The few men who came back to Laurentum later in the evening said our army had set sentinels around the enemy camp and settled down to feasting and drinking, content with their day’s work and ready to break into the camp next morning and finish off the Trojans. So then, if Turnus had a plan, it was extermination.
I know what happened that night from tales told next day by men coming back to the city, and then much later, by Serestus the Trojan, when he became my friend. He took part in a grim conference in the Trojan camp that evening about their chances of holding out until Aeneas returned with the hoped-for allies. Not knowing he had gone from Pallanteum to Etruria, they were desperately anxious about his long absence.
Two soldiers, young Euryalus and his older friend Nisus, came to the conference and volunteered to creep out through the Latin encampment and carry word to Aeneas. Distressed over the loss of the ships, craving his father’s presence and support, Ascanius sent the pair out heaped with praise and promises. When Aeneas came back and won the war, he said, Euryalus would receive all the lands belonging to King Latinus as a reward, and twelve Latin matrons to use as he pleased. I remember the wave of pure rage that came over me when Serestus told me that.
So the two sneaked over the ramparts in the deep dark of night, and threaded among the burnt-out watch fires, finding their enemies sprawled asleep, full of food and wine. Instead of hurrying through the Latin camp and on upriver, they fell to slaughtering sleeping men and stealing their drinking cups and armor. They cut the throats of ten or twenty helpless, drunken men before their bloodlust and greed were sated and they finally hurried off, burdened with stolen stuff. A patrol saw the gleam of stolen armor, heard the clinking of it, fell on them, and killed them. Their heads were cut off, stuck on poles, and paraded in front of the Trojan ramparts at dawn.
When Silvia and I hid and spied on the Trojans, we saw Euryalus on the grass, joking with Ascanius. Gorgeous, Silvia had called him. We had seen his mother straighten the red cap on his head. She was the woman who offered Aeneas a weaving she brought from Troy for her son’s bride gift. She saw the heads on the poles.
Later in the morning the Italian troops made an all-out assault. Against heavy odds, the Trojans held on: their archers shot Rutulians and Aequians dead as they worked their way through the ditch, and their swordsmen met attackers clambering up over the earthworks, sword to sword, and repelled them. The Trojans fought so well that by noon half our army had fallen back, unwilling to charge that ditch and wall again. They fought so well that some young Trojans, sick of being on the defensive, began to shout victory, and opened the gates of their camp to charge out and drive the enemy back. Turnus, utterly fearless, hacked and hewed his way in that opened gate, not even looking to see if his men were following him. Alone, he cut his way through the enemy camp, so mad with the fury of killing that the Trojans ran from him, till he got down to the river. He leapt in, in full armor as he was, swam downstream, and came ashore among his friends.
That feat of reckless courage was the last of the day. Both armies were worn out, there were no more assaults. Both camps were silent that evening.
We got news all day and in the evening, little by little, as wounded men were brought or made their way back to Laurentum. They were still limping in after dark. Some of them were not wounded, only tired or frightened; they had left the siege, left the battle, they wanted no more fighting just now. These were Latins whose homes were in or near the city, whose relatives would take them in. No Rutulians, no Aequians or Volscians were among them.
One of our royal herdsmen, Urso, came with a sword wound in his thigh. I asked him about Tyrrhus and his sons, Silvia’s two remaining brothers. He said they had all been in the fighting, both days, and that “the old man was like a wild boar, mad with rage. But he wore out,” he said. Urso was not a man I had known well, and he did not even recognise me until one of the other women called me by name. Then he stared at me, and his face flushed and broke out in sweat. He raised himself up on his elbow. “It’s all about you, woman,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you marry our Almo? or that King Turnus? All this killing for a girl’s whim!”
The women hurried over and hushed him and hissed at him, scandalised, but I said, “Let him alone. He had to fight for me.” My voice shook, and the fierce red blush of shame and anger ran over my face and body as I spoke. “I’m doing what I have to do, Urso,” I told him. “We all are.” He lay staring at me but said no more.
We had turned the courtyard into an infirmary. It was full of wounded men by now, and women looking after them, in a murmur of low voices and moaning and the glimmer of oil lamps in the warm night under the restless leaves of the great laurel. The women’s quarter remained closed, and my mother stayed there. She gave orders for supplies when asked, but she had not come out of her rooms all day.
Early the next morning, long before sunrise, I saw her striding under the colonnade to the royal apartment, alone. Verus, on duty at that door, bowed his head to her. She went in. I got up from my half-sleeping vigil beside a dying man and followed her. I do not know why. Maybe I thought I should defend my father from her.
As I came down the corridor I heard her voice in his room, coaxing at first, then becoming hard and fierce. “It’s not too late, Latinus,” she was saying. “The foreigners will be destroyed today. They can’t hold out any longer. Their great chieftain has run away up the river. He won’t be back! Send to Turnus. Tell him he is your son, your daughter’s husband. Put the reins of power in his hand. Why not? You’ve given up your power. So, why are you delaying? Why are you hiding in the Regia? You could have gone out and watched the battle, at least! You could have taken a little of the credit for saving the country! Have you been hiding here thinking the foreigners would come and rescue you and Lavinia? Did you really think they were going to defeat Turnus?” She said the name “Turnus” with passionate energy.
I stood in the dark corridor, just past the door. Inside the bedroom it must have been even darker.
“What is it you want, Amata?” My father’s voice was thick with sleep, low and slow. “What do you think you want?”
“I want you to save a little of our pride. It is shameful that Turnus should have to be ashamed of his father-in-law! Get up and go out there. Act like a king.”
“What am I to do?”
I did feel shame, hearing that.
“Act like a man, for once, if you can’t act like a king. If you want to know how a king acts, look at Turnus.”
There was a silence, then a sound of movement, a shift or scuffle, in the dark room, a sharp “Ah!” from my mother.
“Enough,” my father said, even lower, but with a different tone. “Enough of Turnus. He is not my son, or yours. He is not Lavinia’s husband. Or yours. Go back to your rooms now. Keep silent. Do not send any more messengers to Turnus. My men have intercepted them. Even if the Trojans are defeated, that will not make Turnus king of Latium. I will never make him king of Latium. Nor will you! Now go.”
He must have been holding her, and now pushed her out of his room—she came out staggering wildly and nearly fell. She turned back to the doorway at once, but he menaced her in some way, for she stopped and stood clenching her fists and shaking them in front of her shoulders, crying out broken words I could not understand. She whirled round with a strange moan, like a hurt dog, and ran back down the corridor. She had not seen me standing just past the door. I was trembling so that I could hardly move, but I managed to creep on past the dark doorway of the room and follow my mother back to the courtyard full of hurt and dying men, where the paling sky dimmed the light of the small lamps.