Latinus had known the enthusiasm of war before and knew better than to try to oppose its first furor, to waste speech on the mindless.
But I was a child of peace, and all I could see was a defeated old man hiding in his palace while fools bellowed in the street. And his queen, in her filthy slave’s clothing, striding about, shameless, triumphing in the desecration of daily life, thinking she’d have it all her way.
She wouldn’t have me, not while I could get away from her. Even if my father had foresworn his power, he was my hope of resistance. I gathered up my things and told Maruna and a few other women to move with me out of the women’s quarter into the royal apartments, the bedrooms my mother had not used for years. Lina and Sicana and all the rest of my mother’s devoted attendants, the queen’s faction, were already filtering back into the house. Gaia was brandishing her sword in the hallways. I was not going to let myself come again under the control of those women.
Poor old Vestina was shocked, wept, whined, tried to order me to stay where I belonged, raged feebly when I refused, but I could not reassure her or take her with me; her loyalty was too divided between Amata and myself. I slipped into the royal apartments through the back halls with my little troop and asked my father’s guard to tell him that his daughter asked to occupy the queen’s rooms.
My father sent for me to come. He was sitting in the audience room with Drances and the others. Rather than ask them to leave, he rose and came to talk to me in the space behind the throne. He looked tired and grim, the wrinkles heavy on his cheeks and around his eyes. “Why did you not consult me about this change of rooms, daughter?”
“I was afraid if she heard of it, the queen would forbid me.”
“Do you not owe her obedience?”
“Not when obedience to her is disobedience to you.”
He frowned, turned half away, controlling anger. “Say what you mean.”
“If she can—if I’m in her power—she’ll marry me to Turnus.”
He made an impatient, dismissive noise.
“That was why she took me up into the hills. To meet him there. To defy the oracle and betray the alliance you offered the Trojans.”
“She would not,” he began, but he could not say, “She would not dare,” knowing she had opened the War Gate. He stood scowling and indecisive.
“Let me stay with you, father. Let me have one of your guards at my door. I’m trying to obey you and the oracle. I will not marry Turnus.”
After a while he said, “Do you dislike him so?”
His voice was weak, the question was weak. I tried to suppress my impatience. “You promised me to the Trojan leader. He is my husband. I will have no other.”
“It looks as if the people will go to war to prevent it, daughter,” he said, with a show of making light of it.
“Father, I know what I have to do. And I will. My mother won’t stop me, and all the men in the kingdom shouting for war won’t stop me.” Only you can, I thought, but I did not say it. The thought, however, weakened my resolve, and my voice shook somewhat when I said, “I beg you to let me do as I must, and protect me so that I can.”
I do not know what was going through his mind, what he might have said, when Drances came forward. He had of course heard us, and being always very sure of his mind and free with his tongue, and encouraged in his freedom, he did not even ask leave to break in on us. “King,” he said, “your daughter is right, and wise, and brave. If Turnus were to take advantage of the queen’s favor, in this time of confusion, and defy the oracle, defy you—the crime could not be undone. Ruin would be upon us! Have patience. Our people will come to their senses. But as you said yourself, they must see what color blood is first. Keep the maiden safe with you, away from danger, away from the Rutulian. Let your guards defend her. She is our pledge of honor. In her, the sacred powers are with us.”
Drances always said too much, went too far, but maybe he had to rant, now, to make my father hear him.
“Very well,” Latinus said slowly, ponderously. “You may stay in your mother’s apartments, Lavinia. I will set a guard at the door. But I will have no more disrespectful, rebellious talk about the queen. You understand?”
I bowed my head, murmured thanks, and slipped away.
It was a great deal easier to talk with the king’s guards than with the king. I had known them since I was a baby—Verus, Aulus, Albinus, Gaius and the others; some of them still called me by my childish title Camilla, altar girl. The pick of Latinus’ fighting men in his fighting years, they were all middle-aged, grizzled, a bit thick in the waist under their bronze corselets, fond of their food and drink but not slow in their wits. They were keenly aware that the Regia was now a house divided. To my relief I found that they shared my antipathy to Turnus, even if they did not want to think ill of their queen. “The Rutulian’s got the queen tied round his finger,” said Verus, “being her sister’s son, see, she’s made a son of him, he can’t do wrong. It’s how mothers are.” I didn’t mind how they explained it so long as they saw that I might be in danger from Amata. And they did see that, for without my asking, one of them was near me wherever I went in the Regia to carry out my ritual and housekeeping duties.
Those were strange days, when half my own house was foreign to me. I never entered the women’s quarters, my home for so long. I was entirely estranged from my mother, and on terms of embarrassment with women I’d known all my life. Most of them could not believe I was insisting on my betrothal to the foreign chief, the enemy, or could not understand why I did. Amata let them say that I was mindlessly, slavishly obedient to my father, and whisper that he was quite senile. And indeed, hiding away in his quarters, eating in privacy, seeing almost no one, Latinus seemed to give proof of his weakness. I saw him only when I assisted him at a rite performed in the house or the city; he never went out the city gates.
Neither did I, though I spent a good deal of time up on the roofs and the watchtower looking out over the city walls. Up there, I could get away from the curiosity of some and the ill will of others. Verus or one of the other guards was always on duty at the foot of the stairs that led up to the platform in the southeast corner, the highest place in the city, from which you could see the exercise field, the plains and pastures and groves as far as Tyrrhus’ farm, the blue hills eastward, and westward the Lentulus winding down among its marshes to the dunes. I took my distaff and went up with Maruna or one of the other girls; we put up an awning, for the summer sun was getting hot. Sometimes women asked if they could join me and came to sit with me a while, with their work or their baby, as if things were as they used to be. It was brave of them, for it was a defiance of my mother, in whose power they were. Some of them told me about her behavior, which clearly worried them. Every day she ordered that the banquet hall be made ready and animals butchered, so that Turnus and his ally chiefs could have a feast. But the chiefs were all busy riding about the countryside raising troops; and arrogant as he was, Turnus would hesitate to eat at the king’s table without the king’s invitation. He sent excuses. Amata always said, “He’ll come tomorrow. We must be ready for him.” So the house sweepers and the stable boys were living on choice cuts of beef and mutton, the women said, shaking their heads over the waste and folly of it.