Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  He and his well-armed troop of companions came back safe and sound after twenty days. He said he and Diomedes had a good talk and fought the whole Trojan war over. They had sealed a treaty of peace and assistance at the altar with the sacrifice of ten boars, ten oxen, and ten rams, for Diomedes was rich.

  On the way home, the last night out, Aeneas spent the night at the Alban Mountain. "That's a sacred place if I ever saw one," he said. "It made me think of Mount Ida. But nobody lives there."

  "It is sacred. Father's been there for the winter solstice, when a gap in the rim of the crater points to the sun. And when there's drought, or rain out of season, or if lightning strikes somebody dead, people go to Alba to pray and worship. I don't know why it's empty. Maybe the land's not good."

  "There's a village up by the lake, they said, but there ought to be a real town there. The soil is pale, though."

  "It's white ash," Ascanius said. "Ash is good for vines."

  Aeneas went north early in the autumn to Caere by ship, taking with him as fine a gift as we could offer Tarchon and his people for their help in the war: three white bulls, three white rams, and a pair of stallion colts with grey coats that would whiten as they aged. The horses had splendid gear of gilt leather and gilt bronze, given by my father. It was not a mighty gift for two kings to give, but it was fitting to our present status. There was no use our pretending to equal the Etruscans in wealth, or power, or the arts of living. They knew it and we knew it. They made Aeneas welcome in Caere, and he stayed over a month in Etruria, visiting Falerii and Veii, well received everywhere. He sailed home pleased with his journey.

  I did not want to spoil his pleasure, but when we were in our room away from everyone else and I could speak my mind I burst out, "Oh never go away again for so long, Aeneas! I beg you! Never go away again at all!"—and to my surprise I began to cry.

  Of course he soothed me and quieted me and asked what had worried me, and of course I could not tell him that only this winter and the next summer and the next winter were left to us together.

  I said, "I know you have to make these journeys. But maybe you can put them off till later—when Silvius is a year or two older?—Not this year. No more traveling this year. Or even two years? And not for so long—Not for a whole month—"

  It made no sense to him. How could it? He worked at it, and finally said all he could possibly say: "I won't travel unless I must, Lavinia."

  I nodded, trying to repress my weeping, and hot and red with shame at my weakness and my efforts to deceive our fate.

  "I cannot bear to see you cry," he said. His own eyes were full of tears.

  There was another cause of my distress at his long absence, which I did not mention any more than the other: Ascanius' behavior while he was gone. Aeneas had left him in charge of the household and all affairs at Lavinium, as was right. The eldest son and heir should be getting experience in taking responsibility. Understandably, Ascanius found it frightening to take on his father's authority, was anxious, and overdid it. He ruled with a heavy hand. People were ready to make every excuse for his youth, but he was uncommonly tactless even for a boy his age. He was hasty, willful, pompous; he sulked at any setback, and disdained any advice, even from Achates—especially from Achates, perhaps, because Achates was so faithful a lieutenant and friend of Aeneas. Pining for combat in order to prove himself fearless, or fearing it and therefore stumbling into it, I do not know which, Ascanius sought a quarrel wherever it could be found. In the month Aeneas had been gone, he had stirred up resentment and ill-feeling in almost every person or group he had had to deal with, done damage which would take months to repair.

  Try as I might, I could not forgive Ascanius for spoiling both the peace of his father's rule and his father's peace of mind. I so much wanted Aeneas' brief reign to be a true reward for all his travails, a haven of happiness. I longed to see my son of the evening star shine out at last in tranquillity. While Aeneas was in Etruria I had thought I should tell Ascanius what I knew: that his father's life had not much longer to run. Surely if he knew that, natural piety would make him wish to spare his father trouble and grief, and his competitive spirit could control itself for a year or so. But Ascanius was so suspicious and jealous of me that I could not bring myself to trust him with that knowledge. He might even scoff at it. He tended to look down on all things Latin, including our oracles and sacred places; and I had heard him say that the best thing about the Greeks was that they knew how to keep women in their place. Though I told myself it was just a boy talking, and believed Ascanius had a good heart under all his bluffing and sulking, still I could not trust him with my knowledge. I could not trust him not to use it against Aeneas, in anger, or as a show of power.

  Ascanius and I kept out of each other's way as best we could. Aware, now, that his wife and his son did not get along, Aeneas was careful not to put either of us in a false position with the other. Though people often confuse it with weakness or duplicity, tact is a great quality in a ruler, whether of a country or a household; awareness of the other allows respect, and people respond to it, returning the recognition and the respect. Aeneas governed with tact, and was beloved for it.

  He had to exercise it actively that winter and spring, mending fences with landowners and tribesmen and neighboring peoples whom Ascanius had offended—including my father. Rebellious as Ascanius might be, his pride in his ancestry and father was as naive as a child's, and he simply could not accept the doddering old chieftain of a province on the far western edge of the world as an equal, let alone as his king. During Aeneas' absence he had dismissed a messenger from Latinus without answer and had issued orders contrary to Latinus' orders. My father said nothing at the time, but spoke to Aeneas after his return. He suggested—Latinus had a good deal of tact, himself—that the boy be given a domain to rule, away from both Laurentum and Lavinium. (My father called Ascanius the boy, and greeted him as son of Aeneas; whereas he called his grandson Silvius, and greeted him as little king. His tact did not prevent him from being very stubborn.)

