Lavinia

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “His greed,” I said at once. “Greed, selfishness—self, self! He saw the world only as what he wanted from it. He killed the Greek boy for his sword belt. And killed him cruelly, and boasted about it! That was what you couldn’t bear—seeing that belt on his shoulder.”

  “I killed the Etruscan boy Lausus. Cruelly.”

  “You didn’t boast about it!”

  “No. I grieved about it. What good did that do? He was dead.”

  “But Aeneas, nobody spared anybody in that battle, not even when they begged for their lives—you said so.” Later, I remembered that it was not Aeneas who had told me that, but the poet. But neither Aeneas nor I noticed at the time, and I went on, eloquent in my desire to spare him his anguish—"You were fighting to the death, not just you and Turnus but all of you. It doesn’t matter if you were crazy with bloodlust or cold as seawater, you did what you had to do. Pallas tried to kill Turnus and so Turnus killed him. Lausus tried to kill you and so you killed him. Turnus tried to kill you and so you killed him. It was a challenge to the death between you two. Nothing else could have ended the war. That is the order—the fas of war. Isn’t it? And you obeyed it. You did what you had to do, what had to be done. As you always do!”

  He said nothing for a while, and then very little. I thought he was struck by my argument. He was stricken by it.

  It was only much later that I saw I had taken from him the self-blame that allowed him some self-justification. If he could not see his battle rage as the enemy of his piety, as fury for a moment overcoming his better self, if he could not see his killing Turnus as a fatal instant of disorder, then he had to see the fury as part of his true nature, part of the right order of things, the order he had spent his life trying to uphold, serve, preserve. If that order held his killing Turnus to be a righteous act, was it, itself, righteous?

  Turnus’ death ensured the victory of Aeneas’ cause, but it was a mortal defeat for the man Aeneas.

  As he struck, Aeneas had called the killing a sacrifice. But of what, to what?

  I did not know what kind of courage I was asking of my patient hero. We did not speak again of the matter. I went on thinking that I had unburdened his mind of an unnecessary guilt, comforted him, relieved him of the need for courage. Young wives can be great fools.

  Our city grew up around our little Regia so quickly that it sometimes seemed unreal, a vision, like my dream of it; but to look out from our door and see the thatch and tile roofs all around, and smell the cooking smoke from them rising, and hear the voices of the people, a young Latin wife calling to her Trojan husband, a workman shouting to his helper, a child singing a jumping-game song—that was all real, every morning and evening, and vivid and cheerful. Lavinium looked much like any other city of our coast, though its citadel stood higher than many, on its ridge of tufa over the little dark river Prati. Left to themselves, the Trojans might have built the houses differently, but the carpenters were Italians and did things the way they always did things. And I insisted that every tree within the walls that could be left standing should stand. The Trojans thought that odd at first, but they admitted the virtues of shade in midsummer, and came to take pride in the oak or laurel or willow grove that sheltered their house. We had less shade than most, in the Regia, but I had brought a scion of the laurel of my father’s house in our courtyard, and in a year it was already above our heads. And we planted a wild grapevine to climb out over a lattice and shade the south end of the courtyard.

  There were a great many weddings that first year. Not many Trojan women had come from Sicily on this last leg of the long retreat from Troy. The men were eager to take a wife wherever they could find one. By winter there was hardly an unmarried girl left in Latium, and unmarried Latin men complained about it copiously. My Silvius was the first baby born in Lavinium, but before that May was over there were five more little Trojan-Latins wailing in cradles around town, and the powers that attend childbirth were busy all that year and the years that followed.

  Local families that acquired Trojan sons-in-law were drawn to the city by the bonds of kinship, and workmen came attracted by the need for their crafts. Many of them settled down, liking the new town and its king. Before long there were more Latins than Trojans in Lavinium. The hardy warriors who had come so far with Aeneas found themselves living as Italian householders among Italian householders, farming beside the native farmers, their great city a legend, their noble lineage meaningless, and all their battles, adventures, storms, and voyages sunk in daily domesticity at the fireside of a small house in a small city in a foreign land.

