Lavinia

I went to the salt beds by the mouth of the river, in the May of my nineteenth year, to get salt for the sacred meal. Tita and Maruna came with me, and my father sent an old house slave and a boy with a donkey to carry the salt home. It’s only a few miles up the coast, but we made an overnight picnic of it, loading the poor little donkey with food, taking all day to get there, setting up camp on a grassy dune above the beaches of the river and the sea. The five of us had supper round the fire, and told stories and sang songs while the sun set in the sea and the May dusk turned blue and bluer. Then we slept under the seawind.

I woke at the first beginning of light. The others were sound asleep. The birds were just beginning their dawn chorus. I got up and went down to the mouth of the river. I dipped up a little water and let it fall back as offering before I drank, saying the river’s name, Tiber, Father Tiber, and his old, secret names as well, Albu, Rumon. Then I drank, liking the half-salt taste of the water. The sky was light enough now that I could see the long, stiff waves at the bar where the current met the incoming tide.

Out beyond that, on the dim sea I saw ships—a line of great, black ships, coming up from the south and wheeling and heading in to the river mouth. On each side of each ship a long rank of oars lifted and beat like the beat of wings in the twilight.

One after another the ships breasted the waves at the bar, rising and plunging, one after another they came straight on. Their long, arched, triple beaks were bronze. I crouched by the waterside in the salty mud. The first ship entered the river and came past me, dark above me, moving steadily to the heavy soft beat of the oars on the water. The faces of the oarsmen were shadowed but a man stood up against the sky on the high stern of the ship, gazing ahead.

His face is stern yet unguarded; he is looking ahead into the darkness, praying. I know who he is.

By the time the last of the ships passed by me with that soft, labored beat and rush of oars and vanished into the forest that grows thick on both banks, the birds were singing aloud everywhere and the sky was bright above the eastern hills. I climbed back up to our camp. No one was awake; the ships had passed them in their sleep. I said nothing to them of what I had seen. We went down to the salt pans and dug up enough of the muddy grey stuff to make salt for the year’s use, loaded it in the donkey’s baskets, and set off home. I did not let them linger, and they complained and dawdled a little, but we were home well before noon.

I went to the king and said, “A great fleet of warships went up the river at dawn, father.” He looked at me; his face was sad. “So soon,” was all he said.

I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I’m not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it? That seems unlikely. No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet’s idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy. It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.

But he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He’s not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I know; he grieved for me. Perhaps where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him.

I won’t die. Of that I am all but certain. My life is too contingent to lead to anything so absolute as death. I have not enough real mortality. No doubt I will eventually fade away and be lost in oblivion, as I would have done long ago if the poet hadn’t summoned me into existence. Perhaps I will become a false dream clinging like a bat to the underside of the leaves of the tree at the gate of the underworld, or an owl flitting in the dark oaks of Albunea. But I won’t have to tear myself from life and go down into the dark, as he did, poor man, first in his imagination, and then as his own ghost. We each have to endure our own afterlife, he said to me once, or that is one way to understand what he said. But that dim loitering about, down in the underworld, waiting to be forgotten or reborn—that isn’t true being, not even half true as my being is as I write and you read it, and nowhere near as true as in his words, the splendid, vivid words I’ve lived in for centuries.

And yet my part of them, the life he gave me in his poem, is so dull, except for the one moment when my hair catches fire—so colorless, except when my maiden cheeks blush like ivory stained with crimson dye—so conventional, I can’t bear it any longer. If I must go on existing century after century, then once at least I must break out and speak. He didn’t let me say a word. I have to take the word from him. He gave me a long life but a small one. I need room, I need air. My soul reaches out into the old forests of my Italy, up to the sunlit hills, up to the winds of the swan and the truth-speaking crow. My mother was mad, but I was not. My father was old, but I was young. Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war. She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn’t be given, wouldn’t be taken, but chose my man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure; not a bad balance.

All the same, sometimes I believe I must be long dead, and am telling this story in some part of the underworld that we didn’t know about—a deceiving place where we think we’re alive, where we think we’re growing old and remembering what happened when we were young, when the bees swarmed and my hair caught fire, when the Trojans came. After all, how can it be that we can all talk to one another? I remember the foreigners from the other side of the world, sailing up the Tiber into a country they knew nothing of: their envoy came to my father’s house, explained that he was a Trojan, and made polite speeches in fluent Latin. Now how could that be? Do we all know all the languages? That can be true only of the dead, whose land lies under all the other lands. How is it that you understand me, who lived twenty-five or thirty centuries ago? Do you know Latin?

But then I think no, it has nothing to do with being dead, it’s not death that allows us to understand one another, but poetry.

If you’d met me when I was a girl at home you might well have thought that my poet’s faint portrait of me, sketched as if with a brass pin on a wax tablet, was quite sufficient: a girl, a king’s daughter, a marriageable virgin, chaste, silent, obedient, ready to a man’s will as a field in spring is ready for the plow.

I’ve never plowed, but I’ve watched our farmers at it all my life: the white ox trudging forward in the yoke, the man gripping the long wood handles that buck and rear as he tries to force the plowshare through the soil that looks so meek and ready and is so tough, so shut. He strains with all his weight and muscle to make a scratch deep enough to hold the barley seed. He labors till he’s gasping and shaking with exhaustion and wants only to lie down in the furrow and sleep on his hard mother’s breast among the stones. I never had to plow, but I had a hard mother too. Earth will take the plowman in her arms at last and let him sleep deeper than the barley seed, but my mother had no embrace for me.

I was silent and meek because if I spoke up, if I showed my will, she might remember that I was not my brothers, and I’d suffer for it. I was six when they died, little Latinus and baby Laurens. They’d been my dears, my dolls. I played with them and adored them. My mother Amata watched over us smiling as the spindle dropped and rose in her fingers. She didn’t leave us with our nurse Vestina and the other women as a queen might do, but stayed with us all day long, for love. Often she sang to us as we played. Sometimes she stopped spinning and leapt up, took my hands and Latinus’ hands and danced with us, and we all laughed together. “My warriors,” she called the boys, and I thought she was calling me a warrior too, because she was so happy when she called them warriors, and her happiness was ours.

We fell ill: first the baby, then Latinus with his round face and big ears and clear eyes, then I. I remember the strange dreams of fever. My grandfather the woodpecker flew to me and pecked my head and I cried out with the pain. In a month or so I got better, got well again; but the boys’ fever would fall and then return, fall and return. They grew thin, they wasted away. They would seem to be on the mend, Laurens would nurse eagerly at my mother’s breast, Latinus would creep out of bed to play with me. Then the fever would come back and seize them. One afternoon Latinus went into convulsions, the fever was a dog that shakes a rat to death, he was shaken to death, the crown prince, the hope of Latium, my playmate, my dear. That night the thin little baby brother slept easily, his fever was down; next morning early he died in my arms with a gasp and a shiver, like a kitten. And my mother went mad with grief.

My father would never understand that she was mad.

He grieved bitterly for his sons. He was a man of warm feeling, and the boys had been, as a man sees it, his posterity. He wept for them, aloud at first, then for a long time in silence, for years. But he had the relief of his duties as king, and he had the rites to perform, the consolation of returning ritual, the reassurance of the ancient family spirits of his house. And I was solace to him, too, for I performed the rites with him, as a king’s daughter does; and also he loved me dearly, his first-born, late-born child. For he was much older than my mother.

She was eighteen when they married, he was forty. She was a princess of the Rutuli of Ardea, he was king of all Latium. She was beautiful, passionate and young; he, a man in his prime, handsome and strong, a victorious warrior who loved peace. It was a match that might have turned out very well.

He didn’t blame her for the boys’ deaths. He didn’t blame me for not having died. He took his loss and set what was left of his heart’s hope on me. He went on, greyer and grimmer every year, but never unkind, and never weak, except in this: he let my mother do as she would, looked away when she acted wilfully, was silent when she spoke wildly.

Her awful grief met no human answer. She was left with a husband who couldn’t hear or speak to her, a six-year-old weeping daughter, and a lot of miserable, frightened women who were afraid, as servants and slaves must be afraid, that they might be punished for the children’s death.

For him she had only contempt; for me, rage.

I can remember each separate time I touched my mother’s hand or body, or she touched mine, since my brothers died. She never slept again in the bed where she and my father conceived us.

After many days when she never came out of her room, she reappeared, seeming little changed, still splendid, with her shining black hair, her cream-white face, her proud bearing. Her manner in company had always been somewhat distant, rather lofty; she played the queen among commoners, and I used to marvel at how different she was with the men who thronged the king’s house than she was with us children, when she sat spinning and singing and laughed and danced with us. With the house people her manner had been imperious, wilful, hot-tempered, but they loved her, for there was no meanness in her. Now she was mostly cold to them, cold to us, calm. But when I spoke, or my father spoke, often I saw the crimp of loathing in her face, the desolate, scornful fury, before she looked away.

She wore the boys’ bullas round her neck, the little amulet bags with a tiny clay phallus in them that boys wear for good luck and protection. She kept the bullas in their gold capsules hidden under her clothes. She never took them off.

The anger that she hid in company broke out often in the women’s side of the house as fierce irritation with me. The pet name many people called me, “little queen,” particularly annoyed her, and they soon stopped saying it. She did not often speak to me, but if I annoyed her she would turn on me suddenly and tell me in a hard, flat voice that I was a fool, ugly, stupidly timid. “You’re afraid of me. I hate cowards,” she would say. Sometimes my presence drove her into actual frenzy. She would strike me or shake me till my head snapped back and forth. Once the fury drove her to tear at my face with her nails. Vestina pulled me away from her, got her to her room and quieted her, and hurried back to wash the long, bleeding rips down my cheeks. I was too stunned to cry, but Vestina wept over me as she put salve on the wounds. “They won’t scar,” she said tearfully, “I’m sure they won’t scar.”

My mother’s voice came calmly from where she was lying in her bedroom: “That’s good.”

Vestina told me to tell people that the cat had scratched me. When my father saw my face and demanded to know what had happened, I said, “Silvia’s old cat scratched me. I was holding her too tight and a hound came by and she was frightened. It wasn’t her fault.” I came to half believe the story, as children will, and decorated it with details and circumstances, such as that I was quite alone when it happened, in the oak grove just outside Tyrrhus’ farmstead, and ran all the way home. I repeated that Silvia was not to blame, nor was the cat. I didn’t want to get either of them in trouble. Kings are quick to punish, it relieves their anxiety. Silvia was my dearest friend and playmate, and the old farm cat had a litter of suckling kittens that would die without her. So it had to be my fault alone that my face was scratched. And Vestina was right: her comfrey salve was good; the long red furrows scabbed, healed, and left no scar but one faint silvery track down my left cheekbone under the eye. A day comes when Aeneas traces the scar with his finger and asks me what it is. “A cat scratched me,” I say. “I was holding her, and a dog frightened her.”

I know that there will be far greater kings of far greater kingdoms than Latinus of Latium, my father. Upriver at Seven Hills there used to be two little fortified places with dirt walls, Janiculum and Saturnia; then some Greek settlers came, rebuilt on the hillside, and called their fort and town Pallanteum. My poet tried to describe to me that place as he knew it when when he was alive, or will know it when he lives, I should say, for although he was dying when he came to me, and has been dead a long time now, he hasn’t yet been born. He is among those who wait on the far side of the forgetful river. He hasn’t forgotten me yet, but he will, when at last he comes to be born, swimming across that milky water. When he first imagines me he won’t know that he is yet to meet me in the forest of Albunea. Anyhow, he told me that in time to come, where that village is now, the Seven Hills and the valleys among the hills and all the riverbanks will be covered for miles with an unimaginable city. There will be temples of marble splendid with gold on the hilltops, wide arched gates, innumerable figures carved of marble and bronze; more people will pass through the Forum of that city in a single day, he said, than I will see in all the towns and farmsteads, on all the roads, in all the festivals and battlefields of Latium, in all my life. The king of that city will be the great ruler of the world, so great that he will despise the name of king and be known only as the one made great with holy power, the august. All the peoples of all the lands will bow to him and bring tribute. I believe this, knowing that my poet always speaks the truth, if not always the whole truth. Not even a poet can speak the whole truth.

But in my girlhood his great city was a rough little town built up against the slope of a rocky hill full of caves and overgrown with thick scrub. I went there once with my father, a day’s sail up the river on the west wind. The king there, Evander, an ally of ours, was an exile from Greece, and in some trouble here too—he had killed a guest. He’d had sufficient reason for it, but that sort of thing doesn’t get forgotten by our country folk. He was grateful for my father’s favor and did his best to entertain us, but he lived far more poorly than our wealthy farmers. Pallanteum was a dark stockade, huddled under trees between the wide yellow river and the forested hills. They gave us a feast, of course, beef and venison, but served it very strangely: we had to lie down on benches at small tables, instead of sitting all together at one long table. That was the Greek fashion. And they didn’t keep the sacred salt and meal on the table. That worried me all through the banquet.

Evander’s son Pallas, who was about my age, eleven or twelve then, a nice boy, told me a story about a huge beast-man that used to live up there in one of the caves and came out in twilight to steal cattle and tear people to pieces. He was seldom seen, but left great footprints. A Greek hero called Ercles came by and killed the beast-man. What was he called? I asked, and Pallas said Cacus. I knew that that meant the fire lord, the chief man of a tribal settlement, who kept Vesta alight for the people of the neighborhood, with the help of his daughters, as my father did. But I didn’t want to contradict the Greeks’ story of the beast-man, which was more exciting than mine.

Pallas asked me if I’d like to see a she-wolf’s den, and I said yes, and he took me to a cave called the Lupercal, quite near the village. It was sacred to Pan, he said, which seemed to be what the Greeks called our grandfather Faunus. Anyhow, the settlers let the wolf and her cubs alone, wisely, and she let them alone too. She never even hurt their dogs, though wolves hate dogs. There were plenty of deer for her in those hills. Now and then in spring she’d take a lamb. They counted that as sacrifice, and when she didn’t take a lamb, they’d sacrifice a dog to her. Her mate had disappeared this past winter.

It was not the wisest thing perhaps for two children to stand at the mouth of her den, for she had cubs, and she was there. The cave smelled very strong. It was black dark inside, and silent. But as I grew used to the dark I saw the two small, unmoving fires of her eyes. She stood there between us and her children.

Pallas and I backed away slowly, our gaze always on her eyes. I did not want to go, though I knew I should. I turned at last and followed Pallas, but slowly, looking back often to see if the she-wolf would come out of her house and stand there dark and stiff-legged, the loving mother, the fierce queen.

On that visit to the Seven Hills I saw that my father was a much greater king than Evander was. Later I came to know that he was more powerful than any of the kings of the West in his day, even though he might be nothing in comparison with the great august one to come. He had established his kingdom firmly by warfare and defense of his borders long before I was born. While I was a child growing up, there were no wars to speak of. It was a long time of peace. Of course there were feuds and battles among the farmers and along the boundaries. We’re a rough people, born of oak, as they say, here in the western land; tempers run high, weapons are always at hand. Now and then my father had to intervene, put down a rustic quarrel that got too hot or spread too widely. He had no standing army. Mars lives in the plowlands and the borders of the plowlands. If there was trouble, Latinus called his farmers from their fields, and they came with their fathers’ old bronze swords and leather shields, ready to fight to the death for him. When they’d put down the trouble they went back to their fields, and he to his high house.

The high house, the Regia, was the great shrine of the city, a sacred place, for our storeroom gods and ancestors were the Penates and Lares of the city and the people. Latins came there from all over Latium to worship and sacrifice as well as to feast with the king. You saw the high house from a long way off in the countryside, standing among tall trees above the walls and towers and roofs.

The walls of Laurentum were high and strong, because it wasn’t built on a hilltop like most cities, but on the rich plains that sloped down towards the lagoons and the sea. Farmed fields and pastures lay all round it outside the ditch and earthwork, and in front of the city gate was a broad open ground where athletes played and men trained their horses. But entering the gate of Laurentum you came out of sun and wind into deep, fragrant shade. The city was a great grove, a forest. Every house stood among oak trees, fig trees, elms, slender poplars and spreading laurels. The streets were shady, leafy, narrow. The broadest of the streets led up to the king’s house, great and stately, towering with a hundred columns of cedar wood.

On a shelf on each wall of the entryway was a row of images, carved by an Etruscan exile years ago as an offering to the king. They were spirits, ancestors—two-faced Janus, Saturn, Italus, Sabinus, Grandfather Picus who was turned into the red-capped woodpecker but whose statue in a stiff carved toga sat holding the sacred staff and shield—a double row of grim figures in cracked and blackened cedar. They were not large, but they were the only images in human form in Laurentum, except the little clay Penates, and they filled me with fear. Often I shut my eyes as I ran between those long dark faces with blank staring eyes, under axes and crested helmets and javelins and the bars of city gates and the prows of ships, war trophies, nailed up along the walls.

The corridor of the images opened out into the atrium, a low, large, dark room with a roof open in the center to the sky. To the left were the council and banquet halls, which as a child I seldom entered, and beyond them the royal apartments; straight ahead was the altar of Vesta, with the domed brick storerooms behind it. I turned right and ran past the kitchens out into the great central courtyard, where a fountain played under the laurel tree my father planted when he was young, and lemon trees and sweet daphne and shrubs of thyme and oregano and tarragon grew in big pots, and women worked and chatted and spun and wove and rinsed out jugs and bowls in the fountain pool. I ran across among them, under the colonnade of cedar pillars, into the women’s part of the house, the best part, home.

If I was careful not to bring myself to my mother’s attention I had nothing to fear. Sometimes, as I grew towards womanhood, she spoke to me kindly enough. And there were a lot of women there who loved me, and women who flattered me, and old Vestina to spoil me, and other girls to be a girl with, and babies to play with. And—women’s side or men’s side—it was my father’s house, and I was my father’s daughter.

My best friend, though, was not a girl of the Regia at all but the youngest child of the cattleman Tyrrhus, who was in charge of my family’s herds as well as his own. His family farm was a quarter mile from the city gates, a huge place with many outbuildings, the stone-and-timber farmhouse bulking up among them like an old grey gander in a flock of geese. Cattle pens and paddocks and pastures stretched away back from the kitchen gardens among the low, oak-crowned hills. The farm was a place of endless industry, people working everywhere all day; but unless the forge was lit and the anvil clanging, or a drove of cattle was penned in close by for castration or for market, it was deeply quiet. Distant mooing from the valleys and the murmur of mourning doves and wood doves in the oak groves near the house made a continuous softness of sound into which other noises sank away and were lost. I loved that farm.

Silvia came to keep me company sometimes at the Regia, but we both preferred to be at her place. In summer I ran out there almost every day. Tita, a slave a couple of years older than I, came with me as the guardian my status of virgin princess required, but as soon as we got there Tita joined her friends among the farm women, and Silvia and I ran off to climb trees or dam the creek or play with the kittens or catch polliwogs and roam the woods and hills, as free as the sparrows.

