Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

The sacred place was in a grassy glade deep in the forest, marked out in a rough square with a rock wall no higher than my knee. Within that enclosure the sense of the numen, the presence and power of the sacred, was strong and strange. Tattered, rotting fleeces lay about on the earth inside the wall. There was a small rock altar; my father cut a turf from outside the wall and laid it on the altar. We drew the corner of our togas over our heads. He lighted the fire. I made a garland of young laurel leaves and garlanded the lamb. I sprinkled it with salted meal from my bag, and held it while he prayed. The lamb was docile and fearless, a noble sacrifice; it had its own piety. I held it while my father cut its throat with the long bronze knife, offering this life to the powers we do not know, in fear and gratitude and seeking to be in peace with them. We burned the entrails on the altar fire to augment the power of the spirits. We toasted and ate the ribs ourselves, having not eaten since noon the day before. The rest of the meat I wrapped to carry home. My father scraped the hide and laid it down on the ground, the fleece up, and gathered the remnants of other sheepskins and spread them out. They were damp from the rain a couple of days earlier, and stank of rot and mildew, but that is one’s bed at Albunea.

It was quite dark now, the red of the sun was gone from the aisles of the trees, and the sky between the branches was dim. We lay down on the sheepskins, the fleece of our lamb under our heads.

I do not know if the power of Albunea came into my father that night, but it came to me, not as a voice speaking from the trees as it comes to others, but as a dream, or what I took to be a dream. In my sleep I was beside a river, which I knew to be the Numicus. I stood at a ford, alone, watching the clear water run among stones. I saw a thread of color in the water as it ran by, a vein of red. It thickened and blurred into a cloud of red that drifted downstream and was gone. A heavy, heavy weight of grief bore down my heart so that my knees failed and I crouched weeping among the stones. At last I got up and walked upstream and came to a town; its ramparts were of fresh earth. I was still weeping, and held the corner of my garment over my head and face, but I knew that city was my home. Then in my dream I was in the forest of Albunea again, still alone. This time I went past the altar glade and came to the spring. I could not come close to the cave. The hissing, boiling noise was loud there, and all about the mouth of the cave the ground was bog and shallow pools. The stinking, bluish mist hovered over the water and the ground. I heard a woodpecker off among the trees, his tapping on a trunk and his call like a harsh laugh—then he came flying. I drew back, pulling the cloth over my head, afraid, but he did not strike me. I saw his scarlet head flash before me. He drew his wings across my eyes twice, very lightly, like the touch of the softest veil. He laughed as he flew off. I looked up and saw it was not dark under the trees; the forest was full of a still light without shadows, and the water and mist of the spring were luminous.

I woke then, and saw that same still light for a while in the glade, fading as day came.

Before we left, I went on to the spring, and saw it was as I had seen it in my dream, though shadowed.

My father was again silent as we started home. As we came out of the forest I looked south, imagining the course of the Numicus, the ford, and the place where I had seen the town in my dream. I said, “Grandfather Picus came to me while I slept last night, father.” And I told him what I had seen.

He listened and said nothing for a time. “That is a powerful grandfather,” he said at last.

“He struck my head when I had the fever. I cried for the pain.”

“But this time he touched your eyes with his wing.”

I nodded. We walked on a while. Latinus said, “Albunea is in his gift. He and the other powers of the woods. He has given you the freedom of it, daughter. He has opened your eyes to see.”

“May I come with you again?”

“You may come there when you choose, I think.”

If my daughter had lived she never could have run safe and free through fields outside our domains or along the hillsides among the grazing herds, as I used to run. When my son was a boy the forests were safer for him than the pagus fields. But when I was a girl I walked the open hillsides and the wilderness paths to Albunea with no companion but Maruna. Sometimes she accompanied me all the way, sometimes she stayed the night with a woodcutter’s family at the edge of the forest while I went alone to the sacred glade. We could do this because the peace my father had brought to Latium was real and durable. In that peace, little children could watch the cattle, shepherds could let their flocks wander in the summer pastures with no risk of theft, women and girls need not go guarded or in bands but could walk without fear on any path in Latium. Even in the true wild where there were no paths we were afraid of wolf and boar, not man. Because this order had held all my life as a girl, I thought it was the way the world had always been and would be. I had not learned how peace galls men, how they gather impatient rage against it as it continues, how even while they pray the powers for peace, they work against it and make certain it will be broken and give way to battle, slaughter, rape, and waste. Of all the greater powers the one I fear most is the one I cannot worship, the one who walks the boundary, the one who sets the ram on the ewe, and the bull on the heifer, and the sword in the farmer’s hand: Mavors, Marmor, Mars.

I kept the storerooms of the king’s house: that was my duty as the king’s daughter, the camilla, the novice. The food we ate was in my charge. I ground the meal and the sacred salt that blessed the food. Daily and faithfully I cared for Vesta burning on our hearth, the bright center of our lives. But I was not permitted to enter the small room beside the house door where Mars lived—not Mars of the plow, Mars of the bull and stallion, nor Mars of the wolf, but the other one: Mars the sword, the spears, the shields that the Leapers brought out on the day of the new year, shaking him, waking him, rousing him up, dancing and leaping with him in the streets and through the fields. That Mars would be shut away again only when the October Horse had been sacrificed and winter itself, with cold and rain and darkness, ordained the peace.

Mars has no altar in the city. Men worship him. A girl, a virgin, I could have no business with him and wanted none. The house I kept was closed to him, as his was to me.

But I honored the sanction. He did not.

When I was a girl, I did not know him well enough to fear him. I liked to see the Leapers rush to open that locked room on the first day of March and come out in red cloaks and high-pointed hats, dancing, driving out the old year, letting in the new, brandishing the long spears and the shields shaped like an owl’s face, cavorting and shouting through the streets of Laurentum, “ Mavors! Mavors! Macte esto!” We girls ran from them and hid as we were supposed to do, in a dutiful, laughing mockery of fear. Oh how the men like to stick their spears up into the air, we said. Oh how they like to poke their spears and jab their spears. Oh don’t they wish their spears were always ten feet long!

Because we were at peace I could laugh at the Leapers, because we were at peace I could sleep alone in Albunea, because we were at peace my father saw no harm in it when more suitors for my hand began coming to the Regia. Let them vie with one another, let Aventinus scowl at Turnus, let Turnus snub young Almo; they dared not quarrel under the king’s roof, or break the king’s peace across their boundaries. One of them would prove the best man in the end and take me to his house, and the others must make the best of it. My father enjoyed their visits very much, far more than I did. They brought young manhood into the house. He liked to feast them well and give them wine, pouring their bowls full again and again; he liked their gifts of game and sausage and white kids and black piglets; he liked them to see his beautiful fiery queen, so much younger than he, not so much older than some of them. He was a good and generous host, and his geniality disarmed their touchy brashness and their rivalries. They ended up all laughing late into the night at the great table. He made what might have been a cause of quarrels into a way to better friendship among his subject kings and chieftains.