Lavinia

My relief and joy at seeing him, embracing him, was so great it set all else aside. I felt that night that to have known such fulfillment was to be, in some part of my being, forever safe from absolute despair, from the ruin of the soul. Joy my shield.

I do not know if that is true, but I would not deny it, even later, even now.

Everything was bustle at first, getting baths and food for the tired men. Aeneas had time to tell me that he had patched up a month’s truce with Camers and brought Ascanius back “to talk about what went wrong.” Serestus and Mnestheus were left in charge of Alba Longa and the restive borderlands.

Ascanius had indeed caused most of the trouble, by claiming as Latin ground certain winter pastures used by the Rutulians, and putting settlers in a stream valley the Rutulians considered their summer pasture, and sending his soldiers to harass any Rutulians who crossed the border. Since the border was a vague one in many places, and traditionally porous, these were sure means of rousing bad feeling. Camers’ attempts to protect Rutulian farmers by sending out armed men had resulted in some bloody skirmishes and much menacing talk from Ascanius about leveling the walls of Ardea, to which Camers responded by threatening to annex Velitrae and obliterate Alba Longa.

Achates told me about the meeting with Camers. He praised Aeneas’ peacemaking skill, which as he described it consisted in saying almost nothing. Camers had wanted to come round, but could not admit it. His failed attack had left him sore, chastened, ready to let well enough alone; but Ascanius had been making boasts and threats which he would not endure. Aeneas listened patiently to a long list of offenses, without either apologising for them or justifying them, before he could even suggest a truce. Achates said he had been so patient and so firm that Camers, who was not much older than Ascanius, ended up talking to him, the man who had killed Camers’ father in the battle before Laurentum, as to a father.

So the truce was made, and made in good faith, though both Achates and Aeneas thought that Camers would have a problem controlling the rough farmers of his borderlands. Aeneas’ problem, evidently, was how to control his son.

Although Ascanius had been brought back in apparent disgrace, nothing was said of it that night: he was made welcome at the impromptu feast we set out for the homecomers. He showed neither shame nor defiance, but behaved much as usual. He had been very well trained in manners, and they stood him in good stead at a time like this. He must have been puzzling over the question of what Aeneas was finally going to say or do. So was I. But the evening went off cheerily enough, and father and son embraced as they used to at parting for the night.

And the question continued unanswered. Aeneas had done what he had said he’d do: deprive Ascanius of command and bring him back to Lavinium. And that was all. He said nothing. He was not a man to waste words. He did, and let be. He spoke when he had to.

Ascanius stewed quite a while, fretted, sulked, and once or twice tried to bring the situation to a head. Aeneas evaded his attempts. The nearest he would come to discussing Ascanius’ position was through a kind of running conversation they had about virtue. Manly virtue, that is, in the original sense of the word—manliness itself, manhood. Ascanius said one day, with his youthful pompousness, that the only true proof of manhood was in battle: true virtue was skill in fighting, courage to fight, will to win, and victory. Aeneas said, “Victory?”

“What’s the use of skill and courage if you’re dead?”

“Hector had no virtue?”

“Of course he did. He won all his battles, till the last one.”

“We all do,” Aeneas remarked.

That was a little beyond Ascanius, perhaps, and the subject was dropped; but Aeneas brought it up again soon, at dinner one day.

“So a man can prove his manhood only in war,” he said meditatively.

“A certain kind of manhood,” Achates suggested. “Surely wisdom is as much a virtue as battle prowess?”

“But perhaps one that isn’t limited to men,” I said.

I will say here that the Trojans had not been used to including women in conversation, nor were any Greeks I ever met. For men and women to sit together at table and speak as equals was our Latin custom, which I think we may have learned from the Etruscans. As queen, I could have my way in such matters. Some of the rougher Trojans needed a lesson in respect, in table manners, which they got both from Aeneas and from me. But others like Achates and Serestus took to this as to our other customs without any trouble. When I invited them to the Regia, their wives came with them and sat with us above the salt, and often I invited the women to come when their husbands were away.

“Indeed. Women can gain wisdom,” Ascanius announced, with his irritating, touching pomposity. “But not true virtue.”

“But what is piety?” Aeneas asked.

That brought a thoughtful silence.

“Obedience to the will of the powers of earth and sky?” I said at last, making my statement a question, as women so often do.

“The effort to fulfill one’s destiny,” Achates said.

“Doing right,” said Illivia, Serestus’ wife, a calm, forceful woman from Tusculum, who had become one of my dearest friends.

“What is right in battle, in war?” Aeneas asked.

“Skill, courage, strength,” Ascanius answered promptly. “In war, virtue is piety. Fighting to win!”

“So victory makes right?”

“Yes,” Ascanius said, and several of the men nodded vigorously; but the older Trojans, some of them, did not. Nor did the women.

“I cannot make it out,” Aeneas said in his quiet voice. “I thought what a man knew he ought to do was what he must do. But what if they’re not the same? Then, to win a victory is to be defeated. To uphold order is to cause disorder, ruin, death. Virtue and piety destroy each other. I cannot make it out.”

Even Ascanius had no answer for that.

I doubt if anyone there knew what was on Aeneas’ mind, when he said that to obey one’s fate might be to disobey one’s conscience. Only I could know how the death of Turnus weighed on his soul. I know Achates thought he was speaking of the Greek victory over Troy in a war which, though they might be justified in waging it, brought almost as much ruin on the Greeks as on the Trojans. Perhaps he was.

At any rate, he did not let Ascanius’ definition of manhood as battle courage rest. He returned to the discussion next day. We had no visitors, and the three of us had gathered around the hearth after the day’s work was done, I with my distaff, Aeneas with a little whetstone and my small ritual knife, which had grown dull. He drew it lightly and patiently across the stone. “If a man believes his virtue can be proved only in war,” he said to Ascanius, “then he sees time spent on anything else as wasted. Farming, if he’s a farmer—government, if he’s a ruler—worship, the acts of religion—all inferior to prowess in war.”

“Yes, just so!” Ascanius said, pleased, thinking he had convinced his father.

“I would not trust that man to farm, or govern, or serve the powers that rule us,” Aeneas said. “Because whatever he was doing, he’d seek to make war.”

Ascanius got the drift now, and recoiled uneasily. “Not necessarily—,” he began.

“Necessarily,” Aeneas said, with grim finality. “I spent my life among such men, Ascanius. I proved my virtue among them.”

“Yes, you did, father! You were the best, the best among them all!” There were tears in Ascanius’ eyes and his voice trembled.

“Except for Hector,” Aeneas said. “And on the other side, Achilles, the great hero, and Diomedes, who both defeated me. I would probably have lost to Odysseus, big Ajax, maybe Agamemnon. I think I could have beaten Menelaus. And what if I had? Would I be a better man for it? Would my virtue be greater than it is? Am I who I am because I killed men? Am I Aeneas because I killed Turnus?”

He was leaning forward; the firelight gleamed in his eyes; he did not raise his voice but spoke with terrible intensity. Ascanius cowered back from him, catching his breath.

“If you are to rule Latium after me, and pass it to your brother Silvius, I want to know that you’ll learn how to govern, not merely make war, that you’ll learn to ask the powers of earth and sky for guidance for yourself and your people, that you’ll learn to seek your manhood on a greater field than the battlefield. Tell me that you will learn those things, Ascanius.”

“I will, father,” the young man said, in tears.

“Much depended on me,” Aeneas said, more gently. “Much will depend on you. In the end, I did ill. You have begun ill, but I count on you to do well in the end. So, give me your hand on it, son.”

Ascanius put out his hand, and Aeneas drew him into an embrace; they clung hard to each other.

I sat with my distaff, my face turned to the fire. I could not weep.

A few days later, just before the March Kalends, Aeneas sent Ascanius back to the Alban Hills. He said nothing about honoring the truce with Camers; there was no use saying more; he could only hope. He looked a little grim, those early days of March, when the Leapers were in the streets shaking the sacred spears and singing Mars, Mavors, macte esto! But Serestus and Mnestheus came back from Alba Longa reporting that everything was quiet and that Ascanius seemed resolved to keep it so.

It was a warm spring, after the wet winter. Everything was early to bloom and bear. The walnut trees in the forests were beautiful in their quick flowering. Barley and millet came up tall, with heavy heads, and the grass was as thick and tender in the meadows and on the hillsides as I ever saw it. Our flocks and herds had a good increase, and Aeneas was particularly pleased with the crop of new foals in our stables. He had bred a very fine mare to the stallion Latinus gave him, and the bright chestnut colt she bore was his pride. “He’ll be Silvius’ horse,” he said. And he introduced the boy child and the horse child quite solemnly. He let Silvius lead the mare about and see how the colt followed her, and finally set him up on her back for a ride. Silvius was transfixed with terror and delight, clutching the mare’s mane with one hand and his father’s hand with the other, and making a soft noise, “oo! oo!” like a pigeon as they paraded round the stable yard. After that every morning he would ask his father, timidly, “Wide?” And Aeneas would go with him to the stables for his ride.

Our people, my Latins of Lavinium, called Aeneas father. “Will that fence do, Father Aeneas?"—"Father, the barley’s in!"—They spoke to Latinus the same way, and young as I was, I was Mother Lavinia, for we use the words not only for our parents but for those who take responsibility for us. Often a soldier calls his captain his father, and rightly, too, if the captain looks after his men as he should. But Aeneas’ people used the word to him in a particularly affectionate way, caressingly, claiming him. The duty that had been laid on him to lead his people had isolated him as their leader; after his father’s death he had had to make the decisions alone, take responsibility alone; so this bond of affection meant a great deal to him. He tried to deserve it. He took his actual fatherhood with the same seriousness and deep pleasure. It was beautiful to see him walk with Silvius, shortening his stride to the child’s, ever careful of the child’s dignity.

I knew he had greatly honored his own father. He never spoke of his mother and I do not know if he ever knew her. It was with some caution that I asked him about his own early childhood.

“I don’t remember much,” he said. “I was with women, in the woods, on the mountain. A group of women living in the forest.”

“Were they kind to you?”

“Kind, careless. They let me run about… I’d get into trouble, and one of them would come and laugh and scoop me up. I was wild as a bear cub.”

