Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  Of course it was foolish to ask if I liked him. A young girl meeting a man, a handsome man, a king, who may be her first suitor, does not like or dislike him. Her heart beats, her blood runs, and she sees him—sees him only: maybe as the rabbit sees the hawk, maybe as the earth sees the sky. I saw Turnus as a city sees a splendid stranger, a captain of armies, at the city gate. That he was there, that he had come, was wonderful and terrible. Nothing would ever be the same again. But there was no need, yet, to unbar the gate.

  Turnus stayed several days with us, but I met him again only once. He requested my presence at dinner on his last evening, and I was sent in to the feast, but not to eat with the guests and company, only for the aftercourse, to hear the singing and see the dancers. I sat with my mother, and again Turnus looked often at me, making no effort to disguise it. He smiled at us. His smile was a pleasant, quick flash. When he was watching the dancers, I looked at him. I noticed how small his ears were, that his head was well shaped, that his jaw was square and strong. He might get jowly, later in life. The back of his neck was pleasant, smooth. I saw that he was attentive and respectful to my father, who, sitting near him, looked old.

  My mother was ten or twelve years older than her nephew, but tonight she did not look it; her eyes shone and she laughed. She and Turnus got on well together and were at ease. They talked lightly across the table, and the other guests joined in, and my father listened to them benevolently.

  The day after Turnus left, my father sent for me and my mother. We walked under the portico outside the banquet hall; he had sent away all the people that usually were around him. It was a rainy spring day, and he was wearing his toga, for as he got older he felt the cold. He paced with us in silence for a while and then said, "The Rutulian king began to say to me last night that he wishes to be a suitor for your hand, Lavinia. I did not let him go on. I said that you are not yet of an age for me to permit talk of courtship or marriage. He would have argued, of course, but I did not let him argue. I said my daughter is too young."

  He looked at us both. I had no idea what to say. I looked at my mother.

  "You gave him no encouragement at all?" Amata asked, calm and civil, as she always was with her husband.

  "I didn't say that she'll always be too young," my father answered in his mild, dry way.

  "King Turnus has a great deal to offer his bride," she said.

  "He does indeed. Good land down there. He's a good fighter, too, they say. His father certainly was."

  "I am sure he is a brave warrior."

  "And wealthy."

  We paced on down the portico. Rain pattered in the courtyard, the leaves of the lemon trees nodded. Under the big laurel tree it was still quite dry, and one of the house girls sat there spinning and singing a long spinning song.

  "So you might favor the boy if he comes back another year?" my father asked my mother.

  "I might," she said coolly. "If indeed he is willing to wait."

  "And you, Lavinia?"

  "I don't know," I said.

  He put his hand on my shoulder. "Don't worry about it, my dear," he said. "There's plenty of time for this sort of thing."

  "What would you do about tending Vesta?" I said—I could not bring myself to say, "if I went off to be married."

  "Well, we must think about that. Choose a girl to whom you can begin to teach the duties."

  "Maruna," I said at once.

  "An Etruscan?"

  "Her mother is. You took her on a raid across the river. Maruna grew up here. She's pious." By that word I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe. My father had taught me the meaning of the word and the value of it.

  "Good. Take her with you when you tend the fire and clean the hearth and make the sacred salt. Let her begin to learn all these matters."

  My mother had nothing to say in this; it is the king's daughter who keeps his hearth alight. It was bitter to both my parents, I know, that when we sat to dinner every day the boy who fed the altar fire with our food and spoke the blessing was not their son, as he should have been, but only a servant boy. Now the care of the fire and the storerooms too must go to a substitute, a slave.

  My father sighed a little; his large, warm, hard hand was still on my shoulder. My mother paced forward, impassive. As we turned to walk back down under the columns she said, "It might be well not to make that young king wait too long."

  "A year, or two, or three," Latinus said.

  "Oh," and she winced with disgust and impatience. "Three years! The man is young, Latinus! He has hot blood in his veins."

  "All the more reason to give our girl time to grow up."

