Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

We pondered it as we went back to the woodcutter’s hut.

“It means we’re to stay here, in the forest. Doesn’t it, mother?” Silvius said at last.

It was what I had been thinking, yet my first impulse was to deny it, to say no, it couldn’t be that clear and simple. I said nothing till we came into the clearing, and then, “It seems to mean that. But how…? We can’t lurk here like outcasts or beggars—living off what Maruna can send us.”

“I can hunt, and snare, mother.”

“You certainly can, and you’d better do it, too, if you want meat tonight. But in the long run… People will see us, everybody here knows us, after all! We can’t just vanish into the forest.”

“If we went farther, we could. Up in the hills.”

“For how long, child? Summer, yes; autumn, maybe; winter, no. Life’s hard for those who live apart from others, even if they have a sound roof and a full granary. You and I are too soft for it… But I will not take orders from Ascanius! If I obey him in this, if I give him you, even if I go with you, I will have given your kingship away. He must accept our sovereignty in Lavinium. Where can we go?”

“Well, what if people do recognise us? And find out where we are? Would anybody make us go to Alba? If we said we were supposed to live in the woods—if we told them the oracle said so?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, let’s find out,” Silvius said.

It is pleasant when your child says what you want to say.

“His pigs told him to go to Alba,” I said. “How can he argue with his grandfather, who tells us to stay here?”

I began to remember how, when Faunus told my father in Albunea that I must be married to a foreigner, Latinus had announced it right away to all and sundry. The more people heard it the more powerful it was. Everyone, not just the king, had heard the oracle.

“I think I should go to Lavinium today,” I told Silvius. “You stay here. Get us a rabbit or quail if you can. If anybody but me comes here, disappear. I’ll be back before evening.”

So I walked back along the foothills and across the fields to my city, thinking hard all the way, and entered the gate in mid-morning. I was relieved to find Ascanius had still not sent for Silvius. And I was surprised and touched by the welcome people gave me, crowding round me with greetings and caresses and anxious inquiries. I was the center of a whole throng by the time I had climbed the street to the Regia.

Here’s my chance, I thought. So I turned round there before the house doors, while people of the household came crowding out behind me to make me welcome, and called, “People of my city!” They quieted down to hear me, and I spoke out, hardly knowing what I was going to say from one word to the next. “Last night in the forest of Albunea, in the place of the oracle of my forefathers, I lay down by the altar to sleep. And the voice of King Anchises, father of our King Aeneas, spoke to me in dream, prophesying that his grandson Silvius was to live with me in the woods of Latium. In obedience to this foretelling, I will neither send my son to Alba Longa nor keep him here in Lavinium, but he and I will live in the forest until the signs and portents bid us do otherwise. The voice in the dream called Silvius king and father of kings. May you rejoice in that knowledge as I do!” They put up a great shout at that, which heartened me, and I ended—"But till Silvius comes to the age of rule, Ascanius rules alone, and my city will continue to be governed by Ascanius and by his father’s friends.”

“But where will you go off to in the wilderness, little queen?” some old fellow in the crowd called out, and I answered, “Not far, friend! My heart is in Lavinium, with you!” That made them cheer again, and I entered my house amid a considerable tumult, my heart beating very hard. Achates was there to meet me. Riding the goodwill of my people, I forestalled what he might have said, saying to him, “My friend, I know Ascanius ordered you to bring Silvius to Alba Longa. As your queen, I ask you to obey me, leaving Silvius with me, letting the prophecy be fulfilled.”

He accepted that with a slow bow of his head, saying only, “You saw the Lord Anchises?"—incredulous yet wistful, urgent, wanting to believe me.

“No, but I heard a voice, that spoke as if to Aeneas. I took it to be his father’s voice. The fathers speak, in Albunea.”

Achates hesitated and then asked, “Did you see him?” Him was Aeneas, of course, and Achates spoke with such love and longing that the tears came into my eyes. I could only shake my head, and after a while I said, “He was there with me, Achates. For a moment.”

But as I said it I knew that it was not true. Aeneas had not been there with me as a man in the flesh, nor had Anchises spoken. It was the poet who spoke. It was all the words of the poet, the words of the maker, the foreteller, the truth teller: nothing more, nothing less. But was I myself any more, or less, than that?

And this was nothing I could say to any living soul, or ever did, till now.

I had been right to count on Ascanius’ respect for portents and oracles, which he had learned from his father but exaggerated almost to superstition. He was rigid in all observances; he longed to be called pious, as Aeneas was. Piety to him meant a man’s obedience to the will of higher powers, a safe righteousness. He would never have believed that Aeneas saw his victory over Turnus as his own defeat. He did not understand that in his father’s piety lay his tragedy.

I may misjudge him; he may have come to share some of Aeneas’ anguish of conscience, as he grew older. But I never knew Ascanius well.

At any rate, when Achates and Serestus took word to him of my decision, he entertained them without berating them for obeying me rather than him, and sent back no clear message at all to me. I think he felt himself forestalled by the combination of forces I had brought against him—the sacred oracle of the Italians speaking with the hallowed voice of the Trojan grandfather. By silence he gave consent.

So began the period of our “exile,” no exile at all compared to that of the old Trojans forever homesick for their fallen city, our “living in the woods,” which turned out to be a pretty easy life. I sent for some carpenters to come brace up the woodcutter’s hut and thatchers to replace the rat-infested, rain-rotted roof. They ended up rebuilding the whole thing, adding on a second room and building a proper hearth, while volunteers swarmed in the clearing chopping brambles and spading and putting in a kitchen garden with every herb and vegetable that grows in Latium, even a sapling walnut tree and a full-grown Sicilian caperberry bush. They wanted to put a fence around it all, but I forbade it. “Wolves, queen,” old Girnus said—"bears—!” And I said, “There are no bears in Albunea, and if a wolf comes here I will call him brother.” They took that saying back to Lavinium, and some people called me Mother Wolf, after that.

The way from town to the woodcutter’s hut soon became a beaten path, and I had to limit the number of volunteer workmen and visitors to a few and only on certain days, or we would have had no peace there at all. When, late in summer, all the workmen were done and it was quiet again, it was very quiet. Silvius was off all day in the forest or at his lessons—for the old Trojans took his education in hand with vigor, and put him through a merciless daily schedule of exercises, military drills, weapons training, music, recitation, and equitation. When I had cleaned my house and tended my garden, I had little to do, and being used to having a great household to run, I was bored and lonely at first. I felt myself useless, a fraud. The Regias I had managed with such hard work and endless care in Laurentum, in Lavinium, in Alba Longa, were all going on perfectly well without me. Maruna, with Sicana as her second in command, kept the house in Lavinium, and did the worship as I had trained her long ago to do; so I could not ask her to be with me in the forest.