Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  "She would not," he began, but he could not say, "She would not dare," knowing she had opened the War Gate. He stood scowling and indecisive.

  "Let me stay with you, father. Let me have one of your guards at my door. I'm trying to obey you and the oracle. I will not marry Turnus."

  After a while he said, "Do you dislike him so?"

  His voice was weak, the question was weak. I tried to suppress my impatience. "You promised me to the Trojan leader. He is my husband. I will have no other."

  "It looks as if the people will go to war to prevent it, daughter," he said, with a show of making light of it.

  "Father, I know what I have to do. And I will. My mother won't stop me, and all the men in the kingdom shouting for war won't stop me." Only you can, I thought, but I did not say it. The thought, however, weakened my resolve, and my voice shook somewhat when I said, "I beg you to let me do as I must, and protect me so that I can."

  I do not know what was going through his mind, what he might have said, when Drances came forward. He had of course heard us, and being always very sure of his mind and free with his tongue, and encouraged in his freedom, he did not even ask leave to break in on us. "King," he said, "your daughter is right, and wise, and brave. If Turnus were to take advantage of the queen's favor, in this time of confusion, and defy the oracle, defy you—the crime could not be undone. Ruin would be upon us! Have patience. Our people will come to their senses. But as you said yourself, they must see what color blood is first. Keep the maiden safe with you, away from danger, away from the Rutulian. Let your guards defend her. She is our pledge of honor. In her, the sacred powers are with us."

  Drances always said too much, went too far, but maybe he had to rant, now, to make my father hear him.

  "Very well," Latinus said slowly, ponderously. "You may stay in your mother's apartments, Lavinia. I will set a guard at the door. But I will have no more disrespectful, rebellious talk about the queen. You understand?"

  I bowed my head, murmured thanks, and slipped away.

  It was a great deal easier to talk with the king's guards than with the king. I had known them since I was a baby—Verus, Aulus, Albinus, Gaius and the others; some of them still called me by my childish title Camilla, altar girl. The pick of Latinus' fighting men in his fighting years, they were all middle-aged, grizzled, a bit thick in the waist under their bronze corselets, fond of their food and drink but not slow in their wits. They were keenly aware that the Regia was now a house divided. To my relief I found that they shared my antipathy to Turnus, even if they did not want to think ill of their queen. "The Rutulian's got the queen tied round his finger," said Verus, "being her sister's son, see, she's made a son of him, he can't do wrong. It's how mothers are." I didn't mind how they explained it so long as they saw that I might be in danger from Amata. And they did see that, for without my asking, one of them was near me wherever I went in the Regia to carry out my ritual and housekeeping duties.

  Those were strange days, when half my own house was foreign to me. I never entered the women's quarters, my home for so long. I was entirely estranged from my mother, and on terms of embarrassment with women I'd known all my life. Most of them could not believe I was insisting on my betrothal to the foreign chief, the enemy, or could not understand why I did. Amata let them say that I was mindlessly, slavishly obedient to my father, and whisper that he was quite senile. And indeed, hiding away in his quarters, eating in privacy, seeing almost no one, Latinus seemed to give proof of his weakness. I saw him only when I assisted him at a rite performed in the house or the city; he never went out the city gates.

  Neither did I, though I spent a good deal of time up on the roofs and the watchtower looking out over the city walls. Up there, I could get away from the curiosity of some and the ill will of others. Verus or one of the other guards was always on duty at the foot of the stairs that led up to the platform in the southeast corner, the highest place in the city, from which you could see the exercise field, the plains and pastures and groves as far as Tyrrhus' farm, the blue hills eastward, and westward the Lentulus winding down among its marshes to the dunes. I took my distaff and went up with Maruna or one of the other girls; we put up an awning, for the summer sun was getting hot. Sometimes women asked if they could join me and came to sit with me a while, with their work or their baby, as if things were as they used to be. It was brave of them, for it was a defiance of my mother, in whose power they were. Some of them told me about her behavior, which clearly worried them. Every day she ordered that the banquet hall be made ready and animals butchered, so that Turnus and his ally chiefs could have a feast. But the chiefs were all busy riding about the countryside raising troops; and arrogant as he was, Turnus would hesitate to eat at the king's table without the king's invitation. He sent excuses. Amata always said, "He'll come tomorrow. We must be ready for him." So the house sweepers and the stable boys were living on choice cuts of beef and mutton, the women said, shaking their heads over the waste and folly of it.

