Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  We discussed where the foreigners might have landed, for we hadn't heard a clear report yet. Silvia thought they would have tied up at the wooden docks at Sirmo, but I had it in my head that they had not gone so far upstream, but had beached their ships at the place called Venticula, where the river takes a great bend to the north. Though we said nothing about it, we were both aware that if any of our countrymen saw us, whether they recognised us or not, they would rightly tell us to get back home at once, and might make sure we did so. There was a cart road to Sirmo, to Venticula only a path leading through dense woods and past the marshes of the Fossula. We kept off the cart road and the straight pagus lanes, away from farmhouses and shepherds' huts, following the path that wound over old grass-grown dunes and skirted swampy thickets as it neared the river, till we finally scrambled up the low forested hill above Venticula.

  As we came over the crest of the hill, we both realised that we weren't alone in the woods: we heard men talking, calling, the blows of an ax, then we saw a couple of helmeted heads across a myrtle thicket, behind which we at once crouched down to hide. Silvia had a fit of wild, silent giggles, which infected me. We crouched shaking with crazy laughter. The soldiers crashed on down the hill, and when it had been silent for a while except for ax blows far off, I wriggled around to the end of the thicket. From there I could look right down the hillside through the trees to the open glades by the shore. I whispered to Silvia, "There they are!" She crawled beside me and we lay watching the Trojans.

  I saw my husband almost at once. He stood out among them, not by any ornament or richness of clothing—they were all dressed like soldiers on the march who'd been on duty a long time and crammed into ships on the sea as well, all plain and worn and dirty—he simply stood out, the way the morning star stands out from other stars. He was a man in his forties, with a strong face. He was sitting comfortably on the ground and laughing at something one of the other men said. They were having a picnic there on the grass. Almost all of them were men. They had brought flatbread up from the ships, which were run up stern-first along the beach. They had gathered a great basket of wild greens to pile up on the rounds of flatbread, having no meat or cheese, evidently, as well as no plates or tables. The few women among them were none of them young; one matron, smiling, presented Aeneas with a round of bread heaped with greens, which he rolled up and bit into with gusto. Close to him sat a boy of fifteen or so, who looked enough like him, and looked up to him in such a way, that I was sure it was his son Ascanius. With him were a very pretty boy of his age and a beautiful youth a few years older, wearing a bent-forward red cloth cap. The woman who had served the meal sat down beside him and set his cap straight with an unmistakably maternal fussiness, adoring him.

  "They're much better looking than I thought foreigners would be," Silvia whispered to me. "That boy with the red cap is gorgeous." I hushed her with a nudge of my elbow. I was afraid they might hear us, since we could hear them clearly enough, though to be sure the wind was blowing our way.

  Red Cap said something about the meal being fit for rabbits not men, and young Ascanius said, "Well, it's not at every meal that you get to eat the table too."

  At that Aeneas looked at him as if startled. After gazing motionless for a minute he stood up. They all looked up at him.

  "That is the omen," he said, his voice ringing clear and solemn. " 'When hunger drives you to eat your tables, there will be your journey's end.' You remember what the Harpy said to us?"

  A murmur of assent and awe ran among them all, those travel-weary men and boys and few women sitting there on the grass above the river. They did not take their eyes off Aeneas.

  "Euryalus, bring me a myrtle bough," he said, and Red Cap ran to break off a bough. Aeneas bent it into a wreath to cover his head, and stretched out his arms, his hands palm up to the sky. He said, "Dear faithful gods of the house of Troy! This is your promised land at last! We are home, my people, we have come home!" He looked round at them all and his face shone with tears. He prayed again: "Hear us, spirit of this place, and spirits and rivers we do not yet know! Night, and the rising stars! My father in the underworld and my mother in the heavens, hear our prayer!" Then he turned round and drew a deep breath. "Achates!" he shouted in a tremendous voice. "Tell them to bring the wine up from the ship!"

