Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

I had nothing to do with the Penates of Troy leaving the altar of the king’s house in Alba Longa and coming to Lavinium.

I gave no women orders to spirit them away by night, or men either, or children. Because it was an act that might have been calculated for political effect, there will always be suspicion, even open assumption, that it was planned and executed by me, or by someone else who wished to weaken Ascanius’ authority. I do not think it was. I think the gods knew when it was time to come home.

Maruna came to me at Albunea, early in the morning, out of breath, and bade me come with her at once to Lavinium, to the Regia. I had not entered the gates of my city or my house for five years, but I knew Maruna would not summon me without cause. She hurried with me across the April fields, through the city gate, through the doors of the house, to the hearth of Vesta at the back of the hearth room, where the Penates of Latium had stood ever since my father’s death. And I saw standing with them the figures of clay and ivory, the gods of the house of Anchises, that Aeneas had brought with him across the lands and seas from Troy.

I gasped and stood in awe, my legs trembling. I was shocked, incredulous, frightened.

Yet the fear did not go very deep. I could not be terrified, because I could only see it as right that our gods should be here, in our house.

So the others perhaps saw me as less amazed than I might have been, and thought my surprise and my questions a pretense. And indeed I did not ask many questions. I thought it impious to question mortals about a matter that had apparently been carried out by greater powers.

Of course some of my women were capable of spiriting the Penates out of Alba and into Lavinium. But as I thought about it I could not imagine any of them actually doing it. All of them seemed utterly surprised, dismayed, even terrified when they saw the figures on the altar; and they were honest women. I would not let them be interrogated. If indeed I found that one had done it, what was I to do with her? Punish? Praise? Best leave the inexplicable unexplained. As for the men, I left them to Achates, Serestus, and Mnestheus, who I knew were themselves incapable of plotting an act of sacrilege, however welcome its implications. They found no suspects and no hint of how or even when the strange event had occurred. The first to see the gods had been Maruna herself, coming for the morning worship.

I stayed in my city, that day, among my people. I sent for Silvius, and ordered a triple sacrifice, a lamb, a calf, and a young pig. Silvius presided, with the old Trojan captains to assist him. With the lifeblood and roasted meat of the good animals we thanked and blessed the Lares and Penates of Troy and Latium and asked their blessing. Maruna read the entrails as the Etruscans do, and foretold from them great and lasting glory for the house of Aeneas.

And then I went back to the little house in the forest. But my son stayed in the Regia that night, guarding his ancestral gods, seeking their blessing.

In Alba Longa there had of course been great dismay, horror, when the absence of the old Penates was discovered. A little camillus, a helper, a boy of nine, who first raised the alarm, had been beaten nearly to death by horrified women who blamed the mischief on him. Queen Salica, who might have calmed them, no longer lived there.

They carried the news to King Ascanius with fear and trembling. He came out of his rooms, then, for the first time since Atys’ death. He walked across the great court to the Vestal hearth and stood gazing at it. Only the Penates of the old village of Alba Longa stood there, few and humble as the gods of a poor man’s house. Vesta herself, the body of sacred fire, burned up clear and bright as ever.

Ascanius cast a little salted meal into the fire. He lifted up his hands to pray, but he could not speak; tears began to run down his face; he turned and went back in silence, weeping, to his rooms.

Ascanius made no effort to find a human agency for the Penates’ return to Lavinium. To him, as to me, it was a pure sign of the will of the powers greater than us. We accepted it as such. But while it was a miraculous joy to me, and a portent of divine favor to Aeneas’ younger son, to the elder son it was an almost fatal blow.

I do not know whether his marriage had been such an unhappy mockery as—now—everyone was saying. All the women’s quarters were abuzz with talk about how unhappy Salica had been from the very beginning, how she suffered from her husband’s distaste for her, how she hid her humiliation even from her closest companions (except of course the one telling the story). If all that was true, Ascanius had also worn a public mask and never let it slip, all these years. I think it likelier that something little by little went wrong in the marriage, Ascanius’ sexual discomfort with women perhaps driving him gradually back to seek the tender simplicities of his first love; and Atys, poor loyal soul, was there to offer them. Poor souls all of them.

But fate was hardest on Ascanius. He lost his lover and a battle at one stroke; at the next, his wife; and then his father’s gods. His choice of a capital was, it seemed, wrong. Everything he had built up to support his image of himself as Aeneas’ worthy successor slipped away from him, like mud crumbling softly from a riverbank into the water.

He could not pull himself together for a long time, so long that his war captains, despairing of getting any orders from him, came down to Lavinium and asked the counsel of the old Trojans and the young king.

For so Silvius was openly called now. He would be seventeen in May. He had lived in the forest, following the oracle; he had served his term of exile. The return of the ancestral powers to his house was a clear sign. The young king and the gods had come home on the same day.

The people of Lavinium and all western Latium made him a heartfelt, joyful welcome, bringing tribute unasked and overflowing. Soon from Gabii, Praeneste, Tibur, Nomentum, people were arriving to see and greet him and offer him their white lambs, their fine colts, their service in arms. There was a sense all over the country of a darkness lifting, a better hope. No mortal hope is ever fully satisfied, I know, but this overflow of good feeling and confidence secured much of its own fulfillment: the Latins saw themselves as a people again, they held up their heads. Only a fool could have spoiled so promising a start. Not being a fool, Silvius was cautious and often almost incredulous of his good fortune, and relied very much on the counsel of people he had learned to trust; but being seventeen years old, he seized every advantage, accepted every gift, rejoiced in his popularity, offered love for love, and rode the fair wind, as long as it blew, like a happy young hawk.

When the captains came from Alba Longa, he called a council, and he called me to it.

I demurred, privately, to him. I was so unused to being among people, after five years in the forest, that the idea appalled me. “I don’t belong there,” I said.

“You sat in your father’s council, and my father’s.”

“No. I sat at the back and listened, sometimes.”

“But you are the queen.”

“Queen mother.”

“A queen is a queen,” said my son, regally.

He did look a good deal like Aeneas, but there was something of Latinus and myself, something Italian, in the way he stood and the way he turned his head. He knew how to occupy space. He would be a handsome man at twenty-five, but an absolutely beautiful one at fifty. Such maternal thoughts distracted me. I was staring at him as a cow stares at her calf, with mindless, endless contentment.

“You are the queen here, mother, and you can’t do anything about it, unless I get married. Then you can retire, if you insist. But I don’t plan to marry any time soon. If you aren’t the queen then you’re my subject, and I command you to attend the council.”