  Aeneas acted promptly on the suggestion. He offered Ascanius the governorship of the region of the Alban Hills, Lake Albanus, the village of Alba Longa, and the old city of Velitrae. He told him that his job there was to keep the peace with restless neighbors, so that the religious festivals of Mount Alba, to which people came from all over south Italy, could be held in safety, and to see to the improvement of agriculture and the training of a loyal body of farmer soldiers in the service of the Latin kings. He told me he had been blunt with his son, warning him that if he stirred up trouble instead of preventing it, he would be summoned back to Lavinium and deprived of command.

  Ascanius went off with his bosom friend Atys, and a tiny army, all mounted on good horses and well armed, helmet plumes nodding, proud and handsome. He stayed in Alba Longa, and sent satisfactory reports to his father. The experiment appeared to be successful.

  It was a great relief to me to have him gone. I would have Aeneas to myself and unworried by his son, all the rest of the summer, the autumn, the winter. I did not think about the spring. Spring would come. Janus would open the gates and Mars would bring it in as ever. I need not think about it.

  Cattle rustlers and bands of brigands, poor men from Rutulia and the hill country east of Latium, were a perpetual threat to outlying farms; the Aequians and Sabines, who lived up the Tiber and its tributary the Allia, harassed Evander's settlement and sometimes sailed down the father river in their war canoes, hoping to raid the salt beds, so that Aeneas had manned ships anchored at his old camp at Venticula to chase them off. But these were no more than the troubles my father had always had, and Latium was as much at peace again as when I was a child. Aeneas could give his mind to building and farming and flocks and herds, to hunting, which he loved as his son did, and to the ever-recurring rituals, which he loved as I did.

  We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their w
ill through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house. Both Aeneas and I had grown up in this responsibility, and it was dear to us both.

  He and Latinus divided their royal duties harmoniously, the younger man always deferring to the old man but ready to take the burden from him if he tired. Not all our Latin customs were familiar to Aeneas the Trojan, but he took up our rituals as if born to them and performed them with a ready grace. I remember him as he led the Ambarvalia, that spring, the bright spring.

  Every farmer was doing the same rite on his own land, leading his own household through the ceremony; Latinus would be going to his land under the walls of Laurentum while Aeneas led the procession down from Lavinium to the royal fields. During the days before, we had done a good deal of work in the house to prepare, washing the white clothes everybody wore—they must be washed in running water, which meant a lot of trips down to the river—and gathering good herbs, lucky herbs, and weaving them into garlands for both people and animals. Everyone who participated was supposed to refrain from sex the night before and come to the ceremony chaste.

  The silence was what I had always loved best about Ambarvalia. Nobody spoke. People, like animals, walked saying nothing. It wasn't actually a requirement, but because any word spoken would carry unearthly weight, and a word said amiss might bring disaster to the crops and beasts, it was easier and better not to speak at all. Only the king and his assistants in the ceremony spoke "with the lucky tongue," almost inaudibly repeating the litanies which old Ferox lined out for them a few words at a time, his voice soft and expressionless. Ferox had farmed this piece of land long before we built Lavinium near it; he had known the litanies and led the circumambulation of the fields for sixty years. He was the true lord of the rites.

  Aeneas followed him, leading a white lamb wreathed about with the leaves of fruit trees and wild olive, and we all followed after, clear around the field three times, from boundary stone to boundary stone, facing Janus and turning our backs on him as he faced and turned his back on us. We walked in silence, so that we heard the sound of our garments, and our bare feet on the plowland, and our breathing, and the birds singing the spring in, up in the oak groves.

  Then Aeneas led the lamb to the old stone altar topped with a fresh turf of grass, and made the sacrifice. You can tell a great deal about a man from how he performs sacrifice. Aeneas' hands on the leggy ram-lamb were calm and gentle, his knife stroke sudden and sure; the lamb went down softly on its knees and then its side as if it were lying down to sleep, dead before it could be frightened.

  During the sacrifice old Ferox prayed aloud, telling the spirits of the place that as we now with our gift of life increased their numen, their power itself, so we asked them to give us increase and keep harm from the planted fields. And then, with other old men, loud and harsh, he sang the Arval Song:

  Be with us, Lares, help us!

  Let no harm come,

  no harm come, Mars!

  Mars of the Wild, eat your fill,

  eat your fill, Mars, leap on the boundary stone,

  eat your fill, Mars, stand on the boundary stone,

  call the Interceders to plead for us!

  Be with us, Mars!

  Dance now, dance now, dance now, dance now, dance!

  So we had drawn the silent circle of protection around the fields, and prayed to the implacable power of the place and season, and now came the dancing, and the feasting, and the carols and love songs.