  At that moment Silvia nudged me. Seven or eight men with bows and arrows were trotting in single file across the clearing to our left. It was time for us to be out of there.

  We crept under the shelter of the cork oaks into thick woods to our right, and through them back over the crest of the hill and so down the way we'd come. We were home before evening. At the farm, Silvia turned to me and gave me a big hug. We were both sweaty from our long run, we stuck to each other when we hugged. We laughed, and Silvia said, "That was a good idea, going there!" So we parted for the last time.

  When I got back to the Regia I heard that my father had given orders that no one was to approach the strangers' camp until he had determined who they were and why they had brought longships and armed men into the heart of Latium. I said nothing, of course, about my hare-brained exploit, but slipped into the house, washed and put on a clean tunic, and sat spinning away as if I'd never set foot outside the door in my life.

  The word was that the king was going to send Drances with a party of men to talk to the strangers in the morning. But next day before Drances even set out, people ran shouting, "They're coming!"—and a small troop of foreigners came riding up to the city gates.

  Their horses looked poorly, as well they might, poor creatures, after a sea voyage, but they were decked out with silver-mounted bridles and trappings, and the men were grand in embroidered cloaks, bronze breastplates, and tall helmets with crests of horsehair or feathers. I could get only a glimpse of the troop from our doorway as they rode up the Via Regia, before the women were sent off to the back of the house; but I saw Aeneas was not with them.

  While Drances and other officials brought them in and escorted them to the king's audience hall, I went through the royal apartments and entered the audience hall through the king's door, behind his seat. He had not bidden me to be there; but I had been present with or without my mother at many audiences, as a courtesy to the visitors and to welcome their wives and daughters, and if he did not want me now, he had only to send me away.

  I do not think he knew at first that I was there. He was already speaking to the Trojan envoys. He welcomed them with stately courtesy and asked immediately, though politely, where they came from and the cause of their visit to Latium: had they perhaps gone astray or been driven out of their course on the high seas?

  A tall, thin Trojan introduced himself as Ilioneus, and in a spate of elegant and respectful language explained that they had come to the kingdom of the great Latinus following the command of fate. Natives of the noble city of Troy, which had withstood a ten-year siege by the Greeks but had fallen at last to treachery, they had escaped from the burning.

  As the herald spoke, I heard the poet's voice overlapping his as a sea wave running up the shore overtakes and overlaps the wave before it. I knew then that the high house of the king and all of us in it had being only in those words. And that knowledge changed nothing. The messenger still must speak, the king must listen, the king's daughter must follow her fate.

  The messenger spoke on: oracles had bidden them bring the gods of Troy over the seas to the far shore of Italy, where they would find a home. Their lord Aeneas son of Anchises had led them for seven years across land and sea, and though other kings had asked them to stay, he would offer alliance only to Latinus, who reigned over the land promised them by the oracle. And in earnest of his goodwill, Aeneas offered to the king some poor fragments, saved from the fallen city, that had belonged to his father's brother King Priam of Troy.

  One of the Trojans came forward and laid at my father's feet a marvelous tall libation cup that looked to be of solid gold carved and jeweled, a silver rod or wand, a thin, old, gold crown, and
a delicate weaving of royal crimson embroidered with gold thread.

  My father gazed down at these things in silence for some time, neither accepting nor refusing them. At last he asked the envoy to tell him more about the city of Troy and their quarrel with the Greeks, and then something of their seven-year voyage across the Middle Sea, all of which Ilioneus did. My father asked if they had stopped in Sicily, and Ilioneus said that they had left a colony there; he asked if they had been in touch with the Greek settlement south of us, whose king was Diomedes, and Ilioneus said that they had not, Diomedes being a veteran of the siege of Troy and not likely to be well disposed to Trojans. All his answers were both direct and graceful.

  My father let silence fall again, looking downward, his eyes moving as they followed his thoughts.

