Lavinia

by Le Guin, Ursula K.

  Of course some of my women were capable of spiriting the Penates out of Alba and into Lavinium. But as I thought about it I could not imagine any of them actually doing it. All of them seemed utterly surprised, dismayed, even terrified when they saw the figures on the altar; and they were honest women. I would not let them be interrogated. If indeed I found that one had done it, what was I to do with her? Punish? Praise? Best leave the inexplicable unexplained. As for the men, I left them to Achates, Serestus, and Mnestheus, who I knew were themselves incapable of plotting an act of sacrilege, however welcome its implications. They found no suspects and no hint of how or even when the strange event had occurred. The first to see the gods had been Maruna herself, coming for the morning worship.

  I stayed in my city, that day, among my people. I sent for Silvius, and ordered a triple sacrifice, a lamb, a calf, and a young pig. Silvius presided, with the old Trojan captains to assist him. With the lifeblood and roasted meat of the good animals we thanked and blessed the Lares and Penates of Troy and Latium and asked their blessing. Maruna read the entrails as the Etruscans do, and foretold from them great and lasting glory for the house of Aeneas.

  And then I went back to the little house in the forest. But my son stayed in the Regia that night, guarding his ancestral gods, seeking their blessing.

  In Alba Longa there had of course been great dismay, horror, when the absence of the old Penates was discovered. A little camillus, a helper, a boy of nine, who first raised the alarm, had been beaten nearly to death by horrified women who blamed the mischief on him. Queen Salica, who might have calmed them, no longer lived there.

  They carried the news to King Ascanius with fear and trembling. He came out of his rooms, then, for the first time since Atys' death. He walked across the great court to the Vestal hearth and stood gazing at it. Only the Penates of the old village of Alba Longa stood there, few and humble as the gods of a poor man's house. Vesta herself, the body of sacred fire, burned up clear and bright as ever.

  Ascanius cast a little salted meal into the fire. He lifted up his hands to pray, but he could not speak; tears began to run down his face; he turned and went back in silence, weeping, to his rooms.

  Ascanius made no effort to find a human agency for the Penates' return to Lavinium. To him, as to me, it was a pure sign of the will of the powers greater than us. We accepted it as such. But while it was a miraculous joy to me, and a portent of divine favor to Aeneas' younger son, to the elder son it was an almost fatal blow.

  I do not know whether his marriage had been such an unhappy mockery as—now—everyone was saying. All the women's quarters were abuzz with talk about how unhappy Salica had been from the very beginning, how she suffered from her husband's distaste for her, how she hid her humiliation even from her closest companions (except of course the one telling the story). If all that was true, Ascanius had also worn a public mask and never let it slip, all these years. I think it likelier that something little by little went wrong in the marriage, Ascanius' sexual discomfort with women perhaps driving him gradually back to seek the tender simplicities of his first love; and Atys, poor loyal soul, was there to offer them. Poor souls all of them.

  But fate was hardest on Ascanius. He lost his lover and a battle at one stroke; at the next, his wife; and then his father's gods. His choice of a capital was, it seemed, wrong. Everything he had built up to support his image of himself as Aeneas' worthy successor slipped away from him, like mud crumbling softly from a riverbank into the water.

  He could not pull himself together for a long time, so long that his war captains, despairing of getting any orders from him, came down to Lavinium and asked the counsel of the old Trojans and the young king.

  For so Silvius was openly called now. He would be seventeen in May. He had lived in the forest, following the oracle; he had served his term of exile. The return of the ancestral powers to his house was a clear sign. The young king and the gods had come home on the same day.

  The people of Lavinium and all western Latium made him a heartfelt, joyful welcome, bringing tribute unasked and overflowing. Soon from Gabii, Praeneste, Tibur, Nomentum, people were arriving to see and greet him and offer him their white lambs, their fine colts, their service in arms. There was a sense all over the country of a darkness lifting, a better hope. No mortal hope is ever fully satisfied, I know, but this overflow of good feeling and confidence secured much of its own fulfillment: the Latins saw themselves as a people again, they held up their heads. Only a fool could have spoiled so promising a start. Not being a fool, Silvius was cautious and often almost incredulous of his good fortune, and relied very much on the counsel of people he had learned to trust; but being seventeen years old, he seized every advantage, accepted every gift, rejoiced in his popularity, offered love for love, and rode the fair wind, as long as it blew, like a happy young hawk.

