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
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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 Fawa.
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 slave?"
"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 Fawa 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
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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 tra
veled 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 Am-ata 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
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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.
At first, when my husband did not come to me in the marriage-bed, I thought it was yet another of his acts of kindness—for he could be kind, when thoughts of the Fates and his destiny were not oppressing him. The brutal war, and the sudden unexpected horror of my mother's death, had left me easily frightened and prone to nightmares. For a long time, I do not think I could have made myself lie quiet and accepting underneath any man, let alone the killer of Turnus—whom my mother had, perhaps, loved as more than just an old playmate and distant kin. It was good of my husband, or so I thought, to give me the time I needed in which to heal.
The healing came slowly, but it came. I do not think I would ever have come to enjoy lying with a man, but with Aeneas, who was always gentle to me, I could have learned to tolerate it, and perhaps
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to give him pleasure even if I found none. And in time there would have been children, which I had begun to want a great deal. Children of Aeneas, out of my body, would carry out my father's old hopes for Latium, and at the same time would bring my own life full circle, creating anew the family grouping of my early childhood.
The Fates who had so beset Aeneas must have found me amusing as well: now that I was, finally, ready for my husband, it seemed that my husband was not ready for me. I waited patiently, supposing that his difficult life had left him with ghosts and nightmares of his own, but the months went past and still he did not approach me. I decided at last that patient waiting had failed, and that—since I lacked the talent and the knowledge for seduction—nothing was left but to ask outright.
I waited until a morning when Askanios was away, and Aeneas and I, except for the servants, were alone. We had taken our morning meal in the courtyard, in the shade of the olive tree, and had talked of everyday matters, the summer weather and t
he health of the crops and whether the household would need to trade for anything before winter came. When he finished the last of the bread and rose to go, I stopped him.
"Husband," I said. "There is another thing."
His brows drew together in a worried frown. "Is there trouble again with the clans?" He had come to rely on me, since we were married, to keep him informed about their shifting feuds and alliances. No man not born to Latium could keep them unentangled in his mind.
"No," I said. "This concerns the two of us alone." I took a deep breath, and knotted my hands
together in my lap. "Aeneas, when will you give me a child?"
He became very still, as a man does who spies an adder coiled beneath his descending foot.
"Lawinia," he said. "I thought that you understood."
The day was hot and bright, but I felt suddenly cold. "What was it that I was supposed to
understand?"
"This marriage," he said. "How it would have to be."
"No. I don't understand." I began to feel a new emotion stirring in me, one that I was
unaccustomed to feeling—the deep, bitter anger that comes from loving and from being betrayed.
"Explain it to me."
Say whatever else you want about Aeneas the son of Anchises, but he was a man honest enough to speak the full truth when it was demanded of him, even though he knew the telling would destroy whatever harmony had grown up between us.
"Everything I have done," he said, "from the burning of Wilion until this moment, I have done because the gods desired it and commanded me. They intended this homeland in Latium to be for Askanios and his progeny; I will not go against their will by giving him younger brothers whose claim through you is greater than his own."
That was the start of our quarrel, and the sum of it, though it lasted longer and grew worse. In the end I left him, running from the house in the wildness of my anger, not caring who if anyone might follow. I took the winding path to the cliff above the ocean. There, in the solitude of the high place, I unbound my hair and lifted up my hands to pray to the god who had marked me once in the cave at Cumae.
Turtledove, Harry - Anthology 07 - New Tales Of The Bronze Age - The First Heroes (with Doyle, Noreen) Page 23