  I felt safe up there on the tower. I watched the men drilling on the exercise field, practicing at swordplay, grouping and charging as the officers shouted orders. It all seemed like the games boys play. Sometimes Verus or Aulus stood at the parapet with me and told me what the maneuvers were for. "They're not using the trumpets," Verus remarked. Latinus had told me once how he had realised, years ago, in Etruria, that the Veiians were telling each other across the battlefield where they needed reinforcements, when to attack or retreat, by the sweet piercing signals like bird calls. He captured two Etruscan trumpeters and had them teach their tricks to some of his boys; and he had won the advantage in more than one fight, he said, from those trumpet tunes. But Turnus was evidently not one for innovations or foreign ways. His men bellowed their orders. The endless, raucous shouting, like dogs barking, wore on all our nerves.

  The numbers of men encamped to the north and east of Laurentum grew daily. Ufens arrived with his rough Aequians. An even rougher troop came from Praeneste, men in wolfskin caps, who went into battle with one foot shod in leather and the other bare. From my platform I could see the captains conferring, among them my old suitors, Ufens and handsome Aventinus, flaunting his lion-skin cape. Mezentius the Etruscan, who had been tyrant of Caere, came up from Ardea with his son Lausus. I looked at Mezentius to see what a traitorous, murderous tyrant looked like. I expected something more sinister than this tough old soldier, clearly very fond of the slender, dark-eyed son whom he kept close by him.

  Turnus was waiting for Messapus to come with his horse troops from Soracte. He arrived at last on the same day as a troop of Volscians, also mounted, black horsehair crests on their helmets. I looked for the woman warrior my poet had said would ride with the Volscians, but I did not see her. But then, he said he had invented her. But had he not invented all of us? I tried to take comfort in that, to pretend that it was all a pretense, all the shouted orders and clashed weapons and sharpened swords, the nervous horses and swaggering men. The horrible list of carnage my poet had told me on the last night, that was what they were making ready for. But why, what was it for? For a pet deer? For a girl? What good would that be?

  Without war there are no heroes.

  What harm would that be?

  Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.

  They all gathered the next morning, our Latins nearest the city walls, then the Oscans, Sabines, Volscians in their bands, the Rutulians out in front, and Turnus on his splendid stallion leading them. Women and children and old men on the city walls cheered and threw down flowers as they rode off north, towards the river.

  My poet could tell how heads were split and brains spattered armor, how men with a sword in their lungs crawled gasping out their blood and life, how so-and-so killed so-and-so, and so on. He could tell what he had not seen with his mortal eyes, because that was his gift; but I do not have that gift. I can tell only what I was told and what I saw.

  What follows I was told, then and since, by men retur
ned from the battle.

  Aeneas had gone upriver to the Greek settlement hoping to bring reinforcements. He had been gone now for eight days. The Trojans had had no word from him. They completed a steep ditch and earthwork round their camp, which was built into the bend of the river so that it was protected on two sides by the Tiber; their ships were drawn up stern first on the beach within the earthwork.

  The forces of Latium attacked the camp. The older men among the Trojans, veterans of the ten-year siege of Troy, managed a fierce and skillful defense. Young Ascanius was wild to make a sally and chase the Latins off, but Aeneas had left orders that if attacked they were not to attack. The captains he left in charge followed those orders, though it was hard to restrain the young Trojans when the Latins began to taunt them as cowards hiding behind their ramparts. "Is that all the Italian land you want?" they shouted. "That little bit of riverbank? Why don't you come out? We'll give you dirt to eat!" They repeatedly tried to force the gate or swarm up over the rampart, but the Trojans drove them back, hand to hand and with showers of darts and javelins. A rain of iron, Rufus Anso called it.

