Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

We all straggled up to the grassy level under the trees and set down burdens and drew breath for a while. Amata stood and talked to us, telling us that this was the festival of the Caprotinae as the Rutulians celebrated it in their hills—a festival of women, for women only. “We will set guards,” she said. “If a man comes near us, he must be driven away. If he refuses to go, or if he tries to spy on us, it’s death for him, worse than death! For if he spies on our mysteries that’s the end of his manhood—he’ll go back down the mountain a eunuch! Balina brought four sharp swords with her, and four strong women will keep watch day and night on the paths. And the powers of the hills and wilderness wait to curse the man who dares approach us. For Mars must stay below us here, Mars must keep down at the fields’ edge and the forests’ edge, standing on his boundaries. The heights and the wild forests are ours, ours alone, for our worship and our revels. And look, look, the sun rises! Greet the day, sisters! Sicana, open a wine jug, pass it around!”

So the day began with drinking, and by noon some of the women were too drunk to dance; they laughed and screeched and vomited and fell over and slept where they fell. Amata taught us the dances and songs of her Caprotinae, and a sacred game in which the older women tried to catch the younger ones and whip them with fig branches, shouting out crude joking songs about men’s penises and women’s vulvas; and we held other ceremonies at altars we raised to Fauna of the wilderness, and the Juno of women, and Ceres who swells the seed in the womb of Earth to be born as the bread of life. Slaves were sent back down to the city to fetch more wine. During the day, groups of women began to straggle in, coming from other households in the city, drawn by curiosity about this new women’s rite and by solidarity with their queen. I found myself in an odd position with these townswomen, who were all outraged for me and enraged at my father. They hung about me to commiserate, and pet me, and encourage me in my love and fidelity to Turnus of Ardea. Their indignation and kindness were real and touching, and yet as unreal as all the rest of this escape, this mistake.

I played the part of the meek voiceless maiden all through this masquerade up in the hills. I could not bring myself to tell these sympathetic matrons that I had no love at all for Turnus and wanted only to obey my father and the oracle. To do so would be to betray my mother, and to turn her rage against me. I was a coward. I felt false, frightened, incredulous, scornful, and alone.

My mother had brought none of my women up here to the hills, only her women; and for all her wild gaiety and seeming abandon, she never let me out of her sight. I was very glad when I saw, among the last group of newcomers, Maruna. She had put on my best palla, for that was the rule, the servant to dress as mistress and the mistress as servant. I winked at her to let her know I’d seen her, and seen my best palla, too, but we kept our distance and did not speak. Slight and quiet, Maruna had a gift of going unnoticed, very useful to a slave. She kept with the group she’d come with and did as all the others did, and I think my mother never noticed her.

During the evening Amata began to drink—she had only tasted and pretended, till then—and by nightfall she was not drunk, but mellowed, less hectic, and enjoying the escapade far more than she had pretended to till then. Her laugh came from deep in her belly. I had never heard her laugh like that. It made her seem strange, another woman, a woman she might have been. I felt an aching pang of grief for her.

“Lavinia,” she called me, and when I came to her, picking my way among the women sprawled about in the grass amid the little flickering oil lamps and the low boughs of the great fig trees, “Lavinia, I sent for him, last night, before we left. I sent a messenger on horseback. He should be here tomorrow. Your wedding night, my darling!”

I knew who he was, and what she meant; it was all part of the craziness, the unreality, but in her game I had to play the game. “How will he know where to come?”

“The women will tell him. They’re looking out for him, they’ll catch him before he ever gets into the city. He should be here by this time tomorrow.”

“But men are not allowed here among us,” I said.

“Oh, this one is,” my mother said, in that deep melting laughing voice.

She pulled at my hand to make me sit down beside her. She leaned close to me and whispered in my ear, “There will be such a wedding night here in the hills! And then to Ardea. Home to Ardea! It’s all planned. All planned!”

She kept me by her all night. I had to sleep close to her and the group of women she was drinking and gambling with, in the light of their lamps fixed on low branches. I slept only in snatches all night long, waking up always with a start, my mind racing. I kept telling myself not to worry, all I had to do was go along with whatever my mother wanted until her game played itself out, as it must, in confusion and disillusion and retreat. But she had sent for Turnus—what if he came? What if she handed me over to him in a mock wedding, a real rape? What if he took me off to Ardea? There would be nothing, nothing I could do. At the thought my body went stiff, my hands clenched, and I hid my face in my arms. I had to get away from here. I had to find a way to escape. But even if I could creep away, I could not find my way through the forest in the dark: the guards were watching the path we had come by, and it was a long way through wild, broken hills. The best I could hope for was to get far enough away to hide for the rest of the night and then follow a stream down to the lowlands. But my mother’s women were all around me, still awake, the tiny lamps still flickering. And beyond them, the guards.

The same series of thoughts—the effort to reassure myself, the shock of thinking Turnus might come, the attempt to imagine a way to escape—repeated itself in my head, round and round, again and again, all night. Sometimes I slept and had snatches of dreams of my poet, not in the altar place of Albunea but here in the wild hills; he seemed to be nearby, near one of the oil lamps, but he was deformed, shrunken into a stump of shadow, mumbling words I could not understand. Then I would wake to the endless repetition of the same thoughts.

I got up at the first hint of light. Seeing Amata asleep at last among her women, I slipped away towards the dell we had been using as a place to piss, and for a moment I thought I could simply walk on—but just past the dell, Gaia was standing on guard, leaning on a naked sword as if it were a cane. She greeted me loudly, with a stupid smile. She was a sweeper, not quite right in her wits; she was devoted to my mother, as were many of these women. If Amata had told her not to let me pass, she would not let me pass. Amata was not a particularly kind mistress, she showed little affection, but she was not stingy, not cruel, and did not play favorites: that was more than enough to win loyalty. And her grief for her lost sons gave her a kind of sanctity among the women of her household. “The poor queen,” I had heard them say a thousand times, and it never seemed strange to me that they still pitied her. They were right. She was an unhappy woman.

Many of us slept late and got up staggering. Food and drink had nearly given out, and groups went down to Laurentum to bring stores from their own storehouses and from the Regia. There was a good deal of coming and going, but I could not slip away or join a group going down to the city, as I hoped, for if Amata was not with me, tall Sicana and dour Lina always were, keeping watch.

I and some slave girls were the only young women here; the city matrons had left their virgin daughters safe at home. But women with babies at the breast had of course brought their nurslings, and I passed much of the day relieving tired mothers by rocking fretful babies. It saved me from having to talk with half-drunken adults. And the babies were a relief from the falseness, the insanity of what we were doing. They were solid, real, and needy. They were too young to imagine anything. Looking after them was a comfort to me, for which of course I was overpraised and flattered—look how kind the king’s daughter is to the slave’s child. Look how kind the slave’s child is to the king’s daughter, I thought, as a sweet, languid little girl smiled up at me, falling asleep in my arms.