  It was hard for some of them, the younger ones particularly. The men over thirty were mostly glad to be done with hardship and salt water, to have a hearth of their own and a bed with a wife in it. But Aeneas kept an eye on the men in their teens and twenties, giving them the hardest work to do; anything dangerous in any way was for them; and he kept up a series of drills and athletic games in which they competed for championship in one skill or sport after another, while older men and children looked on and cheered. Young Latins were welcome to these games, and many joined in them with strong competitive spirit. There were various Trojan holy days to be marked by games, and Aeneas added every Latin festival he could to the calendar, so the young men were always in training for one event or another.

  My stepson Ascanius had learned to ride in Africa and was an excellent horseman, usually taking the lead in any displays of riding and training. In other sports, archery, racing, leaping, wrestling, throwing the stone, or military drills with sword and spear, he was not naturally among the best, but he thought he ought to be and drove himself desperately to excel. When he came in sixth, or fifth, or even second, he was angry and ashamed, and would dispute the judgment, or go off scowling to berate himself. If he was not the huntsman who killed the boar or stag, he came home from hunting sad and sullen. He had his father’s seriousness and sense of duty, but not his sense of proportion or his patient strength. Their young prince had naturally been the darling of the exiled Trojans during their wanderings, and I think when they were in Carthage the queen had spoiled him, for he was always talking about what Dido had let him do and how splendid it had been in Africa. If he noticed how his father’s face darkened at such talk, he never asked why. With me, only a few years older than he was, he was wary and reserved. I could not be the cherishing mother he had lost. I seemed to him, and even to myself, more like an elder sister, a powerful rival for the father’s love. He was jealous of his baby half brother. No father could have loved a son more than Aeneas loved Ascanius, but Ascanius had not yet grown into the generosity of heart that would let him simply accept that love; he thought he had to earn it by proving himself superior to it. He was restless and unhappy, and his unhappiness troubled his father. Fortunately he loved hunting, and so he was sent with a hunting party up into the mountains as often as he liked. Our flocks and herds were not yet plentiful, and game was a great treat for us. Ascanius could feel himself needed, a hero, worthy of his father, when he strode in with a feast’s worth of meat and a bearskin, the rack of a great stag, or the tusks of a mountain boar as trophy.

  My son Silvius was born the day after the May Kalends, a little early by our calculations, not a large baby, but a fine one. Even when his little red face was as flat and slant-eyed as a kitten’s I could see his father’s features latent in it, the strong brow line and eminent nose. He smiled unmistakably at less than a month old, and wept real tears soon after: again taking after his father, a good-humored man, easily moved to tears. Silvius suckled insatiably, had almost no colic, slept a great deal, and when awake was wide awake and full of good cheer. There is not much you can say about a baby unless you are talking with its father or another mother or nurse; infants are not part of the realm of ordinary language, talk is inadequate to them as they are inadequate to talk. Silvius was a fine baby and gave his mother and father infinite delight, let that suffice.

  There was not much hard feeling against Aeneas�
� people among the people of Latium. As the Latins saw it now, they had been used by the Rutulians to fight a war that was more in Turnus’ interest than theirs. They had been humiliated and were glad to put it all behind them. My father Latinus was held in more honor now than ever, as his people saw his effort to keep the peace justified and his prophecies fulfilled. He welcomed their goodwill; but he was a man bereft of joy in life. His health often failed. The war, brief as it was, had made him old. More and more often he called for Aeneas to come up to Laurentum, or came to Lavinium to advise and consult with him on matters of government and land use, decisions about planting, harvesting, trade. He made it clear that Aeneas was his son, the next king of Latium, and that his counsellors must keep Aeneas’ favor or lose his. He was immensely generous to us, opening up his royal lands to our farmers, stocking our pastures with the best of his own flocks and herds, so that Lavinium could grow and flourish from the start.