  Of that song Ferox and the old men sang, Aeneas told me he had never heard anything like it, nor had he known the Mars we know. The Mars of his people was a bringer of war and disorder only, not a guardian of the herds and flocks, not the power that holds the thin boundary between the tame and the wild. He asked the old men about the song and about Mars, and I know he pondered over what they said.

  He had not known the song in far-off Troy, but my poet had known it in far-off Mantua, across the mountains, in the dark of time to come, hundreds of years after I first heard it sung. That night in Albunea when we talked about our households and our ways, I asked the poet if his people kept Ambarvalia, and he smiled at me and sang, to the tune that was ancient even when I knew it, Enos Lases iuvate!—Be with us, Lares, help us.

  Mars' time is the season of the farmer and the warrior: spring and summer. In October the lances and shields of the Leapers are put away. War ends as the harvest comes home. That year Latinus held the October Horse ceremony, the only time we sac rifice a horse except at the funeral of a king. People came from all over Latium for it, grateful for the peace of the realm and the excellence of the harvest. It was the last great ceremony held at Laurentum.

  We went there to stay several days, and Aeneas assisted my father in the rites. I could no longer do so, since my marriage, for I was not the daughter of his household any longer, being the mother of my own. But little Silvius, Latinus' heir, was allowed to take the plate of sacred food from the table to the hearth after dinner and cast the food into the Vestal fire. Maruna's mother went with him and prevented him from dropping the plate as well as the food into the fire. "Only the beans, Silvius," she whispered, and he, very solemn, said, "Ony bees." He was supposed to say, "The gods are favorable," but we said it for him.

  That was a good autumn, rich and mild, and the winter rains were long and soft. In the press of daily occupation and obligation, and the continual delights and anxieties of caring for Silvius, and the unfailing joy and pleasure of Aeneas' companionship and love, I lost track of the passage of the days; they were all one day and long, blessed night. But once in a while I would wake for no reason deep in the winter darkness, my body and soul as cold as the ice on the river's edge, thinking: This is the third winter.

  Then I would lie awake and my mind would gnaw and gnaw at the puzzle I could not solve. The poet had told me that Aeneas would rule for three summers and three winters. Was the summer we married the first of the three summers? I thought that because it was half gone before he came to rule in Lavinium, the count of three summers and three winters should begin with the winter of that year, and the summer that lay before us now would be his third—his third and last. But at least he would have till the summer—through the summer—he would not die this spring!

  But why must he die? Perhaps the poet had not meant that at all. The poet had not said he would die, only that his reign would be three years. Perhaps he would give up the kingship, give it to Ascanius, and live on, a long life, a happy life, the life he deserved. Why had I not thought of that before?

  The idea filled my mind and dazzled me so I could sleep no more; and in the morning when he woke I could scarcely keep myself from bursting out to him, "Give your kingdom to your son, Aeneas!"

  I had sense enough not to do that, but in a day or two I did ask, trying to speak lightly, if he had ever thought of laying his rule aside and living as an ordinary man.

  He looked at me quickly, a flash of his dark eyes. "That choice wasn't offered me," he said. "Priam's nephew, Anchises' son."

  "But now you're in a land where your fathers are less important than your sons, perhaps."

  "If I grant that," he said after considering it, "what then? I was sent here to be king. Hector came from his grave, Creusa rose from her death, to tell me what I had to do. I was to t
ake my people to the western land, and rule. And marry there, and have a son ... You can't say I don't do my duty, Lavinia." He had spoken somberly at first, but he ended with a half-suppressed smile.

  "No one would ever say that of you! But you have done it—you carried out the prophecy—you fulfilled your destiny—hard as it was, voyaging over sea, the storms, and shipwrecks, and losing friends, and having to fight a war when you finally got here—And you have reigned, and founded your dynasty. Do you never think of saying: Now I've done that, now let me stand aside—let me rest a while, now I've come to harbor?"

  He gazed at me for some time, a direct, mild, thoughtful gaze. He was thinking why I said what I had said, and finding no answer. "Silvius is still rather short to stand aside for," he said finally.

  It made me laugh. I was very tense. "Yes, he is. But Ascanius—"

  "You want Ascanius to rule Lavinium?" He was surprised into sternness for a moment, then his expression changed, became tender; he thought he knew why I was asking him to step down. "Lavinia, dear wife, you mustn't fear for me so much. It's less dangerous to be the king than to be a common soldier. Anyway, the day of our death isn't in our hands. There is no safe place. You know that."

  "Yes, I know that."

  He came to hold and comfort me, and I held him close.

  "Truly," he asked, "you'd give up being queen, to spare me the trouble of being king?" I had not in fact actually thought about that aspect of my plan. He went on, "Who would take your place? We'd have to get Ascanius married off." He was teasing me, by now. He knew that the idea of handing over my people and my Penates to a strange woman would be dreadful to me. I was distressed and ashamed, feeling I had been caught in a lying trick, a stupid ruse. I could not speak, but blushed the way I do, turning red all over. He saw and felt that and kissed me, gently at first, but with arousing passion. We were in the small courtyard of our house, no one about. "Come on, come!" he said, and still red as fire I followed him into our bedroom, where the conversation took a different form.