  We women of the Regia took in as many wounded as we could, and looked after them as best we could. Rufus Anso was a farmer from the royal lands just west of the city, who was brought back to the city wounded. He was about my age. A javelin had gone right through his belly below the navel, they had pulled it on out from the back. Our healing women told me he would die. He was not in much pain yet, only frightened; he wanted to talk, not to be left alone, and I sat with him that night. I had sent for his mother, but she could not come till the next day. He said, "The air went dark all at once, like rain. It was like a rain of iron."

  A dart had hit his arm near the elbow, and he complained more of the pain of that small wound than the other. He seemed incredulous that he had been hurt at all. He thought it unfair, bad luck. I wondered why a man would go into battle expecting not to be hurt, what he thought a battle was. He was impressed by the Trojan defense and said they were good fighters. But he had expected to kill, not to be killed, and lay puzzling about the injustice of it. His mother came next day, and he was carried off home, where he died in agony a few days later.

  What weapons did to men was all I saw then of warfare. I did not have to watch them fighting, yet.

  A report came back to us just after dark. While his men made a showy attack on the gate of the Trojan camp, Turnus, alone, got round the ramparts on the river side, lighted a torch, and ran from one beached ship to the next, firing them. The dry wood was caulked with resin, and the ships lay close side by side: the fire caught, the downriver wind spread it from ship to ship: in no time they were all aflame. Turnus escaped before the Trojans saw the fire towering up over the river at their back. All they could do was cut the lines, push the mass of flaming ships out into the water, and watch them drift out on the current and lurch and burn down to the waterline and sink.

  Rufus Anso listened to the man who reported this to us and said, "Well, seems they won't be going back where they came from, those Trojins!" He thought it a good joke. And there was much cheering and high spirits among the wounded men and the women of the Regia.

  I was confused and troubled. Should I not be happy at this feat of daring, this victory for my people? Here among my own people, caring for men of my own people hurt by the invaders, how could I be on the invaders' side?

  But if our purpose was to drive the foreigners out of Italy, why burn their ships? Evidently Turnus meant to exterminate them, not drive them away—if he had acted with any intention except to do immediate harm and carry off an act of bravery.

  I thought again and again of the treaty Latinus had made with them, which we had violated. Tyrrhus and the herdsmen had attacked in anger, the Trojans had responded in self-defense. The matter could and should have stopped there. If there is any sacred thing, it is a treaty. How could the powers of our earth, our land, be with us if we not only defied the oracle they gave us, but did one of the great acts of evil—the deliberate breaking of a promise?

  My mind went round and round on these thoughts and my heart was torn and miserable, wanting to rejoice with the people around me but unable to. I felt myself a traitor, as if I had done the great wrong, had caused it simply by being who and what I was. My mother had taught me that self-pitying guilt, and I had known it most of my life. Though I fought against it, knowing it childish and mistaken, under this stress and pressure it was all too easy to be childish, to be mistaken, to drop back into it.

  The few men who came back to Laurentum later in the evening said our army had set sentinels around the enemy camp and settled down to feasting and drinking, content with their day's work and ready to break into the camp next morning and finish off the Trojans. So then, if Turnus had a plan, it was extermination.

  I know what happened that night from tales told next day by men coming back to the city, and then much later, by Serestus the Trojan, when he became my friend. He took part in a grim conference in the Trojan camp that evening about their chances of holding out until Aeneas returned with the hoped-for allies. Not knowing he had gone from Pallanteum to Etruria, they were desperately anxious about his long absence.

  Two soldiers, young Euryalus and his older friend Nisus, came to the conference and volunteered to creep out through the Latin encampment and carry word to Aeneas. Distressed over the loss of the ships, craving his father's presence and support, Ascanius sent the pair out heaped with praise and promises. When Aeneas came back and won the war, he said, Euryalus would receive all the lands belonging to King Latinus as a reward, and twelve Latin matrons to use as he pleased. I remember the wave of pure rage that came over me when Serestus told me that.