  Within a couple of years the new town was drawing people away from the old one. People said to one another, “Things are lively down there on the Prati; what if we set up shop there?” So Laurentum began slowly to become the town it now is, a very small, sleepy, silent place, its gate unguarded, the neglected houses shaded by immense trees, no one at all in the Regia but a few old guards and their wives and slaves to care for the house gods and sit spinning by the pool under the great laurel.

  If most of the Latins kept no grudge against Aeneas’ people, old Tyrrhus did, and his one son who had survived the war, and his daughter Silvia. They did not forgive the Trojans, would never forgive them. The old man defied Latinus openly, calling him a coward who’d sold his kingdom and his daughter to a foreign adventurer. Why don’t you Latins rise up and drive out the usurpers? he shouted. Look what the king is doing, giving away our cattle to these robbers!—Latinus let him shout, let him keep his position as royal herdsman, did not punish or reprove him at all. That shocked people like Drances, who said the king endangered his dignity and power by permitting treasonous speech, but Latinus ignored Drances as well as Tyrrhus. Since his rant brought about no response, people came to dismiss Tyrrhus as only a bitter old man, raving in his unassuageable grief. As for Drances, Aeneas trusted him no more than I did; he and Latinus let him talk, and let his talk die away into nothing.

  The stag Cervulus that Ascanius shot did not die of the wound, but lived on some years, lame and timid, always staying close to the farmhouse; so people in Laurentum told me. I sent to Silvia once to ask if I might visit. She sent me no reply. Cowardice kept me from going there. I was afraid the old man would rage at me and insult my husband. I was afraid Silvia would turn her back on me. She married late, a cousin who had come to help her father and brother with the herds. So she never left her own Penates, but lived all her life on the home farm. I never saw her again.

  Outside Latium, among our allied and neighbor kingdoms, the war had left hard feelings and sore hearts. Every people that had sent warriors to aid Turnus had seen them limp home beaten, their kings and captains dead. The conduct of the war itself had been so erratic—a treaty no sooner made than broken, then remade, then broken again in the making—and its aims had been so unclear, that they hardly knew who was to blame. It was easy to lay it to Turnus’ ambition. But then, Latinus had allowed his people to fight alongside Turnus as if it had truly been an alliance of Italians to drive the foreigners out. And the Volscian and Sabine kings and captains had been slaughtered not by Italians but by Trojans, Etruscans, Greeks. Everybody knew the Etruscans were seeking dominion over the southern states; Greeks were never to be trusted; and who were these Trojans who had sailed in claiming all Italy as their inheritance?

  For word of that prophecy had got out. Though Aeneas never spoke of it in public, some of his people did: they told how he had brought them here, guided by omens and oracles, to rule the whole country, to found a glorious, everlasting empire. Ascanius talked about it to the Latin youths who were now his intimates. He brought them into our atrium to show them Aeneas’ shield with its mysterious foreshadowings of mighty buildings and endless wars. “Those warriors, those kings are my descendants,” he said to his friends. As he spoke, I passed by carrying little Silvius on my shoulder, as Aeneas had carried the shield.

  * * *

  IN THE SECOND SPRING, LATE IN MARS’ MONTH, A BAND OF Rutulians and Volscians met in secret outside Ardea and coming across country at night made an early morning assault on Lavinium. Our walls were built solid by then, but they were not guarded against attack; closed at nightfall, the city gate was opened before dawn to let shepherds and herdsmen in and out with their animals. Our first warning was a couple of farm boys who came pelting up the ramp shouting, “An army! An army is coming!” The gate- keepers set up the alarm. In an emergency, Aeneas moved like a cat: he was up and outside, calling to Ascanius and Achates, Serestus and Mnestheus, to get the men together under arms, before I understood anything at all.

  When I went up on our roof to look out over the walls and saw the mob of men drifting across the fields like a dark cloud shot through with the gleam of spear points, swift and almost silent, terror gripped me. It was war again, it was Mars coming again to break down the doors, blood and death and ruin, the end of everything. I held Silvius close to my breast, crouching so that we were sheltered by the roof-parapet, and moaned like a hurt dog. I had lost the courage of virginity. I was a cowering, weak-kneed woman like the rest of them, fearful for my child and my man. Fortunately Maruna was not. Just as when we had thought Laurentum was to stand siege, she began to speak to me about supplies, water, wood for the cookfires, and so brought me out of my fit of cowardice. I went down with her and said the morning prayers, and then saw to what was to be done.

