Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  Mars has no altar in the city. Men worship him. A girl, a virgin, I could have no business with him and wanted none. The house I kept was closed to him, as his was to me.

  But I honored the sanction. He did not.

  When I was a girl, I did not know him well enough to fear him. I liked to see the Leapers rush to open that locked room on the first day of March and come out in red cloaks and high-pointed hats, dancing, driving out the old year, letting in the new, brandishing the long spears and the shields shaped like an owl's face, cavorting and shouting through the streets of Laurentum, "Mavors! Mavors! Macte esto!" We girls ran from them and hid as we were supposed to do, in a dutiful, laughing mockery of fear. Oh how the men like to stick their spears up into the air, we said. Oh how they like to poke their spears and jab their spears. Oh don't they wish their spears were always ten feet long!

  Because we were at peace I could laugh at the Leapers, because we were at peace I could sleep alone in Albunea, because we were at peace my father saw no harm in it when more suitors for my hand began coming to the Regia. Let them vie with one another, let Aventinus scowl at Turnus, let Turnus snub young Almo; they dared not quarrel under the king's roof, or break the king's peace across their boundaries. One of them would prove the best man in the end and take me to his house, and the others must make the best of it. My father enjoyed their visits very much, far more than I did. They brought young manhood into the house. He liked to feast them well and give them wine, pouring their bowls full again and again; he liked their gifts of game and sausage and white kids and black piglets; he liked them to see his beautiful fiery queen, so much younger than he, not so much older than some of them. He was a good and generous host, and his geniality disarmed their touchy brashness and their rivalries. They ended up all laughing late into the night at the great table. He made what might have been a cause of quarrels into a way to better friendship among his subject kings and chieftains.

  If he had been my only parent I might have taken my suitors lightly, as he did, and with pleasure. Some of them were good fellows. Some were easy to laugh at. Ufens of Nersae, a mountain man, came in wolfskins, with a wolfskin hat, a black curly beard all over his red face, staring around him as if he'd never been in a town before, glowering at everybody except me—he couldn't look at me at all. Tita and the other women teased me endlessly about marrying him, the Wolf Boy, Chinthicket, they called him. And I could laugh with them. But I was polite and cautious and cold to all my suitors, even beyond what befitted my status as virgin prize; for my mother did not take the matter lightly at all, and made my position both difficult and false.

  She wanted to marry me to her nephew Turnus of Ardea. That desire had come to possess her. She favored Turnus openly, was all smiles to him and hardly civil to the others who came to stand in his way. Her prejudice made it hard even for rich men like Aventinus to come courting me, and very hard for such a young man as Almo, son of Tyrrhus, the manager of the royal cattle herds, my Silvia's eldest brother. Almo was aiming pretty high in courting me at all, and against such a rival as King Turnus he stood no chance. But he was not merely ambitious, he had fallen in love with me; and having been fond of him all my life as an almost brother, I was sorry for him and kind to him, and so gave him false hope. My mother had no pity on him. She was fiercely jealous of our royal honor. She treated Almo as a cowherd. My father should not have allowed such discourtesy in his hall; but still he let all she did and said go by, and she hid the worst of her behavior from him. It was the game they played, that she could be mad yet not mad because he would not know she was mad.

  I did not want to be courted. I did not want to receive the game, the sausages, the kids, the piglets, the stiff compliments. I did not want to sit at the banquet, the silent modest maiden, while my mother Amata spurned and sneered and turned her back on honest men and wooed her sister's son, handsome blue-eyed Turnus.

  He did not snub or spurn her, never, of course not, he smiled, he murmured, he lowered his long eyelashes and lifted them again smiling and looked right through her to what he wanted. Could she not see that? Could I, a stupid virgin of seventeen, see it, and she not see it? Could my father sit at the head of the table and not see it?