“Then your father came for you?”

He nodded. “A lame man. In armor. I was afraid of him. I remember I tried to hide in the thickets. But the women knew my hiding places. They scooped me up again and handed me over to him.”

“So after that you lived with him?”

“And learned farming and manners and all that.”

“When did you go to Troy?”

“Priam had us come, sometimes. He never liked us.”

“He gave you his daughter,” I said, surprised.

“He didn’t exactly give her,” Aeneas answered, but he did not want to say any more about Creusa, and I did not press him. After a little while he said, “It’s a good place for a child, the woods. You don’t learn much about people, but you learn silence. Patience. And that there’s nothing much to fear in the wilderness—less than there is on a farm or in the city.”

I thought of Albunea, that fearful place where I had never been afraid. I almost asked him to come there with me, but I did not. Though it was so nearby, I had not been there since our marriage. I wanted to go and yet it did not seem the time. I found I could not imagine being there with him. So I said nothing of it.

The weather was so mild in late March that we went over to the coast, a walk of a couple of miles. I wanted Silvius to have a first sight of the ocean. Aeneas carried him perched on his shoulder most of the way. We were a large group winding through the dunes, slaves carrying picnic food, several families, a few extra young men as guards. Everybody, slave and free, children and grown, scattered out on the pale yellow beach as soon as we got there, wading, gathering shells, enjoying the sunlight. Aeneas and I wandered off from the others, leaving Silvius with a group of adoring women and Maruna to keep them from spoiling him. We walked a long way down the shore. I could seldom get out to walk as I used to these days, and it was a wonderful pleasure to step out barefoot on the sand, splashing through the small streams that ran down to the sea, keeping pace with my husband’s even, untiring stride. The sea made its emotionless lament to our right. Looking out over the low breakers to the wave glitter that dissolved in the mist of the horizon, I said, “How far you came! Across that sea—the other seas—years, miles.”

“How far I came to come home,” he said.

After a while I said, though until the moment I said it I had not been perfectly certain of it, “Aeneas, I’m carrying a child.”

He walked on for a while, a smile slowly spreading over his face, then stopped, and stopped me by taking my hands, and took me in a close embrace. “A girl?” he said, as if I would know, and I rashly answered, “A girl.”

“All I want you give me,” he said, hugging the breath nearly out of me, kissing my face and neck. “Dark one, dear one, wife, girl, queen, my Italian, my love.” There were some rocks running down from inland that would hide us from anyone coming down the shore, and we tugged each other towards them. In their shelter we made love, rather hastily and with a good deal of laughter at first because of sand where it was not wanted, but with a rising wild passion, so that at the height of it I felt that he had made me one with the sea and its tides and its deeps. When we came back to the world he lay there on the sand by me, and he was so beautiful I could not look away from him. I touched his breast and arms and face softly with my fingertips, and he lay half asleep in the sunlight, smiling.

We got up and walked out into the water, waist deep, hand in hand, till the cold struck through and the tug of the waves began to take us off our feet. “Let’s go on, let’s go on,” I said, but I was frightened, too. Aeneas suddenly swung me round, half carrying me back to the shore. Then we wandered back to the others. Silvius had fallen asleep under a little awning the women had made out of scarves. There was sand in his small, arched eyebrows, and his face in the pale radiance under the white cloths was very serious. I lay down by him and whispered his name to him, the name I called him secretly, “Aeneas Silvius, Aeneas Silvius.”

I cannot tell any more of our happiness.

Early in April Aeneas went down to Alba Longa overnight, and reported that all was well there. Late in April my father came to visit us for some days. May came. The day came that I was at the mouth of Tiber three years ago at dawn and saw the dark ships turn and come up the river one by one.

That day Aeneas went, with Achates and our chief herdsman and four or five young men, looking for a small herd of our cattle that had escaped their pasture east of town, crossed the Numicus at the ford, and were thought to be wandering down towards Troia. These were our finest cows and heifers and we did not want them scattered or lost. The men found the herd and drove them back to the river. A group of men from Rutulia had stolen the cattle, or perhaps was following them to steal them. These men attacked Aeneas and the others while they were at the ford of the Numicus. They were armed with spears and staves. Several of Aeneas’ men had weapons, and though outnumbered, fought back fiercely, killing two of the outlaws at once. The Rutulians fell back and ran, all but a young man whom Aeneas had pinned down, his sword at the man’s throat. The young man begged, “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me!” Aeneas hesitated, then turned his sword aside and said, “Go on.” The young man struggled up and ran off. He stopped and picked up a spear another man had dropped. He turned and threw it. It hit Aeneas in the back and went through his chest. He fell to his knees and then facedown in the shallow water of the ford. He did not die at once, but he was dead when they carried him into Lavinium, into the Regia, into the courtyard, where I was looking through our new cloth, the winter’s weaving, that had been bleaching on the grass outside the walls. I had picked out a fine piece as a toga for him. Unaccustomed to wearing the toga, he often found it cumbersome. I was folding the light, soft, pure white cloth when I heard them calling out his name and mine.

Go on, go. In our tongue it is a single sound, i.

It is the last word Aeneas said. So in my mind it is spoken to me, said to me. I am the one to go, to go on. Go where?

I do not know. I hear him say it, and I go. On, away. On the way. The way to go. When I stop I hear him say it, his voice, Go on.

In Lavinium all that night they cried his name aloud, calling him father, lamenting in the streets.

Achates, Serestus, Mnestheus gathered the men of Troy at first dawn and rode to Ardea, scouring the countryside on the way: they did not find the cattle thieves, but Camers of Ardea knew who they were and where to look for them. He rode with the Trojans. They rode the men down and killed them all. They were farmers’ sons from northern Rutulia, led by a couple of Etruscans who had come with Mezentius to Ardea, bitter, leaderless men living in exile.

I had sent a rider on our best horse, Aeneas’ horse, to Ascanius in Alba Longa. Ascanius arrived in Lavinium on the second day, and late that day the Trojans came back. Our house that had been full of weeping women was full now of grim, armed men.

I did not let them put armor on Aeneas. All that gear of bronze and gold and the great shield that held the fearful future should go to Ascanius and then to Silvius. I washed his body, noble and terrible in death, scar-seamed. I clothed him in the toga of our people, the fine white one I had chosen for him.

When many die, as in plague or war, we burn the dead, but our older way is burial under earth. I ordered that Aeneas’ grave be beside the road above the ford of the Numicus. There he was carried, the torches flaring and smoking in the rainy wind of a May morning. Latinus spoke the ritual words. Men heaped up the river rocks into a great barrow over the grave. When all was done I stood and called his name aloud three times, Aeneas! Aeneas! Aeneas! And the other people called his name with me. Then in silence, carrying the dead torches upside down, we walked back to his city.

On the ninth day after his death, Latinus performed the sacrifice of kings, killing the beautiful stallion he had given Aeneas by the tomb of rocks. The horse was buried by the tomb.

On that day also he named Ascanius king of Latium, to share the rule with him as Aeneas had. It was necessary that Latinus lend this succession all the weight of his authority, and that I too demand that my people recognise Ascanius as king: for they did not want him. He had antagonised them from the beginning. It was he who shot Silvia’s deer. They never forgot that. He had been arrogant, quarrelsome, aloof, seeming much more a foreigner than his father. My people in Lavinium wanted Latinus to rule them, wanted me there in the Regia, bringing up Silvius, their little one, their prince, their king to be. They stood sullen, with tear-streaked faces, while Latinus proclaimed Ascanius king.

In the days of mourning Ascanius had for the first time appealed to me for support; he found I could give it to him, and he came to me to weep. During the ceremonies he looked and acted what he was, a boy overwhelmed by grief, dismayed, distressed, terrified by the responsibility he must bear. Accepting the kingship and making his vows to the people and the land, he spoke in a barely audible voice, trembling. At one point I had to say to him softly, “King of the Latins, hold up your head!” He obeyed.

I do not know what the strength was that carried me through that time. I suppose I am one of my people, made of oak. Oaks don’t bend, though they can break. And I had known what was coming. I had lived with Aeneas’ death a long time, from the time I first saw his face, high on the ship’s prow, dark in the twilight of morning, gazing up the river in prayer and eager hope. Three years, the poet had said. Three years to the day it was. The three old women who spin and cut the thread had measured exactly, to the inch, nothing to spare. No gift of summer days.

In that first year of Aeneas’ death his captains and old companions, particularly Achates, were my mainstay. Though my dear Maruna, the women of the household, and friends such as Illivia gave me most generous, loving sympathy and support, I wanted most of all to be with Aeneas’ friends, because it was a little like being with him. It was the tone of the male voice, the way they moved, what they talked about, even the Trojan accent, that comforted me. Among them he did not seem so far from me.

Achates had loved him—I will say this, though my heart resists—as much as I loved him, and for years longer. I am sure Achates came very near suicide that summer. He blamed himself for the incident at the ford: he should have insisted they wear cuirasses, he should have been closer to Aeneas during the fighting, he should not have let Aeneas release the young man, should have followed the young man and kept an eye on him, should have seen the weapon lying on the ground—everything that he could blame himself for, he did.

It was Achates who had first told me, when they brought Aeneas home, what happened at the ford. Now I found that by letting him tell it over, he could talk out some of his shame and rage, and strange as it may seem I wanted to hear it again, to hear it told over and over, till I could see it as if I had been there, as if I were Achates, as if I had knelt by Aeneas, had pulled the terrible blade out of his back, and held him in my arms, and watched his blood color the shallow water that ran among the rocks. “He was not dead. He held on to me, but I don’t think he saw me,” Achates said. “He was looking up at the sky. When we picked him up to lay him on the litter, he closed his eyes. He never spoke.” He never spoke, but he was not dead, then. So long as Achates told me the story, Aeneas was not dead.

Ascanius, almost distraught with his new responsibilities, was at first jealous of my being with the Trojan captains: they were his men, not mine, he needed them for advice and to do his bidding, and they had no business loitering around the Regia with women. He ordered Achates to go up to Alba Longa and govern there. Achates accepted his order without a word, but I was afraid for him. I went privately to my stepson and asked him to send Mnestheus or Serestus, who knew the settlement better and would have no objection to leaving Lavinium. “Let Achates stay here, at least till next year,” I said. “He goes daily to Aeneas’ tomb. Let his grief heal. He has no heart to go to Alba Longa.”

