Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

For a moment I heard the voice, the voice like no other, in my memory. When the poet first came, when he first stood there in the altar place, he had said that Faunus spoke from the trees of Albunea to King Latinus, telling him not to marry his daughter to a man of Latium. Then, seeing me startled and troubled by that, he said, “I think it has not happened yet. Faunus has not spoken to Latinus. Perhaps it never will happen.” And he said that perhaps he had imagined it, that it was a dream within a dream.

And I had imagined it. It had not happened. It would not happen. False dreams, visions, follies.

The roofs were standing hard black against the paling eastern sky when I went in and lay down for a little while.

It was a day of worship, and I was up before the sun. I put on the red-edged toga I wore as a child and still wore for the rites, and went to wake my father, calling with the ritual words at his door: “Do you wake, king? Waken!” And soon he came out, also in his red-edged robe, the loose corner pulled up over his head for worship, and we went to the altar in the atrium.

A number of the house people were with us, among them my mother, who did not usually attend the common rituals. She stood quite close behind me as I scattered the salsamola on the altar. I had the sense that she intended to be close to me, to keep me under her eyes, within reach, all that day, till she got what she wanted. The warmth, the pressure of her body so close behind me was palpable, and I wanted to escape it. I moved closer to my father as he held a little pitch-dipped stick in Vesta’s fire and lifted it to light the altar torches, murmuring the sacred words. I do not know if the pitch scattered, or a wind blew in, or a hand moved, but I suddenly saw a strangeness all around me, a flickering movement of brightness. There were voices crying, screaming—"Lavinia, Lavinia! her hair’s on fire—she’s burning—” I put up my hands to my head and felt a queer soft movement in the air about it. Sparks danced and leapt around me, and I smelled smoke. As I turned I saw through a yellowish, dim cloud my mother standing there not an arm’s length from me. She stared with wild eyes at something above my head. I turned and ran from her, ran through the people, through the atrium, out to the courtyard. Flame and yellow smoke followed me, sparks scattered from me, people screamed, I heard my father call my name. I ran to the fountain pool under the laurel and threw myself down, my face in the water, my hair in the water.

My father was there kneeling by me, lifting me up. “Lavinia, little one, daughter, my daughter,” he whispered. “Are you hurt, are you hurt, let me see.”

I was very bewildered, but I saw amazement dawning through the horror in his face. He passed his hand over my dripping head, down my lank wet hair.

“Can it be you took no harm?”

“What was it, father? There was a fire—”

“A fire above your head. Leaping, blazing. I thought it was your hair—I thought the torch had caught it—Are you not hurt? not burned?”

I put my own hand on my head; I was dizzy, but my scalp and hair felt as usual, only sopping wet. Nothing was burned but the corner of my toga which I had worn pulled up over my head at the altar. All that corner of the white, red-bordered wool was scorched black.

The whole household was gathered around us by now, filling the courtyard, shouting and crying and asking and answering. My mother stood by the trunk of the laurel, her face fixed, blank. My father looked up at her and said, “She took no harm, Amata. She is all right!”

She answered something, I don’t know what. Maruna’s mother pressed forward; she knelt beside us and touched my head and cheeks gently, a license allowed her as a healer. She looked then at my father and said sternly, imperiously, “An omen, king. Speak the omen!”

And he obeyed the slave. He stood up. He looked down at me, and up into the great tree, and spoke. “War,” he said.

All the people fell silent at his voice.

“War,” he said again, and then, as if struggling with the words, or as if the words pushed themselves from his throat and mouth without his will: “Bright fame, bright glory will crown Lavinia. But she brings her people war.”

Gradually everything and everyone got quieted down. People scattered out, talking all the way, to their morning work. Vestina took me off to dry my hair and weep and fuss over me, while the red-bordered toga with the blackened, burnt corner passed from hand to hand among the marveling women.

The rite that had been interrupted must be begun again and carried out. That was so much on my mind that at last I broke free from the women to go assist my father; but he sent me back at once to the women’s quarters, telling me to send Maruna to help him. I should rest, he said, and come to him later.

I was glad of it, for I found myself shaky and light-headed. “I think I need to eat something,” I said when I came back to the women’s side, and Vestina cried, “Of course, of course, poor lamb!” and sent girls off to fetch curds and honey and spelt porridge, all of which I ate, and felt better.

My mother had been in the room with us all along, but did not join the chatter. She sat at her great loom. I was a good spinning-woman, I made as strong and even a thread as any, but I was slow and clumsy at the loom. Amata was by far the best of our weavers, working fast, with a steady rhythm and utter concentration; when she was weaving she was aware of nothing else, and her face looked rapt and calm. The very fine woolen thread I had been spinning all this spring was for the piece she was working on now, a full breadth of the finest white fabric, the kind you can gather yards of into your hand and pass through a finger ring. Today, as the women at last began talking about something besides the mysterious flame of fire, and how the yellow smoke had swirled behind me when I ran, and how sparks flew all through the house yet nothing caught fire from them, and so on, and on, my mother turned round from the loom and beckoned to me. I went to her.

“Do you know what it is I’m making, Lavinia?” she asked with the strangest smile, a wide, blind smile that was almost coy.

As soon as she asked me the question I knew the answer. But I said, “A summer palla.”

“Your wedding gown. You’ll wear it when you marry. See how fine it is!”

“Your weaving’s always beautiful, mother.”

“You’ll wear it when you marry, when you marry him,” she said, almost as if it were the refrain of a song, and she turned back to the loom and took up the shuttle. And as she wove she whispered that half song under her breath, “You’ll wear it when you marry, when you marry him.”

About midday I went alone to my father’s rooms. As I crossed the courtyard I paused under the laurel tree and asked the powers of the tree and the spring, the Lar of the household and my dear Penates, to be with me and help me. All I had thought and seen so clearly last night, sitting there on the bench under the stars, all I had so firmly and reasonably resolved, was gone, burnt away in a puff of heatless flame, a coil of yellow smoke. I knew what I must say, but I wanted help in saying it.

My father embraced me and tried to make certain once again that I was quite unhurt, unburnt, unshaken.

“I am well, father,” I said. “I was terribly hungry, though. I ate everything they brought from the kitchen.” That reassured him, as I knew it would. “Now may I speak to you about my suitors?”

He sat down on the chest against the wall and gave one grave nod.

“I said I would ask you today to give me to one of them.”

A nod.

“But because of what happened this morning—the omen—I ask you not to ask me my choice, but instead to go to Albunea, and ask the powers there. Whatever they tell you, I will obey.”