My mother would have kept me home. “What kind of company is it she chooses to keep? Cowherds!” But my father, born a king, ignored her snobbery. “Let the child run about and get strong. They’re good people,” he said. Indeed Tyrrhus was a trusty, competent man, ruling his pastures as firmly as my father ruled his realm. He had an explosive temper but was just with his people; he kept every feast day generously, with observance and sacrifice to the local spirits and sacred places. He had fought beside my father in the old wars long ago, and still had a bit of the warrior about him. But he was soft as warm butter when it came to his daughter. Her mother had died soon after her birth, and she had no sisters. She grew up the darling of her father and brothers and all the house people. She was in many ways more a princess than I. She didn’t have to spend hours a day spinning or weaving, and had no ceremonial duties. The old cooks ran the kitchen for her, the old slaves kept the household for her, the girls swept the hearth and fed the fire for her; she had all the time in the world to run free on the hills and play with her pet animals.

Silvia had a wonderful way with creatures. In the evening, the little owls would come to her quavering call, hu-u-u, hi-i-i, and alight a moment on her outstretched hand. She tamed a fox cub; when it grew to a vixen she let it go free, but it brought its cubs round yearly for us to see, letting them gambol in the twilight on the grass under the oaks. She reared a fawn her brothers took on a hunt, the hounds having pulled down its mother. Silvia was ten or eleven when they brought the little thing in. She nursed it tenderly, and it grew into a magnificent stag as tame as any dog. He trotted off to the woods every morning, but was always back at supper time; they let him come into the dining room and eat from their trenchers. Silvia adored her Cervulus. She washed him and combed him, and decked his splendid antlers with vines in autumn and flower wreaths in spring. Male deer can be dangerous, but the stag was docile and mild, far too trusting for his own good. Silvia fastened a broad white linen band round his neck as a sign, and all the hunters of the forests of Latium knew Silvia’s Cervulus. Even the hounds knew him and seldom started him, having been scolded and beaten for doing so.

It was a wonderful thing to be out on the hills and see a great stag come walking calmly from the forest, balancing his crown of horns. He would kneel and put his nose in Silvia’s hand, and folding his tall delicate legs under him, sit there between us while she stroked his neck. He smelled sweet and strong and gamy. His eyes were large, dark, and quiet; so were Silvia’s eyes. That is what it was like in the age of Saturn, my poet said, the golden time of the first days when there was no fear in the world. Silvia seemed a daughter of that age. To sit with her on the sunlit slopes or run with her on the forest trails she knew so well was the delight of my life. There was no one in all that country of our girlhood who wished us any harm. Our pagans, the folk of the plowlands, greeted us from their fields or the doorstep of their round huts. The surly bee-keeper saved a comb of honey for us, the dairy women had a sip of cream for us, the cowboys showed off for us, riding bull calves or vaulting an old cow’s horns, and the old shepherd Ino showed us how to make piping flutes of oat straw.

Sometimes in summer as the long day drew toward evening and we knew we should be starting home to the farm, we’d both lie facedown on the hillside and push our faces right into the harsh dry grass and the hard clodded dirt, breathing in the infinitely complex smell, hay-sweet and soil-bitter, of the warm summer earth, our earth. Then we were both Saturn’s children. We leapt up and ran down the hill, ran home—race you to the cattle ford!

When I was fifteen years old, King Turnus came on a visit of state to my father. He was my cousin, my mother’s nephew; his father Daunus, ailing, had given him the crown of Rutulia the year before, and we’d heard of the splendors of the ceremonies of his coronation at Ardea, the nearest city south of Latium. The Rutulians had been close allies of ours since Latinus married Daunus’ sister Amata, but young Turnus showed signs of wanting to go his own way. When the Etruscans of Caere drove out their tyrant Mezentius, a savage man who held nothing sacred, Turnus took him in. Now all Etruria was angry with Turnus for receiving and sheltering the tyrant, who had abused his power so cruelly that even the Lares and the Penates of his household had forsaken him. That ill feeling was a matter of concern to us, since Caere was just across the river. The Etruscan cities were powerful and it behooved us to keep on good terms with them if we could.

My father discussed these matters with me as we walked to the sacred forest of Albunea. It lay east of Laurentum, under the hills, a day’s walk. We had gone there together several times; I served as his acolyte in the rites there as he praised and propitiated our ancestors and the powers of the woods and springs. In those solitary walks he talked to me as to his heir. Though I couldn’t inherit his crown, he saw no reason why I should remain ignorant of matters of policy and government. After all, I’d almost certainly be queen of some kingdom. Perhaps, indeed, of Rutulia.

He didn’t talk about that possibility, but the women did. Vestina was certain of it the moment she heard of King Turnus’ visit: “He’s coming for our Lavinia! He’s coming courting!”

My mother looked sharply at Vestina across the big basket of raw wool we were all pulling. Pulling wool, drawing apart the blobs and hunks of a washed fleece to separate the fibers so they can be carded, was always my favorite housework; it’s easy and perfectly mindless, and the clean fleece smells sweet, and your hands get soft from the oil in the wool, and the blobs and hunks end up as a huge, pale, airy, hairy, lovely cloud towering out of the basket.

“Now that’s enough of that,” my mother said. “Only peasants talk about marriage for a girl her age.”

“They say he’s the most beautiful man in Italy,” said Tita.

“And he rides a stallion nobody else can ride,” said Picula.

“And his hair is golden,” said Vestina.

“He has a sister, Juturna, as beautiful as he is, but she’s vowed never to leave the river, they say,” said Sabella.

“What a gabble of geese you are!” my mother said.

“You must have known him as a child, queen?” Sicana, my mother’s favorite woman, asked.

“Yes, he was a fine little boy,” Amata said. “Very fond of his own way.” She smiled a little, as she often did when she spoke of her childhood home.

I went up to the watchtower in the southeast corner of the house, above the royal apartments, from which one could see down into the streets and over the city walls and gate. I saw the visitors arrive at the gate and come up the Via Regia, all mounted, with shining breastplates and nodding crests. Then I ran down to the atrium and stood with the house people while my father welcomed Turnus. I got a good look at him, his men, and his high plumed helmet. He was splendidly handsome, well-made and muscular, with curly red-brown hair, dark-blue eyes, and a proud stance. If there was any physical flaw in him, it was that he was rather short for his strong build and deep chest, so that his walk seemed a bit strutting. His voice was deep and clear.

I was summoned to dinner in the great hall that day. My mother and I put on our finest light robes, with the women goose-gabbling all about us and fussing with our hair. Sicana set out for my mother the great necklace of gold and garnets that was Latinus’ wedding gift to her, but she put it aside and wore a necklace and earrings of silver and amethyst which her uncle Daunus had given her as a parting gift. She looked joyful and radiant. I thought that as usual I could hide behind her, effaced and protected by her imperious beauty.

But during the meal, while Turnus talked affably with both my father and my mother, he looked at me. He didn’t stare, but he looked again and again, with a slight smile. I became embarrassed as I never had been. His intense blue eyes began to frighten me. Every time I dared glance up, he was looking at me.

I hadn’t given any thought to love and marriage. What was there to think about? When it came time for me to be married, I’d be married, and find out what love was, and childbirth, and the rest of it. Until then, it was nothing to me. Silvia and I could tease each other and joke about a handsome young farmer who made eyes at her, or her eldest brother Almo who sometimes hung around to talk to me, but it was all words, it meant nothing. No man in the house, in the city, in all the country, could look at me as Turnus was looking. My realm was virginity and I was at home in it, unthreatened and at ease. No man had ever made me blush.

Now I felt myself burning red from the roots of my hair clear down to my breasts, to my knees. I cowered with shame. I couldn’t eat. The besieging army was at the walls.

Turnus would certainly have recognised the poet’s portrait of me as a shrinking silent maiden. My mother, beside whom I sat, was well aware of my discomfort, and it did not displease her; she let me cower, and talked away to Turnus about Ardea. I don’t know if she made a signal to my father or he came to his own decision, but as soon as the meat trenchers had been removed, and the boy had thrown the offering into the fire, and the servants were going round with ewers and napkins and refilling wine goblets for the aftercourse, he bade my mother send me away.

“We are losing the flower of the feast,” the visiting king protested graciously.

“The child needs her sleep,” said my father.

Turnus lifted his cup—the double-handled gold goblet from Cures engraved with a hunting scene, loot from one of my father’s wars, our best piece of tableware—and said, “Fairest of all the daughters of Father Tiber, may you have sweet dreams!”

I sat paralysed.

“Get along with you,” my mother murmured to me, with something like a laugh.

I slipped out as quick as I could, barefoot, for I didn’t want to stop to put my sandals on. I heard Turnus’ resonant voice behind me in the hall, but not what he said. My ears were ringing. The night air in the courtyard was like cold water dashed over my hot face and body, making me gasp and shiver.

In the women’s side I was of course pounced on by all the girls and women telling me and one another how glorious and gorgeous the young king was, how big and tall, how he’d hung up his helmet and a huge sword and a gilt bronze breastplate like a giant’s in the hall, and asking me what had he said at dinner? and did I like him? I couldn’t answer. Vestina helped me drive them all away, saying I looked feverish and needed to go to bed. After I’d finally persuaded her too to leave me alone, I could lie in my bed in my small silent room and look at Turnus.

Of course it was foolish to ask if I liked him. A young girl meeting a man, a handsome man, a king, who may be her first suitor, does not like or dislike him. Her heart beats, her blood runs, and she sees him—sees him only: maybe as the rabbit sees the hawk, maybe as the earth sees the sky. I saw Turnus as a city sees a splendid stranger, a captain of armies, at the city gate. That he was there, that he had come, was wonderful and terrible. Nothing would ever be the same again. But there was no need, yet, to unbar the gate.

Turnus stayed several days with us, but I met him again only once. He requested my presence at dinner on his last evening, and I was sent in to the feast, but not to eat with the guests and company, only for the aftercourse, to hear the singing and see the dancers. I sat with my mother, and again Turnus looked often at me, making no effort to disguise it. He smiled at us. His smile was a pleasant, quick flash. When he was watching the dancers, I looked at him. I noticed how small his ears were, that his head was well shaped, that his jaw was square and strong. He might get jowly, later in life. The back of his neck was pleasant, smooth. I saw that he was attentive and respectful to my father, who, sitting near him, looked old.

My mother was ten or twelve years older than her nephew, but tonight she did not look it; her eyes shone and she laughed. She and Turnus got on well together and were at ease. They talked lightly across the table, and the other guests joined in, and my father listened to them benevolently.

The day after Turnus left, my father sent for me and my mother. We walked under the portico outside the banquet hall; he had sent away all the people that usually were around him. It was a rainy spring day, and he was wearing his toga, for as he got older he felt the cold. He paced with us in silence for a while and then said, “The Rutulian king began to say to me last night that he wishes to be a suitor for your hand, Lavinia. I did not let him go on. I said that you are not yet of an age for me to permit talk of courtship or marriage. He would have argued, of course, but I did not let him argue. I said my daughter is too young.”

He looked at us both. I had no idea what to say. I looked at my mother.

“You gave him no encouragement at all?” Amata asked, calm and civil, as she always was with her husband.

“I didn’t say that she’ll always be too young,” my father answered in his mild, dry way.

“King Turnus has a great deal to offer his bride,” she said.

“He does indeed. Good land down there. He’s a good fighter, too, they say. His father certainly was.”

“I am sure he is a brave warrior.”

“And wealthy.”

We paced on down the portico. Rain pattered in the courtyard, the leaves of the lemon trees nodded. Under the big laurel tree it was still quite dry, and one of the house girls sat there spinning and singing a long spinning song.

“So you might favor the boy if he comes back another year?” my father asked my mother.

“I might,” she said coolly. “If indeed he is willing to wait.”

“And you, Lavinia?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, my dear,” he said. “There’s plenty of time for this sort of thing.”

“What would you do about tending Vesta?” I said—I could not bring myself to say, “if I went off to be married.”

“Well, we must think about that. Choose a girl to whom you can begin to teach the duties.”

“Maruna,” I said at once.

“An Etruscan?”

“Her mother is. You took her on a raid across the river. Maruna grew up here. She’s pious.” By that word I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe. My father had taught me the meaning of the word and the value of it.

“Good. Take her with you when you tend the fire and clean the hearth and make the sacred salt. Let her begin to learn all these matters.”

My mother had nothing to say in this; it is the king’s daughter who keeps his hearth alight. It was bitter to both my parents, I know, that when we sat to dinner every day the boy who fed the altar fire with our food and spoke the blessing was not their son, as he should have been, but only a servant boy. Now the care of the fire and the storerooms too must go to a substitute, a slave.

My father sighed a little; his large, warm, hard hand was still on my shoulder. My mother paced forward, impassive. As we turned to walk back down under the columns she said, “It might be well not to make that young king wait too long.”

“A year, or two, or three,” Latinus said.

“Oh,” and she winced with disgust and impatience. “Three years! The man is young, Latinus! He has hot blood in his veins.”

“All the more reason to give our girl time to grow up.”

Amata did not argue, she never argued, but she shrugged.

I read in her shrug her disbelief that I would ever grow to be a match for such a man as Turnus. Indeed I wondered how I could. To mate with such a man I should be deep-breasted and majestic like my mother, fierce like her, and fiercely beautiful. I was short and thin, sunburnt, uncouth. I was a girl, not a woman. I put my hand up on my father’s hand on my shoulder and held it there as we walked. I could look at blue-eyed Turnus in the darkness of my room at night, but I did not want to think about leaving my home.

Aeneas’ armor hangs in the entryway of our house here in Lavinium, as Turnus’ sword and breastplate hung on his visits to Laurentum. I have seen Aeneas wear the armor several times, the helmet, cuirass, greaves, with the long sword and the round shield, all of bronze: he shines as the sea glances and dazzles under the sun. To see his armor hanging there is to realise what a large, powerful man he is. He doesn’t look large, or even very muscular, because his body is in perfect proportion, and he moves lightly and gracefully, considerate of who and what is around him, not shoving forward as many big, strong men do. Yet I can hardly lift the armor he wears so easily. It was a gift from his mother, who had it made for him by a great fire lord, he told me. Indeed the man who forged and worked that armor was the lord of smiths. There is in all the western world no work so beautiful as that shield.

The surface of the seven layers of welded bronze is covered all over with a great pattern of figures embossed and delicately carved and picked out with gold and silver inlay. Here and there is a slight dent or scratch from battle. I stand and study that shield often. The picture I like best is high on the left, a wolf who turns her sleek neck back to lick her suckling cubs, but the cubs are human babies, boys, greedy at her teats. Another I like is a goose, all done in silver, who stands with her neck upstretched, hissing in alarm. Behind her some men climb a cliff; their hair is curly gold, their cloaks are striped with silver; around his neck each man has a twisted collar of gold.

Not far from the wolf are figures I recognise from our festivals—some Leaping Priests with two-lobed shields, and a pair of Wolf Boys running naked, brandishing their thorn sticks at laughing women. There are a few women here and there in the pictures, but mostly it is men, men fighting, endless battle scenes, men torn apart, men disemboweled, bridges torn down, walls torn down, slaughter.

Aeneas is not in any of the pictures, and nothing the poet told me about the siege and fall of his city, or his wanderings before he came to Latium, is recognisable on the shield. “Are these scenes of Troy?” I ask him, and he shakes his head.

“I do not know what they are,” he says. “They may be scenes of what is yet to come.”

“What is yet to come is mostly war, then,” I say, looking among them for some that aren’t battles, for an unhelmeted face. I see a mass rape, women screaming and fighting as they are dragged off by warriors. I see great, beautiful ships with banks of oars, but the ships are all at war, some are burning. Fire and smoke rise up over the water.

“I think it may be the realm our sons’ sons will inherit,” he says, very low. Aeneas always speaks out of silence, seldom at length, usually in a low voice. He is never sullen, but he is quiet, he handles words as he handles his sword, only when he has to.

That is my poet’s Rome, then, the great city in many of the pictures. I look more closely at the center of the shield, the sea battle. On the stern of a ship stands a man with a handsome, cold face. Fire streams from his head, and a comet hovers over it. I think that is the man made great, the august one.

As I continue looking I see things I never observed before. The city, or some great city, lies all in ruins, utterly destroyed and burned. I see another destroyed city, and another. Enormous fires burst out in a line, one after another, enveloping a whole countryside in flame. Huge machines of war crawl on the ground, or dive under the sea, or hurtle through the air. The earth itself burns in oily black clouds. Now an immense round cloud of destruction rises up over the sea at the end of the world. I know it is the end of the world. I say to Aeneas in horror, “Look, look!”

But he cannot see what I see in the shield. He will not live to see it. He must die after only three years, and widow me. Only I, who met the poet in the woods of Albunea, can keep looking through the bronze of my husband’s shield to see all the wars he will not fight.

The poet made him live, live greatly, so he must die. I, whom the poet gave so little life to, I can go on. I can live to see the cloud above the sea at the end of the world.

I burst into tears and clasp Aeneas in my arms, and he holds me tenderly, telling me not to cry, dear heart, don’t cry.

The king’s house where i live is a square divided in four quarters; the great laurel tree is at the crossing, the center. I go out at first dawn from the house and from the city into the fields east of the city.

The pagus where we pagans live is the pattern of the farmers’ fields, outlined by the paths between the fields. At the crossing, where four fields meet, is the shrine of the Lares, the spirits of the meeting place. The shrine has four doors, and before each door is the altar of a farmer’s field. I stand out on one of the paths between fields, looking at the sky.

The house of the sky is limitless, but with my mind I give it borders and divide it into four. I stand at the center, the crossing, facing south, facing Ardea. I watch the empty sky into which light flows upward slowly. Crows fly from the left, from the eastern hills, circle above me calling, and return into the sunrise that crowns the hills with fire. It is a good omen, but the red sunrise foretells a stormy day.

I was twelve when I first went with my father to Albunea, the sacred forest under the hill, where sulfur springs running out from a high cave fill the shadowy air with an endless, troubled noise and a mist that smells of rotten eggs. There the spirits of the dead are within hearing if you call. In the old days people came to Albunea from all the western lands to consult with the spirits and powers of the place; now many go to the oracle near Tibur, which bears the same name. This lesser Albunea was sacred to my family. When my father was disturbed in his mind he went there. This time he said to me, “Wear your sacred robe, daughter, and come help me with the sacrifice.” I had served as his assistant often at home, as a child’s duty is, but I had never yet been to the sacred spring. I put on my red-bordered toga and took a bag of salted meal from the storeroom behind Vesta. We walked for some miles on paths through familiar fields and pastures, then we were in country I had not seen before, wilder, the forested hills drawing closer on both sides. We came to a little stream and followed the north side of its rocky gorge; it was called the Prati, my father said, and he told me of the rivers of Latium: our Lentulus at Laurentum, the Harenosus, the Prati, the Stagnulus, and the sacred Numicus that rises high on the Alban Mountain and is our boundary with Rutulia.

He carried the sacrifice, a two-week lamb. It was April. The thickets were all budding and in bloom, and the oaks on the hillsides bore their long, delicate, reticent flowers of green and bronze. The forests ahead of us rose up and up towards the Alban Mountain, and craggy woods hung like a dark cloud to our left. We entered under the trees. It was dark in the forest, and only a few birds sang, though the fields and thickets had been loud with their chanting. I smelled the stink of the spring nearby, but did not see the vapors, and heard the noise of the water only faintly, a hissing murmur like a kettle coming to the boil.

