Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  When the Greek's messenger was done, the counsellors broke into muttering, and then discussion, and they would have been shouting soon, but the king stood up and lifted his arms slowly, with open palms upturned, in the gesture of invocation. They fell still. Latinus bowed his head, and the silence deepened. He sat down on his high seat again and spoke. "I wish we had settled this great matter sooner! Better not to convene the council when the enemy is at the gate. My people, we are fighting an unrighteous war against an enemy who will not be conquered, because they follow the will of earth and heaven, while we do not. We have broken our obligations, they have held to theirs. We cannot defeat them. I know my mind has wavered on this, but I am certain now. Hear what I propose. Let us give them the land I own out beyond Sicania, all the rough foothill farmland there and the pine forests of the mountains: let us ask them to build their city there and share our realm. Or, if they wish to leave, we will rebuild the ships we burned. Let us send them envoys, with gifts to seal the treaty, now. Consider well what I say, and take this chance to spare our shaken people from defeat!"

  Silence followed, but not a cold silence. They knew their king was a brave man, a warrior, who would not surrender lightly, and a man of piety, who had received the clear word of an oracle and held that it must be obeyed. They were thinking it over.

  Unfortunately, Drances got up and began to talk. He talked vividly and fluently as always, but with burning malevolence, addressing Turnus directly. He told Turnus the war was his doing, the defeat was his doing, and it was up to him to end it—unless he was so smitten with glory and so lustful for the dowry of a king's daughter that he would lead our armies out again, "leaving our worthless lives scattered over the fields, unburied, unwept, unknown. But if you had any real courage at all, you'd stand up to the man who challenged you!"

  At this Turnus of course burst out and called Drances a coward who had never yet been on the battlefield, whose tongue talked of courage while his feet were running away. The Latin alliance was not defeated, far from it! Had not the Tiber run red with Trojan blood? Maybe the Greek Diomedes was afraid of Aeneas, but Messapus was not, and Tolumnius was not, and the Volscians did not know what fear was. "And does this hero challenge me to fight him alone? I hope he does. Better that I appease the angry powers by my death or win deathless fame by my courage. Better I than Drances!"

  There was a growl of applause for that from the old counsellors, but Latinus intervened to stop the exchange of boast and insult and was about to speak again, when a messenger ran in under Verus' escort, shouting, "The Trojan army is advancing on the city!" He was followed by other messengers, and through the opened doors of the room by a great noise of people in alarm, like a flock of geese or swans startled up crying and cackling on the marshes.

  Turnus seized the moment unhesitating. "To arms!" he shouted. "Shall we sit here praising peace while the enemy attacks us?" And he ran out, calling to his captains, ordering who should defend the city and who should ride out with him. Latinus could not have stopped him if he had tried. He did not try. He sat motionless on his throne while the council broke up and the counsellors hurried out to see what was happening. Drances tried to talk to him but Latinus paid no attention, ordering him with a gesture to stand away. At last he got up and walked past us women, going to his apartment. He did not look at us or speak.

  Amata took my hand.

  Without thought, as if her touch were ice or fire, I pulled my hand away from her and stood facing her, ready to fight or run if she tried to touch me again.

  She stood staring at me.

  "I won't hurt you," she said at last, almost childishly.

  "You have hurt me enough," I said. "What do you want?"

  She spoke hesitantly, still staring at me as if she scarcely knew me. "I thought—I think we should show ourselves to the people—at the altar of the Lar Popularis."

  She was right. With the king in hiding and the enemy attacking, the people needed immediate reassurance that all was well with their royal family and the powers that guarded the city. I nodded. I set off, then turned and said to Juturna, "You come too." I had no business giving orders to a king's sister, but she came without a word, pulling her grey veil about her.

