They had dug her tomb beside the Sacred Way, at the foot of a hill. They would give her a stone and inscription befitting a princess, no doubt. Even a fallen Vestal, even the daughter of a deposed king, required propriety from her murderers.

  The tomb was a chamber cut into dirt and rock and containing, I guessed, a couch and a small supply of food and water. According to law, Amulius was not allowed to execute a Novice convicted of- fornication; he could, however, must, however, allow her to die. His men would cover the roof with a wooden plank and shovel the plank with earth. First, they would insert a wooden tube to supply her with air. She would not suffocate; she would die of thirst or fear.

  No, not fear, this girl with the eyes of a queen, this girl who had taken no vintner into her couch. A god, or one who passed for a god, had been her beloved.

  They removed the thongs to release her hands. She held them up to the light, pale, small, perfect. Turning, she faced her accusers, her sometime friends, her helpless, hapless father. She did not plead; she simply stated her innocence.

  “He came to me in a shower of gold, like Zeus to Danae. But I knew him for Mars at once. Patron of farmers, lord of battles. He hadn’t a beard, you see, and his hair was as gold as a shield in the sun. My hair is as black as the earth with which you will seal my tomb. That poor young man you beheaded—I never knew his name. I saw him from time to time in the streets and he bowed to my sisters and me with reverence in his eyes, not lust. His hair was black like mine. Look at my sons.”

  “The boy confessed,” said Amulius. His voice resembled the hoot of an owl, a sound which passes for wisdom when no one bothers to understand that the bird is saying, “Me, me, me.”

  “Under torture.”

  “Of his own will, before witnesses. Do you think that a god—especially the Holy Father Mars—would violate a Vestal?”

  “He did not violate me. He spoke my name. ‘Rhea,’ he said. ‘Give me sons to build my city.’ I opened my arms to him.”

  Numitor, silent till now, dazed, I think, spoke like a man returned from the Styx. “Aeneas predicted just such a city.”

  “Alba Longa.”

  “No, a greater. A second Troy.” He stirred from his dream. A sleepwalker awakened (or one who even in grief retained his sense of royalty, the noble gesture, the way of kings?), he threaded between the guards and took his daughter into his arms. No one tried to stop him.

  “Father, it will be well with me. The God has promised!” She clung to him, briefly a little girl, but returned to womanhood and a woman’s death. She kissed his cheek and walked, without compulsion, to the edge of the pit. Lifting her arms, she stared at the sky.

  “So blue, so blue,” she said, half in a whisper, and yet we heard her as if she had shouted the words. “It overarches the world like the wing of a god. I must memorize its blue.”

  Foot under tiny foot, she descended the ladder into the tomb. Amulius nodded and slaves, unobtrusive in brown loincloths, emerged from the crowd and proceeded to bury the door. The dirt which rained from their shovels reenacted, in miniature, the lava from Mt. Vesuvius, that son of Vulcan, in one of his shows of rage.

  Numitor gave a single anguished cry, “Rhea!”, and swooned, so it seemed to me, with a guard conveniently at hand to break his fall.

  “Earth, reclaim your errant daughter,” intoned Amulius. “Vesta-, cleanse her of guilt with your all-pervasive fire.” He has the eyes of an owl, I thought, and owls are never wise, whatever men think, but cunning to capture the mouse or the squirrel.

  “Now I shall claim my reward,” said the Faun, grasping my shoulder. “Did you ever see such a sight? The burial of a princess!”

  He was no longer a comical child. He had torn the wings from a butterfly. I shook free of him. He groped for my arm—I felt his hairy fingers through the sleeve of my tunic—and I struck him across the mouth. He did not follow me.

  I followed the. donkey-faced guard with the twins.

  III

  “Drown them, Faustulus,” he said, handing them to the shepherd who, I recalled, had tended the herds of Numitor, now the herds of Amulius. I had followed the guard and a well-worn cattle trail from the city of temples to a village of wattle huts. A wall of wooden stakes, anathema to wolves, enclosed the huts, together with pens for fastidious pigs and rancid goats, and a small enclosure of cypress wood, roofless but sacrosanct, dedicated to Rumina, the goddess of nursing mothers.

  I had climbed a rowan tree and I peered from its branches like a wren from a nest. Safe, so I thought. Seeing but unseen.

