Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

But after a time I began to like my solitude. I lost the wish for any visitor or voice to break the silence of the trees, threaded always with the singing of insects and birds and the sound of wind in leaves. I gardened, and spun, and wove on the big loom set up in the second room, and was content with silence, until my son came back at evening to eat with me and talk a little, quietly, before sleep.

And so the years passed.

There were some border incidents, but Ascanius seemed to have lost his unhappy knack of stirring up wars. His marriage had been celebrated with great ceremony, his Rutulian wife kept his house in royal fashion, and they were said to be a happy couple. But they had no child. After a few years, Ascanius called in wise women and soothsayers. The wise women said that Salica was in perfect health and there was no reason she should not conceive. The soothsayers all foretold that she would die barren. They gave no cause or cure, and their prophecies were cloaked in images and cloudy language, for if the fault was in Ascanius they did not wish to say so.

I heard this and other news as gossip from Illivia and other women who came to visit with me, and from my Latin and Trojan counsellors who ruled Lavinium and the northwest of Latium in Ascanius’ and my name. Achates, and Silvius too, saw to it that these men came to consult with me on matters of importance, so that I knew well enough what was happening in the country and around it, though I kept my advice to a minimum, and entertained no guests at all. If an important traveler, king or trader, came to Latium, he was entertained at Alba Longa. He was told that Queen Lavinia was living with her son in the forest in obedience to an oracle and so could not be seen. I had to turn away even Tarchon of Caere, who came to Lavinium, and whom I longed to see; I let Silvius go to him once, but I had to refuse myself, or else my exile became a mere mockery. But I could trust Achates and Mnestheus to entertain him as befitted a great Etruscan king and a true friend of my husband and my son. Tarchon did not go on to Alba Longa, which signified pretty clearly that if Ascanius wanted his friendship he must earn it.

Unfortunately, Ascanius chose to test it severely, by provoking the Veiian Etruscans at Ruma. Their colony there was growing larger. Latins in Fidenae and Tibur and around Lake Regillus were now patrolling the outlying borders of their farmlands, since there had been the inevitable episodes of cattle rustling, sheep stealing, quarrels at terminus stones. Mars was ready, as ever, to dance on the boundary lines. Ascanius had every right to defend his subjects’ property, as Latinus had done when Evander’s Greeks first settled there. But Latinus had a low opinion of the Seven Hills as a city site, thinking the river bottom unhealthy and the hills unfit for plowing or grazing, so he did not begrudge the territory to Evander. Ascanius did begrudge it.

He had got on with the Etruscans thus far only by ignoring them. He thought them arrogant, perfidious, incalculable. He said a treaty with Etruscans was worse than useless, for they would not keep it—though the only one he made with them was when they helped him fight the war on the Anio, and they had kept it. Holding himself superior to all Italians as a Trojan, son of the divine Aeneas sent by fate to rule in Italy, he resented finding himself actually inferior to the Etruscans in wealth, manpower, weaponry, and the arts of life. His prejudice made him see them as all of one kind. In fact Caere and Veii were old rivals. Tarchon did not like to watch the other city-state expanding south of the Tiber; he had come to Lavinium to feel us out about the settlement at Ruma, and would have joined with us to put pressure on Veii to keep the settlement small. Achates and Serestus understood this and counselled Ascanius to court Tarchon. Ascanius brushed their advice aside.

In March, soon after the Leapers danced, he decided to teach Veii a lesson. He sent a small army to a disputed boundary between Ruma and Lake Regillus and drove the Etruscans, mostly shepherds, back almost to the Seven Hills. As they got closer to the settlement, reinforcements met them, and they began to turn and fight. Men were killed on both sides. To Ascanius’ soldiers, their losses justified them in keeping the flocks that fell into their hands. But by the end of a second day, they had to fall back all the way to Lake Regillus, letting go the sheep they had taken. The Rumans rounded up their flocks and stayed on armed guard all across the uncertain border.

As if scornful of his enemy, Ascanius had not gone with his army. He put it in charge of his boyhood friend, Atys. I had known Atys as a handsome, warmhearted, rather childish man, who was kind to Silvius when we lived at Alba and gave him riding lessons. Retreating with his army, Atys had taken off his helmet, hot with the bright spring sunlight; a stone an Etruscan shepherd threw struck his head and knocked him from his horse, and he never recovered consciousness. They brought his body and those of five other soldiers home to Alba Longa.

Ascanius broke down. He threw himself on Atys’ body weeping, and could not stop his tears. When his wife tried to console him and lead him away, he turned on her with cruel, senseless insults, screaming that she had whored with half his army and was barren because she was a whore. He could not be torn away from Atys’ corpse until his weeping exhausted him, sobs becoming convulsions and then a kind of swoon from which he could not be roused. All this was in the great courtyard of the Regia, witnessed by many. Word of it came to Lavinium within hours. Silvius told me when he came home in the evening from his lessons.

Everyone was shocked, puzzled, alarmed by this inordinate show of grief. Atys had been Ascanius’ boy lover, but that was long ago. If Atys was so dear to him why had he sent him on this mission? After all, he had experienced captains who knew the ground better, like Rutilus of Gabii, who had grown up there. Among the talk and speculation Sicana and the others brought me next day was a persistent tale that some time ago Ascanius had been overheard quarreling with Atys, shouting that he was ashamed of him. Atys’ friends wondered if he had been sent to lead an inadequate army into danger as punishment, or to get rid of him. And many were now saying that Atys and Ascanius had never ceased to be lovers, that even on the eve of Ascanius’ wedding they had met, and ever since. Amid such sad and shameful gossip Ascanius lay still stricken in his room, seeing no one.

His wife Salica was turned from his door. Humiliated past endurance, she went with a group of her women to her family home in Ardea.

I was fated, it seems, to live among people who suffered beyond measure from grief, who were driven mad by it. Though I suffered grief, I was doomed to sanity. This was no doing of the poet’s. I know that he gave me nothing but modest blushes, and no character at all. I know that he said I raved and tore my golden tresses at my mother’s death. He simply was not paying attention: I was silent then, tearless, and only intent on making her poor soiled body decent. And my hair has always been dark. In truth he gave me nothing but a name, and I have filled it with myself. Yet without him would I even have a name? I have never blamed him. Even a poet cannot get everything right.

It is strange, though, that he gave me no voice. I never spoke to him till we met that night by the altar under the oaks. Where is my voice from, I wonder? the voice that cries on the wind in the heights of Albunea, the voice that speaks with no tongue a language not its own?

Well, these are questions I cannot answer. I will tell you now of another question I cannot answer, and a thing not many people believe. You will not believe it either, I know, but it is the truth.