Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  "Turnus would never," she began, and then, her voice shaking, she said, "It was for you, it was for you."

  "Turnus doesn't care a stick for me or you either," I said. I heard myself speak with the sneering stridency I had so often heard in my mother's voice. I thought of the clarity of the sky above the altar between the armies as the two kings swore the treaty. A great swell of shame and passion ran all through my body. I knelt down before my mother and took the hem of her white palla. I said, "Mother, forgive me. Let us have peace between us!"

  "Never, he would never," she said. She looked around as if bewildered. "Is it my fault?" she cried. She turned away, pulling her gown out of my hand, and hurried back into her own apartment and closed the door behind her.

  I crouched there weeping for a while. Tears that had been pent up in me through these terrible days poured out. Then they were done, and I put back the hair from my forehead and wiped my face with the edge of my palla and stood up, looking at the women who were watching me in awe and concern and confusion.

  "It was Turnus' people who broke the truce, but it will be the Trojans and Etruscans besieging the city," I said to them, groping for the truth I needed and the reassurance we all needed. My voice quavered. "So we have no true friends but our own Latin men fighting out there, and ourselves. What can we do to make the house safe, and wait out the siege?"

  They all gazed in silence, some of them sniveling, until Maruna said, "The storerooms are full."

  I said, "Praise be to our Penates, the storerooms are full, and the fountain runs. Is there plenty of firewood for the cooking stoves?"

  That was indeed a problem, and something within our scope. A discussion arose about it, and Tita said, "We could cut down the laurel tree." At that Sicana, the tall grim woman who had always served and sided with my mother, said, "Are you mad, Tita? Go wash your mouth out and beg all that's sacred to give you the wits of a rabbit! Cut down the king's tree? Idiot! There's the old poplars back of the stables, to start with." I put Sicana at once in charge of finding men with axes to fell and cut up the trees; then there were a hundred other things to be done, and women willing to do them.

  The battle outside the walls went on all this time, all that morning. I saw none of it. I heard the noise of it only when there was some pause in the business of the house. I can tell only what I was told. The Rutulians at first, in the surprise of their assault, drove the Trojans and their allies back, but after that the battle moved steadily nearer the rampart and ditch outside the city walls and gate. Messapus was in charge of the Rutulians; Turnus was here and there, "but never staying in one place," said the man who brought us the clearest report. This man, Mellus, had been among our recovering wounded in the Regia, and went out to fight again; his wound, a bad sword cut, reopened as he fought. He managed to get back inside the city while the gates were still open. He reported to the king that the Trojans were not trying to get closer to the gate, but were holding their position on the rampart while Aeneas hunted for Turnus, claiming his right to settle the war by single combat, and Turnus rode here and there through the fighting, mounted on his horse, dealing out death, but never letting Aeneas meet him. After Mellus had made this report clearly and quietly, he fainted from loss of blood; and though we did what we could for him in our courtyard hospital, he died that evening. He was a Latin farmer, with a small farm and orchard in the foothills south of the city.

  I was trying to direct the sweepers to use mops and soaked rags to keep the courtyard pavement clean of blood from the wounded men who were continually carried in, when the roar of noise swelled up immediately outside the city gate. All of us in the house looked up from what we were doing, and some ran up onto the walls and the watchtower to see what was happening. They reported to us that the Trojans had crossed the space between the ditch and the walls and were attacking the city gate, led by their tall captain with the red crest on his helmet, although the crest had been sliced off short. One of the girls who had gone to the wall above the gate said the captain was shouting that the Italians had broken the treaty twice and their king was faithless.

  "And he killed Verus," she said. She was white as whey and talked in a high, monotonous voice, repeating things over and over. "He just sliced off his, his head, just sliced off his head, off his body."

