He kissed me back. “I won’t leave you,” he said. “Never.”
“Oh, never and forever aren’t for mortals, love. But we won’t be parted till I know it’s right that we part.”
“That’s never, then,” he said.
A bird sang out sweet from the dark trees, a long trill brimming with the lovely ignorant happiness of spring. “Is this where we’re going to stay?”
“Tonight, at least.”
“Good. You brought fire, didn’t you?”
I showed him the little clay fire pot I had filled from Vesta of the Regia and brought in a wicker sling. “Lay a fire on the hearth and say the prayers,” I told him. I swept out the hut while he did so, and we kindled the hearth fire together.
“Your father grew up in the woods on a great mountain, Ida, did you know that?” I asked him. Of course he knew it, but he wanted to hear it again, and listened intently while I repeated to him the little that Aeneas had told me of his childhood. Then he went off with his bow and arrows to see if there were any unwary rabbits or quail about. I went on cleaning out the hut, and made us beds of young pine boughs I tore from saplings. There was no rubbish in the hut, only the tiny leavings of spiders and woodmice, and some fallen thatch. Poor people have little to leave. There was half a broken earthenware bowl on a shelf; it had been kept, it was of use. I put in it the handful of salt I had brought from home and set it on the shelf that would serve as our table.
Silvius shot nothing, but had planned where to lay snares for quail in the morning, and brought four crayfish he had hand-caught in a streamlet. We garnished our millet porridge with crayfish. I wished only that I had been able to carry water from home, for the water of the streams all around the sulfur springs is vile to the taste.
We slept rolled up in our cloaks. I slept long and well. At Albunea, even outside the grove as we were here, I was always spared from fear. Or rather I felt fear but it was entirely different from the sharp dread of losing Silvius, and from the endless alarms and anxieties of living; it was the fear we call religion, an accepting awe. It was the terror we feel when we look up at the sky on a clear night and see the white fires of all the stars of the eternal universe. That fear goes deep. But worship and sleep and silence are part of it.
Silvius was away all next day exploring the forest heights above the springs. I did not worry about him; he was a sensible boy; there were no boars or bears this near the farmlands, and here in inner Latium no enemies were near. Along in the afternoon, Ursina appeared at the edge of the clearing, quick and silent as a mountain lion. “Aunt Maruna sent me,” she whispered. She brought a jug of good water, a bag of dried fava beans, and a packet of dried figs and raisins—Tita had put that in for Silvius, having great sympathy for his love of sweets.
“What did the men from Alba Longa do?” I asked.
“They asked about you. Aunt told them you had gone to Albunea of Tibur. The others think you did. The men went back to Alba yesterday. Aunt said to tell you this: they ordered Lord Achates and Mnestheus to bring Silvius to Alba when you come back to Lavinium.”
I kissed her and asked her to bring a little wine for sacrifice tomorrow. She slipped off again as quietly as she had come.
I sat on the half-decayed wooden doorstep in the spring sunlight and pondered.
If I went back to Lavinium, faithful Achates would obey Ascanius’ order.
I could take Silvius back to Alba Longa myself and stay with him there, an unwelcome, unwanted, unwilling guest in Ascanius’ court, struggling to protect my son from neglect, envy, and harm.
I could do as my father had suggested years ago: make my way to Caere in Etruria and ask King Tarchon to take us under his protection and help me bring up Silvius as a king’s son.
That was a truly frightening thought to me, but I made myself consider it.
I was still thinking when I heard the little sparrow whistle that was our signal, and Silvius appeared. He was dirty, thorn-scratched and tired, had snared a big hare, and was proud of himself. He washed, I skinned and cleaned the hare, and we made spits of green willow and toasted the meat over the small fire in the hut, an excellent dinner.
“Tomorrow evening we fast,” I told Silvius. “We’ll spend the night in the sacred forest.”
“Can I see the cave and the stinking pools?”
“Yes.”
“What do people take as offering?”
“A lamb.”
“I could go get a lamb from the royal flock there by Lavinium—I’d make sure nobody sees me—”
“No. We can’t go near town, neither of us. We’ll make what offering we can, tomorrow. The grandfathers will understand. I’ve gone there before with empty hands.”
The next day, as the sun hung red above the sea mist in the west, we followed the narrow path into the grove of Albunea and came to the sacred enclosure. It looked as derelict and lonesome as the woodcutter’s hut. Its oracle spoke chiefly to those of my father’s lineage, and there were few of us left now—some old cousins still living in Laurentum, and myself, and Silvius. No one had done sacrifice there for a year or more. The remnants of fleece on the ground were mere black shreds. We cut a turf for the altar, and Silvius poured out the flask of wine as offering while I prayed to the ancestors and powers of the place. It was already too dark to go to the pools. We had brought our cloaks. My son laid his out just where my father had slept when we were here. I took my old place near the altar where I had sat and talked to the poet. We sat in the darkness for a long time, silent. The stars burned white through the black leaves of the trees. When I looked over, I saw Silvius had lain down, curled up in his cloak; he looked like a lamb asleep in the starlight. I sat awake. The creatures of the night made separate sounds, rustlings and scratchings, near and far on the forest floor; an owl called once, from the right, far away up on the hillside, a long quavering i-i-i. I felt no urgent presence of the spirits of the place. It was all silent, all sacred.
After a long time, when the constellations had changed, I spoke to the poet, not aloud but in my mind. “Dear poet, all you told me came to be. You guided me truly, up to Aeneas’ death. Since then I’ve let others lead me. But I go astray. I can’t trust Ascanius: he doesn’t know his own enmity to Silvius. I wish you were here to guide me now. I wish you could sing to me.”
No voice spoke. The hush had grown very deep. I sighed at last and lay down, overcome by sleep. Sleep made the ground seem soft and the cloak warm to me. Words and images drifted through my mind. The words were, Speak me! Then they turned and seemed to reverse themselves as they drifted away: I say your being.. I saw Aeneas’ shield very clearly for an instant, the turn of the she-wolf’s head to her bright flank. I felt myself lying on a vault like a turtle’s shell of earth and stone that arched over a great dark hollow. Below me lay a vast landscape of shadows, forests of shadowy trees. Out beyond those trees I saw my son standing in dim sunlight on the bank of a river, a river wider than Tiber, so broad and misty I could not clearly see the other shore. Silvius was a man of nineteen or twenty. He was leaning on Aeneas’ great spear and he looked as Aeneas must have looked when he was young. There were multitudes of people all up and down the endless grassy bank. The grass was shadowy grey, not green. A voice near me, by my ear, an old man’s voice, was speaking softly: “…your last child, whom your wife Lavinia will bring up in the woods, a king, a father of kings.” Then I had so strong a sense of my husband’s presence, his physical body and being, with me, in me, as if I were he, that I woke and found myself sitting up, bewildered, in the dark, bereft. No one was there. Only Silvius asleep across the clearing. The stars were fading as the sky paled.