The sacred place was in a grassy glade deep in the forest, marked out in a rough square with a rock wall no higher than my knee. Within that enclosure the sense of the numen, the presence and power of the sacred, was strong and strange. Tattered, rotting fleeces lay about on the earth inside the wall. There was a small rock altar; my father cut a turf from outside the wall and laid it on the altar. We drew the corner of our togas over our heads. He lighted the fire. I made a garland of young laurel leaves and garlanded the lamb. I sprinkled it with salted meal from my bag, and held it while he prayed. The lamb was docile and fearless, a noble sacrifice; it had its own piety. I held it while my father cut its throat with the long bronze knife, offering this life to the powers we do not know, in fear and gratitude and seeking to be in peace with them. We burned the entrails on the altar fire to augment the power of the spirits. We toasted and ate the ribs ourselves, having not eaten since noon the day before. The rest of the meat I wrapped to carry home. My father scraped the hide and laid it down on the ground, the fleece up, and gathered the remnants of other sheepskins and spread them out. They were damp from the rain a couple of days earlier, and stank of rot and mildew, but that is one’s bed at Albunea.

It was quite dark now, the red of the sun was gone from the aisles of the trees, and the sky between the branches was dim. We lay down on the sheepskins, the fleece of our lamb under our heads.

I do not know if the power of Albunea came into my father that night, but it came to me, not as a voice speaking from the trees as it comes to others, but as a dream, or what I took to be a dream. In my sleep I was beside a river, which I knew to be the Numicus. I stood at a ford, alone, watching the clear water run among stones. I saw a thread of color in the water as it ran by, a vein of red. It thickened and blurred into a cloud of red that drifted downstream and was gone. A heavy, heavy weight of grief bore down my heart so that my knees failed and I crouched weeping among the stones. At last I got up and walked upstream and came to a town; its ramparts were of fresh earth. I was still weeping, and held the corner of my garment over my head and face, but I knew that city was my home. Then in my dream I was in the forest of Albunea again, still alone. This time I went past the altar glade and came to the spring. I could not come close to the cave. The hissing, boiling noise was loud there, and all about the mouth of the cave the ground was bog and shallow pools. The stinking, bluish mist hovered over the water and the ground. I heard a woodpecker off among the trees, his tapping on a trunk and his call like a harsh laugh—then he came flying. I drew back, pulling the cloth over my head, afraid, but he did not strike me. I saw his scarlet head flash before me. He drew his wings across my eyes twice, very lightly, like the touch of the softest veil. He laughed as he flew off. I looked up and saw it was not dark under the trees; the forest was full of a still light without shadows, and the water and mist of the spring were luminous.

I woke then, and saw that same still light for a while in the glade, fading as day came.

Before we left, I went on to the spring, and saw it was as I had seen it in my dream, though shadowed.

My father was again silent as we started home. As we came out of the forest I looked south, imagining the course of the Numicus, the ford, and the place where I had seen the town in my dream. I said, “Grandfather Picus came to me while I slept last night, father.” And I told him what I had seen.

He listened and said nothing for a time. “That is a powerful grandfather,” he said at last.

“He struck my head when I had the fever. I cried for the pain.”

“But this time he touched your eyes with his wing.”

I nodded. We walked on a while. Latinus said, “Albunea is in his gift. He and the other powers of the woods. He has given you the freedom of it, daughter. He has opened your eyes to see.”

“May I come with you again?”

“You may come there when you choose, I think.”

If my daughter had lived she never could have run safe and free through fields outside our domains or along the hillsides among the grazing herds, as I used to run. When my son was a boy the forests were safer for him than the pagus fields. But when I was a girl I walked the open hillsides and the wilderness paths to Albunea with no companion but Maruna. Sometimes she accompanied me all the way, sometimes she stayed the night with a woodcutter’s family at the edge of the forest while I went alone to the sacred glade. We could do this because the peace my father had brought to Latium was real and durable. In that peace, little children could watch the cattle, shepherds could let their flocks wander in the summer pastures with no risk of theft, women and girls need not go guarded or in bands but could walk without fear on any path in Latium. Even in the true wild where there were no paths we were afraid of wolf and boar, not man. Because this order had held all my life as a girl, I thought it was the way the world had always been and would be. I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste. Of all the greater powers the one I fear most is the one I cannot worship, the one who walks the boundary, the one who sets the ram on the ewe, and the bull on the heifer, and the sword in the farmer’s hand: Mavors, Marmor, Mars.

I kept the storerooms of the king’s house: that was my duty as the king’s daughter, the camilla, the novice. The food we ate was in my charge. I ground the meal and the sacred salt that blessed the food. Daily and faithfully I cared for Vesta burning on our hearth, the bright center of our lives. But I was not permitted to enter the small room beside the house door where Mars lived—not Mars of the plow, Mars of the bull and stallion, nor Mars of the wolf, but the other one: Mars the sword, the spears, the shields that the Leapers brought out on the day of the new year, shaking him, waking him, rousing him up, dancing and leaping with him in the streets and through the fields. That Mars would be shut away again only when the October Horse had been sacrificed and winter itself, with cold and rain and darkness, ordained the peace.

Mars has no altar in the city. Men worship him. A girl, a virgin, I could have no business with him and wanted none. The house I kept was closed to him, as his was to me.

But I honored the sanction. He did not.

When I was a girl, I did not know him well enough to fear him. I liked to see the Leapers rush to open that locked room on the first day of March and come out in red cloaks and high-pointed hats, dancing, driving out the old year, letting in the new, brandishing the long spears and the shields shaped like an owl’s face, cavorting and shouting through the streets of Laurentum, “Mavors! Mavors! Macte esto!” We girls ran from them and hid as we were supposed to do, in a dutiful, laughing mockery of fear. Oh how the men like to stick their spears up into the air, we said. Oh how they like to poke their spears and jab their spears. Oh don’t they wish their spears were always ten feet long!

Because we were at peace I could laugh at the Leapers, because we were at peace I could sleep alone in Albunea, because we were at peace my father saw no harm in it when more suitors for my hand began coming to the Regia. Let them vie with one another, let Aventinus scowl at Turnus, let Turnus snub young Almo; they dared not quarrel under the king’s roof, or break the king’s peace across their boundaries. One of them would prove the best man in the end and take me to his house, and the others must make the best of it. My father enjoyed their visits very much, far more than I did. They brought young manhood into the house. He liked to feast them well and give them wine, pouring their bowls full again and again; he liked their gifts of game and sausage and white kids and black piglets; he liked them to see his beautiful fiery queen, so much younger than he, not so much older than some of them. He was a good and generous host, and his geniality disarmed their touchy brashness and their rivalries. They ended up all laughing late into the night at the great table. He made what might have been a cause of quarrels into a way to better friendship among his subject kings and chieftains.

If he had been my only parent I might have taken my suitors lightly, as he did, and with pleasure. Some of them were good fellows. Some were easy to laugh at. Ufens of Nersae, a mountain man, came in wolfskins, with a wolfskin hat, a black curly beard all over his red face, staring around him as if he’d never been in a town before, glowering at everybody except me—he couldn’t look at me at all. Tita and the other women teased me endlessly about marrying him, the Wolf Boy, Chinthicket, they called him. And I could laugh with them. But I was polite and cautious and cold to all my suitors, even beyond what befitted my status as virgin prize; for my mother did not take the matter lightly at all, and made my position both difficult and false.

She wanted to marry me to her nephew Turnus of Ardea. That desire had come to possess her. She favored Turnus openly, was all smiles to him and hardly civil to the others who came to stand in his way. Her prejudice made it hard even for rich men like Aventinus to come courting me, and very hard for such a young man as Almo, son of Tyrrhus, the manager of the royal cattle herds, my Silvia’s eldest brother. Almo was aiming pretty high in courting me at all, and against such a rival as King Turnus he stood no chance. But he was not merely ambitious, he had fallen in love with me; and having been fond of him all my life as an almost brother, I was sorry for him and kind to him, and so gave him false hope. My mother had no pity on him. She was fiercely jealous of our royal honor. She treated Almo as a cowherd. My father should not have allowed such discourtesy in his hall; but still he let all she did and said go by, and she hid the worst of her behavior from him. It was the game they played, that she could be mad yet not mad because he would not know she was mad.

I did not want to be courted. I did not want to receive the game, the sausages, the kids, the piglets, the stiff compliments. I did not want to sit at the banquet, the silent modest maiden, while my mother Amata spurned and sneered and turned her back on honest men and wooed her sister’s son, handsome blue-eyed Turnus.

He did not snub or spurn her, never, of course not, he smiled, he murmured, he lowered his long eyelashes and lifted them again smiling and looked right through her to what he wanted. Could she not see that? Could I, a stupid virgin of seventeen, see it, and she not see it? Could my father sit at the head of the table and not see it?

Drances, an old friend and adviser of my father, was the only person of the household who showed dislike or distrust of Turnus. Drances greatly admired the sound of his own voice and was used to pontificating at our table, but now he had to listen to Turnus’ tales of his exploits and triumphs in skirmishes and raids and hunts, and endure the young man’s careless, genial, unintended discourtesies. I saw that Drances watched Turnus very keenly, and watched my mother too. Sometimes he would glance at my father, or even at me, as if to say, Do you see? My father was impervious, and I would not return his glance. I wanted nothing to do with Drances; it seemed he knew what I knew, but I did not know what he would do with the knowledge.

I came to the banquets because I must, and left as soon as I could. The only way I could avoid my suitors entirely was not to be in the house at all. These days I could go to Silvia’s farm only if I knew poor ardent Almo would not be there. I could achieve absence from the Regia only by going to Albunea.

My mother’s anger was chafed by the idea that I had some gift like my father’s of conversation with the spirits. It gave me a kind of uncanny importance, which she despised. I agreed with her in my heart: the importance was false. But the gift was real. And it was useful to me as my reason not to be always at home, dressed in white, the meek garlanded sacrifice, while the suitors paraded through and drank their wine, and Turnus flattered my mother and laughed with my father and looked at me as the butcher looks at the cow. Amata tried to forbid me to go to the sacred place, for many good reasons, which she argued eloquently. My father, as always, seemed hardly to hear her. Usually that was how she got her way, but where I was concerned, his deafness was different. He temporised, waved his hand mildly, said, “Oh, it will do the child no harm,” or, “Prince Aventinus will still be here, no doubt, when she returns,” and let me go. And I put on my red-bordered robe, told Maruna to be ready at dawn, and went.

Turnus came for a visit in late April of the year I was eighteen. He brought a wagonload of splendid gifts to my parents. One was a horrible little creature that he said sailors had brought from Africa; it had hands and feet like ours, and a face like a noseless baby. He brought it in riding his shoulder, dressed in a tiny toga. It clambered all about, chattering, pulling things to pieces, spilling the salt, then stopping to sit and fondle its penis and stare at us with bright black eyes. Everyone at the long table laughed at its tricks. He presented it as a pet for me, and I tried to be kind to the little animal; but I could not like it, and it hated me. It pulled my hair and pissed my dress, and then sprang into my mother’s arms. She kissed it and crooned over it. It pulled at the chains round her neck, tugged out the little gold bullas that held my brothers’ amulets, and put one in its mouth. Seeing that, a sickness came over me. I had to ask to be excused, and as always my father let me go, though my mother would have made me stay.

I ran out into the courtyard and stopped at the fountain under the great laurel to wash my face and hands and my palla where the animal had pissed it. The night was cool, the stars bright through the leaves of the laurel. How I loved this house! How could I ever leave it, leave the spirits of the tree, of the spring, of my storerooms, of the hearth, of my people, leave the beloved familiar powers and go serve those of a stranger in a strange place? That would be slavery. I would not do it. Maybe I would marry Almo, and my father would name him his heir, to be king after him, and we would live here, here, nowhere else… I knew that could not be. Yet my father had no heir, and someday he must name one, or adopt a son. I thought I did not care who it was so long as it was not Turnus. There was nothing much wrong with Turnus himself, but much wrong in the way my mother looked at him.

I went on to the women’s side of the house. I told Maruna we were going to the forest tomorrow morning. Old Vestina said, “The Rutulian prince has just arrived, child! That is scarcely courteous.” And Maruna’s mother, the Etruscan slave who had taught me to read the birds’ flight, a wise and gentle woman, said, “It might be better to put it off a day or two.”

“My mother can entertain King Turnus far better than I can,” I said, staring them both down, daring them to speak.

Vestina chirped, “But it’s you, you he comes to see, how he looks at you, anyone can see you have his heart!” Maruna’s mother said nothing. And I left with Maruna at daybreak.

I took my bag of salted meal. The pastures were full of spring lambs, bouncing about, whirling their tails as they sucked at the teat, but I needed no blood sacrifice when I went to Albunea. I scattered salsamola on the altar, slept on the old fleeces of other sacrifices, and sought no vision or guidance. All I wanted when I went there was to sleep there, in that silence, with those spirits around me, in the numen of Albunea. A night there clarified my heart and quieted my mind, so that I could come back home and do my duty.

The walk there was an escape, too, a time of freedom. Maruna was not lighthearted and adventurous like my Silvia, and we did not chatter all day long when we walked as Silvia and I did. Maruna was rather silent, but alert, noticing all things in earth and sky; she was patient, sweet, a good companion. She did not have Silvia’s way with animals, but she knew the birds; and she had learned some of her mother’s lore, so we talked about what we might read in the calls and flights of the birds in the fields and wild lands about us as we went. And sometimes we talked about what the dead might have to say to us. In Etruria they think much about the dead, and Maruna’s mother had been trained in that knowledge when she was a girl in the great city of Caere. I felt ignorant and rustic when she or her daughter spoke of it. To me the dead were best buried, left undisturbed, thought about as little as possible; one did not want to bring their unhappy shadows creeping across the floor, hiding under the table, snapping at dropped food, for they were hungry, the dead were, always hungry. Every spring my father, like every householder in Latium, walked all about his house at midnight with nine black beans in his mouth, and when he spat them out he said, “Shadows, be gone!"—and the ghosts that had infested the house ate the beans and went back underground.

But according to Maruna’s mother the matter of the dead was not that simple.

Maybe it was she who had opened my mind so that when I slept at Albunea that night, that night in April when I was eighteen, on that ground that is so thin a roof above the underworld, the poet could come to me, and I could see and speak to him.

Maruna turned off on the path to the woodcutter’s hut, and I went on into the forest alone. When I walked there I always remembered the dream I had the first time I went to Albunea, the blood in the river, the city on a hill, the quiet radiance that filled the darkness under the trees.

No one was at the sacred place, but there had been recent sacrifices; fresh fleeces lay on the ground, and a stack of unburned wood by the altar. I scattered salted meal on the altar and all about the enclosure, and wished I could light a little fire, but I had brought none. So I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong. For the first time I wondered if I might hear the voice that my father heard speak from among them in the dark. The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion. I went back to the sacred enclosure praying, very humbly beseeching these great powers to have pity on my weakness. I was glad I had lit no fire. I made a heap of the fleeces, rolled up in my red-edged toga, for the air was cool, and lay down in the late dusk to sleep.

I became aware that a figure was standing within the enclosure, on the other side of the altar: a tall shadow. For a moment I thought it was a tree. Then I saw it was a man.

I sat up and said, “Be welcome here.”

I was not afraid, but the awe was still in me, the religion bound me.

He spoke: “What is this place?” His voice was very low.

“The altar place of Albunea.”

“Albunea!” he said. I could see that he was looking around, though it was quite dark, a thin high mist dimming the starlight. After a minute he said again, wondering, almost with a laugh in his voice, “So it is!—And you are?”

“Lavinia daughter of Latinus.”

Again he repeated the name: “Lavinia…” Then he did laugh, a brief ha! of amazement and amusement. He said at last, “May I stay a while, Lavinia daughter of King Latinus?”

“The altar place is open to all men.” And I added, “There are fleeces here to sit on, or sleep on. I have more than I need.”

“I need nothing, king’s daughter,” he said. He came a few steps closer so that the altar was not between us, and sat down on the ground. “I am a wraith,” he said. “I am not here in my body. My body is lying on the deck of a ship sailing from Greece to Italy, but I don’t think I’ll get to Brundisium even if the ship does. I am sick, I am dying, I am on my way to… to Acheron… Or else I am a false dream. But they come from under there, don’t they, the false dreams? They nest like bats in the great tree at the gates of the kingdom of the shadows… So maybe I am a bat that has flown here from Hades. A dream that has flown into a dream. Into my poem. To Albunea, the sacred grove, where King Latinus heard his grandfather Faunus prophesy, telling him not to marry his daughter to a man of Latium…” His voice was low and musical, like the voice of one talking to the spirits, praying; and that almost laugh came and went in it.

But I said quite sharply, “Did he?” I couldn’t help it. Surely my father would have told me if he had received such a warning. Why would he keep it from me?

The man, the shadow, paused; he thought; and he said, “Perhaps not yet.”

He knew that he had surprised, disturbed me, and wanted to reassure me. I felt then for the first time his kindness, his searching kindness, sensitive to every suffering.

He went on, hesitant, “I think it has not happened yet. Faunus has not spoken to Latinus. Perhaps it never did—never will happen. You should not be concerned about it. I made it up. I imagined it. A dream within a dream… within the dream that has been my life…”

“I am not a dream, and I don’t think I’m dreaming,” I said after a while. I spoke mildly. For he was sad, very sad. He had said he was dying. He was adrift, bereft, poor soul. I wanted to give him comfort, better comfort than can be found in dreams.

He looked at me as if he could see me, as if light filled the glade, light not of sun or moon or star or fire. He studied me. I did not mind it. There was no insolence in him. I could not possibly fear him.

“I believe you,” he said. “How old are you, Lavinia?”

“Eighteen last January.”

“‘Ripe now for a man, of full age now for marriage,’” he said gently, and I knew it was a line of a song, though I did not know the song.

“Oh yes,” I said, very drily. I felt no shyness, no falseness, with him.

My response surprised the brief laugh from him again.

“Perhaps I did not do you justice, Lavinia,” he said. It seemed he too could say anything to me, whether I understood it or not. That was all right.

“What should I call you?”

He said his name, and I said, “You’re Etruscan?”

“I’m a Mantuan. I had Etruscan grandfathers. How did you know?”

“Maru, Maro—it’s an Etruscan name.”

“So it is. Ah, but how long ago—how long ago you lived, Lavinia! Centuries, centuries! Is there any Mantua, now—yet? Do you know that name?”

“No.”

He said, after a pause, and with a kind of wondering, passionate urgency, “Rome. Do you know that name?”

“No. But the Etruscans call—” I stopped. The secret name of the river is not to be spoken to all. Did he know it? But why keep secrets from a wraith, from a dying man? “One of Tiber’s sacred names is Rumon.”

“She came to Albunea by herself,” he said, speaking into the darkness, “and knew the sacred names of the river, and had no wish to be married. And I knew nothing of all that! I never looked at her. I had to tell what the men were doing… Perhaps I can—” But he broke off, and presently said, “No. No chance of that.” He looked around again, and sighed, and said, “I keep thinking I’ll wake up and see the damned deck of the ship, and the gulls overhead, and the sun that goes across the sky so slowly, and the damned Greek doctor…”

I have said we understood each other, that we spoke the same language. I did understand him, though he used words I did not know.