  At last he looked up. "Oracles, you say, bade you come to this country," he said. "I will tell you that your coming also was foretold. I think, my friends, that we are to enact what fate will have us do. If your chief Aeneas seeks alliance, if he seeks to settle here with us, I will ask him to come to my city and offer me his hand, even as he has offered me these noble gifts. And I will take it, as I accept them, in sign of friendship and pledge of peace. And say this also to him: my only daughter is bidden by our oracle to marry a stranger, a man who, even as the oracle spoke, was coming to us. I think your lord Aeneas is the man. And if my mind sees truly, this marriage is what I wish. So bid him come." He stood up, and only then, I think, did he see me; but he showed no surprise, he only looked at me with serene, affectionate eyes, a look of perfect certainty, smiling a little.

  He did not introduce the envoys to me, but moved among them, admiring their noble gifts, ordering our people to bring out gifts for them. I backed away quietly through the door I had come in.

  To hear myself promised as part of a treaty, exchanged like a cup or a piece of clothing, might seem as deep an insult as could be offered to a human soul. But slaves and unmarried girls expect such insult, even those of us who have been allowed liberty enough to pretend we are free. My liberty had been great, and so I had dreaded its end. So long as it could end only with Turnus or the other suitors, I had felt that insult, that bondage awaiting me, the only possible outcome. I had been the dove tied to the pole, flapping its silly wings as if it could fly, while the boys below shouted and pointed and shot at it till at last an arrow struck.

  I felt nothing of that entrapment now, that helpless shame. I felt the same certainty I had seen in my father's eyes. Things were going as they should go, and in going with them I was free. The string that tied me to the pole had been cut. For the first time I knew what it would be to fly, to take to my wings across the air, across the years to come, to go, to go on.

  "I will marry him," I said in my heart, as I went through the rooms of the Regia. "I will make him my husband, and bring the gods of his house here to join with the gods of mine. I will bring him home."

  I turned aside and went across the courtyard, past the great laurel tree, to the domed rooms behind the atrium, the storehouses, my domain, where I and the Penates ruled. Before long it would be the fourth month, June, time to throw open the doors of those storehouses and clean them out, clear them for the new harvest. I sent for a couple of the women who helped me there and we began making ready for the ceremony, recalling and singing to one another the words of the songs of Vesta and Ceres, Fire and Bread, while we carried out empty bins and swept the dusty floors.

  There was commotion all through the house and city as the gifts Latinus had ordered were brought out and men chosen to take them. He himself had been out to the stables to select a few good horses, and to send word to Tyrrhus to have a herd of choice bull calves and a flock of lambs driven to Venticula so the Trojans could have sacrifice and meat. He knew what a king's hospitality should be, and enjoyed his own generosity. He looked like a young man as he strode across the courtyard, and I watched him with pride.

  But Amata came hurrying to meet him from the women's quarters, her hair loose, her face white, her voice loud.

  "Is it true what they say, husband? That you gave our daughter to a stranger—a foreigner—a man you have not seen, know nothing of? Is this wise? Is this kind to the girl?—and me?—Not to say a word to me—"

  My father had stopped and stood erect facing her. The geniality had gone out of his face and old age had come back into it. "This is not the place, Amata."

  "I will speak—"

  "Come with me then. You too, Lavinia." He strode off to the royal apartments and we followed him. Catching up with Amata, I said, "Mother, he did as the oracle commanded, and as I myself asked him to do. Truly I did! This is how it must be. It will be all right!"

  She did not even hear me, I think. As soon as we were in Latinus' office she began to talk, pouring out a torrent of arguments—How could he ruthlessly discard our understanding with Turnus and the other suitors? How could they not see it as pledge breaking? What did it matter if the oracle said the marriage must be with a foreigner?—was Rutulia not a different country from Latium, was Turnus not a foreigner?

