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The story of Rhea Silvia is the story of a woman of pre-Roman Latium whose life is overtaken by the forces of war. A woman who loses her city, her family, her children. A woman whose mother (by my telling) comes from forest people, deer-hunters and black-pottery sculptors, and whose father is one of the descendants of the mythic Trojan Aeneas (of Virgil’s Aeneid fame).

I’m sharing this story in two parts this weekend and next for all my readers, accompanied by the audio-recording I made of it several years ago on my podcast, Kalliope’s Sanctum. You can find this recording at the end of the post, both as an embedded track and with a link to the podcast in case you would prefer to listen there.

This novelette was originally published in my short story collection Our Lady of the Dark Country, but I’m making it fully available here together with the audio as an offering to this time of incredible grief and violence—as one sort of mythic lens with which to approach it; as a story dedicated to the unveiling of imperialistic violence; as a prayer for mothers and fathers and their children, for husbands and wives, for family lineages.

I wrote “Rhea Silvia” six years ago, after time spent in Southern Italy, where I saw a worn sarcophagus depicting scenes of the euphemistically titled “union” of Mars and Rhea Silvia, the suckling of Romulus and Remus by the great mother-wolf, and the Tiber River as an anthropomorphic god who saves Rhea when she has been thrown into the water to be drowned, and becomes her true husband.

I remember standing in front of that carving somewhere in a little museum in Salerno I think. I remember that I could already feel the story beginning to take shape. Rhea Silvia’s voice guided me strongly throughout the writing process. These pages came through in a handful of weeks. I listened, and wrote what I heard her tell me about herself, as all writers do with the characters who come to them that way. She remains perhaps the most beloved-to-me voice I’ve ever written. I couldn’t tell you why, only that she haunted me, and haunts me still. That she moved me, that she felt very close to my heart, that I loved and mourned right alongside her. That it was a terrifying, heart-breaking story to listen for. That her dignity and her courage changed me, by touching her with my words.

Rhea forest-woman.

Rhea wolf-mother.

Rhea who loved the river god.

Rhea, whose children were fathered by War.

Rhea, who was taken from her children.

Rhea, whose heart broke many times.

Rhea, whose children founded the war-state called Rome.

Rome, whose ideologies we are still ruled by. Rome the conqueror. Rome the crucifier.

But Rhea is still beside the Tiber, her true husband, waiting for her boys to return to her as they were when they were born.

Here is her story.

 R H E A S I L V I A a novelette by Sylvia V. Linsteadt + (see end for recording to listen & read along at once) p a r t o n e 

They call me the Mother of Rome as if I should be honored by the name. As if, after all that has been done, I should be glad of what it was my body began.

They call me Mother of Rome now, but in the beginning I was Rhea Silvia, mostly just Rhea, a girl who loved the beechwood and who tended well the fire.

I was mortal then, but the love of the Tiber has since made me otherwise. And so I am in the river and the trees still, watching the city that long ago laid the roadways to the end of the world.

All this, and it began when a woman’s body was caught under the hands of War.

For so I was.

I had felt it in my uncle’s gaze from the time I was a child. I felt the strain its absence made in my father Numitor, king of Alba Longa. He valued peace, which there was little of in the territories beyond Alba Longa. Still, it lived in him. Other men did not always like him, for he carried peace like a woman carries a child—out in the open in front of him, proudly, for all to see. I adored him and so did my mother, even though she was no ordinary Latin wife, but a woman of the forest. Silvia. She named me for herself. She of the wood, a daughter of trees.

It is no ordinary man who can coax one of the old people of the forest to be his wife, but my mother consented to be Numitor’s. She came from the great wood that covered the Apennine mountains south and east of my father’s land— the old oak and beech forests where in spring the woodland flowers made a blue and white froth, and sun through the new leaves was a numinous green.

My mother took me there often in spring and in summer. For weeks at a time we would go, just she and I, taking one mule along to carry our bedskins and baskets, one jug of fine wine to offer the trees and another for her family.

My mother taught how to speak with the hare and the deer and the woodpecker. She taught me the name of every plant that grew there and their every use, and the way to talk to a beech, which was different than an oak or holly or hawthorn, a sycamore or a pine. She taught me to use a bow, how to skin a rabbit, how to make fire with two sticks, how to sing until a star fell through the night, how to calm an angry boar, how to earn the respect of wolves.

