He looked into my face for a moment and looked away. “Tyrrhus’ eldest boy was killed.”
First to die is young Almo—you know him. An arrow in his throat chokes off his speech and breath with blood.
I whispered his name as Maruna had whispered the name of the deer.
“And old Galaesus.”
Old Galaesus, who’s rich and used to being in control, tries to keep them from fighting, comes between them, and has his face smashed in for his pains.
My father said, “I can’t believe it. Galaesus tried to interfere, calm them down. He thought young men in a fight would listen to him.”
I stood dumb. I stood as I have stood in the shallows of the sea with the tide rising, the waves coming in one over the other, pushing me and drawing away the sand under my feet with the undertow, till all the world was shining and sliding away.
I took Maruna’s arm, and she helped me stand. “Please let us go, king,” she murmured to my father, and he, finally seeing our filth and tatters and scratched arms, came with us across the courtyard, calling out for women to help us.
“Tell me something I have never understood” I say as we sit in the small courtyard, the inmost room of our apartment in the Regia. It is a warm morning of June and my husband, who has a great capacity for simple enjoyment, is basking in the early sunlight while we have our breakfast of white figs and new milk sweetened with honey.
“I’ll do my best,” he says.
“You might rather not.”
“Well, let’s see.”
“Why didn’t you come to talk with my father, right away, when he asked you to come affirm the alliance he offered?”
The question interests him. He sits up a little straighter to look back to a year ago. It is of great importance to him that he speak truth as nearly as he can, and since it is always hard to speak truly of things in the past, he thinks about it a while before he speaks. “I was getting together some gifts to bring with me,” he says. “Something that would be suitable for you—a betrothal gift. I’d already sent Priam’s cup and crown and scepter. The last, best bits of Troy I had. There wasn’t anything left, except our gods. But I didn’t want to come like a beggar! Euryalus’ mother had a shawl woven with silver threads, she’d been keeping it to give to her son’s bride when he married, she brought it and offered it to me. Poor soul!…Anyhow, while I was worrying about gifts, word came that a band of farmers had attacked our hunting party, because Ascanius had shot a pet stag. Gyas had an arrow nick in his arm, and our men had killed two farmers. That was bad news. A bad beginning. It looked as if the country people weren’t going to accept us, no matter what their king said. Then Drances came to our camp by the ships. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“He didn’t say he was sent by Latinus, or even that Latinus knew he’d come. He’d taken it on himself to warn us that Turnus was using the quarrel with the farmers to raise the whole country against us—sending off to the Volscians and the Sabines, even to Diomedes down south, for fighting men.”
“Drances was always envious of Turnus.”
“I wondered why he came to us. But if I’d gone back with him to Laurentum, then, could I have prevented the war?”
“No,” I say.
And he does not question my certainty. He accepts that I know some things that I could not, in the ordinary way, know. He does not ask how I know. I have told him that I used to go to the oracle at Albunea with my father. But I have never told him about the poet. I doubt that I ever will.
It has not been difficult for me to believe in my fictionality, because it is, after all, so slight. But for him it would be very difficult. Even if he is at the moment inactive, domesticated, a contented man sitting in the sunlight talking with his wife, the poet’s passionate, commanding, anxious, dangerous hero would find it hard to accept contingence, the nullity of his will and conscience. Piety, faithfulness, obedience to what must be rightly done, the fas, is the desire of his heart. To know that he has obeyed a poet, rather than his conscience, might be anguish to him—even if he saw, as I see, that the poet obeyed his conscience and followed the fas. Why should I trouble him with that, when his concerns are so great and his time so short?
He agrees with my judgment, nodding. “It was time for war. Mars on the march… Drances himself said it would be a provocation if I tried to come to the city then. So I hope you see that it was not in neglect of my obligation to you and your father that I failed to come. Did you take it as such?”
Even if he has not worried about it before, his worry about it now is endearing. I want to let him off easily, but perversely I say, “Well, you might have sent a message. I did wonder whether you really wanted the princess as part of the package.”
He looks appalled, as he always does when he thinks he’s been remiss in duty. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I did.”
“It was unfair of me to wonder. After all, I had the advantage of you. I’d seen you.” He knows that Silvia and I saw his picnic by the river; I told him about it early on, and the idea of two girls hidden in the bushes spying on an army both shocked and entertained him. “And my father could have sent you a message, but he didn’t either. So, go on about that time.”
I can tell that he is, for once, disposed to talk, to reminisce. He thinks again for a while and says, “I was undecided, that night. Perplexed.” I am fond of his understatements when he talks about the decisions he has had to make, on which the lives of his people depended. “We simply weren’t a large enough force to stand up to a whole countryside determined to drive us away. The answer might be to get back in the ships and go… but where? We’d come where we were to come. That much was clear. So, I went off to think about it, down by the river. My thoughts ran about in every direction at once, trying to see what to do. As if my mind was a bowl full of water reflecting a light, and you shake the bowl this way and that, and the reflections dance over the ceiling, but they don’t come together… And I watched the reflection of the moon on the river shiver and break apart… Then I prayed to the river, Tiber. And while I prayed, there in the reeds under the poplars, my mind grew quieter. And the river gave me my answer. I thought: upriver, Drances said, is a town with a Greek king, an ally of Latinus but not on good terms with all the Latins. A foreigner like us. Maybe he’d help us. And that came to me as the thing to do. All the broken reflections came together. I got some sleep, and next day I took some men upstream in two of the galleys. I left my son in charge of building up our camp so it could be defended. It was time he took some real responsibility.”
“That was a pretty big responsibility for a boy.”
“Well, of course he had Mnestheus and Serestus to call on. Good men. Experienced. They had full authority from me. But I didn’t realise how quickly the Latins would get their troops and their allies together and attack. And burn our ships, so my people had no way to escape. Ah!” The memory of that makes him clench his fist and scowl in pain. “I thought I had eight or ten days clear to look for some allies of my own. Turnus moved unbelievably fast. A man of immense talent.”
Is it self-admiration to admire the man you killed? Is it self-judgment to judge him? I say, “He had courage, but not character. He was greedy.”
“It’s hard to ask a young fellow to be selfless,” Aeneas says, with a rueful smile.
“It seems to be easy enough to expect it of young women.”
He ponders. “Perhaps women have more complicated selves. They know how to do more than one thing at one time. That comes late to men. If at all. I don’t know if I’ve learned it yet.”