“Lavinia,” she called me, and when I came to her, picking my way among the women sprawled about in the grass amid the little flickering oil lamps and the low boughs of the great fig trees, “Lavinia, I sent for him, last night, before we left. I sent a messenger on horseback. He should be here tomorrow. Your wedding night, my darling!”
I knew who he was, and what she meant; it was all part of the craziness, the unreality, but in her game I had to play the game. “How will he know where to come?”
“The women will tell him. They’re looking out for him, they’ll catch him before he ever gets into the city. He should be here by this time tomorrow.”
“But men are not allowed here among us,” I said.
“Oh, this one is,” my mother said, in that deep melting laughing voice.
She pulled at my hand to make me sit down beside her. She leaned close to me and whispered in my ear, “There will be such a wedding night here in the hills! And then to Ardea. Home to Ardea! It’s all planned. All planned!”
She kept me by her all night. I had to sleep close to her and the group of women she was drinking and gambling with, in the light of their lamps fixed on low branches. I slept only in snatches all night long, waking up always with a start, my mind racing. I kept telling myself not to worry, all I had to do was go along with whatever my mother wanted until her game played itself out, as it must, in confusion and disillusion and retreat. But she had sent for Turnus—what if he came? What if she handed me over to him in a mock wedding, a real rape? What if he took me off to Ardea? There would be nothing, nothing I could do. At the thought my body went stiff, my hands clenched, and I hid my face in my arms. I had to get away from here. I had to find a way to escape. But even if I could creep away, I could not find my way through the forest in the dark: the guards were watching the path we had come by, and it was a long way through wild, broken hills. The best I could hope for was to get far enough away to hide for the rest of the night and then follow a stream down to the lowlands. But my mother’s women were all around me, still awake, the tiny lamps still flickering. And beyond them, the guards.
The same series of thoughts—the effort to reassure myself, the shock of thinking Turnus might come, the attempt to imagine a way to escape—repeated itself in my head, round and round, again and again, all night. Sometimes I slept and had snatches of dreams of my poet, not in the altar place of Albunea but here in the wild hills; he seemed to be nearby, near one of the oil lamps, but he was deformed, shrunken into a stump of shadow, mumbling words I could not understand. Then I would wake to the endless repetition of the same thoughts.
I got up at the first hint of light. Seeing Amata asleep at last among her women, I slipped away towards the dell we had been using as a place to piss, and for a moment I thought I could simply walk on—but just past the dell, Gaia was standing on guard, leaning on a naked sword as if it were a cane. She greeted me loudly, with a stupid smile. She was a sweeper, not quite right in her wits; she was devoted to my mother, as were many of these women. If Amata had told her not to let me pass, she would not let me pass. Amata was not a particularly kind mistress, she showed little affection, but she was not stingy, not cruel, and did not play favorites: that was more than enough to win loyalty. And her grief for her lost sons gave her a kind of sanctity among the women of her household. “The poor queen,” I had heard them say a thousand times, and it never seemed strange to me that they still pitied her. They were right. She was an unhappy woman.
Many of us slept late and got up staggering. Food and drink had nearly given out, and groups went down to Laurentum to bring stores from their own storehouses and from the Regia. There was a good deal of coming and going, but I could not slip away or join a group going down to the city, as I hoped, for if Amata was not with me, tall Sicana and dour Lina always were, keeping watch.
I and some slave girls were the only young women here; the city matrons had left their virgin daughters safe at home. But women with babies at the breast had of course brought their nurslings, and I passed much of the day relieving tired mothers by rocking fretful babies. It saved me from having to talk with half-drunken adults. And the babies were a relief from the falseness, the insanity of what we were doing. They were solid, real, and needy. They were too young to imagine anything. Looking after them was a comfort to me, for which of course I was overpraised and flattered—look how kind the king’s daughter is to the slave’s child. Look how kind the slave’s child is to the king’s daughter, I thought, as a sweet, languid little girl smiled up at me, falling asleep in my arms.
Amata organised dances and whipping games in the afternoon, but they lacked the wild spontaneity of the first day. Everyone knew by now that Amata was expecting Turnus to arrive, and that she meant to marry me to him. Many women were uneasy with the idea of his coming, feeling, I think, like heifers who’d jumped the fence and found themselves in the bull’s pasture. And the notion of a marriage so far from the doorway of the house and the Penates and Lares of the family and the city was puzzling and shocking to us all. How could you get married in the wilderness, where none of the domestic powers could help you, and the local powers and spirits had no care for human matters and might well be malevolent? Though Amata continued to talk of a wedding, the others dealt with it by speaking of it as a betrothal. That was something they could look forward to as plausible. So they kept their expectation high all afternoon and evening. When night came and Turnus had not, Amata began to drink again and urge us all to drink. The dances and songs soon broke up into aimless, foolish noisiness. Yet through it all my mother kept me close beside her, with Lina and Sicana; and the guards with swords did not drink, but spelled each other on duty all night long, waiting out of sight, down the path.
Next day a good many women slipped away quietly, and some groups that went down to bring food and drink did not come back. I thought it likely they had lost heart for trudging back and forth, but Amata said their men had locked them up, threatening to beat them if they ran off to the hills again. She ranted about what would happen to those men if they tried to come up here. All our women she sent to the Regia came back, laden with wine and bread: no one had hindered them from raiding the storerooms, and they were told the king had given orders that the women performing religious rites up in the hills were not to be disturbed. But they said also that people were talking about some kind of quarrel with a hunting party of the strangers, in the forest, between Laurentum and the river.
As the day wore on, many of us felt light-headed from little food and much wine and the strangeness of irresponsibility. There was a good deal of weeping, crazy laughter, shouting, quarreling.
As I sat with Tulia’s year-old boy, who was teething, trying to soothe him with a lullaby, Maruna appeared beside me for a moment. “Tonight?” she murmured, and I nodded, not looking at her; she whispered, “Owl,” and was gone again.
"Doro, doro, dormiu” I sang to the baby, “papa has a ring for you,” and wondered what Maruna meant. All I could do was wait and find out.
“You like babies, don’t you,” my mother said to me, standing above me in her soiled, ragged slave’s tunic. Her legs were white and shapely, with fine, soft, black hair on the shins and calves. She looked down at the child in my arms. Her face contorted as if she had toothache.