Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  At last I could see Aeneas. He had been hidden from me before because he was seated—my father had had a folding stool brought for him, since he was still lame. But he stood up as soon as he saw me, and we looked at each other at eye level. He was much taller than I, but I was up on the dais.

  Seeing him made me happy. It brought me joy. I thought I saw a gleam, a reflection of my pleasure in his face.

  We bowed our heads in formal greeting, and then a dark man with a keen, kind face, Achates, brought a big pottery vessel up to the dais and rested it there. It was made of heavy red clay, un-decorated, broad at the bottom, broad-shouldered, with a sealed stopper. Aeneas put his hands on it, large, scarred hands, with a formality of gesture that came naturally to him, and also with a kind of affectionate tenderness.

  "Lavinia," he said, "when I left Troy I could not bring much with me: my father and my son, some of my people, and the gods of my household and my ancestors. My father is with the lords of the underworld; my son Ascanius stands there, and with him are my people, ready to do you honor as his mother and their queen. And my Penates and the sacred things of my ancestors I give you now to keep and cherish on the altars of our house, in the city that will bear your name. They have come a long way to your hearth and heart."

  I knelt down and put my hands on the vessel too. I said, "I will keep and cherish them," in a thin voice.

  "Where shall we build Lavinium?" he said, energetic, smiling now with open pleasure, looking from me to Latinus.

  "We must go about the country and see what will suit best," my father said. "I thought of a region in the foothills, up near the father river. Good growing land, and good timber above it."

  "Down the coast," I said. My voice was still weak and hoarse. "On a hill, in a bend of the river that comes down from Albunea."

  They all looked at me.

  "I saw it there, the city," I said. "In a dream."

  Aeneas continued to gaze at me, and his face grew grave and intense. "I will build your city where you saw it built, Lavinia," he said. Then he drew back a little, though we both still kept our hands on the pottery vessel. He smiled again and said, "And did you dream the day of our marriage?"

  "No," I whispered.

  "Name it, King Latinus," Aeneas said. "Name it soon! Too much time wasted already, too many deaths, too much grief. Let us not be wasteful, from now on."

  My father did not ponder long. "The Kalends of Quintilis. If the auguries be good."

  "They will be," Aeneas said.

  They were, of course.

  The Trojans had only what was left of June to start their city and build us a house, but they were amazingly hard workers, better disciplined than we Italians and not used to taking so many holidays. By the first day of the fifth month, the town of Lavinium existed. A bend of the little river Prati half encircled the steep rocky hill that was the citadel. Around the east and south sides of the hill, sloping down more gently, was a ditch and rampart; higher up, a wooden palisade showed where the city wall of tufa rock would be built. Within that the streets were laid out. The main road went up to the citadel with a sharp turn on a steep ramp just before the gate, an excellent defensive position, as all the old soldiers said with satisfaction. A small stone house stood on the hilltop, facing the gate: the Regia. That house, the only one completely finished, looked out over the tents and huts and scaffoldings that made up most of the other habitations, and across the palisade to the water meadows of the Prati and the sea dunes a couple of miles to the east. West of the city the forests of oak and pine rose up and up towards the old volcano, the long mountain, Alba.

  Early in the morning of that first day of Quintilis, my last day in my father's house, I was arrayed as a bride. I who had so often ornamented the sacrificial lamb or calf was now ornamented, and my role, like theirs, was meekness. Vestina parted my hair with a bronze spear blade into six tresses and wound each with red wool fillets; I put on the wreath of good herbs and flowers I'd picked before sunrise in the fields outside town; a woolen sash was tied in a complicated knot round the waist of my tunic, Vestina and old Aula arguing for a long time about exactly how to tie it; and over all went a large, long, light veil, dyed red-orange. It was the flame veil my father's mother Marica had worn when she was married, and her mother before her. Then I joined the three young boys waiting for me in the courtyard, all carrying lighted white thorn torches. The flames were invisible, a mere tremor in the brightness of the midsummer day. Caesus walked in front of me, the other two boys walked beside me, and their mother Lupina, a respectable towns-woman, came behind me as my matron of honor. After us came my father with his counsellors and what was left of his guards, and an honor guard of Trojan soldiers sent by Aeneas, and everybody else who wanted to be in the wedding.

  We went down the Via Regia and people joined us all along the way, all shouting out the wedding word nobody knows the meaning of, "talassio! talassio!" and throwing nuts about and making dirty jokes. The dirty jokes are part of the marriage ritual, which seemed to surprise the Trojans. There was plenty of time to tell them, since the whole lot of us walked all the way to Lavinium, at least six miles. The wedding torches had to be relit or replaced several times, and people got hungry and began eating their walnuts and filberts instead of throwing them about. Water sellers with their tiny, heavy-laden donkeys did a good business all the way.

  It was strange to me to walk inside the flame veil, looking out at the world through it. All that path I knew so well, all the hills and fields and forests, were a little dim, and colored faintly as if with sunset light. I felt set apart from all things, all people, alone, in a way I would never be alone again.

