“My mother can entertain King Turnus far better than I can,” I said, staring them both down, daring them to speak.
Vestina chirped, “But it’s you, you he comes to see, how he looks at you, anyone can see you have his heart!” Maruna’s mother said nothing. And I left with Maruna at daybreak.
I took my bag of salted meal. The pastures were full of spring lambs, bouncing about, whirling their tails as they sucked at the teat, but I needed no blood sacrifice when I went to Albunea. I scattered salsamola on the altar, slept on the old fleeces of other sacrifices, and sought no vision or guidance. All I wanted when I went there was to sleep there, in that silence, with those spirits around me, in the numen of Albunea. A night there clarified my heart and quieted my mind, so that I could come back home and do my duty.
The walk there was an escape, too, a time of freedom. Maruna was not lighthearted and adventurous like my Silvia, and we did not chatter all day long when we walked as Silvia and I did. Maruna was rather silent, but alert, noticing all things in earth and sky; she was patient, sweet, a good companion. She did not have Silvia’s way with animals, but she knew the birds; and she had learned some of her mother’s lore, so we talked about what we might read in the calls and flights of the birds in the fields and wild lands about us as we went. And sometimes we talked about what the dead might have to say to us. In Etruria they think much about the dead, and Maruna’s mother had been trained in that knowledge when she was a girl in the great city of Caere. I felt ignorant and rustic when she or her daughter spoke of it. To me the dead were best buried, left undisturbed, thought about as little as possible; one did not want to bring their unhappy shadows creeping across the floor, hiding under the table, snapping at dropped food, for they were hungry, the dead were, always hungry. Every spring my father, like every householder in Latium, walked all about his house at midnight with nine black beans in his mouth, and when he spat them out he said, “Shadows, be gone!"—and the ghosts that had infested the house ate the beans and went back underground.
But according to Maruna’s mother the matter of the dead was not that simple.
Maybe it was she who had opened my mind so that when I slept at Albunea that night, that night in April when I was eighteen, on that ground that is so thin a roof above the underworld, the poet could come to me, and I could see and speak to him.
Maruna turned off on the path to the woodcutter’s hut, and I went on into the forest alone. When I walked there I always remembered the dream I had the first time I went to Albunea, the blood in the river, the city on a hill, the quiet radiance that filled the darkness under the trees.
No one was at the sacred place, but there had been recent sacrifices; fresh fleeces lay on the ground, and a stack of unburned wood by the altar. I scattered salted meal on the altar and all about the enclosure, and wished I could light a little fire, but I had brought none. So I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong. For the first time I wondered if I might hear the voice that my father heard speak from among them in the dark. The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion. I went back to the sacred enclosure praying, very humbly beseeching these great powers to have pity on my weakness. I was glad I had lit no fire. I made a heap of the fleeces, rolled up in my red-edged toga, for the air was cool, and lay down in the late dusk to sleep.
I became aware that a figure was standing within the enclosure, on the other side of the altar: a tall shadow. For a moment I thought it was a tree. Then I saw it was a man.
I sat up and said, “Be welcome here.”
I was not afraid, but the awe was still in me, the religion bound me.
He spoke: “What is this place?” His voice was very low.
“The altar place of Albunea.”
“Albunea!” he said. I could see that he was looking around, though it was quite dark, a thin high mist dimming the starlight. After a minute he said again, wondering, almost with a laugh in his voice, “So it is!—And you are?”
“Lavinia daughter of Latinus.”
Again he repeated the name: “Lavinia…” Then he did laugh, a brief ha! of amazement and amusement. He said at last, “May I stay a while, Lavinia daughter of King Latinus?”
“The altar place is open to all men.” And I added, “There are fleeces here to sit on, or sleep on. I have more than I need.”
“I need nothing, king’s daughter,” he said. He came a few steps closer so that the altar was not between us, and sat down on the ground. “I am a wraith,” he said. “I am not here in my body. My body is lying on the deck of a ship sailing from Greece to Italy, but I don’t think I’ll get to Brundisium even if the ship does. I am sick, I am dying, I am on my way to… to Acheron… Or else I am a false dream. But they come from under there, don’t they, the false dreams? They nest like bats in the great tree at the gates of the kingdom of the shadows… So maybe I am a bat that has flown here from Hades. A dream that has flown into a dream. Into my poem. To Albunea, the sacred grove, where King Latinus heard his grandfather Faunus prophesy, telling him not to marry his daughter to a man of Latium…” His voice was low and musical, like the voice of one talking to the spirits, praying; and that almost laugh came and went in it.
But I said quite sharply, “Did he?” I couldn’t help it. Surely my father would have told me if he had received such a warning. Why would he keep it from me?
The man, the shadow, paused; he thought; and he said, “Perhaps not yet.”
He knew that he had surprised, disturbed me, and wanted to reassure me. I felt then for the first time his kindness, his searching kindness, sensitive to every suffering.
He went on, hesitant, “I think it has not happened yet. Faunus has not spoken to Latinus. Perhaps it never did—never will happen. You should not be concerned about it. I made it up. I imagined it. A dream within a dream… within the dream that has been my life…”
“I am not a dream, and I don’t think I’m dreaming,” I said after a while. I spoke mildly. For he was sad, very sad. He had said he was dying. He was adrift, bereft, poor soul. I wanted to give him comfort, better comfort than can be found in dreams.
He looked at me as if he could see me, as if light filled the glade, light not of sun or moon or star or fire. He studied me. I did not mind it. There was no insolence in him. I could not possibly fear him.
“I believe you,” he said. “How old are you, Lavinia?”
“Eighteen last January.”
“‘Ripe now for a man, of full age now for marriage,’” he said gently, and I knew it was a line of a song, though I did not know the song.
“Oh yes,” I said, very drily. I felt no shyness, no falseness, with him.
My response surprised the brief laugh from him again.
“Perhaps I did not do you justice, Lavinia,” he said. It seemed he too could say anything to me, whether I understood it or not. That was all right.
“What should I call you?”
He said his name, and I said, “You’re Etruscan?”
“I’m a Mantuan. I had Etruscan grandfathers. How did you know?”
“Maru, Maro—it’s an Etruscan name.”
“So it is. Ah, but how long ago—how long ago you lived, Lavinia! Centuries, centuries! Is there any Mantua, now—yet? Do you know that name?”
“No.”
He said, after a pause, and with a kind of wondering, passionate urgency, “Rome. Do you know that name?”