“You want him here with you?” Ascanius asked, drily.

I have noticed that some men whose sexual interest is in men not women believe that all women are insatiably lustful of men. I don’t know whether this is a reflection of their own desires, or fear, or mere jealousy, but it fosters a good deal of contempt and misunderstanding. Ascanius tended to look at women that way, and his ardent wish to keep Aeneas’ memory unsullied led him to suspect me with every man. I knew that already. It outraged my honor and disposed me to feel some contempt in return for Ascanius, but neither anger nor scorn would do me any good. I said, “I wish I could keep all Aeneas’ friends, and his elder son, here with me. But I’ve been afraid Achates may take his own life in his grief. I beg you to let him stay here with you, at least through the winter, and send someone else to Alba Longa.”

“I wish I could go myself,” Ascanius said.

He strode up and down the room we were in; he did not look much like his father, but sometimes he moved like him.

“I meant it as an honor for Achates,” he said. “The chief city of Latium is going to be Alba Longa, not Lavinium. The situation is infinitely better—higher, better land—and central to where our power will be when I finally get real control over Rutulia. I thought Achates would take it as an honor. But if he is as broken as you think, I’ll send Mnestheus and Atys. So, you need not kneel, mother.” For I had been ready to go down in the formal posture of supplication, holding his knees. I knew he would not have held out against that. He was not a hard young man, but kindly by nature, and easily swayed, though rigid about hierarchy, formalities, anything that supported his uncertain self-esteem.

And it was not easy for him to keep up that self-esteem here in Lavinium, where the people endlessly mourned Aeneas, honored old Latinus, loved me as daughter and widow of their kings, and resented him. Trying to emulate Aeneas’ authority, he was harsh in manner and often arbitrary in judgment. It was a difficult year for him, even though the harvest was superb and all Latium remained peaceful, with little of the raiding and boundary jumping we had all feared might follow the death of a king at the hands of outlaws.

The winter was a dark one, with long, cold rain, snow up on the hills and even on the piedmont farmlands. I learned at last to weave well, that winter, for if I had no work to keep my hands and mind occupied I could do nothing but hide in my room and weep. I feared for the first time that I had my mother’s weakness, her madness. At night I went into dark places in my mind. I went down underground among shadows and could not find the way up and out. In my room in the darkness I heard babies weeping underfoot. I dared not take a step lest I step on a baby.

I have not told this all in order as it happened. It is still hard to speak of. A month after Aeneas’ death I lost the fetus that might have been my daughter. Only my women knew that I had been pregnant and that the pregnancy miscarried. Only my women and Aeneas knew. I went with Maruna in the dark before dawn and we buried the tiny scrap of life that had not lived, deep under the great stones of Aeneas’ grave.

Ascanius went often to Alba Longa, and in the second summer after Aeneas’ death, not long after he celebrated the Parentalia for his father with all due ritual, he moved there. Trouble had flared up on our borders; he wanted to govern from Alba, a more defensible position. He took with him the Penates of Troy, and Silvius and me. He left Mnestheus and Serestus in charge of Lavinium. Achates chose to stay there, as did most of the older Trojans. The men who followed Ascanius were his particular friends and intimates among the young Trojans, such as Atys who had been his childhood sweetheart, and the group of young Latins who formed his guard and captained his forays. Many of these men were still unmarried; if they had wives they brought them and their household along to settle in Alba. I was allowed to bring twenty women as my retinue. As Ascanius had no wife, we were given all the woman’s side of the Regia, a much bigger and finer house than the small one Aeneas had built in Lavinium. Ascanius’ high house was imposing, and the site of it was more than imposing. It was like living in the sky. From the walls and roofs of the citadel you looked right down on the great lake and across it to the eastern wall of the crater. Farther down the mountain the young vineyards were thriving, as Ascanius had predicted, and the town that sprawled out below the citadel was thriving too, full of activity, building, the coming and going of armed men.

I felt exposed there, always; there were too many great ashen slopes, too much sky, no shade. The water of the lake did not move, did not speak, like the waters I knew, but lay silent, blue, hard. I felt isolated there. I felt useless.

I ran the household for my stepson, of course, obtained and trained slave women to do the housework and cooking and cloth making, and saw to the rites and festivals as always. I would have attended councils and dinners with the men as I had done in my father’s house and my husband’s, but I was not wanted there. Nor did I belong there. Mars ruled in Alba. The talk was all of war, even in the winter season when there was no fighting.

It was not that Ascanius sought to be continually in arms, but he seemed unable to avoid combat, and combat was continually offered along our southern and eastern borders. He met every threat or challenge at once with counteraggression; he followed victory with vengeance, defeat with renewed attack as soon as possible. Truce was rare, peace was gone. He provoked even old Evander to break the alliance. I think he might have been crazy enough to quarrel with the Etruscans, if my father had not prevented him. Latinus kept up a strong friendship with Caere and Veii. He let Ascanius know that if he imperiled that bond, he might have to prove his claim to co-rule western Latium. He was deeply angry with Ascanius, not least for dragging me and Silvius off to Alba.

He came once to visit us there. It was a hard trip for him, for he was an old man and lame with old wounds. He had given Aeneas and me most of his valuables; he came in what state he could, with what few were left of his companion guards, late in December. He accepted Ascanius’ welcoming honors stiffly. He sat with the young men at the feast table and hardly spoke, the servants said. Whenever he could he would come sit with us in the courtyard or at the fire in the weaving hall, and talk with me, and study his grandson.

Silvius’ favorite toys at the time were two big acorns and their cups and a curious litle knot of wood he had found that looked slightly like a horse. With these he was playing most intently down on the hearth, whispering a story about them under his breath. Now and then we could hear a bit of it: “Go on, drink. No. The fat one said not to… Look, is it a house?”

“This is a fine boy, Lavinia,” my father said.

“I know,” I told him, laughing at the lovably predictable.

It was good to laugh. There was little to laugh about in that house.

“You bring him up well.” It was a statement, not an order, but it had a sound of command or warning in it.

“I hope to bring him up as Aeneas would.” Latinus nodded vigorously. “Right,” he said. “Stay with him.”

“I do, father.”

“Your husband was a great warrior, but he sought peace.”

I had thought myself past it, but the tears welled. I fought the sob and did not speak.

“His son might govern well enough in peace,” Latinus said. “But he hasn’t the patience to fight wars. Don’t let him have the training of your son.”

How could I prevent Ascanius from taking over Silvius’ upbringing, if he wanted to? I had no power.

“I wouldn’t have come here if I could have stayed in Lavinium,” I said at last, trying to keep my voice from pitiable quavering.

“I know, daughter. It was best that I not interfere.”

I nodded agreement.

“But if the time comes that you must, that you know it right to go—then take your gods and your child and go! Will you?”

“I will.”

I thought he was telling me to come to him, but he said, “Tarchon of Caere would take you in, and treat you with honor.”

“Oh—surely it won’t come to that!” I said, staring at him, shocked and startled.

“I don’t know what it will come to. If he learns a few lessons of war and draws in his horns, all may yet be well.” He was Ascanius. “I tried again last night to tell him to leave Evander and Pallanteum alone. The old man is dying. The Etruscans will move in when he dies and take over the Seven Hills. In peace. No reason why they should not. Except his impatience. Oh, I was a fool as a young man, but never fool enough to take on Etruria! The best allies we could have. How can I make him see it?”

“You can’t, father.”

“Oh look, oh look,” came Silvius’ little whisper, “they’re giving him a golden bowl!”

My father watched the child with a half smile, but his eyes were sad. “Patience!” he said. “I need it as much as he does.”

It was the last time I saw my father. He took cold, walking out in his crop lands in the rain, and it went to his lungs; he died a few days later, the day after the Ides of January. I ordered horses and a few men to escort me and Maruna and Sicana to Laurentum. Ascanius, busy up on our border fighting the Marsi near Tibur, knew nothing of what had happened. I did not take Silvius with me, for he had had a cough and fever for some days, and the weather was bitter with icy rain. The great laurel stood in its winter darkness over the fountain in the courtyard of my old home. The War Gate still hung open, rusted on its unlucky hinges. All the people in Laurentum seemed old; there were no young faces or voices. I stayed only long enough to bury my father by the roadway into his city. I could not stay the nine days of mourning. I had to go back to my son in the city of my exile.

Ascanius was sole king of Latium now. Not all the Latin farmers were happy about it, but they made no protest or resistance; the pressure on our borders was insistent, and they wanted a single leader during war. And war was our lot for years to come. The Volscians and the Hernici, hoping Latinus’ death had weakened the kingdom, harassed the border farms and towns constantly. Before long Camers of Ardea, who had come to see Aeneas as an ally and almost a father, took offense at Ascanius’ arrogance; he began letting his Rutulians make raids and forays into Latium, and rebuilt his alliance with the Volscians. And, though it did not yet bring any increase of fighting, the Etruscans of the great inland city Veii were sending groups of farm families to colonise the Seven Hills on the Tiber. They did not occupy the little Greek settlement, but simply moved in all around it, building on both sides of the river, where Janiculum had been and up on the hill they called the Palatine, clearing the forest along the riverbanks and pasturing their fine cattle all through the valleys. Many of the younger Greeks of Pallanteum moved to Diomedes’ city in Arpi, others came to settle in Alba Longa. Latium had long laid claim to the region of the Seven Hills, and all the south side of the father river as far up as Nomentum. Ascanius was bitterly irked by this quiet takeover, but he remembered Latinus’ warnings and didn’t defy Etruria. The Veiian colonists offered excellent terms to us for salt from our salt beds at the river mouth, and showed no sign of wanting to expand further into our lands. They called the new settlement by their name for the river, Ruma.

Aeneas’ shield hung in the entryway of the high house of Alba Longa. Ascanius did not wear it when he went out to war, or the greaves and gilt cuirass, the helmet with its maimed red crest, and the long bronze sword. Once he said in my hearing that these forays by farmers, these squabbles with petty barbarian kingdoms, didn’t deserve such mighty weapons but should be settled with hoes and mattocks. I think the armor was too heavy for him.