  When we came at last to the front door of the house on the hill in the new city, Caesus turned round and with a whoop waved his burning torch and threw it end over end as high as he could into the crowd massed behind us. There was a scramble for it and a lot of yelling, as people burned their hands grabbing at it to carry off for good luck.

  Then they all quieted down again and watched me as I rubbed the posts of the doorway with the lump of wolf's fat Vestina had carried and given to me to use—it was brownish, stale, with a rank smell. Then she gave me some red wool fillets, and I tied them around the door posts, murmuring worship to Janus the Doorkeeper.

  All this time tall Aeneas stood in the shadow inside the doorway, silent and unmoving, watching me.

  When I was done, I stood still and looked up at him.

  He asked the question that is asked: "Who are you?"

  And I gave the answer that is given: "Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia."

  Then with a sudden, wide smile he moved, he picked me up and swung me high over the threshold of our house and set me down inside it.

  So I was made his wife, the mother of our people, his and mine.

  As a wife, I never felt that grieving anger that I used to feel and once spoke out to my poet in Albunea, asking why must a girl be brought up at home to live as a woman in exile. Indeed my exile was a small matter, since I went only a few miles from my old home, my father, the dear Regia with its laurel tree, and the Lar Familiaris of my childhood. But there was more to it than that. Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free. But in giving up my girl self and taking on the obligations of womanhood I found myself freer than I had ever been. If I owed duty to my husband, it was very easy to pay. And as understanding grew between us and we came to trust each other, there were no restraints on me at all but those of religion and my duty to my people. I had grown up with those, they were part of me, not external, not enslaving; rather, in enlarging the s
cope of my soul and mind, they liberated me from the narrowness of the single self.

  I did not bring the Penates of Laurentum with me. My father had manumitted his slave, Maruna's mother, to be their servant and guardian in my place. When I first entered my new house in Aeneas' arms, the Penates of his father's house in Troy stood on the altar at the back of the atrium: they were the gods of this house now, my family's gods, and I was their servant and guardian. A very old bowl of thin silver, worn and dented, stood near them, ready for the sacred meal. The lamps were of polished black clay. On our dining table was a plate painted red and black and on it was a little mound of dried fava beans, the food that must always stand on the table for the gods who share it with us, and near it the salt cellar: all as it should be. And on the hearth Vesta, the holy fire, burned small and clear.

  Aeneas was about twice my age when we married. When I first saw his whole body, all muscle and sinew and bone and scar, I thought of the lean splendor of a wolf Almo and his brothers had caught and kept caged for a while before they killed it as a sacrifice to Mars. Aeneas' body had been made in a hard school. But the man was no wolf, nor a hard man. I knew he had loved two women before me and grieved for them both. Although he knew me first only as an item in a treaty, he was disposed by nature and by practice to treat me as a wife, intimate to his own being. At first I think my youth awed him. He was afraid of hurting me. He praised my beauty with incredulous delight. He honored my ignorance, but I was impatient with it and ready to learn from him, as he soon learned. As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

  I will not, I cannot tell much in detail of the three years of our marriage, for my mind holds me back from speaking much of those doings and undertakings that seemed of such importance to us and filled our days so full. And indeed they were important both to us and to our people; and they have filled my life, not only then but ever since, completing me, so that though I knew the bitter grief of widowhood, I seldom felt the utter emptiness. I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining. The purest, completest happiness I know is that of a baby at the breast and the mother giving suck. From that I know what perfect fulfillment is. But I cannot regain it by remembering, by speaking, by yearning. To have known it is enough, and all.

  I knew how little time Aeneas had to live, and he did not. Or I think he did not. I do not know all the prophecies he may have heard during his voyage, or when he went among the shadows. If he did know, the knowledge did not weigh on him or make him shorten his view or shrink his hope at all. He looked forward fearlessly and sought to shape the time to come; he was a man building a city, founding a nation, working in every way he could for the well-being of his people, his family, himself. His shield hung in our entrance hall, full of images of the time to come, the kings, the templed hills, the heroes and their wars. He had carried the future of his people on his shoulder into war. Now he meant to found that future in peace.

  After ten years of war in Troy, war had met him again unlooked for, unwanted, here on the Italian shore. He wanted never to meet it again. He was determined to make an enduring peace, as Latinus had done. His first and strongest purpose was to establish the rule of law, the custom of negotiation and arbitration, the superiority of rational patience over mindless violence, among his Trojans and the Latins who were building Lavinium with them, and among all our neighboring peoples.

  It did not take me long to realise, as the first year passed, how his mind dwelt on the ending of the brief war here in Italy, how that had shaken and reshaped all his idea of who he was and what his duty was. Not the war itself; that had been unavoidable; once Mars rules men, Mars must be obeyed on his own terms. It was the ending of it that weighed on Aeneas: the manner of Turnus' death. To him, that put all the rest into question.

  He saw it as a murder. He saw himself as a murderer. He had withheld his sword, giving Turnus time to surrender to him fully and courageously, and yet after that, dismissing the obligation to spare the helpless and pardon the conquered, in a fury of vengeance he had killed him. He had done nefas, unspeakable wrong.

