Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  ***

  SILVIUS HAD SLEPT WITHOUT DREAMING. IT WAS I WHO HAD the dream and heard the voice, but it was not my grandfather who spoke.

  At dawn we rose and went to the spring. While Silvius explored about the cave, I sat on the rock outcrop and watched the sunlight strike across the pale water through the low mists that always hung above it. The stink of sulfur was less strong in the morning air. We bathed in shallow pools a little way downstream from the dead, muddy ground at the cave mouth. The water was warm and felt soft on the skin. It would be a good place to bring arthritis, or an old aching wound.

  We went back to the enclosure, and having nothing else to offer in thanks we heaped the altar with sweet herbs, boughs of bay laurel, and what few flowers we found in clearings in the woods. When we had done that and said our thanks, before we left the sacred place, I told Silvius my dream. "I saw you, a grown man. Yet it was as if you were not yet born—as if you stood waiting to live. And beside me an old man was speaking. He was not speaking to me. He spoke of you to your father Aeneas. He said: That is your last son, a king and father of kings, whom your wife Lavinia will bring up in the woods. And then the dream ended."

  We pondered it as we went back to the woodcutter's hut.

  "It means we're to stay here, in the forest. Doesn't it, mother?" Silvius said at last.

  It was what I had been thinking, yet my first impulse was to deny it, to say no, it couldn't be that clear and simple. I said nothing till we came into the clearing, and then, "It seems to mean that. But how...? We can't lurk here like outcasts or beggars—living off what Maruna can send us."

  "I can hunt, and snare, mother."

  "You certainly can, and you'd better do it, too, if you want meat tonight. But in the long run ... People will see us, everybody here knows us, after all! We can't just vanish into the forest."

  "If we went farther, we could. Up in the hills."

  "For how long, child? Summer, yes; autumn, maybe; winter, no. Life's hard for those who live apart from others, even if they have a sound roof and a full granary. You and I are too soft for it ... But I will not take orders from Ascanius! If I obey him in this, if I give him you, even if I go with you, I will have given your kingship away. He must accept our sovereignty in Lavinium. Where can we go?"

  "Well, what if people do recognise us? And find out where we are? Would anybody make us go to Alba? If we said we were supposed to live in the woods—if we told them the oracle said so?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, let's find out," Silvius said.

  It is pleasant when your child says what you want to say.

  "His pigs told him to go to Alba," I said. "How can he argue with his grandfather, who tells us to stay here?"

  I began to remember how, when Faunus told my father in Albunea that I must be married to a foreigner, Latinus had announced it right away to all and sundry. The more people heard it the more powerful it was. Everyone, not just the king, had heard the oracle.

  "I think I should go to Lavinium today," I told Silvius. "You stay here. Get us a rabbit or quail if you can. If anybody but me comes here, disappear. I'll be back before evening."

  So I walked back along the foothills and across the fields to my city, thinking hard all the way, and entered the gate in mid-morning. I was relieved to find Ascanius had still not sent for Silvius. And I was surprised and touched by the welcome people gave me, crowding round me with greetings and caresses and anxious inquiries. I was the center of a whole throng by the time I had climbed the street to the Regia.

  Here's my chance, I thought. So I turned round there before the house doors, while people of the household came crowding out behind me to make me welcome, and called, "People of my city!" They quieted down to hear me, and I spoke out, hardly knowing what I was going to say from one word to the next. "Last night in the forest of Albunea, in the place of the oracle of my forefathers, I lay down by the altar to sleep. And the voice of King Anchises, father of our King Aeneas, spoke to me in dream, prophesying that his grandson Silvius was to live with me in the woods of Latium. In obedience to this foretelling, I will neither send my son to Alba Longa nor keep him here in Lavinium, but he and I will live in the forest until the signs and portents bid us do otherwise. The voice in the dream called Silvius king and father of kings. May you rejoice in that knowledge as I do!" They put up a great shout at that, which heartened me, and I ended—"But till Silvius comes to the age of rule, Ascanius rules alone, and my city will continue to be governed by Ascanius and by his father's friends."