We sat in silence for a while. An owl called to the left, an owl answered from the right.

“Tell me,” he said, “have they come yet, the Trojans?”

A word I did not know. “Tell me who they are.”

“You’ll know who they are when they come, Latinus’ daughter. I am—” He hesitated—"I am searching for my duty here. How much is it right for me to tell you? Do you want to know your future, Lavinia?”

“No,” I said at once. Then I sought in my own mind for my duty, or my will, and finally said, “I want to know what’s right to do, but I don’t want to know what’s to come of it.”

“It’s enough to know what ought to come of it,” he said, gravely agreeing. I felt his smile though I could not see it.

The left-hand owl called again, the right-hand owl replied.

“Oh,” he said, “the air is so cool, the night is so dark, and the owls call, and the earth, the dirt—this is Italy, I’m home!…I wish I could die here. Here, not on that wooden deck on the sea in the sun. Here, on this dirt. But this isn’t my body, this is only my delirium.”

“I think you are here,” I said, “only your body is not. But I see you. I talk with you. Tell me who the Trojans are.”

“No no no. I must not. They are yet to come. Do what’s right to do and what follows will be what should follow.” He laughed. “Tell me, have you any suitors, Lavinia, ‘ripe now for a man, of full age for marriage’?”

“Yes.”

“What are their names?”

“Clausus the Sabine, Almo Tyrrhus’ son, Ufens of Nersae, Aventinus, Turnus of Rutulia.”

“And you favor none of them?”

“I favor none of them.”

“Why is that?”

“Why should I? Where can a man take me that is better than my father’s house? What do I want with a lesser king? Why should I serve Lares that are not my family’s Lares, the Penates of some other woman’s storerooms, the fire of a foreign hearth? Why, why is a girl brought up at home to be a woman in exile the rest of her life?”

“Hah,” he said, not a laugh this time but a long outbreath. “I don’t know, Lavinia. I don’t know. But listen. If a man came—if a man came to marry you who was a man among a thousand—a warrior, a hero, a handsome man—”

“Turnus is all that.”

“Has he piety?”

The word brought me up short, but I had no doubt of my answer. “No,” I said.

“Well. If a man came who was heroic and also responsible, and just, and faithful, a man who had lost much, and suffered much, and made a good many mistakes and paid for them all—a man who saw his city betrayed and burned, and saved his father and his son from the burning, a man who went down alive into the underworld and returned, a man who learned piety the hard way… Might you favor such a man?”

“I would certainly pay attention to him,” I said.

“It would be wise to do so.”

A silence fell between us, companionable.

I said at last, “Have you seen, when the young men have archery contests, sometimes they catch a dove, and put a cord round her foot, and shinny up a high pole and tie her to the top, leaving just enough cord so she thinks she can fly? And then she is the target of their arrows.”

“I have seen that.”

“If I were an archer I’d break the cord with my arrow.”

“That too I have seen. But another man shot the dove as she flew free.”

After a while I said, “Perhaps it’s just as well that women don’t learn to shoot arrows.”

“Camilla did. You know of her?”

“A woman archer?”

“A woman warrior, beautiful, invincible. From Volscia.”

I shook my head. All I knew of the Volscians was what my father said: savage fighters, faithless allies.

“Well,” the wraith said, “I suppose I did invent her. But I liked her.”

“Invent her?”

“I am a poet, Lavinia.” I liked the sound of the word, but he saw I did not know it. “A vates,” he said. I knew that word of course: foreteller, soothsayer. It went with his being part Etruscan, and with the knowledge he seemed to have of what had not happened yet. But I didn’t see what it had to do with this woman warrior, who sounded like a mere story to me.

“Would you tell me more about the man who is coming?”

He pondered a little. Even though we were talking with such ease and openness, in perfect trust, as if we were both shadows, harmless and invulnerable, with all eternity before us, still, he was a man who thought before he spoke.

“Yes,” he said, “I can do that. What do you want to know?”

“Why is he coming here?”

“That, I think, I should not tell you now. Time will tell. But I think it would not be wrong for me to tell you where he is coming from.”

“I am listening.” I got more comfortable on the fleeces.

“O Lavinia,” he said, “you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it. Well, never mind. Did you ever hear of Troy?”

“Yes. It’s a little town south of here, near Ardea.”

“Ah—not that Troia. This one was a great city. Far east of here, east of the Middle Sea, east of the isles of Greece, on the shore of Asia. There was a pretty prince of Troy named Paris. He and a Greek queen ran off together. Her husband called the other kings of Greece together, and they went to Troy, a great army in a thousand beaked ships, to get the woman back. Helen, her name was.”

“What did they want her back for?”

“Her husband’s honor demanded it.”

“I should think his honor demanded that he divorce her and find himself a decent wife.”

“Lavinia, these people were Greeks. Not Ro—not Italians.”

“King Evander’s a Greek. I wonder if he’d chase after a cheating wife.”

“Lavinia daughter of the king, will you let me tell my tale?”

“I’m sorry. I won’t talk.”

“Then I will tell you the story of the fall of Troy, as Aeneas told it to the queen of Carthage,” he said. And he sat up straighter, there on the dark ground, a shadow among shadows, and began to sing.

It wasn’t singing like the shepherds’ songs, or rowers’ choruses, or the hymns at Ambarvalia and Compitalia, or the songs women sing all day at spinning and weaving and pounding and chopping and cleaning and sweeping. There was no tune to it. Its words were all the music of it, its words were its drumbeat, clack of the loom, tread of feet, oarstroke, heartbeat, waves breaking on the beach at Troy away across the world.

I cannot say here all he sang, about the great horse, and the snakes that came out of the sea, and the fall of the city. I will tell only what I have most thought about in the tale.

When the Greeks came out of the horse and let their army into the city, Aeneas the Trojan warrior fought against them in the streets. He fought in a kind of madness, furious, mindless, until he saw the king’s high house afire. Then his mind cleared: he thought of his own house and people, and ran there. That house was some way from the center of the city, and it was still quiet there.

As he went through the streets he saw great powers made visible, moving in the darkness, the powers that willed Troy to burn.

When he got home, he tried to get his people to leave the house, escape the city, save themselves; but his father Anchises wouldn’t go. Anchises was crippled, could hardly walk. He said he would die in his own house. But the house people wouldn’t leave him there, wouldn’t go without him. Aeneas was about to give up, rush back into the madness and get himself killed in the street fighting. His wife Creusa stopped him, and told him he had no right to do that. It was his duty and hers to try to save their people. She had their little son Ascanius with her. And as she spoke, someone said, “Look!"—and they saw that the boy’s hair had caught fire—a gold flame leaped up over his head. They put it out, but old Anchises, who could read omens, said it was a good omen. Then they saw a shooting star run across the sky and fall into the forest up on the mountain over the city, Mount Ida. Anchises said they should follow that star. So Aeneas told all the house people to scatter out and run, get out of the city any way they could, and told them where to meet: at a mound with an old altar of the Grain Mother, outside the city gate under Mount Ida. Then Anchises carried the household gods in a big clay pot, and Aeneas carried crippled Anchises on his back; he took little Ascanius’ hand, and Creusa followed him; and so they set off through the dark streets.

But Anchises saw soldiers down a side street and shouted to Aeneas to run. Aeneas obeyed, turned aside, running blindly in the dark, and lost his way. Finally he recognised a street and made his way, still carrying his father and holding the little boy’s hand, to the gate, and came out to the altar where all his people were waiting for him. Only then he realised his wife wasn’t with them. She’d been behind him when he turned and ran, and he never looked back to see if she was with him. No one had seen her.

So he went back into the city alone. He ran to their house, thinking she might have gone there. The whole house was burning, full of flame. He ran through the city shouting, “Creusa! Creusa!"—past the ruined buildings, and the fires, and the soldiers killing and looting. And then he saw her. She stood in front of him in the dark street. But she was taller than herself. And she said, “I will not go with you, nor will I be the slave of any Greek. The Earth Mother keeps me here. And you must go a long way for a long time, you must go, my sweet husband, until at last you come to the Western Land. There you will be a king and have a queen. No tears for me, but let your love guard our son!” And he tried to speak to her, and to take her in his arms—three times he tried, but it was like putting his arms around the wind, around a dream. She was gone into the shadow.

So he went back to the altar mound, where a great crowd of people had gathered now, fleeing the city, joining his house people. No Greeks had followed them out of the city, yet. He took his father up on his back again, and led them all up into the hills, where the shooting star had fallen. It was almost morning.

I remember that as the poet’s voice died away, a first bird piped up, thin and far off, though there was no light yet in the sky, and no voice answered. Here, too, it was almost morning. I looked where the shadow of the poet had been and there was nothing. I lay down in the fleeces and slept till the sun’s light, piercing and flashing through the dark trunks and thickets of the forest, woke me.

I was ravenously hungry, a wolf. I went straight to the woodcutter’s cottage, where Maruna was waiting for me. It was the old kind of house, one tall round room of stakes with a roof of boughs, all thatched with straw. The woodcutter was already gone to his work in the woods. I asked his wife for food. She had nothing but a scrape of spelt porridge and a cup of sour goat’s milk, which she was frightened to offer me because she thought such poor stuff would insult me and I’d be angry with her. I gobbled it up. Having nothing to give her, I kissed her. I thanked her for feeding the she-wolf. She laughed in bewilderment.

“I ate everything you have, what will you eat?” I asked, and she said comfortably, “Oh, he always brings a rabbit or some birds.”

“Perhaps I’ll wait,” I said, but my joke bewildered her again. No doubt she thought we always ate meat at the king’s house.

So I set off with Maruna. There was a great joy in me that morning. Maruna saw it and asked, “Was it a good night there?”

“Yes. I saw my kingdom,” I said. I did not know myself what I meant. “And I saw a great city fall, all burning. And a man came out of it with a man on his back. And he is coming here.”

She listened, believed me, asked nothing.

I could say that, I could talk that way to Maruna, my slave and sister, but not to anyone else.

All the way home I puzzled how I could win my way back to Albunea, soon, as soon as possible, and stay there more than one night. For I was quite certain that the poet would come back, but equally certain that he could not come back for long. His time with me was limited. He was on his way down to the shadow land, and it would not be a long journey for him.

I turned aside from our path and walked to the little river Prati, running shallow and bright on its stones. I was thirsty, and knelt to drink above the ford there, marked with the hooves of cattle. When I looked up from drinking, the ford made me think of the place I had stood in my dream six years before and seen the blood in the water, on the river Numicus. A dread and awe came into me. I stood, and opened my meal bag, and scattered salsamola on the stones.

I looked up at Maruna standing patiently on the riverbank, a tall girl my age, with a long, dark, soft Etruscan face. Tying up the meal bag I said, “Maruna, I need to go back to Albunea, soon. And maybe stay more than one night.”

She pondered for half a mile homeward before she said, “Not while King Turnus is here.”

“No.”

“But when he leaves… Will the king ask why you want to go?”

“Probably. And you can’t lie about sacred things.”

“You can be silent, though,” said Maruna.

“I am the king’s daughter,” I said, thinking how the poet had called me that. “I will do as I will do, and the king will nod his head.” I laughed out loud, and then I said, “Look, look, Maruna! There’s Silvia’s deer! What’s he doing so far from home?”

The big stag was walking on an open hillside just above a field where the new crops were coming up green. His white linen neckpiece was torn and dingy, but his antlers were splendid in their new velvet.

Maruna pointed a little way ahead of the stag: a slender doe was drifting along, nibbling a grass stem here and there, ignoring her follower entirely. “That’s what he’s doing so far from home.”

“Mating season or not. Just like Turnus,” I said, and laughed again. Nothing could keep my heart down that morning.

So with that courage in me I went to my father as soon as I got home, and greeted him, and said, “Father, when our guest has gone, may I go to Albunea again? Maruna will go with me, and anyone else you wish, if you think I need to be guarded. I wish to sleep there alone, more than one night.”

Latinus looked at me, a long look, affectionate, distant, judging. He was about to ask me a question, and then he did not. “I begrudge every night you are not under my roof, daughter. How much longer will I have you? But I trust you. Go to the sacred place when you will, stay as you must, return when you can.”

“I will,” I said, and thanked him, and he kissed my forehead. Then, because fathers must be stern, he said, “I expect you to be at the banquet tonight. And no sulking, no green swoons.”

“Then keep the African creature from me.”

“I will,” he said, and I saw perfectly well that he was thinking he wished he could keep the man who brought the African creature from me too; but he said nothing.

So I endured the rest of Turnus’ visit, meek and maidenly, even saying a word or two at table now and then. Turnus in fact paid very little attention to me. He did not need to. It was my father he must persuade. My mother, of course, was already wooed and won. The tricky bit for Turnus was to encourage her to adore him without offending my father, and to seek my father’s conversation and approval without letting her feel neglected. Turnus was a fierce, impetuous man, used to getting his way, not used to watching his tongue. He kept up his cautious courtesies pretty well, but sometimes I knew he was as desperate to get the banquet over as I was. It gave me a fellow feeling with him. As a cousin, I liked Turnus.

The animal from Africa had bitten my mother painfully, and then disappeared. Later on it was found that one of the hounds had got it, eaten its entrails, and left the rest lying by the house wall, where a pregnant weaving woman saw it, thought it was the corpse of a baby, went shrieking into labor, and bore a dead child. That was a creature of ill omen if ever I saw one.

I came again to the altar in Albunea in the evening of the Kalends of May. We had started late from home. By the time I had hung up the basket of food I brought with me on a tree branch to keep it from vermin, and blessed the altar place, and laid out the fleeces to sleep on, it was getting dark. Again I wished for a fire, for the cheer of it, but I had left the fire pot with Maruna. I sat and listened and watched the light die. The trees gathered and grew stronger in the dark. One owl called, from the right, far off. None answered.

In the great silence my heart went down, and farther down. What a fool I was to have come here. What did I remember of my last night here? I had had a dream about a man who was dying somewhere else, in some other time. Nothing to do with me. And for that I had come back here, with my silly basket of food.

I lay down. I was tired, and quite soon was asleep.

I woke in the black starless dark and looked past the altar. He was there.

“Poet,” I said.

He said, “Lavinia.”

A light rain was pattering on the ground and on the leaves of the forest. It ceased and began again and ceased.

He came where he had sat before, not far from me, and sat on the ground again, his arms round his knees.

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No. Are you?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to offer him fleeces to keep off the rain, but I knew it was no good.

“The ship is coming into harbor,” he said. His voice was gentle and humorous, charged with passion yet quietly flowing, even when he was not singing his poem. That is what his song was called, he had told me, the first night, an epic poem. “We’ve passed through the arms of the harbor, where Pompey had his blockade of ships. I can feel how the rise and fall of the waves has diminished. I hated that swelling and sinking when I was out at sea, but I miss it now. We’ll be ashore soon, no waves at all. Only a hot, flat bed, and sweat and aching, and more fever and less fever… What an escape some kind god has given me! To be here, in the dark, in the rain, to be cold, shivering—are you shivering, Lavinia?”

“No. I’m fine. I wish—” I didn’t know what to say. “I wish you were well,” I said.

“I’m well enough. I’m very well. I have been granted what few poets are granted. Maybe it’s because I haven’t finished the poem. So I can still live in it. Even while I die I can live in it. And you, you can live in it, be here—be here to talk to me, even if I can’t write. Tell me… Tell me, daughter of King Latinus, how goes it in Latium?”

“The spring was early. Calving and lambing went well. The spelt and barley are tall for the season. Everything is well with the Penates of my house, except the salt is getting low. I’ll have to go down to the salt beds at the mouth of the father river soon, and bring dirty salt back, and clean it and leach it and bake it and soak it and dry it and pound it and all the rest you have to do to make it right.”

“How did you learn to do all that?”

“From the old women.”

“Not from your mother?”

“My mother is from Ardea. They don’t have salt beds nearby, down there. They trade for their salt with houses like ours. That’s why our women know how to make it. We trade it. But the sacred salt, for the salsamola, I have to make that myself. From beginning to end.”

“What would you rather do?”

“Talk with you,” I said.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“The Trojans.”

“What do you want to know about the Trojans?”

I had trouble getting started, but then it came out: “When Troy was burning… His wife Creusa—they were in the streets, trying to escape—He had the child, she was behind him. They got separated. The Greek soldiers killed her. And then she came to him, taller than life, there in the darkness and the burning, and told him he must go on, get out, save his people. And he tried to hold her, three times, but she was only air and shadow.”

He nodded.

“But later on—you said he went down to the underworld, and talked to the shadows of the dead there—later on. Did he meet his wife again there?”

The poet was silent, and then said, “No.”

“He couldn’t find her among so many,” I said, trying to imagine the dead.

“He didn’t look for her.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. And I doubt that I’ll know any more when I get there. We each have to endure our own afterlife… He had lost her. In the fire, in the slaughter, in the streets. Lost her forever. He couldn’t look back. He had his people to look after.”

After a time I asked, “Where did they go after they escaped from Troy?”

“They wandered a long time around the Middle Sea, not knowing where to go, getting it wrong. They came to Sicily and stayed a while. His father died there. They set off again to seek the promised land, but a storm scattered the fleet and threw the ships onto a wild coast in Africa.”

“And what did they do there?”

“Thanked the gods for safe deliverance, and got themselves some venison, and feasted. And then Aeneas and his friend Achates went off to find out what country they were in, and came to a city that was just being built. Carthage it was called, and the people were Phoenicians, and the queen was Dido. And she welcomed them.”

“Tell me about it.”

The poet seemed hesitant. I felt at once that his hesitation had something to do with the queen.

“He fell in love with Queen Dido,” I said, and felt a curious flatness or disappointment as I said it.

“She fell in love with him,” the poet said. His voice was grave. “I think this is not really a story to be told to a young girl, Lavinia.”

“But I am not a young girl. I am ‘ripe now for a man, of full age now for marriage.’ As you said… And I am aware that mar ried women sometimes fall in love with other men. Younger men.” I doubt he heard the dryness in my voice when I said that. He was thinking about the African queen.

“She was a widow. There was nothing wrong about it. Except that her heart and her will ran away with her. She very much needed a king. She was an excellent ruler, her people loved her; they were founding a beautiful city there, everything going very well; but it’s a rare thing for a woman to rule long alone. It makes men uncomfortable. The neighboring kings and chiefs were after her. Courting her, coveting her power, wooing and threatening at the same time. Aeneas came as her savior, her answer to them—a tried warrior, with his own troops—a man born to be a king, but with no country of his own. She needed him before she loved him. She fell in love with his son, first. She took to Ascanius at once, held him and hugged him and promised him good times, and of course the motherless boy liked her, the warmhearted, beautiful, kind, childless woman. And that went to Aeneas’ heart. His son was all the family he had left. He promised to help Dido get her city started. And so…”

A pause.

“One thing led to another,” I said.

“I can never get used to the fact, though I know it, that women are born cynics. Men have to learn cynicism. Infant girls could teach it to them.”

