The First Heroes

by Harry Turtledove

  “There they are, then,” Watis says.

  Lawinia nods, staring down at the beach. The horsemen are coming to a stop and dismounting. The man with the purple cloak steps out of the chariot and tosses the reins to one of his men. He lays a hand on the hilt of his sword and looks up the path toward the two women.

  “We’ll receive them in the shrine,” Watis says. “Come along.”

  When they go inside they leave the door open. Watis stands in front of the altar. Lawinia sits at her feet. Together they listen to the sound of footsteps trudging up the hill.

  “Holy one! Servant of Dian!” The man’s voice bristles with anger. “Are you in there?”

  “Come in and see,” Watis calls back. “But watch your words in the god’s house.”

  Flipping back his purple cloak, the young man strides in, and two of his men follow. Askanios. She remembers him as a child on the edge of manhood. Now stubble darkens his chin, and he stands tall.

  “Give me that woman,” Askanios says. “She’s a murderess.”

  “Oh?” Watis crosses her arms over her chest. “She says otherwise.”

  Askanios lays a hand on his sword hilt and takes one step forward, but at that moment the sunlight reaches the west-facing window. Like a spear a long gleam falls across his eyes and blinds him. Blinking he turns sharply away. One of his men, a solid-looking fellow with gray in his hair, catches his arm and whispers urgently in their peculiar language.

  “My apologies, Holy One,” Askanios says. “I forgot myself.”

  “I’m glad you remember yourself now. Now. You say this woman murdered your father. She denies it. She tells me that she’ll abide by the god’s decision in the matter. Will you?”

  “Yes, I will. If the god tells us that she killed my father, will you give her to me?”

  Lawinia sobs once.

  “Yes,” Watis says. “If the god tells me. Not if you tell me, mind. Come with me into the cave. We’ll see if Great Dian will speak to us.”

  The mouth of the cave is a narrow opening in the mountain above the shrine. “Go up,” Watis says to Lawinia. “The rest of us will follow.” Then, to Askanios, “The caves are dark. If you want light, you must bring it with you.”

  If Askanios takes any deeper meaning from the words, he gives no sign. “Light a torch,” he says to one of his men, and it is done. The flame is pale against the daylight, but when the little procession—Lawinia, Watis, Askanios and his torchbearer, and a straggling tail of armed men—passes into the depths beyond the mouth of the cave, the smoky orange glow pushes back the darkness ahead of them.

  The cramped entryway widens out into a large open area—the god’s grotto, where his voice speaks truth through his servant to those who come willing to hear. The air is cool, freshened day and night by the breezes that issue, like the breath from a hundred mouths, out of the cracks and channels and narrow passageways that lead from the grotto to the world outside.

  Watis seats herself on the tall chair where she will wait for the coming of the god. “Speak,” she says to Askanios. “The god will listen.”

  “I always knew that the woman Lawinia held some grievance against my father,” Askanios says. He speaks formally and in measured words, as men will speak before their gods. “I saw it in her face and heard it in her voice, though she never spoke it. What grudge she could possibly hold against the husband who had saved her from marriage to Turnus—a man whose very allies thought him a brute and a danger!—and made her part of his own high destiny, I cannot say, but a grudge there was, and it broke forth at last in anger. I was not there to hear it, but the women of the household say that she and my father quarreled over the morning meal, and that my stepmother ran from the house alone. My father went after her; and I, a newcomer to their troubles, followed too late and too far behind.

  “I saw her standing on the high cliff above the sandy beach, with her hands upraised and her hair unbound, and I heard her voice rise and fall as she called out to the wind. My father was on the narrow path below, toiling upward to reach her—and when my stepmother’s chant ended he fell as if struck by a javelin, toppling down from the path to his death below. He was a good man, faithful to his gods and to his duty, and this woman has worked his ending by witchcraft.”

  Watis does not like Askanios—he is arrogant, and he lacks the respect that should be paid to one through whom the god speaks—but she hears the faint hoarseness in his voice that tells of grief, and the god whispers to her that he has told his part of the story honestly.