  When the captains came from Alba Longa, he called a council, and he called me to it.

  I demurred, privately, to him. I was so unused to being among people, after five years in the forest, that the idea appalled me. "I don't belong there," I said.

  "You sat in your father's council, and my father's."

  "No. I sat at the back and listened, sometimes."

  "But you are the queen."

  "Queen mother."

  "A queen is a queen," said my son, regally.

  He did look a good deal like Aeneas, but there was something of Latinus and myself, something Italian, in the way he stood and the way he turned his head. He knew how to occupy space. He would be a handsome man at twenty-five, but an absolutely beautiful one at fifty. Such maternal thoughts distracted me. I was staring at him as a cow stares at her calf, with mindless, endless contentment.

  "You are the queen here, mother, and you can't do anything about it, unless I get married. Then you can retire, if you insist. But I don't plan to marry any time soon. If you aren't the queen then you're my subject, and I command you to attend the council."

  "Don't be childish, Silvius," I said. But he had won the game, of course. I attended his council. I sat at the back and never spoke. There was no use shocking Ascanius' captains. They were worried enough as it was.

  They had information that Veii had been sending armed men to Ruma ever since our ill-fated border raid. It looked as if the Etruscans planned either forays into our territory or an all-out attack on Gabii or Collatia. The chiefs of Alba Longa had sent all the men they could raise into the area to guard it, but it was a long border, and our soldiers were spread thin. They had strict orders not to attack, only to defend.

  "But we don't know what they'll be facing," said Marsius, a young general. They were all young. Ascanius had not liked to have older men about him.

  "We could double the army easily," Mnestheus said. "There's great spirit among the people here."

  "We could get in touch with Tarchon of Caere," said Silvius.

  The Albans looked blank, frowned. "An Etruscan?" said Marsius.

  "Tarchon was here not long ago, and it seemed he had in mind an alliance to contain Ruma."

  Serestus spoke: "But we were not then at liberty to discuss it with him."

  There was a silence.

  "I know you remember that Tarchon of Caere helped you, or your fathers, put my father on the throne of Latium," Silvius said. He said it mildly, not chiding or reproaching. I saw Achates look at him with a half smile. He was hearing his king speak. We all were.

  We sent messengers to Caere, recruits and volunteers to strengthen the Alban forces encircling the Seven Hills. In April Tarchon's army moved eastward from Caere, cutting off the route from Veii to the Tiber. There were some skirmishes in Etruria, none in Latium. The colony at Ruma withdrew all forces from its borders; its men ceased to threaten our farms and cities, turning back to plowing and harvesting. Silvius had won his first war without fighting it.

  At the end of that summer he rode to the woodcutter's house on his handsome chestnut stallion, and said to me, "Mother, I think you sho
uld come back to your city." I had been thinking the same thing, and merely nodded.

  It was a great pleasure to live again in the high house of Lavinium, to sweep Vesta's hearth and prepare the salted meal for my gods and Aeneas' gods, to look after a great storeroom and a busy household, to have children about underfoot and women to talk things over with and the deep ring of men's voices out in the stable yard.

  In that life, which had been all my life till we went to the forest, the years slipped away. Silvius went up to Alba Longa often, meeting amicably with his brother, sharing the duties of rule, though now Ascanius took second place, deferring to the younger king. He came a few times to Lavinium for festivals or councils, a sad-eyed, heavyset, stooped man who fussed over trifles. His wife lived on in Ardea in her brother Camers' household. Silvius, who frequently crossed the Tiber, cultivating amity with Etruria, married the Caeran lady Ramtha Matunae, a beautiful and noble woman. We held a great wedding in Lavinium.

  The children began to come: a girl, a boy, a boy, a girl. Then I was the grandmother queen in the noisy courtyard, where the laurel tree I had planted when I came there with Aeneas towered over the walls.

