The men dismounted at the house door. I hurried down from my spy post above the door and came round to enter the council chamber from the back. But Gaius, who had taken over Verus’ position as chief of the king’s guards, stopped me at the doorway. “The king says please to wait until you are sent for, queen,” he said.
He was the first to call me that. I am not sure he knew what he was saying. He was a silent, shy, grave old man, embarrassed at having to stop me.
So I had to wait at the doorway, unable to hear most of what they were saying. My father was on his cross-legged throne. I could see his back, and several Trojans, but not Aeneas. There was some speech making. The Etruscan Tarchon asked Latinus’ pardon for bringing his men to fight against the Latins, explaining that the people of Caere had resolved to take the tyrant Mezentius from Turnus in Ardea to punish him as he deserved, but an oracle told them they must have a foreign leader for such an expedition, and Aeneas had turned up at exactly the right moment. Latinus accepted this apology as gracefully as it was offered. He wanted no quarrel with Etruria. Drances did a great deal of the talking. He had been utterly odious to me since Turnus’ death; there was no reason in it, but I could not help it, and I clenched my fists in loathing as he droned on. Then one of the Trojans said something and an Etruscan answered, and everyone laughed, which changed the mood; and I heard a quiet, resonant voice: “I bring a gift for your daughter, King Latinus.”
“That is most gracious, noble Aeneas,” my father said. “And she will bring to you a dowry worthy of our wealth and pride.”
“I have no doubt of that, my king. But what I bring, I wish to give her with my own hands.”
My father nodded, and said to Caesus who was attending him as page, “Send for my daughter Lavinia.”
Caesus was just turning to fetch me as I came forward with Gaius. I arrived with unseemly speed. My father looked a little startled.
At last I could see Aeneas. He had been hidden from me before because he was seated—my father had had a folding stool brought for him, since he was still lame. But he stood up as soon as he saw me, and we looked at each other at eye level. He was much taller than I, but I was up on the dais.
Seeing him made me happy. It brought me joy. I thought I saw a gleam, a reflection of my pleasure in his face.
We bowed our heads in formal greeting, and then a dark man with a keen, kind face, Achates, brought a big pottery vessel up to the dais and rested it there. It was made of heavy red clay, un-decorated, broad at the bottom, broad-shouldered, with a sealed stopper. Aeneas put his hands on it, large, scarred hands, with a formality of gesture that came naturally to him, and also with a kind of affectionate tenderness.
“Lavinia,” he said, “when I left Troy I could not bring much with me: my father and my son, some of my people, and the gods of my household and my ancestors. My father is with the lords of the underworld; my son Ascanius stands there, and with him are my people, ready to do you honor as his mother and their queen. And my Penates and the sacred things of my ancestors I give you now to keep and cherish on the altars of our house, in the city that will bear your name. They have come a long way to your hearth and heart.”
I knelt down and put my hands on the vessel too. I said, “I will keep and cherish them,” in a thin voice.
“Where shall we build Lavinium?” he said, energetic, smiling now with open pleasure, looking from me to Latinus.
“We must go about the country and see what will suit best,” my father said. “I thought of a region in the foothills, up near the father river. Good growing land, and good timber above it.”
“Down the coast,” I said. My voice was still weak and hoarse. “On a hill, in a bend of the river that comes down from Albunea.”
They all looked at me.
“I saw it there, the city,” I said. “In a dream.”
Aeneas continued to gaze at me, and his face grew grave and intense. “I will build your city where you saw it built, Lavinia,” he said. Then he drew back a little, though we both still kept our hands on the pottery vessel. He smiled again and said, “And did you dream the day of our marriage?”
“No,” I whispered.
“Name it, King Latinus,” Aeneas said. “Name it soon! Too much time wasted already, too many deaths, too much grief. Let us not be wasteful, from now on.”
My father did not ponder long. “The Kalends of Quintilis. If the auguries be good.”
“They will be,” Aeneas said.
They were, of course.
The Trojans had only what was left of June to start their city and build us a house, but they were amazingly hard workers, better disciplined than we Italians and not used to taking so many holidays. By the first day of the fifth month, the town of Lavinium existed. A bend of the little river Prati half encircled the steep rocky hill that was the citadel. Around the east and south sides of the hill, sloping down more gently, was a ditch and rampart; higher up, a wooden palisade showed where the city wall of tufa rock would be built. Within that the streets were laid out. The main road went up to the citadel with a sharp turn on a steep ramp just before the gate, an excellent defensive position, as all the old soldiers said with satisfaction. A small stone house stood on the hilltop, facing the gate: the Regia. That house, the only one completely finished, looked out over the tents and huts and scaffoldings that made up most of the other habitations, and across the palisade to the water meadows of the Prati and the sea dunes a couple of miles to the east. West of the city the forests of oak and pine rose up and up towards the old volcano, the long mountain, Alba.
Early in the morning of that first day of Quintilis, my last day in my father’s house, I was arrayed as a bride. I who had so often ornamented the sacrificial lamb or calf was now ornamented, and my role, like theirs, was meekness. Vestina parted my hair with a bronze spear blade into six tresses and wound each with red wool fillets; I put on the wreath of good herbs and flowers I’d picked before sunrise in the fields outside town; a woolen sash was tied in a complicated knot round the waist of my tunic, Vestina and old Aula arguing for a long time about exactly how to tie it; and over all went a large, long, light veil, dyed red-orange. It was the flame veil my father’s mother Marica had worn when she was married, and her mother before her. Then I joined the three young boys waiting for me in the courtyard, all carrying lighted white thorn torches. The flames were invisible, a mere tremor in the brightness of the midsummer day. Caesus walked in front of me, the other two boys walked beside me, and their mother Lupina, a respectable towns-woman, came behind me as my matron of honor. After us came my father with his counsellors and what was left of his guards, and an honor guard of Trojan soldiers sent by Aeneas, and everybody else who wanted to be in the wedding.
We went down the Via Regia and people joined us all along the way, all shouting out the wedding word nobody knows the meaning of, “talassio! talassio!” and throwing nuts about and making dirty jokes. The dirty jokes are part of the marriage ritual, which seemed to surprise the Trojans. There was plenty of time to tell them, since the whole lot of us walked all the way to Lavinium, at least six miles. The wedding torches had to be relit or replaced several times, and people got hungry and began eating their walnuts and filberts instead of throwing them about. Water sellers with their tiny, heavy-laden donkeys did a good business all the way.
It was strange to me to walk inside the flame veil, looking out at the world through it. All that path I knew so well, all the hills and fields and forests, were a little dim, and colored faintly as if with sunset light. I felt set apart from all things, all people, alone, in a way I would never be alone again.