Lavinia

“Lavinia,” she called me, and when I came to her, picking my way among the women sprawled about in the grass amid the little flickering oil lamps and the low boughs of the great fig trees, “Lavinia, I sent for him, last night, before we left. I sent a messenger on horseback. He should be here tomorrow. Your wedding night, my darling!”

I knew who he was, and what she meant; it was all part of the craziness, the unreality, but in her game I had to play the game. “How will he know where to come?”

“The women will tell him. They’re looking out for him, they’ll catch him before he ever gets into the city. He should be here by this time tomorrow.”

“But men are not allowed here among us,” I said.

“Oh, this one is,” my mother said, in that deep melting laughing voice.

She pulled at my hand to make me sit down beside her. She leaned close to me and whispered in my ear, “There will be such a wedding night here in the hills! And then to Ardea. Home to Ardea! It’s all planned. All planned!”

She kept me by her all night. I had to sleep close to her and the group of women she was drinking and gambling with, in the light of their lamps fixed on low branches. I slept only in snatches all night long, waking up always with a start, my mind racing. I kept telling myself not to worry, all I had to do was go along with whatever my mother wanted until her game played itself out, as it must, in confusion and disillusion and retreat. But she had sent for Turnus—what if he came? What if she handed me over to him in a mock wedding, a real rape? What if he took me off to Ardea? There would be nothing, nothing I could do. At the thought my body went stiff, my hands clenched, and I hid my face in my arms. I had to get away from here. I had to find a way to escape. But even if I could creep away, I could not find my way through the forest in the dark: the guards were watching the path we had come by, and it was a long way through wild, broken hills. The best I could hope for was to get far enough away to hide for the rest of the night and then follow a stream down to the lowlands. But my mother’s women were all around me, still awake, the tiny lamps still flickering. And beyond them, the guards.

The same series of thoughts—the effort to reassure myself, the shock of thinking Turnus might come, the attempt to imagine a way to escape—repeated itself in my head, round and round, again and again, all night. Sometimes I slept and had snatches of dreams of my poet, not in the altar place of Albunea but here in the wild hills; he seemed to be nearby, near one of the oil lamps, but he was deformed, shrunken into a stump of shadow, mumbling words I could not understand. Then I would wake to the endless repetition of the same thoughts.

I got up at the first hint of light. Seeing Amata asleep at last among her women, I slipped away towards the dell we had been using as a place to piss, and for a moment I thought I could simply walk on—but just past the dell, Gaia was standing on guard, leaning on a naked sword as if it were a cane. She greeted me loudly, with a stupid smile. She was a sweeper, not quite right in her wits; she was devoted to my mother, as were many of these women. If Amata had told her not to let me pass, she would not let me pass. Amata was not a particularly kind mistress, she showed little affection, but she was not stingy, not cruel, and did not play favorites: that was more than enough to win loyalty. And her grief for her lost sons gave her a kind of sanctity among the women of her household. “The poor queen,” I had heard them say a thousand times, and it never seemed strange to me that they still pitied her. They were right. She was an unhappy woman.

Many of us slept late and got up staggering. Food and drink had nearly given out, and groups went down to Laurentum to bring stores from their own storehouses and from the Regia. There was a good deal of coming and going, but I could not slip away or join a group going down to the city, as I hoped, for if Amata was not with me, tall Sicana and dour Lina always were, keeping watch.

I and some slave girls were the only young women here; the city matrons had left their virgin daughters safe at home. But women with babies at the breast had of course brought their nurslings, and I passed much of the day relieving tired mothers by rocking fretful babies. It saved me from having to talk with half-drunken adults. And the babies were a relief from the falseness, the insanity of what we were doing. They were solid, real, and needy. They were too young to imagine anything. Looking after them was a comfort to me, for which of course I was overpraised and flattered—look how kind the king’s daughter is to the slave’s child. Look how kind the slave’s child is to the king’s daughter, I thought, as a sweet, languid little girl smiled up at me, falling asleep in my arms.

Amata organised dances and whipping games in the afternoon, but they lacked the wild spontaneity of the first day. Everyone knew by now that Amata was expecting Turnus to arrive, and that she meant to marry me to him. Many women were uneasy with the idea of his coming, feeling, I think, like heifers who’d jumped the fence and found themselves in the bull’s pasture. And the notion of a marriage so far from the doorway of the house and the Penates and Lares of the family and the city was puzzling and shocking to us all. How could you get married in the wilderness, where none of the domestic powers could help you, and the local powers and spirits had no care for human matters and might well be malevolent? Though Amata continued to talk of a wedding, the others dealt with it by speaking of it as a betrothal. That was something they could look forward to as plausible. So they kept their expectation high all afternoon and evening. When night came and Turnus had not, Amata began to drink again and urge us all to drink. The dances and songs soon broke up into aimless, foolish noisiness. Yet through it all my mother kept me close beside her, with Lina and Sicana; and the guards with swords did not drink, but spelled each other on duty all night long, waiting out of sight, down the path.

Next day a good many women slipped away quietly, and some groups that went down to bring food and drink did not come back. I thought it likely they had lost heart for trudging back and forth, but Amata said their men had locked them up, threatening to beat them if they ran off to the hills again. She ranted about what would happen to those men if they tried to come up here. All our women she sent to the Regia came back, laden with wine and bread: no one had hindered them from raiding the storerooms, and they were told the king had given orders that the women performing religious rites up in the hills were not to be disturbed. But they said also that people were talking about some kind of quarrel with a hunting party of the strangers, in the forest, between Laurentum and the river.

As the day wore on, many of us felt light-headed from little food and much wine and the strangeness of irresponsibility. There was a good deal of weeping, crazy laughter, shouting, quarreling.

As I sat with Tulia’s year-old boy, who was teething, trying to soothe him with a lullaby, Maruna appeared beside me for a moment. “Tonight?” she murmured, and I nodded, not looking at her; she whispered, “Owl,” and was gone again.

"Doro, doro, dormiu” I sang to the baby, “papa has a ring for you,” and wondered what Maruna meant. All I could do was wait and find out.

“You like babies, don’t you,” my mother said to me, standing above me in her soiled, ragged slave’s tunic. Her legs were white and shapely, with fine, soft, black hair on the shins and calves. She looked down at the child in my arms. Her face contorted as if she had toothache.

“He’ll breed you,” she said. “You can count on that. He’s not like the old eunuch. He’ll breed sons who live.”

She spoke clearly, with detachment. She was drunk the way I’d seen men at feasts be drunk, day-and-night drunk, drunk to the bone. I did not reply, but went on with the lullaby in an undertone, for the baby was beginning to relax at last. I did not want to look up at my mother. I knew her anger was gathering to burst out again. I knew she knew Turnus was not going to come. I was very much afraid of her.

’Doro, doro, dormiu” she sang, mocking. “What a ewe lamb, what a eunuch’s daughter you are, Lavinia! All milk and meekness. All obedience to your dear papa who makes up oracles to suit himself. Don’t think you’re going to have it your way this time. I go where you go. You come with me, my girl. You come with me to Ardea tomorrow.”

I bowed my head and said nothing. The child felt the tension in my arms and began to whimper again.

“Shut the brat up,” Amata said, turning away. “Sicana! Where’s the jug?”

It was an endless evening. After Tulia took her baby off, I dozed, sitting with my back against a great old fig tree. My head ached, my muscles were tight, my mind dull, blank. The sun set in clouds behind the endless trees of the forest, and the night came on very dark. Most women fell asleep early; only Amata’s group of gamblers stayed up, still drinking, till even they wore out. My mother came and lay down next to me. “Asleep already, little ewe lamb?” she said. She set down a small oil lamp near her head. “Sleep well. Tomorrow we’re off to Ardea. Sleep well. Sleep well.” She bunched up the corner of her palla under her head for a pillow, laid her arm over me, not in an embrace, and lay silent. I felt the weight and warmth of her arm, of her body against mine. I lay looking into the darkness, watching the shadows from the small lamp flame move among leaves and branches. After a long time and very slowly I moved out from under the warm, heavy arm that lay across me. My mother sighed, snored once loudly, did not move. I lay watching the shadows die. I was asleep, but awake too, for I heard an owl’s thin quavering cry, nearby, to my left: iii, i, i.

Without thought or pause I stood up softly and stepped among the sleeping women in that direction. No lamps burned now, but the clouds had thinned and summer starlight was grey on the grass. The owl called softly from farther away, and I followed. I saw Gaia slumped asleep under a tree like a lump of darkness, her sword standing by her, its point stuck in the ground.

I came away from the fig trees, crossed a tiny side stream where I slipped and stumbled, clambered up to a place where trees massed thicker and darker. Maruna was there. I knew her though I could barely see her. She took my hand and we went on together.

Before long she murmured, “I think we’ve lost the path.”

We had; but we got along for half a mile or so downhill before we came into a stream gully so overhung with trees and overgrown with thickets that we could go no farther in the dark. We waited there some hours, curled up together for warmth, dozing, till the wind came up as it will do sometimes an hour before the dawn, clearing off the clouds, and the moon gave us enough light to go on. We struck a downhill path, and took it; it soon opened into a woodcutter’s drag, down which we could run. And we ran.

By the time it was light we were out of the high hills, coming into pastures. I knew the country from my rambles with Silvia, knew where we were, and could head straight for the city. We came to the southern gate in the bright early morning. It was shut and there were men guarding it.

I went with maruna to my father’s rooms, and at his door I said aloud, “Do you wake, king? Waken!” He came out, heavy-eyed, lumbering, huddling his bedclothes about him, and took me in his arms without a word.

When he released me he said, “Where is your mother?”

“At the fig-tree spring.”

“She didn’t come with you?”

“I escaped from her,” I said.

He looked uncomprehending, confused. His grey hair was tufted and matted with sleep. “Escaped?”

“I didn’t want to be there!” I said in anguish, and then, trying to speak calmly, though I could not, “Father, she said she’d sent for Turnus. To betroth me, marry me to him—I don’t know. I was afraid he’d come. She kept me guarded. I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t have got away without Maruna.”

“Sent for Turnus?”

It was more than the stupidity of arousal from sleep. He did not understand, he would not understand that his wife had tried to betray him. Feeling that I had already betrayed her, I could not say anything.

“I must get your mother and the other women out of the woods,” he said at last. “There’s been trouble. Fighting. It could be dangerous for them up there. Is she—will she come back today? What is it she’s doing there?”

“Women’s rites. Dances her people have.” I tried to get my mind to think about what really mattered. “If you send to tell her that there’s been fighting, that the women there are in danger, I think she’ll come back. But send women messengers, father. Men can’t approach. Some of her women are armed.”

“But this is madness,” my father said.

I was tired, strained, worn out by all the folly and anxiety of the past days and nights. I stared at him. I said, “She’s been mad for thirteen years!”

When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property. My father did not hear me.

“Wait,” he said, and turned away to his room. I waited.

Maruna slipped away and brought a pitcher of water from the well in the courtyard, and I gratefully drank every drop of it—except a little that I poured out to the Penates first, and a little that I used to wet the corner of my garment and try to clean my face. I was all dirt and dried sweat. The coarse old tunic was tattered and filthy after our night run, and my best palla that Maruna wore was completely ruined. Maruna and I were mourning over the great snags and tears in it when my father came back, dressed. He looked at us with dull puzzlement. “You must go get cleaned up, Lavinia,” he said.

“I’d like to, father. But please, what is the trouble, who is fighting?”

“The Trojans were hunting. I told them they could hunt the forests between Venticula and Laurentum. They have to have food.” He stopped.

I asked at last, “Did some of our hunters try to stop them?”

“They shot the deer. The stag.” His face was stricken as he said it. I could not think what he meant. Why should hunters not shoot a stag?

He said, “Silvia’s deer.”

“Cervulus,” Maruna whispered.

“The creature ran home—to Tyrrhus’ farm—bleeding, with the arrow in its flank—crying like a child, they said. And Silvia screamed as if it had been her child shot. They couldn’t comfort her. Her brothers and the old man swore they’d punish the hunter. But it was the king’s son who shot the deer.”

“Ascanius,” I said.

It begins with a boy who shoots a deer.

The waves lapped one over another on the shore where the tide was rising.

“If that is his name.” I had never seen my father bewildered like this. He groped among words and finally said, “Tyrrhus went into a blind rage, the way he does. He and his boys—they got their farm people together and went out against the hunting party. Armed. With swords, axes, bows. They fought—somewhere over Villia Ridge—they found the Trojans and tried to slaughter them. But the hunters were soldiers. Defending their prince. They killed—”

He looked into my face for a moment and looked away. “Tyrrhus’ eldest boy was killed.”

First to die is young Almo—you know him. An arrow in his throat chokes off his speech and breath with blood.

I whispered his name as Maruna had whispered the name of the deer.

“And old Galaesus.”

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.

My father said, “I can’t believe it. Galaesus tried to interfere, calm them down. He thought young men in a fight would listen to him.”

I stood dumb. I stood as I have stood in the shallows of the sea with the tide rising, the waves coming in one over the other, pushing me and drawing away the sand under my feet with the undertow, till all the world was shining and sliding away.

I took Maruna’s arm, and she helped me stand. “Please let us go, king,” she murmured to my father, and he, finally seeing our filth and tatters and scratched arms, came with us across the courtyard, calling out for women to help us.

“Tell me something I have never understood” I say as we sit in the small courtyard, the inmost room of our apartment in the Regia. It is a warm morning of June and my husband, who has a great capacity for simple enjoyment, is basking in the early sunlight while we have our breakfast of white figs and new milk sweetened with honey.

“I’ll do my best,” he says.

“You might rather not.”

“Well, let’s see.”

“Why didn’t you come to talk with my father, right away, when he asked you to come affirm the alliance he offered?”

The question interests him. He sits up a little straighter to look back to a year ago. It is of great importance to him that he speak truth as nearly as he can, and since it is always hard to speak truly of things in the past, he thinks about it a while before he speaks. “I was getting together some gifts to bring with me,” he says. “Something that would be suitable for you—a betrothal gift. I’d already sent Priam’s cup and crown and scepter. The last, best bits of Troy I had. There wasn’t anything left, except our gods. But I didn’t want to come like a beggar! Euryalus’ mother had a shawl woven with silver threads, she’d been keeping it to give to her son’s bride when he married, she brought it and offered it to me. Poor soul!…Anyhow, while I was worrying about gifts, word came that a band of farmers had attacked our hunting party, because Ascanius had shot a pet stag. Gyas had an arrow nick in his arm, and our men had killed two farmers. That was bad news. A bad beginning. It looked as if the country people weren’t going to accept us, no matter what their king said. Then Drances came to our camp by the ships. Did you know that?”

“No.”

“He didn’t say he was sent by Latinus, or even that Latinus knew he’d come. He’d taken it on himself to warn us that Turnus was using the quarrel with the farmers to raise the whole country against us—sending off to the Volscians and the Sabines, even to Diomedes down south, for fighting men.”

“Drances was always envious of Turnus.”

“I wondered why he came to us. But if I’d gone back with him to Laurentum, then, could I have prevented the war?”

“No,” I say.

And he does not question my certainty. He accepts that I know some things that I could not, in the ordinary way, know. He does not ask how I know. I have told him that I used to go to the oracle at Albunea with my father. But I have never told him about the poet. I doubt that I ever will.

It has not been difficult for me to believe in my fictionality, because it is, after all, so slight. But for him it would be very difficult. Even if he is at the moment inactive, domesticated, a contented man sitting in the sunlight talking with his wife, the poet’s passionate, commanding, anxious, dangerous hero would find it hard to accept contingence, the nullity of his will and conscience. Piety, faithfulness, obedience to what must be rightly done, the fas, is the desire of his heart. To know that he has obeyed a poet, rather than his conscience, might be anguish to him—even if he saw, as I see, that the poet obeyed his conscience and followed the fas. Why should I trouble him with that, when his concerns are so great and his time so short?

He agrees with my judgment, nodding. “It was time for war. Mars on the march… Drances himself said it would be a provocation if I tried to come to the city then. So I hope you see that it was not in neglect of my obligation to you and your father that I failed to come. Did you take it as such?”

Even if he has not worried about it before, his worry about it now is endearing. I want to let him off easily, but perversely I say, “Well, you might have sent a message. I did wonder whether you really wanted the princess as part of the package.”

He looks appalled, as he always does when he thinks he’s been remiss in duty. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I did.”

“It was unfair of me to wonder. After all, I had the advantage of you. I’d seen you.” He knows that Silvia and I saw his picnic by the river; I told him about it early on, and the idea of two girls hidden in the bushes spying on an army both shocked and entertained him. “And my father could have sent you a message, but he didn’t either. So, go on about that time.”

I can tell that he is, for once, disposed to talk, to reminisce. He thinks again for a while and says, “I was undecided, that night. Perplexed.” I am fond of his understatements when he talks about the decisions he has had to make, on which the lives of his people depended. “We simply weren’t a large enough force to stand up to a whole countryside determined to drive us away. The answer might be to get back in the ships and go… but where? We’d come where we were to come. That much was clear. So, I went off to think about it, down by the river. My thoughts ran about in every direction at once, trying to see what to do. As if my mind was a bowl full of water reflecting a light, and you shake the bowl this way and that, and the reflections dance over the ceiling, but they don’t come together… And I watched the reflection of the moon on the river shiver and break apart… Then I prayed to the river, Tiber. And while I prayed, there in the reeds under the poplars, my mind grew quieter. And the river gave me my answer. I thought: upriver, Drances said, is a town with a Greek king, an ally of Latinus but not on good terms with all the Latins. A foreigner like us. Maybe he’d help us. And that came to me as the thing to do. All the broken reflections came together. I got some sleep, and next day I took some men upstream in two of the galleys. I left my son in charge of building up our camp so it could be defended. It was time he took some real responsibility.”

