He looked up at me again. I nodded. “I understand. I will obey.”
My father got up, stiff and ponderous; he was not used to sleeping out, on hard ground, these days. He rubbed his thighs and stretched his arms painfully. “I am old, daughter,” he said. “And now I have to face those young fellows with this refusal.” He shook his head, hunched up his shoulders. “If only my sons had lived. I am too old, Lavinia!”
It was not like him to say that. I did not know what to say to him; I was too young to feel anything but surprised, uncomprehending pity, and I did not want to pity my father the king.
He went off into the woods to piss, and when he came back he was holding himself a little straighter. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’ll take no insolence from them. I can still protect my daughter and my house and city.” We gathered up the little we had brought, and as we did so, he said, “I could wish your mother hadn’t set her mind on your marrying Turnus. But I can see, because he’s her nephew, it seems to her like getting one of her sons back. Well. Come along, my dear.” He set off, walking heavily, and I followed.
When we came to where the men had camped, they were just waking. The sky was bright behind the eastern hills and all the birds in the world were singing. There was a little brook there, and my father and I both knelt on the bank to wash our hands and faces. As the knights joined us, I heard my father telling them what the oracle had said. That surprised me again. I had assumed he would announce it formally at home, perhaps summoning the suitors to explain to them that their request had been denied by the powers and the ancestors. To talk about it openly now was to ensure that it would be common knowledge in Laurentum as soon as we got back, and throughout all Latium within a day or two. I could not think why my father had done this, unless he thought he could not face my mother with the news himself, and wanted her to hear it from me, or from hearsay among the women.
But she came to meet us, almost running across the courtyard, flushed and beautiful in her excitement. “I know! I dreamed of you there,” she cried. “I am so glad!”
We both stopped, staring like cattle, no doubt. She took my hands and kissed me. “I am so happy about it!”
“About—?”
“Oh! The bridal bed! In Ardea! I saw it all in my dream!”
After a blank pause my father said, loudly and awkwardly, “The oracle forbids Lavinia to marry a man of Latium. She must wait for a foreign suitor.”
“No. That’s not what it said at all. I saw it. I heard it!”
“Amata, calm yourself,” he said. “We will speak of this in private. Lavinia—call the women—take your mother with you—” And he strode off to his rooms.
My mother started to run after him, then stopped, bewildered, and said to me, “What is wrong with him?”
“Nothing, mother. Come with me.” I tried to go on to the women’s side, but she protested, and only when her women Sicana and Lina came to urge her to come with them did she fall silent, the happy brightness dying out of her face, and follow me.
The news was all over the house and town at once, of course. The king’s daughter is not to marry Turnus, or Messapus, or any of them, she’s got to wait for a foreigner to come marry her. That’s what the bees meant, that’s why her hair caught fire yet didn’t burn. War! War! Who’ll fight? Who’s the foreigner coming? And what will King Turnus have to say to him?
And what will I have to say to him, I wondered, as everybody chattered on.
Amata seemed stunned. She did not tell us what the dream was that she had taken to be a true dream and that the oracle had so cruelly belied. She did not join in the general talk, did not speak to me at all. We kept away from each other. It was easy enough, we had kept apart for twelve years.
By nightfall I was sick of the chatter and commotion and wanted only to be free of the women, away from the house, outdoors, alone, where I could think. My mother was at her loom. I went and asked her permission to go get salt at the river mouth next day.
“Ask the king,” she said, not looking away from her work.
So I went to him. He pondered a minute. “I suppose it’s safe,” he said.
“Why would it not be safe?” I said, amazed. Our possession of the salt beds was one of our great strengths as a nation, and we guarded them accordingly. Nobody had tried to raid them for decades.
“I’ll send Gaius with you. And take a couple of your women.”
“What do we want Gaius for? I’ll have Pico with the donkey, to carry the salt back.”
“Gaius will go with you. Go by the west path. Be back before dark.”
“I can’t, father. We have to dig the salt.”
He frowned. “You can do that and be back in a day easily!”
“I hoped to spend the night there, father. By Tiber.”
I very seldom pleaded with him. “Well, why not,” he said after a long pause. “My mind is vexed, troubled, I hardly know… Go on, then. Give worship to our father river. But one night only!” As I thanked him and left, he said, “And look out for Etruscans!”
Everybody always said that when you went to Tiber, as if the northern bank were forever crowded with Etruscans waiting to leap in, swim across, carry you off, and torture you. There were awful stories about Etruscan torture. But we had always been on good terms with Caere, except when Mezentius ruled it. And it would be a mighty swimmer who swam the river there at its mouth. People said, “Look out for Etruscans,” when you went to the river the way they said, “Look out for bears,” when you went up into the hills—out of habit.
All the same, as I went to find Tita to tell her to find Pico and tell him to be ready with the donkey in the morning, I wondered if the foreigner I was to marry might be an Etruscan.
For when I was not in Albunea, when I was among people, the things my poet had said to me came and went in my mind, sometimes seeming as real as they did when he spoke them, but more often fading away like the shreds of a dream that vanish as you try to remember them. It was a true dream, but you cannot live your life in a dream even if it be true. Hardest of all to remember was what the poet had said last night—was it only last night? He was dying. I did not want to remember that. I did not want to remember what he had sung, the endless hideous deaths. I knew he had told me the name of the man I was to marry, his wife’s name and his son’s, I knew he came from the far city, Troy, I knew there was to be a war, men would kill men… and yet, here in the courtyard of the Regia, passing by the great laurel, where women were gathered talking and singing at their work, the names and all slipped away from me, and I wondered if the foreigner I was to marry might be an Etruscan.
They were foreign enough, the Etruscans. They saw the future in the livers of sheep. I liked Maruna’s bird lore, but I could do without the tortures and the sheep livers.
My spirits had risen as soon as I had permission to go, and when we left the city next morning I felt like a sparrow let go from the snare. All the trouble about suitors, the threats, the strange portents, the dark prophecies, dropped away from me. I forbade Tita to say a word about all that. We joked and told stories all the way to Tiber, and even grave Maruna laughed like a child. That was a joyous day, and that night I slept a quiet sleep on the dune under the stars.
And in the twilight of morning of the next day, alone, kneeling in the mud by Tiber, I saw the great ships turn from the sea and come into the river. I saw my husband stand on the high stern of the first ship, though he did not see me. He gazed up the dark river, praying, dreaming. He did not see the deaths that lay before him, all along the river, all the way to Rome.
There was nothing but commotion and discussion and agitation in the Regia and the town all that day. Everybody knew what the oracle had told Latinus and they all had to discuss it endlessly—and then word came across the fields of a fleet of ships seen going up the river, and of a crowd of armed strangers making camp on the Latin shore. The talk about that made me think of the great, dark, humming mutter of the swarming bees.