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.
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 should 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 w
ould 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.
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