Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

He was leaning forward; the firelight gleamed in his eyes; he did not raise his voice but spoke with terrible intensity. Ascanius cowered back from him, catching his breath.

“If you are to rule Latium after me, and pass it to your brother Silvius, I want to know that you’ll learn how to govern, not merely make war, that you’ll learn to ask the powers of earth and sky for guidance for yourself and your people, that you’ll learn to seek your manhood on a greater field than the battlefield. Tell me that you will learn those things, Ascanius.”

“I will, father,” the young man said, in tears.

“Much depended on me,” Aeneas said, more gently. “Much will depend on you. In the end, I did ill. You have begun ill, but I count on you to do well in the end. So, give me your hand on it, son.”

Ascanius put out his hand, and Aeneas drew him into an embrace; they clung hard to each other.

I sat with my distaff, my face turned to the fire. I could not weep.

A few days later, just before the March Kalends, Aeneas sent Ascanius back to the Alban Hills. He said nothing about honoring the truce with Camers; there was no use saying more; he could only hope. He looked a little grim, those early days of March, when the Leapers were in the streets shaking the sacred spears and singing Mars, Mavors, macte esto! But Serestus and Mnestheus came back from Alba Longa reporting that everything was quiet and that Ascanius seemed resolved to keep it so.

It was a warm spring, after the wet winter. Everything was early to bloom and bear. The walnut trees in the forests were beautiful in their quick flowering. Barley and millet came up tall, with heavy heads, and the grass was as thick and tender in the meadows and on the hillsides as I ever saw it. Our flocks and herds had a good increase, and Aeneas was particularly pleased with the crop of new foals in our stables. He had bred a very fine mare to the stallion Latinus gave him, and the bright chestnut colt she bore was his pride. “He’ll be Silvius’ horse,” he said. And he introduced the boy child and the horse child quite solemnly. He let Silvius lead the mare about and see how the colt followed her, and finally set him up on her back for a ride. Silvius was transfixed with terror and delight, clutching the mare’s mane with one hand and his father’s hand with the other, and making a soft noise, “oo! oo!” like a pigeon as they paraded round the stable yard. After that every morning he would ask his father, timidly, “Wide?” And Aeneas would go with him to the stables for his ride.

Our people, my Latins of Lavinium, called Aeneas father. “Will that fence do, Father Aeneas?"—"Father, the barley’s in!"—They spoke to Latinus the same way, and young as I was, I was Mother Lavinia, for we use the words not only for our parents but for those who take responsibility for us. Often a soldier calls his captain his father, and rightly, too, if the captain looks after his men as he should. But Aeneas’ people used the word to him in a particularly affectionate way, caressingly, claiming him. The duty that had been laid on him to lead his people had isolated him as their leader; after his father’s death he had had to make the decisions alone, take responsibility alone; so this bond of affection meant a great deal to him. He tried to deserve it. He took his actual fatherhood with the same seriousness and deep pleasure. It was beautiful to see him walk with Silvius, shortening his stride to the child’s, ever careful of the child’s dignity.

I knew he had greatly honored his own father. He never spoke of his mother and I do not know if he ever knew her. It was with some caution that I asked him about his own early childhood.

“I don’t remember much,” he said. “I was with women, in the woods, on the mountain. A group of women living in the forest.”

“Were they kind to you?”

“Kind, careless. They let me run about… I’d get into trouble, and one of them would come and laugh and scoop me up. I was wild as a bear cub.”

“Then your father came for you?”

He nodded. “A lame man. In armor. I was afraid of him. I remember I tried to hide in the thickets. But the women knew my hiding places. They scooped me up again and handed me over to him.”

“So after that you lived with him?”

“And learned farming and manners and all that.”

“When did you go to Troy?”

“Priam had us come, sometimes. He never liked us.”

“He gave you his daughter,” I said, surprised.

“He didn’t exactly give her,” Aeneas answered, but he did not want to say any more about Creusa, and I did not press him. After a little while he said, “It’s a good place for a child, the woods. You don’t learn much about people, but you learn silence. Patience. And that there’s nothing much to fear in the wilderness—less than there is on a farm or in the city.”

I thought of Albunea, that fearful place where I had never been afraid. I almost asked him to come there with me, but I did not. Though it was so nearby, I had not been there since our marriage. I wanted to go and yet it did not seem the time. I found I could not imagine being there with him. So I said nothing of it.

The weather was so mild in late March that we went over to the coast, a walk of a couple of miles. I wanted Silvius to have a first sight of the ocean. Aeneas carried him perched on his shoulder most of the way. We were a large group winding through the dunes, slaves carrying picnic food, several families, a few extra young men as guards. Everybody, slave and free, children and grown, scattered out on the pale yellow beach as soon as we got there, wading, gathering shells, enjoying the sunlight. Aeneas and I wandered off from the others, leaving Silvius with a group of adoring women and Maruna to keep them from spoiling him. We walked a long way down the shore. I could seldom get out to walk as I used to these days, and it was a wonderful pleasure to step out barefoot on the sand, splashing through the small streams that ran down to the sea, keeping pace with my husband’s even, untiring stride. The sea made its emotionless lament to our right. Looking out over the low breakers to the wave glitter that dissolved in the mist of the horizon, I said, “How far you came! Across that sea—the other seas—years, miles.”

“How far I came to come home,” he said.

After a while I said, though until the moment I said it I had not been perfectly certain of it, “Aeneas, I’m carrying a child.”

He walked on for a while, a smile slowly spreading over his face, then stopped, and stopped me by taking my hands, and took me in a close embrace. “A girl?” he said, as if I would know, and I rashly answered, “A girl.”

“All I want you give me,” he said, hugging the breath nearly out of me, kissing my face and neck. “Dark one, dear one, wife, girl, queen, my Italian, my love.” There were some rocks running down from inland that would hide us from anyone coming down the shore, and we tugged each other towards them. In their shelter we made love, rather hastily and with a good deal of laughter at first because of sand where it was not wanted, but with a rising wild passion, so that at the height of it I felt that he had made me one with the sea and its tides and its deeps. When we came back to the world he lay there on the sand by me, and he was so beautiful I could not look away from him. I touched his breast and arms and face softly with my fingertips, and he lay half asleep in the sunlight, smiling.

We got up and walked out into the water, waist deep, hand in hand, till the cold struck through and the tug of the waves began to take us off our feet. “Let’s go on, let’s go on,” I said, but I was frightened, too. Aeneas suddenly swung me round, half carrying me back to the shore. Then we wandered back to the others. Silvius had fallen asleep under a little awning the women had made out of scarves. There was sand in his small, arched eyebrows, and his face in the pale radiance under the white cloths was very serious. I lay down by him and whispered his name to him, the name I called him secretly, “Aeneas Silvius, Aeneas Silvius.”