  When Ascanius had ruled thirty years in Alba Longa, he gave up his crown. Silvius, called Aeneas Silvius by his people, ruled Latium alone.

  He moved then to Alba, for it was in truth a better center of rule than Lavinium. He begged me to come with him and Ramtha and the children, but I was not going to leave my city again, or not in that direction. He did not try to move his Lares and Penates, for they like me had shown their will was to stay where Aeneas put them.

  So I lived on as the old queen in the old Regia, within the threshold my husband carried me across on our wedding day. Sicana died at last, and Tita, but Maruna was with me always. Now and then we walked, or rode in a donkey cart, to sleepy Laurentum of our girlhood, and spent an afternoon there by the fountain under the old laurel. Once we went on to the mouth of the father river and filled our cart with the grey, dirty, sacred salt. Often we walked down from Lavinium to the Numicus, and watched the water run, and coming home stayed a while by the great stone tomb where Aeneas lay in state near his daughter who might have been, a shadow in shadows. Now and then we walked to Albunea, and Maruna slept in the woodcutter's cottage while I went on alone into the forest, bearing fire for the altar, and an offering of fruit or grain and wine, and the fleece of a dark-colored ewe, on which I lay down in the sacred place to sleep. I heard no voices in the darkness among the trees. I saw no visions. I slept.

  Maruna fell ill; her heart failed, she grew weak, and could not rise to sweep the hearth. One morning I heard the women wailing.

  Silvius came for Maruna's ninth-day ceremony. No one wondered that a king should come to the funeral of a slave. He asked me again to come to Alba, to be with him, but I shook my head. "I will live here with Aeneas," I told him. There were tears in his eyes, but he did not press me. He was, as I had thought he would be, a splendid man at fifty, straight and strong-bodied, dark-eyed, with greying hair.

  "You are older than he was," I thought, but I did not tell him my thought.

  He had to be off; there was trouble from the Volscians, or the Sabines, or the Aequians. There would always be war on the borders, and often in the heartland. So long as there is a kingdom there will be another Turnus calling to be killed.

  For a time after Maruna's death I did not go to Albunea. I could not bear to go with anyone but her, and having grown somewhat lame was timid about walking across the fields and up into the woods alone. At last, weary of my cowardice, I sent for Maruna's niece Ursina, whom I had given a farmstead on the Prati. She walked with me to the woodcutter's house, then back to her farm to see to her animals, and returned for me in the morning. She was still a lioness, a walk of four or five miles was nothing to her. So I could go to my forest when the need came on me.

  Once when I went there in winter, sleeping out on the fleeces in the cold, though it hardly rained at all, I got up very stiff at dawn and found myself feverish. I stayed in the woodcutter's house that day, but the doctors in Lavinium insisted on bringing me back to town where they could torment me more easily. It may be that that happened more than once. As I speak now I feel my voice fail, as Maruna's heart failed, growing weak, so that even at the base of her throat one could hardly find the pulse. Even in my throat I can hardly feel the vibration of the voice.

  But I will not die. I cannot. I will never go down among the shadows under Albunea to see Aeneas tall among the warriors, gleaming in bronze. I will not speak to Creusa of Troy, as I once thought I might, or Dido of Carthage, proud and silent, still bearing the great sword wound in her breast. They lived and died as women do and as the poet sang them. But he did not sing me enough life to die. He only gave me immortality.

  I do not need to call on Ursina to come with me any more. Not for a long time. One must be changed, to be immortal. I can go from Lavinium to Albunea on my own wings. More and more I live there, hunting among the trees in twilight, in starlight. My eyes need little light to see their prey: to me the night there is luminous, a soft radiance. When the sun begins to rise and dazzle all the sky, I find the dark place in the hollow oak. That is my high house now. It does not matter that the Regia in Lavinium is only clay bricks in earth. In my dark bedroom I sleep the days away, near the pools of stinking, misty water that once were sacred. I wake as the sun goes down, and listen. My hearing is good. I can hear a mouse breathe among the fallen oak leaves. Through the noise of the water in the cave I can hear the roar and rumor of the vast city that covers all the Seven Hills and the banks of the father river and the old pagus lines for miles and miles. I can hear the endless sound of the engines of war on all the roads of the world. But I stay here. I fly among the trees on soft wings that make no sound. Sometimes I call out, but not in a human voice. My cry is soft and quavering: i, i, I cry: Go on, go.

