“He’ll breed you,” she said. “You can count on that. He’s not like the old eunuch. He’ll breed sons who live.”
She spoke clearly, with detachment. She was drunk the way I’d seen men at feasts be drunk, day-and-night drunk, drunk to the bone. I did not reply, but went on with the lullaby in an undertone, for the baby was beginning to relax at last. I did not want to look up at my mother. I knew her anger was gathering to burst out again. I knew she knew Turnus was not going to come. I was very much afraid of her.
’Doro, doro, dormiu” she sang, mocking. “What a ewe lamb, what a eunuch’s daughter you are, Lavinia! All milk and meekness. All obedience to your dear papa who makes up oracles to suit himself. Don’t think you’re going to have it your way this time. I go where you go. You come with me, my girl. You come with me to Ardea tomorrow.”
I bowed my head and said nothing. The child felt the tension in my arms and began to whimper again.
“Shut the brat up,” Amata said, turning away. “Sicana! Where’s the jug?”
It was an endless evening. After Tulia took her baby off, I dozed, sitting with my back against a great old fig tree. My head ached, my muscles were tight, my mind dull, blank. The sun set in clouds behind the endless trees of the forest, and the night came on very dark. Most women fell asleep early; only Amata’s group of gamblers stayed up, still drinking, till even they wore out. My mother came and lay down next to me. “Asleep already, little ewe lamb?” she said. She set down a small oil lamp near her head. “Sleep well. Tomorrow we’re off to Ardea. Sleep well. Sleep well.” She bunched up the corner of her palla under her head for a pillow, laid her arm over me, not in an embrace, and lay silent. I felt the weight and warmth of her arm, of her body against mine. I lay looking into the darkness, watching the shadows from the small lamp flame move among leaves and branches. After a long time and very slowly I moved out from under the warm, heavy arm that lay across me. My mother sighed, snored once loudly, did not move. I lay watching the shadows die. I was asleep, but awake too, for I heard an owl’s thin quavering cry, nearby, to my left: iii, i, i.
Without thought or pause I stood up softly and stepped among the sleeping women in that direction. No lamps burned now, but the clouds had thinned and summer starlight was grey on the grass. The owl called softly from farther away, and I followed. I saw Gaia slumped asleep under a tree like a lump of darkness, her sword standing by her, its point stuck in the ground.
I came away from the fig trees, crossed a tiny side stream where I slipped and stumbled, clambered up to a place where trees massed thicker and darker. Maruna was there. I knew her though I could barely see her. She took my hand and we went on together.
Before long she murmured, “I think we’ve lost the path.”
We had; but we got along for half a mile or so downhill before we came into a stream gully so overhung with trees and overgrown with thickets that we could go no farther in the dark. We waited there some hours, curled up together for warmth, dozing, till the wind came up as it will do sometimes an hour before the dawn, clearing off the clouds, and the moon gave us enough light to go on. We struck a downhill path, and took it; it soon opened into a woodcutter’s drag, down which we could run. And we ran.
By the time it was light we were out of the high hills, coming into pastures. I knew the country from my rambles with Silvia, knew where we were, and could head straight for the city. We came to the southern gate in the bright early morning. It was shut and there were men guarding it.
I went with maruna to my father’s rooms, and at his door I said aloud, “Do you wake, king? Waken!” He came out, heavy-eyed, lumbering, huddling his bedclothes about him, and took me in his arms without a word.
When he released me he said, “Where is your mother?”
“At the fig-tree spring.”
“She didn’t come with you?”
“I escaped from her,” I said.
He looked uncomprehending, confused. His grey hair was tufted and matted with sleep. “Escaped?”
“I didn’t want to be there!” I said in anguish, and then, trying to speak calmly, though I could not, “Father, she said she’d sent for Turnus. To betroth me, marry me to him—I don’t know. I was afraid he’d come. She kept me guarded. I couldn’t get away. I couldn’t have got away without Maruna.”
“Sent for Turnus?”
It was more than the stupidity of arousal from sleep. He did not understand, he would not understand that his wife had tried to betray him. Feeling that I had already betrayed her, I could not say anything.
“I must get your mother and the other women out of the woods,” he said at last. “There’s been trouble. Fighting. It could be dangerous for them up there. Is she—will she come back today? What is it she’s doing there?”
“Women’s rites. Dances her people have.” I tried to get my mind to think about what really mattered. “If you send to tell her that there’s been fighting, that the women there are in danger, I think she’ll come back. But send women messengers, father. Men can’t approach. Some of her women are armed.”
“But this is madness,” my father said.
I was tired, strained, worn out by all the folly and anxiety of the past days and nights. I stared at him. I said, “She’s been mad for thirteen years!”
When the poet sang me the fall of Troy, his story told of the king’s daughter Cassandra, who foresaw what would happen and tried to prevent the Trojans from letting the great horse into the city, but no one would listen to her: it was a curse laid on her, to see the truth and say it and not be heard. It is a curse laid on women more often than on men. Men want the truth to be theirs, their discovery and property. My father did not hear me.
“Wait,” he said, and turned away to his room. I waited.
Maruna slipped away and brought a pitcher of water from the well in the courtyard, and I gratefully drank every drop of it—except a little that I poured out to the Penates first, and a little that I used to wet the corner of my garment and try to clean my face. I was all dirt and dried sweat. The coarse old tunic was tattered and filthy after our night run, and my best palla that Maruna wore was completely ruined. Maruna and I were mourning over the great snags and tears in it when my father came back, dressed. He looked at us with dull puzzlement. “You must go get cleaned up, Lavinia,” he said.
“I’d like to, father. But please, what is the trouble, who is fighting?”
“The Trojans were hunting. I told them they could hunt the forests between Venticula and Laurentum. They have to have food.” He stopped.
I asked at last, “Did some of our hunters try to stop them?”
“They shot the deer. The stag.” His face was stricken as he said it. I could not think what he meant. Why should hunters not shoot a stag?
He said, “Silvia’s deer.”
“Cervulus,” Maruna whispered.
“The creature ran home—to Tyrrhus’ farm—bleeding, with the arrow in its flank—crying like a child, they said. And Silvia screamed as if it had been her child shot. They couldn’t comfort her. Her brothers and the old man swore they’d punish the hunter. But it was the king’s son who shot the deer.”
“Ascanius,” I said.
It begins with a boy who shoots a deer.
The waves lapped one over another on the shore where the tide was rising.
“If that is his name.” I had never seen my father bewildered like this. He groped among words and finally said, “Tyrrhus went into a blind rage, the way he does. He and his boys—they got their farm people together and went out against the hunting party. Armed. With swords, axes, bows. They fought—somewhere over Villia Ridge—they found the Trojans and tried to slaughter them. But the hunters were soldiers. Defending their prince. They killed—”