There was a spacious cave in the mountains where we slept on the fine lambskins we had brought. Wood violets grew outside under the beech shade. I loved the crunch of my feet through their bronze leaves. In all seasons they covered the ground, the new and old leaves together. My mother’s people visited us there, bringing meat to share on the fire—bear sometimes, and deer, and a kind of wildwood wine made of honey and berries that was sometimes delicious and sometimes sour as vinegar.

We never went to their village place because they moved with the seasons and because it was dangerous, in case we were followed by my uncle’s men. They would have liked to see all the mountain people killed or brought as slaves into the cities of Latium, and the trees there claimed for timber.

My father kept them from it, but barely.

My mother’s folk were quiet, kind, gentle people. When I was very young I believed the stories I heard whispered about her among my father’s servants and the people of the farms and fields of Alba Longa. That she was part tree herself, or part doe. A dryad, a nymph, a witch at least.

Does that make me part tree as well? I would wonder, sitting by the Tiber with my feet in the current, examining my hands for green, for bark.

No, my mother assured me, the forest people weren’t dryads, though they could surely speak with trees. They were the First People, she told me when I was old enough to also understand the word War. The last of the ones who had been here, living on the land of the place my father called Latium and they called an older, secret name, since the beginning of time.

Our people, she told me, rocking me on her lap by the fire among them, her legs bare and sticking to my bare legs, they were here before even the great volcano first filled the sky with ash and turned the valleys to wastelands.

Our people lived through that.

Our people know how out of ash may one day grow the most beautiful gardens.

Our people remember the time when great elephantine beasts walked here, and lions gold as wild barley, and the stars were people who walked among us too.

She taught me their language, which was much softer than the Latin of my father and the Greek I’d heard spoken by traders and knew a few words of; closer to the Etruscan some of the servants spoke, and yet not that either, but stranger and softer still.

Speaking my mother’s language, I saw things differently. I forgot that I was separate from the wood, the wolf, the wind, the bronze leaves underfoot, the quail I skinned with my bare hands. I had known the gods and goddesses of my father’s people all my life. I had dutifully performed the seasonal rites with the Vestal priestesses, learning from his mother, my grandmother, the way of hearth and earth and ancestors. But in my mother’s language, among my mother’s people, I saw them.

I remember the first time it happened. I was ten and spoke my mother’s way fluently by then, as wild and dark as any of my cousins, running free through the summer wood. That day I was alone with the clay jug down by the spring below the cave, gathering water.

Across the stream a young stag raised his head and looked at me.

He had two short antlers beginning to grow like the budding tips of fruit trees, all covered in velvet. They shone.

He looked up at me, entirely, and in him I saw a god.

He was a god.

I made a sound.

Swift as water he was gone.

But his look lingered behind him. Black-eyed, clear, his velvet antlers shining. A little god.

His look had looked at me from an eternal place.

All animals are little gods, I said to myself. I ran back to my mother with this revelation, the water half spilled by the time I reached her where she sat in the sun with her basket, separating hazelnuts from their husks.

She kissed my cheeks and scolded me over the water, but said, “Now you sound like one of us, my daughter. Today you have no Latin accent. Today you are of the wood. The god has shown his eyes to you, and I am proud.”

 + + +

People talked, of course. How could the king allow his wife and only daughter to disappear unarmed into the mountain forests for weeks at a time? Surely the queen was a dryad. Did she sleep with wolves when she was away? Did her daughter too, the young whelp?

But my father Numitor had worked hard to keep peace in his land, among his people, and they knew this. They felt it in the safety of their outer fields at night, and they too let their children run unarmed and unattended. They trusted him.

But the king, they whispered still, is he being made a cuckold? And does he not see his brother’s treachery, waiting for the chance to spring? He should keep his wife and daughter near; you never know what might happen.

I heard all this from the servants, the kitchen women and the ones who helped my mother in the weaving room. I listened when they thought I wasn’t there. I had the quiet of mild creatures about me, and the cunning. I learned that from my mother.

She never did have much attention for the spindle or the thread, and her weaving was penetrated by little inconsistencies where she had stopped and gone to the windows to breathe an autumn wind, or watch a gray dove fan out her tail as she flew, or look to the mountains east and south and begin in her mind to plan another journey there.

“After the first acorn fall,” she said one day at the window. I was fourteen, she thirty-seven, with a little silver at her temples, but her eyes as young as ever. As young, I imagined, as the day my father first saw her in the oakwood where he was hunting boar with a few of his men.

She was already a full-grown woman then. Not, she told me grinning once, a maid. Not close! Not nearly; your father’s people are so strange, to value such a thing in brides. Your father was glad of it too, come our wedding night.