  "Verus," I said, not comprehending yet; there was too much to do. I was aware, even inside the Regia, that there was a great movement of people in the streets. Some were pressing to get down to the gates and throw them open in surrender, others were trying to get down there with pikes and poles and axes and kitchen knives to keep the attackers out of the city. The noise within the city was a dull mindless roar. Somebody shouted, "Fire!" and at that I did run up onto the platform to see if the Regia was threatened. Flaming missiles were flying up over the walls in a couple of places, but people in the streets below rushed to put them out. Still the cry of fire was repeated again and again, and the dark buzzing wailing noise of the people all over the city was so loud one could not think.

  Through that noise there came from down in the house a shrieking of women, so keen and sharp I turned and ran down the stairs again and to the women's side.

  There the screaming and high wailing rang and echoed so I could not hear what Sicana, coming at me with her mouth open in a square and her eyes unseeing, cried to me. I followed her to my mother's rooms. I saw Amata hanging from the noose she had made of twisted cloth and tied over a beam. Her feet were bare. Her long black hair hung down all round her face and body.

  Sicana and I pushed back the table under her and Sicana held her while I cut the cloth noose with my small knife. We laid her down on the long table there in her anteroom. She still wore the little gold bullas my brothers had worn. "Wash her," I commanded Sicana and the others, for she had soiled herself in her agony, and I could not bear for her body to be shamed.

  What I had to do was tell my father.

  He had heard the frenzy in the women's side and was coming across the courtyard, Drances and some others following him. I stopped him under the laurel tree. I am not sure what I said. He stood a while. His face looked very tired and sad; he embraced me, and I held to him. I said, "Come to her." At that he let me go, and slowly got down on his knees, and picked up dirt from around the roots of the laurel tree, and rubbed it into his grey hair.

  I knelt by him, trying to give him comfort.

  I realised that though the wailing went on in the women's rooms, the noise of the city and the war had sunk down almost to quietness.

  I looked up and saw people standing motionless on the walls of the house and the platform. They were still. It grew still.

  Then there was a great sound like a deep breath, like the earth breathing, all around the walls. I thought it was earthquake, the sound earthquake makes as it comes. But it was the sound of the end. The war was over. Turnus was dead. The poem was finished.

  No, but it was left unfinished.

  Didn't you tell me that, my poet? here in the sacred place, where the stinking sulfur water comes up from under the earth to make pools on the earth, and the stars shine between the leaves? Once you said it was not complete, and should be burned.

  But then again, at the end, you said it was finished. And I know they did not burn it. I would have burned with it.

  But what am I to do now? I have lost my guide, my Vergil. I must go on by myself through all that is left after the end, all the rest of the immense, pathless, unreadable world.

  What is left after a death? Everything else. The sun a man saw rise goes down though he does not see it set. A woman sits down to the weaving another woman left in the loom.

  I have found my way so far, even though the poet did not tell me the way. I guessed it right, without mistake, from things he said, the clues he gave me. I came to the center of the maze following him. Now I must find my way back out alone. It will be longer and slower in the living, but not so long, I think, to tell.

  There were many who saw Turnus die, for it w
as before the gates of Laurentum that he finally stopped hiding from Aeneas and turned to fight him. Both men threw their spears, and missed. So they met sword to sword, but Turnus' sword broke, and he turned and ran again.

  Aeneas tried to chase him, but was too lame to run. He stopped and tried to pull out his spear from the wild olive trunk it had hit. That was a sacred tree. I had done worship to Faunus there many times. The Trojans had cut it down in a rage of destruction when they occupied the ramparts, and nothing but the stump was left. The spear was big and heavy and had gone deep, and the tree would not let it go. While Aeneas was struggling with it, Juturna ran up to Turnus and gave him a sword. Aeneas pulled his spear free at last and came for Turnus, shouting, "This is a fight, Turnus, not a footrace!"

