“What did the men from Alba Longa do?” I asked.
“They asked about you. Aunt told them you had gone to Albunea of Tibur. The others think you did. The men went back to Alba yesterday. Aunt said to tell you this: they ordered Lord Achates and Mnestheus to bring Silvius to Alba when you come back to Lavinium.”
I kissed her and asked her to bring a little wine for sacrifice tomorrow. She slipped off again as quietly as she had come.
I sat on the half-decayed wooden doorstep in the spring sunlight and pondered.
If I went back to Lavinium, faithful Achates would obey Ascanius’ order.
I could take Silvius back to Alba Longa myself and stay with him there, an unwelcome, unwanted, unwilling guest in Ascanius’ court, struggling to protect my son from neglect, envy, and harm.
I could do as my father had suggested years ago: make my way to Caere in Etruria and ask King Tarchon to take us under his protection and help me bring up Silvius as a king’s son.
That was a truly frightening thought to me, but I made myself consider it.
I was still thinking when I heard the little sparrow whistle that was our signal, and Silvius appeared. He was dirty, thorn-scratched and tired, had snared a big hare, and was proud of himself. He washed, I skinned and cleaned the hare, and we made spits of green willow and toasted the meat over the small fire in the hut, an excellent dinner.
“Tomorrow evening we fast,” I told Silvius. “We’ll spend the night in the sacred forest.”
“Can I see the cave and the stinking pools?”
“Yes.”
“What do people take as offering?”
“A lamb.”
“I could go get a lamb from the royal flock there by Lavinium—I’d make sure nobody sees me—”
“No. We can’t go near town, neither of us. We’ll make what offering we can, tomorrow. The grandfathers will understand. I’ve gone there before with empty hands.”
The next day, as the sun hung red above the sea mist in the west, we followed the narrow path into the grove of Albunea and came to the sacred enclosure. It looked as derelict and lonesome as the woodcutter’s hut. Its oracle spoke chiefly to those of my father’s lineage, and there were few of us left now—some old cousins still living in Laurentum, and myself, and Silvius. No one had done sacrifice there for a year or more. The remnants of fleece on the ground were mere black shreds. We cut a turf for the altar, and Silvius poured out the flask of wine as offering while I prayed to the ancestors and powers of the place. It was already too dark to go to the pools. We had brought our cloaks. My son laid his out just where my father had slept when we were here. I took my old place near the altar where I had sat and talked to the poet. We sat in the darkness for a long time, silent. The stars burned white through the black leaves of the trees. When I looked over, I saw Silvius had lain down, curled up in his cloak; he looked like a lamb asleep in the starlight. I sat awake. The creatures of the night made separate sounds, rustlings and scratchings, near and far on the forest floor; an owl called once, from the right, far away up on the hillside, a long quavering i-i-i. I felt no urgent presence of the spirits of the place. It was all silent, all sacred.
After a long time, when the constellations had changed, I spoke to the poet, not aloud but in my mind. “Dear poet, all you told me came to be. You guided me truly, up to Aeneas’ death. Since then I’ve let others lead me. But I go astray. I can’t trust Ascanius: he doesn’t know his own enmity to Silvius. I wish you were here to guide me now. I wish you could sing to me.”
No voice spoke. The hush had grown very deep. I sighed at last and lay down, overcome by sleep. Sleep made the ground seem soft and the cloak warm to me. Words and images drifted through my mind. The words were, Speak me! Then they turned and seemed to reverse themselves as they drifted away: I say your being.. I saw Aeneas’ shield very clearly for an instant, the turn of the she-wolf’s head to her bright flank. I felt myself lying on a vault like a turtle’s shell of earth and stone that arched over a great dark hollow. Below me lay a vast landscape of shadows, forests of shadowy trees. Out beyond those trees I saw my son standing in dim sunlight on the bank of a river, a river wider than Tiber, so broad and misty I could not clearly see the other shore. Silvius was a man of nineteen or twenty. He was leaning on Aeneas’ great spear and he looked as Aeneas must have looked when he was young. There were multitudes of people all up and down the endless grassy bank. The grass was shadowy grey, not green. A voice near me, by my ear, an old man’s voice, was speaking softly: “…your last child, whom your wife Lavinia will bring up in the woods, a king, a father of kings.” Then I had so strong a sense of my husband’s presence, his physical body and being, with me, in me, as if I were he, that I woke and found myself sitting up, bewildered, in the dark, bereft. No one was there. Only Silvius asleep across the clearing. The stars were fading as the sky paled.
* * *
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, all 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.
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