When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property. My father did not hear me.
“Wait,” he said, and turned away to his room. I waited.
Maruna slipped away and brought a pitcher of water from the well in the courtyard, and I gratefully drank every drop of it—except a little that I poured out to the Penates first, and a little that I used to wet the corner of my garment and try to clean my face. I was all dirt and dried sweat. The coarse old tunic was tattered and filthy after our night run, and my best palla that Maruna wore was completely ruined. Maruna and I were mourning over the great snags and tears in it when my father came back, dressed. He looked at us with dull puzzlement. “You must go get cleaned up, Lavinia,” he said.
“I’d like to, father. But please, what is the trouble, who is fighting?”
“The Trojans were hunting. I told them they could hunt the forests between Venticula and Laurentum. They have to have food.” He stopped.
I asked at last, “Did some of our hunters try to stop them?”
“They shot the deer. The stag.” His face was stricken as he said it. I could not think what he meant. Why should hunters not shoot a stag?
He said, “Silvia’s deer.”
“Cervulus,” Maruna whispered.
“The creature ran home—to Tyrrhus’ farm—bleeding, with the arrow in its flank—crying like a child, they said. And Silvia screamed as if it had been her child shot. They couldn’t comfort her. Her brothers and the old man swore they’d punish the hunter. But it was the king’s son who shot the deer.”
“Ascanius,” I said.
It begins with a boy who shoots a deer.
The waves lapped one over another on the shore where the tide was rising.
“If that is his name.” I had never seen my father bewildered like this. He groped among words and finally said, “Tyrrhus went into a blind rage, the way he does. He and his boys—they got their farm people together and went out against the hunting party. Armed. With swords, axes, bows. They fought—somewhere over Villia Ridge—they found the Trojans and tried to slaughter them. But the hunters were soldiers. Defending their prince. They killed—”
He looked into my face for a moment and looked away. “Tyrrhus’ eldest boy was killed.”
First to die is young Almo—you know him. An arrow in his throat chokes off his speech and breath with blood.
I whispered his name as Maruna had whispered the name of the deer.
“And old Galaesus.”
Old Galaesus, who’s rich and used to being in control, tries to keep them from fighting, comes between them, and has his face smashed in for his pains.
My father said, “I can’t believe it. Galaesus tried to interfere, calm them down. He thought young men in a fight would listen to him.”
I stood dumb. I stood as I have stood in the shallows of the sea with the tide rising, the waves coming in one over the other, pushing me and drawing away the sand under my feet with the undertow, till all the world was shining and sliding away.
I took Maruna’s arm, and she helped me stand. “Please let us go, king,” she murmured to my father, and he, finally seeing our filth and tatters and scratched arms, came with us across the courtyard, calling out for women to help us.
“Tell me something I have never understood” I say as we sit in the small courtyard, the inmost room of our apartment in the Regia. It is a warm morning of June and my husband, who has a great capacity for simple enjoyment, is basking in the early sunlight while we have our breakfast of white figs and new milk sweetened with honey.
“I’ll do my best,” he says.
“You might rather not.”
“Well, let’s see.”
“Why didn’t you come to talk with my father, right away, when he asked you to come affirm the alliance he offered?”
The question interests him. He sits up a little straighter to look back to a year ago. It is of great importance to him that he speak truth as nearly as he can, and since it is always hard to speak truly of things in the past, he thinks about it a while before he speaks. “I was getting together some gifts to bring with me,” he says. “Something that would be suitable for you—a betrothal gift. I’d already sent Priam’s cup and crown and scepter. The last, best bits of Troy I had. There wasn’t anything left, except our gods. But I didn’t want to come like a beggar! Euryalus’ mother had a shawl woven with silver threads, she’d been keeping it to give to her son’s bride when he married, she brought it and offered it to me. Poor soul!…Anyhow, while I was worrying about gifts, word came that a band of farmers had attacked our hunting party, because Ascanius had shot a pet stag. Gyas had an arrow nick in his arm, and our men had killed two farmers. That was bad news. A bad beginning. It looked as if the country people weren’t going to accept us, no matter what their king said. Then Drances came to our camp by the ships. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“He didn’t say he was sent by Latinus, or even that Latinus knew he’d come. He’d taken it on himself to warn us that Turnus was using the quarrel with the farmers to raise the whole country against us—sending off to the Volscians and the Sabines, even to Diomedes down south, for fighting men.”
“Drances was always envious of Turnus.”
“I wondered why he came to us. But if I’d gone back with him to Laurentum, then, could I have prevented the war?”
“No,” I say.
And he does not question my certainty. He accepts that I know some things that I could not, in the ordinary way, know. He does not ask how I know. I have told him that I used to go to the oracle at Albunea with my father. But I have never told him about the poet. I doubt that I ever will.
It has not been difficult for me to believe in my fictionality, because it is, after all, so slight. But for him it would be very difficult. Even if he is at the moment inactive, domesticated, a contented man sitting in the sunlight talking with his wife, the poet’s passionate, commanding, anxious, dangerous hero would find it hard to accept contingence, the nullity of his will and conscience. Piety, faithfulness, obedience to what must be rightly done, the fas, is the desire of his heart. To know that he has obeyed a poet, rather than his conscience, might be anguish to him—even if he saw, as I see, that the poet obeyed his conscience and followed the fas. Why should I trouble him with that, when his concerns are so great and his time so short?
