Laurentum itself was full of wounded men and refugees now, and more kept straggling in. Everywhere was a sense of exhaustion, confusion, lack of purpose. But when Turnus came, he appeared unaware of any such mood; he rode in the city gate on his fine stallion, tossed the reins to a stableman in the street before the Regia, and strode in, handsome and smiling, broad and erect in his high-crested helmet, Pallas’ ornate gold sword belt glittering over his shoulder. I watched him arrive with Messapus and Tolumnius, the Rutulian soothsayer, from my watchtower. Soon I saw my mother hurry across the courtyard to the reception rooms, picking her way round the makeshift beds of wounded men. I went downstairs then. My father was not in his apartments, so he had come out of hiding and gone to meet Turnus and the other captains. I was glad of that. There was a lot to be done for the people in the Regia, and I was busy with that all the evening, till Drances found me at the granary room.
Now, I had never much liked Drances. He was not like the old farmer warriors who made up most of my father’s circle of friends and counsellors. He was soft, flexible, enthusiastic. He did not lay down his opinion like a large rock on the table, as they did, and challenge anybody to move them from it; his opinions seemed to weigh very little, to be light and airy, a mere waft of words; but he got his way, more often than not. He was a city man, a politician. To him, my mother and I were unimportant persons in tactically important positions. We had to be managed. He saw women as he saw dogs or cattle, members of another species, to be taken into account only as they were useful or dangerous. He considered my mother dangerous, me negligible, except insofar as I might be made use of.
Yet he had an acute perception of relationships, more like that of a woman than of many men. He knew I was afraid of Amata, that I had run away from her and taken refuge in the royal apartments, that she was in love with Turnus, that I was not, that my father and she had quarreled. All this was grist to his mill. He had always opposed betrothing me to Turnus, I suppose because he saw Turnus as a threat to Latinus’ power encouraged by Amata’s favoritism, and was envious of Turnus’ splendid, contemptuous manhood, and wanted to thwart it. As I came out of the granary he stopped me and said, out of hearing of anyone else, “Daughter of Latinus, have no fear that your father will let you be given to the Rutulian. Our king could not prevent the breaking of the treaty, but no sacrilegious marriage will follow, be assured. Trust me.”
I thanked him and stood with lowered eyes. I knew what he thought of me, the girl who understood nothing, the nobody that everybody was fighting a war about.
All the same I was grateful to him for saying what he did. Though the war had not gone as they expected, and many of them were troubled about the broken treaty and the flouted oracle, still most of our people backed their queen and her local hero against the foreigners. And they assumed that whatever my parents chose was my choice. My father’s weakness had left me alone, isolated; there was nobody I could tell the truth to, nobody to hear me speak my heart. Maruna was loyal beyond question, but I could not lay my burden on the shoulders of the powerless. She knew my heart, but we could not talk freely.
The next morning, Latinus sent messengers to the Trojan camp requesting a truce for the performance of rites and the burial of the dead. Corpses were lying all over the riverbank and the ground for a mile inland.
Drances was one of the messengers, and when he came back to Laurentum he made a point of seeing me and telling me about the parley. He said, “We told the Trojan leader that since he surely had no quarrel with the dead, would he not allow decent burial to men who might have been the hosts, the fathers-in-law of his men. He answered at once, very directly: ‘You ask peace for the dead: I would grant it to the living, if I could! Why are we at war? If Turnus will not honor his king’s treaty, if he wants to drive us out of Latium, then let him alone meet me alone with sword in hand. We two could have spared all these deaths!’ Ah, you should have seen him as he said that—what a man he is—the man you’re promised to!”
“I have seen him.”
That brought Drances up short. He stared.
“I spied on the Trojan camp from the hill, the day after they landed,” I said. “Aeneas is a tall man, with a deep chest, and big hands. He speaks rather softly. His eyes are full of fire, smoke and fire, because he saw his city burn.”
Drances continued to stare. The dog had talked.
“You speak the truth, king’s daughter,” he said at last.
I looked down at my spindle and let it drop, twisting the wool into thread as it fell. “Please go on telling me about the parley.”
Drances pulled himself together and went on. He had thanked Aeneas, he said, and promised to revive the treaty with Latinus. “I told him, ‘Let Turnus seek his own alliances. We would rather help you rebuild your Troy here, with us!’ And so we made a twelve day truce. And now the Trojan knows that Turnus is still not the ruler of Latium. It was a good day’s work. I doubt our people will go back to war, whatever Turnus and Messapus decide to do.”
“That is for the king to decide,” I murmured.
“Indeed, indeed. But take heart, Lavinia! Your father will never defy the oracle!”
He presumed too much, I thought. I bowed slightly and walked away from him. He might pat the dog, but it declined to wag its tail.
From the farms and from the city people went out that afternoon and found their sons and fathers and brothers dead on the field. Some carried home the bodies of their dead to wash them and mourn them and bury them. Others made pyres there where they fell, so that evening all the fields north of Laurentum were clustered with fires, and smoke dimmed the stars. All the woodsmen in Latium brought wood in from the forests, and next day a huge common pyre was built outside the city walls for men who lived too far to be carried home for burial. It burned all day. Grief hung as dark and heavy in the city as the smoke.
We were told that the Trojans were burning their dead on the shore of the river. Those who saw the ceremony said that young men ran round the pyre three times on foot, then horsemen galloped round it three times, while people wailed aloud and blew conch shells. Warriors threw the weapons they had taken from their enemies onto the fire that consumed their friends. The rite was not like ours and yet it was like enough, there was nothing alien in it.
The next days passed in a curious suspense and inactivity. We looked after wounded men in the Regia and in houses all over Laurentum; some healed, some died. No word came from the Trojans. Evidently they were waiting to hear what we would say to Aeneas’ offer of single combat with Turnus and a restoration of the treaty. But my father sent no messengers to them. Like his people, he was uncertain what to do.
Drances had made sure that Aeneas’ words to him were heard everywhere, and many people in the anger of their grief cried that this war was accursed. It was Turnus’ fault; he had broken the truce Latinus made. If Turnus claimed the king’s daughter, let him win her fighting the Trojan hand to hand, let one life pay for all. But there were as many who, fearing foreigners, said that the war was our salvation, that the Trojans and their allies had come to overrun the land, and Latinus could save Latium only by sending Turnus with our forces to destroy or drive out the invaders.