I saw Silvius standing in front of the shield, looking up at it steadily. He was six or seven years old. I asked, “What do you see there, Silvius?”

He did not answer for a while and then said, in a small voice as if from far away, “I’m watching all the people in the great round place.”

I stood with him and gazed. I saw the mother wolf, the burning ships, the man with the comet over his head, soldiers killing soldiers, men torturing men. I saw a splendid thing: great arches of white stone that strode down from the mountains across valleys to the city with its hills and temples. The city Rome.

I was afraid of the shield, but the child was not; the power that had made it and dwelt in it was in his blood. He put out his hand to the golden cuirass, following the curves and decorations with palm and fingers, smiling.

“You’ll wear it one day,” I said.

He nodded. “When I know how,” he said.

Silvius had a good deal of strength, for a child. He was not boisterous, and rougher boys often mistook his quietness for meekness or timidity. If they presumed on it, they found out their mistake. He ignored verbal attacks, but he met physical bullying or threat with instant resistance and retaliation: hit, he hit back hard. He was competitive; he loved all sports and games, rode and hunted whenever he could, and was a diligent pupil of Ascanius’ old teacher of swordplay, spear throwing, archery, and the other arts of battle. With boys and men he was serious, silent, and reserved. Only with me and my women and the little children of the women’s side did he go off guard. The Silvius of the courtyard was merry, affectionate, mischievous, greedy for sweets, patient with babies, impatient with ritual duties, fond of jokes and silly riddles and nonsense rhymes. Everybody liked him. Even Ascanius liked him, half unwillingly.

In those early years of his reign, barely out of his own boyhood, Ascanius lived in the glare of his father’s name, forever trying to find his own glory, always outshone. He was too adoring of Aeneas’ memory to be able to resent him, but he was envious and resentful of any other power or popularity, particularly mine. He felt that he must outdo his father, striving to be a brighter sun, and here was I the moon, effortlessly shining with the sun’s reflected light, effortlessly beloved by my people, because I was one of them, and because they had loved Aeneas. However modestly I lived, hidden like a captive in Ascanius’ house, he perceived me as a constant threat to his dignity, and believed I undermined his decisions. Our people were increasingly unhappy with the endless warfare that kept young men in danger and left the farms for old men to plow—how could they be happy with it? But Ascanius blamed their protests and reluctance on me. I poisoned his councils, I whispered with the women, I turned the Latins against him. In vain I behaved as a Vestal, not a queen, doing nothing at all but look after the household and the altars: still I was at fault.

It was a dull life, not a bitter one, but dusty, dust dry, with no spring of life in it except my beautiful, bright, thoughtful boy. He grew, and thrived, and gave me a vein at least of tenderness and hope.

There came a March when we Latins struck out at last at the Volscians and Rutulians, driving their armies right down to the coast, taking Ardea and Antium and reducing them to beg for terms and accept our domination. Our men came back from that campaign in time for the April plowing, and were home all the summer. The harvest was good. In the knowledge of victory, Ascanius began to relax and show the benevolence that was his original nature. He invited me several times to feasts in his great hall, treating me with formal honor. A few times he even talked with me informally, very cautiously, but beginning to show a glimmer of trust. It was then that he told me a strange story, a prophecy I had not heard before. I will tell it as he told it.

It was in the time when Turnus was gathering armies to drive the Trojans out. Aeneas was making ready to sail up the Tiber to ask help from Evander. In the morning of that day, Ascanius said, he and his father saw lying on the riverbank a great white wild sow with thirty white piglets suckling her. At once Aeneas called for a sacrifice, and at the altar he announced the portent: his new kingdom was to be founded in the place called White, that is Alba, and his heir would rule there for thirty years.

Neither he nor my poet had spoken to me of this prophecy. I knew only that he had been bidden to build a new city in Italy and name it for his wife. I did not speak of that, since Ascanius cherished this portent of the sow as justifying his move to Alba Longa. It weighed strangely on my mind. I dreamed more than once thereafter of albino piglets who trotted by one after another endlessly, though their throats were cut and gaped open bleeding dark clots of blood, and of a huge white creature gasping and wallowing on the grass, who had been bled dry and yet was not dead and could not die.

The next year was a peaceful one, but then the Sabines joined with the Aequians against our northeastern towns and farms, burning, looting, and taking slaves as far into our territory as Tibur and Fidenae. Two years went in fighting those peoples. Ascanius defeated them decisively in a long battle late in the year in the hills above the Anio. All the old Trojans fought with him there, Achates, Mnestheus, Serestus, men who had fought before the walls of Troy when they were young. It was their last battle. The soldiers came home in the winter rain, lean and lank as old wolves, but victorious.

Again Ascanius was genial and gracious in triumph. He summoned the Trojans from Lavinium to receive special honors in Alba Longa, and made sure that his younger captains treated them with respect. Though there had been little profit from this defensive war, whatever booty had been taken he shared out among all the men who had fought for Latium, and he sent lavish gifts to Gabii and Praeneste in thanks for their aid.

Along at the time of the dark solstice he came back from a brief trip down to Ardea. He sent for me and said to me, “Mother, I know your heart has never been here in Alba Longa.”

“My heart is where my son is,” I said.

“And beside your husband’s tomb, I think.” He said it gently, and I nodded.

“You have ruled my household with grace and wisdom, and many here will grieve for your going, if you go. But I say to you now, if you wish to go, you may. I have asked for the hand of Camers’ sister Salica, and she will come here as my bride in April. If you were here to show her the ways of the house and teach her the skills of housekeeping in which you are so outstanding, you would have our undying gratitude. But if you feel that it may not be wise to have two queens under one roof, or simply if you wish to return to Lavinium, which is your home beyond all question, built for you by my father, I wish you to feel free to make whatever choice you please.”

The pompous awkwardness and the good intent were very like Ascanius. I was sorting out his words, and a glow of hope was just beginning to rise in me and warm my whole soul, when he went on, “And I’ll keep Silvius here, of course, for his training. It’s time I was a better brother to him—I who stand in a father’s place to him.”

“No,” I said.

He stared.

“If you are bringing a wife here, it’s right that I go. She should rule here. I’ll go back to Lavinium willingly, gratefully. But not without Silvius.”

He was puzzled, displeased; he had thought his offer entirely reasonable and generous.

“The boy is eleven, is he not?”

“Yes.”

“It’s time he was brought up among men.”

“I do not leave my son. He is my charge from Aeneas.”

“You cannot be his mother and his father.”

“I can. I am. Ascanius, do not ask this of me. You will not part me from Silvius. I am grateful for your brotherly care for him. Have no fear, in Lavinium he’ll be brought up in all the ways and arts of men by his father’s companions and your Latin captains there. I think you know I haven’t coddled him. Is he unskilled for his age, or lazy, or cowardly? Is he in any way unworthy of his father?”

He stared again. I was the she-wolf on the shield now. He saw my teeth.

He said at last, “This is unseemly.”

“That I should refuse to give up my son?”

“He will be here with me. A few miles from Lavinium!”

“Where he is, I am.”

He turned away, baffled, repeating, “This is most unseemly.”

Few people, I suppose, had openly opposed his will since he became king of Latium. He had forgotten that there was still a queen.

I stood silent. He said at last, “We will speak of this again.” And as he left the room, he said hastily, almost shrewishly, “Consider your position. You cannot have your way in all things.”

He could not bear contradiction; he did not have the strength that allows opposition. He could be generous only when his will prevailed. I saw even then that he would be immovable. I had justified his suspicions. He knew now that he had been right to suspect me all along, all the years I had done his bidding, served his household, bowed my head and held my tongue. I was a woman, therefore never to be trusted, never obeyed. I must be disregarded, or defeated.

When I went to my rooms in the women’s quarters that evening my head felt as if it were fuller of thoughts than my skull could hold, yet I could think only of the one thing. Ascanius had ruled my life for nearly ten years. I had done his will not my own, and he had taken that for granted, as if I were a slave. Now he meant, without malice but without need or reason, to take from me the use and purpose of my life. He was not the man to bring up my son, Aeneas’ son. My father had said so, and I knew it was so.

“Is there something wrong?” Maruna asked me when we were out in the urinals together, and I said, “The king’s sending me back to Lavinium.”

Maruna’s face lighted up.

“He means to keep Silvius here.”

She was silent.

“I won’t go without him,” I said. After a moment, going to the basin to wash, I said, “And I won’t stay here. Enough is enough!”

She came to stand by me, and I called to the girl, “Maia, come bring us fresh water, child!” The ten-year-old came with a pitcher and poured cool water over our hands, while her little sister ran in with towels. They were Sicana’s granddaughters, not pretty children but very bright. “You’ll come back with us to Lavinium, you two,” I said to them, and they made big eyes, wondering what I meant.

“I will go,” I repeated to Maruna, drying my hands. It helped calm me to say it aloud. “And with Silvius. Maruna, am I like my mother?”

As usual she paused before she answered. “In many ways,” she said at last.

“Because I know how she went mad. I know I could go mad as she did. Tell me if you see me going mad. Promise you will.”

“I will.”

“I have my father in me too. I think if I knew the madness was taking me over, I could stop it. But not if I lost Silvius.”

She nodded.

I did indeed understand something of how my mother’s mind worked in her frenzy: the ceaseless whirl of ideas, plans, schemes, the terrible irritation with anything that turned thought from its obsession and with anyone who did not understand it, and the curious sense of waiting in ambush. I remembered two pale gold eyes that shone of their own light. I was the she-wolf in the cave, standing stiff-legged, silent, in darkness, ready.

Preparations for the marriage of Ascanius and Salica went forward at the same time as my preparations to leave the king’s house of Alba Longa. I and my women left everything in readiness for the new queen, every grain bin filled, the chests of bedding and clothing full of clean, folded, fine-spun woollens and supple furs and fleeces, the sacred meal made ready, the altars dusted and the floors swept. There was not a moth, not a mouse among the stores, and every snowy lamb’s-wool rug on the floor was fresh. I had my pride. And also I wanted Salica to feel welcomed and at home. She was young, just eighteen, and though Ascanius would never mistreat her, I did not think he would be a good husband. He had no sexual interest in women and did not like them as companions. He was marrying because people think it strange if a king does not take a wife, and because he wanted an heir to prove his manhood, perhaps to bolster his unadmitted rivalry with Silvius.