  We went out and walked through the streets to the square where the shrine to the protective spirit of the city stands. As we walked women joined us, coming out of every house, running down the streets. When we came to the place there was a great crowd around us. Amata had walked ahead, and she lighted the incense, but it was I who had stood with the king before this altar a hundred times, and it was I who knew and spoke the words he used to speak, offering the people's duty and honor to the Lar, the spirit and indwelling power of border and boundary, walled city, place of our people.

  The women around us bowed their heads or knelt down, and the people crowded into the streets and up on the walls and roofs fell silent listening.

  I felt flow into me from them a loving trustfulness, a flood of feeling that humbled my mind and yet gave me a sense of great and reliable support. I was their daughter, their pledge to the future, a powerless girl yet one who could speak for them to the great powers, a mere token for political barter yet also a sign of what was of true value to us all. I stood among my people in silence when the ritual was done, all of us quiet as the birds that stand in hundreds at evening on the sea beach, seeming to worship together.

  And so we could hear the noise outside the walls—rumble and clash and crash, neighing and yelling and thunder of hooves and feet, the noise of an army making ready for war.

  The memory of the sweetness of that worship at the shrine of the Lar of the People was a solace and shield to me in the dark time that followed. Something had changed in the weighting of the balance. I no longer had to hide away, isolated from the current of public feeling; I was buoyed up by it, borne on it. My courage was restored.

  Yet there seemed no reason why I should feel such confidence. Any hope of obeying the oracle, or following my fate as the poet told it, seemed lost. When my father proposed placating the Trojans by giving them land or building ships for them, he had not even spoken of my part in the original bargain. It seemed I was not worth mentioning. My mother had what she wanted—war against the foreigners, with Turnus in control of it, lord of the kingdom and the king's daughter. Yet she went back to the Regia with that same bewildered look on her face and shut herself up in her rooms, while I was released from my seclusion. I found a kindness in the eyes of the men in the streets, the women of my household. They spoke my name tenderly. I felt welcomed, protected. My home was my own again, even if it was under siege.

  I went to the king's apartment and talked with him very briefly. Haggard and aged, his eyes red and swollen, he told me to come to him with any news of great importance, otherwise to let him be; he was not well. I asked him to rest and sleep. Verus and I would meet the messengers, I said, and come to him if need arose. So I spent some of that day in the atrium and at the doors of the Regia with Gaius and other men of the king's guard, receiving couriers from the battlefield.

  There was a constant flow of men and news between the city and the fields in front of it, where the Volscians and the Latins were taking up position for battle under Messapus and the Volscian captains. Scouts reported that Aeneas had sent his horsemen and the Etruscans forward, while he led the rest of his troops up into the hills northeast of the city—Verus said it looked as if his goal was to come at our army from two directions. So Turnus had taken his Rutulians up into the hills, intending to set an ambush for the Trojans at both ends of a pass. I knew the place, Golo Pass the shepherds called it, a narrow dark gorge. An army might well enter it and be trapped.

  Such news came to us quite steadily for a while. In the early or midafternoon there was a pause. Leaving Verus in charge at our front doors, I ran up to my watchtower, just for a look, I thought.

  I stood at the parapet to look out over the roofs and walls to the exercise grounds and fields north of the city. In se
veral long irregular lines beyond the earthworks stood the ranks of Volscians with their black helmet crests, and behind them our Latins, very motley in their helmets and hand-me-down armor. Horses fidgeted, and their riders let them dance and curvet. Archers and men with long, light lances stood around in front of the Volscians, some fidgeting like the horses, others looking bored, leaning on their lances, chatting together.

  The watchtower had the widest view in the city, and we on it may have been the first to see the glint of light on the metal tips of lances far off over the fields in the north.

  A boy on a pony came scouring across the pastures, the pony white with lather, the boy yelling—I could not hear his words but he was surely yelling, "They're coming!"—and they came.