“That was a pretty big responsibility for a boy.”

“Well, of course he had Mnestheus and Serestus to call on. Good men. Experienced. They had full authority from me. But I didn’t realise how quickly the Latins would get their troops and their allies together and attack. And burn our ships, so my people had no way to escape. Ah!” The memory of that makes him clench his fist and scowl in pain. “I thought I had eight or ten days clear to look for some allies of my own. Turnus moved unbelievably fast. A man of immense talent.”

Is it self-admiration to admire the man you killed? Is it self-judgment to judge him? I say, “He had courage, but not character. He was greedy.”

“It’s hard to ask a young fellow to be selfless,” Aeneas says, with a rueful smile.

“It seems to be easy enough to expect it of young women.”

He ponders. “Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all. I don’t know if I’ve learned it yet.”

He frowns, brooding; he is probably thinking of what he sees as his worst failing: the fury of bloodlust that overcomes him in battle, making him a mindless, indiscriminate slaughterer, “like a sheepdog gone mad among the sheep,” he says. Of course much of his reputation as a warrior rests on this battle madness. Men who faced him were terrified of him. And I cannot see how it differs from the courage he respects in his heroes, men he has told me of with such admiration—the Trojan Hector, the Greek Achilles. But to him it is unquestionably a vice, an abuse of skill, nefas. I know he dreads every threat of war from our neighbors, not because he hates or fears fighting; in fact he loves it; but he fears himself. He believes that he murdered Turnus. I have argued with him about this: it was in a fair fight, he couldn’t leave an implacable, powerful enemy alive, and so on. He could not deny my arguments; I drove him to silence. But he has not forgiven himself.

Old Vestina appears in the doorway under the colonnade, holding the baby, who twists about in her arms making a noise like a small bellows being squeezed very fast. “He’s hungry, queen,” she says sternly. The milk is already bursting from my breasts at the sight of him. “Hand him over,” I say, and get him settled, although he’s so eager he can’t find the nipple at first and thrashes his fists in fury, gasping indignantly. “Talk about greed,” I say.

My husband’s dark eyes rest on me and Silvius with a peaceful, undemanding tenderness. He pours himself another bowl of sweetened milk from the pitcher, dribbles a few drops of it on the ground in worship, and salutes his son with it before he drinks. “Your health,” he says.

I bathed away the filth of the three nights spent at the fig-tree spring, and slept for a few hours in the middle of the day; but it was hard to rest for long, with all the commotion going on in the courtyard and quarters of the house. “Turnus, Turnus"—I heard his name constantly. I got up at last and went to find out what was going on. Turnus had come, but not to my mother waiting for him up in the hills. He was out in front of the city gates, they told me, with an army of herdsmen, farmers, and city folk. I climbed up onto the roof of the watchtower to have a look.

It was a big crowd, and more coming in across the fields all the time. The men all carried weapons, whether they were farm tools or hunter’s bows or swords and bronze-tipped lances. As they grouped together they made a dark, endless noise. I looked down from the roof at the top of the laurel in the courtyard where the bees had swarmed. But these men were not the foreigners the bees had foretold. They were Latins, Laurentians, Italians. My people. My enemies.

All that evening the fields were full of armed men; they camped all over the field of exercise and under the slopes of the outer rampart. Next morning I went up to the roof over the front door to look. The crowds outside the city gate and in the city, filling the streets around the Regia, had doubled. Every now and then a shout went up. War, they shouted, war! Drive out the strangers! Send the murderers back where they came from!—I saw a group making their way through the others; some of them were men I knew, herdsmen. They were carrying something long and heavy wrapped in a white cloth stained with blood. “Almo, Almo,” they chanted. “Avenge our brother! Avenge our dead!” I glimpsed Almo’s and Sylvia’s father Tyrrhus among them, white-haired, staring wild-eyed, staggering along, half carried by other men. This procession made its way up the street towards the doors of the Regia. There they laid the burden down. The shouting was frenzied now, the air shook and rocked with it. And I saw Turnus. He stood in front of the gates of the king’s house, facing the crowd.

“Are we to be ruled by strangers?” he shouted, and the crowd all round shouted like thunder in the streets, “No!"—"Is my promised bride to be given to a foreigner?"—"No!"—"Latinus! King of Latium! I stand at your gates! We demand justice! We demand war!” And the men all shouted, “War!”

After what seemed a long time, the doors of the Regia opened. My father came out, flanked by his guards, with Drances and a few other old counsellors. The shouting died down. Men near and farther called, “The king, the king speaks.”

Looking down from almost directly above as I knelt hidden behind the decorative edge tiles of the roof, I could see only the top of my father’s head, grey hair gone thin on the skull.

“Men of Latium, my children!” he said in his strong voice, and paused for a long time, so long it seemed he might not speak again. Men shifted from foot to foot. At last he went on, but sounding now more like an old man. “An oracle has spoken. A promise has been given. If you defy the voice that guides us, if you break the treaty I made, you do wrong. You will pay for that wrongdoing in blood. You know that. That is all I can say to you. Turnus, son of my old friend Daunus and sister-son of my wife, if you are determined to lead our people into this guilt, I cannot stop you. I can only say that you rob me of the harbor of peace I hoped for in my last years, the righteous death I longed for.”

The silence continued. Without waiting for any answer Latinus turned away and came back into the Regia. His guards closed the high doors behind him, leaving Turnus and the crowds outside, still silent for a little. Then the murmuring and the dark noise began again, and swelled, and grew till it surrounded the house and filled the city.

Now there was a new turmoil in the streets behind the house. I was not the only one up there on the roofs. Maruna and Tita and several girls were up on the watchtower platform over the southeast corner of the house, and one of them was pointing to the east gate. I ran to join them. From the platform we saw another procession straggling up the streets: women—slaves and mistresses, brazen or calm, shamefaced or proud, all with wild hair, with soiled, torn togas and tunics—Amata and her troop from the fig-tree spring.

My mother came into the place in front of the Regia, walking as always with a regal gait. Turnus hurried to meet her there. They met and embraced and talked for a while. Presently a new chant began among the men around them: “Open the War Gate! Open the War Gate!”

The War Gate of Laurentum stands in a little square not far from the actual city gates, a pair of tall bronze-studded oaken doors in a frame of cedar, with an altar of Janus to the east of it and an empty space around it. The doors always stood closed and barred, old and grim and meaningless. There had never been any ceremony there in my lifetime, except at the Kalends of every January when we made libations to Janus. But now everybody was shouting, “The queen, the queen will open the War Gate!” and the crowds were flowing down that way. I could make out my mother for a while among them, and Turnus’ high helmet crest. Then the trees cut off my view, and I could only hear the shouting. A great cheer went up of “Mars! Mavors! Macte esto!” and people came dancing and calling that the Gate of War was open.

My father’s brief appearance before the doors of the Regia seemed to me, to most of us, an abdication. He had made a formal plea, yet not even waited for a reply. “I cannot stop you,” he had said to Turnus. It outraged me to think he had said that. How could he say it? How could he hand his power over to Turnus and creep back into the house?

As I look back on it now, I think he was speaking not to Turnus but to the crowd, the men, his Latins. They had, in fact, the power. Turnus could use them so long as they let him, but he could not control them, any more than Latinus could. And so Latinus’ plea was made to them, in the hope that they might remember it later. For now, they were afire, mad with excitement. The chance of a fight, the promise of bursting out in violence, vengeance, righteous wrath, that was all they saw at the moment, all they wanted. Every farmer hates a foreigner, and here was a troop of fancy fellows from somewhere who thought they could walk in and take over Latium, shoot the deer, marry the princess, push honest men around—well, they’d find out their mistake. The old king wouldn’t stand up against them, but the new one would. What did it matter if he was a Rutulian? We’re all Latins. We stand shoulder to shoulder, the peoples of the West, defending our fields, our altars, our women. Once we’ve driven these strangers into the sea, we can sort out our own affairs.

Latinus had known the enthusiasm of war before and knew better than to try to oppose its first furor, to waste speech on the mindless.

But I was a child of peace, and all I could see was a defeated old man hiding in his palace while fools bellowed in the street. And his queen, in her filthy slave’s clothing, striding about, shameless, triumphing in the desecration of daily life, thinking she’d have it all her way.

She wouldn’t have me, not while I could get away from her. Even if my father had foresworn his power, he was my hope of resistance. I gathered up my things and told Maruna and a few other women to move with me out of the women’s quarter into the royal apartments, the bedrooms my mother had not used for years. Lina and Sicana and all the rest of my mother’s devoted attendants, the queen’s faction, were already filtering back into the house. Gaia was brandishing her sword in the hallways. I was not going to let myself come again under the control of those women.

Poor old Vestina was shocked, wept, whined, tried to order me to stay where I belonged, raged feebly when I refused, but I could not reassure her or take her with me; her loyalty was too divided between Amata and myself. I slipped into the royal apartments through the back halls with my little troop and asked my father’s guard to tell him that his daughter asked to occupy the queen’s rooms.

My father sent for me to come. He was sitting in the audience room with Drances and the others. Rather than ask them to leave, he rose and came to talk to me in the space behind the throne. He looked tired and grim, the wrinkles heavy on his cheeks and around his eyes. “Why did you not consult me about this change of rooms, daughter?”

“I was afraid if she heard of it, the queen would forbid me.”

“Do you not owe her obedience?”

“Not when obedience to her is disobedience to you.”

He frowned, turned half away, controlling anger. “Say what you mean.”

“If she can—if I’m in her power—she’ll marry me to Turnus.”

He made an impatient, dismissive noise.

“That was why she took me up into the hills. To meet him there. To defy the oracle and betray the alliance you offered the Trojans.”

“She would not,” he began, but he could not say, “She would not dare,” knowing she had opened the War Gate. He stood scowling and indecisive.

“Let me stay with you, father. Let me have one of your guards at my door. I’m trying to obey you and the oracle. I will not marry Turnus.”

After a while he said, “Do you dislike him so?”

His voice was weak, the question was weak. I tried to suppress my impatience. “You promised me to the Trojan leader. He is my husband. I will have no other.”

“It looks as if the people will go to war to prevent it, daughter,” he said, with a show of making light of it.

“Father, I know what I have to do. And I will. My mother won’t stop me, and all the men in the kingdom shouting for war won’t stop me.” Only you can, I thought, but I did not say it. The thought, however, weakened my resolve, and my voice shook somewhat when I said, “I beg you to let me do as I must, and protect me so that I can.”

I do not know what was going through his mind, what he might have said, when Drances came forward. He had of course heard us, and being always very sure of his mind and free with his tongue, and encouraged in his freedom, he did not even ask leave to break in on us. “King,” he said, “your daughter is right, and wise, and brave. If Turnus were to take advantage of the queen’s favor, in this time of confusion, and defy the oracle, defy you—the crime could not be undone. Ruin would be upon us! Have patience. Our people will come to their senses. But as you said yourself, they must see what color blood is first. Keep the maiden safe with you, away from danger, away from the Rutulian. Let your guards defend her. She is our pledge of honor. In her, the sacred powers are with us.”

Drances always said too much, went too far, but maybe he had to rant, now, to make my father hear him.

“Very well,” Latinus said slowly, ponderously. “You may stay in your mother’s apartments, Lavinia. I will set a guard at the door. But I will have no more disrespectful, rebellious talk about the queen. You understand?”

I bowed my head, murmured thanks, and slipped away.

It was a great deal easier to talk with the king’s guards than with the king. I had known them since I was a baby—Verus, Aulus, Albinus, Gaius and the others; some of them still called me by my childish title Camilla, altar girl. The pick of Latinus’ fighting men in his fighting years, they were all middle-aged, grizzled, a bit thick in the waist under their bronze corselets, fond of their food and drink but not slow in their wits. They were keenly aware that the Regia was now a house divided. To my relief I found that they shared my antipathy to Turnus, even if they did not want to think ill of their queen. “The Rutulian’s got the queen tied round his finger,” said Verus, “being her sister’s son, see, she’s made a son of him, he can’t do wrong. It’s how mothers are.” I didn’t mind how they explained it so long as they saw that I might be in danger from Amata. And they did see that, for without my asking, one of them was near me wherever I went in the Regia to carry out my ritual and housekeeping duties.

Those were strange days, when half my own house was foreign to me. I never entered the women’s quarters, my home for so long. I was entirely estranged from my mother, and on terms of embarrassment with women I’d known all my life. Most of them could not believe I was insisting on my betrothal to the foreign chief, the enemy, or could not understand why I did. Amata let them say that I was mindlessly, slavishly obedient to my father, and whisper that he was quite senile. And indeed, hiding away in his quarters, eating in privacy, seeing almost no one, Latinus seemed to give proof of his weakness. I saw him only when I assisted him at a rite performed in the house or the city; he never went out the city gates.

Neither did I, though I spent a good deal of time up on the roofs and the watchtower looking out over the city walls. Up there, I could get away from the curiosity of some and the ill will of others. Verus or one of the other guards was always on duty at the foot of the stairs that led up to the platform in the southeast corner, the highest place in the city, from which you could see the exercise field, the plains and pastures and groves as far as Tyrrhus’ farm, the blue hills eastward, and westward the Lentulus winding down among its marshes to the dunes. I took my distaff and went up with Maruna or one of the other girls; we put up an awning, for the summer sun was getting hot. Sometimes women asked if they could join me and came to sit with me a while, with their work or their baby, as if things were as they used to be. It was brave of them, for it was a defiance of my mother, in whose power they were. Some of them told me about her behavior, which clearly worried them. Every day she ordered that the banquet hall be made ready and animals butchered, so that Turnus and his ally chiefs could have a feast. But the chiefs were all busy riding about the countryside raising troops; and arrogant as he was, Turnus would hesitate to eat at the king’s table without the king’s invitation. He sent excuses. Amata always said, “He’ll come tomorrow. We must be ready for him.” So the house sweepers and the stable boys were living on choice cuts of beef and mutton, the women said, shaking their heads over the waste and folly of it.

I felt safe up there on the tower. I watched the men drilling on the exercise field, practicing at swordplay, grouping and charging as the officers shouted orders. It all seemed like the games boys play. Sometimes Verus or Aulus stood at the parapet with me and told me what the maneuvers were for. “They’re not using the trumpets,” Verus remarked. Latinus had told me once how he had realised, years ago, in Etruria, that the Veiians were telling each other across the battlefield where they needed reinforcements, when to attack or retreat, by the sweet piercing signals like bird calls. He captured two Etruscan trumpeters and had them teach their tricks to some of his boys; and he had won the advantage in more than one fight, he said, from those trumpet tunes. But Turnus was evidently not one for innovations or foreign ways. His men bellowed their orders. The endless, raucous shouting, like dogs barking, wore on all our nerves.

The numbers of men encamped to the north and east of Laurentum grew daily. Ufens arrived with his rough Aequians. An even rougher troop came from Praeneste, men in wolfskin caps, who went into battle with one foot shod in leather and the other bare. From my platform I could see the captains conferring, among them my old suitors, Ufens and handsome Aventinus, flaunting his lion-skin cape. Mezentius the Etruscan, who had been tyrant of Caere, came up from Ardea with his son Lausus. I looked at Mezentius to see what a traitorous, murderous tyrant looked like. I expected something more sinister than this tough old soldier, clearly very fond of the slender, dark-eyed son whom he kept close by him.

Turnus was waiting for Messapus to come with his horse troops from Soracte. He arrived at last on the same day as a troop of Volscians, also mounted, black horsehair crests on their helmets. I looked for the woman warrior my poet had said would ride with the Volscians, but I did not see her. But then, he said he had invented her. But had he not invented all of us? I tried to take comfort in that, to pretend that it was all a pretense, all the shouted orders and clashed weapons and sharpened swords, the nervous horses and swaggering men. The horrible list of carnage my poet had told me on the last night, that was what they were making ready for. But why, what was it for? For a pet deer? For a girl? What good would that be?

Without war there are no heroes.

What harm would that be?

Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.

They all gathered the next morning, our Latins nearest the city walls, then the Oscans, Sabines, Volscians in their bands, the Rutulians out in front, and Turnus on his splendid stallion leading them. Women and children and old men on the city walls cheered and threw down flowers as they rode off north, towards the river.

My poet could tell how heads were split and brains spattered armor, how men with a sword in their lungs crawled gasping out their blood and life, how so-and-so killed so-and-so, and so on. He could tell what he had not seen with his mortal eyes, because that was his gift; but I do not have that gift. I can tell only what I was told and what I saw.

What follows I was told, then and since, by men returned from the battle.

Aeneas had gone upriver to the Greek settlement hoping to bring reinforcements. He had been gone now for eight days. The Trojans had had no word from him. They completed a steep ditch and earthwork round their camp, which was built into the bend of the river so that it was protected on two sides by the Tiber; their ships were drawn up stern first on the beach within the earthwork.

