He frowns, brooding; he is probably thinking of what he sees as his worst failing: the fury of bloodlust that overcomes him in battle, making him a mindless, indiscriminate slaughterer, “like a sheepdog gone mad among the sheep,” he says. Of course much of his reputation as a warrior rests on this battle madness. Men who faced him were terrified of him. And I cannot see how it differs from the courage he respects in his heroes, men he has told me of with such admiration—the Trojan Hector, the Greek Achilles. But to him it is unquestionably a vice, an abuse of skill, nefas. I know he dreads every threat of war from our neighbors, not because he hates or fears fighting; in fact he loves it; but he fears himself. He believes that he murdered Turnus. I have argued with him about this: it was in a fair fight, he couldn’t leave an implacable, powerful enemy alive, and so on. He could not deny my arguments; I drove him to silence. But he has not forgiven himself.
Old Vestina appears in the doorway under the colonnade, holding the baby, who twists about in her arms making a noise like a small bellows being squeezed very fast. “He’s hungry, queen,” she says sternly. The milk is already bursting from my breasts at the sight of him. “Hand him over,” I say, and get him settled, although he’s so eager he can’t find the nipple at first and thrashes his fists in fury, gasping indignantly. “Talk about greed,” I say.
My husband’s dark eyes rest on me and Silvius with a peaceful, undemanding tenderness. He pours himself another bowl of sweetened milk from the pitcher, dribbles a few drops of it on the ground in worship, and salutes his son with it before he drinks. “Your health,” he says.
I bathed away the filth of the three nights spent at the fig-tree spring, and slept for a few hours in the middle of the day; but it was hard to rest for long, with all the commotion going on in the courtyard and quarters of the house. “Turnus, Turnus"—I heard his name constantly. I got up at last and went to find out what was going on. Turnus had come, but not to my mother waiting for him up in the hills. He was out in front of the city gates, they told me, with an army of herdsmen, farmers, and city folk. I climbed up onto the roof of the watchtower to have a look.
It was a big crowd, and more coming in across the fields all the time. The men all carried weapons, whether they were farm tools or hunter’s bows or swords and bronze-tipped lances. As they grouped together they made a dark, endless noise. I looked down from the roof at the top of the laurel in the courtyard where the bees had swarmed. But these men were not the foreigners the bees had foretold. They were Latins, Laurentians, Italians. My people. My enemies.
All that evening the fields were full of armed men; they camped all over the field of exercise and under the slopes of the outer rampart. Next morning I went up to the roof over the front door to look. The crowds outside the city gate and in the city, filling the streets around the Regia, had doubled. Every now and then a shout went up. War, they shouted, war! Drive out the strangers! Send the murderers back where they came from!—I saw a group making their way through the others; some of them were men I knew, herdsmen. They were carrying something long and heavy wrapped in a white cloth stained with blood. “Almo, Almo,” they chanted. “Avenge our brother! Avenge our dead!” I glimpsed Almo’s and Sylvia’s father Tyrrhus among them, white-haired, staring wild-eyed, staggering along, half carried by other men. This procession made its way up the street towards the doors of the Regia. There they laid the burden down. The shouting was frenzied now, the air shook and rocked with it. And I saw Turnus. He stood in front of the gates of the king’s house, facing the crowd.
“Are we to be ruled by strangers?” he shouted, and the crowd all round shouted like thunder in the streets, “No!"—"Is my promised bride to be given to a foreigner?"—"No!"—"Latinus! King of Latium! I stand at your gates! We demand justice! We demand war!” And the men all shouted, “War!”
After what seemed a long time, the doors of the Regia opened. My father came out, flanked by his guards, with Drances and a few other old counsellors. The shouting died down. Men near and farther called, “The king, the king speaks.”
Looking down from almost directly above as I knelt hidden behind the decorative edge tiles of the roof, I could see only the top of my father’s head, grey hair gone thin on the skull.
“Men of Latium, my children!” he said in his strong voice, and paused for a long time, so long it seemed he might not speak again. Men shifted from foot to foot. At last he went on, but sounding now more like an old man. “An oracle has spoken. A promise has been given. If you defy the voice that guides us, if you break the treaty I made, you do wrong. You will pay for that wrongdoing in blood. You know that. That is all I can say to you. Turnus, son of my old friend Daunus and sister-son of my wife, if you are determined to lead our people into this guilt, I cannot stop you. I can only say that you rob me of the harbor of peace I hoped for in my last years, the righteous death I longed for.”
The silence continued. Without waiting for any answer Latinus turned away and came back into the Regia. His guards closed the high doors behind him, leaving Turnus and the crowds outside, still silent for a little. Then the murmuring and the dark noise began again, and swelled, and grew till it surrounded the house and filled the city.
Now there was a new turmoil in the streets behind the house. I was not the only one up there on the roofs. Maruna and Tita and several girls were up on the watchtower platform over the southeast corner of the house, and one of them was pointing to the east gate. I ran to join them. From the platform we saw another procession straggling up the streets: women—slaves and mistresses, brazen or calm, shamefaced or proud, all with wild hair, with soiled, torn togas and tunics—Amata and her troop from the fig-tree spring.
My mother came into the place in front of the Regia, walking as always with a regal gait. Turnus hurried to meet her there. They met and embraced and talked for a while. Presently a new chant began among the men around them: “Open the War Gate! Open the War Gate!”
The War Gate of Laurentum stands in a little square not far from the actual city gates, a pair of tall bronze-studded oaken doors in a frame of cedar, with an altar of Janus to the east of it and an empty space around it. The doors always stood closed and barred, old and grim and meaningless. There had never been any ceremony there in my lifetime, except at the Kalends of every January when we made libations to Janus. But now everybody was shouting, “The queen, the queen will open the War Gate!” and the crowds were flowing down that way. I could make out my mother for a while among them, and Turnus’ high helmet crest. Then the trees cut off my view, and I could only hear the shouting. A great cheer went up of “Mars! Mavors! Macte esto!” and people came dancing and calling that the Gate of War was open.
My father’s brief appearance before the doors of the Regia seemed to me, to most of us, an abdication. He had made a formal plea, yet not even waited for a reply. “I cannot stop you,” he had said to Turnus. It outraged me to think he had said that. How could he say it? How could he hand his power over to Turnus and creep back into the house?
As I look back on it now, I think he was speaking not to Turnus but to the crowd, the men, his Latins. They had, in fact, the power. Turnus could use them so long as they let him, but he could not control them, any more than Latinus could. And so Latinus’ plea was made to them, in the hope that they might remember it later. For now, they were afire, mad with excitement. The chance of a fight, the promise of bursting out in violence, vengeance, righteous wrath, that was all they saw at the moment, all they wanted. Every farmer hates a foreigner, and here was a troop of fancy fellows from somewhere who thought they could walk in and take over Latium, shoot the deer, marry the princess, push honest men around—well, they’d find out their mistake. The old king wouldn’t stand up against them, but the new one would. What did it matter if he was a Rutulian? We’re all Latins. We stand shoulder to shoulder, the peoples of the West, defending our fields, our altars, our women. Once we’ve driven these strangers into the sea, we can sort out our own affairs.