  Amata did not argue, she never argued, but she shrugged.

  I read in her shrug her disbelief that I would ever grow to be a match for such a man as Turnus. Indeed I wondered how I could. To mate with such a man I should be deep-breasted and majestic like my mother, fierce like her, and fiercely beautiful. I was short and thin, sunburnt, uncouth. I was a girl, not a woman. I put my hand up on my father's hand on my shoulder and held it there as we walked. I could look at blue-eyed Turnus in the darkness of my room at night, but I did not want to think about leaving my home.

  Aeneas' armor hangs in the entryway of our house here in Lavinium, as Turnus' sword and breastplate hung on his visits to Laurentum. I have seen Aeneas wear the armor several times, the helmet, cuirass, greaves, with the long sword and the round shield, all of bronze: he shines as the sea glances and dazzles under the sun. To see his armor hanging there is to realise what a large, powerful man he is. He doesn't look large, or even very muscular, because his body is in perfect proportion, and he moves lightly and gracefully, considerate of who and what is around him, not shoving forward as many big, strong men do. Yet I can hardly lift the armor he wears so easily. It was a gift from his mother, who had it made for him by a great fire lord, he told me. Indeed the man who forged and worked that armor was the lord of smiths. There is in all the western world no work so beautiful as that shield.

  The surface of the seven layers of welded bronze is covered all over with a great pattern of figures embossed and delicately carved and picked out with gold and silver inlay. Here and there is a slight dent or scratch from battle. I stand and study that shield often. The picture I like best is high on the left, a wolf who turns her sleek neck back to lick her suckling cubs, but the cubs are human babies, boys, greedy at her teats. Another I like is a goose, all done in silver, who stands with her neck upstretched, hissing in alarm. Behind her some men climb a cliff; their hair is curly gold, their cloaks are striped with silver; around his neck each man has a twisted collar of gold.

  Not far from the wolf are figures I recognise from our festivals—some Leaping Priests with two-lobed shields, and a pair of Wolf Boys running naked, brandishing their thorn sticks at laughing women. There are a few women here and there in the pictures, but mostly it is men, men fighting, endless battle scenes, men torn apart, men disemboweled, bridges torn down, walls torn down, slaughter.

  Aeneas is not in any of the pictures, and nothing the poet told me about the siege and fall of his city, or his wanderings before he came to Latium, is recognisable on the shield. "Are these scenes of Troy?" I ask him, and he shakes his head.

  "I do not know what they are," he says. "They may be scenes of what is yet to come."

  "What is yet to come is mostly war, then," I say, looking among them for some that aren't battles, for an unhelmeted face. I see a mass rape, women screaming and fighting as they are dragged off by warriors. I see great, beautiful ships with banks of oars, but the ships are all at war, some are burning. Fire and smoke rise up over the water.

  "I think it may be the realm our sons' sons will inherit," he says, very low. Aeneas always speaks out of silence, seldom at length, usually in a low voice. He is never sullen, but he is quiet, he handles words as he handles his sword, only when he has to.

  That is my poet's Rome, then, the great city in many of the pictures. I look more closely at the
center of the shield, the sea battle. On the stern of a ship stands a man with a handsome, cold face. Fire streams from his head, and a comet hovers over it. I think that is the man made great, the august one.

  As I continue looking I see things I never observed before. The city, or some great city, lies all in ruins, utterly destroyed and burned. I see another destroyed city, and another. Enormous fires burst out in a line, one after another, enveloping a whole countryside in flame. Huge machines of war crawl on the ground, or dive under the sea, or hurtle through the air. The earth itself burns in oily black clouds. Now an immense round cloud of destruction rises up over the sea at the end of the world. I know it is the end of the world. I say to Aeneas in horror, "Look, look!"

  But he cannot see what I see in the shield. He will not live to see it. He must die after only three years, and widow me. Only I, who met the poet in the woods of Albunea, can keep looking through the bronze of my husband's shield to see all the wars he will not fight.

