I felt safe up there on the tower. I watched the men drilling on the exercise field, practicing at swordplay, grouping and charging as the officers shouted orders. It all seemed like the games boys play. Sometimes Verus or Aulus stood at the parapet with me and told me what the maneuvers were for. “They’re not using the trumpets,” Verus remarked. Latinus had told me once how he had realised, years ago, in Etruria, that the Veiians were telling each other across the battlefield where they needed reinforcements, when to attack or retreat, by the sweet piercing signals like bird calls. He captured two Etruscan trumpeters and had them teach their tricks to some of his boys; and he had won the advantage in more than one fight, he said, from those trumpet tunes. But Turnus was evidently not one for innovations or foreign ways. His men bellowed their orders. The endless, raucous shouting, like dogs barking, wore on all our nerves.
The numbers of men encamped to the north and east of Laurentum grew daily. Ufens arrived with his rough Aequians. An even rougher troop came from Praeneste, men in wolfskin caps, who went into battle with one foot shod in leather and the other bare. From my platform I could see the captains conferring, among them my old suitors, Ufens and handsome Aventinus, flaunting his lion-skin cape. Mezentius the Etruscan, who had been tyrant of Caere, came up from Ardea with his son Lausus. I looked at Mezentius to see what a traitorous, murderous tyrant looked like. I expected something more sinister than this tough old soldier, clearly very fond of the slender, dark-eyed son whom he kept close by him.
Turnus was waiting for Messapus to come with his horse troops from Soracte. He arrived at last on the same day as a troop of Volscians, also mounted, black horsehair crests on their helmets. I looked for the woman warrior my poet had said would ride with the Volscians, but I did not see her. But then, he said he had invented her. But had he not invented all of us? I tried to take comfort in that, to pretend that it was all a pretense, all the shouted orders and clashed weapons and sharpened swords, the nervous horses and swaggering men. The horrible list of carnage my poet had told me on the last night, that was what they were making ready for. But why, what was it for? For a pet deer? For a girl? What good would that be?
Without war there are no heroes.
What harm would that be?
Oh, Lavinia, what a woman’s question that is.
They all gathered the next morning, our Latins nearest the city walls, then the Oscans, Sabines, Volscians in their bands, the Rutulians out in front, and Turnus on his splendid stallion leading them. Women and children and old men on the city walls cheered and threw down flowers as they rode off north, towards the river.
My poet could tell how heads were split and brains spattered armor, how men with a sword in their lungs crawled gasping out their blood and life, how so-and-so killed so-and-so, and so on. He could tell what he had not seen with his mortal eyes, because that was his gift; but I do not have that gift. I can tell only what I was told and what I saw.
What follows I was told, then and since, by men returned from the battle.
Aeneas had gone upriver to the Greek settlement hoping to bring reinforcements. He had been gone now for eight days. The Trojans had had no word from him. They completed a steep ditch and earthwork round their camp, which was built into the bend of the river so that it was protected on two sides by the Tiber; their ships were drawn up stern first on the beach within the earthwork.
The forces of Latium attacked the camp. The older men among the Trojans, veterans of the ten-year siege of Troy, managed a fierce and skillful defense. Young Ascanius was wild to make a sally and chase the Latins off, but Aeneas had left orders that if attacked they were not to attack. The captains he left in charge followed those orders, though it was hard to restrain the young Trojans when the Latins began to taunt them as cowards hiding behind their ramparts. “Is that all the Italian land you want?” they shouted. “That little bit of riverbank? Why don’t you come out? We’ll give you dirt to eat!” They repeatedly tried to force the gate or swarm up over the rampart, but the Trojans drove them back, hand to hand and with showers of darts and javelins. A rain of iron, Rufus Anso called it.
We women of the Regia took in as many wounded as we could, and looked after them as best we could. Rufus Anso was a farmer from the royal lands just west of the city, who was brought back to the city wounded. He was about my age. A javelin had gone right through his belly below the navel, they had pulled it on out from the back. Our healing women told me he would die. He was not in much pain yet, only frightened; he wanted to talk, not to be left alone, and I sat with him that night. I had sent for his mother, but she could not come till the next day. He said, “The air went dark all at once, like rain. It was like a rain of iron.”
A dart had hit his arm near the elbow, and he complained more of the pain of that small wound than the other. He seemed incredulous that he had been hurt at all. He thought it unfair, bad luck. I wondered why a man would go into battle expecting not to be hurt, what he thought a battle was. He was impressed by the Trojan defense and said they were good fighters. But he had expected to kill, not to be killed, and lay puzzling about the injustice of it. His mother came next day, and he was carried off home, where he died in agony a few days later.
What weapons did to men was all I saw then of warfare. I did not have to watch them fighting, yet.
A report came back to us just after dark. While his men made a showy attack on the gate of the Trojan camp, Turnus, alone, got round the ramparts on the river side, lighted a torch, and ran from one beached ship to the next, firing them. The dry wood was caulked with resin, and the ships lay close side by side: the fire caught, the downriver wind spread it from ship to ship: in no time they were all aflame. Turnus escaped before the Trojans saw the fire towering up over the river at their back. All they could do was cut the lines, push the mass of flaming ships out into the water, and watch them drift out on the current and lurch and burn down to the waterline and sink.
Rufus Anso listened to the man who reported this to us and said, “Well, seems they won’t be going back where they came from, those Trojins!” He thought it a good joke. And there was much cheering and high spirits among the wounded men and the women of the Regia.
I was confused and troubled. Should I not be happy at this feat of daring, this victory for my people? Here among my own people, caring for men of my own people hurt by the invaders, how could I be on the invaders’ side?
But if our purpose was to drive the foreigners out of Italy, why burn their ships? Evidently Turnus meant to exterminate them, not drive them away—if he had acted with any intention except to do immediate harm and carry off an act of bravery.
I thought again and again of the treaty Latinus had made with them, which we had violated. Tyrrhus and the herdsmen had attacked in anger, the Trojans had responded in self-defense. The matter could and should have stopped there. If there is any sacred thing, it is a treaty. How could the powers of our earth, our land, be with us if we not only defied the oracle they gave us, but did one of the great acts of evil—the deliberate breaking of a promise?
My mind went round and round on these thoughts and my heart was torn and miserable, wanting to rejoice with the people around me but unable to. I felt myself a traitor, as if I had done the great wrong, had caused it simply by being who and what I was. My mother had taught me that self-pitying guilt, and I had known it most of my life. Though I fought against it, knowing it childish and mistaken, under this stress and pressure it was all too easy to be childish, to be mistaken, to drop back into it.