Very early the next morning, I slipped out of the Regia and out of Laurentum without asking permission or telling anyone, and ran through the oak grove to Tyrrhus’ farm. Silvia was in the cool stone dairy with some of the dairy women, skimming cream. I said, “Silvia, let’s go to the river. Let’s take a look at these strangers.”
It was usually Silvia, not I, who proposed anything daring or dangerous, and I took her by surprise.
“What do you want to see foreigners for?” she asked—a reasonable question.
“Because I have to marry one.”
She’d heard the decree of the oracle, of course. She frowned at first, no doubt thinking of Almo, but after a minute she looked up with a half smile. “You want to see if they have two heads?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe these aren’t the foreigners you have to marry one of.”
“I think they are.”
She was standing with the skimmer in hand, her hair tied back, her bare arms shining in the dim cool place and her bare feet on the wet floor; the dairy was kept very clean, sluiced out constantly with water. She couldn’t resist the escapade. “Oh, all right!” she said, and gave the skimmer and a few orders to Valenta the dairy keeper, and came out into the sunshine with me. She put on her sandals and we struck off across the pastures. It was six miles or so to the river; we had done it often in our rambles and explorations, and knew the ways through the woods.
We discussed where the foreigners might have landed, for we hadn’t heard a clear report yet. Silvia thought they would have tied up at the wooden docks at Sirmo, but I had it in my head that they had not gone so far upstream, but had beached their ships at the place called Venticula, where the river takes a great bend to the north. Though we said nothing about it, we were both aware that if any of our countrymen saw us, whether they recognised us or not, they would rightly tell us to get back home at once, and might make sure we did so. There was a cart road to Sirmo, to Venticula only a path leading through dense woods and past the marshes of the Fossula. We kept off the cart road and the straight pagus lanes, away from farmhouses and shepherds’ huts, following the path that wound over old grass-grown dunes and skirted swampy thickets as it neared the river, till we finally scrambled up the low forested hill above Venticula.
As we came over the crest of the hill, we both realised that we weren’t alone in the woods: we heard men talking, calling, the blows of an ax, then we saw a couple of helmeted heads across a myrtle thicket, behind which we at once crouched down to hide. Silvia had a fit of wild, silent giggles, which infected me. We crouched shaking with crazy laughter. The soldiers crashed on down the hill, and when it had been silent for a while except for ax blows far off, I wriggled around to the end of the thicket. From there I could look right down the hillside through the trees to the open glades by the shore. I whispered to Silvia, “There they are!” She crawled beside me and we lay watching the Trojans.
I saw my husband almost at once. He stood out among them, not by any ornament or richness of clothing—they were all dressed like soldiers on the march who’d been on duty a long time and crammed into ships on the sea as well, all plain and worn and dirty—he simply stood out, the way the morning star stands out from other stars. He was a man in his forties, with a strong face. He was sitting comfortably on the ground and laughing at something one of the other men said. They were having a picnic there on the grass. Almost all of them were men. They had brought flatbread up from the ships, which were run up stern-first along the beach. They had gathered a great basket of wild greens to pile up on the rounds of flatbread, having no meat or cheese, evidently, as well as no plates or tables. The few women among them were none of them young; one matron, smiling, presented Aeneas with a round of bread heaped with greens, which he rolled up and bit into with gusto. Close to him sat a boy of fifteen or so, who looked enough like him, and looked up to him in such a way, that I was sure it was his son Ascanius. With him were a very pretty boy of his age and a beautiful youth a few years older, wearing a bent-forward red cloth cap. The woman who had served the meal sat down beside him and set his cap straight with an unmistakably maternal fussiness, adoring him.
“They’re much better looking than I thought foreigners would be,” Silvia whispered to me. “That boy with the red cap is gorgeous.” I hushed her with a nudge of my elbow. I was afraid they might hear us, since we could hear them clearly enough, though to be sure the wind was blowing our way.
Red Cap said something about the meal being fit for rabbits not men, and young Ascanius said, “Well, it’s not at every meal that you get to eat the table too.”
At that Aeneas looked at him as if startled. After gazing motionless for a minute he stood up. They all looked up at him.
“That is the omen,” he said, his voice ringing clear and solemn. “‘When hunger drives you to eat your tables, there will be your journey’s end.’ You remember what the Harpy said to us?”
A murmur of assent and awe ran among them all, those travel-weary men and boys and few women sitting there on the grass above the river. They did not take their eyes off Aeneas.
“Euryalus, bring me a myrtle bough,” he said, and Red Cap ran to break off a bough. Aeneas bent it into a wreath to cover his head, and stretched out his arms, his hands palm up to the sky. He said, “Dear faithful gods of the house of Troy! This is your promised land at last! We are home, my people, we have come home!” He looked round at them all and his face shone with tears. He prayed again: “Hear us, spirit of this place, and spirits and rivers we do not yet know! Night, and the rising stars! My father in the underworld and my mother in the heavens, hear our prayer!” Then he turned round and drew a deep breath. “Achates!” he shouted in a tremendous voice. “Tell them to bring the wine up from the ship!”
At that moment Silvia nudged me. Seven or eight men with bows and arrows were trotting in single file across the clearing to our left. It was time for us to be out of there.
We crept under the shelter of the cork oaks into thick woods to our right, and through them back over the crest of the hill and so down the way we’d come. We were home before evening. At the farm, Silvia turned to me and gave me a big hug. We were both sweaty from our long run, we stuck to each other when we hugged. We laughed, and Silvia said, “That was a good idea, going there!” So we parted for the last time.
When I got back to the Regia I heard that my father had given orders that no one was to approach the strangers’ camp until he had determined who they were and why they had brought longships and armed men into the heart of Latium. I said nothing, of course, about my hare-brained exploit, but slipped into the house, washed and put on a clean tunic, and sat spinning away as if I’d never set foot outside the door in my life.
The word was that the king was going to send Drances with a party of men to talk to the strangers in the morning. But next day before Drances even set out, people ran shouting, “They’re coming!"—and a small troop of foreigners came riding up to the city gates.
Their horses looked poorly, as well they might, poor creatures, after a sea voyage, but they were decked out with silver-mounted bridles and trappings, and the men were grand in embroidered cloaks, bronze breastplates, and tall helmets with crests of horsehair or feathers. I could get only a glimpse of the troop from our doorway as they rode up the Via Regia, before the women were sent off to the back of the house; but I saw Aeneas was not with them.