I had spoken at once, of course, to Silvius about our departure, and we talked the matter over, for he was a thoughtful and intelligent child, and children have a wisdom of their own. I had thought he might volunteer to stay at Alba Longa, not wanting to quarrel with Ascanius, and because he saw obedience to his king and older brother as his duty. But he did not. He said, “Let Ascanius rule here and leave us free to rule Lavinium. I’m Latinus’ heir as well as Aeneas’. I want to live in the west and learn my lessons from my father’s friends. Ascanius doesn’t really want me here.” After a while he added with a regretful sigh, “But Atys says the horses here are a lot better than the horses in Lavinium.”

“Your father chose a colt for you, sired by his own stallion. I think that horse is there in the royal stables.”

He lit up at that.

“So you see Latium with two kings again?” I asked him.

“If need be,” he said, grave as a man of forty, and then, “I don’t want to be here without you!”

“And I won’t leave you here. So that’s settled.”

“Him and his sow and his thirty pigs,” said Silvius.

“When we’re in Lavinium, I will take you to the forest of Albunea,” I told him, with a deep swell of anticipated joy in my heart. “Where your grandfather Faunus may speak to you from the darkness of the oak groves in the night, as he spoke to your grandfather Latinus.”

“Tell me about Picus,” the boy said, and so I told him once again about the grandfather who became a woodpecker. He loved to hear the stories of his land and people here as well as he loved to hear the old Trojans tell over their war with the Greeks.

We were so content with our arrangement and imaginings that I persuaded myself Ascanius would see reason as I saw it. But when I went to him to ask formal leave to depart for Lavinium with my son, he was extremely angry and made no attempt to hide it.

“You may go,” he said. “Silvius stays here. As I gave you to know last month.”

There was nothing for it but supplication. “Son of my husband, king of Latium,” I said, and went down on my knees and took hold of his legs at the knees—"I who am daughter and wife and mother of kings ask you to honor my will in this. Aeneas left me Silvius to bring up, and I will obey his sacred charge. You lose nothing in letting your brother go with me. You gain our love and gratitude. Reign here and over us, with your wife, and your children to come—and may the powers that guard the wombs of women be favorable! Let Silvius live in his father’s house among his father’s old fellow-warriors, and grow to manhood there. Then he will be worthy to come to you and serve you, if fate wills and allows it.”

It is very difficult to stand while someone is clasping your knees and pleading eloquently at you from below. The clasp puts you off balance, and your position is acutely embarrassing, all too much as if you were allowing oral sex. Perhaps some people are gratified by receiving a supplication, but I always hated it, and hoped Ascanius might find it as unpleasant as I did. I bowed my head down after I spoke till my forehead was on his feet. He could move only by kicking me. He tried to shift his feet, but didn’t kick. We were in his council room, and ten or twelve of his friends and counsellors were watching and listening.

I should not have challenged him among other people. If I had sought him out alone he might have let me persuade him. But changing a command, giving way to a woman—he could not let himself be seen showing such weakness.

“The boy will stay,” he said. He shifted around enough that I had to let go of his legs. I stayed kneeling some little while, silent. It was a deep and uncomfortable silence. His young courtiers were no friends of mine and most of them had no interest in Silvius, but most of them were Latins, and our people have a piety towards the bond of parent and child, as well as the habit of respect for the mother of a household. It was shocking to them to see me on my knees, more shocking to hear my stepson flatly refuse my plea.

I stood up and gathered my white palla round me, facing him. I put the corner of it up over my head, as in a sacred act. I said, “Our wills in this matter are different, king.” And I turned around and walked out of the council room. As I gained the corridor I heard the men’s voices break out in the room behind me, and as I went farther I could hear Ascanius’ voice, high and loud, trying to dominate them.

I had defeated him morally; but that really made no difference. He was still in control. I must get out of his control. There was no time to ponder further or prepare.

I sent Tita to bring Silvius in from the exercise field, and Maruna and Sicana and I gathered our women—sixteen of the twenty who had come with us here nine years ago, and the children some of them had borne here, and a few others who had attached themselves to me—and told them to leave as soon as they could, to take different ways down through the hills, a few in each group, keeping unseen as best they could, and make their way to Lavinium. I sent for two light carts to be brought out and a pair of mules to pull each; we loaded a few garments and things precious to us in them. I put Rosalba and her newborn baby in one, along with old Vestina, who was very frail now and living in a twilight of the mind. Silvius and Maruna and I rode in the other cart. Silvius stood up with the driver and ordered him to put the mules into a trot. We were off, down the steep white road, within an hour of my interview with Ascanius.

The short February day was ending when we drove into Lavinium. The little walled town with its citadel above the river looked very quiet and grey in the low light from the west. The narrow river reflected the sky like a shard of glass.

Some of my young women, running cross-country the way Silvia and I used to do, had got there before us. They had roused the few slaves who looked after the Regia, got the doors open and fires lit on the Vestal hearth and in the kitchen and royal apartment. But the widowed house was cold and dank and dusty. All the clean bedclothes and soft furs and fleeces were back there in Alba Longa, and all the fresh food too. The wheat and millet in the granaries was scant and stale. There was not room for all of us as we kept arriving, and several women had to seek the hospitality of families in the town. But as word went round among the townsfolk, they got up a real welcome for us, bringing us all kinds of food and drink and comforts. “Little queen,” they called me, the way they had when I was a child. “Little queen, have you come back to us then? Will you stay, will you stay in your own city? And the king, our little king, Aeneas Silvius, look how he’s grown!” By the time Achates arrived to bid me welcome, I could give him at least a good fire and a bowl of warm wine thickened with meal and honey.

Of all Aeneas’ old comrades I had missed Achates most; he was the kindest of them, the most brotherly. He had come up to Alba Longa often to visit with me, and I always rejoiced to see him and found him a wise counsellor. For all his loyalty to Ascanius, I felt that he was secretly on my side. It was a blow, therefore, when he said, “But Silvius cannot stay here if the king forbids it.”

“The king,” I said, “the king,” and then I paused. At last I asked, “Who am I, Achates?”

He looked at me, taken aback.

I said, “I am your king’s wife.”

After a long time he said, “Widow.”

He was a brave man.

“And your king’s mother,” I said.

“My king to be.”

“You owe protection to your king to be.”

“Ascanius intends him no harm, Lavinia.”

“He intends no harm, but harm will come to Silvius there. He doesn’t belong there. It’s not his seat in the realm—this is. Ascanius will be busy with his new bride, and she with him. No one there will look after Silvius’ interest. Some of them are intriguers and no friends of his. I will not leave my young ram-lamb unguarded among strangers!”

The image made Achates cock his handsome grey head. “Better say you don’t want your wolf cub brought up in a barnyard,” he said. Then he clearly wished he hadn’t said anything so disrespectful to Ascanius, and frowned. “The boy’s older brother is his proper guardian,” he said stiffly. “I know it’s hard for you to part from him—”

“Do me justice, Achates! When the time comes to part from him, I’ll let him go! But the time has not come. He’s young. He needs to be with true friends and teachers—like you. His father and his grandfather left him in my charge, and I will not give that up to anyone else.”

I thought I could sway him, but I could not.

Nor would Aeneas’ other old companions, when I talked with them in the next days, approve my keeping Silvius from Ascanius’ court. I think they all thought that I was right, but could not admit it. The will of a widowed queen could not be openly allowed to overrule that of a reigning king. Ascanius had not treated them very well, he had left them to grow old away from the center of power, he ignored them except for the most formal recognition of their service; but they were Aeneas’ men and he was Aeneas’ son and his word was law. If Silvius had been older, they would have listened to him, for he was Aeneas’ son too and they loved him dearly; but as grown men they thought they should not be swayed by the will of a boy of eleven.

Meanwhile, we waited for word to come from Alba Longa. Daily I looked out from the walls dreading to see a mounted troop ride down the hill road, soldiers with orders to take Silvius back with them, or Ascanius himself coming down from the mountain to play the sky father with lightning and thunder of wrath.

However, the wedding festivities were going forward in Ardea and Alba, all those days, and I think Ascanius found it undignified to be squabbling with his stepmother while welcoming his bride. He simply ignored us. So we had all the end of March at peace there in Lavinium, and I cannot say how often I wept with both pain and joy at being there again, in my home, where I and my love had lived.

I had brought Aeneas’ armor and sword and shield in the cart—Sicana helped Silvius and me lift them down and carry them. Now they hung again in his own house, where they should hang.

And we waited to hear from the house of Ascanius.

In midmorning one day while I was at my loom starting a new piece, the girl Ursina came running in. “A troop of armed men on horseback, coming down the way from Alba, queen,” she said. “About a mile away now. One leads a riderless horse.”

For Silvius.

I had made a hundred plans for what to do when Ascanius sent for Silvius, but they fell to dust under the hooves of those horsemen. There was only one thing to do, and it was what I had done already—run. Run and hide.

“Send Silvius to me,” I told Ursina, a girl of fifteen or so, wild and tawny as a lioness, Maruna’s niece. She darted off. I went to my room and tied up a few things in an old palla, and when Silvius came panting in I told him we were going to the forest to escape from Ascanius’ men.

“I’ll get horses,” he said.

“No need, we’re not going far. And horses are hard to hide. Get your cloak and good shoes and meet me in the kitchen.”

I gathered up a cook pot and some food in another bundle, Silvius came, and we were off. Maruna met us in the doorway of the house. I said, “I hope he will not punish you!"—meaning all my women and the people of the house. “Tell the king’s men: the queen went with her son to the great oracle of the springs near Tibur to ask guidance of the oracle. That will keep them busy a little while.”

“But you…”

“You know where to look for me, Maruna. The woodcutter’s.”