  Drances, an old friend and adviser of my father, was the only person of the household who showed dislike or distrust of Turnus. Drances greatly admired the sound of his own voice and was used to pontificating at our table, but now he had to listen to Turnus' tales of his exploits and triumphs in skirmishes and raids and hunts, and endure the young man's careless, genial, unintended discourtesies. I saw that Drances watched Turnus very keenly, and watched my mother too. Sometimes he would glance at my father, or even at me, as if to say, Do you see? My father was impervious, and I would not return his glance. I wanted nothing to do with Drances; it seemed he knew what I knew, but I did not know what he would do with the knowledge.

  I came to the banquets because I must, and left as soon as I could. The only way I could avoid my suitors entirely was not to be in the house at all. These days I could go to Silvia's farm only if I knew poor ardent Almo would not be there. I could achieve absence from the Regia only by going to Albunea.

  My mother's anger was chafed by the idea that I had some gift like my father's of conversation with the spirits. It gave me a kind of uncanny importance, which she despised. I agreed with her in my heart: the importance was false. But the gift was real. And it was useful to me as my reason not to be always at home, dressed in white, the meek garlanded sacrifice, while the suitors paraded through and drank their wine, and Turnus flattered my mother and laughed with my father and looked at me as the butcher looks at the cow. Amata tried to forbid me to go to the sacred place, for many good reasons, which she argued eloquently. My father, as always, seemed hardly to hear her. Usually that was how she got her way, but where I was concerned, his deafness was different. He temporised, waved his hand mildly, said, "Oh, it will do the child no harm," or, "Prince Aventinus will still be here, no doubt, when she returns," and let me go. And I put on my red-bordered robe, told Maruna to be ready at dawn, and went.

  Turnus came for a visit in late April of the year I was eighteen. He brought a wagonload of splendid gifts to my parents. One was a horrible little creature that he said sailors had brought from Africa; it had hands and feet like ours, and a face like a noseless baby. He brought it in riding his shoulder, dressed in a tiny toga. It clambered all about, chattering, pulling things to pieces, spilling the salt, then stopping to sit and fondle its penis and stare at us with bright black eyes. Everyone at the long table laughed at its tricks. He presented it as a pet for me, and I tried to be kind to the little animal; but I could not like it, and it hated me. It pulled my hair and pissed my dress, and then sprang into my mother's arms. She kissed it and crooned over it. It pulled at the chains round her neck, tugged out the little gold bullas that held my brothers' amulets, and put one in its mouth. Seeing that, a sickness came over me. I had to ask to be excused, and as always my father let me go, though my mother would have made me stay.

  I ran out into the courtyard and stopped at the fountain under the great laurel to wash my face and hands and my palla where the animal had pissed it. The night was cool, the stars bright through the leaves of the laurel. How I loved this house! How could I ever leave it, leave the spirits of the tree, of the spring, of my storerooms, of the hearth, of my people, leave the beloved familiar powers and go serve those of a stranger in a strange place? That would be slavery. I would not do it. Maybe I would marry Almo, and my father would name him his heir, to be king after him, and we would live here, here, nowhere else ... I knew that could not be. Yet my father had no heir, and someday he must name one, or adopt a son. I thought I did not care who it was so long as it was not Turnus. There was nothing much wrong with Turnus himself, but much wrong in the way my mother looked at him.

  I went on to the women's side of the house. I told Maruna we were going to the forest tomorrow morning. Old Vestina said, "The Rutulian
prince has just arrived, child! That is scarcely courteous." And Maruna's mother, the Etruscan slave who had taught me to read the birds' flight, a wise and gentle woman, said, "It might be better to put it off a day or two."

  "My mother can entertain King Turnus far better than I can," I said, staring them both down, daring them to speak.

  Vestina chirped, "But it's you, you he comes to see, how he looks at you, anyone can see you have his heart!" Maruna's mother said nothing. And I left with Maruna at daybreak.

