“It was Turnus’ people who broke the truce, but it will be the Trojans and Etruscans besieging the city,” I said to them, groping for the truth I needed and the reassurance we all needed. My voice quavered. “So we have no true friends but our own Latin men fighting out there, and ourselves. What can we do to make the house safe, and wait out the siege?”
They all gazed in silence, some of them sniveling, until Maruna said, “The storerooms are full.”
I said, “Praise be to our Penates, the storerooms are full, and the fountain runs. Is there plenty of firewood for the cooking stoves?”
That was indeed a problem, and something within our scope. A discussion arose about it, and Tita said, “We could cut down the laurel tree.” At that Sicana, the tall grim woman who had always served and sided with my mother, said, “Are you mad, Tita? Go wash your mouth out and beg all that’s sacred to give you the wits of a rabbit! Cut down the king’s tree? Idiot! There’s the old poplars back of the stables, to start with.” I put Sicana at once in charge of finding men with axes to fell and cut up the trees; then there were a hundred other things to be done, and women willing to do them.
The battle outside the walls went on all this time, all that morning. I saw none of it. I heard the noise of it only when there was some pause in the business of the house. I can tell only what I was told. The Rutulians at first, in the surprise of their assault, drove the Trojans and their allies back, but after that the battle moved steadily nearer the rampart and ditch outside the city walls and gate. Messapus was in charge of the Rutulians; Turnus was here and there, “but never staying in one place,” said the man who brought us the clearest report. This man, Mellus, had been among our recovering wounded in the Regia, and went out to fight again; his wound, a bad sword cut, reopened as he fought. He managed to get back inside the city while the gates were still open. He reported to the king that the Trojans were not trying to get closer to the gate, but were holding their position on the rampart while Aeneas hunted for Turnus, claiming his right to settle the war by single combat, and Turnus rode here and there through the fighting, mounted on his horse, dealing out death, but never letting Aeneas meet him. After Mellus had made this report clearly and quietly, he fainted from loss of blood; and though we did what we could for him in our courtyard hospital, he died that evening. He was a Latin farmer, with a small farm and orchard in the foothills south of the city.
I was trying to direct the sweepers to use mops and soaked rags to keep the courtyard pavement clean of blood from the wounded men who were continually carried in, when the roar of noise swelled up immediately outside the city gate. All of us in the house looked up from what we were doing, and some ran up onto the walls and the watchtower to see what was happening. They reported to us that the Trojans had crossed the space between the ditch and the walls and were attacking the city gate, led by their tall captain with the red crest on his helmet, although the crest had been sliced off short. One of the girls who had gone to the wall above the gate said the captain was shouting that the Italians had broken the treaty twice and their king was faithless.
“And he killed Verus,” she said. She was white as whey and talked in a high, monotonous voice, repeating things over and over. “He just sliced off his, his head, just sliced off his head, off his body.”
“Verus,” I said, not comprehending yet; there was too much to do. I was aware, even inside the Regia, that there was a great movement of people in the streets. Some were pressing to get down to the gates and throw them open in surrender, others were trying to get down there with pikes and poles and axes and kitchen knives to keep the attackers out of the city. The noise within the city was a dull mindless roar. Somebody shouted, “Fire!” and at that I did run up onto the platform to see if the Regia was threatened. Flaming missiles were flying up over the walls in a couple of places, but people in the streets below rushed to put them out. Still the cry of fire was repeated again and again, and the dark buzzing wailing noise of the people all over the city was so loud one could not think.
Through that noise there came from down in the house a shrieking of women, so keen and sharp I turned and ran down the stairs again and to the women’s side.
There the screaming and high wailing rang and echoed so I could not hear what Sicana, coming at me with her mouth open in a square and her eyes unseeing, cried to me. I followed her to my mother’s rooms. I saw Amata hanging from the noose she had made of twisted cloth and tied over a beam. Her feet were bare. Her long black hair hung down all round her face and body.
Sicana and I pushed back the table under her and Sicana held her while I cut the cloth noose with my small knife. We laid her down on the long table there in her anteroom. She still wore the little gold bullas my brothers had worn. “Wash her,” I commanded Sicana and the others, for she had soiled herself in her agony, and I could not bear for her body to be shamed.
What I had to do was tell my father.
He had heard the frenzy in the women’s side and was coming across the courtyard, Drances and some others following him. I stopped him under the laurel tree. I am not sure what I said. He stood a while. His face looked very tired and sad; he embraced me, and I held to him. I said, “Come to her.” At that he let me go, and slowly got down on his knees, and picked up dirt from around the roots of the laurel tree, and rubbed it into his grey hair.
I knelt by him, trying to give him comfort.
I realised that though the wailing went on in the women’s rooms, the noise of the city and the war had sunk down almost to quietness.
I looked up and saw people standing motionless on the walls of the house and the platform. They were still. It grew still.
Then there was a great sound like a deep breath, like the earth breathing, all around the walls. I thought it was earthquake, the sound earthquake makes as it comes. But it was the sound of the end. The war was over. Turnus was dead. The poem was finished.
No, but it was left unfinished.
Didn’t you tell me that, my poet? here in the sacred place, where the stinking sulfur water comes up from under the earth to make pools on the earth, and the stars shine between the leaves? Once you said it was not complete, and should be burned.
But then again, at the end, you said it was finished. And I know they did not burn it. I would have burned with it.
But what am I to do now? I have lost my guide, my Vergil. I must go on by myself through all that is left after the end, all the rest of the immense, pathless, unreadable world.
What is left after a death? Everything else. The sun a man saw rise goes down though he does not see it set. A woman sits down to the weaving another woman left in the loom.
I have found my way so far, even though the poet did not tell me the way. I guessed it right, without mistake, from things he said, the clues he gave me. I came to the center of the maze following him. Now I must find my way back out alone. It will be longer and slower in the living, but not so long, I think, to tell.
There were many who saw Turnus die, for it was before the gates of Laurentum that he finally stopped hiding from Aeneas and turned to fight him. Both men threw their spears, and missed. So they met sword to sword, but Turnus’ sword broke, and he turned and ran again.
Aeneas tried to chase him, but was too lame to run. He stopped and tried to pull out his spear from the wild olive trunk it had hit. That was a sacred tree. I had done worship to Faunus there many times. The Trojans had cut it down in a rage of destruction when they occupied the ramparts, and nothing but the stump was left. The spear was big and heavy and had gone deep, and the tree would not let it go. While Aeneas was struggling with it, Juturna ran up to Turnus and gave him a sword. Aeneas pulled his spear free at last and came for Turnus, shouting, “This is a fight, Turnus, not a footrace!”