  “The King has told his people that he has sent the boys to live with a kinsman in Etruria. But of course they must die. Babies grow up. Princes may lead rebellions to avenge mothers or fulfill prophecies.”

  Faustulus nodded and rather too eagerly, I thought, accepted the children into his arms.

  “Yes,” he said, between a growl and a grunt. “I will give them to the Tiber. He will swallow them like a serpent.”

  “And I will watch him feast. I must carry word to the King that I have seen them drown.”

  You would like to see them drown. You are worse than a cruel and childish Faun. You are a cruel young man.

  “Be off with you, Celer. Do you think I would disobey him? He would have my head on a stake!” Faustulus was tall and formidable; aging but hardly old; a leader by virtue of strength as well as years. His skin was the color and texture of bark; his beard was moss, graying but not yet gray. He was called the Oak.

  He clenched a massive fist to enforce his words. Shepherds paused in the doors to their huts—poised, I should say—to await his command. Firelight illumined them into figures of bronze, no, of wood. The forest was in their craggy faces, their knotted arms; like trees, they stood tall; like trees, they offered protection instead of invasion.

  Celer glared at him and turned reluctantly in his tracks, muttering, “I will say that I watched them drown.”

  He saw me in my tree as he left the camp. I read his eyes: behind his donkey face, the long head, the large ears, lay the soul of a serval cat, that sleek and treacherous animal beloved as a pet by Etruscan kings. He did not recognize me for a Dryad. The marks of my race, the tunic, the green hair, the pointed ears, were hidden by leaves and branches. Perhaps he mistook me for a shepherd’s girl. Lust disfigured his face into the mask of a mime. He grinned; his grin was at once an invitation and a threat: Accept or submit.

  At first I thought that he meant to climb the tree. But the camp was much too close. The shepherds could hear my cries (or so he must have thought. He could not see my knife).

  “Later,” I heard him say, half in promise, half in anger. The chatter of magpies muffled his steps. He was not worth our fear. I returned to my watch.

  I was ready to call from the tree and forbid the execution. These shepherds, I knew, had always respected the Forest Folk. I would identify myself as Aeneas’ love and claim the twins.

  But I saw in Faustulus’ eyes that he did not mean to obey Amulius.

  “Here, here, little ones,” he said with the rough and hesitant friendliness of a man unused to children. “Hungry, are you? My wife, Larentia, shall give you some milk.”

  She emerged from the hut—materialized—a wraith of a woman whose footsteps were whispers; whose robe of plain homespun seemed somehow woven of night. She was not, however, her husband’s shadow.

  “Faustulus, you are not to kill them.”

  “I have been expecting Celer,” he said. “I knew the charge he would bring me. Amulius is a tyrant but also, strangely, a man in awe of the gods. I am a shepherd but also a priest to Rumina. To murder princes, he would only choose a priest. The deed must not be known in the town; therefore, he chose from his shepherds in the country.”

  “By Saturn’s mossy beard, I wonder the gods can abide your prayers! You deliver speeches instead of sentences. What about the twins?”

  “I have made them a boat out of osier reeds.”

  “Why can’t we keep them here? Amulius never visits the village. Rarely sends his men. Two little boys are easily hidden.”

  “I have sworn to give them to the river. I cannot break my oath as a priest, even to the hireling of a tyrant. But if the river should return their boat…

  She laughed like the wind as it plays with a nest of wrens, a young mother’s laugh. “A man and his pride! I would have sworn and broken a hundred oaths to save those boys. Well, we shall pray to the Forest Folk. If any are left. We have frightened them with our axes and our roads. Amulius’ men have hunted them for his circuses.”

  “Shepherds have never harmed them, my dear. We have left libations of honey at hollow trees. Given Rumina the milk from the whitest cows. Come, we will stand and raise our arms in prayer.”

  “For sons?” she asked. “It is not too much to ask? Princes at that.”

  “Rumina, goddess of nursing mothers…

  “Follow them, Luperca, you on that side, I on this.

  We shall wait till they drift ashore.” Needless to say, I had never learned to swim. Wooden vibrations are lost to rapid waters, and Dryads avoid a river as Naiads a forest. Luperca had swum to the opposite bank, but only under the threat of a hazel switch and the bribe of a raw squirrel. Between us, we were hardly a promising team for the rescue of the twins.