The forces of Latium attacked the camp. The older men among the Trojans, veterans of the ten-year siege of Troy, managed a fierce and skillful defense. Young Ascanius was wild to make a sally and chase the Latins off, but Aeneas had left orders that if attacked they were not to attack. The captains he left in charge followed those orders, though it was hard to restrain the young Trojans when the Latins began to taunt them as cowards hiding behind their ramparts. “Is that all the Italian land you want?” they shouted. “That little bit of riverbank? Why don’t you come out? We’ll give you dirt to eat!” They repeatedly tried to force the gate or swarm up over the rampart, but the Trojans drove them back, hand to hand and with showers of darts and javelins. A rain of iron, Rufus Anso called it.

We women of the Regia took in as many wounded as we could, and looked after them as best we could. Rufus Anso was a farmer from the royal lands just west of the city, who was brought back to the city wounded. He was about my age. A javelin had gone right through his belly below the navel, they had pulled it on out from the back. Our healing women told me he would die. He was not in much pain yet, only frightened; he wanted to talk, not to be left alone, and I sat with him that night. I had sent for his mother, but she could not come till the next day. He said, “The air went dark all at once, like rain. It was like a rain of iron.”

A dart had hit his arm near the elbow, and he complained more of the pain of that small wound than the other. He seemed incredulous that he had been hurt at all. He thought it unfair, bad luck. I wondered why a man would go into battle expecting not to be hurt, what he thought a battle was. He was impressed by the Trojan defense and said they were good fighters. But he had expected to kill, not to be killed, and lay puzzling about the injustice of it. His mother came next day, and he was carried off home, where he died in agony a few days later.

What weapons did to men was all I saw then of warfare. I did not have to watch them fighting, yet.

A report came back to us just after dark. While his men made a showy attack on the gate of the Trojan camp, Turnus, alone, got round the ramparts on the river side, lighted a torch, and ran from one beached ship to the next, firing them. The dry wood was caulked with resin, and the ships lay close side by side: the fire caught, the downriver wind spread it from ship to ship: in no time they were all aflame. Turnus escaped before the Trojans saw the fire towering up over the river at their back. All they could do was cut the lines, push the mass of flaming ships out into the water, and watch them drift out on the current and lurch and burn down to the waterline and sink.

Rufus Anso listened to the man who reported this to us and said, “Well, seems they won’t be going back where they came from, those Trojins!” He thought it a good joke. And there was much cheering and high spirits among the wounded men and the women of the Regia.

I was confused and troubled. Should I not be happy at this feat of daring, this victory for my people? Here among my own people, caring for men of my own people hurt by the invaders, how could I be on the invaders’ side?

But if our purpose was to drive the foreigners out of Italy, why burn their ships? Evidently Turnus meant to exterminate them, not drive them away—if he had acted with any intention except to do immediate harm and carry off an act of bravery.

I thought again and again of the treaty Latinus had made with them, which we had violated. Tyrrhus and the herdsmen had attacked in anger, the Trojans had responded in self-defense. The matter could and should have stopped there. If there is any sacred thing, it is a treaty. How could the powers of our earth, our land, be with us if we not only defied the oracle they gave us, but did one of the great acts of evil—the deliberate breaking of a promise?

My mind went round and round on these thoughts and my heart was torn and miserable, wanting to rejoice with the people around me but unable to. I felt myself a traitor, as if I had done the great wrong, had caused it simply by being who and what I was. My mother had taught me that self-pitying guilt, and I had known it most of my life. Though I fought against it, knowing it childish and mistaken, under this stress and pressure it was all too easy to be childish, to be mistaken, to drop back into it.

The few men who came back to Laurentum later in the evening said our army had set sentinels around the enemy camp and settled down to feasting and drinking, content with their day’s work and ready to break into the camp next morning and finish off the Trojans. So then, if Turnus had a plan, it was extermination.

I know what happened that night from tales told next day by men coming back to the city, and then much later, by Serestus the Trojan, when he became my friend. He took part in a grim conference in the Trojan camp that evening about their chances of holding out until Aeneas returned with the hoped-for allies. Not knowing he had gone from Pallanteum to Etruria, they were desperately anxious about his long absence.

Two soldiers, young Euryalus and his older friend Nisus, came to the conference and volunteered to creep out through the Latin encampment and carry word to Aeneas. Distressed over the loss of the ships, craving his father’s presence and support, Ascanius sent the pair out heaped with praise and promises. When Aeneas came back and won the war, he said, Euryalus would receive all the lands belonging to King Latinus as a reward, and twelve Latin matrons to use as he pleased. I remember the wave of pure rage that came over me when Serestus told me that.

So the two sneaked over the ramparts in the deep dark of night, and threaded among the burnt-out watch fires, finding their enemies sprawled asleep, full of food and wine. Instead of hurrying through the Latin camp and on upriver, they fell to slaughtering sleeping men and stealing their drinking cups and armor. They cut the throats of ten or twenty helpless, drunken men before their bloodlust and greed were sated and they finally hurried off, burdened with stolen stuff. A patrol saw the gleam of stolen armor, heard the clinking of it, fell on them, and killed them. Their heads were cut off, stuck on poles, and paraded in front of the Trojan ramparts at dawn.

When Silvia and I hid and spied on the Trojans, we saw Euryalus on the grass, joking with Ascanius. Gorgeous, Silvia had called him. We had seen his mother straighten the red cap on his head. She was the woman who offered Aeneas a weaving she brought from Troy for her son’s bride gift. She saw the heads on the poles.

Later in the morning the Italian troops made an all-out assault. Against heavy odds, the Trojans held on: their archers shot Rutulians and Aequians dead as they worked their way through the ditch, and their swordsmen met attackers clambering up over the earthworks, sword to sword, and repelled them. The Trojans fought so well that by noon half our army had fallen back, unwilling to charge that ditch and wall again. They fought so well that some young Trojans, sick of being on the defensive, began to shout victory, and opened the gates of their camp to charge out and drive the enemy back. Turnus, utterly fearless, hacked and hewed his way in that opened gate, not even looking to see if his men were following him. Alone, he cut his way through the enemy camp, so mad with the fury of killing that the Trojans ran from him, till he got down to the river. He leapt in, in full armor as he was, swam downstream, and came ashore among his friends.

That feat of reckless courage was the last of the day. Both armies were worn out, there were no more assaults. Both camps were silent that evening.

We got news all day and in the evening, little by little, as wounded men were brought or made their way back to Laurentum. They were still limping in after dark. Some of them were not wounded, only tired or frightened; they had left the siege, left the battle, they wanted no more fighting just now. These were Latins whose homes were in or near the city, whose relatives would take them in. No Rutulians, no Aequians or Volscians were among them.

One of our royal herdsmen, Urso, came with a sword wound in his thigh. I asked him about Tyrrhus and his sons, Silvia’s two remaining brothers. He said they had all been in the fighting, both days, and that “the old man was like a wild boar, mad with rage. But he wore out,” he said. Urso was not a man I had known well, and he did not even recognise me until one of the other women called me by name. Then he stared at me, and his face flushed and broke out in sweat. He raised himself up on his elbow. “It’s all about you, woman,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you marry our Almo? or that King Turnus? All this killing for a girl’s whim!”

The women hurried over and hushed him and hissed at him, scandalised, but I said, “Let him alone. He had to fight for me.” My voice shook, and the fierce red blush of shame and anger ran over my face and body as I spoke. “I’m doing what I have to do, Urso,” I told him. “We all are.” He lay staring at me but said no more.

We had turned the courtyard into an infirmary. It was full of wounded men by now, and women looking after them, in a murmur of low voices and moaning and the glimmer of oil lamps in the warm night under the restless leaves of the great laurel. The women’s quarter remained closed, and my mother stayed there. She gave orders for supplies when asked, but she had not come out of her rooms all day.

Early the next morning, long before sunrise, I saw her striding under the colonnade to the royal apartment, alone. Verus, on duty at that door, bowed his head to her. She went in. I got up from my half-sleeping vigil beside a dying man and followed her. I do not know why. Maybe I thought I should defend my father from her.

As I came down the corridor I heard her voice in his room, coaxing at first, then becoming hard and fierce. “It’s not too late, Latinus,” she was saying. “The foreigners will be destroyed today. They can’t hold out any longer. Their great chieftain has run away up the river. He won’t be back! Send to Turnus. Tell him he is your son, your daughter’s husband. Put the reins of power in his hand. Why not? You’ve given up your power. So, why are you delaying? Why are you hiding in the Regia? You could have gone out and watched the battle, at least! You could have taken a little of the credit for saving the country! Have you been hiding here thinking the foreigners would come and rescue you and Lavinia? Did you really think they were going to defeat Turnus?” She said the name “Turnus” with passionate energy.

I stood in the dark corridor, just past the door. Inside the bedroom it must have been even darker.

“What is it you want, Amata?” My father’s voice was thick with sleep, low and slow. “What do you think you want?”

“I want you to save a little of our pride. It is shameful that Turnus should have to be ashamed of his father-in-law! Get up and go out there. Act like a king.”

“What am I to do?”

I did feel shame, hearing that.

“Act like a man, for once, if you can’t act like a king. If you want to know how a king acts, look at Turnus.”

There was a silence, then a sound of movement, a shift or scuffle, in the dark room, a sharp “Ah!” from my mother.

“Enough,” my father said, even lower, but with a different tone. “Enough of Turnus. He is not my son, or yours. He is not Lavinia’s husband. Or yours. Go back to your rooms now. Keep silent. Do not send any more messengers to Turnus. My men have intercepted them. Even if the Trojans are defeated, that will not make Turnus king of Latium. I will never make him king of Latium. Nor will you! Now go.”

He must have been holding her, and now pushed her out of his room—she came out staggering wildly and nearly fell. She turned back to the doorway at once, but he menaced her in some way, for she stopped and stood clenching her fists and shaking them in front of her shoulders, crying out broken words I could not understand. She whirled round with a strange moan, like a hurt dog, and ran back down the corridor. She had not seen me standing just past the door. I was trembling so that I could hardly move, but I managed to creep on past the dark doorway of the room and follow my mother back to the courtyard full of hurt and dying men, where the paling sky dimmed the light of the small lamps.

“The worst moment?” Aeneas ponders for a while. “The worst moment was coming up the river in the Etruscan ships—my few men, and the Greeks Evander had sent with me, and the Etruscans from Caere. I was counting on getting up to our camp at sunrise. I had no idea what had been going on, of course, but I was worried. Young Pallas had been hanging around me all night, talking, asking questions—King Evander’s son.”

“I knew him when we were children,” I said. “He took me to the wolf’s den near Pallanteum.”

“He was a nice boy. Very excited, the night before his first battle. Poor boy, poor Evander… Well, Pallas kept chattering, but the feeling that something was wrong kept growing on me. We came over the bar, into the river, as the air began to get grey. I saw stuff floating downstream all around us. Driftwood, I thought, from a storm higher up the river. But it was all black. A big chunk bumped up against our prow. It was the stern of a ship, charred, eaten away by fire. The river was full of pieces of burned ships floating along with the current.

“Tarchon and Astur from Caere came up beside me, and Astur asked after a while, Are they yours?’ I said yes. I had seen the figurehead of the Ida go by. Achates was with me there, and after a while he said, ‘It must be the whole fleet.’ I thought so too.

“I said, ‘No bodies.’ For there was nothing but the fragments of the ships. But that was no cheer. It looked as if they’d taken our camp, burned the ships, slaughtered the people.

“I said to Tarchon, ‘I fear I’ve brought you to a lost battle,’ but he shook his head. ‘Wait and see,’ he said. The Etruscans are strange people, they seem to live half in the other world. So we put on armor, in case of arrows from shore when we landed, and we rowed on up the river thick with broken burnt wood. You could smell the stink of burning.

“We rounded the long curve just as the sun rose. I saw our fort, our camp. The ships were gone but the earthworks were standing, and there were men on them, guards—in Trojan helmets. My heart gave a leap, and I held up my shield as high as I could and shouted out to my people in the camp. The first sunlight struck the bronze in a great flare of light. And the men on shore shouted back, first the guards, then a roar from them all. They weren’t dead, they weren’t asleep. They were ready. After that, I never really worried much about the outcome of it all.”

I remember Aeneas’ words as I remember the poet’s words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.

My judgment of turnus is that he could not look farther than the moment. His response to emergency was instant, active, complete; where he failed and wavered was in following through, holding to a purpose. That of course is where Aeneas excelled. In emergency, at the moment of choice, Aeneas might hesitate, confused, looking to the outcome, torn between conflicting claims and possibilities: in a torment of indecision he groped for his purpose, his fate, till he found it. Then his choice was made and he acted on it. And while he acted, his purpose was unwavering. Afterwards he might agonise over it all again, question his conscience endlessly, never fully satisfied that he had done the right thing.

But Turnus never looked back, as he never looked forward.

I think he was truly fearless: but a man without fear is one who lacks a quality of humanity. Men followed him for his brilliant daring, but he did not take charge of them. He met the event as it came, and so events buffeted him and blew him about, and he lost sight of what had to be done, and seemed to act on whim. So he broke a treaty, twice, without a thought. So more than once he left the battlefield, abandoned his men without guidance. And at last, when he had to face the implacable, he seemed to act in a kind of panic. But it was not fear, even then. It was recklessness meeting the reckoning.

Aeneas, who does not forgive himself, will not grant me even this tempered judgment; he will say of Turnus only, “He was young.”

At any rate, Turnus certainly could rise to the unforeseen. He pulled his Rutulians and their allies together at the first sight of the Etruscan ships sweeping up the river in the sunrise, and was ready with a fighting force to meet Aeneas and his allies as they landed.

Some of the ships could land within the Trojan earthwork, but the current brought others to shore outside it, and the men disembarking were at a great disadvantage as Turnus’ men attacked them. Archers and lancemen on the ships covered them with the iron rain, and the Trojans sallied out of their camp to defend them. Many Italians, Trojans, Greeks, Etruscans never saw the noon of that morning. And the killing went on and on. Up the riverbank they fought, and over the green lawns and through the thickets of the shore. The Trojans were tremendously heartened by their leader’s return, and Aeneas had to keep them from wild charges that would scatter them out, since even with the new reinforcements they were far outnumbered. He kept them, Serestus told me, in good defensive order around their camp and the Etruscan ships, so they had a fallback if they needed it. And the battle went on in the heat of the June day, hour after hour, man against man.

Turnus was enraged with Evander for allying with the Trojans against him. When he saw Evander’s son Pallas dueling with young Lausus, he saw a chance of vengeance. He shouted out that this was his fight, and made Lausus stand back. Pallas made a brave attempt to fight, but Turnus killed him with one awful blow of his bronze-pointed oak spear through his shield and through his body. Then he stood over him. “Send him back to his traitor father the way he deserves to get him,” he said, and putting his foot on the dying boy, he yanked with main force at the heavy, gold-plated weapon belt across his shoulder till he tore it off. And he strode off with the trophy, waving it in the air and laughing.

When Aeneas heard of this, the fury came into him. He told Serestus to keep the Trojans together, and went looking for Turnus. He killed men along the way, left and right, ruthless, relentless. He was the mad dog among the sheep now. The Latins fell back from him as the Trojans had fallen back from Turnus in the camp.

But Turnus himself was nowhere. After killing Pallas, he disappeared. No man I ever talked to knew what became of him during the long hour that Aeneas stalked him through the battlefield, challenging him, calling out to him to come fight. No doubt he was resting, catching his breath somewhere up the hill in the shade, but he chose a strange time to do it.

It was Mezentius, the old Etruscan tyrant, who met Aeneas face to face. Men who saw it said the two fought as equals. When Aeneas wounded the older man in the thigh with a spear, Mezentius’ men gathered round him and got him mounted on a horse, while his son Lausus covered their retreat. Young as he was, Lausus came bravely at Aeneas. After shouting in vain at him not to try to attack, Aeneas killed him with a single sword stroke. Then he followed Mezentius to the riverbank. When they told him his son was dead, the old tyrant turned and called out to Aeneas: “Come on, then! What does my death matter now?” and charged. Aeneas had to kill the horse with a blow between the eyes. Wounded, pinned under the fallen horse, the old man fought like a bear until Aeneas cut his throat.

Many Italians who saw that fight asked why it was Mezentius, not Turnus, fighting the Trojan captain.

The fury went out of Aeneas then. He went back to where Pallas lay and gave orders, in tears, that the boy’s body be wrapped to carry back to his father, Evander, with a guard of honor, though not with slaves to be sacrificed, as the poet said; I do not know how my poet could think his own Italian people would commit such barbarity. Perhaps the Greeks might. Though all my poet sang was true and is true, yet there are small mistakes in the truth of it, and I have tried to mend those tiny rents in the great fabric as I tell my part in it. So, then, Aeneas withdrew his men from the field. The Italians were already withdrawing, not to their siege position round the Trojan camp but miles farther back towards the city.

