Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

“They’re much better looking than I thought foreigners would be,” Silvia whispered to me. “That boy with the red cap is gorgeous.” I hushed her with a nudge of my elbow. I was afraid they might hear us, since we could hear them clearly enough, though to be sure the wind was blowing our way.

Red Cap said something about the meal being fit for rabbits not men, and young Ascanius said, “Well, it’s not at every meal that you get to eat the table too.”

At that Aeneas looked at him as if startled. After gazing motionless for a minute he stood up. They all looked up at him.

“That is the omen,” he said, his voice ringing clear and solemn. “‘When hunger drives you to eat your tables, there will be your journey’s end.’ You remember what the Harpy said to us?”

A murmur of assent and awe ran among them all, those travel-weary men and boys and few women sitting there on the grass above the river. They did not take their eyes off Aeneas.

“Euryalus, bring me a myrtle bough,” he said, and Red Cap ran to break off a bough. Aeneas bent it into a wreath to cover his head, and stretched out his arms, his hands palm up to the sky. He said, “Dear faithful gods of the house of Troy! This is your promised land at last! We are home, my people, we have come home!” He looked round at them all and his face shone with tears. He prayed again: “Hear us, spirit of this place, and spirits and rivers we do not yet know! Night, and the rising stars! My father in the underworld and my mother in the heavens, hear our prayer!” Then he turned round and drew a deep breath. “Achates!” he shouted in a tremendous voice. “Tell them to bring the wine up from the ship!”

At that moment Silvia nudged me. Seven or eight men with bows and arrows were trotting in single file across the clearing to our left. It was time for us to be out of there.

We crept under the shelter of the cork oaks into thick woods to our right, and through them back over the crest of the hill and so down the way we’d come. We were home before evening. At the farm, Silvia turned to me and gave me a big hug. We were both sweaty from our long run, we stuck to each other when we hugged. We laughed, and Silvia said, “That was a good idea, going there!” So we parted for the last time.

When I got back to the Regia I heard that my father had given orders that no one was to approach the strangers’ camp until he had determined who they were and why they had brought longships and armed men into the heart of Latium. I said nothing, of course, about my hare-brained exploit, but slipped into the house, washed and put on a clean tunic, and sat spinning away as if I’d never set foot outside the door in my life.

The word was that the king was going to send Drances with a party of men to talk to the strangers in the morning. But next day before Drances even set out, people ran shouting, “They’re coming!"—and a small troop of foreigners came riding up to the city gates.

Their horses looked poorly, as well they might, poor creatures, after a sea voyage, but they were decked out with silver-mounted bridles and trappings, and the men were grand in embroidered cloaks, bronze breastplates, and tall helmets with crests of horsehair or feathers. I could get only a glimpse of the troop from our doorway as they rode up the Via Regia, before the women were sent off to the back of the house; but I saw Aeneas was not with them.

While Drances and other officials brought them in and escorted them to the king’s audience hall, I went through the royal apartments and entered the audience hall through the king’s door, behind his seat. He had not bidden me to be there; but I had been present with or without my mother at many audiences, as a courtesy to the visitors and to welcome their wives and daughters, and if he did not want me now, he had only to send me away.

I do not think he knew at first that I was there. He was already speaking to the Trojan envoys. He welcomed them with stately courtesy and asked immediately, though politely, where they came from and the cause of their visit to Latium: had they perhaps gone astray or been driven out of their course on the high seas?

A tall, thin Trojan introduced himself as Ilioneus, and in a spate of elegant and respectful language explained that they had come to the kingdom of the great Latinus following the command of fate. Natives of the noble city of Troy, which had withstood a ten-year siege by the Greeks but had fallen at last to treachery, they had escaped from the burning.

As the herald spoke, I heard the poet’s voice overlapping his as a sea wave running up the shore overtakes and overlaps the wave before it. I knew then that the high house of the king and all of us in it had being only in those words. And that knowledge changed nothing. The messenger still must speak, the king must listen, the king’s daughter must follow her fate.

The messenger spoke on: oracles had bidden them bring the gods of Troy over the seas to the far shore of Italy, where they would find a home. Their lord Aeneas son of Anchises had led them for seven years across land and sea, and though other kings had asked them to stay, he would offer alliance only to Latinus, who reigned over the land promised them by the oracle. And in earnest of his goodwill, Aeneas offered to the king some poor fragments, saved from the fallen city, that had belonged to his father’s brother King Priam of Troy.

One of the Trojans came forward and laid at my father’s feet a marvelous tall libation cup that looked to be of solid gold carved and jeweled, a silver rod or wand, a thin, old, gold crown, and a delicate weaving of royal crimson embroidered with gold thread.

My father gazed down at these things in silence for some time, neither accepting nor refusing them. At last he asked the envoy to tell him more about the city of Troy and their quarrel with the Greeks, and then something of their seven-year voyage across the Middle Sea, all of which Ilioneus did. My father asked if they had stopped in Sicily, and Ilioneus said that they had left a colony there; he asked if they had been in touch with the Greek settlement south of us, whose king was Diomedes, and Ilioneus said that they had not, Diomedes being a veteran of the siege of Troy and not likely to be well disposed to Trojans. All his answers were both direct and graceful.

My father let silence fall again, looking downward, his eyes moving as they followed his thoughts.

At last he looked up. “Oracles, you say, bade you come to this country,” he said. “I will tell you that your coming also was foretold. I think, my friends, that we are to enact what fate will have us do. If your chief Aeneas seeks alliance, if he seeks to settle here with us, I will ask him to come to my city and offer me his hand, even as he has offered me these noble gifts. And I will take it, as I accept them, in sign of friendship and pledge of peace. And say this also to him: my only daughter is bidden by our oracle to marry a stranger, a man who, even as the oracle spoke, was coming to us. I think your lord Aeneas is the man. And if my mind sees truly, this marriage is what I wish. So bid him come.” He stood up, and only then, I think, did he see me; but he showed no surprise, he only looked at me with serene, affectionate eyes, a look of perfect certainty, smiling a little.

He did not introduce the envoys to me, but moved among them, admiring their noble gifts, ordering our people to bring out gifts for them. I backed away quietly through the door I had come in.

To hear myself promised as part of a treaty, exchanged like a cup or a piece of clothing, might seem as deep an insult as could be offered to a human soul. But slaves and unmarried girls expect such insult, even those of us who have been allowed liberty enough to pretend we are free. My liberty had been great, and so I had dreaded its end. So long as it could end only with Turnus or the other suitors, I had felt that insult, that bondage awaiting me, the only possible outcome. I had been the dove tied to the pole, flapping its silly wings as if it could fly, while the boys below shouted and pointed and shot at it till at last an arrow struck.