He agrees with my judgment, nodding. “It was time for war. Mars on the march… Drances himself said it would be a provocation if I tried to come to the city then. So I hope you see that it was not in neglect of my obligation to you and your father that I failed to come. Did you take it as such?”
Even if he has not worried about it before, his worry about it now is endearing. I want to let him off easily, but perversely I say, “Well, you might have sent a message. I did wonder whether you really wanted the princess as part of the package.”
He looks appalled, as he always does when he thinks he’s been remiss in duty. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I did.”
“It was unfair of me to wonder. After all, I had the advantage of you. I’d seen you.” He knows that Silvia and I saw his picnic by the river; I told him about it early on, and the idea of two girls hidden in the bushes spying on an army both shocked and entertained him. “And my father could have sent you a message, but he didn’t either. So, go on about that time.”
I can tell that he is, for once, disposed to talk, to reminisce. He thinks again for a while and says, “I was undecided, that night. Perplexed.” I am fond of his understatements when he talks about the decisions he has had to make, on which the lives of his people depended. “We simply weren’t a
large enough force to stand up to a whole countryside determined to drive us away. The answer might be to get back in the ships and go… but where? We’d come where we were to come. That much was clear. So, I went off to think about it, down by the river. My thoughts ran about in every direction at once, trying to see what to do. As if my mind was a bowl full of water reflecting a light, and you shake the bowl this way and that, and the reflections dance over the ceiling, but they don’t come together… And I watched the reflection of the moon on the river shiver and break apart… Then I prayed to the river, Tiber. And while I prayed, there in the reeds under the poplars, my mind grew quieter. And the river gave me my answer. I thought: upriver, Drances said, is a town with a Greek king, an ally of Latinus but not on good terms with all the Latins. A foreigner like us. Maybe he’d help us. And that came to me as the thing to do. All the broken reflections came together. I got some sleep, and next day I took some men upstream in two of the galleys. I left my son in charge of building up our camp so it could be defended. It was time he took some real responsibility.”
“That was a pretty big responsibility for a boy.”
“Well, of course he had Mnestheus and Serestus to call on. Good men. Experienced. They had full authority from me. But I didn’t realise how quickly the Latins would get their troops and their allies together and attack. And burn our ships, so my people had no way to escape. Ah!” The memory of that makes him clench his fist and scowl in pain. “I thought I had eight or ten days clear to look for some allies of my own. Turnus moved unbelievably fast. A man of immense talent.”
Is it self-admiration to admire the man you killed? Is it self-judgment to judge him? I say, “He had courage, but not character. He was greedy.”
“It’s hard to ask a young fellow to be selfless,” Aeneas says, with a rueful smile.
“It seems to be easy enough to expect it of young women.”
He ponders. “Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all. I don’t know if I’ve learned it yet.”
He frowns, brooding; he is probably thinking of what he sees as his worst failing: the fury of bloodlust that overcomes him in battle, making him a mindless, indiscriminate slaughterer, “like a sheepdog gone mad among the sheep,” he says. Of course much of his reputation as a warrior rests on this battle madness. Men who faced him were terrified of him. And I cannot see how it differs from the courage he respects in his heroes, men he has told me of with such admiration—the Trojan Hector, the Greek Achilles. But to him it is unquestionably a vice, an abuse of skill, nefas. I know he dreads every threat of war from our neighbors, not because he hates or fears fighting; in fact he loves it; but he fears himself. He believes that he murdered Turnus. I have argued with him about this: it was in a fair fight, he couldn’t leave an implacable, powerful enemy alive, and so on. He could not deny my arguments; I drove him to silence. But he has not forgiven himself.
Old Vestina appears in the doorway under the colonnade, holding the baby, who twists about in her arms making a noise like a small bellows being squeezed very fast. “He’s hungry, queen,” she says sternly. The milk is already bursting from my breasts at the sight of him. “Hand him over,” I say, and get him settled, although he’s so eager he can’t find the nipple at first and thrashes his fists in fury, gasping indignantly. “Talk about greed,” I say.
My husband’s dark eyes rest on me and Silvius with a peaceful, undemanding tenderness. He pours himself another bowl of sweetened milk from the pitcher, dribbles a few drops of it on the ground in worship, and salutes his son with it before he drinks. “Your health,” he says.
I bathed away the filth of the three nights spent at the fig-tree spring, and slept for a few hours in the middle of the day; but it was hard to rest for long, with all the commotion going on in the courtyard and quarters of the house. “Turnus, Turnus"—I heard his name constantly. I got up at last and went to find out what was going on. Turnus had come, but not to my mother waiting for him up in the hills. He was out in front of the city gates, they told me, with an army of herdsmen, farmers, and city folk. I climbed up onto the roof of the watchtower to have a look.