  Fortunately, the Tiber is not a ferocious river except in flood; in places he is little more than a stream. He dealt gently with the twins; he nudged, twisted, lifted their osier cockleshell of a boat, but he did not try to swamp; at length, he wafted them among the reeds ahead of me. Dragonflies—crimson bodies and silver wings—spurted out of my path and hung, an aerial garden, as I parted the reeds. Luperca sought the narrowest ford and joined me, shaking free of the water as if it were pitch from one of the burning lakes to the north. Black Hair squalled like a wolf cub, angry, not afraid.

  “You are Luperca’s,” I said. “I will call you the Little Wolf.”

  Fair Hair happily made a nest of my arms. He smelled of osiers and lily pads.

  “And you—I will name you after a bird. Aeneas was Halcyon, Ascanius was Phoenix. My son was Cuckoo. You are Woodpecker, I think. The Bird of Fire. Your hair is yellow instead of red. Still, both of you are flames.”

  I tried to love them the same, the fair and the dark, for in both I recognized the unmistakable touch of divinity. But the heart, like a bird, accepts no commands. I loved the fair; I feared the dark.

  Lujperca at my heels, I cradled both of them in my arms and started the journey to my tree. Behind us, sandals crackled along the river bank—shepherds, no doubt, in search of what I had already found. I laughed at my successful theft.

  Sometimes I had to rest. The twins were large for their age. I was small as humans measure size. Once I gave them water from trumpet flowers. Fair Hair drank the water and kept his flower; Dark Hair drank and threw his flower to the ground. At last, and yet too soon—for I enjoyed my bundles—we reached my tree. Woodpeckers, bears, wolf cubs…Why should I not rear the human kin of my own Ascanius?

  “Home,” I said. Dark Hair looked at my tree with curiosity and grudging approval. Fair Hair clung to my neck and took the word on faith.

  “First, I must give my thanks to Rumina. Of all the goddesses, she only has time for babes in arms.”

  “Niece!” Segeta, who else?

  For once I could not show respect, even for blood, even for the dead. “Hush, Old Woman. You will frighten my twins. Why can’t you leave me alone? I know you’re restless in the Nether Lands, but must you always come at the wrong time with the wrong advice?”

  “Ungrateful child,” she clucked. “Honor my years if not my experience. If you rear them as Dryad children they will come to love your tree, which is all very well. They will come to depend on your tree, which isn’t. How can they ever; return to Alba Longa? And return they must, for they are princes and there is a throne to claim. Consider Cuckoo, your son.”

  “Cuckoo lived to be twenty-five. He died of a chill.”

  “He died from the demons of town and marketplace. His Dryad blood—”

  “He was happy until he died. There are worse things than death at twenty-five.”

  “He took no bride. Bore no children. He knew the risk. He knew the power of a tree—to protect, but only so long as you stay within its citadel.”

  “These are sturdy boys. They are one month old. They could pass for six. I hardly expect my tree to weaken their blood. Return to your wanderings and leave me to my sons.”

  Needless to say, the door to my tree was not in the trunk; it is cruel to cut holes into living wood (even my windows are cut into sapless parts). Furthermore, obvious doors invite visitors—and invaders.

  Gently I laid the boys at Luperca’s feet She crouched above them as if she would like to give suck, though of course she was still too young. Acanthus lilies and jonquils hid the place; Rumina’s altar too, scattered by many weathers (but not its sacredness). I parted the flowers and knelt; I lifted a door so cleverly colored and contoured that even animals mistook it for a rock.

  Carrying two babies, of course, I could not de- scend a ladder, walk through the tunnel under the tree, and ascend the spiral stairs within the trunk.

  “Luperca—”

  I did not have to give her instructions. As daintily as if she were carrying a squab to a hungry cub, she lifted Black Hair by the seat of his loin cloth and felt her way down the slanted ladder.

  “Never mind,” I whispered to his twin. “You shall travel with me.”

  How warm, and familiar he felt against my breast, how sturdily beat his heart!

  “You are not like my Cuckoo at all. He was always a sickly child, though I loved him the more for every demon he fought, and loved him the most at the last.”

  We followed Luperca into the tree. With One hand I held the child; with the other I lowered the door-which shut us into the cool and familiar night of roots and earth.

