Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

I was summoned to dinner in the great hall that day. My mother and I put on our finest light robes, with the women goose-gabbling all about us and fussing with our hair. Sicana set out for my mother the great necklace of gold and garnets that was Latinus’ wedding gift to her, but she put it aside and wore a necklace and earrings of silver and amethyst which her uncle Daunus had given her as a parting gift. She looked joyful and radiant. I thought that as usual I could hide behind her, effaced and protected by her imperious beauty.

But during the meal, while Turnus talked affably with both my father and my mother, he looked at me. He didn’t stare, but he looked again and again, with a slight smile. I became embarrassed as I never had been. His intense blue eyes began to frighten me. Every time I dared glance up, he was looking at me.

I hadn’t given any thought to love and marriage. What was there to think about? When it came time for me to be married, I’d be married, and find out what love was, and childbirth, and the rest of it. Until then, it was nothing to me. Silvia and I could tease each other and joke about a handsome young farmer who made eyes at her, or her eldest brother Almo who sometimes hung around to talk to me, but it was all words, it meant nothing. No man in the house, in the city, in all the country, could look at me as Turnus was looking. My realm was virginity and I was at home in it, unthreatened and at ease. No man had ever made me blush.

Now I felt myself burning red from the roots of my hair clear down to my breasts, to my knees. I cowered with shame. I couldn’t eat. The besieging army was at the walls.

Turnus would certainly have recognised the poet’s portrait of me as a shrinking silent maiden. My mother, beside whom I sat, was well aware of my discomfort, and it did not displease her; she let me cower, and talked away to Turnus about Ardea. I don’t know if she made a signal to my father or he came to his own decision, but as soon as the meat trenchers had been removed, and the boy had thrown the offering into the fire, and the servants were going round with ewers and napkins and refilling wine goblets for the aftercourse, he bade my mother send me away.

“We are losing the flower of the feast,” the visiting king protested graciously.

“The child needs her sleep,” said my father.

Turnus lifted his cup—the double-handled gold goblet from Cures engraved with a hunting scene, loot from one of my father’s wars, our best piece of tableware—and said, “Fairest of all the daughters of Father Tiber, may you have sweet dreams!”

I sat paralysed.

“Get along with you,” my mother murmured to me, with something like a laugh.

I slipped out as quick as I could, barefoot, for I didn’t want to stop to put my sandals on. I heard Turnus’ resonant voice behind me in the hall, but not what he said. My ears were ringing. The night air in the courtyard was like cold water dashed over my hot face and body, making me gasp and shiver.

In the women’s side I was of course pounced on by all the girls and women telling me and one another how glorious and gorgeous the young king was, how big and tall, how he’d hung up his helmet and a huge sword and a gilt bronze breastplate like a giant’s in the hall, and asking me what had he said at dinner? and did I like him? I couldn’t answer. Vestina helped me drive them all away, saying I looked feverish and needed to go to bed. After I’d finally persuaded her too to leave me alone, I could lie in my bed in my small silent room and look at Turnus.

Of course it was foolish to ask if I liked him. A young girl meeting a man, a handsome man, a king, who may be her first suitor, does not like or dislike him. Her heart beats, her blood runs, and she sees him—sees him only: maybe as the rabbit sees the hawk, maybe as the earth sees the sky. I saw Turnus as a city sees a splendid stranger, a captain of armies, at the city gate. That he was there, that he had come, was wonderful and terrible. Nothing would ever be the same again. But there was no need, yet, to unbar the gate.

Turnus stayed several days with us, but I met him again only once. He requested my presence at dinner on his last evening, and I was sent in to the feast, but not to eat with the guests and company, only for the aftercourse, to hear the singing and see the dancers. I sat with my mother, and again Turnus looked often at me, making no effort to disguise it. He smiled at us. His smile was a pleasant, quick flash. When he was watching the dancers, I looked at him. I noticed how small his ears were, that his head was well shaped, that his jaw was square and strong. He might get jowly, later in life. The back of his neck was pleasant, smooth. I saw that he was attentive and respectful to my father, who, sitting near him, looked old.

My mother was ten or twelve years older than her nephew, but tonight she did not look it; her eyes shone and she laughed. She and Turnus got on well together and were at ease. They talked lightly across the table, and the other guests joined in, and my father listened to them benevolently.

The day after Turnus left, my father sent for me and my mother. We walked under the portico outside the banquet hall; he had sent away all the people that usually were around him. It was a rainy spring day, and he was wearing his toga, for as he got older he felt the cold. He paced with us in silence for a while and then said, “The Rutulian king began to say to me last night that he wishes to be a suitor for your hand, Lavinia. I did not let him go on. I said that you are not yet of an age for me to permit talk of courtship or marriage. He would have argued, of course, but I did not let him argue. I said my daughter is too young.”

He looked at us both. I had no idea what to say. I looked at my mother.

“You gave him no encouragement at all?” Amata asked, calm and civil, as she always was with her husband.

“I didn’t say that she’ll always be too young,” my father answered in his mild, dry way.

“King Turnus has a great deal to offer his bride,” she said.

“He does indeed. Good land down there. He’s a good fighter, too, they say. His father certainly was.”

“I am sure he is a brave warrior.”

“And wealthy.”

We paced on down the portico. Rain pattered in the courtyard, the leaves of the lemon trees nodded. Under the big laurel tree it was still quite dry, and one of the house girls sat there spinning and singing a long spinning song.

“So you might favor the boy if he comes back another year?” my father asked my mother.

“I might,” she said coolly. “If indeed he is willing to wait.”

“And you, Lavinia?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, my dear,” he said. “There’s plenty of time for this sort of thing.”

“What would you do about tending Vesta?” I said—I could not bring myself to say, “if I went off to be married.”

“Well, we must think about that. Choose a girl to whom you can begin to teach the duties.”

“Maruna,” I said at once.

“An Etruscan?”

“Her mother is. You took her on a raid across the river. Maruna grew up here. She’s pious.” By that word I meant responsible, faithful to duty, open to awe. My father had taught me the meaning of the word and the value of it.

“Good. Take her with you when you tend the fire and clean the hearth and make the sacred salt. Let her begin to learn all these matters.”

My mother had nothing to say in this; it is the king’s daughter who keeps his hearth alight. It was bitter to both my parents, I know, that when we sat to dinner every day the boy who fed the altar fire with our food and spoke the blessing was not their son, as he should have been, but only a servant boy. Now the care of the fire and the storerooms too must go to a substitute, a slave.