  I took my bag of salted meal. The pastures were full of spring lambs, bouncing about, whirling their tails as they sucked at the teat, but I needed no blood sacrifice when I went to Albunea. I scattered salsamola on the altar, slept on the old fleeces of other sacrifices, and sought no vision or guidance. All I wanted when I went there was to sleep there, in that silence, with those spirits around me, in the numen of Albunea. A night there clarified my heart and quieted my mind, so that I could come back home and do my duty.

  The walk there was an escape, too, a time of freedom. Maruna was not lighthearted and adventurous like my Silvia, and we did not chatter all day long when we walked as Silvia and I did. Maruna was rather silent, but alert, noticing all things in earth and sky; she was patient, sweet, a good companion. She did not have Silvia's way with animals, but she knew the birds; and she had learned some of her mother's lore, so we talked about what we might read in the calls and flights of the birds in the fields and wild lands about us as we went. And sometimes we talked about what the dead might have to say to us. In Etruria they think much about the dead, and Maruna's mother had been trained in that knowledge when she was a girl in the great city of Caere. I felt ignorant and rustic when she or her daughter spoke of it. To me the dead were best buried, left undisturbed, thought about as little as possible; one did not want to bring their unhappy shadows creeping across the floor, hiding under the table, snapping at dropped food, for they were hungry, the dead were, always hungry. Every spring my father, like every householder in Latium, walked all about his house at midnight with nine black beans in his mouth, and when he spat them out he said, "Shadows, be gone!"—and the ghosts that had infested the house ate the beans and went back underground.

  But according to Maruna's mother the matter of the dead was not that simple.

  Maybe it was she who had opened my mind so that when I slept at Albunea that night, that night in April when I was eighteen, on that ground that is so thin a roof above the underworld, the poet could come to me, and I could see and speak to him.

  Maruna turned off on the path to the woodcutter's hut, and I went on into the forest alone. When I walked there I always remembered the dream I had the first time I went to Albunea, the blood in the river, the city on a hill, the quiet radiance that filled the darkness under the trees.

  No one was at the sacred place, but there had been recent sacrifices; fresh fleeces lay on the ground, and a stack of unburned wood by the altar. I scattered salted meal on the altar and all about the enclosure, and wished I could light a little fire, but I had brought none. So I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong. For the first time I wondered if I might hear the voice that my father heard speak from among them in the dark. The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion. I went back to the sacred enclosure praying, very humbly beseeching these great powers to have pity on my weakness. I was glad I had lit no fire. I made a heap of the fleeces, rolled up in my red-edged toga, for the air was cool, and lay down in the late dusk to sleep.

  I became aware that a figure was standing within the enclosure, on the other side of the altar: a tall shadow. For a moment I thought it was a tree. Then I saw it was a man.

  I sat up and said, "Be welcome here."

  I was not afraid, but the awe was still in me, the religion bound me.

  He spoke: "What is this place?" His voice was very low.

  "The altar place of Albunea."

  "Albunea!" he said. I could see that he was looking around, though it was quite dark, a thin high mist dimming the starlight. After a minute he said again, wondering, almost with a laugh in his voice, "So it is!—And you are?"

  "Lavinia daughter of Latinus."

  Again he repeated the name: "Lavinia..." Then he did laugh, a brief ha! of amazement and amusement. He said at last, "May I stay a while, Lavinia daughter of King Latinus?"

  "The altar place is open to all men." And I added, "There are fleeces here to sit on, or sleep on. I have more than I need."

  "I need nothing, king's daughter," he said. He came a few steps closer so that the altar was not between us, and sat down on the ground. "I am a wraith," he said. "I am not here in my body. My body is lying on the deck of a ship sailing from Greece to Italy, but I don't think I'll get to Brundisium even if the ship does. I am sick, I am dying, I am on my way to ... to Acheron ... Or else I am a false dream. But they come from under there, don't they, the false dreams? They nest like bats in the great tree at the gates of the kingdom of the shadows ... So maybe I am a bat that has flown here from Hades. A dream that has flown into a dream. Into my poem. To Albunea, the sacred grove, where King Latinus heard his grandfather Faunus prophesy, telling him not to marry his daughter to a man of Latium..." His voice was low and musical, like the voice of one talking to the spirits, praying; and that almost laugh came and went in it.