  It was very beautiful, the bristling glitter of lance heads far off there, moving quickly nearer and nearer. The air was shaken with the thrilling drum of the feet of horses at the gallop. All along the lines of men drawn up in front of the city, spears and lances reared up into the sunlight, and horses began to whinny and shift and fight the reins. Then the Etruscan horns and trumpets sounded their battle signals, some deep and hoarse, some silvery sweet. The attackers came on: the defenders stood firm: for a moment everything seemed to stop, hold still. With a blare of the horns and a great shout of men's voices, arrows and javelins and lances went up from both sides, a swift darkness passing and crossing in the air between the two armies. Under the iron rain they met face to face, men afoot and horsemen, body to body.

  I tell you what I saw as I saw it, not understanding it. I saw men running towards the city, converging on the gate. I thought they were the attackers. I could not understand why they suddenly began turning around, running back towards other men who, when they met, fought them, swords rising and falling. Then men were running away from the city, holding their shields behind them as they ran, and mounted men and riderless horses ran with them, and other men followed them, until suddenly those being chased turned around and the swords went up and down again, and there was the horrible noise of men screaming. And it all happened over again. It was like sea waves approaching the city and washing back from it. But the spray was dust, thick, dark, summer dust. After that there was no running and turning, only knots and pairs of men chopping at one another in the dust with swords, and throwing and pushing heavy lances at one another, and blood running where the sword bit and the spear point hit. Mars, Mavors, macte esto. I do not know how long it went on. I stood clutching the parapet of the platform, Maruna and other women with me, and women and children stood on all the roofs and on the walls, watching men kill men.

  The snarling trumpets rang out again. A group of horsemen far out in the fields moved forward in a solid mass like a shadow across the ripening crops and the pagus paths through the hot slanting light full of dust. Before that mass the lines and knots of fighting men gave way. Very quickly the movement involved them all: they were turning and coming back to the city, the Volscians with their black horsehair crests, they were all running back towards the walls. Both armies, all the men down there in the fields were running towards the walls in a cloud of dust that half hid them, fine dust of the plowlands billowing up brownish gold, sunlight making strange hollows and aisles in it through which loomed the shapes and shadows of horses and men.

  The city gates were open. They had been open all through the fighting. I thought: I must go down and give orders that they be shut! Maruna held my arm. I did not understand why I could not hear what she said to me. She put her mouth almost on my ear, crying, "The guards will defend the gate! Stay here! Stay up here!" As she drew away, something passed us perfectly silently and lay still on the platform. A bird, I thought, they shot a bird, but I saw it was an arrow. It lay there with its long, bright bronze point and stiff clipped feathers, harmless. I could not hear anything because the noise down at the gate and the noise on all the roofs and walls of the city was so huge: a screaming, a howling that filled all the world and the mind. From the watchtower we could not see what was happening at the gate. But we could see those who could see, standing on the walls above and near the gate. Some of them were watching their son or husband die, cut down by a bronze sword in front of the locked gate of his city.

  We saw the Etruscans pull away, and the black-crested Volscians follow, though fewer, and slowly. The Volscians stopped just outside the ditch. The Etruscans went on a hundred paces or more before they stopped, wheeled their horses, and stood motionless in the dimming, settling dust. There was a long pause, the sound of shouting fading slowly away, rising in pitch as it grew less, till it was only the crying and moaning of the wounded and bereft.

  "Look, look," somebody said, and where she pointed we saw a column of men coming at a quick pace, though in the distance it seemed slow, down out of the western hills. "It's Turnus, Turnus is coming!" people shouted from roof to roof. An old man's voice shouted, "Where's he been all day?" but he was drowned out by cheers and acclamations for Turnus and the Rutulians. The cheering rang thin and did not last long. Somewhere down near the gate a woman was keening, a gasping ululation, intolerably shrill and full of pain.

  I went down, back to the doors of the Regia, then; so I did not see, as others did, Aeneas lead the Trojans down out of the hills on the same road Turnus had taken, not far behind him.