Laurentum itself was full of wounded men and refugees now, and more kept straggling in. Everywhere was a sense of exhaustion, confusion, lack of purpose. But when Turnus came, he appeared unaware of any such mood; he rode in the city gate on his fine stallion, tossed the reins to a stableman in the street before the Regia, and strode in, handsome and smiling, broad and erect in his high-crested helmet, Pallas’ ornate gold sword belt glittering over his shoulder. I watched him arrive with Messapus and Tolumnius, the Rutulian soothsayer, from my watchtower. Soon I saw my mother hurry across the courtyard to the reception rooms, picking her way round the makeshift beds of wounded men. I went downstairs then. My father was not in his apartments, so he had come out of hiding and gone to meet Turnus and the other captains. I was glad of that. There was a lot to be done for the people in the Regia, and I was busy with that all the evening, till Drances found me at the granary room.

Now, I had never much liked Drances. He was not like the old farmer warriors who made up most of my father’s circle of friends and counsellors. He was soft, flexible, enthusiastic. He did not lay down his opinion like a large rock on the table, as they did, and challenge anybody to move them from it; his opinions seemed to weigh very little, to be light and airy, a mere waft of words; but he got his way, more often than not. He was a city man, a politician. To him, my mother and I were unimportant persons in tactically important positions. We had to be managed. He saw women as he saw dogs or cattle, members of another species, to be taken into account only as they were useful or dangerous. He considered my mother dangerous, me negligible, except insofar as I might be made use of.

Yet he had an acute perception of relationships, more like that of a woman than of many men. He knew I was afraid of Amata, that I had run away from her and taken refuge in the royal apartments, that she was in love with Turnus, that I was not, that my father and she had quarreled. All this was grist to his mill. He had always opposed betrothing me to Turnus, I suppose because he saw Turnus as a threat to Latinus’ power encouraged by Amata’s favoritism, and was envious of Turnus’ splendid, contemptuous manhood, and wanted to thwart it. As I came out of the granary he stopped me and said, out of hearing of anyone else, “Daughter of Latinus, have no fear that your father will let you be given to the Rutulian. Our king could not prevent the breaking of the treaty, but no sacrilegious marriage will follow, be assured. Trust me.”

I thanked him and stood with lowered eyes. I knew what he thought of me, the girl who understood nothing, the nobody that everybody was fighting a war about.

All the same I was grateful to him for saying what he did. Though the war had not gone as they expected, and many of them were troubled about the broken treaty and the flouted oracle, still most of our people backed their queen and her local hero against the foreigners. And they assumed that whatever my parents chose was my choice. My father’s weakness had left me alone, isolated; there was nobody I could tell the truth to, nobody to hear me speak my heart. Maruna was loyal beyond question, but I could not lay my burden on the shoulders of the powerless. She knew my heart, but we could not talk freely.

The next morning, Latinus sent messengers to the Trojan camp requesting a truce for the performance of rites and the burial of the dead. Corpses were lying all over the riverbank and the ground for a mile inland.

Drances was one of the messengers, and when he came back to Laurentum he made a point of seeing me and telling me about the parley. He said, “We told the Trojan leader that since he surely had no quarrel with the dead, would he not allow decent burial to men who might have been the hosts, the fathers-in-law of his men. He answered at once, very directly: ‘You ask peace for the dead: I would grant it to the living, if I could! Why are we at war? If Turnus will not honor his king’s treaty, if he wants to drive us out of Latium, then let him alone meet me alone with sword in hand. We two could have spared all these deaths!’ Ah, you should have seen him as he said that—what a man he is—the man you’re promised to!”

“I have seen him.”

That brought Drances up short. He stared.

“I spied on the Trojan camp from the hill, the day after they landed,” I said. “Aeneas is a tall man, with a deep chest, and big hands. He speaks rather softly. His eyes are full of fire, smoke and fire, because he saw his city burn.”

Drances continued to stare. The dog had talked.

“You speak the truth, king’s daughter,” he said at last.

I looked down at my spindle and let it drop, twisting the wool into thread as it fell. “Please go on telling me about the parley.”

Drances pulled himself together and went on. He had thanked Aeneas, he said, and promised to revive the treaty with Latinus. “I told him, ‘Let Turnus seek his own alliances. We would rather help you rebuild your Troy here, with us!’ And so we made a twelve day truce. And now the Trojan knows that Turnus is still not the ruler of Latium. It was a good day’s work. I doubt our people will go back to war, whatever Turnus and Messapus decide to do.”

“That is for the king to decide,” I murmured.

“Indeed, indeed. But take heart, Lavinia! Your father will never defy the oracle!”

He presumed too much, I thought. I bowed slightly and walked away from him. He might pat the dog, but it declined to wag its tail.

From the farms and from the city people went out that afternoon and found their sons and fathers and brothers dead on the field. Some carried home the bodies of their dead to wash them and mourn them and bury them. Others made pyres there where they fell, so that evening all the fields north of Laurentum were clustered with fires, and smoke dimmed the stars. All the woodsmen in Latium brought wood in from the forests, and next day a huge common pyre was built outside the city walls for men who lived too far to be carried home for burial. It burned all day. Grief hung as dark and heavy in the city as the smoke.

We were told that the Trojans were burning their dead on the shore of the river. Those who saw the ceremony said that young men ran round the pyre three times on foot, then horsemen galloped round it three times, while people wailed aloud and blew conch shells. Warriors threw the weapons they had taken from their enemies onto the fire that consumed their friends. The rite was not like ours and yet it was like enough, there was nothing alien in it.

The next days passed in a curious suspense and inactivity. We looked after wounded men in the Regia and in houses all over Laurentum; some healed, some died. No word came from the Trojans. Evidently they were waiting to hear what we would say to Aeneas’ offer of single combat with Turnus and a restoration of the treaty. But my father sent no messengers to them. Like his people, he was uncertain what to do.

Drances had made sure that Aeneas’ words to him were heard everywhere, and many people in the anger of their grief cried that this war was accursed. It was Turnus’ fault; he had broken the truce Latinus made. If Turnus claimed the king’s daughter, let him win her fighting the Trojan hand to hand, let one life pay for all. But there were as many who, fearing foreigners, said that the war was our salvation, that the Trojans and their allies had come to overrun the land, and Latinus could save Latium only by sending Turnus with our forces to destroy or drive out the invaders.

When Latinus at last called his counsellors, they came in that same division of mind. And they were met right away with bad news from Diomedes, the Greek who had founded a city in the south, whom we had sent to for troops. He refused. He politely told our envoys that we were fools to take on the Trojans. “We fought them for ten years,” he said, “and though we beat them, how many of us ever came home? Our victory brought us shipwreck, death, exile. Aeneas is no ordinary man. He brings his gods with him. Keep the peace, keep your treaty with him, sheathe your swords!”

Amata and I were at that meeting, sitting far back in the shadows behind Latinus’ throne, and veiled. With us was the princess Juturna, Turnus’ sister, who had come up from Ardea to be with him. She was very beautiful, with blue eyes like his, but hers were strange eyes that seemed to gaze through water at the world. She had vowed chastity, people said; some said it was because the river Juturna, for which she was named, gave her certain powers so long as she remained virgin; others said she had been raped as a girl and since then would speak to no man but her brother. I do not know the truth of these stories. She spoke to us only in the barest civility, very softly, calling Amata aunt and me cousin, and sat listening to the council, a translucent grey veil over her head and shoulders.

When the Greek’s messenger was done, the counsellors broke into muttering, and then discussion, and they would have been shouting soon, but the king stood up and lifted his arms slowly, with open palms upturned, in the gesture of invocation. They fell still. Latinus bowed his head, and the silence deepened. He sat down on his high seat again and spoke. “I wish we had settled this great matter sooner! Better not to convene the council when the enemy is at the gate. My people, we are fighting an unrighteous war against an enemy who will not be conquered, because they follow the will of earth and heaven, while we do not. We have broken our obligations, they have held to theirs. We cannot defeat them. I know my mind has wavered on this, but I am certain now. Hear what I propose. Let us give them the land I own out beyond Sicania, all the rough foothill farmland there and the pine forests of the mountains: let us ask them to build their city there and share our realm. Or, if they wish to leave, we will rebuild the ships we burned. Let us send them envoys, with gifts to seal the treaty, now. Consider well what I say, and take this chance to spare our shaken people from defeat!”

Silence followed, but not a cold silence. They knew their king was a brave man, a warrior, who would not surrender lightly, and a man of piety, who had received the clear word of an oracle and held that it must be obeyed. They were thinking it over.

Unfortunately, Drances got up and began to talk. He talked vividly and fluently as always, but with burning malevolence, addressing Turnus directly. He told Turnus the war was his doing, the defeat was his doing, and it was up to him to end it—unless he was so smitten with glory and so lustful for the dowry of a king’s daughter that he would lead our armies out again, “leaving our worthless lives scattered over the fields, unburied, unwept, unknown. But if you had any real courage at all, you’d stand up to the man who challenged you!”

At this Turnus of course burst out and called Drances a coward who had never yet been on the battlefield, whose tongue talked of courage while his feet were running away. The Latin alliance was not defeated, far from it! Had not the Tiber run red with Trojan blood? Maybe the Greek Diomedes was afraid of Aeneas, but Messapus was not, and Tolumnius was not, and the Volscians did not know what fear was. “And does this hero challenge me to fight him alone? I hope he does. Better that I appease the angry powers by my death or win deathless fame by my courage. Better I than Drances!”

There was a growl of applause for that from the old counsellors, but Latinus intervened to stop the exchange of boast and insult and was about to speak again, when a messenger ran in under Verus’ escort, shouting, “The Trojan army is advancing on the city!” He was followed by other messengers, and through the opened doors of the room by a great noise of people in alarm, like a flock of geese or swans startled up crying and cackling on the marshes.

Turnus seized the moment unhesitating. “To arms!” he shouted. “Shall we sit here praising peace while the enemy attacks us?” And he ran out, calling to his captains, ordering who should defend the city and who should ride out with him. Latinus could not have stopped him if he had tried. He did not try. He sat motionless on his throne while the council broke up and the counsellors hurried out to see what was happening. Drances tried to talk to him but Latinus paid no attention, ordering him with a gesture to stand away. At last he got up and walked past us women, going to his apartment. He did not look at us or speak.

Amata took my hand.

Without thought, as if her touch were ice or fire, I pulled my hand away from her and stood facing her, ready to fight or run if she tried to touch me again.

She stood staring at me.

“I won’t hurt you,” she said at last, almost childishly.

“You have hurt me enough,” I said. “What do you want?”

She spoke hesitantly, still staring at me as if she scarcely knew me. “I thought—I think we should show ourselves to the people—at the altar of the Lar Popularis.”

She was right. With the king in hiding and the enemy attacking, the people needed immediate reassurance that all was well with their royal family and the powers that guarded the city. I nodded. I set off, then turned and said to Juturna, “You come too.” I had no business giving orders to a king’s sister, but she came without a word, pulling her grey veil about her.

We went out and walked through the streets to the square where the shrine to the protective spirit of the city stands. As we walked women joined us, coming out of every house, running down the streets. When we came to the place there was a great crowd around us. Amata had walked ahead, and she lighted the incense, but it was I who had stood with the king before this altar a hundred times, and it was I who knew and spoke the words he used to speak, offering the people’s duty and honor to the Lar, the spirit and indwelling power of border and boundary, walled city, place of our people.

The women around us bowed their heads or knelt down, and the people crowded into the streets and up on the walls and roofs fell silent listening.

I felt flow into me from them a loving trustfulness, a flood of feeling that humbled my mind and yet gave me a sense of great and reliable support. I was their daughter, their pledge to the future, a powerless girl yet one who could speak for them to the great powers, a mere token for political barter yet also a sign of what was of true value to us all. I stood among my people in silence when the ritual was done, all of us quiet as the birds that stand in hundreds at evening on the sea beach, seeming to worship together.

And so we could hear the noise outside the walls—rumble and clash and crash, neighing and yelling and thunder of hooves and feet, the noise of an army making ready for war.

The memory of the sweetness of that worship at the shrine of the Lar of the People was a solace and shield to me in the dark time that followed. Something had changed in the weighting of the balance. I no longer had to hide away, isolated from the current of public feeling; I was buoyed up by it, borne on it. My courage was restored.

Yet there seemed no reason why I should feel such confidence. Any hope of obeying the oracle, or following my fate as the poet told it, seemed lost. When my father proposed placating the Trojans by giving them land or building ships for them, he had not even spoken of my part in the original bargain. It seemed I was not worth mentioning. My mother had what she wanted—war against the foreigners, with Turnus in control of it, lord of the kingdom and the king’s daughter. Yet she went back to the Regia with that same bewildered look on her face and shut herself up in her rooms, while I was released from my seclusion. I found a kindness in the eyes of the men in the streets, the women of my household. They spoke my name tenderly. I felt welcomed, protected. My home was my own again, even if it was under siege.

I went to the king’s apartment and talked with him very briefly. Haggard and aged, his eyes red and swollen, he told me to come to him with any news of great importance, otherwise to let him be; he was not well. I asked him to rest and sleep. Verus and I would meet the messengers, I said, and come to him if need arose. So I spent some of that day in the atrium and at the doors of the Regia with Gaius and other men of the king’s guard, receiving couriers from the battlefield.

There was a constant flow of men and news between the city and the fields in front of it, where the Volscians and the Latins were taking up position for battle under Messapus and the Volscian captains. Scouts reported that Aeneas had sent his horsemen and the Etruscans forward, while he led the rest of his troops up into the hills northeast of the city—Verus said it looked as if his goal was to come at our army from two directions. So Turnus had taken his Rutulians up into the hills, intending to set an ambush for the Trojans at both ends of a pass. I knew the place, Golo Pass the shepherds called it, a narrow dark gorge. An army might well enter it and be trapped.

Such news came to us quite steadily for a while. In the early or midafternoon there was a pause. Leaving Verus in charge at our front doors, I ran up to my watchtower, just for a look, I thought.

I stood at the parapet to look out over the roofs and walls to the exercise grounds and fields north of the city. In several long irregular lines beyond the earthworks stood the ranks of Volscians with their black helmet crests, and behind them our Latins, very motley in their helmets and hand-me-down armor. Horses fidgeted, and their riders let them dance and curvet. Archers and men with long, light lances stood around in front of the Volscians, some fidgeting like the horses, others looking bored, leaning on their lances, chatting together.

The watchtower had the widest view in the city, and we on it may have been the first to see the glint of light on the metal tips of lances far off over the fields in the north.

A boy on a pony came scouring across the pastures, the pony white with lather, the boy yelling—I could not hear his words but he was surely yelling, “They’re coming!"—and they came.

It was very beautiful, the bristling glitter of lance heads far off there, moving quickly nearer and nearer. The air was shaken with the thrilling drum of the feet of horses at the gallop. All along the lines of men drawn up in front of the city, spears and lances reared up into the sunlight, and horses began to whinny and shift and fight the reins. Then the Etruscan horns and trumpets sounded their battle signals, some deep and hoarse, some silvery sweet. The attackers came on: the defenders stood firm: for a moment everything seemed to stop, hold still. With a blare of the horns and a great shout of men’s voices, arrows and javelins and lances went up from both sides, a swift darkness passing and crossing in the air between the two armies. Under the iron rain they met face to face, men afoot and horsemen, body to body.

I tell you what I saw as I saw it, not understanding it. I saw men running towards the city, converging on the gate. I thought they were the attackers. I could not understand why they suddenly began turning around, running back towards other men who, when they met, fought them, swords rising and falling. Then men were running away from the city, holding their shields behind them as they ran, and mounted men and riderless horses ran with them, and other men followed them, until suddenly those being chased turned around and the swords went up and down again, and there was the horrible noise of men screaming. And it all happened over again. It was like sea waves approaching the city and washing back from it. But the spray was dust, thick, dark, summer dust. After that there was no running and turning, only knots and pairs of men chopping at one another in the dust with swords, and throwing and pushing heavy lances at one another, and blood running where the sword bit and the spear point hit. Mars, Mavors, macte esto. I do not know how long it went on. I stood clutching the parapet of the platform, Maruna and other women with me, and women and children stood on all the roofs and on the walls, watching men kill men.

The snarling trumpets rang out again. A group of horsemen far out in the fields moved forward in a solid mass like a shadow across the ripening crops and the pagus paths through the hot slanting light full of dust. Before that mass the lines and knots of fighting men gave way. Very quickly the movement involved them all: they were turning and coming back to the city, the Volscians with their black horsehair crests, they were all running back towards the walls. Both armies, all the men down there in the fields were running towards the walls in a cloud of dust that half hid them, fine dust of the plowlands billowing up brownish gold, sunlight making strange hollows and aisles in it through which loomed the shapes and shadows of horses and men.

The city gates were open. They had been open all through the fighting. I thought: I must go down and give orders that they be shut! Maruna held my arm. I did not understand why I could not hear what she said to me. She put her mouth almost on my ear, crying, “The guards will defend the gate! Stay here! Stay up here!” As she drew away, something passed us perfectly silently and lay still on the platform. A bird, I thought, they shot a bird, but I saw it was an arrow. It lay there with its long, bright bronze point and stiff clipped feathers, harmless. I could not hear anything because the noise down at the gate and the noise on all the roofs and walls of the city was so huge: a screaming, a howling that filled all the world and the mind. From the watchtower we could not see what was happening at the gate. But we could see those who could see, standing on the walls above and near the gate. Some of them were watching their son or husband die, cut down by a bronze sword in front of the locked gate of his city.