My mother always spoke that way. I didn’t know until I was starting to grow into a woman myself that the other girl’s mothers did not. I would speak of the opening crocuses as little vulvas full of Earth’s desire. I would watch the stalking, well-hung tomcat mount a tabby, and ask aloud if she felt pleasure. This made the other girls go scarlet, and stammer, and their mothers call me names.

At the window the day I was fourteen, my mother looked at the mountain and spoke of going there, lightly, as she always did. We hadn’t been since the first of spring six months past. But since then it seemed to me that many things had changed. The ground did not feel stable beneath my feet as it once had. Maybe it was just the changes in my body, the feeling that I was growing up. But also it was the rumors I heard, and my uncle’s eyes on me when he visited, not familial but frightening, too bright.

“My uncle,” I said to her, softly. The other women always liked to eavesdrop. “He stinks of war. He’s stirring it up among our allies. It isn’t safe now, mother.”

“You sound like your father,” she replied, her eyes still far away, twisting at a bit of black wool that had broken off the spindle. I could see the cave and the beechwood in her eyes. The autumn fall of leaves, the smoke from fires under stars, her brothers’ warm and laughing arms, welcoming her home again. A part of her was always going home, whenever she looked that way toward the mountains and the distant trees.

“But you heard it too mother. About the slaughter of the northern tribes. How they were raiding Sabine cattle, and uncle allied with their men to kill them all. Wild people, like yours. I’ve never seen father angrier. The men have the taste of war again, after sixteen years of peace. That’s what he says, and the farmers, and the kitchen women too. Uncle hates you, and me. You know that. He hates where you came from.”

“He is only one man,” my mother spat, stamping one bare foot on the stone floor the way she did when she was angry, when she wanted to feel the power of Earth inside her. But I saw fear hiding in her eye too. A heron flew past the window just then, up from the marsh at the river’s edge, winging toward the land across the river, toward those seven distant hills. His wingbeats were slow and grey, and he called out once in a harsh voice. Dread leapt through me at the sound.

Over dinner that night my mother mentioned the autumn journey to my father.

“For acorns, Numitor,” she said in a low voice, her eyelashes the color of dusk, and her hair too. A dark woodland dusk. I could almost smell it. I knew my father could. Sometimes I was certain of my mother’s magic. Other times I thought she was only a woman who knew the forest’s ways, and so was powerful and different from others I knew. Perhaps they are one and the same thing.

“I will make your favorite spiced nut wine, in time for Saturnalia,” she went on. “It’s been long. My brothers will fear Alba Longa has forsaken them. They must be afraid, hearing news from the north about Amulius and his alliance with the Sabines. I could assure them of their protection.”

“Your going now might well be the greatest risk to their safety, my love,” Numitor replied, taking up the hand that touched his hand and turning it over to kiss the dark palm. I saw the shiver run up my mother’s neck. I knew my mother’s perfume, rose oil and musk and dry leaves.

My father knew it better. He breathed deep from her wrist before lifting his head and taking a swallow of wine. “I fear Amulius would follow you. I do not know how I could prevent it. He’s restless, prowling for a fight. Like a caged wolf. Farming never satisfied him, and peace makes him restless. Perhaps I’ve been a fool. He stirs it in the others. This business with the Sabines, I fear it’s only a beginning. He undermines me, and yet to retaliate is to break what is most sacred in me.” He sighed, and drained his cup. It rattled when he set it down. The bronze caught the fire’s glow.

I saw my face in it, long and dark and solemn, like my mother’s. But I saw I had my father’s nose, his chin and curving hairline, and this made me glad. He was a striking man, my father. Only a little older than my mother, perhaps by five years, but with much more silver, and lines all around his eyes and forehead. The cost of carrying peace inside him when the world seemed always hungry for war. The cost of holding a kingdom together by gentleness, integrity, intelligence and trust, and not by fear. It took all of him, and lined him young. I saw this clearly in that moment, and saw why my mother would have left her people to be his queen.

“You know I am quiet as a doe, and take the forest paths,” my mother replied. “No one sees us. Amulius has tried to follow before. I did not tell you, I did not want to worry you, but he is no match for me. I am a wolf when I must be, Numitor. I leave no trace, the trees look after me. You know how it will go with me if I do not go home soon. I must be watered, I must.” Her voice had a desperate edge. It alarmed both me and him. His eyes were dark, but my father sighed and kissed her, and I knew she had won.