  The Etruscans drew back farther to join with the Trojans. What was left of our men and the Volscians camped, with Turnus' Rutulians, between the earthen rampart and the city walls. They spent the evening digging the ditch deeper, setting up defenses for the gate.

  I did not see that. At first I was with the women looking after the new lot of wounded men in our courtyard, and then I saw my mother pass under the colonnade, going to the council rooms. At once—though I stopped at the fountain under the laurel tree to wash blood hastily off my hands and arms, and bathe my face in the blessed cool of the water—I followed her.

  I joined her and Juturna at the back of the council room. My father sat on his throne with its curved crossed legs; he did not look like the shaky old man I had last seen, but sat erect and stately in his red-edged toga, listening to Turnus. Drances was there, and Verus and several of the other guards and knights, but only a few of the king's council. Most people were caring for their wounded or mourning their dead, or were out helping fortify the walls for siege.

  Turnus was still in battle gear, though in fact he had not fought that day. He was dusty, and his face was strained and pale. He was not strutting now. He looked young, anxious, handsomer than ever. Amata and Juturna both stood watching him with yearning eyes. He was giving a report of the conditions of the allied army to Latinus, not trying to disguise that his ambush had failed, or deny that the Volscians had broken and run, nearly bringing the Etruscans after them into the city. But he praised Messapus and Tolumnius and the Latin troops, and the citizens too, for rallying at the city gate and holding firm.

  "Tomorrow," my father said, "you and your men will be with them. And Aeneas and his men will be with the Etruscans."

  "Yes," Turnus said. There was a pause. He shifted his position, stood with his legs a little farther apart, his head back. "I do not hang back. There is no delay in me," he said rather strangely, his voice growing louder. "If people say the treaty was broken, if the Trojans think so, I give them the lie. Repeat the rites, King Latinus, renew the terms of the agreement, tomorrow morning, before all the people! I swear to you here and now, I will by myself clear our people of the taint of cowardice. This Trojan, this man who ran away from his conquered city, let him meet me, let him meet me alone, in fair fight. Let all Latium be on the city walls to see it. Either my sword will take all shame from us, and take Lavinia from him, or he will rule a defeated people and have her as his wife."

  He glanced at us three women standing behind the throne as he finished speaking, but his eyes did not meet mine.

  Latinus answered him with a slow, thoughtful firmness. On the eve of defeat, confidence had returned into him, as it had into me. "Turnus, no
one questions your courage. It is so great, in fact, that it obliges me to move slowly, to hold back. Consider: your father gave you a noble kingdom, you're rich and have the goodwill of your neighbors. You know that I am your friend, your kinsman by marriage. And there are many girls of good family, unmarried, in Latium. Weigh all that in the balance! For whatever happens, I cannot give you my daughter. It is forbidden. It cannot be done. My wish to make the bond strong between us, my wife's pleading, my own weakness led me to do wrong. I broke the pledge. I let it be thought that the promised wife could be taken from the man she was pledged to. Wrongly, I let this war begin. Let it end, now, before a final defeat. Why have I changed back and forth like this, hiding from the inevitable? If I was and am willing to take the Trojans as allies while you're alive, why should I wait for your death to do so? Consenting to this duel, I betray you to your death. Let it not be so. Let my old friend, your father Daunus, see you come home alive!"

  "My sword can draw blood too," Turnus said; he had been pale, but was now red-faced, his blue eyes glittering. "You needn't try to protect me, Father Latinus. The story is that some power hides this Aeneas from his enemies in battle. But here, on our ground, the powers are with me. I will defeat him!"

  At this Amata started forward, ran to Turnus and took his arms, half clinging to him, half kneeling as a suppliant. Her black hair was loose and she was in tears, her voice high and shaking. "Turnus, if you ever loved me—you are our only hope—the only savior, the honor of this disgraced house. All our power is in your hands. Don't throw it away! Don't throw away your life! What happens to you happens to me! I will not be a slave to foreigners! I have no one but you! If you die, I die!"