While Drances and other officials brought them in and escorted them to the king’s audience hall, I went through the royal apartments and entered the audience hall through the king’s door, behind his seat. He had not bidden me to be there; but I had been present with or without my mother at many audiences, as a courtesy to the visitors and to welcome their wives and daughters, and if he did not want me now, he had only to send me away.
I do not think he knew at first that I was there. He was already speaking to the Trojan envoys. He welcomed them with stately courtesy and asked immediately, though politely, where they came from and the cause of their visit to Latium: had they perhaps gone astray or been driven out of their course on the high seas?
A tall, thin Trojan introduced himself as Ilioneus, and in a spate of elegant and respectful language explained that they had come to the kingdom of the great Latinus following the command of fate. Natives of the noble city of Troy, which had withstood a ten-year siege by the Greeks but had fallen at last to treachery, they had escaped from the burning.
As the herald spoke, I heard the poet’s voice overlapping his as a sea wave running up the shore overtakes and overlaps the wave before it. I knew then that the high house of the king and all of us in it had being only in those words. And that knowledge changed nothing. The messenger still must speak, the king must listen, the king’s daughter must follow her fate.
The messenger spoke on: oracles had bidden them bring the gods of Troy over the seas to the far shore of Italy, where they would find a home. Their lord Aeneas son of Anchises had led them for seven years across land and sea, and though other kings had asked them to stay, he would offer alliance only to Latinus, who reigned over the land promised them by the oracle. And in earnest of his goodwill, Aeneas offered to the king some poor fragments, saved from the fallen city, that had belonged to his father’s brother King Priam of Troy.
One of the Trojans came forward and laid at my father’s feet a marvelous tall libation cup that looked to be of solid gold carved and jeweled, a silver rod or wand, a thin, old, gold crown, and a delicate weaving of royal crimson embroidered with gold thread.
My father gazed down at these things in silence for some time, neither accepting nor refusing them. At last he asked the envoy to tell him more about the city of Troy and their quarrel with the Greeks, and then something of their seven-year voyage across the Middle Sea, all of which Ilioneus did. My father asked if they had stopped in Sicily, and Ilioneus said that they had left a colony there; he asked if they had been in touch with the Greek settlement south of us, whose king was Diomedes, and Ilioneus said that they had not, Diomedes being a veteran of the siege of Troy and not likely to be well disposed to Trojans. All his answers were both direct and graceful.
My father let silence fall again, looking downward, his eyes moving as they followed his thoughts.
At last he looked up. “Oracles, you say, bade you come to this country,” he said. “I will tell you that your coming also was foretold. I think, my friends, that we are to enact what fate will have us do. If your chief Aeneas seeks alliance, if he seeks to settle here with us, I will ask him to come to my city and offer me his hand, even as he has offered me these noble gifts. And I will take it, as I accept them, in sign of friendship and pledge of peace. And say this also to him: my only daughter is bidden by our oracle to marry a stranger, a man who, even as the oracle spoke, was coming to us. I think your lord Aeneas is the man. And if my mind sees truly, this marriage is what I wish. So bid him come.” He stood up, and only then, I think, did he see me; but he showed no surprise, he only looked at me with serene, affectionate eyes, a look of perfect certainty, smiling a little.
He did not introduce the envoys to me, but moved among them, admiring their noble gifts, ordering our people to bring out gifts for them. I backed away quietly through the door I had come in.
To hear myself promised as part of a treaty, exchanged like a cup or a piece of clothing, might seem as deep an insult as could be offered to a human soul. But slaves and unmarried girls expect such insult, even those of us who have been allowed liberty enough to pretend we are free. My liberty had been great, and so I had dreaded its end. So long as it could end only with Turnus or the other suitors, I had felt that insult, that bondage awaiting me, the only possible outcome. I had been the dove tied to the pole, flapping its silly wings as if it could fly, while the boys below shouted and pointed and shot at it till at last an arrow struck.
I felt nothing of that entrapment now, that helpless shame. I felt the same certainty I had seen in my father’s eyes. Things were going as they should go, and in going with them I was free. The string that tied me to the pole had been cut. For the first time I knew what it would be to fly, to take to my wings across the air, across the years to come, to go, to go on.
“I will marry him,” I said in my heart, as I went through the rooms of the Regia. “I will make him my husband, and bring the gods of his house here to join with the gods of mine. I will bring him home.”
I turned aside and went across the courtyard, past the great laurel tree, to the domed rooms behind the atrium, the storehouses, my domain, where I and the Penates ruled. Before long it would be the fourth month, June, time to throw open the doors of those storehouses and clean them out, clear them for the new harvest. I sent for a couple of the women who helped me there and we began making ready for the ceremony, recalling and singing to one another the words of the songs of Vesta and Ceres, Fire and Bread, while we carried out empty bins and swept the dusty floors.
There was commotion all through the house and city as the gifts Latinus had ordered were brought out and men chosen to take them. He himself had been out to the stables to select a few good horses, and to send word to Tyrrhus to have a herd of choice bull calves and a flock of lambs driven to Venticula so the Trojans could have sacrifice and meat. He knew what a king’s hospitality should be, and enjoyed his own generosity. He looked like a young man as he strode across the courtyard, and I watched him with pride.
But Amata came hurrying to meet him from the women’s quarters, her hair loose, her face white, her voice loud.
“Is it true what they say, husband? That you gave our daughter to a stranger—a foreigner—a man you have not seen, know nothing of? Is this wise? Is this kind to the girl?—and me?—Not to say a word to me—”
My father had stopped and stood erect facing her. The geniality had gone out of his face and old age had come back into it. “This is not the place, Amata.”
“I will speak—”
“Come with me then. You too, Lavinia.” He strode off to the royal apartments and we followed him. Catching up with Amata, I said, “Mother, he did as the oracle commanded, and as I myself asked him to do. Truly I did! This is how it must be. It will be all right!”
She did not even hear me, I think. As soon as we were in Latinus’ office she began to talk, pouring out a torrent of arguments—How could he ruthlessly discard our understanding with Turnus and the other suitors? How could they not see it as pledge breaking? What did it matter if the oracle said the marriage must be with a foreigner?—was Rutulia not a different country from Latium, was Turnus not a foreigner?
“He is a Latin, one of us, one of your house,” my father said, frowning. I thought it a mistake for him to answer her arguments at all, and indeed it only inflamed her. She accused him of listening to Drances’ counsel, Drances who hated and was jealous of Turnus—faithful Turnus who only sought to uphold and support Latinus’ throne in his old age. She berated him cruelly for oath breaking and weakness and indecision, and in the next breath pleaded with him, calling on his strength and wisdom. He stood enduring the flood of words and said nothing, only occasionally shaking his head. At last, as her voice began to get hoarse and shrill, he broke in, also hoarsely: “The matter is settled. Accept it, Amata. Remember you are a queen.” And to me he said, “Take your mother back to her rooms and comfort her, Lavinia.”