She nodded. She was desperately worried for us and I was worried for her, but I could not hesitate. Silvius and I went down the street, slipped out through the postern gate of the town, and struck across the fields, across the last pagus, following the course of the Prati into the wooded foothills northwest under cover of the newleaved oaks. In time we came to the old path from Laurentum to Albunea, winding along under the hills.

Silvius wrinkled his nose. He could scent like a hound.

“Rotten eggs?” I asked. We had not spoken at all, hurrying along in fugitive silence.

He nodded.

“That’s the sulfur springs.”

“Are we going there?”

“Nearby.”

We came to the forester’s cottage where Maruna used to spend the night while the poet and I talked in the sacred grove. Trees had grown up and closed in on the high round hut, and I almost passed it without seeing it. The clearing and what had been the kitchen garden were rank with brambles and tall weeds. I called out. No one answered. I went to the door and saw the house was desolate. The woodcutter and his wife had gone elsewhere, or were dead.

Silvius was into the hut and all around it with a child’s quick curiosity. “This is a good place,” he said. He put down his bundle on the doorstep. I had noticed how unwieldy it was as he walked with it, and it went down with a thud and a clank. “What did you put in that?” I asked. He looked at me a bit askance, and opened up the bundle. He had brought his short bow, arrows, a hunting knife, and the short sword he used for battle practice.

“For wolves,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “Well, dear son, I think maybe we are the wolves.”

He thought it over and the idea clearly pleased him. He nodded.

“Come and sit down a bit,” I said, sitting on the doorstep and pushing the weapons aside to make room. A shaft of sunlight struck through the gloom of the pines and oaks all around and made it warm there. Silvius sat down next to me. I looked at his thin brown boy legs and the shoes that were too heavy for his feet. He leaned his head against me. “They don’t want to kill us, do they, mother?” he asked, not with terror but for reassurance.

“No. They want to part us. I am certain in my heart that it’s wrong for me to let you go. But there’s no way I can keep Ascanius from taking you to Alba, except by hiding you so he can’t.”

He thought for a long time and said, “I could go live on a farm somewhere off in the country and pretend to be a farm boy.”

“You might. It would put the farmer’s family at risk, though.”

He nodded shortly, ashamed of not having seen that.

I was ashamed too of involving him in any deceit. I said, “Listen. I lied about going to the great oracle at Tibur. But I do want to consult the oracle. Ours, my father’s, my forefathers’ oracle, here, at Albunea. Maybe it will tell us what to do. I don’t know if it will speak to a woman, but it might speak to you. Grandson of Latinus, of Faunus, of Picus, of Saturn…” I stroked his hard, slight shoulder, still sweaty from our quick walk. “Son of Aeneas.” I kissed him.

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.

SILVIUS HAD SLEPT WITHOUT DREAMING. IT WAS I WHO HAD the dream and heard the voice, but it was not my grandfather who spoke.

At dawn we rose and went to the spring. While Silvius explored about the cave, I sat on the rock outcrop and watched the sunlight strike across the pale water through the low mists that always hung above it. The stink of sulfur was less strong in the morning air. We bathed in shallow pools a little way downstream from the dead, muddy ground at the cave mouth. The water was warm and felt soft on the skin. It would be a good place to bring arthritis, or an old aching wound.

We went back to the enclosure, and having nothing else to offer in thanks we heaped the altar with sweet herbs, boughs of bay laurel, and what few flowers we found in clearings in the woods. When we had done that and said our thanks, before we left the sacred place, I told Silvius my dream. “I saw you, a grown man. Yet it was as if you were not yet born—as if you stood waiting to live. And beside me an old man was speaking. He was not speaking to me. He spoke of you to your father Aeneas. He said: That is your last son, a king and father of kings, whom your wife Lavinia will bring up in the woods. And then the dream ended.”

We pondered it as we went back to the woodcutter’s hut.

“It means we’re to stay here, in the forest. Doesn’t it, mother?” Silvius said at last.

It was what I had been thinking, yet my first impulse was to deny it, to say no, it couldn’t be that clear and simple. I said nothing till we came into the clearing, and then, “It seems to mean that. But how…? We can’t lurk here like outcasts or beggars—living off what Maruna can send us.”

“I can hunt, and snare, mother.”

“You certainly can, and you’d better do it, too, if you want meat tonight. But in the long run… People will see us, everybody here knows us, after all! We can’t just vanish into the forest.”

“If we went farther, we could. Up in the hills.”

“For how long, child? Summer, yes; autumn, maybe; winter, no. Life’s hard for those who live apart from others, even if they have a sound roof and a full granary. You and I are too soft for it… But I will not take orders from Ascanius! If I obey him in this, if I give him you, even if I go with you, I will have given your kingship away. He must accept our sovereignty in Lavinium. Where can we go?”

“Well, what if people do recognise us? And find out where we are? Would anybody make us go to Alba? If we said we were supposed to live in the woods—if we told them the oracle said so?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s find out,” Silvius said.

It is pleasant when your child says what you want to say.

“His pigs told him to go to Alba,” I said. “How can he argue with his grandfather, who tells us to stay here?”

I began to remember how, when Faunus told my father in Albunea that I must be married to a foreigner, Latinus had announced it right away to all and sundry. The more people heard it the more powerful it was. Everyone, not just the king, had heard the oracle.

“I think I should go to Lavinium today,” I told Silvius. “You stay here. Get us a rabbit or quail if you can. If anybody but me comes here, disappear. I’ll be back before evening.”

So I walked back along the foothills and across the fields to my city, thinking hard all the way, and entered the gate in mid-morning. I was relieved to find Ascanius had still not sent for Silvius. And I was surprised and touched by the welcome people gave me, crowding round me with greetings and caresses and anxious inquiries. I was the center of a whole throng by the time I had climbed the street to the Regia.

Here’s my chance, I thought. So I turned round there before the house doors, while people of the household came crowding out behind me to make me welcome, and called, “People of my city!” They quieted down to hear me, and I spoke out, hardly knowing what I was going to say from one word to the next. “Last night in the forest of Albunea, in the place of the oracle of my forefathers, I lay down by the altar to sleep. And the voice of King Anchises, father of our King Aeneas, spoke to me in dream, prophesying that his grandson Silvius was to live with me in the woods of Latium. In obedience to this foretelling, I will neither send my son to Alba Longa nor keep him here in Lavinium, but he and I will live in the forest until the signs and portents bid us do otherwise. The voice in the dream called Silvius king and father of kings. May you rejoice in that knowledge as I do!” They put up a great shout at that, which heartened me, and I ended—"But till Silvius comes to the age of rule, Ascanius rules alone, and my city will continue to be governed by Ascanius and by his father’s friends.”

“But where will you go off to in the wilderness, little queen?” some old fellow in the crowd called out, and I answered, “Not far, friend! My heart is in Lavinium, with you!” That made them cheer again, and I entered my house amid a considerable tumult, my heart beating very hard. Achates was there to meet me. Riding the goodwill of my people, I forestalled what he might have said, saying to him, “My friend, I know Ascanius ordered you to bring Silvius to Alba Longa. As your queen, I ask you to obey me, leaving Silvius with me, letting the prophecy be fulfilled.”

He accepted that with a slow bow of his head, saying only, “You saw the Lord Anchises?"—incredulous yet wistful, urgent, wanting to believe me.

“No, but I heard a voice, that spoke as if to Aeneas. I took it to be his father’s voice. The fathers speak, in Albunea.”

Achates hesitated and then asked, “Did you see him?” Him was Aeneas, of course, and Achates spoke with such love and longing that the tears came into my eyes. I could only shake my head, and after a while I said, “He was there with me, Achates. For a moment.”

But as I said it I knew that it was not true. Aeneas had not been there with me as a man in the flesh, nor had Anchises spoken. It was the poet who spoke. It was all the words of the poet, the words of the maker, the foreteller, the truth teller: nothing more, nothing less. But was I myself any more, or less, than that?

And this was nothing I could say to any living soul, or ever did, till now.

I had been right to count on Ascanius’ respect for portents and oracles, which he had learned from his father but exaggerated almost to superstition. He was rigid in all observances; he longed to be called pious, as Aeneas was. Piety to him meant a man’s obedience to the will of higher powers, a safe righteousness. He would never have believed that Aeneas saw his victory over Turnus as his own defeat. He did not understand that in his father’s piety lay his tragedy.

I may misjudge him; he may have come to share some of Aeneas’ anguish of conscience, as he grew older. But I never knew Ascanius well.

At any rate, when Achates and Serestus took word to him of my decision, he entertained them without berating them for obeying me rather than him, and sent back no clear message at all to me. I think he felt himself forestalled by the combination of forces I had brought against him—the sacred oracle of the Italians speaking with the hallowed voice of the Trojan grandfather. By silence he gave consent.

So began the period of our “exile,” no exile at all compared to that of the old Trojans forever homesick for their fallen city, our “living in the woods,” which turned out to be a pretty easy life. I sent for some carpenters to come brace up the woodcutter’s hut and thatchers to replace the rat-infested, rain-rotted roof. They ended up rebuilding the whole thing, adding on a second room and building a proper hearth, while volunteers swarmed in the clearing chopping brambles and spading and putting in a kitchen garden with every herb and vegetable that grows in Latium, even a sapling walnut tree and a full-grown Sicilian caperberry bush. They wanted to put a fence around it all, but I forbade it. “Wolves, queen,” old Girnus said—"bears—!” And I said, “There are no bears in Albunea, and if a wolf comes here I will call him brother.” They took that saying back to Lavinium, and some people called me Mother Wolf, after that.

The way from town to the woodcutter’s hut soon became a beaten path, and I had to limit the number of volunteer workmen and visitors to a few and only on certain days, or we would have had no peace there at all. When, late in summer, all the workmen were done and it was quiet again, it was very quiet. Silvius was off all day in the forest or at his lessons—for the old Trojans took his education in hand with vigor, and put him through a merciless daily schedule of exercises, military drills, weapons training, music, recitation, and equitation. When I had cleaned my house and tended my garden, I had little to do, and being used to having a great household to run, I was bored and lonely at first. I felt myself useless, a fraud. The Regias I had managed with such hard work and endless care in Laurentum, in Lavinium, in Alba Longa, were all going on perfectly well without me. Maruna, with Sicana as her second in command, kept the house in Lavinium, and did the worship as I had trained her long ago to do; so I could not ask her to be with me in the forest.