  Serestus was close to them then. He told me he saw an uncanny thing: an owl, a little owl, flew round Turnus, there in the broad daylight. He said that Turnus tried to keep it from his face. He seemed dazed, bewildered, like a man already mortally wounded. He ran off a short way again till he came to a terminus stone, a boundary marker. He stopped at it, turned, picked the huge stone up, grappling it in his arms, and threw it at Aeneas. It fell short by far. Then he stood there with the same bewildered look, holding his sword but doing nothing, till Aeneas brought him down, sending his heavy spear through Turnus' thigh.

  Aeneas came limping up and stood over him breathing hard. Turnus couldn't get up. He struggled to his knees. When he'd got his breath he spoke clearly and quietly, as if his confusion had passed. He said, "You've won. I ask no mercy. Do as you will. If you kill me, send my body home to my father. Lavinia is your wife. Don't take your hatred further." Aeneas listened to him and drew back, as if to spare him. Then he saw Turnus had on the gold sword belt he had torn off dying Pallas. He shouted out, "Did you let the boy live? It's he, it's Pallas who makes this sacrifice!"—and he drove his sword into Turnus' heart.

  Juturna had stayed on the battlefield all through the fighting. They say she had more than once hidden her brother from Aeneas who came stalking him, lame and dire. She came forward now through the broken Rutulian ranks and knelt by Turnus' body, her grey veils falling over him, and keened.

  Aeneas stood there leaning on his sword until Achates and Serestus came to him; then he sheathed the sword, and with an arm round his friends' necks, they helping him to walk, he began to hobble slowly back to the Trojan camp. He turned round as they crossed the rampart, and called out, "King Latinus! Our treaty holds!"

  Latinus was not there to answer him; he was in an inner room with his dead wife, dust in his hair. But the Latin troops replied, many-voiced, "The treaty holds," and people on the walls repeated it.

  The few that were left of the Rutulian captains—for in his final fury Aeneas had killed every man who dared meet him—gathered their troops together and formed a group to take up and carry the bodies of Turnus and Camers and Tolumnius. In silence they began their long walk back to Ardea. The leaderless troops scattered out to find rest or find their dead comrades. Next day they too would straggle back to Rutulia, or Volscia, or the hill country.

  Juturna went alone, northward; people saw her go, but she was never seen again, and it is thought she drowned herself that night in the father river.

  The Latin army dispersed as the allies did. Some came into the city for rest or healing, but many went to find their dead brothers or neighbors on the battlefield and carry them home, back to the farm down the valley or over the ridge. Already from the nearby homesteads slaves with carts drawn by an ox or a donkey were coming out, sent by the farmwife or the old farmer to help carry the wounded and the dead.

  That night in the city we heard the knock of axes, the distant crash of falling trees, in the woods north and east of the city. Next morning the woodcutters were busy hauling in wood for pyres outside the walls.

  One pyre was built up high and separate for my mother. She was carried out on a white litter, dressed in the delicate white palla she had woven and called my wedding gown. Everyone in the city who could walk followed the procession.

  The closest relative of the dead lights the fire, with face averted. I lit her fire. When the fire had done its work I picked out of the fierce smoking ashes a bone, a little finger bone, to bury in the earth, so that her soul need not wander. Then my father stood and called out her name three times, as is our custom, and I and all the people called her with him: Amata! Amata! Amata! And silence after that.

  ***

  THE OLD GUARD VERUS WAS DEAD, AND AULUS. EVERY ONE OF the young men who had been my suitors was dead. My mother was dead. Almost every household in Latium grieved for a father or brother or son killed or crippled. I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame. They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?

  In the evening of the day of my mother's funeral, I called Maruna, Sicana, and others of the chief women of the Regia to come with me. Old Vestina was too broken with grief to do anything but crouch on the floor in my mother's room and rock herself, crying without tears, making a little moaning like a sick child.