  So the two sneaked over the ramparts in the deep dark of night, and threaded among the burnt-out watch fires, finding their enemies sprawled asleep, full of food and wine. Instead of hurrying through the Latin camp and on upriver, they fell to slaughtering sleeping men and stealing their drinking cups and armor. They cut the throats of ten or twenty helpless, drunken men before their bloodlust and greed were sated and they finally hurried off, burdened with stolen stuff. A patrol saw the gleam of stolen armor, heard the clinking of it, fell on them, and killed them. Their heads were cut off, stuck on poles, and paraded in front of the Trojan ramparts at dawn.

  When Silvia and I hid and spied on the Trojans, we saw Euryalus on the grass, joking with Ascanius. Gorgeous, Silvia had called him. We had seen his mother straighten the red cap on his head. She was the woman who offered Aeneas a weaving she brought from Troy for her son's bride gift. She saw the heads on the poles.

  Later in the morning the Italian troops made an all-out assault. Against heavy odds, the Trojans held on: their archers shot Rutulians and Aequians dead as they worked their way through the ditch, and their swordsmen met attackers clambering up over the earthworks, sword to sword, and repelled them. The Trojans fought so well that by noon half our army had fallen back, unwilling to charge that ditch and wall again. They fought so well that some young Trojans, sick of being on the defensive, began to shout victory, and opened the gates of their camp to charge out and drive the enemy back. Turnus, utterly fearless, hacked and hewed his way in that opened gate, not even looking to see if his men were following him. Alone, he cut his way through the enemy camp, so mad with the fury of killing that the Trojans ran from him, till he got down to the river. He leapt in, in full armor as he was, swam downstream, and came ashore among his friends.

  That feat of reckless courage was the last of the day. Both armies were worn out, there were no more assaults. Both camps were silent that evening.

  We got news all day and in the evening, little by little, as wounded men were brought or made their way back to Laurentum. They were still limping in after dark. Some of them were not wounded, only tired or frightened; they had left the siege, left the battle, they wanted no more fighting just now. These were Latins whose homes were in or near the city, whose relatives would take them in. No Rutuli
ans, no Aequians or Volscians were among them.

  One of our royal herdsmen, Urso, came with a sword wound in his thigh. I asked him about Tyrrhus and his sons, Silvia's two remaining brothers. He said they had all been in the fighting, both days, and that "the old man was like a wild boar, mad with rage. But he wore out," he said. Urso was not a man I had known well, and he did not even recognise me until one of the other women called me by name. Then he stared at me, and his face flushed and broke out in sweat. He raised himself up on his elbow. "It's all about you, woman," he said. "Why wouldn't you marry our Almo? or that King Turnus? All this killing for a girl's whim!"

  The women hurried over and hushed him and hissed at him, scandalised, but I said, "Let him alone. He had to fight for me." My voice shook, and the fierce red blush of shame and anger ran over my face and body as I spoke. "I'm doing what I have to do, Urso," I told him. "We all are." He lay staring at me but said no more.

  We had turned the courtyard into an infirmary. It was full of wounded men by now, and women looking after them, in a murmur of low voices and moaning and the glimmer of oil lamps in the warm night under the restless leaves of the great laurel. The women's quarter remained closed, and my mother stayed there. She gave orders for supplies when asked, but she had not come out of her rooms all day.

  Early the next morning, long before sunrise, I saw her striding under the colonnade to the royal apartment, alone. Verus, on duty at that door, bowed his head to her. She went in. I got up from my half-sleeping vigil beside a dying man and followed her. I do not know why. Maybe I thought I should defend my father from her.

  As I came down the corridor I heard her voice in his room, coaxing at first, then becoming hard and fierce. "It's not too late, Latinus," she was saying. "The foreigners will be destroyed today. They can't hold out any longer. Their great chieftain has run away up the river. He won't be back! Send to Turnus. Tell him he is your son, your daughter's husband. Put the reins of power in his hand. Why not? You've given up your power. So, why are you delaying? Why are you hiding in the Regia? You could have gone out and watched the battle, at least! You could have taken a little of the credit for saving the country! Have you been hiding here thinking the foreigners would come and rescue you and Lavinia? Did you really think they were going to defeat Turnus?" She said the name "Turnus" with passionate energy.