Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

“You want him here with you?” Ascanius asked, drily.

I have noticed that some men whose sexual interest is in men not women believe that all women are insatiably lustful of men. I don’t know whether this is a reflection of their own desires, or fear, or mere jealousy, but it fosters a good deal of contempt and misunderstanding. Ascanius tended to look at women that way, and his ardent wish to keep Aeneas’ memory unsullied led him to suspect me with every man. I knew that already. It outraged my honor and disposed me to feel some contempt in return for Ascanius, but neither anger nor scorn would do me any good. I said, “I wish I could keep all Aeneas’ friends, and his elder son, here with me. But I’ve been afraid Achates may take his own life in his grief. I beg you to let him stay here with you, at least through the winter, and send someone else to Alba Longa.”

“I wish I could go myself,” Ascanius said.

He strode up and down the room we were in; he did not look much like his father, but sometimes he moved like him.

“I meant it as an honor for Achates,” he said. “The chief city of Latium is going to be Alba Longa, not Lavinium. The situation is infinitely better—higher, better land—and central to where our power will be when I finally get real control over Rutulia. I thought Achates would take it as an honor. But if he is as broken as you think, I’ll send Mnestheus and Atys. So, you need not kneel, mother.” For I had been ready to go down in the formal posture of supplication, holding his knees. I knew he would not have held out against that. He was not a hard young man, but kindly by nature, and easily swayed, though rigid about hierarchy, formalities, anything that supported his uncertain self-esteem.

And it was not easy for him to keep up that self-esteem here in Lavinium, where the people endlessly mourned Aeneas, honored old Latinus, loved me as daughter and widow of their kings, and resented him. Trying to emulate Aeneas’ authority, he was harsh in manner and often arbitrary in judgment. It was a difficult year for him, even though the harvest was superb and all Latium remained peaceful, with little of the raiding and boundary jumping we had all feared might follow the death of a king at the hands of outlaws.

The winter was a dark one, with long, cold rain, snow up on the hills and even on the piedmont farmlands. I learned at last to weave well, that winter, for if I had no work to keep my hands and mind occupied I could do nothing but hide in my room and weep. I feared for the first time that I had my mother’s weakness, her madness. At night I went into dark places in my mind. I went down underground among shadows and could not find the way up and out. In my room in the darkness I heard babies weeping underfoot. I dared not take a step lest I step on a baby.

I have not told this all in order as it happened. It is still hard to speak of. A month after Aeneas’ death I lost the fetus that might have been my daughter. Only my women knew that I had been pregnant and that the pregnancy miscarried. Only my women and Aeneas knew. I went with Maruna in the dark before dawn and we buried the tiny scrap of life that had not lived, deep under the great stones of Aeneas’ grave.

Ascanius went often to Alba Longa, and in the second summer after Aeneas’ death, not long after he celebrated the Parentalia for his father with all due ritual, he moved there. Trouble had flared up on our borders; he wanted to govern from Alba, a more defensible position. He took with him the Penates of Troy, and Silvius and me. He left Mnestheus and Serestus in charge of Lavinium. Achates chose to stay there, as did most of the older Trojans. The men who followed Ascanius were his particular friends and intimates among the young Trojans, such as Atys who had been his childhood sweetheart, and the group of young Latins who formed his guard and captained his forays. Many of these men were still unmarried; if they had wives they brought them and their household along to settle in Alba. I was allowed to bring twenty women as my retinue. As Ascanius had no wife, we were given all the woman’s side of the Regia, a much bigger and finer house than the small one Aeneas had built in Lavinium. Ascanius’ high house was imposing, and the site of it was more than imposing. It was like living in the sky. From the walls and roofs of the citadel you looked right down on the great lake and across it to the eastern wall of the crater. Farther down the mountain the young vineyards were thriving, as Ascanius had predicted, and the town that sprawled out below the citadel was thriving too, full of activity, building, the coming and going of armed men.

I felt exposed there, always; there were too many great ashen slopes, too much sky, no shade. The water of the lake did not move, did not speak, like the waters I knew, but lay silent, blue, hard. I felt isolated there. I felt useless.

I ran the household for my stepson, of course, obtained and trained slave women to do the housework and cooking and cloth making, and saw to the rites and festivals as always. I would have attended councils and dinners with the men as I had done in my father’s house and my husband’s, but I was not wanted there. Nor did I belong there. Mars ruled in Alba. The talk was all of war, even in the winter season when there was no fighting.

It was not that Ascanius sought to be continually in arms, but he seemed unable to avoid combat, and combat was continually offered along our southern and eastern borders. He met every threat or challenge at once with counteraggression; he followed victory with vengeance, defeat with renewed attack as soon as possible. Truce was rare, peace was gone. He provoked even old Evander to break the alliance. I think he might have been crazy enough to quarrel with the Etruscans, if my father had not prevented him. Latinus kept up a strong friendship with Caere and Veii. He let Ascanius know that if he imperiled that bond, he might have to prove his claim to co-rule western Latium. He was deeply angry with Ascanius, not least for dragging me and Silvius off to Alba.

He came once to visit us there. It was a hard trip for him, for he was an old man and lame with old wounds. He had given Aeneas and me most of his valuables; he came in what state he could, with what few were left of his companion guards, late in December. He accepted Ascanius’ welcoming honors stiffly. He sat with the young men at the feast table and hardly spoke, the servants said. Whenever he could he would come sit with us in the courtyard or at the fire in the weaving hall, and talk with me, and study his grandson.

Silvius’ favorite toys at the time were two big acorns and their cups and a curious litle knot of wood he had found that looked slightly like a horse. With these he was playing most intently down on the hearth, whispering a story about them under his breath. Now and then we could hear a bit of it: “Go on, drink. No. The fat one said not to… Look, is it a house?”

“This is a fine boy, Lavinia,” my father said.

“I know,” I told him, laughing at the lovably predictable.

It was good to laugh. There was little to laugh about in that house.

“You bring him up well.” It was a statement, not an order, but it had a sound of command or warning in it.

“I hope to bring him up as Aeneas would.” Latinus nodded vigorously. “Right,” he said. “Stay with him.”

“I do, father.”

“Your husband was a great warrior, but he sought peace.”

I had thought myself past it, but the tears welled. I fought the sob and did not speak.

“His son might govern well enough in peace,” Latinus said. “But he hasn’t the patience to fight wars. Don’t let him have the training of your son.”

How could I prevent Ascanius from taking over Silvius’ upbringing, if he wanted to? I had no power.