Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

Ascanius went off with his bosom friend Atys, and a tiny army, all mounted on good horses and well armed, helmet plumes nodding, proud and handsome. He stayed in Alba Longa, and sent satisfactory reports to his father. The experiment appeared to be successful.

It was a great relief to me to have him gone. I would have Aeneas to myself and unworried by his son, all the rest of the summer, the autumn, the winter. I did not think about the spring. Spring would come. Janus would open the gates and Mars would bring it in as ever. I need not think about it.

Cattle rustlers and bands of brigands, poor men from Rutulia and the hill country east of Latium, were a perpetual threat to outlying farms; the Aequians and Sabines, who lived up the Tiber and its tributary the Allia, harassed Evander’s settlement and sometimes sailed down the father river in their war canoes, hoping to raid the salt beds, so that Aeneas had manned ships anchored at his old camp at Venticula to chase them off. But these were no more than the troubles my father had always had, and Latium was as much at peace again as when I was a child. Aeneas could give his mind to building and farming and flocks and herds, to hunting, which he loved as his son did, and to the ever-recurring rituals, which he loved as I did.

We who are called royal are those who speak for our people to the powers of the earth and sky, as those powers transmit their will through us to the people. We are go-betweens. The chief duty of a king is to perform the rites of praise and placation as they should be performed, to observe care and ceremony and so understand and make known the will of the powers that are greater than we are. It is the king who tells the farmer when to plow, when to plant, when to harvest, when the cattle should go up to the hills and when they should return to the valleys, as he learns these things from his experience and his service at the altars of earth and sky. In the same way it is the mother of the family who tells her household when to rise, what work to do, what food to prepare and cook, and when to sit to eat it, having learned these things from her experience and her service at the altars of her Lares and Penates. So peace is maintained and things go well, in the kingdom and in the house. Both Aeneas and I had grown up in this responsibility, and it was dear to us both.

He and Latinus divided their royal duties harmoniously, the younger man always deferring to the old man but ready to take the burden from him if he tired. Not all our Latin customs were familiar to Aeneas the Trojan, but he took up our rituals as if born to them and performed them with a ready grace. I remember him as he led the Ambarvalia, that spring, the bright spring.

Every farmer was doing the same rite on his own land, leading his own household through the ceremony; Latinus would be going to his land under the walls of Laurentum while Aeneas led the procession down from Lavinium to the royal fields. During the days before, we had done a good deal of work in the house to prepare, washing the white clothes everybody wore—they must be washed in running water, which meant a lot of trips down to the river—and gathering good herbs, lucky herbs, and weaving them into garlands for both people and animals. Everyone who participated was supposed to refrain from sex the night before and come to the ceremony chaste.

The silence was what I had always loved best about Ambarvalia. Nobody spoke. People, like animals, walked saying nothing. It wasn’t actually a requirement, but because any word spoken would carry unearthly weight, and a word said amiss might bring disaster to the crops and beasts, it was easier and better not to speak at all. Only the king and his assistants in the ceremony spoke “with the lucky tongue,” almost inaudibly repeating the litanies which old Ferox lined out for them a few words at a time, his voice soft and expressionless. Ferox had farmed this piece of land long before we built Lavinium near it; he had known the litanies and led the circumambulation of the fields for sixty years. He was the true lord of the rites.

Aeneas followed him, leading a white lamb wreathed about with the leaves of fruit trees and wild olive, and we all followed after, clear around the field three times, from boundary stone to boundary stone, facing Janus and turning our backs on him as he faced and turned his back on us. We walked in silence, so that we heard the sound of our garments, and our bare feet on the plowland, and our breathing, and the birds singing the spring in, up in the oak groves.

Then Aeneas led the lamb to the old stone altar topped with a fresh turf of grass, and made the sacrifice. You can tell a great deal about a man from how he performs sacrifice. Aeneas’ hands on the leggy ram-lamb were calm and gentle, his knife stroke sudden and sure; the lamb went down softly on its knees and then its side as if it were lying down to sleep, dead before it could be frightened.

During the sacrifice old Ferox prayed aloud, telling the spirits of the place that as we now with our gift of life increased their numen, their power itself, so we asked them to give us increase and keep harm from the planted fields. And then, with other old men, loud and harsh, he sang the Arval Song:

So we had drawn the silent circle of protection around the fields, and prayed to the implacable power of the place and season, and now came the dancing, and the feasting, and the carols and love songs.

Of that song Ferox and the old men sang, Aeneas told me he had never heard anything like it, nor had he known the Mars we know. The Mars of his people was a bringer of war and disorder only, not a guardian of the herds and flocks, not the power that holds the thin boundary between the tame and the wild. He asked the old men about the song and about Mars, and I know he pondered over what they said.

He had not known the song in far-off Troy, but my poet had known it in far-off Mantua, across the mountains, in the dark of time to come, hundreds of years after I first heard it sung. That night in Albunea when we talked about our households and our ways, I asked the poet if his people kept Ambarvalia, and he smiled at me and sang, to the tune that was ancient even when I knew it, Enos Lases iuvate! —Be with us, Lares, help us.

Mars’ time is the season of the farmer and the warrior: spring and summer. In October the lances and shields of the Leapers are put away. War ends as the harvest comes home. That year Latinus held the October Horse ceremony, the only time we sac rifice a horse except at the funeral of a king. People came from all over Latium for it, grateful for the peace of the realm and the excellence of the harvest. It was the last great ceremony held at Laurentum.

We went there to stay several days, and Aeneas assisted my father in the rites. I could no longer do so, since my marriage, for I was not the daughter of his household any longer, being the mother of my own. But little Silvius, Latinus’ heir, was allowed to take the plate of sacred food from the table to the hearth after dinner and cast the food into the Vestal fire. Maruna’s mother went with him and prevented him from dropping the plate as well as the food into the fire. “Only the beans, Silvius,” she whispered, and he, very solemn, said, “Ony bees.” He was supposed to say, “The gods are favorable,” but we said it for him.

That was a good autumn, rich and mild, and the winter rains were long and soft. In the press of daily occupation and obligation, and the continual delights and anxieties of caring for Silvius, and the unfailing joy and pleasure of Aeneas’ companionship and love, I lost track of the passage of the days; they were all one day and long, blessed night. But once in a while I would wake for no reason deep in the winter darkness, my body and soul as cold as the ice on the river’s edge, thinking: This is the third winter.