Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

“I think you are here,” I said, “only your body is not. But I see you. I talk with you. Tell me who the Trojans are.”

“No no no. I must not. They are yet to come. Do what’s right to do and what follows will be what should follow.” He laughed. “Tell me, have you any suitors, Lavinia, ‘ripe now for a man, of full age for marriage’?”

“Yes.”

“What are their names?”

“Clausus the Sabine, Almo Tyrrhus’ son, Ufens of Nersae, Aventinus, Turnus of Rutulia.”

“And you favor none of them?”

“I favor none of them.”

“Why is that?”

“Why should I? Where can a man take me that is better than my father’s house? What do I want with a lesser king? Why should I serve Lares that are not my family’s Lares, the Penates of some other woman’s storerooms, the fire of a foreign hearth? Why, why is a girl brought up at home to be a woman in exile the rest of her life?”

“Hah,” he said, not a laugh this time but a long outbreath. “I don’t know, Lavinia. I don’t know. But listen. If a man came—if a man came to marry you who was a man among a thousand—a warrior, a hero, a handsome man—”

“Turnus is all that.”

“Has he piety?”

The word brought me up short, but I had no doubt of my answer. “No,” I said.

“Well. If a man came who was heroic and also responsible, and just, and faithful, a man who had lost much, and suffered much, and made a good many mistakes and paid for them all—a man who saw his city betrayed and burned, and saved his father and his son from the burning, a man who went down alive into the underworld and returned, a man who learned piety the hard way… Might you favor such a man?”

“I would certainly pay attention to him,” I said.

“It would be wise to do so.”

A silence fell between us, companionable.

I said at last, “Have you seen, when the young men have archery contests, sometimes they catch a dove, and put a cord round her foot, and shinny up a high pole and tie her to the top, leaving just enough cord so she thinks she can fly? And then she is the target of their arrows.”

“I have seen that.”

“If I were an archer I’d break the cord with my arrow.”

“That too I have seen. But another man shot the dove as she flew free.”

After a while I said, “Perhaps it’s just as well that women don’t learn to shoot arrows.”

“Camilla did. You know of her?”

“A woman archer?”

“A woman warrior, beautiful, invincible. From Volscia.”

I shook my head. All I knew of the Volscians was what my father said: savage fighters, faithless allies.

“Well,” the wraith said, “I suppose I did invent her. But I liked her.”

“Invent her?”

“I am a poet, Lavinia.” I liked the sound of the word, but he saw I did not know it. “A vates,” he said. I knew that word of course: foreteller, soothsayer. It went with his being part Etruscan, and with the knowledge he seemed to have of what had not happened yet. But I didn’t see what it had to do with this woman warrior, who sounded like a mere story to me.

“Would you tell me more about the man who is coming?”

He pondered a little. Even though we were talking with such ease and openness, in perfect trust, as if we were both shadows, harmless and invulnerable, with all eternity before us, still, he was a man who thought before he spoke.

“Yes,” he said, “I can do that. What do you want to know?”

“Why is he coming here?”

“That, I think, I should not tell you now. Time will tell. But I think it would not be wrong for me to tell you where he is coming from.”

“I am listening.” I got more comfortable on the fleeces.

“O Lavinia,” he said, “you are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it. Well, never mind. Did you ever hear of Troy?”

“Yes. It’s a little town south of here, near Ardea.”

“Ah—not that Troia. This one was a great city. Far east of here, east of the Middle Sea, east of the isles of Greece, on the shore of Asia. There was a pretty prince of Troy named Paris. He and a Greek queen ran off together. Her husband called the other kings of Greece together, and they went to Troy, a great army in a thousand beaked ships, to get the woman back. Helen, her name was.”

“What did they want her back for?”

“Her husband’s honor demanded it.”

“I should think his honor demanded that he divorce her and find himself a decent wife.”

“Lavinia, these people were Greeks. Not Ro—not Italians.”

“King Evander’s a Greek. I wonder if he’d chase after a cheating wife.”

“Lavinia daughter of the king, will you let me tell my tale?”

“I’m sorry. I won’t talk.”

“Then I will tell you the story of the fall of Troy, as Aeneas told it to the queen of Carthage,” he said. And he sat up straighter, there on the dark ground, a shadow among shadows, and began to sing.

It wasn’t singing like the shepherds’ songs, or rowers’ choruses, or the hymns at Ambarvalia and Compitalia, or the songs women sing all day at spinning and weaving and pounding and chopping and cleaning and sweeping. There was no tune to it. Its words were all the music of it, its words were its drumbeat, clack of the loom, tread of feet, oarstroke, heartbeat, waves breaking on the beach at Troy away across the world.

I cannot say here all he sang, about the great horse, and the snakes that came out of the sea, and the fall of the city. I will tell only what I have most thought about in the tale.

When the Greeks came out of the horse and let their army into the city, Aeneas the Trojan warrior fought against them in the streets. He fought in a kind of madness, furious, mindless, until he saw the king’s high house afire. Then his mind cleared: he thought of his own house and people, and ran there. That house was some way from the center of the city, and it was still quiet there.

As he went through the streets he saw great powers made visible, moving in the darkness, the powers that willed Troy to burn.

When he got home, he tried to get his people to leave the house, escape the city, save themselves; but his father Anchises wouldn’t go. Anchises was crippled, could hardly walk. He said he would die in his own house. But the house people wouldn’t leave him there, wouldn’t go without him. Aeneas was about to give up, rush back into the madness and get himself killed in the street fighting. His wife Creusa stopped him, and told him he had no right to do that. It was his duty and hers to try to save their people. She had their little son Ascanius with her. And as she spoke, someone said, “Look!"—and they saw that the boy’s hair had caught fire—a gold flame leaped up over his head. They put it out, but old Anchises, who could read omens, said it was a good omen. Then they saw a shooting star run across the sky and fall into the forest up on the mountain over the city, Mount Ida. Anchises said they should follow that star. So Aeneas told all the house people to scatter out and run, get out of the city any way they could, and told them where to meet: at a mound with an old altar of the Grain Mother, outside the city gate under Mount Ida. Then Anchises carried the household gods in a big clay pot, and Aeneas carried crippled Anchises on his back; he took little Ascanius’ hand, and Creusa followed him; and so they set off through the dark streets.

But Anchises saw soldiers down a side street and shouted to Aeneas to run. Aeneas obeyed, turned aside, running blindly in the dark, and lost his way. Finally he recognised a street and made his way, still carrying his father and holding the little boy’s hand, to the gate, and came out to the altar where all his people were waiting for him. Only then he realised his wife wasn’t with them. She’d been behind him when he turned and ran, and he never looked back to see if she was with him. No one had seen her.