But after a time I began to like my solitude. I lost the wish for any visitor or voice to break the silence of the trees, threaded always with the singing of insects and birds and the sound of wind in leaves. I gardened, and spun, and wove on the big loom set up in the second room, and was content with silence, until my son came back at evening to eat with me and talk a little, quietly, before sleep.

And so the years passed.

There were some border incidents, but Ascanius seemed to have lost his unhappy knack of stirring up wars. His marriage had been celebrated with great ceremony, his Rutulian wife kept his house in royal fashion, and they were said to be a happy couple. But they had no child. After a few years, Ascanius called in wise women and soothsayers. The wise women said that Salica was in perfect health and there was no reason she should not conceive. The soothsayers all foretold that she would die barren. They gave no cause or cure, and their prophecies were cloaked in images and cloudy language, for if the fault was in Ascanius they did not wish to say so.

I heard this and other news as gossip from Illivia and other women who came to visit with me, and from my Latin and Trojan counsellors who ruled Lavinium and the northwest of Latium in Ascanius’ and my name. Achates, and Silvius too, saw to it that these men came to consult with me on matters of importance, so that I knew well enough what was happening in the country and around it, though I kept my advice to a minimum, and entertained no guests at all. If an important traveler, king or trader, came to Latium, he was entertained at Alba Longa. He was told that Queen Lavinia was living with her son in the forest in obedience to an oracle and so could not be seen. I had to turn away even Tarchon of Caere, who came to Lavinium, and whom I longed to see; I let Silvius go to him once, but I had to refuse myself, or else my exile became a mere mockery. But I could trust Achates and Mnestheus to entertain him as befitted a great Etruscan king and a true friend of my husband and my son. Tarchon did not go on to Alba Longa, which signified pretty clearly that if Ascanius wanted his friendship he must earn it.

Unfortunately, Ascanius chose to test it severely, by provoking the Veiian Etruscans at Ruma. Their colony there was growing larger. Latins in Fidenae and Tibur and around Lake Regillus were now patrolling the outlying borders of their farmlands, since there had been the inevitable episodes of cattle rustling, sheep stealing, quarrels at terminus stones. Mars was ready, as ever, to dance on the boundary lines. Ascanius had every right to defend his subjects’ property, as Latinus had done when Evander’s Greeks first settled there. But Latinus had a low opinion of the Seven Hills as a city site, thinking the river bottom unhealthy and the hills unfit for plowing or grazing, so he did not begrudge the territory to Evander. Ascanius did begrudge it.

He had got on with the Etruscans thus far only by ignoring them. He thought them arrogant, perfidious, incalculable. He said a treaty with Etruscans was worse than useless, for they would not keep it—though the only one he made with them was when they helped him fight the war on the Anio, and they had kept it. Holding himself superior to all Italians as a Trojan, son of the divine Aeneas sent by fate to rule in Italy, he resented finding himself actually inferior to the Etruscans in wealth, manpower, weaponry, and the arts of life. His prejudice made him see them as all of one kind. In fact Caere and Veii were old rivals. Tarchon did not like to watch the other city-state expanding south of the Tiber; he had come to Lavinium to feel us out about the settlement at Ruma, and would have joined with us to put pressure on Veii to keep the settlement small. Achates and Serestus understood this and counselled Ascanius to court Tarchon. Ascanius brushed their advice aside.

In March, soon after the Leapers danced, he decided to teach Veii a lesson. He sent a small army to a disputed boundary between Ruma and Lake Regillus and drove the Etruscans, mostly shepherds, back almost to the Seven Hills. As they got closer to the settlement, reinforcements met them, and they began to turn and fight. Men were killed on both sides. To Ascanius’ soldiers, their losses justified them in keeping the flocks that fell into their hands. But by the end of a second day, they had to fall back all the way to Lake Regillus, letting go the sheep they had taken. The Rumans rounded up their flocks and stayed on armed guard all across the uncertain border.

As if scornful of his enemy, Ascanius had not gone with his army. He put it in charge of his boyhood friend, Atys. I had known Atys as a handsome, warmhearted, rather childish man, who was kind to Silvius when we lived at Alba and gave him riding lessons. Retreating with his army, Atys had taken off his helmet, hot with the bright spring sunlight; a stone an Etruscan shepherd threw struck his head and knocked him from his horse, and he never recovered consciousness. They brought his body and those of five other soldiers home to Alba Longa.

Ascanius broke down. He threw himself on Atys’ body weeping, and could not stop his tears. When his wife tried to console him and lead him away, he turned on her with cruel, senseless insults, screaming that she had whored with half his army and was barren because she was a whore. He could not be torn away from Atys’ corpse until his weeping exhausted him, sobs becoming convulsions and then a kind of swoon from which he could not be roused. All this was in the great courtyard of the Regia, witnessed by many. Word of it came to Lavinium within hours. Silvius told me when he came home in the evening from his lessons.

Everyone was shocked, puzzled, alarmed by this inordinate show of grief. Atys had been Ascanius’ boy lover, but that was long ago. If Atys was so dear to him why had he sent him on this mission? After all, he had experienced captains who knew the ground better, like Rutilus of Gabii, who had grown up there. Among the talk and speculation Sicana and the others brought me next day was a persistent tale that some time ago Ascanius had been overheard quarreling with Atys, shouting that he was ashamed of him. Atys’ friends wondered if he had been sent to lead an inadequate army into danger as punishment, or to get rid of him. And many were now saying that Atys and Ascanius had never ceased to be lovers, that even on the eve of Ascanius’ wedding they had met, and ever since. Amid such sad and shameful gossip Ascanius lay still stricken in his room, seeing no one.

His wife Salica was turned from his door. Humiliated past endurance, she went with a group of her women to her family home in Ardea.

I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it. Though I suffered grief, I was doomed to sanity. This was no doing of the poet’s. I know that he gave me nothing but modest blushes, and no character at all. I know that he said I raved and tore my golden tresses at my mother’s death. He simply was not paying attention: I was silent then, tearless, and only intent on making her poor soiled body decent. And my hair has always been dark. In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself. Yet without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right.

It is strange, though, that he gave me no voice. I never spoke to him till we met that night by the altar under the oaks. Where is my voice from, I wonder? the voice that cries on the wind in the heights of Albunea, the voice that speaks with no tongue a language not its own?

Well, these are questions I cannot answer. I will tell you now of another question I cannot answer, and a thing not many people believe. You will not believe it either, I know, but it is the truth.

I had nothing to do with the Penates of Troy leaving the altar of the king’s house in Alba Longa and coming to Lavinium.

I gave no women orders to spirit them away by night, or men either, or children. Because it was an act that might have been calculated for political effect, there will always be suspicion, even open assumption, that it was planned and executed by me, or by someone else who wished to weaken Ascanius’ authority. I do not think it was. I think the gods knew when it was time to come home.

Maruna came to me at Albunea, early in the morning, out of breath, and bade me come with her at once to Lavinium, to the Regia. I had not entered the gates of my city or my house for five years, but I knew Maruna would not summon me without cause. She hurried with me across the April fields, through the city gate, through the doors of the house, to the hearth of Vesta at the back of the hearth room, where the Penates of Latium had stood ever since my father’s death. And I saw standing with them the figures of clay and ivory, the gods of the house of Anchises, that Aeneas had brought with him across the lands and seas from Troy.

I gasped and stood in awe, my legs trembling. I was shocked, incredulous, frightened.

Yet the fear did not go very deep. I could not be terrified, because I could only see it as right that our gods should be here, in our house.

So the others perhaps saw me as less amazed than I might have been, and thought my surprise and my questions a pretense. And indeed I did not ask many questions. I thought it impious to question mortals about a matter that had apparently been carried out by greater powers.

Of course some of my women were capable of spiriting the Penates out of Alba and into Lavinium. But as I thought about it I could not imagine any of them actually doing it. All of them seemed utterly surprised, dismayed, even terrified when they saw the figures on the altar; and they were honest women. I would not let them be interrogated. If indeed I found that one had done it, what was I to do with her? Punish? Praise? Best leave the inexplicable unexplained. As for the men, I left them to Achates, Serestus, and Mnestheus, who I knew were themselves incapable of plotting an act of sacrilege, however welcome its implications. They found no suspects and no hint of how or even when the strange event had occurred. The first to see the gods had been Maruna herself, coming for the morning worship.

I stayed in my city, that day, among my people. I sent for Silvius, and ordered a triple sacrifice, a lamb, a calf, and a young pig. Silvius presided, with the old Trojan captains to assist him. With the lifeblood and roasted meat of the good animals we thanked and blessed the Lares and Penates of Troy and Latium and asked their blessing. Maruna read the entrails as the Etruscans do, and foretold from them great and lasting glory for the house of Aeneas.

And then I went back to the little house in the forest. But my son stayed in the Regia that night, guarding his ancestral gods, seeking their blessing.

In Alba Longa there had of course been great dismay, horror, when the absence of the old Penates was discovered. A little camillus, a helper, a boy of nine, who first raised the alarm, had been beaten nearly to death by horrified women who blamed the mischief on him. Queen Salica, who might have calmed them, no longer lived there.

They carried the news to King Ascanius with fear and trembling. He came out of his rooms, then, for the first time since Atys’ death. He walked across the great court to the Vestal hearth and stood gazing at it. Only the Penates of the old village of Alba Longa stood there, few and humble as the gods of a poor man’s house. Vesta herself, the body of sacred fire, burned up clear and bright as ever.

Ascanius cast a little salted meal into the fire. He lifted up his hands to pray, but he could not speak; tears began to run down his face; he turned and went back in silence, weeping, to his rooms.

Ascanius made no effort to find a human agency for the Penates’ return to Lavinium. To him, as to me, it was a pure sign of the will of the powers greater than us. We accepted it as such. But while it was a miraculous joy to me, and a portent of divine favor to Aeneas’ younger son, to the elder son it was an almost fatal blow.