We saw the Etruscans pull away, and the black-crested Volscians follow, though fewer, and slowly. The Volscians stopped just outside the ditch. The Etruscans went on a hundred paces or more before they stopped, wheeled their horses, and stood motionless in the dimming, settling dust. There was a long pause, the sound of shouting fading slowly away, rising in pitch as it grew less, till it was only the crying and moaning of the wounded and bereft.

“Look, look,” somebody said, and where she pointed we saw a column of men coming at a quick pace, though in the distance it seemed slow, down out of the western hills. “It’s Turnus, Turnus is coming!” people shouted from roof to roof. An old man’s voice shouted, “Where’s he been all day?” but he was drowned out by cheers and acclamations for Turnus and the Rutulians. The cheering rang thin and did not last long. Somewhere down near the gate a woman was keening, a gasping ululation, intolerably shrill and full of pain.

I went down, back to the doors of the Regia, then; so I did not see, as others did, Aeneas lead the Trojans down out of the hills on the same road Turnus had taken, not far behind him.

The Etruscans drew back farther to join with the Trojans. What was left of our men and the Volscians camped, with Turnus’ Rutulians, between the earthen rampart and the city walls. They spent the evening digging the ditch deeper, setting up defenses for the gate.

I did not see that. At first I was with the women looking after the new lot of wounded men in our courtyard, and then I saw my mother pass under the colonnade, going to the council rooms. At once—though I stopped at the fountain under the laurel tree to wash blood hastily off my hands and arms, and bathe my face in the blessed cool of the water—I followed her.

I joined her and Juturna at the back of the council room. My father sat on his throne with its curved crossed legs; he did not look like the shaky old man I had last seen, but sat erect and stately in his red-edged toga, listening to Turnus. Drances was there, and Verus and several of the other guards and knights, but only a few of the king’s council. Most people were caring for their wounded or mourning their dead, or were out helping fortify the walls for siege.

Turnus was still in battle gear, though in fact he had not fought that day. He was dusty, and his face was strained and pale. He was not strutting now. He looked young, anxious, handsomer than ever. Amata and Juturna both stood watching him with yearning eyes. He was giving a report of the conditions of the allied army to Latinus, not trying to disguise that his ambush had failed, or deny that the Volscians had broken and run, nearly bringing the Etruscans after them into the city. But he praised Messapus and Tolumnius and the Latin troops, and the citizens too, for rallying at the city gate and holding firm.

“Tomorrow,” my father said, “you and your men will be with them. And Aeneas and his men will be with the Etruscans.”

“Yes,” Turnus said. There was a pause. He shifted his position, stood with his legs a little farther apart, his head back. “I do not hang back. There is no delay in me,” he said rather strangely, his voice growing louder. “If people say the treaty was broken, if the Trojans think so, I give them the lie. Repeat the rites, King Latinus, renew the terms of the agreement, tomorrow morning, before all the people! I swear to you here and now, I will by myself clear our people of the taint of cowardice. This Trojan, this man who ran away from his conquered city, let him meet me, let him meet me alone, in fair fight. Let all Latium be on the city walls to see it. Either my sword will take all shame from us, and take Lavinia from him, or he will rule a defeated people and have her as his wife.”

He glanced at us three women standing behind the throne as he finished speaking, but his eyes did not meet mine.

Latinus answered him with a slow, thoughtful firmness. On the eve of defeat, confidence had returned into him, as it had into me. “Turnus, no one questions your courage. It is so great, in fact, that it obliges me to move slowly, to hold back. Consider: your father gave you a noble kingdom, you’re rich and have the goodwill of your neighbors. You know that I am your friend, your kinsman by marriage. And there are many girls of good family, unmarried, in Latium. Weigh all that in the balance! For whatever happens, I cannot give you my daughter. It is forbidden. It cannot be done. My wish to make the bond strong between us, my wife’s pleading, my own weakness led me to do wrong. I broke the pledge. I let it be thought that the promised wife could be taken from the man she was pledged to. Wrongly, I let this war begin. Let it end, now, before a final defeat. Why have I changed back and forth like this, hiding from the inevitable? If I was and am willing to take the Trojans as allies while you’re alive, why should I wait for your death to do so? Consenting to this duel, I betray you to your death. Let it not be so. Let my old friend, your father Daunus, see you come home alive!”

“My sword can draw blood too,” Turnus said; he had been pale, but was now red-faced, his blue eyes glittering. “You needn’t try to protect me, Father Latinus. The story is that some power hides this Aeneas from his enemies in battle. But here, on our ground, the powers are with me. I will defeat him!”

At this Amata started forward, ran to Turnus and took his arms, half clinging to him, half kneeling as a suppliant. Her black hair was loose and she was in tears, her voice high and shaking. “Turnus, if you ever loved me—you are our only hope—the only savior, the honor of this disgraced house. All our power is in your hands. Don’t throw it away! Don’t throw away your life! What happens to you happens to me! I will not be a slave to foreigners! I have no one but you! If you die, I die!”

Hearing her begging, I blushed with shame till tears filled my own eyes. I felt the red blood color my face, my neck and breast and body. I could not move or speak.

But Turnus looked over my mother’s head straight at me, the bright unseeing stare that had frightened me the first time I ever saw him. He spoke to her, though he kept looking at me. “No tears now, mother, no ill omens, please. I’m not free to put off death. I’ve already sent a herald to the Trojan. Tomorrow morning there will be no battle. The treaty will be resworn. He and I alone will meet. Our blood will settle the war. And on that field Lavinia will find her husband.”

He smiled at me, a wide, fierce smile. He put Amata away from him, pushing her hands away. She cowered down sobbing.

“The messenger has gone?” Latinus asked. His voice was dry.

“He may be there by now,” Turnus said proudly.

Latinus moved his head once, the nod of acceptance. “Then go make yourself ready for your fight, my son,” he said, with kindness, and stood up, dismissing the others. He turned around as they left, and I think he was about to tell me to look after my mother, but he asked, “Daughter, are you hurt?”

I saw where he was looking: there was a great smear of half-dried blood all down my palla, which I had not seen in the twilit courtyard. “No. I’ve been with the wounded men, father.”

“Take some rest tonight, my dear. Tomorrow will be a long day, for some. Go, sleep well. Juturna, go with your brother. If you can persuade him out of this duel, do so. There is no need for it. We will restore the treaty and the peace.”

She hurried after Turnus. When the others had all left the room, Latinus went back to Amata, who was hunched down on the floor, her hands plucking and tugging at her hair. He knelt by her and spoke softly. I could not hear what he said. I could not bear to watch them. I went back out across the courtyard, and to my room.

As I meet them in the courtyard of our house, Ascanius is saying something jokingly to his father, “You said it yourself—come to you for work, but not for luck!” Then he goes off to do whatever it is that Aeneas has asked him to do. And I ask Aeneas, “What did he mean?”

“Oh, it’s something I said to him when we couldn’t get that arrowhead out of my leg. I said, ‘You can learn a man’s work from me, son, but if you want good luck, go to somebody else!’ I was in a foul mood.”

“What arrowhead?”

“The last morning of the war.”

I puzzled it over. “But Turnus didn’t have a bow. He was using his sword.”

“Turnus?”

“The wound in your leg—”

“Turnus never wounded me,” he says grimly. Then his face changes. “Oh. I see. I lied to you. To some extent. I lied to everybody, actually.”

“Explain, please.”

We sit down side by side on the bench under the laurel sapling. “Well, it was just after that augur, that Tolumnius, threw his lance to break the truce. I saw him do it. He killed a young Greek on the spot. Then of course they all went mad. I was trying to get our men together, out of it, keep them from fighting—Fighting there. At the altar! Where you were standing!"—His face goes dark again at the thought of it. “And in all the confusion, somebody got me in the leg with an arrow.”

“You don’t know who?”

“Nobody ever claimed the honor,” he says with a bit of mockery. “Serestus and Ascanius helped me get out of the mess, back to our camp. Seeing the captain down is frightening to the men. I had to hop along leaning on my spear, bleeding like a sacrifice. So, old Iapyx did his best, pulled out the shaft, but he couldn’t get the arrowhead out. It was barbed, you see. And everything was going to pieces, back there. So I said, tie it up, man, I can’t stand around here all day, I have to find Turnus and finish this thing. I made Iapyx do it. Once he’d stuffed the hole with dittany and had it tied up tight, it didn’t hurt. You don’t notice that sort of thing much, in the thick of it. So I went back, looking for Turnus. And couldn’t find him. I’ll never understand it. What was he doing? I’d see him not too far off now and then, and then he’d disappear, like a swallow in an atrium—flit past, gone again. I’d go where he’d been and he wasn’t there. I was running out of patience. And just then Messapus knocked off my helmet crest with a spear, and I lost my temper. So I called for an attack on the city.” He looks down, frowning, at his hands clasped between his knees. “I am sorry about that. It was wrong.”

“So Turnus didn’t wound you? You were already wounded when you fought him?”

He nods, rueful at having deceived me, or at having been caught at it. “As soon as I got back to camp, afterwards, Iapyx got the point out—it practically jumped out, then.” He looks at his tough brown thigh and pokes the dent, a hand’s breadth above the right knee, deep and red among other, older dents and scars. “Healed up amazingly fast,” he says, as if this excused everything.

“Why did you let me think it was Turnus that wounded you?”

“I don’t know. I suppose a lie extends itself, somehow. I had to pretend it didn’t amount to anything, you know, while the fighting was going on. As I said, it worries the men. We were so outnumbered, it was always chancy. And I had to find Turnus and fight him to end the whole thing—it was the only way. So, then, afterwards, when I could admit that I’d been hit—in fact as you remember I was pretty lame for a while—it didn’t seem important how it had happened. I didn’t know you thought it was Turnus who did it. It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

He asks this not boyishly, seeking excuse, but gravely, to find out if it does matter very much to me. I have to think about it a while.

“No,” I say. And I lean down and kiss the scarred dent in his thigh. He puts his arms around me and lifts me up against him. His hands under my loose gown are large, warm, rough-skinned, and strong. He smells of salt and incense.

I did sleep, that last night of the war, slept soundly, deeply, so that my waking was slow. At first it seemed to me that there was something I must do for my mother, but I could not think what it was. Then I came a little farther out of sleep and thought that there was to be a ritual and I should help my father with it. Then I woke, and saw my small window just showing the first beginning of light in the sky, and a hundred images of bloody wounds and dying men I had seen yesterday went through my mind in a rush, and with them the poet’s voice chanting, and then came the knowledge that today we would either renew the treaty of peace, or the fighting would be in the city itself and my people defeated, destroyed.

I got up and put on my old red-edged toga with the scorched corner and ran to my father’s apartment to wake him; but he was up and about already. He did not question my presence or my intention to go with him. Together with Drances and a couple of older men we got the ritual implements together, and I brought out the bowl of salted meal to the stable yard, where the animals were to be selected from herds brought in from farms overrun by the fighting. By the time we had picked them, it was time to lead them out to the sacrifice.

Soldiers on guard opened the city gates for us, hailing the king with a clash of weapons on shields. They made to shut the gates behind us, but Latinus said, “Let the gates of our city stand open!” He strode ahead of us, holding up his oak scepter like a lance, the wide purple-red edge of his toga showing bright in the dawn. Our army was drawn up all in order, facing outward from the walls and the earthwork that had been built up outside the ditch. Across a narrow space of farmland, trampled to dust now, the Trojans and Greeks and Etruscans were just forming up their ranks. A space between the armies had been lustrated, marked out as sacred, and an earthen altar set up in the center. Old men from the city were busy piling up firewood in the hearth they had made beside it.

Latinus strode directly to the altar. He held out his hands, palm up. Young Caesus, our salt boy, was ready with a fresh-cut piece of turf and put it square on the king’s hands. Latinus set it on the altar. Just as he did so, the sun shot its first ray over the eastern hills, and Aeneas came forward between the armies and stood across the altar from the king of Latium. Everything happened as if it had been planned and rehearsed a hundred times, everything happened as it should and must.

With Aeneas came his son, Ascanius, standing behind him, and Turnus came to stand behind Latinus at the altar. Aeneas wore the magnificent armor and carried the shield I came to know later. The crest of his helmet was a red plume that looked like the flaming cloud of a volcano. Turnus was as splendid in gold-washed bronze, with a plume that towered up white and streamed in the wind of morning. His sister stood near him in her grey veils. My father had pulled up the corner of his toga over his head, as I had done.

The walls and roofs of Laurentum, when I looked back and up at my city, were dark with people—women, men, children. They were all silent, and the men of the two armies were silent.

I stepped forward with the bowl of salted meal. My father took up some in his hands and sprinkled the sacrifices with it, a young white boar and a two-year-old sheep with very fine white wool. Aeneas came forward and took up meal in his cupped hands from the bowl I held out to him. It was the first time I was ever close to him. He was a big man, all bone and muscle, tanned dark, his face seamed and weathered, worn and fine. He was the man I knew and had known since the poet spoke his name in the glade of Albunea. I looked up at his face, and he looked down at mine. I saw him recognise me.

He turned away to sprinkle the meal over the animals. I gave my father the little ritual knife I carry, and he carefully cut some hair from the forehead of the pig and the sheep. He gave me back the knife. I held it out to Aeneas. He took it and cut a bristle or two and a curl of wool and gave the knife back to me. Then they both stepped to the hearth and dropped the offerings into the fire. Caesus brought the wine jug and the old silver cups on a tray. He poured the cups full and gave one to each king. First Latinus, then Aeneas poured out the libation over the green grass on the altar. My father spoke the ritual words in a low chanting voice, invoking the powers of the earth, the hour, and the place. Aeneas stood gravely listening.

In all this time there was hardly a sound from all the people gathered there. A baby’s wail up on a rooftop in the city; a clink of bronze as a soldier shifted his stance; birds singing far off in the trees of the city streets; and the broad, sweet silence of the brightening sky over all.

My father’s prayer was done. He stepped back a little. Aeneas drew his sword. The hiss of bronze on hardened leather was loud.

He held the sword up over the altar and said, “Let the sun be witness to what I say, and this land also, to which I have come through much suffering. Let Mars who rules the war, let the springs and rivers of this earth and the sky above it and the sea that washes it, bear witness. If Turnus is the victor, my people will withdraw to Evander’s city in defeat, and my son will leave this land, and never return to it in war. But if I am, as I may be, given the victory, I will not make the Italians my subjects, nor claim rule over your land. Let both our peoples, unconquered, pledge eternal treaty. With me come my gods. Latinus, my father-in-law, will keep his sword and his rule. My people will raise up a city. And Lavinia will give it her name.”

He looked directly at me as he said that, not smiling, but with a brightness in his face and eyes. I looked back at him and nodded once, very slightly.

He lowered and sheathed his sword. My father stepped forward to face him and held up his heavy oaken staff over the altar. “By the same powers I swear, Aeneas, by earth, sea, stars, the lord of lightning, and two-faced Janus, and the shadows under earth. I touch the altar. I swear by this fire and the powers that stand between us: Never shall this peace and truth be broken, whatever may come. Never shall my will be changed, not until this staff, the ancient scepter of the lords of Latium, bear branch and leaf!”

He nodded to the men who held the animals. They brought them forward, with the long sacrificial knives, and Latinus cut the sheep’s throat while Aeneas cut the boar’s, each with one quick experienced stroke. And at that the people, soldiers standing by and citizens up on the walls, broke the silence with a long, soft, quavering aaahhh of release, relief, fulfillment.

Now an Etruscan haruspex came forward to look at the entrails of the sacrifice, a matter the Etruscans consider very important; and the animals had to be cut up and the meat spitted and cooked over the fire. This all took a good deal of time. Aeneas and Ascanius stood back from the altar, keeping silent, as did my father; but Turnus began to talk with his sister and with a Rutulian chief, Camers, who stood beside her. Despite his gilded armor and gorgeous plume, Turnus looked pale again, and tired, as if he had not slept; he kept gazing around at his men with a grieving, pleading face. And the Rutulians began to gather around him. Camers talked to them not loudly but earnestly, and they listened, looking grim. The augur Tolumnius moved about among them, also talking. The haruspex took forever poking about in the livers and hearts and kidneys, the attendants put too much meat on the fire at once and nearly put it out so that it had to be rebuilt to burn high, the murmur and mutter of talking grew louder through the ranks of the Italians. The sacred moment was lost, past. The sun was getting higher, the day was beginning to be hot.

People looked up and pointed to a faint clamor in the sky. A great flight of swans was coming from the river, heading south past us and the city, flying lazily, left to right. The Greek and Trojan troops followed the birds’ flight as we Italians and Etruscans did. And so all saw the sudden eagle, arrow-fast from the east, seize the lead swan in its talons in a shower of feathers and shoot on in a wide curve over us, heavily carrying its prey. Then, most strangely, the whole flight of swans turned as one, flying low and fast, the shadows of their wings passing over us, chasing and driving and harrying the eagle, crowding it till it dropped the dead swan and flew up and off over the western hills. A hesitant cheer went up from some of the watchers, but most were silent, wondering at the meaning of the sign.

Into that silence Tolumnius shouted out, “An omen! An omen! Rutulians, Latins, obey the omen! Attack the attacker! Close ranks, defend your rightful king!” And as the men around him shouted and shook their fists in the gesture of Mars, Tolumnius heaved back his six-foot spear and threw it straight into the ranks facing him across the sacred ground.