  “Well,” she says to Lawinia, who is pale and set-faced now, and no longer crying at all. “You’ve heard what the son of Aeneas has to say. Now let the god hear your side of it.”

  Lawinia faces Askanios to look him over with narrow eyes. Askanios looks back at her with lips shut hard, and his hand never leaves the hilt of his sword.

  “My life has been nothing but a length of thread spun by the Fates to hold omens like beads,” Lawinia begins. “My husband complained constantly of the Fates. They had driven him over the seas, he told me, and goaded him with plague and shipwreck. They had stripped him of everything he had ever loved, all for some destiny that he would not live to see. Never once did he think that I too might have a destiny, because he saw me only as the gods’ assurance that he had finally accomplished his own. I knew better.”

  Askanios steps forward, his lips parted, but Watis raises a hand. “Be silent and listen to her,” she says. “The god will decide when he’s heard enough.”

  “Very well.” Askanios steps back with a bob of his head. “Never would I cross the god’s wishes.”

  Watis turns to the girl. “No one will interrupt you again.”

  And so Lawinia speaks:

  I will tell you how I first heard the Fates speak to me. They came not in a dream or vision. They spoke in a borrowed voice, but I heard the message between and behind the words, even though the speaker was full of malice.

  I was still a child. We lived then in the compound of the Woodpecker clan, which stood on a low hill, a mere swelling in the earth like a breast, not far from the banks of Father Tiber. Our house sprawled at the crest of the hill, because my father, Latinus, was clan chief. On a hot summer’s day my mother, Amata, and her two slave women had taken their spinning out to the courtyard. In the shade of an olive tree they perched on high stools, their laps full of carded wool which they fed to the drop spindles a bit at a time. Our house bounded the court on three sides, but the fourth lay open; I was sitting on the ground nearby and playing with my wooden doll when I heard horses coming.

  I looked up to see a man and a boy, or so I thought them, leading their mounts into the court. Another look, and I saw that the boy was no boy at all, but a girl, wearing a short tunic and high-laced leather sandals. Her short black hair clustered in loose curls like a cap of hyacinth blossoms, and her skin was sun-brown as new-baked bread. This was Camilla as I first saw her, her own childhood not far behind her and her name not yet known outside the circle of her kin.

  “Now what’s this?” Mother said. With a flip of her wrist she brought the spindle back to her lap and laid it on the mat of wool. “Metabus?”

  The man frowned. I could tell he didn’t like it that my mother was the first to speak. “Where is your husband? I need to talk with him.”

  “Very well.” Mother glanced at Favva.

  The slave woman stood down from her stool and laid the wool and spindle upon it, then hurried into the house. My mother and Metabus waited, saying nothing, she with her hands folded and Metabus scowling and pacing. Camilla looked bored, and I saw that she had moved closer to where I sat.

  I stole another look at her short tunic. “Why are you dressed like that?”

  Mother started to hush me, but Camilla only smiled. “I’m dressed like this because I belong to the goddess Diana. She hunts in the forest, and so do I.”

  I had never heard of anyone belonging to a god before, and it fascinated me. “You belong to her? Like a sl
ave?”

  “Yes. My father gave me to her.” The thought didn’t seem to bother Camilla very much. “But because I’m her slave, I’m really free. I never have to get married and worry about babies and things like that.”

  “That’s splendid!” I said. But I was still curious. “Were you in the marketplace? Did she barter for you?”

  Metabus had kept an ear open despite his scowling, and my question made him laugh, showing strong teeth like an animal’s in the black of his beard. “The gods don’t stoop to haggling over eggs and lettuces, girl. I was pursued by enemies, and my infant Camilla with me—she could have fit into a market basket, that much is true enough—when we came hard up against a river too fast and deep for a man to wade across. There was nothing left to do but ask the gods for help, and since we were in Diana’s forest, it was she I asked, saying that if she would only keep us both safe she could have my daughter for a servant ever after.”