  Only sometimes my soul wakes as a woman again, and then when I listen I can hear silence, and in the silence his voice.

  AFTERWORD

  THE SETTING, STORY, AND CHARACTERS OF THIS NOVEL ARE based on the last six books of Vergil's epic poem the Aeneid.

  For a long time anybody in Europe and the Americas who had much education at all knew Aeneas' story: his travels from Troy, his love affair with the African queen Dido, his visit to the underworld were shared, familiar references and story sources for poets, painters, opera composers. From the Middle Ages on, the so-called dead language Latin was, through its literature, intensely alive, active, and influential. That's no longer true. During the last century, the teaching and learning of Latin began to wither away into a scholarly specialty. So, with the true death of his language, Vergil's voice will be silenced at last. This is an awful pity, because he is one of the great poets of the world.

  His poetry is so profoundly musical, its beauty is so intrinsic to the sound and order of the words, that it is essentially untranslatable. Even Dryden, even FitzGerald couldn't capture the magic. But a translator's yearning to identify with the text cannot be repressed. This is what urged me to take some scenes, some hints, some foreshadowings from the epic and make them into a novel—a translation into a different form—partial, marginal, but, in intent at least, faithful. More than anything else, my story is an act of gratitude to the poet, a love offering.

  There have been one or two attempts to "finish" the Aeneid, justified by arguments that Vergil himself thought it incomplete (when he knew he was dying, he asked that it be burned), and that it ends with shocking abruptness in a scene that seems to put Aeneas' famous piety, even his heroic victory, in question. I think the poem ends where Vergil wanted it to end. This story is in no way an attempt to change or complete the story of Aeneas. It is a meditative interpretation suggested by a minor character in his story—the unfolding of a hint.

  The Trojan War was probably fought in the thirteenth century bc; Rome was founded, possibly, in the eighth, though there is no proper history of it for centuries after that. T
hat Priam's nephew Aeneas of Troy had anything at all to do with founding Rome is pure legend, a good deal of it invented by Vergil himself.

  But Vergil, as Dante knew, is a trustworthy man to follow. I followed him into his legendary Bronze Age. He never led me astray.

  Sometimes I was puzzled, however. He was familiar with Latium (the region southwest of Rome), and I wasn't; but some of his geography seemed askew, or deliberately misty. Lavinium is now Pratica di Mare, that's all right; but at first it seemed a waste of time to try to be exact about the location of Laurentum, or the forest of Albunea, which couldn't be the sulfur springs near Tibur, now Tivoli, which Horace and other writers called Albunea; and the river Numicus or Numicius was as elusive in location as in name. But as a novelist I was uncomfortable not knowing how far my characters would have to walk from Laurentum to the mouth of the Tiber, how long it would take to drive a mule cart from Lavinium to Alba Longa. My friend the geomancer George Hersh, after burrowing into ancient sources on the Internet, found the modern map I needed for places and distances: Lazio, part of the Grande Carte Stradale d'ltalia. There, in large scale, near Croce di Solferato, is Vergil's Albunea, properly convenient to Laurentum; and there it is, Rio Torto, the river that must have been the Numicus ... It was deeply touching to me to find these places of legend on a highway map of the Touring Club Italiano. On the map and in the myth, they are real.

  A later, equal joy was discovering Vergil's Latium, by Bertha Tilly, who walked all over the region in the 1930s with a keen mind, a sharp eye, and a Brownie camera. Tilly gave me infinite pleasure by rearranging some and confirming most of my sketch map. She photographed shepherds' huts built as they had been built for twenty-seven centuries. And she showed me how the coastline has changed at the mouth of the Tiber, and where the Trojans must have landed, sailing up the Tiber at dawn into the dark forest full of wings and birdsong.