A man bent forward over the shaft making a strange noise like a cough or laugh, clear to hear in the last moment of the silence.

Then the world was filled with the enormous bewildering roar of men shouting, drawing weapons and clashing shields. Men rushed past me, this direction and that, shouldering me unseeing. I could see nothing I knew any more except the altar. I pressed up close to it. My father was there with the boy Caesus, trying to take up the sacred dishes, his hands shaking. “Help me, Lavinia,” he said, and I took and carried what I could. Keeping close together we struggled away from the altar through the confusion of running men and plunging horses towards the city gate. Caesus was not with me, and I stopped and looked back for him. I saw an Etruscan in splendid armor trip and fall backward, sprawling head and shoulders right across the altar. Another man leapt at him and struck down at his exposed throat with a massive blade-headed spear, and the Etruscan’s blood spouted up over men crowding in to tear the armor and weapons off him. Some Rutulians had pulled long burning sticks out of the sacrificial fire and were using them as weapons, shoving them in men’s faces, so there was a stink of burning hair. Beyond them, for an instant, I saw Aeneas, taller than the others, his hand up, calling out in a great dark voice. Then somebody shoved me so that I nearly fell, and the boy Caesus, his face distorted with tears and terror, was tugging at my robe. I hurried on after my father. The gates of the city stood open above us. My father’s guards had gathered around us, and they brought us in.

The confusion in the streets was almost as bad as outside the walls. People were shouting that the Trojans had broken the peace and treacherously attacked the king at the altar. Many old men and boys, even slaves, rushed out to join the battle; the king’s guards kept the great gate open for them and for the wounded to take refuge. Women stood up on the walls screaming insults and throwing down clay bricks and whatever they had to throw at men fighting at the ditch and rampart. Other people rallied to the streets between the great gate and the Regia to protect their king if the enemy broke into the city. Others were feverishly burying their treasures in their garden or trying to wall up their doors and windows so they could hide inside their house.

I followed the king directly to his council room, where Drances and others who had escaped the fighting gathered. Drances was gibbering with terror and talked only about where we should hide. My father was shaken, out of breath, and grey in the face, but he sat on his throne and began to consult with Verus and the others and give orders for the defense of the city and the house. Seeing myself unneeded there, I ran to the women’s side, where there was nothing but dismay and rumor and wailing. My mother was in her apart ment, but she came out to meet me. She spoke to me with savage contempt: “So! that’s how your great Trojan keeps a treaty!”

“He swore peace,” I said.

“He attacked your father across the altar!”

“He did not. He pledged peace with him. He asked to fight Turnus hand to hand. He swore if he lost they’d leave, and if he won, Latinus would still be king of Latium. And father swore to that oath. But Juturna and the Rutulians didn’t want that, and Tolumnius called an omen and threw the spear that broke the truce. I was there. That is what happened.”

“It is not true,” she said, but she knew it was. After what I had seen I had no fear to spare for her. I heard my voice ring out stronger than hers, I felt taller than her as I stood facing her.

“If Turnus had come forward to fight Aeneas, there’d be no war now, the city would be safe,” I said, for my heart was hot with anger. “He betrayed us.”

“Turnus would never,” she began, and then, her voice shaking, she said, “It was for you, it was for you.”

“Turnus doesn’t care a stick for me or you either,” I said. I heard myself speak with the sneering stridency I had so often heard in my mother’s voice. I thought of the clarity of the sky above the altar between the armies as the two kings swore the treaty. A great swell of shame and passion ran all through my body. I knelt down before my mother and took the hem of her white palla. I said, “Mother, forgive me. Let us have peace between us!”

“Never, he would never,” she said. She looked around as if bewildered. “Is it my fault?” she cried. She turned away, pulling her gown out of my hand, and hurried back into her own apartment and closed the door behind her.

I crouched there weeping for a while. Tears that had been pent up in me through these terrible days poured out. Then they were done, and I put back the hair from my forehead and wiped my face with the edge of my palla and stood up, looking at the women who were watching me in awe and concern and confusion.

“It was Turnus’ people who broke the truce, but it will be the Trojans and Etruscans besieging the city,” I said to them, groping for the truth I needed and the reassurance we all needed. My voice quavered. “So we have no true friends but our own Latin men fighting out there, and ourselves. What can we do to make the house safe, and wait out the siege?”

They all gazed in silence, some of them sniveling, until Maruna said, “The storerooms are full.”

I said, “Praise be to our Penates, the storerooms are full, and the fountain runs. Is there plenty of firewood for the cooking stoves?”

That was indeed a problem, and something within our scope. A discussion arose about it, and Tita said, “We could cut down the laurel tree.” At that Sicana, the tall grim woman who had always served and sided with my mother, said, “Are you mad, Tita? Go wash your mouth out and beg all that’s sacred to give you the wits of a rabbit! Cut down the king’s tree? Idiot! There’s the old poplars back of the stables, to start with.” I put Sicana at once in charge of finding men with axes to fell and cut up the trees; then there were a hundred other things to be done, and women willing to do them.

The battle outside the walls went on all this time, all that morning. I saw none of it. I heard the noise of it only when there was some pause in the business of the house. I can tell only what I was told. The Rutulians at first, in the surprise of their assault, drove the Trojans and their allies back, but after that the battle moved steadily nearer the rampart and ditch outside the city walls and gate. Messapus was in charge of the Rutulians; Turnus was here and there, “but never staying in one place,” said the man who brought us the clearest report. This man, Mellus, had been among our recovering wounded in the Regia, and went out to fight again; his wound, a bad sword cut, reopened as he fought. He managed to get back inside the city while the gates were still open. He reported to the king that the Trojans were not trying to get closer to the gate, but were holding their position on the rampart while Aeneas hunted for Turnus, claiming his right to settle the war by single combat, and Turnus rode here and there through the fighting, mounted on his horse, dealing out death, but never letting Aeneas meet him. After Mellus had made this report clearly and quietly, he fainted from loss of blood; and though we did what we could for him in our courtyard hospital, he died that evening. He was a Latin farmer, with a small farm and orchard in the foothills south of the city.

I was trying to direct the sweepers to use mops and soaked rags to keep the courtyard pavement clean of blood from the wounded men who were continually carried in, when the roar of noise swelled up immediately outside the city gate. All of us in the house looked up from what we were doing, and some ran up onto the walls and the watchtower to see what was happening. They reported to us that the Trojans had crossed the space between the ditch and the walls and were attacking the city gate, led by their tall captain with the red crest on his helmet, although the crest had been sliced off short. One of the girls who had gone to the wall above the gate said the captain was shouting that the Italians had broken the treaty twice and their king was faithless.

“And he killed Verus,” she said. She was white as whey and talked in a high, monotonous voice, repeating things over and over. “He just sliced off his, his head, just sliced off his head, off his body.”

“Verus,” I said, not comprehending yet; there was too much to do. I was aware, even inside the Regia, that there was a great movement of people in the streets. Some were pressing to get down to the gates and throw them open in surrender, others were trying to get down there with pikes and poles and axes and kitchen knives to keep the attackers out of the city. The noise within the city was a dull mindless roar. Somebody shouted, “Fire!” and at that I did run up onto the platform to see if the Regia was threatened. Flaming missiles were flying up over the walls in a couple of places, but people in the streets below rushed to put them out. Still the cry of fire was repeated again and again, and the dark buzzing wailing noise of the people all over the city was so loud one could not think.

Through that noise there came from down in the house a shrieking of women, so keen and sharp I turned and ran down the stairs again and to the women’s side.

There the screaming and high wailing rang and echoed so I could not hear what Sicana, coming at me with her mouth open in a square and her eyes unseeing, cried to me. I followed her to my mother’s rooms. I saw Amata hanging from the noose she had made of twisted cloth and tied over a beam. Her feet were bare. Her long black hair hung down all round her face and body.

Sicana and I pushed back the table under her and Sicana held her while I cut the cloth noose with my small knife. We laid her down on the long table there in her anteroom. She still wore the little gold bullas my brothers had worn. “Wash her,” I commanded Sicana and the others, for she had soiled herself in her agony, and I could not bear for her body to be shamed.

What I had to do was tell my father.

He had heard the frenzy in the women’s side and was coming across the courtyard, Drances and some others following him. I stopped him under the laurel tree. I am not sure what I said. He stood a while. His face looked very tired and sad; he embraced me, and I held to him. I said, “Come to her.” At that he let me go, and slowly got down on his knees, and picked up dirt from around the roots of the laurel tree, and rubbed it into his grey hair.

I knelt by him, trying to give him comfort.

I realised that though the wailing went on in the women’s rooms, the noise of the city and the war had sunk down almost to quietness.

I looked up and saw people standing motionless on the walls of the house and the platform. They were still. It grew still.

Then there was a great sound like a deep breath, like the earth breathing, all around the walls. I thought it was earthquake, the sound earthquake makes as it comes. But it was the sound of the end. The war was over. Turnus was dead. The poem was finished.

No, but it was left unfinished.

Didn’t you tell me that, my poet? here in the sacred place, where the stinking sulfur water comes up from under the earth to make pools on the earth, and the stars shine between the leaves? Once you said it was not complete, and should be burned.

But then again, at the end, you said it was finished. And I know they did not burn it. I would have burned with it.

But what am I to do now? I have lost my guide, my Vergil. I must go on by myself through all that is left after the end, all the rest of the immense, pathless, unreadable world.

What is left after a death? Everything else. The sun a man saw rise goes down though he does not see it set. A woman sits down to the weaving another woman left in the loom.

I have found my way so far, even though the poet did not tell me the way. I guessed it right, without mistake, from things he said, the clues he gave me. I came to the center of the maze following him. Now I must find my way back out alone. It will be longer and slower in the living, but not so long, I think, to tell.

There were many who saw Turnus die, for it was before the gates of Laurentum that he finally stopped hiding from Aeneas and turned to fight him. Both men threw their spears, and missed. So they met sword to sword, but Turnus’ sword broke, and he turned and ran again.

Aeneas tried to chase him, but was too lame to run. He stopped and tried to pull out his spear from the wild olive trunk it had hit. That was a sacred tree. I had done worship to Faunus there many times. The Trojans had cut it down in a rage of destruction when they occupied the ramparts, and nothing but the stump was left. The spear was big and heavy and had gone deep, and the tree would not let it go. While Aeneas was struggling with it, Juturna ran up to Turnus and gave him a sword. Aeneas pulled his spear free at last and came for Turnus, shouting, “This is a fight, Turnus, not a footrace!”

Serestus was close to them then. He told me he saw an uncanny thing: an owl, a little owl, flew round Turnus, there in the broad daylight. He said that Turnus tried to keep it from his face. He seemed dazed, bewildered, like a man already mortally wounded. He ran off a short way again till he came to a terminus stone, a boundary marker. He stopped at it, turned, picked the huge stone up, grappling it in his arms, and threw it at Aeneas. It fell short by far. Then he stood there with the same bewildered look, holding his sword but doing nothing, till Aeneas brought him down, sending his heavy spear through Turnus’ thigh.

Aeneas came limping up and stood over him breathing hard. Turnus couldn’t get up. He struggled to his knees. When he’d got his breath he spoke clearly and quietly, as if his confusion had passed. He said, “You’ve won. I ask no mercy. Do as you will. If you kill me, send my body home to my father. Lavinia is your wife. Don’t take your hatred further.” Aeneas listened to him and drew back, as if to spare him. Then he saw Turnus had on the gold sword belt he had torn off dying Pallas. He shouted out, “Did you let the boy live? It’s he, it’s Pallas who makes this sacrifice!"—and he drove his sword into Turnus’ heart.

Juturna had stayed on the battlefield all through the fighting. They say she had more than once hidden her brother from Aeneas who came stalking him, lame and dire. She came forward now through the broken Rutulian ranks and knelt by Turnus’ body, her grey veils falling over him, and keened.

Aeneas stood there leaning on his sword until Achates and Serestus came to him; then he sheathed the sword, and with an arm round his friends’ necks, they helping him to walk, he began to hobble slowly back to the Trojan camp. He turned round as they crossed the rampart, and called out, “King Latinus! Our treaty holds!”

Latinus was not there to answer him; he was in an inner room with his dead wife, dust in his hair. But the Latin troops replied, many-voiced, “The treaty holds,” and people on the walls repeated it.

The few that were left of the Rutulian captains—for in his final fury Aeneas had killed every man who dared meet him—gathered their troops together and formed a group to take up and carry the bodies of Turnus and Camers and Tolumnius. In silence they began their long walk back to Ardea. The leaderless troops scattered out to find rest or find their dead comrades. Next day they too would straggle back to Rutulia, or Volscia, or the hill country.

Juturna went alone, northward; people saw her go, but she was never seen again, and it is thought she drowned herself that night in the father river.

The Latin army dispersed as the allies did. Some came into the city for rest or healing, but many went to find their dead brothers or neighbors on the battlefield and carry them home, back to the farm down the valley or over the ridge. Already from the nearby homesteads slaves with carts drawn by an ox or a donkey were coming out, sent by the farmwife or the old farmer to help carry the wounded and the dead.

That night in the city we heard the knock of axes, the distant crash of falling trees, in the woods north and east of the city. Next morning the woodcutters were busy hauling in wood for pyres outside the walls.

One pyre was built up high and separate for my mother. She was carried out on a white litter, dressed in the delicate white palla she had woven and called my wedding gown. Everyone in the city who could walk followed the procession.

The closest relative of the dead lights the fire, with face averted. I lit her fire. When the fire had done its work I picked out of the fierce smoking ashes a bone, a little finger bone, to bury in the earth, so that her soul need not wander. Then my father stood and called out her name three times, as is our custom, and I and all the people called her with him: Amata! Amata! Amata! And silence after that.

THE OLD GUARD VERUS WAS DEAD, AND AULUS. EVERY ONE OF the young men who had been my suitors was dead. My mother was dead. Almost every household in Latium grieved for a father or brother or son killed or crippled. I think one cannot be left alive among so many deaths without feeling unendurable shame. They say Mars absolves the warrior from the crimes of war, but those who were not the warriors, those for whom the war was said to be fought, even though they never wanted it to be fought, who absolves them?

In the evening of the day of my mother’s funeral, I called Maruna, Sicana, and others of the chief women of the Regia to come with me. Old Vestina was too broken with grief to do anything but crouch on the floor in my mother’s room and rock herself, crying without tears, making a little moaning like a sick child.

We walked down through the streets to the altar of Janus, where I made offering of meal and incense to the power of beginning and ending. People of the city gathered round. No one spoke. The silence of the city after the noise of war brought awe into us all. In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand. When I had made the offering to Janus, I went, followed by my women and many people, to the doors that stood ajar in their high cedar frame nearby, the War Gate, the gate that led nowhere whether it was open or shut. I pushed at one of the doors, then the other. I could not move them. Standing open, they had sagged from their hinges and rested on the stony ground. My women helped me, and men came forward to join us. We finally forced the gates shut, and Sicana and one of the men lifted up the squared beam of oak and slotted it through the thick iron staples of the lock. Then I spoke to the gate: “Stay shut. The treaty holds!” I felt as if I were speaking to an enemy, defeated for the moment, but never anything but an enemy. The people murmured after me, “The treaty holds.”

Aeneas did not come to Laurentum for nine days, the period of mourning. This was simple decency. Coming sooner, he would be perceived and resented as the conqueror enforcing his triumph. No matter that he had sworn to leave the crown and the sword to Latinus and bring only his gods to Latium: we had seen that promise twice broken in the making.

Still—"The new king’s in no hurry to come, is he?” people said. Even my women called him that, though I told them it was disrespectful to our true king. Word got round that the Trojan had been wounded and needed to recover, and people said with some satisfaction, “So Turnus nicked him after all.” Yet they told with admiration how he had hunted Turnus across the battlefield for two hours with an arrowhead in the muscle of his thigh. When he did come he walked lame, and looked rather drawn and gaunt.

He sent a messenger ahead to prepare us, and arrived with a troop of only ten or twelve men, all mounted, dressed in what finery they had—their armor, mostly, cleaned up and polished, and maybe a cloak or tunic that had been handsome before the long voyage from Troy. A couple of splendid Etruscan princes were with them, but none of the Greeks: in grief and bitterness of heart at his son’s death, Evander had called all his men back to Pallanteum. Aeneas rode a horse that had been one of my father’s gifts to him at the very outset, that day when the first treaty was made, when I was promised to him. The fine dun stallion, well trained but lively, scented his old friends the mares in the royal stables as he passed and set up a lot of whinnying, which of course the mares answered with neighs and squeals; so that part of their entrance was fairly noisy. The guards stood aside for them at the gates of Laurentum and they rode quietly up the Via Regia. People came running to look and crowded on the roofs, but they too were quiet.

The men dismounted at the house door. I hurried down from my spy post above the door and came round to enter the council chamber from the back. But Gaius, who had taken over Verus’ position as chief of the king’s guards, stopped me at the doorway. “The king says please to wait until you are sent for, queen,” he said.

He was the first to call me that. I am not sure he knew what he was saying. He was a silent, shy, grave old man, embarrassed at having to stop me.