  The poet made him live, live greatly, so he must die. I, whom the poet gave so little life to, I can go on. I can live to see the cloud above the sea at the end of the world.

  I burst into tears and clasp Aeneas in my arms, and he holds me tenderly, telling me not to cry, dear heart, don't cry.

  The king's house where i live is a square divided in four quarters; the great laurel tree is at the crossing, the center. I go out at first dawn from the house and from the city into the fields east of the city.

  The pagus where we pagans live is the pattern of the farmers' fields, outlined by the paths between the fields. At the crossing, where four fields meet, is the shrine of the Lares, the spirits of the meeting place. The shrine has four doors, and before each door is the altar of a farmer's field. I stand out on one of the paths between fields, looking at the sky.

  The house of the sky is limitless, but with my mind I give it borders and divide it into four. I stand at the center, the crossing, facing south, facing Ardea. I watch the empty sky into which light flows upward slowly. Crows fly from the left, from the eastern hills, circle above me calling, and return into the sunrise that crowns the hills with fire. It is a good omen, but the red sunrise foretells a stormy day.

  I was twelve when I first went with my father to Albunea, the sacred forest under the hill, where sulfur springs running out from a high cave fill the shadowy air with an endless, troubled noise and a mist that smells of rotten eggs. There the spirits of the dead are within hearing if you call. In the old days people came to Albunea from all the western lands to consult with the spirits and powers of the place; now many go to the oracle near Tibur, which bears the same name. This lesser Albunea was sacred to my family. When my father was disturbed in his mind he went there. This time he said to me, "Wear your sacred robe, daughter, and come help me with the sacrifice." I had served as his assistant often at home, as a child's duty is, but I had never yet been to the sacred spring. I put on my red-bordered toga and took a bag of salted meal from the storeroom behind Vesta. We walked for some miles on paths through familiar fields and pastures, then we were in country I had not seen before, wilder, the forested hills drawing closer on both sides. We came to a little stream and followed the north side of its rocky gorge; it was called the Prati, my father said, and he told me of the rivers of Latium: our Lentulus at Laurentum, the Harenosus, the Prati, the Stagnulus, and the sacred Numicus that rises high on the Alban Mountain and is our boundary with Rutulia.

  He carried the sacrifice, a two-week lamb. It was April. The thickets were all budding and in bloom, and the oaks on the hillsides bore their long, delicate, reticent flowers of green and bronze. The forests ahead of us rose up and up towards the Alban Mountain, and craggy woods hung like a dark cloud to our left. We entered under the trees. It was dark in the forest, and only a few birds sang, though the fields and thickets had been loud with their chanting. I smelled the stink of the spring nearby, but did not see the vapors, and heard the noise of the water only faintly, a hissing murmur like a kettle coming to the boil.

  The sacred place was in a grassy glade deep in the forest, marked out in a rough square with a rock wall no higher than my knee. Within that enclosure the sense of the numen, the presence and power of the sacred, was strong and strange. Tattered, rotting fleeces lay about on the earth inside the wall. There was a small rock altar; my father cut a turf from outside the wall and laid it on the altar. We drew the corner of our togas over our heads. He lighted the fire. I made a garland of young laurel leaves and garlanded the lamb. I sprinkled it with salted meal from my bag, and held it while he prayed. The lamb was docile and fearless, a noble sacrifice; it had its own piety. I held it while my father cut its throat with the long bronze knife, offering this life to the powers we do not know, in fear and gratitude and seeking to be in peace with them. We burned the entrails on the altar fire to augment the power of the spirits. We toasted and ate the ribs ourselves, having not eaten since noon the day before. The rest of the meat I wrapped to carry home. My father scraped the hide and laid it down on the ground, the fleece up, and gathered the remnants of other sheepskins and spread them out. They were damp from the rain a couple of days earlier, and stank of rot and mildew, but that is one's bed at Albunea.

  It was quite dark now, the red of the sun was gone from the aisles of the trees, and the sky between the branches was dim. We lay down on the sheepskins, the fleece of our lamb under our heads.

