I was glad of it, for I found myself shaky and light-headed. “I think I need to eat something,” I said when I came back to the women’s side, and Vestina cried, “Of course, of course, poor lamb!” and sent girls off to fetch curds and honey and spelt porridge, all of which I ate, and felt better.
My mother had been in the room with us all along, but did not join the chatter. She sat at her great loom. I was a good spinning-woman, I made as strong and even a thread as any, but I was slow and clumsy at the loom. Amata was by far the best of our weavers, working fast, with a steady rhythm and utter concentration; when she was weaving she was aware of nothing else, and her face looked rapt and calm. The very fine woolen thread I had been spinning all this spring was for the piece she was working on now, a full breadth of the finest white fabric, the kind you can gather yards of into your hand and pass through a finger ring. Today, as the women at last began talking about something besides the mysterious flame of fire, and how the yellow smoke had swirled behind me when I ran, and how sparks flew all through the house yet nothing caught fire from them, and so on, and on, my mother turned round from the loom and beckoned to me. I went to her.
“Do you know what it is I’m making, Lavinia?” she asked with the strangest smile, a wide, blind smile that was almost coy.
As soon as she asked me the question I knew the answer. But I said, “A summer palla.”
“Your wedding gown. You’ll wear it when you marry. See how fine it is!”
“Your weaving’s always beautiful, mother.”
“You’ll wear it when you marry, when you marry him,” she said, almost as if it were the refrain of a song, and she turned back to the loom and took up the shuttle. And as she wove she whispered that half song under her breath, “You’ll wear it when you marry, when you marry him.”
About midday I went alone to my father’s rooms. As I crossed the courtyard I paused under the laurel tree and asked the powers of the tree and the spring, the Lar of the household and my dear Penates, to be with me and help me. All I had thought and seen so clearly last night, sitting there on the bench under the stars, all I had so firmly and reasonably resolved, was gone, burnt away in a puff of heatless flame, a coil of yellow smoke. I knew what I must say, but I wanted help in saying it.
My father embraced me and tried to make certain once again that I was quite unhurt, unburnt, unshaken.
“I am well, father,” I said. “I was terribly hungry, though. I ate everything they brought from the kitchen.” That reassured him, as I knew it would. “Now may I speak to you about my suitors?”
He sat down on the chest against the wall and gave one grave nod.
“I said I would ask you today to give me to one of them.”
A nod.
“But because of what happened this morning—the omen—I ask you not to ask me my choice, but instead to go to Albunea, and ask the powers there. Whatever they tell you, I will obey.”
As I spoke he looked up at me heavily from under his heavy grey-black eyebrows. He listened. When I had spoken, he thought for some while. At last he nodded once again.
“I will go today,” he said.
“May I come with you?”
Again he thought it over. “Yes,” he said. Then he looked up at me again with the shadow of a smile and said, “As we used to go together. Do you remember the first time? You were still a child…” But his face was melancholy. I saw that he looked very worn.
I kissed his hand, and said, “I’ll be ready to go as soon as you like, father.”
“Sacrifices,” he said. “This is… I will need… a lamb—two. Is there a white calf? Two lambs and a white calf—at least.”
“I’ll send to Tyrrhus’ Doro, he’s with the cows and calves in the long meadow pasture. I can see to the animals, father.”
“Good. Do that. There are some things I must see to here before we go—A black calf, better, Lavinia, if there is one. Black, in that place.”
That place, Albunea, that lies so close above the underworld that the shadows of the dead can come and go there easily. Black, in that place.
Lambing had been early that spring, and the lambs the shepherd led to me were quite large. The calf old Doro brought was small, a runt in fact, and he was not altogether black, but brownish on the legs and face; not a perfect sacrifice. My father frowned at him.
I said, “He is pious, father. See how he follows along? And he did his best to be black.”
Doro nodded solemnly. “He’s the blackest we’ve got, king,” he said.
So the king nodded, and we set off.
I wore the toga with the burnt corner, for it was the only sacred toga I had; year after year, my mother had put off making the red dye for a new one. Because we had to lead the animals, and perhaps because my father felt some unease or mistrust in the air, we were quite a troop. It was not as when he and I walked there long ago, he carrying the young lamb, or when I walked with Maruna. She came with me, indeed, but also there was Doro with the calf, and the shepherd’s boy with the lambs, and two slaves carrying the other offerings, and three of my father’s guards, the men who kept the doors of the Regia and went with him, armed, when he rode out visiting other towns or other kings. They were called his horse-riders, his knights, and they did each keep a horse in the royal stable; but this was a sacred journey, and we went afoot.
One after another we walked through the bright day into the evening. We came to the little Prati and followed it upstream, and I remembered the rocky ford of the river where I had seen blood in the water in my dream.
The knights and Maruna and the slaves stopped at the outskirts of the forest. The men would camp there. Maruna would go to the woodcutter’s house. Doro and the shepherd boy led the animals, and Latinus and I carried the other offerings on into the forest of Albunea.
By the time the sacrifice was completed it was night, the altar fire and torches giving the only light under the dark trees. Doro and the boy took the skinned carcasses back to their camp, where the men would have the first feast on the meat. My father reversed the torches. Their flames died in the earth. He stood before the altar, where the fire still fed on the fat of the sacrifice, his head shrouded, murmuring the words of worship and humble request. I sat on the fleece of one of the lambs, listening. I feared and longed to hear the grandfather’s voice speak, answering him, from those dark, silent trees.
But I had scarcely slept the night before, and the day had been long and strange. I was so tired I could not keep my eyes open. I saw the little leaping gold of the altar flame waver and blur. Then I was lying down, looking up into the branch-circled sky dense with stars as the sea beach is dense with sand, a pavement of white fire. And it too wavered and blurred.
I woke. The stars blazed, but other stars. The fire was dead. A small owl called from far on the right, hii-ii, and another answered from yet farther, ii, i.
He was there, the shadow. He stood between me and the altar. His tall form was vague in the grey starlight. On the far side of the altar, near the wall, I saw a glint of bronze, a motionless bulk on the ground: my father sleeping. The feel of the air was that of the hour before the beginning of dawn.
“The time when the dying die,” my poet said, very softly.
I sat up, trying to see him more clearly. I was frightened, distressed, and did not know why, and knew why. I whispered, “Are you dying?”
He nodded.
The nod of a head is such a small thing, it can mean so little, yet it is the gesture of assent that allows, that makes to be. The nod is the gesture of power, the yes. The numen, the presence of the sacred, is called by its name.