  How can a tree survive with a tunnel bored in its trunk, and rooms atop the tunnel? But ‘bored’ is the wrong word. ‘Grown,’ I should say. Some oaks grow with large and elaborate hollows, designed, it would seem, to be occupied into houses. Lacking a Dryad, the tree will die in a single night. If we are nourished by emanations of leaf and bark and wood, so top is the tree sustained by our warmth, our motion, our love. We are separate entities and yet we are one: Father Tree and Daughter Dryad. (It is part of Venus’ pattern, the variegated mosaic of life which only I have broken with my unseasonable youth.)

  And so we came into my atrium, my house-place. Once I remove the window blocks, the sun tiptoes into the room and touches the Adonis-pots, the diminutive pool of water carried laboriously from tulip flowers and swimming with tadpoles which, matured into frogs, will sweeten the air with song. Above me is the room where I cook on the brazier and eat my berries and mushrooms; twice above me, the room which keeps my couch, my cedar chest, my tunics, the bow which belonged to Aeneas, Ascanius’ favorite knife…

  But here in the atrium, I fed the twins. Where did I find the food? There are no secrets among the Forest Folk. It was they who brought the food.

  “Listen,” I said to the twins. “A woodpecker is pounding on my walls! Often they are petulant and disagreeable birds, who hammer holes in our trees. But this one is a particular friend. I know him by his knock. His crest is red, his breast is green, and he would have me believe that he is the god Picus, changed to a bird by Circe, the enchantress, when he scorned her love. But woodpeckers rival Fauns with their tall tales. Still, I call him Picus to save his pride.”

  Picus had brought a gift of berries in his claws. Red, sweet, succulent, they were known as forest-fond and fed to cubs and babies and even the young of the Telesphori, who hang from trees like pears. Black Hair examined suspiciously, snatched, and devoured; Fair Hair opened his mouth and waited until he was fed. Picus preened his feathers in satisfaction.

  Meanwhile, Luperca had left the tree—she can open the hidden door from the inside with her head, from the outside with .her teeth—and now she returned with something more sustaining than berries: a wooden pail (Cuckoo had made it, his first gift to me) with milk from one of her friends, a she-wolf with cubs.

  Luperca was the first; she was not the last. A gentle procession brought more gifts to the twins: bees with royal jelly; a bear with a raw fish which I secretly fed to Luperca, since bears know nothing of human diet (they mean well, though); finally, three of the Telesphori, each with a special gift more lasting than food. One brought nectar distilled from columbine and sweater than myrrh; one brought a minuscule golden box with an image carved from malachite, the gem most valued among the folk in the green forest; one, more practical if less artistic than his friends, brought a pair of tunics precisely fitted to the size of the twins.

  The Telesphori live in the Valley of the Blue Monkeys. Their hooded figures reflect the secrecy of their land. It is ruled by a king who sits on a throne of teakwood and takes tea while he dispenses justice. It is a land of wind chimes sweeter than lyres and strange animals like piebald bears, and trees which grow like intertwining snakes. It is a valley but also a way. The Telesphori exchange gifts as other folk exchange truths.

  I opened a chest and removed the cradle which I had kept since Cuckoo was a baby, a large inverted tortoise shell on wooden rockers, and the bringers of gifts came in turn to visit the twins in their swaddling clothes, then in their tunics, and wish them health and prosperity.

  “And a throne,” said the chief of the Telesphori, the bringer of tunics. A child pretending a throne for other children, I thought, when I looked at his pink, boyish countenance enwreathed by bis green hood. Then I remembered to look behind his eyes and saw a thousand years of sadnesses beyond number, though always confronted with courage, and I knew that he had chosen his wish as carefully as a king chooses his crown.

  A rat seemed to gnaw at my heart.

  “Please,” I said. “They are sleepy now. Who will sing them a lullaby?”

  “I will,” said the smallest, shyest Telesphorus, he who had brought the golden box and the image of malachite. “You see, it is a god who lies in the box. Vaticanus, the friend of children. Whether they hang from a tree like my brothers, or lie in a cradle of tortoiseshell. Here. I will wake him.” He held the figure against the light: boy-god; tunic, sandals, filleted hair; a spray of wheat like a wand in his outstretched hand. He sang this song in my ear:

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15