  Camilla took up the tale; her eyes were dancing, and I could tell that she’d heard the story many times before. “He unbelted his tunic,” she said, “and used the belt to tie me to his spear, and threw the spear across the river. That was no easy cast, with the spear so weighted and out of balance, but the goddess guided and strengthened his arm. The spearhead lodged in the dirt of the riverbank and I hung there, howling, until he swam across to take me down. Since then I honor his promise, and serve Diana out of gratitude.”

  Nothing that exciting had ever happened in the compound of the Woodpecker clan. I thought for a moment and asked, “When I get big can I worship Diana?”

  Metabus was laughing again, even though my mother’s face had knotted in disapproval. I think it amused him that his daughter’s story had put Amata out of pleasure with me. “Maybe you can,” he said to me. “I wouldn’t know. Or maybe you’ll serve some other god, her twin brother, maybe.”

  My mother had heard enough. She slid down from her stool and grabbed my arm so tightly that it hurt and gave me a shake. “Winni, go into the house! Tell Favva to bring some cups and a pitcher of water to offer our guests.”

  I trotted off, rubbing my arm, but at the doorway I looked back. My mother was shaking her finger in Metabus’s face and talking fast and angrily. Metabus, however, was still laughing. That he would dare laugh at the wife of a headman just as if she were a foolish child stunned me—but Camilla’s little smile as she watched them shocked me even more. When I saw it, I truly understood that yes, as she’d told me, she was free.

  I want to be free, too. The thought came to me like a traitor’s whisper, and I ran into the house.

  I don’t remember what Metabus came to ask my father about that day, except that it had to do with one of the feuds in which Metabus, with his violent nature, often found himself embroiled. What I do remember clearly, even across the gap of years, is how beautiful and strong all of my family looked when they stood together in the sunlight by the olive tree. My father had already gone heavily gray—my mother, much his junior, was his second wife—but still he stood tall and straight, and to me he was the handsomest man in Latium. Even my brothers, young and vigorous as they were, yielded pride of place to him in my mind. As for my mother, I had always thought that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, young and slender, always laughing, her pale brown hair pulled back carelessly with a pair of bone combs. My father’s thinning hair was the color of silver, and his face was marked by thoughtful lines, but I remember him as happy then, when my brothers were still alive.

  Yet before three winters had come and gone, everything changed. My younger brother caught a fever and died. My elder brother, my father’s heir, drowned as he swam in the river. Although my father prayed, and my mother worked charms, and both made sacrifice after sacrifice to the gods, she never conceived again. I felt each winter passing without a new heir as a chain, binding me around. I was afraid that I’d never be allowed to serve a god or goddess if I were the only living child of Latinus.

  The second of the omens that were to rule my life came here, in Cumae cave. I was on the threshold between child and woman when my father and mother came to ask the god voice what should be done if my mother could not conceive another heir. Almost, they left me behind—but my father said, “She is Latium, if there is no one else,” and so I traveled with them.

  I remember the heat of the summer day and the flat pale blue of the sky. The sweat ran down the back of my neck and in between my breasts, and the bright sun blinded me and made my head ache. The cool air inside the cave felt pleasant against my skin and the darkness soothed my burning eyes, and I thought how kind it was of the god to shelter his voice from the full strength of his power in the heat of the day.

  We waited together in a circle of torchlight, my mother and father, the god’s voice, and I, and Latinus spoke. “Great Dian,” he said, “no man lives forever, and I grow old. Once I had two sons, either one well-suited to take my place as chief of the Woodpecker clan, but the Fates saw fit to take them before me, and only a daughter remains. I ask now for some omen or word of guidance. Show me, great Dian, what I should do—for the sake of my family, and for the people of Latium who look to us for help and safety.”

  My father finished speaking, and there was silence. Even the air inside the cave, which had flowed about us like the cool breath of the mountain, drying my sweat and making the flame of the torch bend and waver, ceased moving and grew still. The pause lengthened and tightened like wool turning into thread on a spindle, and still nobody moved or spoke, only waited on the coming of the god.