  "But where will you go off to in the wilderness, little queen?" some old fellow in the crowd called out, and I answered, "Not far, friend! My heart is in Lavinium, with you!" That made them cheer again, and I entered my house amid a considerable tumult, my heart beating very hard. Achates was there to meet me. Riding the goodwill of my people, I forestalled what he might have said, saying to him, "My friend, I know Ascanius ordered you to bring Silvius to Alba Longa. As your queen, I ask you to obey me, leaving Silvius with me, letting the prophecy be fulfilled."

  He accepted that with a slow bow of his head, saying only, "You saw the Lord Anchises?"—incredulous yet wistful, urgent, wanting to believe me.

  "No, but I heard a voice, that spoke as if to Aeneas. I took it to be his father's voice. The fathers speak, in Albunea."

  Achates hesitated and then asked, "Did you see him?" Him was Aeneas, of course, and Achates spoke with such love and longing that the tears came into my eyes. I could only shake my head, and after a while I said, "He was there with me, Achates. For a moment."

  But as I said it I knew that it was not true. Aeneas had not been there with me as a man in the flesh, nor had Anchises spoken. It was the poet who spoke. It was all the words of the poet, the words of the maker, the foreteller, the truth teller: nothing more, nothing less. But was I myself any more, or less, than that?

  And this was nothing I could say to any living soul, or ever did, till now.

  I had been right to count on Ascanius' respect for portents and oracles, which he had learned from his father but exaggerated almost to superstition. He was rigid in all observances; he longed to be called pious, as Aeneas was. Piety to him meant a man's obedience to the will of higher powers, a safe righteousness. He would never have believed that Aeneas saw his victory over Turnus as his own defeat. He did not understand that in his father's piety lay his tragedy.

  I may misjudge him; he may have come to share some of Aeneas' anguish of conscience, as he grew older. But I never knew Ascanius well.

  At any rate, when Achates and Serestus took word to him of my decision, he entertained them without berating them for obeying me rather than him, and sent back no clear message at all to me. I think he felt himself forestalled by the combination of forces I had brought against him—the sacred oracle of the Italians speaking with the hallowed voice of the Trojan grandfather. By silence he gave consent.

  So began the period of our "exile," no exile at all compared to that of the old Trojans forever homesick for their fallen city, our "living in the woods," which turned out to be a pretty easy life. I sent for some carpenters to come brace up the woodcutter's hut and thatchers to replace the rat-infested, rain-rotted roof. They ended up rebuilding the whole thing, adding on a second room and building a proper hearth, while volunteers swarmed in the clearing chopping brambles and spading and putting in a kitchen garden with every herb and vegetable that grows in Latium, even a sapling walnut tree and a full-grown Sicilian caperberry bush. They wanted to put a fence around it all, but I forbade it. "Wolves, queen," old Girnus said—"bears—!" And I said, "There are no bears in Albunea, and if a wolf comes here I will call him brother." They took that saying back to Lavinium, and some people called me Mother Wolf, after that.

  The way from town to the woodcutter's hut soon became a beaten path, and I had to limit the number of volunteer workmen and visitors to a few and only on certain days, or we would have had no peace there at all. When, late in summer, al
l the workmen were done and it was quiet again, it was very quiet. Silvius was off all day in the forest or at his lessons—for the old Trojans took his education in hand with vigor, and put him through a merciless daily schedule of exercises, military drills, weapons training, music, recitation, and equitation. When I had cleaned my house and tended my garden, I had little to do, and being used to having a great household to run, I was bored and lonely at first. I felt myself useless, a fraud. The Regias I had managed with such hard work and endless care in Laurentum, in Lavinium, in Alba Longa, were all going on perfectly well without me. Maruna, with Sicana as her second in command, kept the house in Lavinium, and did the worship as I had trained her long ago to do; so I could not ask her to be with me in the forest.