  We walked down through the streets to the altar of Janus, where I made offering of meal and incense to the power of beginning and ending. People of the city gathered round. No one spoke. The silence of the city after the noise of war brought awe into us all. In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand. When I had made the offering to Janus, I went, followed by my women and many people, to the doors that stood ajar in their high cedar frame nearby, the War Gate, the gate that led nowhere whether it was open or shut. I pushed at one of the doors, then the other. I could not move them. Standing open, they had sagged from their hinges and rested on the stony ground. My women helped me, and men came forward to join us. We finally forced the gates shut, and Sicana and one of the men lifted up the squared beam of oak and slotted it through the thick iron staples of the lock. Then I spoke to the gate: "Stay shut. The treaty holds!" I felt as if I were speaking to an enemy, defeated for the moment, but never anything but an enemy. The people murmured after me, "The treaty holds."

  Aeneas did not come to Laurentum for nine days, the period of mourning. This was simple decency. Coming sooner, he would be perceived and resented as the conqueror enforcing his triumph. No matter that he had sworn to leave the crown and the sword to Latinus and bring only his gods to Latium: we had seen that promise twice broken in the making.

  Still—"The new king's in no hurry to come, is he?" people said. Even my women called him that, though I told them it was disrespectful to our true king. Word got round that the Trojan had been wounded and needed to recover, and people said with some satisfaction, "So Turnus nicked him after all." Yet they told with admiration how he had hunted Turnus across the battlefield for two hours with an arrowhead in the muscle of his thigh. When he did come he walked lame, and looked rather drawn and gaunt.

  He sent a messenger ahead to prepare us, and arrived with a troop of only ten or twelve men, all mounted, dressed in what finery they had—their armor, mostly, cleaned up and polished, and maybe a cloak or tunic that had been handsome before the long voyage from Troy. A couple of splendid Etruscan princes were with them, but none of the Greeks: in grief and bitterness of heart at his son's death, Evander had called all his men back to Pallanteum. Aeneas rode a horse that had been one of my father's gifts to him at the very outset, that day when the first treaty was made, when I was promised to him. The fine dun stallion, well trained but lively, scented his old friends the mares in the royal stables as he passed and set up a lot of whinnying, which of course the mares answered with neighs and squeals; so that part of their entrance was fairly noisy. The guards stood aside for them at the gates of Laurentum and they rode quietly up the Via Regia. People came running to lo
ok and crowded on the roofs, but they too were quiet.

  The men dismounted at the house door. I hurried down from my spy post above the door and came round to enter the council chamber from the back. But Gaius, who had taken over Verus' position as chief of the king's guards, stopped me at the doorway. "The king says please to wait until you are sent for, queen," he said.

  He was the first to call me that. I am not sure he knew what he was saying. He was a silent, shy, grave old man, embarrassed at having to stop me.

  So I had to wait at the doorway, unable to hear most of what they were saying. My father was on his cross-legged throne. I could see his back, and several Trojans, but not Aeneas. There was some speech making. The Etruscan Tarchon asked Latinus' pardon for bringing his men to fight against the Latins, explaining that the people of Caere had resolved to take the tyrant Mezentius from Turnus in Ardea to punish him as he deserved, but an oracle told them they must have a foreign leader for such an expedition, and Aeneas had turned up at exactly the right moment. Latinus accepted this apology as gracefully as it was offered. He wanted no quarrel with Etruria. Drances did a great deal of the talking. He had been utterly odious to me since Turnus' death; there was no reason in it, but I could not help it, and I clenched my fists in loathing as he droned on. Then one of the Trojans said something and an Etruscan answered, and everyone laughed, which changed the mood; and I heard a quiet, resonant voice: "I bring a gift for your daughter, King Latinus."

  "That is most gracious, noble Aeneas," my father said. "And she will bring to you a dowry worthy of our wealth and pride."

  "I have no doubt of that, my king. But what I bring, I wish to give her with my own hands."

  My father nodded, and said to Caesus who was attending him as page, "Send for my daughter Lavinia."

  Caesus was just turning to fetch me as I came forward with Gaius. I arrived with unseemly speed. My father looked a little startled.