  He came in a great outrushing of air from all the hundred mouths of the grotto, a roaring blast that whipped my hair loose from its bindings and extinguished the torch altogether. For an instant we stood in total darkness. Then the fire came, and I was enveloped in blue-white flames that licked and played around my body but did not burn. I held up my arms, and the blue fire ran down them like water, and Latinus and Amata gazed at me wide-eyed in its light.

  It seemed forever that I stood there wrapped in the god’s fire, but it can only have been for the space of a few heartbeats. Darkness came again, and the wind stopped, and I fell half-fainting to the cavern floor.

  “The god has spoken,” the seer told my father. “You have your answer.”

  It settled nothing, of course. The gods give us omens, but men—and women—interpret them. My mother and father argued with each other all the rest of that summer and into the winter of the year about what the god had intended. On one thing only were they agreed: when I dared to voice my own belief, or perhaps hope, that Dian Farseer had marked me for his servant, my words found no hearing with either Latinus or Amata.

  “You are all that is left of the family in your generation,” my father said. “For the sake of the whole clan, you must marry, and to the right husband.”

  “To a strong husband,” my mother said, and they began the argument anew as though I had never spoken. I gave up my thoughts of entering the god’s service and resigned myself to marriage. I could only pray that I would find the man pleasing—or at least, pleasing enough.

  I had no lack of suitors. More than one man found the thought of ruling Latium through me desirable. But my father cared for none of them, dismissing one man as too weak and another as too prone, like Metabus, to feuds and quarrels, and yet a third as unkind to his horse, until I began to think that no one could please him. My mother, on the other hand, cared for only one of my prospective husbands; from the beginning, with her, it was Turnus.

  I never completely understood why she was so intent on the marriage—they were distant kin and much of an age, but the same could have been said of half my suitors. She told me that they had played together as toddlers, and perhaps that had some influence. When I once said, in a fit of impatience, that if she loved Turnus so much she could marry him herself, she grew red and slapped me in the face.

  Still my father fretted and delayed, while I grew older and left childhood behind completely. “She’s ripe for marriage,�
� Turnus said to my mother one day. “Latinus will have to see it now.”

  “I’ll speak to him again,” Amata said. “He’s put off making a decision for long enough.”

  She never had the chance. The third of my life’s omens came that night, when Latinus had a dream. He told us all about it in the morning—Grandfather Faunus had spoken to him, he said, and had advised him that I should not marry Turnus or any other man from Latium, but should take a foreigner for a husband.

  Turnus left our house in anger, and my mother sulked for a week. For my part, I was grateful to Grandfather Faunus. Foreigners were rare, and it stood to reason that foreigners in search of wives must be rarer still.

  Then Aeneas came, and the men from Wilion with him.

  Not for a long time did I understand why Grandfather Faunus spoke to my father as he did. The men from Wilion had a destiny, they said, a command from their gods to make a new homeland in this place where our people were already living, and they were men hardened by long years of wandering. If we could not drive them away by force, perhaps it was better to draw them in. Aeneas would rule Latium through me, and through me the line of Latinus would continue.

  Such, at least, my father must have hoped. My mother saw things otherwise, and who can say, now, that she was not right all along? Because it came in the end to war despite his efforts, and the destruction of the world of my childhood—even Camilla, whose service to Diana should have kept her away from such things, died on a battlefield before it was done. But you know all this, and what matters is that the men from Wilion prevailed. Aeneas killed Turnus, and my mother hanged herself in rage and shame, and I was dragged forth from hiding to marry the foreign invader, whether I wanted him or not.

  I had not wanted Aeneas, any more than I had wanted Turnus or any of the other, lesser men whom my father had sent away, but I found marriage to him less of a burden than I had feared. He was kind, and he saw to it that the men from Wilion treated me with respect and honor, as the one through whom the rule of Latium had come into his hands. His son Askanios did not like me—Aeneas’s first wife had died when Wilion fell, and, since Askanios could not truly remember her, he had made her perfect in his mind, and a stepmother could never equal perfection—but the young man’s love for his father was strong enough that he was respectful to me for Aeneas’s sake.