  The attackers never got into the city: our men poured out of the gate to meet them, Aeneas and his old captains at their head, the Trojans and the young athletes armed with sword and shield, spear or lance, and the householders brandishing hoes, mattocks, scythes, and sickles. The two mobs met face to face on the outer wall of the encircling earthworks, where they fought savagely but briefly. Several young archers up on the gate tower shot at the attackers as they scattered, turned, and fled. Most of our men gave chase, some of them stopping to catch a horse from the herds kept in the near paddocks, but Aeneas brought his Trojans and all the young men he could back into the city. I was waiting in front of the house as he came up the street with his troops and turned to talk to them. “How’s that for a lively start to the day?” he said, in his voice that that you could hear through all other voices, even when he spoke quietly, and they all laughed and cheered. “I think they’ve had their lesson,” he went on. “We’re in a good position to practice restraint. The less men they lose, the less revenge they’ll need to take. The whole thing can be quickly forgotten. Who was leading them? Did anyone see?”

  “Camers,” several Latin voices answered, “young Camers of Ardea.”

  “Well, they won’t be apt to follow him again soon. Were they all Rutulians?” He could not yet tell peoples and tribes one from another as we natives could, but even if he had identified the attackers he might have asked for information; he knew that people like to be asked, like to be the ones who know.

  “Volscians, there was a whole crowd of Volscians,” the Latins called, with various descriptions of Volscian character and anatomy—"them with horses’ arses on their hats,” one man shouted. The townsmen were excited, elated with their sudden, easy victory. Small wounds were exhibited proudly. Householders and young men came back with trophies of enemies they had chased down and killed or forced to surrender—breastplates, swords, helmets. Lavinium was a noisy city all that day and night, and a lot of green wine was drunk. Aeneas was genial with the boastful revellers, keeping open house at the Regia for them till very late. “It’s brought them together,” he said to me as we stood apart from the crowd, near the women’s side, before I went to bed. “My people and yours. They’re all Lavinians now. Since this had to happen, it happened fortuna
tely.”

  “But is it going to go on and on?” I asked him, stupidly. “Will it happen again and again?” The awful fear I had felt that morning had never left me, it was like a thin narrow coldness in my bones.

  He looked at me with the eyes that had seen his city burn, that had seen the world of the dead. He held me gently. “Yes,” he said. “But I will keep as much of it from happening as I can, Lavinia.”

  He was able to stave off most of it, for a while. The rout of the would-be besiegers sent a clear message that Lavinium could defend itself, and he followed up on that with energetic efforts to strengthen our alliances with the Sabines, with Caere and other cities of Etruria, and with King Evander in Pallanteum.

  Evander, still sunk in grief for his son, held Aeneas responsible for not protecting the boy in battle; his welcome to our visit was reluctant. I had not been there since my visit with my father when Pallas and I were children. It was very sad to see the little settlement grown poorer, the houses settling into the mud of the riverbank, the women and children looking thin and weary. I looked around in wonder, for this was the place where my poet had said the great city of our descendants was to be. Among the thickets up on those rough hills were to stand the shining palaces and altars pictured on the shield; great crowds, great rulers were to walk on marble pavement, here, between the thatched huts and the wolf’s deserted cave, where a few lean cattle wandered seeking forage.

  Aeneas was in a heavy mood that night when we were alone in the room given us in Evander’s low, dark house. Evander’s sorrowful rancor was hard for him to bear. Seeking some way to cheer him, and with my head full of those images, I said, “You said I have a gift for knowing where to build a city.” For he had often praised my choice of the site of Lavinium.

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Well, this is the best site of all.”

  He looked at me from under his brows, waiting.