even pain.
    “Tarchon understood that. After giving his people the laws that their king wrote down, the boy-god returned into the Earth, remember. In other words, he was buried, having been quietly smothered or poisoned. A wise ruler is unsentimental.”
    “You think he was Tarchon’s own child?” Roger was startled.
    “Assuredly. Sons can be dangerous, yet a man needs them. A race must have them. By papal dispensation I married my cousin, a gentle and lovely lady, but she had only the fineness of our stock, not its vigor. She lived for many years but she bore no child, and in those days I was myself too sentimental to take the needed steps. Yet probably it did not matter; one man’s progeny could scarcely have given a race rebirth.”
    “He was thinking out loud then,” Roger wrote, “not really talking to me. To have no son must be a great grief to a man like that. For him there’s no future. Hitler has (or had) plenty of hopes for his appalling race of super-men (super-bullies, rather), but for the prince everything that exists or that ever can exist is paltry beside his dead-and-gone Rasenna. Wonder what he’d think if he could go back in time and see them as they were. Some Roman playwright accused the women of earning their dowries by prostitution, I remember—the way the Ouled Nail still do in North Africa. But the prince probably would say that that was a foul slander, envious Roman women’s gossip. Etruscan ladies were famous for their beauty. I have a feeling that his highness isn’t exactly the man to be broad-minded about women.”
    At that line Floriano laughed. Suddenly and harshly. “He was not altogether a fool, that Englishman!”
    There was not much more of the entry left. “...I’m sorry for the old chap; his can’t be a cheerful obsession. But I’ve got to get out of this room occasionally, or I’ll soon be going queer myself.”
    There anything like coherent narrative ends. Roger may have begun by going just a little way from his tomb-chamber. One turn, two turns the first day, perhaps—then more. The desire to explore inevitably whetted, inevitably growing.
    He went farther and farther. Not without qualms.
    “...any noise doubly loud in a place like this...own footsteps sound like two men’s... I’d have sworn someone behind me. Conscience? I’m not disturbing anything...never speak of anything I’ve seen with(out) host’s leave, of course.”
    A few fragments draw a dreadful picture. “...damned ugly sight.... Wish I had stayed in my room today.... A good old Etruscan punishment, of course; Virgil mentions it; and all of them must have been proud of their Etruscan blood, even if they weren’t obsessed by it, like Prince Mino. God knows what obsessed or possessed a man who could do a thing like that...heard the yarn years ago: How, whenever an heir of the Carenni comes of age, his father brings him down to see those two skeletons...lesson against treachery. And Prince Mino calls other people barbarians.... Never dreamed the thing could be true, but here they are!... Old saying about everybody having some skeleton in his closet, but those two—!”
    Bewildered, I looked at Floriano. “Have you any idea what he’s talking about?
    He looked surprised. “You do not know the story? How young Amedeo Carenni loved his father’s bride?”
    A horrible thought came to me. “You mean that girl the villa was rebuilt for—?”
    “She. Her husband caught her and his son together.”
    “And then the boy’s own father killed him?”
    “As he lay in his beloved’s arms. And she—that daughter of the people who had been bought from her humble parents like a cow—was chained living to his corpse and buried with him. That is the good old Etruscan punishment our friend spoke of.” Floriano’s mouth was grim; his eyes smoldered.