  I do not know if the power of Albunea came into my father that night, but it came to me, not as a voice speaking from the trees as it comes to others, but as a dream, or what I took to be a dream. In my sleep I was beside a river, which I knew to be the Numicus. I stood at a ford, alone, watching the clear water run among stones. I saw a thread of color in the water as it ran by, a vein of red. It thickened and blurred into a cloud of red that drifted downstream and was gone. A heavy, heavy weight of grief bore down my heart so that my knees failed and I crouched weeping among the stones. At last I got up and walked upstream and came to a town; its ramparts were of fresh earth. I was still weeping, and held the corner of my garment over my head and face, but I knew that city was my home. Then in my dream I was in the forest of Albunea again, still alone. This time I went past the altar glade and came to the spring. I could not come close to the cave. The hissing, boiling noise was loud there, and all about the mouth of the cave the ground was bog and shallow pools. The stinking, bluish mist hovered over the water and the ground. I heard a woodpecker off among the trees, his tapping on a trunk and his call like a harsh laugh—then he came flying. I drew back, pulling the cloth over my head, afraid, but he did not strike me. I saw his scarlet head flash before me. He drew his wings across my eyes twice, very lightly, like the touch of the softest veil. He laughed as he flew off. I looked up and saw it was not dark under the trees; the forest was full of a still light without shadows, and the water and mist of the spring were luminous.

  I woke then, and saw that same still light for a while in the glade, fading as day came.

  Before we left, I went on to the spring, and saw it was as I had seen it in my dream, though shadowed.

  My father was again silent as we started home. As we came out of the forest I looked south, imagining the course of the Numicus, the ford, and the place where I had seen the town in my dream. I said, "Grandfather Picus came to me while I slept last night, father." And I told him what I had seen.

  He listened and said nothing for a time. "That is a powerful grandfather," he said at last.

  "He struck my head when I had the fever. I cried for the pain."

  "But this time he touched your eyes with his wing."

  I nodded. We walked on a while. Latinus said, "Albunea is in his gift. He and the other powers of the woods. He has given you the freedom of it, daughter. He has opened your eyes to see."

  "May I come with you again?"

  "You may come there when you choose, I think."

  If my daughter had lived she never could have run safe and free through fi
elds outside our domains or along the hillsides among the grazing herds, as I used to run. When my son was a boy the forests were safer for him than the pagus fields. But when I was a girl I walked the open hillsides and the wilderness paths to Albunea with no companion but Maruna. Sometimes she accompanied me all the way, sometimes she stayed the night with a woodcutter's family at the edge of the forest while I went alone to the sacred glade. We could do this because the peace my father had brought to Latium was real and durable. In that peace, little children could watch the cattle, shepherds could let their flocks wander in the summer pastures with no risk of theft, women and girls need not go guarded or in bands but could walk without fear on any path in Latium. Even in the true wild where there were no paths we were afraid of wolf and boar, not man. Because this order had held all my life as a girl, I thought it was the way the world had always been and would be. I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste. Of all the greater powers the one I fear most is the one I cannot worship, the one who walks the boundary, the one who sets the ram on the ewe, and the bull on the heifer, and the sword in the farmer's hand: Mavors, Marmor, Mars.

  I kept the storerooms of the king's house: that was my duty as the king's daughter, the camilla, the novice. The food we ate was in my charge. I ground the meal and the sacred salt that blessed the food. Daily and faithfully I cared for Vesta burning on our hearth, the bright center of our lives. But I was not permitted to enter the small room beside the house door where Mars lived—not Mars of the plow, Mars of the bull and stallion, nor Mars of the wolf, but the other one: Mars the sword, the spears, the shields that the Leapers brought out on the day of the new year, shaking him, waking him, rousing him up, dancing and leaping with him in the streets and through the fields. That Mars would be shut away again only when the October Horse had been sacrificed and winter itself, with cold and rain and darkness, ordained the peace.