Ursula Le Guin - Lavinia

If he had been my only parent I might have taken my suitors lightly, as he did, and with pleasure. Some of them were good fellows. Some were easy to laugh at. Ufens of Nersae, a mountain man, came in wolfskins, with a wolfskin hat, a black curly beard all over his red face, staring around him as if he’d never been in a town before, glowering at everybody except me—he couldn’t look at me at all. Tita and the other women teased me endlessly about marrying him, the Wolf Boy, Chinthicket, they called him. And I could laugh with them. But I was polite and cautious and cold to all my suitors, even beyond what befitted my status as virgin prize; for my mother did not take the matter lightly at all, and made my position both difficult and false.

She wanted to marry me to her nephew Turnus of Ardea. That desire had come to possess her. She favored Turnus openly, was all smiles to him and hardly civil to the others who came to stand in his way. Her prejudice made it hard even for rich men like Aventinus to come courting me, and very hard for such a young man as Almo, son of Tyrrhus, the manager of the royal cattle herds, my Silvia’s eldest brother. Almo was aiming pretty high in courting me at all, and against such a rival as King Turnus he stood no chance. But he was not merely ambitious, he had fallen in love with me; and having been fond of him all my life as an almost brother, I was sorry for him and kind to him, and so gave him false hope. My mother had no pity on him. She was fiercely jealous of our royal honor. She treated Almo as a cowherd. My father should not have allowed such discourtesy in his hall; but still he let all she did and said go by, and she hid the worst of her behavior from him. It was the game they played, that she could be mad yet not mad because he would not know she was mad.

I did not want to be courted. I did not want to receive the game, the sausages, the kids, the piglets, the stiff compliments. I did not want to sit at the banquet, the silent modest maiden, while my mother Amata spurned and sneered and turned her back on honest men and wooed her sister’s son, handsome blue-eyed Turnus.

He did not snub or spurn her, never, of course not, he smiled, he murmured, he lowered his long eyelashes and lifted them again smiling and looked right through her to what he wanted. Could she not see that? Could I, a stupid virgin of seventeen, see it, and she not see it? Could my father sit at the head of the table and not see it?

Drances, an old friend and adviser of my father, was the only person of the household who showed dislike or distrust of Turnus. Drances greatly admired the sound of his own voice and was used to pontificating at our table, but now he had to listen to Turnus’ tales of his exploits and triumphs in skirmishes and raids and hunts, and endure the young man’s careless, genial, unintended discourtesies. I saw that Drances watched Turnus very keenly, and watched my mother too. Sometimes he would glance at my father, or even at me, as if to say, Do you see? My father was impervious, and I would not return his glance. I wanted nothing to do with Drances; it seemed he knew what I knew, but I did not know what he would do with the knowledge.

I came to the banquets because I must, and left as soon as I could. The only way I could avoid my suitors entirely was not to be in the house at all. These days I could go to Silvia’s farm only if I knew poor ardent Almo would not be there. I could achieve absence from the Regia only by going to Albunea.

My mother’s anger was chafed by the idea that I had some gift like my father’s of conversation with the spirits. It gave me a kind of uncanny importance, which she despised. I agreed with her in my heart: the importance was false. But the gift was real. And it was useful to me as my reason not to be always at home, dressed in white, the meek garlanded sacrifice, while the suitors paraded through and drank their wine, and Turnus flattered my mother and laughed with my father and looked at me as the butcher looks at the cow. Amata tried to forbid me to go to the sacred place, for many good reasons, which she argued eloquently. My father, as always, seemed hardly to hear her. Usually that was how she got her way, but where I was concerned, his deafness was different. He temporised, waved his hand mildly, said, “Oh, it will do the child no harm,” or, “Prince Aventinus will still be here, no doubt, when she returns,” and let me go. And I put on my red-bordered robe, told Maruna to be ready at dawn, and went.

Turnus came for a visit in late April of the year I was eighteen. He brought a wagonload of splendid gifts to my parents. One was a horrible little creature that he said sailors had brought from Africa; it had hands and feet like ours, and a face like a noseless baby. He brought it in riding his shoulder, dressed in a tiny toga. It clambered all about, chattering, pulling things to pieces, spilling the salt, then stopping to sit and fondle its penis and stare at us with bright black eyes. Everyone at the long table laughed at its tricks. He presented it as a pet for me, and I tried to be kind to the little animal; but I could not like it, and it hated me. It pulled my hair and pissed my dress, and then sprang into my mother’s arms. She kissed it and crooned over it. It pulled at the chains round her neck, tugged out the little gold bullas that held my brothers’ amulets, and put one in its mouth. Seeing that, a sickness came over me. I had to ask to be excused, and as always my father let me go, though my mother would have made me stay.

I ran out into the courtyard and stopped at the fountain under the great laurel to wash my face and hands and my palla where the animal had pissed it. The night was cool, the stars bright through the leaves of the laurel. How I loved this house! How could I ever leave it, leave the spirits of the tree, of the spring, of my storerooms, of the hearth, of my people, leave the beloved familiar powers and go serve those of a stranger in a strange place? That would be slavery. I would not do it. Maybe I would marry Almo, and my father would name him his heir, to be king after him, and we would live here, here, nowhere else… I knew that could not be. Yet my father had no heir, and someday he must name one, or adopt a son. I thought I did not care who it was so long as it was not Turnus. There was nothing much wrong with Turnus himself, but much wrong in the way my mother looked at him.

I went on to the women’s side of the house. I told Maruna we were going to the forest tomorrow morning. Old Vestina said, “The Rutulian prince has just arrived, child! That is scarcely courteous.” And Maruna’s mother, the Etruscan slave who had taught me to read the birds’ flight, a wise and gentle woman, said, “It might be better to put it off a day or two.”

“My mother can entertain King Turnus far better than I can,” I said, staring them both down, daring them to speak.

Vestina chirped, “But it’s you, you he comes to see, how he looks at you, anyone can see you have his heart!” Maruna’s mother said nothing. And I left with Maruna at daybreak.

I took my bag of salted meal. The pastures were full of spring lambs, bouncing about, whirling their tails as they sucked at the teat, but I needed no blood sacrifice when I went to Albunea. I scattered salsamola on the altar, slept on the old fleeces of other sacrifices, and sought no vision or guidance. All I wanted when I went there was to sleep there, in that silence, with those spirits around me, in the numen of Albunea. A night there clarified my heart and quieted my mind, so that I could come back home and do my duty.

The walk there was an escape, too, a time of freedom. Maruna was not lighthearted and adventurous like my Silvia, and we did not chatter all day long when we walked as Silvia and I did. Maruna was rather silent, but alert, noticing all things in earth and sky; she was patient, sweet, a good companion. She did not have Silvia’s way with animals, but she knew the birds; and she had learned some of her mother’s lore, so we talked about what we might read in the calls and flights of the birds in the fields and wild lands about us as we went. And sometimes we talked about what the dead might have to say to us. In Etruria they think much about the dead, and Maruna’s mother had been trained in that knowledge when she was a girl in the great city of Caere. I felt ignorant and rustic when she or her daughter spoke of it. To me the dead were best buried, left undisturbed, thought about as little as possible; one did not want to bring their unhappy shadows creeping across the floor, hiding under the table, snapping at dropped food, for they were hungry, the dead were, always hungry. Every spring my father, like every householder in Latium, walked all about his house at midnight with nine black beans in his mouth, and when he spat them out he said, “Shadows, be gone!"—and the ghosts that had infested the house ate the beans and went back underground.