I had no idea what a cynic was but I knew what he meant. “I wasn’t speaking in contempt. One thing does lead to another. There’s no harm in that. How else would husbands and wives ever come to love each other? She needed a man. And he was kind and noble and handsome and shipwrecked. She fell in love with him. Any woman would.”

“Let it be an omen,” the poet murmured.

“But did he fall in love with her?”

“Yes. He did. She was beautiful, fiery, passionate. Any man would. But…”

“He was still mourning for Creusa.”

“No. His wife, his city, that was all behind him. Far back. Years and lands and seas between them. He didn’t look back. But he didn’t know how to look forward. He was caught in the moment, in the present time. His father’s death was a hard blow to him. He had depended on Anchises, obeyed him even when the old man led them astray. When he died and took the past with him, Aeneas felt the future was gone too. He didn’t know how to go on. The storm that scattered his fleet and took them off course, to lands they didn’t know—there was a storm like that in his soul. He’d lost his way.”

“What was his way?”

“Here. To Italy. To Latium. He knew that.”

“Why couldn’t his future have been in Africa? Why shouldn’t he stay and help the queen build her city and be happy with her?” I spoke reasonably, though in fact I did not want him to have done that. I counted on the poet’s argument.

But he didn’t argue. He shook his head. After a while he said, pursuing his thought, “It was a storm that brought them together, too. While they were out hunting. They got separated from the rest of the hunting party. There was rain, hail, they took refuge in a cave. And so…”

“Did they marry?” I asked after a while.

“Dido took their love for marriage, called it marriage. He did not. He was right.”

“Why?”

“Not even need and love can defeat fate, Lavinia. Aeneas’ gift is to know his fate, what he must do, and do it. In spite of need. In spite of love.”

“So what did he do?”

“He left her.”

“He ran away?”

“He ran away.”

“What did she do?”

“She killed herself.”

I had not expected that. I thought she would send out ships after Aeneas, pursue him, take fiery revenge. I could not like this African queen but I could not possibly despise her. Yet suicide seemed a coward’s answer to betrayal. At last I said so.

“You do not know what despair is,” the poet said gently. “May you never know.”

I accepted that. I knew what despair was. It was where my mother lived after her sons died. But I had not lived there myself.

“It was a hard death,” he said. “Her sword went wide of the heart, and the wound killed her only slowly. She told them to light the pyre she lay on before she was dead. He saw the great fire of it from out at sea.”

“And knew what it was?”

“No. Maybe.”

“His soul must cringe in him every time he thinks of that. Weren’t his people ashamed of him?”

“Even if he’d called himself king there, it would never have been their country. And Dido had stopped building the city, dropped the reins of government. She’d lost her self-respect, she couldn’t think of anything but him. Things weren’t going right. They were glad to get him away from there.” After a time he said, “He did see Dido, down in the underworld. She turned away. She refused to speak to him.”

That seemed only right. But there was an awful sadness in the story, an awful shame and sorrow, an unbearable injustice. I felt so sorry for all three of them, Creusa, Dido, Aeneas, that I could not say anything. We sat a long time in silence.

“Tell me of happier things,” the poet said in his beautiful, gentle voice. “How do you spend your days?”

“You know how the daughter of a house spends her days.”

“Yes, I do. I had an older sister, in Mantua. But this is not Mantua, and our father wasn’t a king…” He waited; I said nothing. He said, “On feast days the chief men of the city come to dine at the king’s table, and visitors from other cities of Latium, and perhaps allies from farther away—and your suitors, of course. Tell me about them.”

I sat for a while in the darkness. The rain had passed over and stars were beginning to shine overhead and through the leaves of the forest around us. “I come here to get away from them. I don’t want to talk about them, please.”

“Not even Turnus? Isn’t he very handsome, very brave?”

“Yes.”

“Not handsome and brave enough to move a girl’s heart?”

“Ask my mother,” I said.

At that he was silent. When he spoke again he had changed his tone. “Who are your friends, then, Lavinia?”

“Silvia. Maruna. Some of the other girls. Some of the old women.”

“Silvia who has a pet stag?”

“Yes. We saw it down this way, Maruna and I. It was following a doe, just like a dog after a bitch. A dog with antlers. It made us laugh.”

“Males in love are ridiculous,” he said. “They can’t help it.”

“How do you know about Silvia’s stag?”

“It came to me.”

“You know everything, don’t you?”

“No. I know very little. And what I thought I knew of you—what little I thought of at all—was stupid, conventional, unimagined. I thought you were a blonde!…But you can’t have two love stories in an epic. Where would the battles fit? In any case, how could one possibly end a story with a marriage?”

“It does seem more like a beginning than an end,” I said.

We both brooded.

“It’s all wrong,” he said. “I will tell them to burn it.”

Whatever he meant, I did not like the sound of it. “And then look back from out at sea and see the great pyre flaming?” I said.

He gave his short laugh. “You have a cruel streak, Lavinia.”

“I don’t think so. Maybe I wish I did. Maybe I’ll need to be cruel.”

“No. No. Cruelty is for the weak.”

“Oh, not only the weak. Isn’t a master stronger than the slave he beats? Wasn’t Aeneas cruel in leaving Dido? But she was the weak one.”

He stood up, a tall shadow in the dimness. He paced back and forth a little. He said: “In the underworld, Aeneas met an old friend, the Trojan prince Deiphobos. Paris, who ran off with Helen, was killed in the war. So the Trojans gave Helen to his brother Deiphobos.”

“Why didn’t they put her out the gate and tell her to go back to her husband?”

“The Trojan women asked that question; but the Trojan men didn’t hear it… So, then, the Greeks took the city, and Menelaus came looking for his wife, the woman they fought the war for. And Helen met him. She took her old husband to the bedroom where her new husband was sound asleep. He hadn’t heard the sounds of battle. She hadn’t wakened him. She’d stolen his sword. So he woke to his death, the Greek stabbing him, hacking him, chopping off his hands, slicing his face in half, crazy for blood, and the woman looking on. And so Deiphobos went down into the dark. Down there, years after, Aeneas saw him, his shadow, still maimed, mutilated, unhealed. They talked a little, but the guide broke in—no time for this, Aeneas must hurry on. And the murdered man said, ‘Go on, go, my glory. I am gone. I join the crowd, return to darkness. I hope you find a better fate.’ And speaking, he turned away.”

I sat in silence. I wanted to cry, but had no tears.

“I will be gone soon,” the poet said. “I will join the crowd, return to darkness.”

“Not yet—”

“Keep me here. Keep me here, Lavinia. Tell me it is better to be alive, better to be a slave living than Achilles dead. Tell me I can finish my work!”

“If you never finish it, it will never end,” I said, speaking only to speak, saying what came into my head, to give him some comfort. “Anyway, how are you going to end it, if not with a marriage? With a murder? Do you have to decide how it ends before you get to the end?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t, in fact. It’s not exactly a matter of deciding. Rather of finding out. Or, as it now stands, of giving up, because I haven’t the strength to go on. That’s the trouble. I am weak. So the end will be cruel.” He paced back and forth once, between me and the altar. I could hear no sound of his steps on the earth. But finally he sighed, a long, rather noisy sigh, and sat down again, his arms round his knees. “Tell me what you and Silvia do, what you talk about. Tell me about her deer. Tell me how you make the salt. Tell me when you spin, when you weave. Did your mother teach you those arts? Tell me how you unlock and clean out the storeroom early in summer, and leave it open for a few days, praying to the Penates that it be refilled with the harvest…”

“You know it all.”

“No. Only you can tell me.”

So I told him what he asked, and comforted him with what he knew.

I spent the next day alone in the forest of Albunea. The air was heavy under the trees, and the sulfur smell stopped my breath when I went near the springs. Wandering away, I found a path up the steep hill, almost a crag, that rises up over the forest. Clearings at the top gave a wide view west to the bright line that was the sea. I sat up there in the sunlight in the thin grass, my back against a fallen log. I had my spindle and a bag of wool; a woman usually carries some of her Penates with her. I was spinning the very finest thread for a summer toga or palla, so my light bag of wool would last me a good while. I sat and spun and thought and gazed out over the hills and woods of Latium, all green with May. At midday I ate a little cheese and spelt bread and found a spring to drink from. There were shepherds’ lettuce and watercress growing at the spring, and I ate that, too, though I had intended to be very sparing, even perhaps to fast; but fasting comes hard to me. Then I explored the hilltop a little more, and when the sun was halfway between high heaven and earth I made my way down into the depths of the woods again. I passed the stinking springs on the windward side and came again to the altar place. There I slept a little, for I had had little sleep the night before. When I woke, in the dusk, big white moths were fluttering in the air within the sacred wall, rising and falling, circling round about one another in an airy maze, wonderful to see. I watched them sleepily, and through their dance I saw my poet standing near the altar.

“The moths look like souls in the underworld,” I said, still only half awake.

He said, “It is a terrible place. On the far side of the dark river are marshy plains, where you hear crying—little, weak, wailing cries, from the ground, everywhere, underfoot. They are the souls of babies who died at birth or in the cradle, died before they lived. They lie there on the mud, in the reeds, in the dark, wailing. And no one comes.”

I was awake now. I said, “How do you know that?”

“I was there.”

“You were in the underworld? With Aeneas?”

“Who else would I be with?” he said. He looked about uncertainly. His voice was low and dull. He went on, hesitant, “It was the Sybil who guided Aeneas… What man did I guide? I met him in a wood, like this. A dark wood, in the middle of the road. I came up from down there to meet him, to show him the way… But when was that? Oh, this dying is a hard business, Lavinia. I am very tired. I can’t think straight any more.”

“You’re not thinking straight about the babies,” I said. “Why would they be punished for not having lived? How could their souls be there before they had time to grow souls? Are the souls of dead kittens there, and of the lambs we sacrifice, and of miscarried fetuses? If not them, then why babies? If you invented that marsh full of miserable dead crying babies, it was a misinvention. It was wrong.”

I was extremely angry. I used the second most powerful word I know, wrong, nefas, against the order of things, unspeakable, unsacred. There will be many words for it, but that was the one I knew. It is only the shadow, the opposite, the undoing, of the great wordfas, the right, what one must do.

He sat down, doubling up his tall shadowy figure, and I could see how wearily he moved, how he bowed his head down like a man spent, defeated; but I would not have pity on him.

“If cruelty comes of weakness, as you said, then you are very weak,” I said.

He did not answer.

After a long time I said, “I think you are strong.” My lips and voice quivered as I spoke, for I did pity him, though I did not want to, and my heart was full of tears.

“If it is wrong, I will take it out of the poem, child,” he said. “If I am permitted to.”

I wanted so much to be able to help him, to give him a fleece to sit on or my own toga to put round his shoulders, for he sat hunched as if he was shivering cold. But I could do nothing for him, and could touch him only with my voice.

“Who is it that permits or forbids you?”

“The gods. My fate. My friends. Augustus.”

I knew what he meant by his fate and his friends. At least I knew what the words meant. The others I was not certain of. And I did not know who his friends were and whether he could trust them. As for his fate, we none of us know that.

“But surely you’re a free man,” I said at last. “Your work is your own.”

“It was till I got sick,” he said. “Then I began to lose my hold on it, and now I think I’ve lost it. They’ll publish it unfinished. I can’t stop them. And I haven’t got the strength to finish it. It ends with a murder, as you said. Turnus’ death. Why does it? Who cares about Turnus? The world is full of fine fearless young men eager to kill and be killed. There’ll always be enough of them for every war.”

“Who kills him?”

The poet did not answer my question. He only said after a long time, “It’s not the right ending.”

“Tell me the right ending.”

Again he was silent for a long time. “I can’t,” he said.

It was almost dark. Leaves and branches that had stood out sharp black against deep blue had begun to blur away into the dimness of night. Venus shone for a minute low between dark tree trunks in the west, and I prayed to the power of its beauty. There was no wind at all, and no bird or creature made any noise.

“I think I know why I came to you, Lavinia. I have wondered—Of all the people of my poem, why were you the one who called my spirit? Why not my great, my dear Aeneas? Why can’t I see him with my living eyes as I saw him so often with the eyes of my art?”

His voice was extremely low, almost breathless. I strained to listen. I did not understand much of what he said, then.

“Because I did see him. And not you. You’re almost nothing in my poem, almost nobody. An unkept promise. No mending that now, no filling your name with life, as I filled Dido’s. But it’s there, that life ungiven, there, in you. So now, at the end, when it’s too late, you have it to give to me. My life. My earth of Italy, my hope of Rome, my hope.”

There was a desperation in his voice that wrung my heart. His words died away and he sat still, his head bowed. I could barely see him.

I was afraid, knowing that he was drifting away from me into his sadness, his mortal sickness. I was afraid I would lose even his shadow. I wanted to keep him with me. Though I did not and could not understand it as he did, I knew what the bond between us was, and how to use it to bring him back.

I said, “I want to know about Aeneas. After he left Africa, after he looked back over the water and saw her funeral fire burning… where did he go then?”

The poet kept his dejected posture for a while. He shook his head a little. He said hoarsely, “Sicily.” He looked around, shrugging his shoulders slowly to get the cramp out.

“He’d already been there, hadn’t he?”

“He went back to celebrate the Parentalia for his father. While he was in Africa with Dido, a year had passed since Anchises died.”

“How did he celebrate?”

“Properly. With ceremony and sacrifice, and then with games and competitions and a feast.” His voice had grown stronger. The music was coming back into it. “Aeneas has a very just sense of what’s appropriate. And he knew his men needed heartening. Seven years wandering and here they were back where they’d been a year ago. So he gave them games. What he forgot was the women.”

“That hardly seems surprising.”

“Very well, my cynic. But Aeneas is not a forgetful man. He thinks about all his people. A lot of women had entrusted themselves to him in the escape from Troy. He’d tried to make the long voyaging bearable to them. But when he announced that they were setting off yet again to seek the promised land, it was too much. Juno got into them, she goaded them. They rebelled. They went down to the shore and set fire to the ships.”

“What do you mean, Juno got into them?”

“She hated Aeneas. She was always against him.” He saw that I was puzzled.

I pondered this. A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can’t “get into” me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.

The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names—Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren’t people. They don’t love and hate, they aren’t for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live.

I was entirely puzzled. I finally asked, “Why does this Juno person hate Aeneas?”

“Because she hates his mother, Venus.”

“Aeneas’ mother is a star?”

“No; a goddess.”

I said cautiously, “Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus.”

He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. “So do we,” he said. “But Venus also became more… With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite… There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light…”

It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy. I said at last, “Why would anyone hate her?”

“Jealousy,” he said.

“A sacred power jealous of another?” I could not understand it. Is a river jealous of another river, is earth jealous of the sky?

“A man in my poem asks, ‘Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?’”

He looked at me. I said nothing.

“Great Homer of Greece says the god lights the fire. Young Lavinia of Italy says the fire is the god. This is Italian ground, Latin ground. You and Lucretius have it right. Offer praise, ask for blessing, and pay no attention to the foreign myths. They’re only literature… So, never mind about Juno. The Trojan women were furious at not having been consulted, and determined to stay in Sicily. And so they set fire to the ships.”

That I could understand well enough. I listened.

“The whole fleet would have burned if a rain squall hadn’t come up and drowned the fires. They lost four ships. The women ran, of course, took to the hills… But Aeneas never even thought of punishing them. He realised he’d pushed them too far. He called a council and let them all choose freely: stay in Sicily, or sail with Aeneas. Old people and many women, a lot of mothers with young children, chose to stay. Others chose to keep on looking for the promised land. So, after the nine days of the festival were done, and another day for the tears of parting, they sailed.”

“This way? To Latium?”

The poet nodded. “But first he put in at Cumae.”

I knew there is an entrance to the underworld there. “To go down? Why?”

“A vision: his father Anchises told him to come find him, across the dark river. And having always obeyed his father and the fates, Aeneas went to Cumae, and found the guide, and the way down.”

“And he saw the marsh where the babies lie crying,” I said. “And his friend who was murdered so cruelly that even his ghost was not healed. And Queen Dido, who turned away and wouldn’t speak. But he didn’t look for his wife Creusa.”

“No,” the poet said humbly.

“It doesn’t matter. I think there is no rejoining, there,” I said. “Shadow cannot touch shadow. I think the long night is for sleeping.”

“Daughter of Latinus, foremother of Lucretius! You promise me what I most desire.”

“Sleep?”

“Sleep.”

“But your poem—”

“Well, my poem will look after itself, no doubt, if I let it.”

We both sat in silence. It was quite dark. The wind was down. Nothing stirred.

“Has he left Cumae, by now?”

“I think so,” the poet said.

We spoke very low, almost in whispers.

“He’ll stop at Circeii, to bury his nurse Caieta, who begged to come with him; but she’s old and ill, and she dies in the ship. He puts ashore to bury her. That will delay him some days.”

A chill of fear had come into me. Too much was coming to me, too soon. I wanted the poet to tell me what was coming, and I didn’t want it. I said, “I don’t know when I can come back here.”

“Nor do I, Lavinia.”

He looked across the dark air at me and I could tell that he was smiling.

“Oh my dear,” he said, still very softly. “My unfinished, my incomplete, my unfulfilled. Child I never had. Come back once more.”

“I will.”

I am not the feminine voice you may have expected. Resentment is not what drives me to write my story. Anger, in part, perhaps. But not an easy anger. I long for justice, but I do not know what justice is. It is hard to be betrayed. It is harder to know you made betrayal inevitable.

Who was my true love, then, the hero or the poet? I don’t mean which of them loved me more; neither of them loved me long. Just sufficiently. Enough. My question is which of them did I more truly love? And I cannot answer it. One was my husband, the beautiful man whose flesh my flesh enclosed to make my son in me, the author of my womanhood, my pride, my glory; the other was a shadow, a whisper in shadows, a virgin’s dream or vision, yet the author of all my being. How can I choose? I lost them both so soon. I knew them only a little better than they knew me. And I remember, always, that I am contingent.

So, of course, were they. It is only too likely that little Publius Vergilius Maro might have died at six or seven, ashes under a small gravestone in Mantua, before he was ever a poet; and with him would have died the hero’s glory, leaving a mere name among a thousand names of warriors, not even a myth on the Italian shore. We are all contingent. Resentment is foolish and ungenerous, and even anger is inadequate. I am a fleck of light on the surface of the sea, a glint of light from the evening star. I live in awe. If I never lived at all, yet I am a silent wing on the wind, a bodiless voice in the forest of Albunea. I speak, but all I can say is: Go, go on.

When i got home with maruna the next day, everybody on the women’s side tried to tell me simultaneously that Turnus had sent a messenger to my father, and that Queen Amata wanted to see me right away.

My habit of fear of my mother made me wince inwardly at that. Yet she had not screamed at me or humiliated me in the old way for a long time now. I was ashamed of my cowardice. As soon as I had washed the dirt of travel from my feet and changed my clothes, I went to her rooms. She sent her maids away and greeted me with real eagerness, kissing my forehead and taking my hands to draw me down to sit beside her. Such a show of love might have seemed false, affected, but Amata was not a schemer. She was far too much at the mercy of her feelings to play a part she did not feel. She was truly glad to see me, and her pleasure went to my heart. I had so longed for the approval, the kindness of my beautiful and unhappy mother that the least sign of it was irresistible to me. I sat down by her willingly.