  "He is a Latin, one of us, one of your house," my father said, frowning. I thought it a mistake for him to answer her arguments at all, and indeed it only inflamed her. She accused him of listening to Drances' counsel, Drances who hated and was jealous of Turnus—faithful Turnus who only sought to uphold and support Latinus' throne in his old age. She berated him cruelly for oath breaking and weakness and indecision, and in the next breath pleaded with him, calling on his strength and wisdom. He stood enduring the flood of words and said nothing, only occasionally shaking his head. At last, as her voice began to get hoarse and shrill, he broke in, also hoarsely: "The matter is settled. Accept it, Amata. Remember you are a queen." And to me he said, "Take your mother back to her rooms and comfort her, Lavinia."

  "I will not, I will not go," she shrieked, shaking her arms in the air, and she ran out, whirling across the courtyard like a top that children whip into spinning, screaming that the king had given his daughter to a stranger, an enemy, that the king was mad. And she made for the front doors of the Regia.

  The guards did not dare touch her, but my women acted very swiftly, with me, as if we had planned what to do. We surrounded Amata before she had got far into the streets of the city, and talking and soothing and stroking and urging her along, we got her back into the Regia and to her rooms on the women's side. There her hysteria turned to a great fit of sobbing, which left her spent and silent at last.

  I thought that collapse into weariness was final. I thought she had given up. That was stupid of me. So was my failure to understand that what she was saying was not only madness or the rage of frustrated desire. She was giving voice to what a great many of our people thought or feared obscurely when they heard what the king had said to the Trojan messenger: that he had welcomed invaders, that, scorning his loyal subjects and allies, he had promised to give his daughter, his inheritance, his country, to a stranger.

  I went to bed that night tired and shaken but in peace of heart, and slept well. I woke to a craziness that I can remember only in vivid bits and patches, because nothing in it was sane or clear, none of it made sense. I woke in my mother's world.

  It was dark night; women with oil lamps were in my room and one of them was patting my shoulder saying, "Wake up, king's daughter! Wake up!" All about me there was bustle, whispering, laughter. As I struggled awake I saw they were all my mother's women, not mine, and that the slave women were dressed up in fine, ceremonial clothes, in my mother's clothes. I heard Amata's voice, and she came in, wearing the coarse unbleached tunic of a slave. "Up, up, girl," she said with a smile, "this is the Goat Feast, the Fig Feast. We're going to do worship the way my people do, up in the hills. If your father can give you away, I can take you away! Come on, now, we must be there at sunrise!" And I was up, and dressed in an old grey tunic and a ragged shawl, and hurried away among the laughing women—out the back door, through the silent streets of the city, out the postern
gate, across the fields, towards the low forested hills that rise east of Laurentum. The tiny oil lamps made a wavering dance down the lane before us and behind us. The eastern skyline was just showing clear against the first beginning of dawn, Mount Alba standing long and dark over the dark world.

  We left the last pagus and entered at once into the forest. Night closed around us, it was hard to see the way. The lamps cast wild shadows through the trees and across the uneven path. Women stopped to free their robes from thorns and entangling branches, but Amata urged them on—"Don't worry about that, a tear can be mended, we must be up in the hills, up at the fig-tree spring, when the sun rises! Come on, hurry along!" And she went back down along the line to encourage the women, house slaves, sweepers and washers and cook's helpers and maids of all work, who were struggling along under heavy loads, baskets and jugs of food and drink. She called them by name, cheered them on, and came whirling back up to the head of the line, laughing and talking. "Oh, this is an adventure, at last!" she called to me joyously as she passed me. And indeed there was a wild thrill of strangeness in the hurry and secrecy, the changed costumes, the line of women carrying lights in the forest in the dark—it was all unreal, fantastic, and I was caught up in the excitement of it.

  We reached the fig-tree springs as the sky was brightening. Up in the heart of the hills a spring breaks out from a ledge of rock on the side of a deep fold in the hillside, and all around below it, on a level meadow, grow huge old wild fig trees, a kind of natural orchard. I had been there once with Silvia in summer to feast on the black fruit; but we had heard swine grunting and crashing all about, drawn by the fallen fruit, and so did not stay long, a wild boar being about the only thing Silvia was afraid of.