So I had to wait at the doorway, unable to hear most of what they were saying. My father was on his cross-legged throne. I could see his back, and several Trojans, but not Aeneas. There was some speech making. The Etruscan Tarchon asked Latinus’ pardon for bringing his men to fight against the Latins, explaining that the people of Caere had resolved to take the tyrant Mezentius from Turnus in Ardea to punish him as he deserved, but an oracle told them they must have a foreign leader for such an expedition, and Aeneas had turned up at exactly the right moment. Latinus accepted this apology as gracefully as it was offered. He wanted no quarrel with Etruria. Drances did a great deal of the talking. He had been utterly odious to me since Turnus’ death; there was no reason in it, but I could not help it, and I clenched my fists in loathing as he droned on. Then one of the Trojans said something and an Etruscan answered, and everyone laughed, which changed the mood; and I heard a quiet, resonant voice: “I bring a gift for your daughter, King Latinus.”

“That is most gracious, noble Aeneas,” my father said. “And she will bring to you a dowry worthy of our wealth and pride.”

“I have no doubt of that, my king. But what I bring, I wish to give her with my own hands.”

My father nodded, and said to Caesus who was attending him as page, “Send for my daughter Lavinia.”

Caesus was just turning to fetch me as I came forward with Gaius. I arrived with unseemly speed. My father looked a little startled.

At last I could see Aeneas. He had been hidden from me before because he was seated—my father had had a folding stool brought for him, since he was still lame. But he stood up as soon as he saw me, and we looked at each other at eye level. He was much taller than I, but I was up on the dais.

Seeing him made me happy. It brought me joy. I thought I saw a gleam, a reflection of my pleasure in his face.

We bowed our heads in formal greeting, and then a dark man with a keen, kind face, Achates, brought a big pottery vessel up to the dais and rested it there. It was made of heavy red clay, un-decorated, broad at the bottom, broad-shouldered, with a sealed stopper. Aeneas put his hands on it, large, scarred hands, with a formality of gesture that came naturally to him, and also with a kind of affectionate tenderness.

“Lavinia,” he said, “when I left Troy I could not bring much with me: my father and my son, some of my people, and the gods of my household and my ancestors. My father is with the lords of the underworld; my son Ascanius stands there, and with him are my people, ready to do you honor as his mother and their queen. And my Penates and the sacred things of my ancestors I give you now to keep and cherish on the altars of our house, in the city that will bear your name. They have come a long way to your hearth and heart.”

I knelt down and put my hands on the vessel too. I said, “I will keep and cherish them,” in a thin voice.

“Where shall we build Lavinium?” he said, energetic, smiling now with open pleasure, looking from me to Latinus.

“We must go about the country and see what will suit best,” my father said. “I thought of a region in the foothills, up near the father river. Good growing land, and good timber above it.”

“Down the coast,” I said. My voice was still weak and hoarse. “On a hill, in a bend of the river that comes down from Albunea.”

They all looked at me.

“I saw it there, the city,” I said. “In a dream.”

Aeneas continued to gaze at me, and his face grew grave and intense. “I will build your city where you saw it built, Lavinia,” he said. Then he drew back a little, though we both still kept our hands on the pottery vessel. He smiled again and said, “And did you dream the day of our marriage?”

“No,” I whispered.

“Name it, King Latinus,” Aeneas said. “Name it soon! Too much time wasted already, too many deaths, too much grief. Let us not be wasteful, from now on.”

My father did not ponder long. “The Kalends of Quintilis. If the auguries be good.”

“They will be,” Aeneas said.

They were, of course.

The Trojans had only what was left of June to start their city and build us a house, but they were amazingly hard workers, better disciplined than we Italians and not used to taking so many holidays. By the first day of the fifth month, the town of Lavinium existed. A bend of the little river Prati half encircled the steep rocky hill that was the citadel. Around the east and south sides of the hill, sloping down more gently, was a ditch and rampart; higher up, a wooden palisade showed where the city wall of tufa rock would be built. Within that the streets were laid out. The main road went up to the citadel with a sharp turn on a steep ramp just before the gate, an excellent defensive position, as all the old soldiers said with satisfaction. A small stone house stood on the hilltop, facing the gate: the Regia. That house, the only one completely finished, looked out over the tents and huts and scaffoldings that made up most of the other habitations, and across the palisade to the water meadows of the Prati and the sea dunes a couple of miles to the east. West of the city the forests of oak and pine rose up and up towards the old volcano, the long mountain, Alba.

Early in the morning of that first day of Quintilis, my last day in my father’s house, I was arrayed as a bride. I who had so often ornamented the sacrificial lamb or calf was now ornamented, and my role, like theirs, was meekness. Vestina parted my hair with a bronze spear blade into six tresses and wound each with red wool fillets; I put on the wreath of good herbs and flowers I’d picked before sunrise in the fields outside town; a woolen sash was tied in a complicated knot round the waist of my tunic, Vestina and old Aula arguing for a long time about exactly how to tie it; and over all went a large, long, light veil, dyed red-orange. It was the flame veil my father’s mother Marica had worn when she was married, and her mother before her. Then I joined the three young boys waiting for me in the courtyard, all carrying lighted white thorn torches. The flames were invisible, a mere tremor in the brightness of the midsummer day. Caesus walked in front of me, the other two boys walked beside me, and their mother Lupina, a respectable towns-woman, came behind me as my matron of honor. After us came my father with his counsellors and what was left of his guards, and an honor guard of Trojan soldiers sent by Aeneas, and everybody else who wanted to be in the wedding.

We went down the Via Regia and people joined us all along the way, all shouting out the wedding word nobody knows the meaning of, “talassio! talassio!” and throwing nuts about and making dirty jokes. The dirty jokes are part of the marriage ritual, which seemed to surprise the Trojans. There was plenty of time to tell them, since the whole lot of us walked all the way to Lavinium, at least six miles. The wedding torches had to be relit or replaced several times, and people got hungry and began eating their walnuts and filberts instead of throwing them about. Water sellers with their tiny, heavy-laden donkeys did a good business all the way.

It was strange to me to walk inside the flame veil, looking out at the world through it. All that path I knew so well, all the hills and fields and forests, were a little dim, and colored faintly as if with sunset light. I felt set apart from all things, all people, alone, in a way I would never be alone again.

When we came at last to the front door of the house on the hill in the new city, Caesus turned round and with a whoop waved his burning torch and threw it end over end as high as he could into the crowd massed behind us. There was a scramble for it and a lot of yelling, as people burned their hands grabbing at it to carry off for good luck.

Then they all quieted down again and watched me as I rubbed the posts of the doorway with the lump of wolf’s fat Vestina had carried and given to me to use—it was brownish, stale, with a rank smell. Then she gave me some red wool fillets, and I tied them around the door posts, murmuring worship to Janus the Doorkeeper.

All this time tall Aeneas stood in the shadow inside the doorway, silent and unmoving, watching me.

When I was done, I stood still and looked up at him.

He asked the question that is asked: “Who are you?”

And I gave the answer that is given: “Where you are Gaius, I am Gaia.”

Then with a sudden, wide smile he moved, he picked me up and swung me high over the threshold of our house and set me down inside it.

So I was made his wife, the mother of our people, his and mine.

As a wife, I never felt that grieving anger that I used to feel and once spoke out to my poet in Albunea, asking why must a girl be brought up at home to live as a woman in exile. Indeed my exile was a small matter, since I went only a few miles from my old home, my father, the dear Regia with its laurel tree, and the Lar Familiaris of my childhood. But there was more to it than that. Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man’s toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free. But in giving up my girl self and taking on the obligations of womanhood I found myself freer than I had ever been. If I owed duty to my husband, it was very easy to pay. And as understanding grew between us and we came to trust each other, there were no restraints on me at all but those of religion and my duty to my people. I had grown up with those, they were part of me, not external, not enslaving; rather, in enlarging the scope of my soul and mind, they liberated me from the narrowness of the single self.

I did not bring the Penates of Laurentum with me. My father had manumitted his slave, Maruna’s mother, to be their servant and guardian in my place. When I first entered my new house in Aeneas’ arms, the Penates of his father’s house in Troy stood on the altar at the back of the atrium: they were the gods of this house now, my family’s gods, and I was their servant and guardian. A very old bowl of thin silver, worn and dented, stood near them, ready for the sacred meal. The lamps were of polished black clay. On our dining table was a plate painted red and black and on it was a little mound of dried fava beans, the food that must always stand on the table for the gods who share it with us, and near it the salt cellar: all as it should be. And on the hearth Vesta, the holy fire, burned small and clear.

Aeneas was about twice my age when we married. When I first saw his whole body, all muscle and sinew and bone and scar, I thought of the lean splendor of a wolf Almo and his brothers had caught and kept caged for a while before they killed it as a sacrifice to Mars. Aeneas’ body had been made in a hard school. But the man was no wolf, nor a hard man. I knew he had loved two women before me and grieved for them both. Although he knew me first only as an item in a treaty, he was disposed by nature and by practice to treat me as a wife, intimate to his own being. At first I think my youth awed him. He was afraid of hurting me. He praised my beauty with incredulous delight. He honored my ignorance, but I was impatient with it and ready to learn from him, as he soon learned. As often as we made love I remembered what my poet told me, that this man was born of a goddess, the force that moves the stars and the waves of the sea and couples the animals in the fields in spring, the power of passion, the light of the evening star.

I will not, I cannot tell much in detail of the three years of our marriage, for my mind holds me back from speaking much of those doings and undertakings that seemed of such importance to us and filled our days so full. And indeed they were important both to us and to our people; and they have filled my life, not only then but ever since, completing me, so that though I knew the bitter grief of widowhood, I seldom felt the utter emptiness. I think if you have lost a great happiness and try to recall it, you are only asking for sorrow, but if you do not try to dwell on the happiness, sometimes you find it dwelling in your heart and body, silent but sustaining. The purest, completest happiness I know is that of a baby at the breast and the mother giving suck. From that I know what perfect fulfillment is. But I cannot regain it by remembering, by speaking, by yearning. To have known it is enough, and all.

I knew how little time Aeneas had to live, and he did not. Or I think he did not. I do not know all the prophecies he may have heard during his voyage, or when he went among the shadows. If he did know, the knowledge did not weigh on him or make him shorten his view or shrink his hope at all. He looked forward fearlessly and sought to shape the time to come; he was a man building a city, founding a nation, working in every way he could for the well-being of his people, his family, himself. His shield hung in our entrance hall, full of images of the time to come, the kings, the templed hills, the heroes and their wars. He had carried the future of his people on his shoulder into war. Now he meant to found that future in peace.

After ten years of war in Troy, war had met him again unlooked for, unwanted, here on the Italian shore. He wanted never to meet it again. He was determined to make an enduring peace, as Latinus had done. His first and strongest purpose was to establish the rule of law, the custom of negotiation and arbitration, the superiority of rational patience over mindless violence, among his Trojans and the Latins who were building Lavinium with them, and among all our neighboring peoples.

It did not take me long to realise, as the first year passed, how his mind dwelt on the ending of the brief war here in Italy, how that had shaken and reshaped all his idea of who he was and what his duty was. Not the war itself; that had been unavoidable; once Mars rules men, Mars must be obeyed on his own terms. It was the ending of it that weighed on Aeneas: the manner of Turnus’ death. To him, that put all the rest into question.

He saw it as a murder. He saw himself as a murderer. He had withheld his sword, giving Turnus time to surrender to him fully and courageously, and yet after that, dismissing the obligation to spare the helpless and pardon the conquered, in a fury of vengeance he had killed him. He had done nefas, unspeakable wrong.

We talked in the summer mornings before we got to work; we talked in darkness, in our marriage bed, in the lengthening autumn nights. He learned that he could talk to me as I think he had never talked to anyone, unless perhaps Creusa long ago, in the dark years of the siege of Troy, when he was young. He was a man who thought hard and constantly about what he had done and what he ought to do, and his active conscience welcomed my listening, my silence and my attempts to answer, as it struggled for clarity. And my ignorance welcomed his questioning, which taught me what is worth asking.

“You were angry,” I said. “You should have been! First Turnus challenged you, then he deliberately ran away from you, kept you chasing him, knowing you’d been wounded, to wear you out. It was a coward’s tactic.”

“If it was a tactic. All’s fair in war.”

“But he broke the truce!”

“It wasn’t his doing. He let his sister talk, and Camers, and that Tolumnius, who threw the spear. Believe me, I have no regret at all for killing Tolumnius… But Turnus didn’t speak, then or later. Not till the end. He acted like a man under a spell.”

“That’s what Serestus said,” I said. “The owl he saw—just before you met with Turnus—he said he doesn’t know if he saw an owl flying around Turnus’ head, beating at him with its wings, or if he saw something Turnus was seeing, that wasn’t actually there.”

I could feel Aeneas shudder slightly. He did not speak.

After a long time I said, “I think there was some evil in Turnus’ heritage. In my mother’s family. Something frantic. A madness. A darkness. It ran in their blood like a black snake, a fire without light. Oh, may the powers of all goodness and the Earth Mother and my Juno keep it from me and our child!”

I knew by then that I had conceived; and I too shuddered as I spoke, and held to Aeneas for courage. He soothed me, stroking my hair.

“There is no evil in you,” he said. “You are as clear of soul as the springs of the Numicus, up there in the hills, as pure and clear.”

But I thought of the springs of Albunea, silent, pallid, under their stinking bluish mist.

“Turnus was young, ambitious, impatient,” he said. “But what was evil in him?”

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

“I killed the Etruscan boy Lausus. Cruelly.”

“You didn’t boast about it!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, you do.”

“Well, this is the best site of all.”

He looked at me from under his brows, waiting.

“I saw it in… call it a dream.” I had never come so close before to speaking of the poet to him, and felt I was treading on a dangerous edge, but I went on, cautiously. “The city on your shield, the great city—”

He nodded.

“It will be here. Just here—and up on those hills, the Seven Hills. I think it will be called by one of the father river’s sacred names. The Etruscans say Ruma, we say Roma. It will be the greatest city in the world.” I looked over at the baby, who was sound asleep in his travel basket. “Full of little Silviuses,” I said. “Thousands of them!”

After a moment he smiled. “Lucky town,” he said. “You saw this?”

“On your shield, mostly.”

“You know how to read it,” he said thoughtfully. “I never have.”

“Guesses, dreams.”

He stood over the baby’s basket, brooding, and presently reached down and stroked the soft wispy hair with the back of his forefinger. “You’ll carry it,” he whispered to the baby.

“Let it not be in battle,” I said.

“Wherever he must… Come then, my dear. We’ll sleep in the great city tonight.”

Evander’s alliance was grudging and he had not much assistance to offer us, but word of our friendship with the Greeks of Pallanteum reached the Greeks at Arpi, a much larger and wealthier colony in the southeast, ruled by a man Aeneas had known long ago and far away: Diomedes, a Greek captain at the siege of Troy. There was little cause for love between them. Achates told me why—Aeneas himself never talked about the war with the Greeks. In combat, in the last year of the siege, Diomedes had killed Aeneas’ charioteer, and while Aeneas stood over the body to save it from the Greek looters, Diomedes brought him down with the throw of a great stone, hitting him in the hip joint, bringing him to his knees. Diomedes’ sword was raised for the death stroke, when Aeneas threw dust up into his eyes and got away—an escape so unexpected it was uncanny, and added a good deal to Aeneas’ reputation as a fighter. Diomedes, furious, went looking for him through the battle. When he finally found him, lamed, he rushed at him to kill him, but the great fighter Hector came to Aeneas’ defense, bringing the whole Trojan line back into battle around him.

Achates told me this story when we were discussing the Greeks and their colonies. I told him in turn how Diomedes had refused to join Turnus’ alliance, warning Turnus to beware of Aeneas, for he was under the protection of great powers. Achates nodded and said, “A wise man, Diomedes. Wiser than he was, anyhow. He used to be a great brawler. He’d take on god or man… I wouldn’t mind seeing him again, after all these years.”

And not long after we returned from Pallanteum, an envoy arrived from Arpi with a gift of ten fine mares and a proposal from Diomedes of an alliance between his people and the Latins “under their kings Latinus and Aeneas.”

Latinus was entirely in favor. He said, “Go on. Go on down there and seal a treaty with the man. That puts the Rutulians and Volscians between him and us. In the nutcracker.”

“There’s a saying,” Aeneas said: “Keep an eye on Greeks when they offer gifts.” He spoke wryly. “Horses, particularly.”

“I’ll keep the horses, then,” my father said. “You go make the speeches.” He was in a mellow mood, that summer; his health had improved and he had come to Lavinium several times, to do worship at the altar of his grandson, as he said.

Aeneas did not take me down to Arpi with him. It was a long way through unsafe country, and he was not sure if he could trust Diomedes. I worried about him while he was gone, but not very much. It was only the second summer. It was not time to worry, yet.

He and his well-armed troop of companions came back safe and sound after twenty days. He said he and Diomedes had a good talk and fought the whole Trojan war over. They had sealed a treaty of peace and assistance at the altar with the sacrifice of ten boars, ten oxen, and ten rams, for Diomedes was rich.

On the way home, the last night out, Aeneas spent the night at the Alban Mountain. “That’s a sacred place if I ever saw one,” he said. “It made me think of Mount Ida. But nobody lives there.”

“It is sacred. Father’s been there for the winter solstice, when a gap in the rim of the crater points to the sun. And when there’s drought, or rain out of season, or if lightning strikes somebody dead, people go to Alba to pray and worship. I don’t know why it’s empty. Maybe the land’s not good.”