She stroked my hair. Her hand trembled a little; she was very excited. Her great, dark eyes seemed full of light.

“King Turnus has sent a messenger, Lavinia.”

“So all the women said.”

“It is a formal request for your hand in marriage.”

She was watching me so eagerly and so closely, sitting so near, that I could do nothing but look down, speechless. I felt the blush rise to my skin, the wave of heat all over my body, and the sense of being trapped, helpless, exposed.

My shrinking silence did not surprise or displease her. She took my hand and held it while she talked. “It is an unusual proposal. King Turnus is a great-hearted man. He speaks not only for himself, but for other young kings and warriors who have come here courting you—Messapus, Aventinus, Ufens, and Clausus the Sabine. Turnus’ message is that to avoid dispute and bad blood among these powerful subjects and allies of Latium, the time has come for the king to choose your husband from among them, and so end their rivalry. All are agreed to accept Latinus’ choice. He will be sending for you soon to tell you his decision.”

I could do nothing but nod.

“It’s not an easy decision for your father to make,” Amata said, her voice growing less hurried and eager, warmer, now that the message had been given. “He’s devoted to you, he doesn’t want to let you go. But he’s been very worried about the rivalries Turnus speaks of. He’s lain awake nights, fearing that the young warriors will come to blows over you or try to force a choice upon him that will upset the kingdom. They’re like a box of tinder, those young men. One spark and they’ll be in arms. And your father is proud of the peace he has kept, and wishes with all his heart to keep it. He is an old man, past fighting. He needs, in fact, the heart and strength of a young man to defend him—a son-in-law. Which of them would you think best suited to that honor?”

I shook my head. My throat was dry, no words would come from it.

“He will ask you, Lavinia. You must be ready for that. He will not want to marry you to a man you dislike—you know that! But it is time for you to marry, and past time. We can’t change that. So you must choose. And it will truly be your choice. He would never go against your heart.”

“I know.”

She got up and moved about the room a little; she took one of the tiny pots of scent from her table and brought it over to dab the rose oil on my wrists.

“It is rather nice to have young men quarreling over one,” she said, with a smile. “I know! It seems such a pity to have to bring all that to an end… But it can’t last forever. And the impossible choice, when suddenly it must be made, usually makes itself. Among them all, all the young possibilities, there really is only one who is possible. Who is inevitable. Intended.”

She smiled again, radiantly. I thought, she is like a girl speaking of her betrothed.

I still said nothing, and she said after waiting a minute, “Well, my dear, you need not tell me your choice; but you will have to tell your father—or let him choose for you.”

I nodded.

“Do you wish us to choose for you?”

The eagerness was strong in her voice. I could not speak.

“Are you so frightened?” She spoke tenderly, and sitting down by me again held me close against her, as she had not done since I was six years old. I could not relax, but sat stiff in her encircling arms. “Oh, Lavinia, he will be kind to you, good to you. He is so fine—so handsome! There is nothing to be afraid of. And you can visit back here often with him. And I’ll be welcome to come visit you in Ardea—he said so to me more than once. Ardea was my home when I was a child. It is a beautiful city. You’ll see. It won’t be so different for you from being here. He’ll look after you as your father does. You’ll be so happy there. You have nothing to fear. I will go with you.”

I broke loose from her embrace, stood up; I had to get free. “Mother, I will talk with father when he sends for me,” I said, and hurried out of the room. There was a singing in my ears, and the burning flush had turned to a cold that ran in my bones.

As I hurried along the colonnade I saw a great commotion in the central courtyard, a lot of people all gathered around the laurel tree. I tried to get past unseen, but first Vestina and then Tita saw me, and crying, “Look, look, come look!” dragged me out towards the tree. Something was up in it, far in the branches, a fat dark animal—a huge sack of something, writhing—a cloud of smoke, dark heavy smoke, caught in the branches. From it came a humming, droning sound. Everybody was shouting, pointing. Bees, they shouted, bees swarming!

My father came across the court, grave, grey, and erect. He looked up at the great swarm that pulsed and sagged and reformed constantly at the summit of the tree. He glanced up at the clouds beginning to color with sunset.

“Are they our bees?” he asked.

Several voices said no. The swarm had flown in over the roofs of the city, “like a great smoke in the sky,” somebody said.

“Tell Castus,” Latinus said to the house slave with him. “They’re gathering for the night. He’ll be able to move them.” The boy darted off to fetch Castus, our beekeeper.

“It’s a sign, master, it’s a sign,” Maruna’s mother cried. “To the very crown of the tree that crowns Laurentum, they come! What is the omen?”

“What direction did they come from?”

“Southwest.”

There was a brief, waiting silence. My father spoke: “Strangers are coming from that quarter—by sea, perhaps. They will come to the king in his house.”

As father of the household, the city, and the state, Latinus was accustomed to read omens. He used no mysterious means and preparations, as the Etruscan soothsayers did. He looked at the omen, read its meaning, and spoke it unhesitating, with grave simplicity.

His people were satisfied. A good many of them stayed in the courtyard, chattering about the omen, brushing strayed, sluggish bees out of their hair, waiting to see Castus gather the swarm to take to our hives.

Latinus had seen me, and said, “Daughter, come.”

I followed him to his rooms. He stopped in the anteroom and stood by the small table there, facing me. The evening light was bright in the doorway.

“Has your mother spoken to you, Lavinia?”

“Yes.”

“So you know that your suitors have agreed to ask me to choose your husband from among them.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” he said with a forced smile, “will you tell me which one you wish me to choose?”

“No.”

I did not speak insolently, but the refusal took him aback. He studied me a minute. “But there is one of them you prefer.”

“No, father.”

“Not Turnus?”

I shook my head.

“Your mother has told me that you love Turnus.”

“No.”

Again he was surprised, but he was patient with me. He said gently, “Are you quite certain, my dear? Your mother has told me that you’ve been in love with him since he first came courting you. And she warned me you’d be timid about admitting it. Such timidity is right and proper in a virgin girl. We need say nothing more about it. All you need do is indicate that you will be content if I accept him for you.”

“No!”

Now he was puzzled and uneasy. “If not Turnus, then which of the others?”

“None.”

“You want me to refuse them all?”

“Can you, father?”

Looking grim, he took a turn round the room; he hunched his broad, muscular shoulders, rubbed his hand over his chin. He had not shaved yet, and the grey bristles stood out on his jaw. He stopped again facing me. “Yes, I can,” he said. “I am still king of Latium. Why do you ask that?”

“I know that Turnus’ offer contained a threat.”

“It can be taken so. You need not concern yourself with that. What do you want, what do you intend, Lavinia? You’re eighteen. You cannot go on indefinitely as a maiden at home.”

“I would rather be a Vestal than marry any of those men.”

We call a woman a Vestal who chooses not to marry or is never chosen, who stays with her father’s family and keeps the hearth fire alight.

He sighed, looking down at his big, scarred hand on the table. I think he had to resist the temptation of that idea, that hope to keep me with him. He finally said, “If I were not king—if I had other daughters—if your brothers had lived—you might have that choice. As it is, as my only child, you are bound to marry, Lavinia. You carry my power in you, our family’s power, and we can’t pretend you don’t.”

“One more year.”

“It will be the same choice in a year.”

I had no answer to that.

“Turnus is the best of them, daughter. Messapus will always be under Turnus’ thumb. Aventinus is a fine lad, with his lion-skin coat, but he hasn’t much sense. You can’t live your life up in Ufens’ mountains, and I won’t send you off among those shifty Sabines. Turnus is the pick of the lot. He’s probably the best man in Latium. He’s running his kingdom well; he’s feared as a fighter; he’s rich. And good-looking. I know all the women think so. And he’s a relation. Your mother tells me he’s wildly in love with you.”

He looked at me hopefully, but I would not return his gaze.

“She tells me all the praises he sings of you. She believes he’s so determined to have you that if I give you to one of the others, he’ll rebel, despite this agreement they made. She may be right. He’s an ambitious, self-confident fellow. But he has reason to be. Your mother has encouraged him. In fact, if you picked one of the others, she might rebel.” He tried to make it a joke, but it was not a joke, and I could see misery in his eyes. “She has your welfare and the good of our kingdom very much at heart,” he said.

I had no argument, no answer.

“Give me five days, father,” I said. My voice came out hoarse and weak.

“And then you will tell me your choice?”

“Yes.”

He took me in his big arms then, and kissed my forehead. I felt the warmth of his body and smelled the familiar smell of him, harsh, dear, and comforting as the smell of the earth on the hills of summer. “You are the light of my eyes, daughter,” he murmured. That made me cry. I kissed his hand and ran back to the women’s side in tears. Everybody was in the courtyard in the twilight, watching Castus talk the swarm together into a great humming dark globe over the fountain, shadowy, swaying, shrinking together always closer and smaller as he talked his spells and made his net ready to capture the bees.

THE FIVE DAYS SEEMED VERY LONG TO ME. I KEPT TO MYSELF as well as I could. Once I got away and ran to Tyrrhus’ farm. Silvia was in the dairy; I coaxed her to come away with me. I wanted to talk to her about the choice I had to make, which of course she knew about; it was common knowledge. Very little in a king’s house can be a secret. And everyone knew that her brother Almo had not even been included in the list of suitors Turnus offered to my father. When I came to her, she hoped I might ask her to reassure Almo, to tell him that he was my choice and should ask the king directly for my hand. The family had let their hopes run high, thinking my friendship with Silvia raised her brother’s status to equality with mine, as indeed it did among us young people: but not among the kings and queens, the mortal powers of our state.

When Silvia understood that I had refused to choose any of the suitors, she began to press Almo’s case. When I shook my head and said, “No, Silvia, I can’t choose him,” she wanted to know why. Had I not always shown him a kindness that had led him to love me? was he not good enough for me? and so on.

I said, “I love him better than any of the others, but I do not want him as my husband. And if I did, if I chose him, it would be the same as killing him. Turnus would be after him like a hawk on a mouse.”

It was a stupid comparison, and Silvia took it ill. “Even if your father refused to protect my brother, I think our household has a few good warriors of its own,” she said stiffly.

“Oh, Silvia, I’m the mouse—the mouse in the field when they cut the hay and lay the ground all bare—everybody watching me, nowhere to go. I run about and run about in my mind and can’t find anywhere to hide. Everywhere I look there’s Turnus, with his blue eyes, and his smile, and my—” I stopped myself. “And my mother trusts him,” I said.

“You don’t?” she asked curiously.

“No. He has no piety. He looks only at himself.”

“Why shouldn’t he? He’s rich, he’s handsome, he’s a king.” Her irony was not entirely ill-natured, but she had no sympathy for me. She was hurt for Almo, and would not let me off easily.

I think she knew I was frightened, but would not ask me what I was afraid of, so I could not speak to her as I longed to.

All the same, we parted friends. She knew well enough that Almo had been in over his head, and that indeed he would have put himself and his family in mortal danger by winning a woman King Turnus wanted. She gave me a long hug and a kiss when we parted, and said, “Oh, I’m sorry all this came up. I wish there weren’t any men in the world. I wish we could go down to the river together the way we did last spring!”

“Maybe we will,” I said, but my heart was low. I kissed her, and so we parted. I went back through the fields trying not to cry. I was near tears or in tears half the time, and sick of it. There was nobody in the world whom I could talk to, or who could understand me, but the poet. Maruna might have understood, indeed perhaps she did, but I could not talk about my mother to her. To ask slaves to speak or hear dishonor of their master is unjust, it puts them at risk. There are always talebearers, toadies, among household slaves, how could it be otherwise? No room in a king’s house is without an ear at the door. I knew I had Maruna’s sympathy, and that was much help to me; but, since I could not protect her, I could not confide in her.

Most of the other women and girls simply wondered why I didn’t jump at Turnus’ offer. Old Vestina sang his praises daily, always to a chorus of sighs and giggles.

And my mother’s affectionate pressure and persuasion in favor of Turnus continued, until four days had passed, and I must make my choice the next day. Then her exasperation with me burst out all at once in a fit of fury like those of years ago. She came into my room just after I had lain down to sleep. She was in her sleeping gown, carrying a tiny oil lamp, its flame no larger than a caper bud; she was there suddenly, looming tall and bulky in the loose white gown, her black hair loose round her white face. “I don’t know what game you’re playing, or how far you think you can lead your father by the nose, Lavinia,” she said in a low, harsh voice, “but I tell you now, you will marry Turnus and be queen of Ardea. You don’t have to cower and whine about it. If you don’t like Turnus, don’t worry, he may not like you all that much either, it’s a political marriage not a rape. There’s one thing a girl is good for, and that’s to be married well, and you’re no different or better than any other girl. So do your duty, as I did mine. If you ruin this chance I’ll never forgive you. I’ll never forgive you.” It was not what she said so much as how she said it that terrified me: she stood very close to the bed, and every moment I felt that she was about to strike me, to claw me with her nails as she had done long ago. Her voice shook and hissed and her breath came hard.

“Say you will marry Turnus,” she said. “Say you will!”

I said nothing. I could not.

A strange noise came from her, a kind of shrieking groan, and she turned and ran out of the room.

After a while I got up, for there was no sleep in that bed, and crept out into the courtyard. No one else was awake. I sat on the wooden bench under the laurel tree and watched the slow sliding of stars over the roofs of the Regia. The chill of the night seemed to come into my mind and make it cool and clear. I saw that I must marry Turnus: it was inevitable. To accept another suitor would be to bring civil war into the kingdom. His agreement with the others meant nothing. Turnus had to compete, to win, to be master; he would never let another man have a woman he had claimed. Mar riage was my duty and my destiny. My mother was right, even if she spoke in her own interest not in mine.

In the morning I would tell my father I was ready for him to accept Turnus as my husband.

The great Bears stood high over the father river, over Etruria. The leaves of the laurel whispered in the mild flow of the night wind. I thought of those three strange nights in Albunea, where the faint stink of the sulfur pools always hung in the dark air and I sat talking with a shadow, a dying man who had not yet been born and who knew my past and my future and my soul, who knew who it was that I should marry, the true hero. But here, now, in the couryard of my house, all that seemed distant, blurred and obscure, a false dream that had nothing to do with waking life. I would not think about it again. I would never go back to Albunea.

For a moment I heard the voice, the voice like no other, in my memory. When the poet first came, when he first stood there in the altar place, he had said that Faunus spoke from the trees of Albunea to King Latinus, telling him not to marry his daughter to a man of Latium. Then, seeing me startled and troubled by that, he said, “I think it has not happened yet. Faunus has not spoken to Latinus. Perhaps it never will happen.” And he said that perhaps he had imagined it, that it was a dream within a dream.

And I had imagined it. It had not happened. It would not happen. False dreams, visions, follies.

The roofs were standing hard black against the paling eastern sky when I went in and lay down for a little while.

It was a day of worship, and I was up before the sun. I put on the red-edged toga I wore as a child and still wore for the rites, and went to wake my father, calling with the ritual words at his door: “Do you wake, king? Waken!” And soon he came out, also in his red-edged robe, the loose corner pulled up over his head for worship, and we went to the altar in the atrium.

A number of the house people were with us, among them my mother, who did not usually attend the common rituals. She stood quite close behind me as I scattered the salsamola on the altar. I had the sense that she intended to be close to me, to keep me under her eyes, within reach, all that day, till she got what she wanted. The warmth, the pressure of her body so close behind me was palpable, and I wanted to escape it. I moved closer to my father as he held a little pitch-dipped stick in Vesta’s fire and lifted it to light the altar torches, murmuring the sacred words. I do not know if the pitch scattered, or a wind blew in, or a hand moved, but I suddenly saw a strangeness all around me, a flickering movement of brightness. There were voices crying, screaming—"Lavinia, Lavinia! her hair’s on fire—she’s burning—” I put up my hands to my head and felt a queer soft movement in the air about it. Sparks danced and leapt around me, and I smelled smoke. As I turned I saw through a yellowish, dim cloud my mother standing there not an arm’s length from me. She stared with wild eyes at something above my head. I turned and ran from her, ran through the people, through the atrium, out to the courtyard. Flame and yellow smoke followed me, sparks scattered from me, people screamed, I heard my father call my name. I ran to the fountain pool under the laurel and threw myself down, my face in the water, my hair in the water.

My father was there kneeling by me, lifting me up. “Lavinia, little one, daughter, my daughter,” he whispered. “Are you hurt, are you hurt, let me see.”

I was very bewildered, but I saw amazement dawning through the horror in his face. He passed his hand over my dripping head, down my lank wet hair.

“Can it be you took no harm?”

“What was it, father? There was a fire—”

“A fire above your head. Leaping, blazing. I thought it was your hair—I thought the torch had caught it—Are you not hurt? not burned?”

I put my own hand on my head; I was dizzy, but my scalp and hair felt as usual, only sopping wet. Nothing was burned but the corner of my toga which I had worn pulled up over my head at the altar. All that corner of the white, red-bordered wool was scorched black.

The whole household was gathered around us by now, filling the courtyard, shouting and crying and asking and answering. My mother stood by the trunk of the laurel, her face fixed, blank. My father looked up at her and said, “She took no harm, Amata. She is all right!”

She answered something, I don’t know what. Maruna’s mother pressed forward; she knelt beside us and touched my head and cheeks gently, a license allowed her as a healer. She looked then at my father and said sternly, imperiously, “An omen, king. Speak the omen!”

And he obeyed the slave. He stood up. He looked down at me, and up into the great tree, and spoke. “War,” he said.

All the people fell silent at his voice.

“War,” he said again, and then, as if struggling with the words, or as if the words pushed themselves from his throat and mouth without his will: “Bright fame, bright glory will crown Lavinia. But she brings her people war.”

Gradually everything and everyone got quieted down. People scattered out, talking all the way, to their morning work. Vestina took me off to dry my hair and weep and fuss over me, while the red-bordered toga with the blackened, burnt corner passed from hand to hand among the marveling women.

The rite that had been interrupted must be begun again and carried out. That was so much on my mind that at last I broke free from the women to go assist my father; but he sent me back at once to the women’s quarters, telling me to send Maruna to help him. I should rest, he said, and come to him later.

I was glad of it, for I found myself shaky and light-headed. “I think I need to eat something,” I said when I came back to the women’s side, and Vestina cried, “Of course, of course, poor lamb!” and sent girls off to fetch curds and honey and spelt porridge, all of which I ate, and felt better.

My mother had been in the room with us all along, but did not join the chatter. She sat at her great loom. I was a good spinning-woman, I made as strong and even a thread as any, but I was slow and clumsy at the loom. Amata was by far the best of our weavers, working fast, with a steady rhythm and utter concentration; when she was weaving she was aware of nothing else, and her face looked rapt and calm. The very fine woolen thread I had been spinning all this spring was for the piece she was working on now, a full breadth of the finest white fabric, the kind you can gather yards of into your hand and pass through a finger ring. Today, as the women at last began talking about something besides the mysterious flame of fire, and how the yellow smoke had swirled behind me when I ran, and how sparks flew all through the house yet nothing caught fire from them, and so on, and on, my mother turned round from the loom and beckoned to me. I went to her.