I do not know whether his marriage had been such an unhappy mockery as—now—everyone was saying. All the women’s quarters were abuzz with talk about how unhappy Salica had been from the very beginning, how she suffered from her husband’s distaste for her, how she hid her humiliation even from her closest companions (except of course the one telling the story). If all that was true, Ascanius had also worn a public mask and never let it slip, all these years. I think it likelier that something little by little went wrong in the marriage, Ascanius’ sexual discomfort with women perhaps driving him gradually back to seek the tender simplicities of his first love; and Atys, poor loyal soul, was there to offer them. Poor souls all of them.

But fate was hardest on Ascanius. He lost his lover and a battle at one stroke; at the next, his wife; and then his father’s gods. His choice of a capital was, it seemed, wrong. Everything he had built up to support his image of himself as Aeneas’ worthy successor slipped away from him, like mud crumbling softly from a riverbank into the water.

He could not pull himself together for a long time, so long that his war captains, despairing of getting any orders from him, came down to Lavinium and asked the counsel of the old Trojans and the young king.

For so Silvius was openly called now. He would be seventeen in May. He had lived in the forest, following the oracle; he had served his term of exile. The return of the ancestral powers to his house was a clear sign. The young king and the gods had come home on the same day.

The people of Lavinium and all western Latium made him a heartfelt, joyful welcome, bringing tribute unasked and overflowing. Soon from Gabii, Praeneste, Tibur, Nomentum, people were arriving to see and greet him and offer him their white lambs, their fine colts, their service in arms. There was a sense all over the country of a darkness lifting, a better hope. No mortal hope is ever fully satisfied, I know, but this overflow of good feeling and confidence secured much of its own fulfillment: the Latins saw themselves as a people again, they held up their heads. Only a fool could have spoiled so promising a start. Not being a fool, Silvius was cautious and often almost incredulous of his good fortune, and relied very much on the counsel of people he had learned to trust; but being seventeen years old, he seized every advantage, accepted every gift, rejoiced in his popularity, offered love for love, and rode the fair wind, as long as it blew, like a happy young hawk.

When the captains came from Alba Longa, he called a council, and he called me to it.

I demurred, privately, to him. I was so unused to being among people, after five years in the forest, that the idea appalled me. “I don’t belong there,” I said.

“You sat in your father’s council, and my father’s.”

“No. I sat at the back and listened, sometimes.”

“But you are the queen.”

“Queen mother.”

“A queen is a queen,” said my son, regally.

He did look a good deal like Aeneas, but there was something of Latinus and myself, something Italian, in the way he stood and the way he turned his head. He knew how to occupy space. He would be a handsome man at twenty-five, but an absolutely beautiful one at fifty. Such maternal thoughts distracted me. I was staring at him as a cow stares at her calf, with mindless, endless contentment.

“You are the queen here, mother, and you can’t do anything about it, unless I get married. Then you can retire, if you insist. But I don’t plan to marry any time soon. If you aren’t the queen then you’re my subject, and I command you to attend the council.”

“Don’t be childish, Silvius,” I said. But he had won the game, of course. I attended his council. I sat at the back and never spoke. There was no use shocking Ascanius’ captains. They were worried enough as it was.

They had information that Veii had been sending armed men to Ruma ever since our ill-fated border raid. It looked as if the Etruscans planned either forays into our territory or an all-out attack on Gabii or Collatia. The chiefs of Alba Longa had sent all the men they could raise into the area to guard it, but it was a long border, and our soldiers were spread thin. They had strict orders not to attack, only to defend.

“But we don’t know what they’ll be facing,” said Marsius, a young general. They were all young. Ascanius had not liked to have older men about him.

“We could double the army easily,” Mnestheus said. “There’s great spirit among the people here.”

“We could get in touch with Tarchon of Caere,” said Silvius.

The Albans looked blank, frowned. “An Etruscan?” said Marsius.

“Tarchon was here not long ago, and it seemed he had in mind an alliance to contain Ruma.”

Serestus spoke: “But we were not then at liberty to discuss it with him.”

There was a silence.

“I know you remember that Tarchon of Caere helped you, or your fathers, put my father on the throne of Latium,” Silvius said. He said it mildly, not chiding or reproaching. I saw Achates look at him with a half smile. He was hearing his king speak. We all were.

We sent messengers to Caere, recruits and volunteers to strengthen the Alban forces encircling the Seven Hills. In April Tarchon’s army moved eastward from Caere, cutting off the route from Veii to the Tiber. There were some skirmishes in Etruria, none in Latium. The colony at Ruma withdrew all forces from its borders; its men ceased to threaten our farms and cities, turning back to plowing and harvesting. Silvius had won his first war without fighting it.

At the end of that summer he rode to the woodcutter’s house on his handsome chestnut stallion, and said to me, “Mother, I think you should come back to your city.” I had been thinking the same thing, and merely nodded.

It was a great pleasure to live again in the high house of Lavinium, to sweep Vesta’s hearth and prepare the salted meal for my gods and Aeneas’ gods, to look after a great storeroom and a busy household, to have children about underfoot and women to talk things over with and the deep ring of men’s voices out in the stable yard.

In that life, which had been all my life till we went to the forest, the years slipped away. Silvius went up to Alba Longa often, meeting amicably with his brother, sharing the duties of rule, though now Ascanius took second place, deferring to the younger king. He came a few times to Lavinium for festivals or councils, a sad-eyed, heavyset, stooped man who fussed over trifles. His wife lived on in Ardea in her brother Camers’ household. Silvius, who frequently crossed the Tiber, cultivating amity with Etruria, married the Caeran lady Ramtha Matunae, a beautiful and noble woman. We held a great wedding in Lavinium.

The children began to come: a girl, a boy, a boy, a girl. Then I was the grandmother queen in the noisy courtyard, where the laurel tree I had planted when I came there with Aeneas towered over the walls.

When Ascanius had ruled thirty years in Alba Longa, he gave up his crown. Silvius, called Aeneas Silvius by his people, ruled Latium alone.

He moved then to Alba, for it was in truth a better center of rule than Lavinium. He begged me to come with him and Ramtha and the children, but I was not going to leave my city again, or not in that direction. He did not try to move his Lares and Penates, for they like me had shown their will was to stay where Aeneas put them.

So I lived on as the old queen in the old Regia, within the threshold my husband carried me across on our wedding day. Sicana died at last, and Tita, but Maruna was with me always. Now and then we walked, or rode in a donkey cart, to sleepy Laurentum of our girlhood, and spent an afternoon there by the fountain under the old laurel. Once we went on to the mouth of the father river and filled our cart with the grey, dirty, sacred salt. Often we walked down from Lavinium to the Numicus, and watched the water run, and coming home stayed a while by the great stone tomb where Aeneas lay in state near his daughter who might have been, a shadow in shadows. Now and then we walked to Albunea, and Maruna slept in the woodcutter’s cottage while I went on alone into the forest, bearing fire for the altar, and an offering of fruit or grain and wine, and the fleece of a dark-colored ewe, on which I lay down in the sacred place to sleep. I heard no voices in the darkness among the trees. I saw no visions. I slept.

Maruna fell ill; her heart failed, she grew weak, and could not rise to sweep the hearth. One morning I heard the women wailing.

Silvius came for Maruna’s ninth-day ceremony. No one wondered that a king should come to the funeral of a slave. He asked me again to come to Alba, to be with him, but I shook my head. “I will live here with Aeneas,” I told him. There were tears in his eyes, but he did not press me. He was, as I had thought he would be, a splendid man at fifty, straight and strong-bodied, dark-eyed, with greying hair.

“You are older than he was,” I thought, but I did not tell him my thought.

He had to be off; there was trouble from the Volscians, or the Sabines, or the Aequians. There would always be war on the borders, and often in the heartland. So long as there is a kingdom there will be another Turnus calling to be killed.

For a time after Maruna’s death I did not go to Albunea. I could not bear to go with anyone but her, and having grown somewhat lame was timid about walking across the fields and up into the woods alone. At last, weary of my cowardice, I sent for Maruna’s niece Ursina, whom I had given a farmstead on the Prati. She walked with me to the woodcutter’s house, then back to her farm to see to her animals, and returned for me in the morning. She was still a lioness, a walk of four or five miles was nothing to her. So I could go to my forest when the need came on me.

Once when I went there in winter, sleeping out on the fleeces in the cold, though it hardly rained at all, I got up very stiff at dawn and found myself feverish. I stayed in the woodcutter’s house that day, but the doctors in Lavinium insisted on bringing me back to town where they could torment me more easily. It may be that that happened more than once. As I speak now I feel my voice fail, as Maruna’s heart failed, growing weak, so that even at the base of her throat one could hardly find the pulse. Even in my throat I can hardly feel the vibration of the voice.

But I will not die. I cannot. I will never go down among the shadows under Albunea to see Aeneas tall among the warriors, gleaming in bronze. I will not speak to Creusa of Troy, as I once thought I might, or Dido of Carthage, proud and silent, still bearing the great sword wound in her breast. They lived and died as women do and as the poet sang them. But he did not sing me enough life to die. He only gave me immortality.

I do not need to call on Ursina to come with me any more. Not for a long time. One must be changed, to be immortal. I can go from Lavinium to Albunea on my own wings. More and more I live there, hunting among the trees in twilight, in starlight. My eyes need little light to see their prey: to me the night there is luminous, a soft radiance. When the sun begins to rise and dazzle all the sky, I find the dark place in the hollow oak. That is my high house now. It does not matter that the Regia in Lavinium is only clay bricks in earth. In my dark bedroom I sleep the days away, near the pools of stinking, misty water that once were sacred. I wake as the sun goes down, and listen. My hearing is good. I can hear a mouse breathe among the fallen oak leaves. Through the noise of the water in the cave I can hear the roar and rumor of the vast city that covers all the Seven Hills and the banks of the father river and the old pagus lines for miles and miles. I can hear the endless sound of the engines of war on all the roads of the world. But I stay here. I fly among the trees on soft wings that make no sound. Sometimes I call out, but not in a human voice. My cry is soft and quavering: i, i, I cry: Go on, go.

Only sometimes my soul wakes as a woman again, and then when I listen I can hear silence, and in the silence his voice.