  But I said quite sharply, "Did he?" I couldn't help it. Surely my father would have told me if he had received such a warning. Why would he keep it from me?

  The man, the shadow, paused; he thought; and he said, "Perhaps not yet."

  He knew that he had surprised, disturbed me, and wanted to reassure me. I felt then for the first time his kindness, his searching kindness, sensitive to every suffering.

  He went on, hesitant, "I think it has not happened yet. Faunus has not spoken to Latinus. Perhaps it never did—never will happen. You should not be concerned about it. I made it up. I imagined it. A dream within a dream ... within the dream that has been my life..."

  "I am not a dream, and I don't think I'm dreaming," I said after a while. I spoke mildly. For he was sad, very sad. He had said he was dying. He was adrift, bereft, poor soul. I wanted to give him comfort, better comfort than can be found in dreams.

  He looked at me as if he could see me, as if light filled the glade, light not of sun or moon or star or fire. He studied me. I did not mind it. There was no insolence in him. I could not possibly fear him.

  "I believe you," he said. "How old are you, Lavinia?"

  "Eighteen last January."

  " 'Ripe now for a man, of full age now for marriage,' " he said gently, and I knew it was a line of a song, though I did not know the song.

  "Oh yes," I said, very drily. I felt no shyness, no falseness, with him.

  My response surprised the brief laugh from him again.

  "Perhaps I did not do you justice, Lavinia," he said. It seemed he too could say anything to me, whether I understood it or not. That was all right.

  "What should I call you?"

  He said his name, and I said, "You're Etruscan?"

  "I'm a Mantuan. I had Etruscan grandfathers. How did you know?"

  "Maru, Maro—it's an Etruscan name."

  "So it is. Ah, but how long ago—how long ago you lived, Lavinia! Centuries, centuries! Is there any Mantua, now—yet? Do you know that name?"

  "No."

  He said, after a pause, and with a kind of wondering, passionate urgency, "Rome. Do you know that name?"

  "No. But the Etruscans call—" I stopped. The secret name of the river is not to be spoken to all. Did he know it? But why keep secrets from a wraith, from a dying man? "One
of Tiber's sacred names is Rumon."

  "She came to Albunea by herself," he said, speaking into the darkness, "and knew the sacred names of the river, and had no wish to be married. And I knew nothing of all that! I never looked at her. I had to tell what the men were doing ... Perhaps I can—" But he broke off, and presently said, "No. No chance of that." He looked around again, and sighed, and said, "I keep thinking I'll wake up and see the damned deck of the ship, and the gulls overhead, and the sun that goes across the sky so slowly, and the damned Greek doctor..."

  I have said we understood each other, that we spoke the same language. I did understand him, though he used words I did not know.

  We sat in silence for a while. An owl called to the left, an owl answered from the right.

  "Tell me," he said, "have they come yet, the Trojans?"

  A word I did not know. "Tell me who they are."

  "You'll know who they are when they come, Latinus' daughter. I am—" He hesitated—"I am searching for my duty here. How much is it right for me to tell you? Do you want to know your future, Lavinia?"

  "No," I said at once. Then I sought in my own mind for my duty, or my will, and finally said, "I want to know what's right to do, but I don't want to know what's to come of it."

  "It's enough to know what ought to come of it," he said, gravely agreeing. I felt his smile though I could not see it.

  The left-hand owl called again, the right-hand owl replied.

  "Oh," he said, "the air is so cool, the night is so dark, and the owls call, and the earth, the dirt—this is Italy, I'm home!...I wish I could die here. Here, not on that wooden deck on the sea in the sun. Here, on this dirt. But this isn't my body, this is only my delirium."