  We talked in the summer mornings before we got to work; we talked in darkness, in our marriage bed, in the lengthening autumn nights. He learned that he could talk to me as I think he had never talked to anyone, unless perhaps Creusa long ago, in the dark years of the siege of Troy, when he was young. He was a man who thought hard and constantly about what he had done and what he ought to do, and his active conscience welcomed my listening, my silence and my attempts to answer, as it struggled for clarity. And my ignorance welcomed his questioning, which taught me what is worth asking.

  "You were angry," I said. "You should have been! First Turnus challenged you, then he deliberately ran away from you, kept you chasing him, knowing you'd been wounded, to wear you out. It was a coward's tactic."

  "If it was a tactic. All's fair in war."

  "But he broke the truce!"

  "It wasn't his doing. He let his sister talk, and Camers, and that Tolumnius, who threw the spear. Believe me, I have no regret at all for killing Tolumnius ... But Turnus didn't speak, then or later. Not till the end. He acted like a man under a spell."

  "That's what Serestus said," I said. "The owl he saw—just before you met with Turnus—he said he doesn't know if he saw an owl flying around Turnus' head, beating at him with its wings, or if he saw something Turnus was seeing, that wasn't actually there."

  I could feel Aeneas shudder slightly. He did not speak.

  After a long time I said, "I think there was some evil in Turnus' heritage. In my mother's family. Something frantic. A madness. A darkness. It ran in their blood like a black snake, a fire without light. Oh, may the powers of all goodness and the Earth Mother and my Juno keep it from me and our child!"

  I knew by then that I had conceived; and I too shuddered as I spoke, and held to Aeneas for courage. He soothed me, stroking my hair.

  "There is no evil in you," he said. "You are as clear of soul as the springs of the Numicus, up there in the hills, as pure and clear."

  But I thought of the springs of Albunea, silent, pallid, under their stinking bluish mist.

  "Turnus was young, ambitious, impatient," he said. "But what was evil in him?"

  "His greed," I said at once. "Greed, selfishness—self, self! He saw the world only as what he wanted from it. He killed the Greek boy for his sword belt. And killed him cruelly, and boasted about it! That was what you couldn't bear—seeing that belt on his shoulder."

  "I killed the Etruscan boy Lausus. Cruelly."

  "You didn't boast about it!"

  "No. I grieved about it. What good did that do? He was dead."

  "But Aeneas, nobody spared anybody in that battle, not even when they begged for their lives—you said so." Later, I remembered that it was not Aeneas who had told me that, but the poet. But neither Aeneas nor I noticed at the time, and I went on, eloquent in my desire to spare him his anguish—"You were fighting to the death, not just you and Turnus but all of you. It doesn't matter if you were crazy with bloodlust or cold as seawater, you did what you had to do. Pallas tried to kill Turnus and so Turnus killed him. Lausus tried to kill you and so you killed him. Turnus tried to kill you and so you killed him. It was a challenge to the death between you two. Nothing else could have ended the war. That is the order—the fas of war. Isn't it? And you obeyed it. You did what you had to do, what had to be done. As you always do!"

  He said nothing for a while, and then very little. I thought he was struck by my argument. He was stricken by it.

  It was only much later that I saw I had taken from him the self-blame that allowed him some self-justification. If he could not se
e his battle rage as the enemy of his piety, as fury for a moment overcoming his better self, if he could not see his killing Turnus as a fatal instant of disorder, then he had to see the fury as part of his true nature, part of the right order of things, the order he had spent his life trying to uphold, serve, preserve. If that order held his killing Turnus to be a righteous act, was it, itself, righteous?

  Turnus' death ensured the victory of Aeneas' cause, but it was a mortal defeat for the man Aeneas.

  As he struck, Aeneas had called the killing a sacrifice. But of what, to what?

  I did not know what kind of courage I was asking of my patient hero. We did not speak again of the matter. I went on thinking that I had unburdened his mind of an unnecessary guilt, comforted him, relieved him of the need for courage. Young wives can be great fools.

  Our city grew up around our little Regia so quickly that it sometimes seemed unreal, a vision, like my dream of it; but to look out from our door and see the thatch and tile roofs all around, and smell the cooking smoke from them rising, and hear the voices of the people, a young Latin wife calling to her Trojan husband, a workman shouting to his helper, a child singing a jumping-game song—that was all real, every morning and evening, and vivid and cheerful. Lavinium looked much like any other city of our coast, though its citadel stood higher than many, on its ridge of tufa over the little dark river Prati. Left to themselves, the Trojans might have built the houses differently, but the carpenters were Italians and did things the way they always did things. And I insisted that every tree within the walls that could be left standing should stand. The Trojans thought that odd at first, but they admitted the virtues of shade in midsummer, and came to take pride in the oak or laurel or willow grove that sheltered their house. We had less shade than most, in the Regia, but I had brought a scion of the laurel of my father's house in our courtyard, and in a year it was already above our heads. And we planted a wild grapevine to climb out over a lattice and shade the south end of the courtyard.