“Do you know what it is I’m making, Lavinia?” she asked with the strangest smile, a wide, blind smile that was almost coy.

As soon as she asked me the question I knew the answer. But I said, “A summer palla.”

“Your wedding gown. You’ll wear it when you marry. See how fine it is!”

“Your weaving’s always beautiful, mother.”

“You’ll wear it when you marry, when you marry him,” she said, almost as if it were the refrain of a song, and she turned back to the loom and took up the shuttle. And as she wove she whispered that half song under her breath, “You’ll wear it when you marry, when you marry him.”

About midday I went alone to my father’s rooms. As I crossed the courtyard I paused under the laurel tree and asked the powers of the tree and the spring, the Lar of the household and my dear Penates, to be with me and help me. All I had thought and seen so clearly last night, sitting there on the bench under the stars, all I had so firmly and reasonably resolved, was gone, burnt away in a puff of heatless flame, a coil of yellow smoke. I knew what I must say, but I wanted help in saying it.

My father embraced me and tried to make certain once again that I was quite unhurt, unburnt, unshaken.

“I am well, father,” I said. “I was terribly hungry, though. I ate everything they brought from the kitchen.” That reassured him, as I knew it would. “Now may I speak to you about my suitors?”

He sat down on the chest against the wall and gave one grave nod.

“I said I would ask you today to give me to one of them.”

A nod.

“But because of what happened this morning—the omen—I ask you not to ask me my choice, but instead to go to Albunea, and ask the powers there. Whatever they tell you, I will obey.”

As I spoke he looked up at me heavily from under his heavy grey-black eyebrows. He listened. When I had spoken, he thought for some while. At last he nodded once again.

“I will go today,” he said.

“May I come with you?”

Again he thought it over. “Yes,” he said. Then he looked up at me again with the shadow of a smile and said, “As we used to go together. Do you remember the first time? You were still a child…” But his face was melancholy. I saw that he looked very worn.

I kissed his hand, and said, “I’ll be ready to go as soon as you like, father.”

“Sacrifices,” he said. “This is… I will need… a lamb—two. Is there a white calf? Two lambs and a white calf—at least.”

“I’ll send to Tyrrhus’ Doro, he’s with the cows and calves in the long meadow pasture. I can see to the animals, father.”

“Good. Do that. There are some things I must see to here before we go—A black calf, better, Lavinia, if there is one. Black, in that place.”

That place, Albunea, that lies so close above the underworld that the shadows of the dead can come and go there easily. Black, in that place.

Lambing had been early that spring, and the lambs the shepherd led to me were quite large. The calf old Doro brought was small, a runt in fact, and he was not altogether black, but brownish on the legs and face; not a perfect sacrifice. My father frowned at him.

I said, “He is pious, father. See how he follows along? And he did his best to be black.”

Doro nodded solemnly. “He’s the blackest we’ve got, king,” he said.

So the king nodded, and we set off.

I wore the toga with the burnt corner, for it was the only sacred toga I had; year after year, my mother had put off making the red dye for a new one. Because we had to lead the animals, and perhaps because my father felt some unease or mistrust in the air, we were quite a troop. It was not as when he and I walked there long ago, he carrying the young lamb, or when I walked with Maruna. She came with me, indeed, but also there was Doro with the calf, and the shepherd’s boy with the lambs, and two slaves carrying the other offerings, and three of my father’s guards, the men who kept the doors of the Regia and went with him, armed, when he rode out visiting other towns or other kings. They were called his horse-riders, his knights, and they did each keep a horse in the royal stable; but this was a sacred journey, and we went afoot.

One after another we walked through the bright day into the evening. We came to the little Prati and followed it upstream, and I remembered the rocky ford of the river where I had seen blood in the water in my dream.

The knights and Maruna and the slaves stopped at the outskirts of the forest. The men would camp there. Maruna would go to the woodcutter’s house. Doro and the shepherd boy led the animals, and Latinus and I carried the other offerings on into the forest of Albunea.

By the time the sacrifice was completed it was night, the altar fire and torches giving the only light under the dark trees. Doro and the boy took the skinned carcasses back to their camp, where the men would have the first feast on the meat. My father reversed the torches. Their flames died in the earth. He stood before the altar, where the fire still fed on the fat of the sacrifice, his head shrouded, murmuring the words of worship and humble request. I sat on the fleece of one of the lambs, listening. I feared and longed to hear the grandfather’s voice speak, answering him, from those dark, silent trees.

But I had scarcely slept the night before, and the day had been long and strange. I was so tired I could not keep my eyes open. I saw the little leaping gold of the altar flame waver and blur. Then I was lying down, looking up into the branch-circled sky dense with stars as the sea beach is dense with sand, a pavement of white fire. And it too wavered and blurred.

I woke. The stars blazed, but other stars. The fire was dead. A small owl called from far on the right, hii-ii, and another answered from yet farther, ii, i.

He was there, the shadow. He stood between me and the altar. His tall form was vague in the grey starlight. On the far side of the altar, near the wall, I saw a glint of bronze, a motionless bulk on the ground: my father sleeping. The feel of the air was that of the hour before the beginning of dawn.

“The time when the dying die,” my poet said, very softly.

I sat up, trying to see him more clearly. I was frightened, distressed, and did not know why, and knew why. I whispered, “Are you dying?”

He nodded.

The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen, the presence of the sacred, is called by its name.

“I don’t have long,” he said.

“Oh, I wish—” But wishes were no use.

“Your father has heard Faunus speak,” he said, with a ghost of laughter in his ghost of voice.

“Then—”

“You will not marry Turnus. No fear of that.”

I stood up, facing him. Though he spoke so gently I was still frightened.

“What will happen?”

“War. The bees swarmed to the great tree. The king’s daugh ter ran through the house with blazing hair, scattering sparks and smoke. And war and glory followed her.”

“Why must there be war?”

“Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is! Because men are men.”

“Then Aeneas is coming to attack us?”

“Not at all. He comes in peace, to offer alliance to your father, and marry you, and settle down to bring up his family. He brings the gods of his household here. But he brings his sword too. And there will be war. Battles, sieges, slaughter, slave taking, town burning, rape. And men who rant and boast, and then kill sleeping men. And men who kill young boys. And the growing crops laid waste. All the wrong that men can do is done. Justice, mercy, does Mars care for them?”

His voice had grown stronger, not loud but curiously strident, so that I glanced at my father to see if he had heard; he slept on, unmoving. “I can tell you the war, Lavinia. Shall I?” He did not wait for my answer. “It begins with a boy killing a deer in the woods. There’s a good cause for war, as good as any other. First to die is young Almo—you know him. An arrow in his throat chokes off his speech and breath with blood. Next old Galaesus, who’s rich and used to being in control, tries to keep them from fighting, comes between them, and has his face smashed in for his pains. And then Turnus sees his chance, and war begins in earnest. No man will spare another man in this battle, though he beg for his life. Ilioneus kills Lucetius, Liger kills Emathion, Asilas kills Corynaeus, Caeneus kills Ortygius. Turnus kills Caeneus, and Itys, and Clonius, and Dioxippus, and Promolus, and Sagaris, and Idas. The blood foams from the pierced lung. The man killed while sleeping vomits blood and wine as he writhes dying. Ascanius shoots his steel-pointed arrow through Remulus’ head, and Turnus’ javelin pierces Antiphates’ throat and lodges in the lung till the steel grows warm, and his sword cleaves Pandarus’ skull between the temples so that the man falls to the ground in his brain-spattered armor, his head dangling in two halves from his neck. And when Aeneas joins the battle, his spear crashes through Maeon’s shield and breastplate, on through his body, to sever Alcanor’s arm from his shoulder. And Pallas drives his sword into Hisbo’s swollen chest, and sweeps Thymber’s head from his neck, and severs Larides’ hand that twitches and clutches with dying fingers at the sword. And Halaesus kills Ladon, and Pheres, and Demodocus, and lops off Strymonius’ hand raised against him, and strikes Thoas in the face with a stone, scattering fragments of skull mixed with blood and brains. And Turnus hurls his steel-tipped lance of oak through Pallas’ shield and breast, and the boy falls forward eating dirt with his bloody mouth. And Turnus puts his foot on the corpse and tears away Pallas’ golden sword belt, boasting of the plunder that will be his death. Then hearing of this, Aeneas rushes out again in blind rage against the enemy, and though Magus begs him for mercy, Aeneas bends the man’s head back and cuts his throat, and he kills Anxur, he kills Antaeus, he kills Lucas, he kills Numa, he kills tawny Camers, he kills Niphaeus, he kills Liger and Lucagus, and Turnus is saved from him only by the goddess who loves him and draws him away from the battle. But Mezentius the tyrant of Caere kills Habrus, he kills Latagus, striking him full in the mouth and face with a huge rock, he hamstrings Palmus and leaves him slowly writhing, he kills Evanthes and Mimas. Acron, dying from Mezentius’ spear cast, hammers the dark earth with his heels. Caedicus kills Alcathous, and Sacrator kills Hydaspes, and Rapo kills Parthenius and Orses, Messapus kills Clonius as he lies fallen from his horse, and Agis is killed by Valerus, Thronius is killed by Salius, and Salius by Aealces. They kill together and are killed together. Then pious Aeneas obeying the will of fate and the gods pierces Mezentius’ groin with his spear, and kills Mezentius’ son Lausus as he tries to protect his father, driving his sword through the young man’s body to the hilt: the point pierces the shield and the tunic his mother wove for him, blood fills his lungs and his life leaving his body flees sorrowing to the shadows. And Aeneas is sorry for the boy. But when Mezentius challenges him, he goes to meet him with a shout of joy, and though Mezentius rains darts on him, Aeneas kills his horse, then taunts the fallen man, and cuts his throat. And the next day he sends Pallas’ body to his father, King Evander, with four prisoners to be sacrificed alive on the grave. How do you like my poem now, Lavinia?”

After a long time I managed to answer him, “That might depend on how it ends.”

“With the triumph of the glorious hero over his enemy, of course. He will kill Turnus, lying wounded and helpless, just as he killed Mezentius.”

“Who is the hero?”

“You know who the hero is.”

“He kills like a butcher. Why is he a hero?”

“Because he does what he has to do.”

“Why does he have to kill a helpless man?”

“Because that is how empires are founded. Or so I hope Augustus will understand it. But I do not think he will.”

He turned away from me and neither of us spoke. I had begun to cry while he sang his hideous chant of slaughter, and my face was still wet. When the poet spoke again, his voice had softened. “But that’s not where it ends for you, Lavinia.”

I took a step towards him, for I could no longer see his face. “Tell me, then.”

“Not with the end of his reign, after only three summers and three winters. You may think all is over at the bloody ford of the Numicus, but it is not there it ends, nor at Lavinium, nor Alba Longa. Not with your death, or your son’s. Not with the Kings, not with the Consuls, the fall of Carthage, the conquest of Gaul. Not even with the murder of Julius, or Augustus’ godhead. The great age returns… maybe… I thought so once. But be of good heart, my daughter, my young grandmother! The gods of Troy are coming to a good house, your house of Latium. And you will marry the son of Spring, the son of the evening star.”

I had hated him while he told that tale of slaughter, but I was losing him, now, already, moment by moment, and I loved him, yearning to him. “Wait—Only tell me—your poem, my poem, did you finish it?”

He seemed to nod, but I could hardly see him, a tall shadow in shadows.

“Don’t go yet—”

“I must go, my glory. I am gone. I join the crowd, return to darkness.”

I cried out his name, went forward, reaching out my arms to hold him, to keep him from death, but it was like holding a breath of the night wind. Nothing was there.

I sat on the fleece, my arms around my knees, the toga with the burnt corner wrapped around me for warmth, till the sky was light above the altar place. I went then to my father and said, “Do you wake, king? Waken!” He sat up. We had brought a little drinking water, for there is none near there; I gave him the flask, and he drank a swallow and rubbed a handful of water on his face.

“You heard the grandfather speak,” I said.

Looking up at me as if still not fully awake, he said, “The voice among the trees.”

I waited.

He looked off into the dark trees and said in the low, level voice of prayer, but clearly: “‘Do not let the daughter of Latium marry a man of Latium. Let her marry the stranger that comes, that even now is coming. And the kingdom of her sons will be far greater than the kingdom of Latium.’”

He looked up at me again. I nodded. “I understand. I will obey.”

My father got up, stiff and ponderous; he was not used to sleeping out, on hard ground, these days. He rubbed his thighs and stretched his arms painfully. “I am old, daughter,” he said. “And now I have to face those young fellows with this refusal.” He shook his head, hunched up his shoulders. “If only my sons had lived. I am too old, Lavinia!”

It was not like him to say that. I did not know what to say to him; I was too young to feel anything but surprised, uncomprehending pity, and I did not want to pity my father the king.

He went off into the woods to piss, and when he came back he was holding himself a little straighter. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’ll take no insolence from them. I can still protect my daughter and my house and city.” We gathered up the little we had brought, and as we did so, he said, “I could wish your mother hadn’t set her mind on your marrying Turnus. But I can see, because he’s her nephew, it seems to her like getting one of her sons back. Well. Come along, my dear.” He set off, walking heavily, and I followed.

When we came to where the men had camped, they were just waking. The sky was bright behind the eastern hills and all the birds in the world were singing. There was a little brook there, and my father and I both knelt on the bank to wash our hands and faces. As the knights joined us, I heard my father telling them what the oracle had said. That surprised me again. I had assumed he would announce it formally at home, perhaps summoning the suitors to explain to them that their request had been denied by the powers and the ancestors. To talk about it openly now was to ensure that it would be common knowledge in Laurentum as soon as we got back, and throughout all Latium within a day or two. I could not think why my father had done this, unless he thought he could not face my mother with the news himself, and wanted her to hear it from me, or from hearsay among the women.

But she came to meet us, almost running across the courtyard, flushed and beautiful in her excitement. “I know! I dreamed of you there,” she cried. “I am so glad!”

We both stopped, staring like cattle, no doubt. She took my hands and kissed me. “I am so happy about it!”

“About—?”

“Oh! The bridal bed! In Ardea! I saw it all in my dream!”

After a blank pause my father said, loudly and awkwardly, “The oracle forbids Lavinia to marry a man of Latium. She must wait for a foreign suitor.”

“No. That’s not what it said at all. I saw it. I heard it!”

“Amata, calm yourself,” he said. “We will speak of this in private. Lavinia—call the women—take your mother with you—” And he strode off to his rooms.

My mother started to run after him, then stopped, bewildered, and said to me, “What is wrong with him?”

“Nothing, mother. Come with me.” I tried to go on to the women’s side, but she protested, and only when her women Sicana and Lina came to urge her to come with them did she fall silent, the happy brightness dying out of her face, and follow me.

The news was all over the house and town at once, of course. The king’s daughter is not to marry Turnus, or Messapus, or any of them, she’s got to wait for a foreigner to come marry her. That’s what the bees meant, that’s why her hair caught fire yet didn’t burn. War! War! Who’ll fight? Who’s the foreigner coming? And what will King Turnus have to say to him?

And what will I have to say to him, I wondered, as everybody chattered on.

Amata seemed stunned. She did not tell us what the dream was that she had taken to be a true dream and that the oracle had so cruelly belied. She did not join in the general talk, did not speak to me at all. We kept away from each other. It was easy enough, we had kept apart for twelve years.

By nightfall I was sick of the chatter and commotion and wanted only to be free of the women, away from the house, outdoors, alone, where I could think. My mother was at her loom. I went and asked her permission to go get salt at the river mouth next day.

“Ask the king,” she said, not looking away from her work.

So I went to him. He pondered a minute. “I suppose it’s safe,” he said.

“Why would it not be safe?” I said, amazed. Our possession of the salt beds was one of our great strengths as a nation, and we guarded them accordingly. Nobody had tried to raid them for decades.

“I’ll send Gaius with you. And take a couple of your women.”

“What do we want Gaius for? I’ll have Pico with the donkey, to carry the salt back.”

“Gaius will go with you. Go by the west path. Be back before dark.”

“I can’t, father. We have to dig the salt.”

He frowned. “You can do that and be back in a day easily!”

“I hoped to spend the night there, father. By Tiber.”

I very seldom pleaded with him. “Well, why not,” he said after a long pause. “My mind is vexed, troubled, I hardly know… Go on, then. Give worship to our father river. But one night only!” As I thanked him and left, he said, “And look out for Etruscans!”

Everybody always said that when you went to Tiber, as if the northern bank were forever crowded with Etruscans waiting to leap in, swim across, carry you off, and torture you. There were awful stories about Etruscan torture. But we had always been on good terms with Caere, except when Mezentius ruled it. And it would be a mighty swimmer who swam the river there at its mouth. People said, “Look out for Etruscans,” when you went to the river the way they said, “Look out for bears,” when you went up into the hills—out of habit.

All the same, as I went to find Tita to tell her to find Pico and tell him to be ready with the donkey in the morning, I wondered if the foreigner I was to marry might be an Etruscan.

For when I was not in Albunea, when I was among people, the things my poet had said to me came and went in my mind, sometimes seeming as real as they did when he spoke them, but more often fading away like the shreds of a dream that vanish as you try to remember them. It was a true dream, but you cannot live your life in a dream even if it be true. Hardest of all to remember was what the poet had said last night—was it only last night? He was dying. I did not want to remember that. I did not want to remember what he had sung, the endless hideous deaths. I knew he had told me the name of the man I was to marry, his wife’s name and his son’s, I knew he came from the far city, Troy, I knew there was to be a war, men would kill men… and yet, here in the courtyard of the Regia, passing by the great laurel, where women were gathered talking and singing at their work, the names and all slipped away from me, and I wondered if the foreigner I was to marry might be an Etruscan.

They were foreign enough, the Etruscans. They saw the future in the livers of sheep. I liked Maruna’s bird lore, but I could do without the tortures and the sheep livers.

My spirits had risen as soon as I had permission to go, and when we left the city next morning I felt like a sparrow let go from the snare. All the trouble about suitors, the threats, the strange portents, the dark prophecies, dropped away from me. I forbade Tita to say a word about all that. We joked and told stories all the way to Tiber, and even grave Maruna laughed like a child. That was a joyous day, and that night I slept a quiet sleep on the dune under the stars.

And in the twilight of morning of the next day, alone, kneeling in the mud by Tiber, I saw the great ships turn from the sea and come into the river. I saw my husband stand on the high stern of the first ship, though he did not see me. He gazed up the dark river, praying, dreaming. He did not see the deaths that lay before him, all along the river, all the way to Rome.

There was nothing but commotion and discussion and agitation in the Regia and the town all that day. Everybody knew what the oracle had told Latinus and they all had to discuss it endlessly—and then word came across the fields of a fleet of ships seen going up the river, and of a crowd of armed strangers making camp on the Latin shore. The talk about that made me think of the great, dark, humming mutter of the swarming bees.

Very early the next morning, I slipped out of the Regia and out of Laurentum without asking permission or telling anyone, and ran through the oak grove to Tyrrhus’ farm. Silvia was in the cool stone dairy with some of the dairy women, skimming cream. I said, “Silvia, let’s go to the river. Let’s take a look at these strangers.”

