When Latinus at last called his counsellors, they came in that same division of mind. And they were met right away with bad news from Diomedes, the Greek who had founded a city in the south, whom we had sent to for troops. He refused. He politely told our envoys that we were fools to take on the Trojans. “We fought them for ten years,” he said, “and though we beat them, how many of us ever came home? Our victory brought us shipwreck, death, exile. Aeneas is no ordinary man. He brings his gods with him. Keep the peace, keep your treaty with him, sheathe your swords!”
Amata and I were at that meeting, sitting far back in the shadows behind Latinus’ throne, and veiled. With us was the princess Juturna, Turnus’ sister, who had come up from Ardea to be with him. She was very beautiful, with blue eyes like his, but hers were strange eyes that seemed to gaze through water at the world. She had vowed chastity, people said; some said it was because the river Juturna, for which she was named, gave her certain powers so long as she remained virgin; others said she had been raped as a girl and since then would speak to no man but her brother. I do not know the truth of these stories. She spoke to us only in the barest civility, very softly, calling Amata aunt and me cousin, and sat listening to the council, a translucent grey veil over her head and shoulders.
When the Greek’s messenger was done, the counsellors broke into muttering, and then discussion, and they would have been shouting soon, but the king stood up and lifted his arms slowly, with open palms upturned, in the gesture of invocation. They fell still. Latinus bowed his head, and the silence deepened. He sat down on his high seat again and spoke. “I wish we had settled this great matter sooner! Better not to convene the council when the enemy is at the gate. My people, we are fighting an unrighteous war against an enemy who will not be conquered, because they follow the will of earth and heaven, while we do not. We have broken our obligations, they have held to theirs. We cannot defeat them. I know my mind has wavered on this, but I am certain now. Hear what I propose. Let us give them the land I own out beyond Sicania, all the rough foothill farmland there and the pine forests of the mountains: let us ask them to build their city there and share our realm. Or, if they wish to leave, we will rebuild the ships we burned. Let us send them envoys, with gifts to seal the treaty, now. Consider well what I say, and take this chance to spare our shaken people from defeat!”
Silence followed, but not a cold silence. They knew their king was a brave man, a warrior, who would not surrender lightly, and a man of piety, who had received the clear word of an oracle and held that it must be obeyed. They were thinking it over.
Unfortunately, Drances got up and began to talk. He talked vividly and fluently as always, but with burning malevolence, addressing Turnus directly. He told Turnus the war was his doing, the defeat was his doing, and it was up to him to end it—unless he was so smitten with glory and so lustful for the dowry of a king’s daughter that he would lead our armies out again, “leaving our worthless lives scattered over the fields, unburied, unwept, unknown. But if you had any real courage at all, you’d stand up to the man who challenged you!”
At this Turnus of course burst out and called Drances a coward who had never yet been on the battlefield, whose tongue talked of courage while his feet were running away. The Latin alliance was not defeated, far from it! Had not the Tiber run red with Trojan blood? Maybe the Greek Diomedes was afraid of Aeneas, but Messapus was not, and Tolumnius was not, and the Volscians did not know what fear was. “And does this hero challenge me to fight him alone? I hope he does. Better that I appease the angry powers by my death or win deathless fame by my courage. Better I than Drances!”
There was a growl of applause for that from the old counsellors, but Latinus intervened to stop the exchange of boast and insult and was about to speak again, when a messenger ran in under Verus’ escort, shouting, “The Trojan army is advancing on the city!” He was followed by other messengers, and through the opened doors of the room by a great noise of people in alarm, like a flock of geese or swans startled up crying and cackling on the marshes.
Turnus seized the moment unhesitating. “To arms!” he shouted. “Shall we sit here praising peace while the enemy attacks us?” And he ran out, calling to his captains, ordering who should defend the city and who should ride out with him. Latinus could not have stopped him if he had tried. He did not try. He sat motionless on his throne while the council broke up and the counsellors hurried out to see what was happening. Drances tried to talk to him but Latinus paid no attention, ordering him with a gesture to stand away. At last he got up and walked past us women, going to his apartment. He did not look at us or speak.
Amata took my hand.
Without thought, as if her touch were ice or fire, I pulled my hand away from her and stood facing her, ready to fight or run if she tried to touch me again.
She stood staring at me.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said at last, almost childishly.
“You have hurt me enough,” I said. “What do you want?”
She spoke hesitantly, still staring at me as if she scarcely knew me. “I thought—I think we should show ourselves to the people—at the altar of the Lar Popularis.”
She was right. With the king in hiding and the enemy attacking, the people needed immediate reassurance that all was well with their royal family and the powers that guarded the city. I nodded. I set off, then turned and said to Juturna, “You come too.” I had no business giving orders to a king’s sister, but she came without a word, pulling her grey veil about her.
We went out and walked through the streets to the square where the shrine to the protective spirit of the city stands. As we walked women joined us, coming out of every house, running down the streets. When we came to the place there was a great crowd around us. Amata had walked ahead, and she lighted the incense, but it was I who had stood with the king before this altar a hundred times, and it was I who knew and spoke the words he used to speak, offering the people’s duty and honor to the Lar, the spirit and indwelling power of border and boundary, walled city, place of our people.
The women around us bowed their heads or knelt down, and the people crowded into the streets and up on the walls and roofs fell silent listening.
I felt flow into me from them a loving trustfulness, a flood of feeling that humbled my mind and yet gave me a sense of great and reliable support. I was their daughter, their pledge to the future, a powerless girl yet one who could speak for them to the great powers, a mere token for political barter yet also a sign of what was of true value to us all. I stood among my people in silence when the ritual was done, all of us quiet as the birds that stand in hundreds at evening on the sea beach, seeming to worship together.
And so we could hear the noise outside the walls—rumble and clash and crash, neighing and yelling and thunder of hooves and feet, the noise of an army making ready for war.
The memory of the sweetness of that worship at the shrine of the Lar of the People was a solace and shield to me in the dark time that followed. Something had changed in the weighting of the balance. I no longer had to hide away, isolated from the current of public feeling; I was buoyed up by it, borne on it. My courage was restored.
Yet there seemed no reason why I should feel such confidence. Any hope of obeying the oracle, or following my fate as the poet told it, seemed lost. When my father proposed placating the Trojans by giving them land or building ships for them, he had not even spoken of my part in the original bargain. It seemed I was not worth mentioning. My mother had what she wanted—war against the foreigners, with Turnus in control of it, lord of the kingdom and the king’s daughter. Yet she went back to the Regia with that same bewildered look on her face and shut herself up in her rooms, while I was released from my seclusion. I found a kindness in the eyes of the men in the streets, the women of my household. They spoke my name tenderly. I felt welcomed, protected. My home was my own again, even if it was under siege.