It was a big crowd, and more coming in across the fields all the time. The men all carried weapons, whether they were farm tools or hunter’s bows or swords and bronze-tipped lances. As they grouped together they made a dark, endless noise. I looked down from the roof at the top of the laurel in the courtyard where the bees had swarmed. But these men were not the foreigners the bees had foretold. They were Latins, Laurentians, Italians. My people. My enemies.
All that evening the fields were full of armed men; they camped all over the field of exercise and under the slopes of the outer rampart. Next morning I went up to the roof over the front door to look. The crowds outside the city gate and in the city, filling the streets around the Regia, had doubled. Every now and then a shout went up. War, they shouted, war! Drive out the strangers! Send the murderers back where they came from!—I saw a group making their way through the others; some of them were men I knew, herdsmen. They were carrying something long and heavy wrapped in a white cloth stained with blood. “Almo, Almo,” they chanted. “Avenge our brother! Avenge our dead!” I glimpsed Almo’s and Sylvia’s father Tyrrhus among them, white-haired, staring wild-eyed, staggering along, half carried by other men. This procession made its way up the street towards the doors of the Regia. There they laid the burden down. The shouting was frenzied now, the air shook and rocked with it. And I saw Turnus. He stood in front of the gates of the king’s house, facing the crowd.
“Are we to be ruled by strangers?” he shouted, and the crowd all round shouted like thunder in the streets, “No!"—"Is my promised bride to be given to a foreigner?"—"No!"—"Latinus! King of Latium! I stand at your gates! We demand justice! We demand war!” And the men all shouted, “War!”
After what seemed a long time, the doors of the Regia opened. My father came out, flanked by his guards, with Drances and a few other old counsellors. The shouting died down. Men near and farther called, “The king, the king speaks.”
Looking down from almost directly above as I knelt hidden behind the decorative edge tiles of the roof, I could see only the top of my father’s head, grey hair gone thin on the skull.
“Men of Latium, my children!” he said in his strong voice, and paused for a long time, so long it seemed he might not speak again. Men shifted from foot to foot. At last he went on, but sounding now more like an old man. “An oracle has spoken. A promise has been given. If you defy the voice that guides us, if you break the treaty I made, you do wrong. You will pay for that wrongdoing in blood. You know that. That is all I can say to you. Turnus, son of my old friend Daunus and sister-son of my wife, if you are determined to lead our people into this guilt, I cannot stop you. I can only say that you rob me of the harbor of peace I hoped for in my last years, the righteous death I longed for.”
The silence continued. Without waiting for any answer Latinus turned away and came back into the Regia. His guards closed the high doors behind him, leaving Turnus and the crowds outside, still silent for a little. Then the murmuring and the dark noise began again, and swelled, and grew till it surrounded the house and filled the city.
Now there was a new turmoil in the streets behind the house. I was not the only one up there on the roofs. Maruna and Tita and several girls were up on the watchtower platform over the southeast corner of the house, and one of them was pointing to the east gate. I ran to join them. From the platform we saw another procession straggling up the streets: women—slaves and mistresses, brazen or calm, shamefaced or proud, all with wild hair, with soiled, torn togas and tunics—Amata and her troop from the fig-tree spring.
My mother came into the place in front of the Regia, walking as always with a regal gait. Turnus hurried to meet her there. They met and embraced and talked for a while. Presently a new chant began among the men around them: “Open the War Gat
e! Open the War Gate!”
The War Gate of Laurentum stands in a little square not far from the actual city gates, a pair of tall bronze-studded oaken doors in a frame of cedar, with an altar of Janus to the east of it and an empty space around it. The doors always stood closed and barred, old and grim and meaningless. There had never been any ceremony there in my lifetime, except at the Kalends of every January when we made libations to Janus. But now everybody was shouting, “The queen, the queen will open the War Gate!” and the crowds were flowing down that way. I could make out my mother for a while among them, and Turnus’ high helmet crest. Then the trees cut off my view, and I could only hear the shouting. A great cheer went up of “Mars! Mavors! Macte esto!” and people came dancing and calling that the Gate of War was open.
My father’s brief appearance before the doors of the Regia seemed to me, to most of us, an abdication. He had made a formal plea, yet not even waited for a reply. “I cannot stop you,” he had said to Turnus. It outraged me to think he had said that. How could he say it? How could he hand his power over to Turnus and creep back into the house?
As I look back on it now, I think he was speaking not to Turnus but to the crowd, the men, his Latins. They had, in fact, the power. Turnus could use them so long as they let him, but he could not control them, any more than Latinus could. And so Latinus’ plea was made to them, in the hope that they might remember it later. For now, they were afire, mad with excitement. The chance of a fight, the promise of bursting out in violence, vengeance, righteous wrath, that was all they saw at the moment, all they wanted. Every farmer hates a foreigner, and here was a troop of fancy fellows from somewhere who thought they could walk in and take over Latium, shoot the deer, marry the princess, push honest men around—well, they’d find out their mistake. The old king wouldn’t stand up against them, but the new one would. What did it matter if he was a Rutulian? We’re all Latins. We stand shoulder to shoulder, the peoples of the West, defending our fields, our altars, our women. Once we’ve driven these strangers into the sea, we can sort out our own affairs.
Lavinia Page 12