  But after a time I began to like my solitude. I lost the wish for any visitor or voice to break the silence of the trees, threaded always with the singing of insects and birds and the sound of wind in leaves. I gardened, and spun, and wove on the big loom set up in the second room, and was content with silence, until my son came back at evening to eat with me and talk a little, quietly, before sleep.

  And so the years passed.

  There were some border incidents, but Ascanius seemed to have lost his unhappy knack of stirring up wars. His marriage had been celebrated with great ceremony, his Rutulian wife kept his house in royal fashion, and they were said to be a happy couple. But they had no child. After a few years, Ascanius called in wise women and soothsayers. The wise women said that Salica was in perfect health and there was no reason she should not conceive. The soothsayers all foretold that she would die barren. They gave no cause or cure, and their prophecies were cloaked in images and cloudy language, for if the fault was in Ascanius they did not wish to say so.

  I heard this and other news as gossip from Illivia and other women who came to visit with me, and from my Latin and Trojan counsellors who ruled Lavinium and the northwest of Latium in Ascanius' and my name. Achates, and Silvius too, saw to it that these men came to consult with me on matters of importance, so that I knew well enough what was happening in the country and around it, though I kept my advice to a minimum, and entertained no guests at all. If an important traveler, king or trader, came to Latium, he was entertained at Alba Longa. He was told that Queen Lavinia was living with her son in the forest in obedience to an oracle and so could not be seen. I had to turn away even Tarchon of Caere, who came to Lavinium, and whom I longed to see; I let Silvius go to him once, but I had to refuse myself, or else my exile became a mere mockery. But I could trust Achates and Mnestheus to entertain him as befitted a great Etruscan king and a true friend of my husband and my son. Tarchon did not go on to Alba Longa, which signified pretty clearly that if Ascanius wanted his friendship he must earn it.

  Unfortunately, Ascanius chose to test it severely, by provoking the Veiian Etruscans at Ruma. Their colony there was growing larger. Latins in Fidenae and Tibur and around Lake Regillus were now patrolling the outlying borders of their farmlands, since there had been the inevitable episodes of cattle rustling, sheep stealing, quarrels at terminus stones. Mars was ready, as ever, to dance on the boundary lines. Ascanius had every right to defend his subjects' property, as Latinus had done when Evander's Greeks first settled there. But Latinus had a low opinion of the Seven Hills as a city site, thinking the river bottom unhealthy and the hills unfit for plowing or grazing, so he did not begrudge the territory to Evander. Ascanius did begrudge it.

  He had got on with the Etruscans thus far only by ignoring them. He thought them arrogant, perfidious, incalculable. He said a treaty with Etruscans was worse than useless, for they would not keep it—though the only one he made with them was when they helped him fight the war on the Anio, and they had kept it. Holding himself superior to all Italians as a Trojan, son of the divine Aeneas sent by fate to rule in Italy, he resented finding himself actually inferior to the Etruscans in wealth, manpower, weaponry, and the arts of life. His prejudice made him see them as all of one kind. In fact Caere and Veii were old rivals. Tarchon did not like to watch the other city-state expanding south of the Tiber; he had come to Lavinium to feel us out about the settlement at Ruma, and would have joined with us to put pressure on Veii to keep the settlement small. Achates and Serestus understood this and counselled Ascanius to court Tarchon. Ascanius brushed their advice aside.

  In March, soon after the Leapers danced, he decided to teach Veii a lesson. He sent a small army to a disputed boundary between Ruma and Lake Regillus and drove the Etruscans, mostly shepherds, back almost to the Seven Hills. As they got closer to the settlement, reinforcements met them, and they began to turn and fight. Men were killed on both sides. To Ascanius' soldiers, their losses justified them in keeping the flocks that fell into their hands. But by the end of a second day, they had to fall back all the way to Lake Regillus, letting go the sheep they had taken. The Rumans rounded up their flocks and stayed on armed guard all across the uncertain border.

