“I will not, I will not go,” she shrieked, shaking her arms in the air, and she ran out, whirling across the courtyard like a top that children whip into spinning, screaming that the king had given his daughter to a stranger, an enemy, that the king was mad. And she made for the front doors of the Regia.
The guards did not dare touch her, but my women acted very swiftly, with me, as if we had planned what to do. We surrounded Amata before she had got far into the streets of the city, and talking and soothing and stroking and urging her along, we got her back into the Regia and to her rooms on the women’s side. There her hysteria turned to a great fit of sobbing, which left her spent and silent at last.
I thought that collapse into weariness was final. I thought she had given up. That was stupid of me. So was my failure to understand that what she was saying was not only madness or the rage of frustrated desire. She was giving voice to what a great many of our people thought or feared obscurely when they heard what the king had said to the Trojan messenger: that he had welcomed invaders, that, scorning his loyal subjects and allies, he had promised to give his daughter, his inheritance, his country, to a stranger.
I went to bed that night tired and shaken but in peace of heart, and slept well. I woke to a craziness that I can remember only in vivid bits and patches, because nothing in it was sane or clear, none of it made sense. I woke in my mother’s world.
It was dark night; women with oil lamps were in my room and one of them was patting my shoulder saying, “Wake up, king’s daughter! Wake up!” All about me there was bustle, whispering, laughter. As I struggled awake I saw they were all my mother’s women, not mine, and that the slave women were dressed up in fine, ceremonial clothes, in my mother’s clothes. I heard Amata’s voice, and she came in, wearing the coarse unbleached tunic of a slave. “Up, up, girl,” she said with a smile, “this is the Goat Feast, the Fig Feast. We’re going to do worship the way my people do, up in the hills. If your father can give you away, I can take you away! Come on, now, we must be there at sunrise!” And I was up, and dressed in an old grey tunic and a ragged shawl, and hurried away among the laughing women—out the back door, through the silent streets of the city, out the postern gate, across the fields, towards the low forested hills that rise east of Laurentum. The tiny oil lamps made a wavering dance down the lane before us and behind us. The eastern skyline was just showing clear against the first beginning of dawn, Mount Alba standing long and dark over the dark world.
We left the last pagus and entered at once into the forest. Night closed around us, it was hard to see the way. The lamps cast wild shadows through the trees and across the uneven path. Women stopped to free their robes from thorns and entangling branches, but Amata urged them on—"Don’t worry about that, a tear can be mended, we must be up in the hills, up at the fig-tree spring, when the sun rises! Come on, hurry along!” And she went back down along the line to encourage the women, house slaves, sweepers and washers and cook’s helpers and maids of all work, who were struggling along under heavy loads, baskets and jugs of food and drink. She called them by name, cheered them on, and came whirling back up to the head of the line, laughing and talking. “Oh, this is an adventure, at last!” she called to me joyously as she passed me. And indeed there was a wild thrill of strangeness in the hurry and secrecy, the changed costumes, the line of women carrying lights in the forest in the dark—it was all unreal, fantastic, and I was caught up in the excitement of it.
We reached the fig-tree springs as the sky was brightening. Up in the heart of the hills a spring breaks out from a ledge of rock on the side of a deep fold in the hillside, and all around below it, on a level meadow, grow huge old wild fig trees, a kind of natural orchard. I had been there once with Silvia in summer to feast on the black fruit; but we had heard swine grunting and crashing all about, drawn by the fallen fruit, and so did not stay long, a wild boar being about the only thing Silvia was afraid of.
We all straggled up to the grassy level under the trees and set down burdens and drew breath for a while. Amata stood and talked to us, telling us that this was the festival of the Caprotinae as the Rutulians celebrated it in their hills—a festival of women, for women only. “We will set guards,” she said. “If a man comes near us, he must be driven away. If he refuses to go, or if he tries to spy on us, it’s death for him, worse than death! For if he spies on our mysteries that’s the end of his manhood—he’ll go back down the mountain a eunuch! Balina brought four sharp swords with her, and four strong women will keep watch day and night on the paths. And the powers of the hills and wilderness wait to curse the man who dares approach us. For Mars must stay below us here, Mars must keep down at the fields’ edge and the forests’ edge, standing on his boundaries. The heights and the wild forests are ours, ours alone, for our worship and our revels. And look, look, the sun rises! Greet the day, sisters! Sicana, open a wine jug, pass it around!”
So the day began with drinking, and by noon some of the women were too drunk to dance; they laughed and screeched and vomited and fell over and slept where they fell. Amata taught us the dances and songs of her Caprotinae, and a sacred game in which the older women tried to catch the younger ones and whip them with fig branches, shouting out crude joking songs about men’s penises and women’s vulvas; and we held other ceremonies at altars we raised to Fauna of the wilderness, and the Juno of women, and Ceres who swells the seed in the womb of Earth to be born as the bread of life. Slaves were sent back down to the city to fetch more wine. During the day, groups of women began to straggle in, coming from other households in the city, drawn by curiosity about this new women’s rite and by solidarity with their queen. I found myself in an odd position with these townswomen, who were all outraged for me and enraged at my father. They hung about me to commiserate, and pet me, and encourage me in my love and fidelity to Turnus of Ardea. Their indignation and kindness were real and touching, and yet as unreal as all the rest of this escape, this mistake.
I played the part of the meek voiceless maiden all through this masquerade up in the hills. I could not bring myself to tell these sympathetic matrons that I had no love at all for Turnus and wanted only to obey my father and the oracle. To do so would be to betray my mother, and to turn her rage against me. I was a coward. I felt false, frightened, incredulous, scornful, and alone.
My mother had brought none of my women up here to the hills, only her women; and for all her wild gaiety and seeming abandon, she never let me out of her sight. I was very glad when I saw, among the last group of newcomers, Maruna. She had put on my best palla, for that was the rule, the servant to dress as mistress and the mistress as servant. I winked at her to let her know I’d seen her, and seen my best palla, too, but we kept our distance and did not speak. Slight and quiet, Maruna had a gift of going unnoticed, very useful to a slave. She kept with the group she’d come with and did as all the others did, and I think my mother never noticed her.
During the evening Amata began to drink—she had only tasted and pretended, till then—and by nightfall she was not drunk, but mellowed, less hectic, and enjoying the escapade far more than she had pretended to till then. Her laugh came from deep in her belly. I had never heard her laugh like that. It made her seem strange, another woman, a woman she might have been. I felt an aching pang of grief for her.