It was usually Silvia, not I, who proposed anything daring or dangerous, and I took her by surprise.

“What do you want to see foreigners for?” she asked—a reasonable question.

“Because I have to marry one.”

She’d heard the decree of the oracle, of course. She frowned at first, no doubt thinking of Almo, but after a minute she looked up with a half smile. “You want to see if they have two heads?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe these aren’t the foreigners you have to marry one of.”

“I think they are.”

She was standing with the skimmer in hand, her hair tied back, her bare arms shining in the dim cool place and her bare feet on the wet floor; the dairy was kept very clean, sluiced out constantly with water. She couldn’t resist the escapade. “Oh, all right!” she said, and gave the skimmer and a few orders to Valenta the dairy keeper, and came out into the sunshine with me. She put on her sandals and we struck off across the pastures. It was six miles or so to the river; we had done it often in our rambles and explorations, and knew the ways through the woods.

We discussed where the foreigners might have landed, for we hadn’t heard a clear report yet. Silvia thought they would have tied up at the wooden docks at Sirmo, but I had it in my head that they had not gone so far upstream, but had beached their ships at the place called Venticula, where the river takes a great bend to the north. Though we said nothing about it, we were both aware that if any of our countrymen saw us, whether they recognised us or not, they would rightly tell us to get back home at once, and might make sure we did so. There was a cart road to Sirmo, to Venticula only a path leading through dense woods and past the marshes of the Fossula. We kept off the cart road and the straight pagus lanes, away from farmhouses and shepherds’ huts, following the path that wound over old grass-grown dunes and skirted swampy thickets as it neared the river, till we finally scrambled up the low forested hill above Venticula.

As we came over the crest of the hill, we both realised that we weren’t alone in the woods: we heard men talking, calling, the blows of an ax, then we saw a couple of helmeted heads across a myrtle thicket, behind which we at once crouched down to hide. Silvia had a fit of wild, silent giggles, which infected me. We crouched shaking with crazy laughter. The soldiers crashed on down the hill, and when it had been silent for a while except for ax blows far off, I wriggled around to the end of the thicket. From there I could look right down the hillside through the trees to the open glades by the shore. I whispered to Silvia, “There they are!” She crawled beside me and we lay watching the Trojans.

I saw my husband almost at once. He stood out among them, not by any ornament or richness of clothing—they were all dressed like soldiers on the march who’d been on duty a long time and crammed into ships on the sea as well, all plain and worn and dirty—he simply stood out, the way the morning star stands out from other stars. He was a man in his forties, with a strong face. He was sitting comfortably on the ground and laughing at something one of the other men said. They were having a picnic there on the grass. Almost all of them were men. They had brought flatbread up from the ships, which were run up stern-first along the beach. They had gathered a great basket of wild greens to pile up on the rounds of flatbread, having no meat or cheese, evidently, as well as no plates or tables. The few women among them were none of them young; one matron, smiling, presented Aeneas with a round of bread heaped with greens, which he rolled up and bit into with gusto. Close to him sat a boy of fifteen or so, who looked enough like him, and looked up to him in such a way, that I was sure it was his son Ascanius. With him were a very pretty boy of his age and a beautiful youth a few years older, wearing a bent-forward red cloth cap. The woman who had served the meal sat down beside him and set his cap straight with an unmistakably maternal fussiness, adoring him.

“They’re much better looking than I thought foreigners would be,” Silvia whispered to me. “That boy with the red cap is gorgeous.” I hushed her with a nudge of my elbow. I was afraid they might hear us, since we could hear them clearly enough, though to be sure the wind was blowing our way.

Red Cap said something about the meal being fit for rabbits not men, and young Ascanius said, “Well, it’s not at every meal that you get to eat the table too.”

At that Aeneas looked at him as if startled. After gazing motionless for a minute he stood up. They all looked up at him.

“That is the omen,” he said, his voice ringing clear and solemn. “‘When hunger drives you to eat your tables, there will be your journey’s end.’ You remember what the Harpy said to us?”

A murmur of assent and awe ran among them all, those travel-weary men and boys and few women sitting there on the grass above the river. They did not take their eyes off Aeneas.

“Euryalus, bring me a myrtle bough,” he said, and Red Cap ran to break off a bough. Aeneas bent it into a wreath to cover his head, and stretched out his arms, his hands palm up to the sky. He said, “Dear faithful gods of the house of Troy! This is your promised land at last! We are home, my people, we have come home!” He looked round at them all and his face shone with tears. He prayed again: “Hear us, spirit of this place, and spirits and rivers we do not yet know! Night, and the rising stars! My father in the underworld and my mother in the heavens, hear our prayer!” Then he turned round and drew a deep breath. “Achates!” he shouted in a tremendous voice. “Tell them to bring the wine up from the ship!”

At that moment Silvia nudged me. Seven or eight men with bows and arrows were trotting in single file across the clearing to our left. It was time for us to be out of there.

We crept under the shelter of the cork oaks into thick woods to our right, and through them back over the crest of the hill and so down the way we’d come. We were home before evening. At the farm, Silvia turned to me and gave me a big hug. We were both sweaty from our long run, we stuck to each other when we hugged. We laughed, and Silvia said, “That was a good idea, going there!” So we parted for the last time.

When I got back to the Regia I heard that my father had given orders that no one was to approach the strangers’ camp until he had determined who they were and why they had brought longships and armed men into the heart of Latium. I said nothing, of course, about my hare-brained exploit, but slipped into the house, washed and put on a clean tunic, and sat spinning away as if I’d never set foot outside the door in my life.

The word was that the king was going to send Drances with a party of men to talk to the strangers in the morning. But next day before Drances even set out, people ran shouting, “They’re coming!"—and a small troop of foreigners came riding up to the city gates.

Their horses looked poorly, as well they might, poor creatures, after a sea voyage, but they were decked out with silver-mounted bridles and trappings, and the men were grand in embroidered cloaks, bronze breastplates, and tall helmets with crests of horsehair or feathers. I could get only a glimpse of the troop from our doorway as they rode up the Via Regia, before the women were sent off to the back of the house; but I saw Aeneas was not with them.

While Drances and other officials brought them in and escorted them to the king’s audience hall, I went through the royal apartments and entered the audience hall through the king’s door, behind his seat. He had not bidden me to be there; but I had been present with or without my mother at many audiences, as a courtesy to the visitors and to welcome their wives and daughters, and if he did not want me now, he had only to send me away.

I do not think he knew at first that I was there. He was already speaking to the Trojan envoys. He welcomed them with stately courtesy and asked immediately, though politely, where they came from and the cause of their visit to Latium: had they perhaps gone astray or been driven out of their course on the high seas?

A tall, thin Trojan introduced himself as Ilioneus, and in a spate of elegant and respectful language explained that they had come to the kingdom of the great Latinus following the command of fate. Natives of the noble city of Troy, which had withstood a ten-year siege by the Greeks but had fallen at last to treachery, they had escaped from the burning.

As the herald spoke, I heard the poet’s voice overlapping his as a sea wave running up the shore overtakes and overlaps the wave before it. I knew then that the high house of the king and all of us in it had being only in those words. And that knowledge changed nothing. The messenger still must speak, the king must listen, the king’s daughter must follow her fate.

The messenger spoke on: oracles had bidden them bring the gods of Troy over the seas to the far shore of Italy, where they would find a home. Their lord Aeneas son of Anchises had led them for seven years across land and sea, and though other kings had asked them to stay, he would offer alliance only to Latinus, who reigned over the land promised them by the oracle. And in earnest of his goodwill, Aeneas offered to the king some poor fragments, saved from the fallen city, that had belonged to his father’s brother King Priam of Troy.

One of the Trojans came forward and laid at my father’s feet a marvelous tall libation cup that looked to be of solid gold carved and jeweled, a silver rod or wand, a thin, old, gold crown, and a delicate weaving of royal crimson embroidered with gold thread.

My father gazed down at these things in silence for some time, neither accepting nor refusing them. At last he asked the envoy to tell him more about the city of Troy and their quarrel with the Greeks, and then something of their seven-year voyage across the Middle Sea, all of which Ilioneus did. My father asked if they had stopped in Sicily, and Ilioneus said that they had left a colony there; he asked if they had been in touch with the Greek settlement south of us, whose king was Diomedes, and Ilioneus said that they had not, Diomedes being a veteran of the siege of Troy and not likely to be well disposed to Trojans. All his answers were both direct and graceful.

My father let silence fall again, looking downward, his eyes moving as they followed his thoughts.

At last he looked up. “Oracles, you say, bade you come to this country,” he said. “I will tell you that your coming also was foretold. I think, my friends, that we are to enact what fate will have us do. If your chief Aeneas seeks alliance, if he seeks to settle here with us, I will ask him to come to my city and offer me his hand, even as he has offered me these noble gifts. And I will take it, as I accept them, in sign of friendship and pledge of peace. And say this also to him: my only daughter is bidden by our oracle to marry a stranger, a man who, even as the oracle spoke, was coming to us. I think your lord Aeneas is the man. And if my mind sees truly, this marriage is what I wish. So bid him come.” He stood up, and only then, I think, did he see me; but he showed no surprise, he only looked at me with serene, affectionate eyes, a look of perfect certainty, smiling a little.

He did not introduce the envoys to me, but moved among them, admiring their noble gifts, ordering our people to bring out gifts for them. I backed away quietly through the door I had come in.

To hear myself promised as part of a treaty, exchanged like a cup or a piece of clothing, might seem as deep an insult as could be offered to a human soul. But slaves and unmarried girls expect such insult, even those of us who have been allowed liberty enough to pretend we are free. My liberty had been great, and so I had dreaded its end. So long as it could end only with Turnus or the other suitors, I had felt that insult, that bondage awaiting me, the only possible outcome. I had been the dove tied to the pole, flapping its silly wings as if it could fly, while the boys below shouted and pointed and shot at it till at last an arrow struck.

I felt nothing of that entrapment now, that helpless shame. I felt the same certainty I had seen in my father’s eyes. Things were going as they should go, and in going with them I was free. The string that tied me to the pole had been cut. For the first time I knew what it would be to fly, to take to my wings across the air, across the years to come, to go, to go on.

“I will marry him,” I said in my heart, as I went through the rooms of the Regia. “I will make him my husband, and bring the gods of his house here to join with the gods of mine. I will bring him home.”

I turned aside and went across the courtyard, past the great laurel tree, to the domed rooms behind the atrium, the storehouses, my domain, where I and the Penates ruled. Before long it would be the fourth month, June, time to throw open the doors of those storehouses and clean them out, clear them for the new harvest. I sent for a couple of the women who helped me there and we began making ready for the ceremony, recalling and singing to one another the words of the songs of Vesta and Ceres, Fire and Bread, while we carried out empty bins and swept the dusty floors.

There was commotion all through the house and city as the gifts Latinus had ordered were brought out and men chosen to take them. He himself had been out to the stables to select a few good horses, and to send word to Tyrrhus to have a herd of choice bull calves and a flock of lambs driven to Venticula so the Trojans could have sacrifice and meat. He knew what a king’s hospitality should be, and enjoyed his own generosity. He looked like a young man as he strode across the courtyard, and I watched him with pride.

But Amata came hurrying to meet him from the women’s quarters, her hair loose, her face white, her voice loud.

“Is it true what they say, husband? That you gave our daughter to a stranger—a foreigner—a man you have not seen, know nothing of? Is this wise? Is this kind to the girl?—and me?—Not to say a word to me—”

My father had stopped and stood erect facing her. The geniality had gone out of his face and old age had come back into it. “This is not the place, Amata.”

“I will speak—”

“Come with me then. You too, Lavinia.” He strode off to the royal apartments and we followed him. Catching up with Amata, I said, “Mother, he did as the oracle commanded, and as I myself asked him to do. Truly I did! This is how it must be. It will be all right!”

She did not even hear me, I think. As soon as we were in Latinus’ office she began to talk, pouring out a torrent of arguments—How could he ruthlessly discard our understanding with Turnus and the other suitors? How could they not see it as pledge breaking? What did it matter if the oracle said the marriage must be with a foreigner?—was Rutulia not a different country from Latium, was Turnus not a foreigner?

“He is a Latin, one of us, one of your house,” my father said, frowning. I thought it a mistake for him to answer her arguments at all, and indeed it only inflamed her. She accused him of listening to Drances’ counsel, Drances who hated and was jealous of Turnus—faithful Turnus who only sought to uphold and support Latinus’ throne in his old age. She berated him cruelly for oath breaking and weakness and indecision, and in the next breath pleaded with him, calling on his strength and wisdom. He stood enduring the flood of words and said nothing, only occasionally shaking his head. At last, as her voice began to get hoarse and shrill, he broke in, also hoarsely: “The matter is settled. Accept it, Amata. Remember you are a queen.” And to me he said, “Take your mother back to her rooms and comfort her, Lavinia.”

“I will not, I will not go,” she shrieked, shaking her arms in the air, and she ran out, whirling across the courtyard like a top that children whip into spinning, screaming that the king had given his daughter to a stranger, an enemy, that the king was mad. And she made for the front doors of the Regia.

The guards did not dare touch her, but my women acted very swiftly, with me, as if we had planned what to do. We surrounded Amata before she had got far into the streets of the city, and talking and soothing and stroking and urging her along, we got her back into the Regia and to her rooms on the women’s side. There her hysteria turned to a great fit of sobbing, which left her spent and silent at last.

I thought that collapse into weariness was final. I thought she had given up. That was stupid of me. So was my failure to understand that what she was saying was not only madness or the rage of frustrated desire. She was giving voice to what a great many of our people thought or feared obscurely when they heard what the king had said to the Trojan messenger: that he had welcomed invaders, that, scorning his loyal subjects and allies, he had promised to give his daughter, his inheritance, his country, to a stranger.

I went to bed that night tired and shaken but in peace of heart, and slept well. I woke to a craziness that I can remember only in vivid bits and patches, because nothing in it was sane or clear, none of it made sense. I woke in my mother’s world.

It was dark night; women with oil lamps were in my room and one of them was patting my shoulder saying, “Wake up, king’s daughter! Wake up!” All about me there was bustle, whispering, laughter. As I struggled awake I saw they were all my mother’s women, not mine, and that the slave women were dressed up in fine, ceremonial clothes, in my mother’s clothes. I heard Amata’s voice, and she came in, wearing the coarse unbleached tunic of a slave. “Up, up, girl,” she said with a smile, “this is the Goat Feast, the Fig Feast. We’re going to do worship the way my people do, up in the hills. If your father can give you away, I can take you away! Come on, now, we must be there at sunrise!” And I was up, and dressed in an old grey tunic and a ragged shawl, and hurried away among the laughing women—out the back door, through the silent streets of the city, out the postern gate, across the fields, towards the low forested hills that rise east of Laurentum. The tiny oil lamps made a wavering dance down the lane before us and behind us. The eastern skyline was just showing clear against the first beginning of dawn, Mount Alba standing long and dark over the dark world.

We left the last pagus and entered at once into the forest. Night closed around us, it was hard to see the way. The lamps cast wild shadows through the trees and across the uneven path. Women stopped to free their robes from thorns and entangling branches, but Amata urged them on—"Don’t worry about that, a tear can be mended, we must be up in the hills, up at the fig-tree spring, when the sun rises! Come on, hurry along!” And she went back down along the line to encourage the women, house slaves, sweepers and washers and cook’s helpers and maids of all work, who were struggling along under heavy loads, baskets and jugs of food and drink. She called them by name, cheered them on, and came whirling back up to the head of the line, laughing and talking. “Oh, this is an adventure, at last!” she called to me joyously as she passed me. And indeed there was a wild thrill of strangeness in the hurry and secrecy, the changed costumes, the line of women carrying lights in the forest in the dark—it was all unreal, fantastic, and I was caught up in the excitement of it.

We reached the fig-tree springs as the sky was brightening. Up in the heart of the hills a spring breaks out from a ledge of rock on the side of a deep fold in the hillside, and all around below it, on a level meadow, grow huge old wild fig trees, a kind of natural orchard. I had been there once with Silvia in summer to feast on the black fruit; but we had heard swine grunting and crashing all about, drawn by the fallen fruit, and so did not stay long, a wild boar being about the only thing Silvia was afraid of.

We all straggled up to the grassy level under the trees and set down burdens and drew breath for a while. Amata stood and talked to us, telling us that this was the festival of the Caprotinae as the Rutulians celebrated it in their hills—a festival of women, for women only. “We will set guards,” she said. “If a man comes near us, he must be driven away. If he refuses to go, or if he tries to spy on us, it’s death for him, worse than death! For if he spies on our mysteries that’s the end of his manhood—he’ll go back down the mountain a eunuch! Balina brought four sharp swords with her, and four strong women will keep watch day and night on the paths. And the powers of the hills and wilderness wait to curse the man who dares approach us. For Mars must stay below us here, Mars must keep down at the fields’ edge and the forests’ edge, standing on his boundaries. The heights and the wild forests are ours, ours alone, for our worship and our revels. And look, look, the sun rises! Greet the day, sisters! Sicana, open a wine jug, pass it around!”

So the day began with drinking, and by noon some of the women were too drunk to dance; they laughed and screeched and vomited and fell over and slept where they fell. Amata taught us the dances and songs of her Caprotinae, and a sacred game in which the older women tried to catch the younger ones and whip them with fig branches, shouting out crude joking songs about men’s penises and women’s vulvas; and we held other ceremonies at altars we raised to Fauna of the wilderness, and the Juno of women, and Ceres who swells the seed in the womb of Earth to be born as the bread of life. Slaves were sent back down to the city to fetch more wine. During the day, groups of women began to straggle in, coming from other households in the city, drawn by curiosity about this new women’s rite and by solidarity with their queen. I found myself in an odd position with these townswomen, who were all outraged for me and enraged at my father. They hung about me to commiserate, and pet me, and encourage me in my love and fidelity to Turnus of Ardea. Their indignation and kindness were real and touching, and yet as unreal as all the rest of this escape, this mistake.

I played the part of the meek voiceless maiden all through this masquerade up in the hills. I could not bring myself to tell these sympathetic matrons that I had no love at all for Turnus and wanted only to obey my father and the oracle. To do so would be to betray my mother, and to turn her rage against me. I was a coward. I felt false, frightened, incredulous, scornful, and alone.

My mother had brought none of my women up here to the hills, only her women; and for all her wild gaiety and seeming abandon, she never let me out of her sight. I was very glad when I saw, among the last group of newcomers, Maruna. She had put on my best palla, for that was the rule, the servant to dress as mistress and the mistress as servant. I winked at her to let her know I’d seen her, and seen my best palla, too, but we kept our distance and did not speak. Slight and quiet, Maruna had a gift of going unnoticed, very useful to a slave. She kept with the group she’d come with and did as all the others did, and I think my mother never noticed her.

During the evening Amata began to drink—she had only tasted and pretended, till then—and by nightfall she was not drunk, but mellowed, less hectic, and enjoying the escapade far more than she had pretended to till then. Her laugh came from deep in her belly. I had never heard her laugh like that. It made her seem strange, another woman, a woman she might have been. I felt an aching pang of grief for her.