  As if scornful of his enemy, Ascanius had not gone with his army. He put it in charge of his boyhood friend, Atys. I had known Atys as a handsome, warmhearted, rather childish man, who was kind to Silvius when we lived at Alba and gave him riding lessons. Retreating with his army, Atys had taken off his helmet, hot with the bright spring sunlight; a stone an Etruscan shepherd threw struck his head and knocked him from his horse, and he never recovered consciousness. They brought his body and those of five other soldiers home to Alba Longa.

  Ascanius broke down. He threw himself on Atys' body weeping, and could not stop his tears. When his wife tried to console him and lead him away, he turned on her with cruel, senseless insults, screaming that she had whored with half his army and was barren because she was a whore. He could not be torn away from Atys' corpse until his weeping exhausted him, sobs becoming convulsions and then a kind of swoon from which he could not be roused. All this was in the great courtyard of the Regia, witnessed by many. Word of it came to Lavinium within hours. Silvius told me when he came home in the evening from his lessons.

  Everyone was shocked, puzzled, alarmed by this inordinate show of grief. Atys had been Ascanius' boy lover, but that was long ago. If Atys was so dear to him why had he sent him on this mission? After all, he had experienced captains who knew the ground better, like Rutilus of Gabii, who had grown up there. Among the talk and speculation Sicana and the others brought me next day was a persistent tale that some time ago Ascanius had been overheard quarreling with Atys, shouting that he was ashamed of him. Atys' friends wondered if he had been sent to lead an inadequate army into danger as punishment, or to get rid of him. And many were now saying that Atys and Ascanius had never ceased to be lovers, that even on the eve of Ascanius' wedding they had met, and ever since. Amid such sad and shameful gossip Ascanius lay still stricken in his room, seeing no one.

  His wife Salica was turned from his door. Humiliated past endurance, she went with a group of her women to her family home in Ardea.

  I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it. Though I suffered grief, I was doomed to sanity. This was no doing of the poet's. I know that he gave me nothing but modest blushes, and no character at all. I know that he said I raved and tore my golden tresses at my mother's death. He simply was not paying attention: I was silent then, tearless, and only intent on making her poor soiled body decent. And my hair has always been dark. In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself. Yet without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right.

  It is strange, though, that he gave me no voice. I never spoke to him till we met that night by the altar under the oaks. Where is my voice from, I wonder? the voice that cries on the wind in the heights of Albunea, the voice that speaks with no tongue a language not its own?

  Well, these are questions I cannot answer. I will tell you now of another question I cannot answer, and a thing not many people believe. You will not believe it
either, I know, but it is the truth.

  I had nothing to do with the Penates of Troy leaving the altar of the king's house in Alba Longa and coming to Lavinium.

  I gave no women orders to spirit them away by night, or men either, or children. Because it was an act that might have been calculated for political effect, there will always be suspicion, even open assumption, that it was planned and executed by me, or by someone else who wished to weaken Ascanius' authority. I do not think it was. I think the gods knew when it was time to come home.

  Maruna came to me at Albunea, early in the morning, out of breath, and bade me come with her at once to Lavinium, to the Regia. I had not entered the gates of my city or my house for five years, but I knew Maruna would not summon me without cause. She hurried with me across the April fields, through the city gate, through the doors of the house, to the hearth of Vesta at the back of the hearth room, where the Penates of Latium had stood ever since my father's death. And I saw standing with them the figures of clay and ivory, the gods of the house of Anchises, that Aeneas had brought with him across the lands and seas from Troy.

  I gasped and stood in awe, my legs trembling. I was shocked, incredulous, frightened.

  Yet the fear did not go very deep. I could not be terrified, because I could only see it as right that our gods should be here, in our house.

  So the others perhaps saw me as less amazed than I might have been, and thought my surprise and my questions a pretense. And indeed I did not ask many questions. I thought it impious to question mortals about a matter that had apparently been carried out by greater powers.