“There’s a village up by the lake, they said, but there ought to be a real town there. The soil is pale, though.”

“It’s white ash,” Ascanius said. “Ash is good for vines.”

Aeneas went north early in the autumn to Caere by ship, taking with him as fine a gift as we could offer Tarchon and his people for their help in the war: three white bulls, three white rams, and a pair of stallion colts with grey coats that would whiten as they aged. The horses had splendid gear of gilt leather and gilt bronze, given by my father. It was not a mighty gift for two kings to give, but it was fitting to our present status. There was no use our pretending to equal the Etruscans in wealth, or power, or the arts of living. They knew it and we knew it. They made Aeneas welcome in Caere, and he stayed over a month in Etruria, visiting Falerii and Veii, well received everywhere. He sailed home pleased with his journey.

I did not want to spoil his pleasure, but when we were in our room away from everyone else and I could speak my mind I burst out, “Oh never go away again for so long, Aeneas! I beg you! Never go away again at all!"—and to my surprise I began to cry.

Of course he soothed me and quieted me and asked what had worried me, and of course I could not tell him that only this winter and the next summer and the next winter were left to us together.

I said, “I know you have to make these journeys. But maybe you can put them off till later—when Silvius is a year or two older?—Not this year. No more traveling this year. Or even two years? And not for so long—Not for a whole month—”

It made no sense to him. How could it? He worked at it, and finally said all he could possibly say: “I won’t travel unless I must, Lavinia.”

I nodded, trying to repress my weeping, and hot and red with shame at my weakness and my efforts to deceive our fate.

“I cannot bear to see you cry,” he said. His own eyes were full of tears.

There was another cause of my distress at his long absence, which I did not mention any more than the other: Ascanius’ behavior while he was gone. Aeneas had left him in charge of the household and all affairs at Lavinium, as was right. The eldest son and heir should be getting experience in taking responsibility. Understandably, Ascanius found it frightening to take on his father’s authority, was anxious, and overdid it. He ruled with a heavy hand. People were ready to make every excuse for his youth, but he was uncommonly tactless even for a boy his age. He was hasty, willful, pompous; he sulked at any setback, and disdained any advice, even from Achates—especially from Achates, perhaps, because Achates was so faithful a lieutenant and friend of Aeneas. Pining for combat in order to prove himself fearless, or fearing it and therefore stumbling into it, I do not know which, Ascanius sought a quarrel wherever it could be found. In the month Aeneas had been gone, he had stirred up resentment and ill-feeling in almost every person or group he had had to deal with, done damage which would take months to repair.

Try as I might, I could not forgive Ascanius for spoiling both the peace of his father’s rule and his father’s peace of mind. I so much wanted Aeneas’ brief reign to be a true reward for all his travails, a haven of happiness. I longed to see my son of the evening star shine out at last in tranquillity. While Aeneas was in Etruria I had thought I should tell Ascanius what I knew: that his father’s life had not much longer to run. Surely if he knew that, natural piety would make him wish to spare his father trouble and grief, and his competitive spirit could control itself for a year or so. But Ascanius was so suspicious and jealous of me that I could not bring myself to trust him with that knowledge. He might even scoff at it. He tended to look down on all things Latin, including our oracles and sacred places; and I had heard him say that the best thing about the Greeks was that they knew how to keep women in their place. Though I told myself it was just a boy talking, and believed Ascanius had a good heart under all his bluffing and sulking, still I could not trust him with my knowledge. I could not trust him not to use it against Aeneas, in anger, or as a show of power.

Ascanius and I kept out of each other’s way as best we could. Aware, now, that his wife and his son did not get along, Aeneas was careful not to put either of us in a false position with the other. Though people often confuse it with weakness or duplicity, tact is a great quality in a ruler, whether of a country or a household; awareness of the other allows respect, and people respond to it, returning the recognition and the respect. Aeneas governed with tact, and was beloved for it.

He had to exercise it actively that winter and spring, mending fences with landowners and tribesmen and neighboring peoples whom Ascanius had offended—including my father. Rebellious as Ascanius might be, his pride in his ancestry and father was as naive as a child’s, and he simply could not accept the doddering old chieftain of a province on the far western edge of the world as an equal, let alone as his king. During Aeneas’ absence he had dismissed a messenger from Latinus without answer and had issued orders contrary to Latinus’ orders. My father said nothing at the time, but spoke to Aeneas after his return. He suggested—Latinus had a good deal of tact, himself—that the boy be given a domain to rule, away from both Laurentum and Lavinium. (My father called Ascanius the boy, and greeted him as son of Aeneas; whereas he called his grandson Silvius, and greeted him as little king. His tact did not prevent him from being very stubborn.)

Aeneas acted promptly on the suggestion. He offered Ascanius the governorship of the region of the Alban Hills, Lake Albanus, the village of Alba Longa, and the old city of Velitrae. He told him that his job there was to keep the peace with restless neighbors, so that the religious festivals of Mount Alba, to which people came from all over south Italy, could be held in safety, and to see to the improvement of agriculture and the training of a loyal body of farmer soldiers in the service of the Latin kings. He told me he had been blunt with his son, warning him that if he stirred up trouble instead of preventing it, he would be summoned back to Lavinium and deprived of command.

Ascanius went off with his bosom friend Atys, and a tiny army, all mounted on good horses and well armed, helmet plumes nodding, proud and handsome. He stayed in Alba Longa, and sent satisfactory reports to his father. The experiment appeared to be successful.

It was a great relief to me to have him gone. I would have Aeneas to myself and unworried by his son, all the rest of the summer, the autumn, the winter. I did not think about the spring. Spring would come. Janus would open the gates and Mars would bring it in as ever. I need not think about it.

Cattle rustlers and bands of brigands, poor men from Rutulia and the hill country east of Latium, were a perpetual threat to outlying farms; the Aequians and Sabines, who lived up the Tiber and its tributary the Allia, harassed Evander’s settlement and sometimes sailed down the father river in their war canoes, hoping to raid the salt beds, so that Aeneas had manned ships anchored at his old camp at Venticula to chase them off. But these were no more than the troubles my father had always had, and Latium was as much at peace again as when I was a child. Aeneas could give his mind to building and farming and flocks and herds, to hunting, which he loved as his son did, and to the ever-recurring rituals, which he loved as I did.

We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house. Both Aeneas and I had grown up in this responsibility, and it was dear to us both.

He and Latinus divided their royal duties harmoniously, the younger man always deferring to the old man but ready to take the burden from him if he tired. Not all our Latin customs were familiar to Aeneas the Trojan, but he took up our rituals as if born to them and performed them with a ready grace. I remember him as he led the Ambarvalia, that spring, the bright spring.

Every farmer was doing the same rite on his own land, leading his own household through the ceremony; Latinus would be going to his land under the walls of Laurentum while Aeneas led the procession down from Lavinium to the royal fields. During the days before, we had done a good deal of work in the house to prepare, washing the white clothes everybody wore—they must be washed in running water, which meant a lot of trips down to the river—and gathering good herbs, lucky herbs, and weaving them into garlands for both people and animals. Everyone who participated was supposed to refrain from sex the night before and come to the ceremony chaste.

The silence was what I had always loved best about Ambarvalia. Nobody spoke. People, like animals, walked saying nothing. It wasn’t actually a requirement, but because any word spoken would carry unearthly weight, and a word said amiss might bring disaster to the crops and beasts, it was easier and better not to speak at all. Only the king and his assistants in the ceremony spoke “with the lucky tongue,” almost inaudibly repeating the litanies which old Ferox lined out for them a few words at a time, his voice soft and expressionless. Ferox had farmed this piece of land long before we built Lavinium near it; he had known the litanies and led the circumambulation of the fields for sixty years. He was the true lord of the rites.

Aeneas followed him, leading a white lamb wreathed about with the leaves of fruit trees and wild olive, and we all followed after, clear around the field three times, from boundary stone to boundary stone, facing Janus and turning our backs on him as he faced and turned his back on us. We walked in silence, so that we heard the sound of our garments, and our bare feet on the plowland, and our breathing, and the birds singing the spring in, up in the oak groves.

Then Aeneas led the lamb to the old stone altar topped with a fresh turf of grass, and made the sacrifice. You can tell a great deal about a man from how he performs sacrifice. Aeneas’ hands on the leggy ram-lamb were calm and gentle, his knife stroke sudden and sure; the lamb went down softly on its knees and then its side as if it were lying down to sleep, dead before it could be frightened.

During the sacrifice old Ferox prayed aloud, telling the spirits of the place that as we now with our gift of life increased their numen, their power itself, so we asked them to give us increase and keep harm from the planted fields. And then, with other old men, loud and harsh, he sang the Arval Song:

So we had drawn the silent circle of protection around the fields, and prayed to the implacable power of the place and season, and now came the dancing, and the feasting, and the carols and love songs.

Of that song Ferox and the old men sang, Aeneas told me he had never heard anything like it, nor had he known the Mars we know. The Mars of his people was a bringer of war and disorder only, not a guardian of the herds and flocks, not the power that holds the thin boundary between the tame and the wild. He asked the old men about the song and about Mars, and I know he pondered over what they said.

He had not known the song in far-off Troy, but my poet had known it in far-off Mantua, across the mountains, in the dark of time to come, hundreds of years after I first heard it sung. That night in Albunea when we talked about our households and our ways, I asked the poet if his people kept Ambarvalia, and he smiled at me and sang, to the tune that was ancient even when I knew it, Enos Lases iuvate!—Be with us, Lares, help us.

Mars’ time is the season of the farmer and the warrior: spring and summer. In October the lances and shields of the Leapers are put away. War ends as the harvest comes home. That year Latinus held the October Horse ceremony, the only time we sac rifice a horse except at the funeral of a king. People came from all over Latium for it, grateful for the peace of the realm and the excellence of the harvest. It was the last great ceremony held at Laurentum.

We went there to stay several days, and Aeneas assisted my father in the rites. I could no longer do so, since my marriage, for I was not the daughter of his household any longer, being the mother of my own. But little Silvius, Latinus’ heir, was allowed to take the plate of sacred food from the table to the hearth after dinner and cast the food into the Vestal fire. Maruna’s mother went with him and prevented him from dropping the plate as well as the food into the fire. “Only the beans, Silvius,” she whispered, and he, very solemn, said, “Ony bees.” He was supposed to say, “The gods are favorable,” but we said it for him.

That was a good autumn, rich and mild, and the winter rains were long and soft. In the press of daily occupation and obligation, and the continual delights and anxieties of caring for Silvius, and the unfailing joy and pleasure of Aeneas’ companionship and love, I lost track of the passage of the days; they were all one day and long, blessed night. But once in a while I would wake for no reason deep in the winter darkness, my body and soul as cold as the ice on the river’s edge, thinking: This is the third winter.

Then I would lie awake and my mind would gnaw and gnaw at the puzzle I could not solve. The poet had told me that Aeneas would rule for three summers and three winters. Was the summer we married the first of the three summers? I thought that because it was half gone before he came to rule in Lavinium, the count of three summers and three winters should begin with the winter of that year, and the summer that lay before us now would be his third—his third and last. But at least he would have till the summer—through the summer—he would not die this spring!

But why must he die? Perhaps the poet had not meant that at all. The poet had not said he would die, only that his reign would be three years. Perhaps he would give up the kingship, give it to Ascanius, and live on, a long life, a happy life, the life he deserved. Why had I not thought of that before?

The idea filled my mind and dazzled me so I could sleep no more; and in the morning when he woke I could scarcely keep myself from bursting out to him, “Give your kingdom to your son, Aeneas!”

I had sense enough not to do that, but in a day or two I did ask, trying to speak lightly, if he had ever thought of laying his rule aside and living as an ordinary man.

He looked at me quickly, a flash of his dark eyes. “That choice wasn’t offered me,” he said. “Priam’s nephew, Anchises’ son.”

“But now you’re in a land where your fathers are less important than your sons, perhaps.”

“If I grant that,” he said after considering it, “what then? I was sent here to be king. Hector came from his grave, Creusa rose from her death, to tell me what I had to do. I was to take my people to the western land, and rule. And marry there, and have a son… You can’t say I don’t do my duty, Lavinia.” He had spoken somberly at first, but he ended with a half-suppressed smile.

“No one would ever say that of you! But you have done it—you carried out the prophecy—you fulfilled your destiny—hard as it was, voyaging over sea, the storms, and shipwrecks, and losing friends, and having to fight a war when you finally got here—And you have reigned, and founded your dynasty. Do you never think of saying: Now I’ve done that, now let me stand aside—let me rest a while, now I’ve come to harbor?”

He gazed at me for some time, a direct, mild, thoughtful gaze. He was thinking why I said what I had said, and finding no answer. “Silvius is still rather short to stand aside for,” he said finally.

It made me laugh. I was very tense. “Yes, he is. But Ascanius—”

“You want Ascanius to rule Lavinium?” He was surprised into sternness for a moment, then his expression changed, became tender; he thought he knew why I was asking him to step down. “Lavinia, dear wife, you mustn’t fear for me so much. It’s less dangerous to be the king than to be a common soldier. Anyway, the day of our death isn’t in our hands. There is no safe place. You know that.”

“Yes, I know that.”

He came to hold and comfort me, and I held him close.

“Truly,” he asked, “you’d give up being queen, to spare me the trouble of being king?” I had not in fact actually thought about that aspect of my plan. He went on, “Who would take your place? We’d have to get Ascanius married off.” He was teasing me, by now. He knew that the idea of handing over my people and my Penates to a strange woman would be dreadful to me. I was distressed and ashamed, feeling I had been caught in a lying trick, a stupid ruse. I could not speak, but blushed the way I do, turning red all over. He saw and felt that and kissed me, gently at first, but with arousing passion. We were in the small courtyard of our house, no one about. “Come on, come!” he said, and still red as fire I followed him into our bedroom, where the conversation took a different form.

But after that day I was never able to put the poet’s words wholly out of mind. They were always in my thoughts, underneath my thoughts, like the dark streams that run underground. There must be some way in which the words did not mean that Aeneas was to die after three summers and winters as king in Latium, but meant only that his rule would end. Maybe he would conquer a neighboring country and rule as king of the Volscians or the Hernici. Maybe he would take me and Silvius back to his own country, and rebuild the beautiful city of Ilium that Achates and Serestus told me about, with its walls and towers and high citadel, and rule there as king of Troy. Maybe he would not die, only be very ill, weakened by illness, so that Ascanius must come and take on the active role of kingship for him, and be called king—but Aeneas would live on with me in Lavinium, and have joy in his son and in his life—he would live, he would not die. So my mind ran from possibility to possibility like a hare dodging hounds, while the three old women, the Fates, spun out the measured thread of what was to be.

The winter was mild but long. January was all rain and mud. A portent occurred in Laurentum: the doors of the War Gate, which my mother had opened and I and Maruna and the men of the city had closed, three years ago, swung open of themselves. People came to Janus’ altar in the morning of the Kalends of February and found the gates hanging ajar. The bolts of the iron hasps that held in place the great locking beam had rusted through, so that the hasps gave way and let the beam drop. The hinges also were rusted and askew, so that the gates could not be closed. Latinus was gravely troubled by the omen. He did not think it right to interfere, to repair the hinges and the hasps, until the meaning of the event became clear. No one knew why they had been made of iron, the unlucky metal, never used in sacred places. He had his smiths make new hasps and bolts and hinges of bronze, but he did not mend or close the War Gate yet.

Troubling news was coming in from east and south of the Alban Hills. Farmers and villagers along the border reported ambushes, barn burning, cattle thieving, and harassment, carried on by both sides, Latin and Rutulian. And young Camers of Ardea, who had led the inept attack on our city two years before, sent to us to complain that his city was being threatened and its farms and pastures constantly raided, by men from Alba Longa.

I watched Aeneas master his bitter, disappointed anger. He was like a man mounted on a powerful horse that fights the reins and plunges, nose to feet, and kicks, twisting its body, and finally is brought to stand white with sweat, shaking, ready to obey.

My heart felt as if it was being squeezed in a fist of fear; but now that the time had come, my empty imaginings of escape all died away and left me to face what there was no escaping. When he said, “I must go down to Ardea,” I made no protest and tried to show no undue fear. He went fully armed and with a strong escort. He was not taking any unnecessary risks, only necessary ones. I kissed him good-bye and held up Silvius for his kiss, and smiled, and bade him come home soon.

“I will come home soon,” he said. “With Ascanius.”

My best friends among Aeneas’ friends, Achates and Serestus, had ridden away with him; I was left with my women. They were of great comfort to me. They helped me keep everything in the household and the city running on as it should. Serestus’ wife Illivia had just had a baby, and we could forget our worries playing with him. My father sent a man down daily to ask if we had news and if we needed advice or help. He did not come himself, for he had been troubled with a cough all winter, and the weather was foul, with hard rains and the ways deep in mud. Nor did I go to him, for I was needed in my city.

Those were nine long, dark days and nights.

At evening of the day after the Ides of February, a troop of wet men on wet horses tramped up out of the rainy dusk to the city gate. The guardsmen cried out, “The king! King Aeneas comes!” He rode in, his sword on his hip and the great shield on his shoulder. Behind him rode Ascanius, unarmed; then Aeneas’ men, all armed.