The next morning my first bleeding came. This, I thought, must have been the cause for my anxiety, my presentiments of doom. It delayed our journey a little, but my mother was delighted. She took me down to the Tiber and bathed me in the way of her people, singing old songs to the water, singing of my beauty as a growing living thing, singing of me as an oak, a nut, a flower, a quail. I wept, feeling sore and afraid and glad all at once. Other women came. They burned laurel smoke around me and fed me honeycomb and saffron, and crowned me with purple crocus petals.

The river up to my waist felt cool and soft. I saw myself rippled in the light green water, shifting. It seemed for a moment I could see myself growing and changing. I reached out underwater and clasped my hands together with the exhilaration of that feeling. For a moment it seemed I held the hand of some other being. The river himself. It was a strong, big hand. Then it was gone, and a younger woman was teasing me.

“Open up your legs, the river will teach you of your own body with his current, of where the pleasure lies.”

“So is that what you’re up to when you’re late to the weaving?” my mother teased back, her breasts shining copper above the water.

We were all naked in a shaded part of the river under sycamore trees. No man would have dared disturb our rituals today, but even so mother had stationed several of her women to guard the river bend where it opened on the town. I blushed, though I had thought before that these matters didn’t embarrass me. But it was true. The water felt nice there, different than it had on any other day. Alive.

The feeling didn’t go away when I left the river. It stayed with me all the while traveling into the mountain with my mother. My bleeding was light, but I was tired after it was over and my mother let me ride the mule instead of walking. That seemed to make the feeling stranger. There was a warmth at the very quick of me, right between my legs. I had never known that before. Vestal, like the beginning of a fire. The women said your first bleeding was the beginning of being grown, a ripening so that you in turn might make new life.

They had not said how it made you also a fire. I wondered if maybe it was like the one we kept for Vesta at the sacred hearth. Something that would never go out. These things I thought and felt as we went along, distracted and flushed. My mother took a circuitous way to get there, just in case my uncle followed us, but what she had told my father was true. She was quiet and clever as the deer, as the wolf. We left hardly a trace. We followed animal paths through the beechwood, through meadows up to the valley beyond which her people lived, under the snow-topped peak of their mother mountain.

 + + +

It was a very good time, that autumn visit when I was fourteen. Perhaps because of what had awakened in my body, I remember it with particular vividness. Perhaps because we went only once more after that, but that time ended in a darkness too complete for me to speak of before I first tell you of this time, the penultimate, so I have it to hold as a crocus flower, a bright thing. The time I was fourteen holds all the other times since I was a girl, caught in amber, in my memory.

My mother, smiling to herself, seemed to understand just what was behind my flush. The first night back among her people, as we ate and sang around a great fire, she sat me beside the three sons of her childhood friend Thisbi, who I called aunt. Everyone hooted then. The men whistled in praise, for my mother doing so showed them all that I was a woman now, and could sit among men as I pleased. I was terribly red all over. I felt hot. I felt the ember of myself and it frightened me, so I had a good swallow of my mother’s wine, which I didn’t much like, and tried to speak to the brother nearest my age.

I cannot now recall his name now. For it was the young singer who regaled us with songs of the trees, the deaths of brave warriors and mothers, the love story of the hunter and deer woman, who watched me, and who I watched too. All the night long we watched each other. As he sang the tales he watched me, and for the first time in my life I relished the feeling of a man’s gaze.

There was dancing. My mother gave me her own fringed skirt and I, a little dizzy with wine, danced with the grown women, swinging my hips as they did, feeling now why they did. Because it was as a bellows on a fire, on a power. We were alight. The younger girls watched me in awe, as I had watched others before me don their mother’s skirts. Nobody made a great fuss but all noticed me that night, and most of all I noticed what was in my body that I had never known.

When the waning moon rose at last and the fire was low, all sought their beds but the young singer and me. He found me at the wood’s edge watching the moon, too alive to sleep. It rose the color of an ember over the eastern ridge, through oaks. I did not seem able to catch my breath. I turned to him like a flame in wind, and I kissed him. His name was Vare. All through the night we kissed. He was very gentle, very kind, never pushing, only kissing and caressing me until I was liquid. We slept in the beech leaves under his fox coat, and woke in the morning besotted.

Later in the day down by the creek, washing our road-worn things, my mother teased me. I could not reply, for what had happened in me set me adrift in myself, a whole sea where a mother cannot go. She knew this, and stopped teasing.

Instead she solemnly tucked a late wood violet into my wet black hair as we laid our clothing to dry on stones and said, “Now you know the secret that all women know. People will make a fuss about their gods and what is holy and what is not. They will call this and that a mystery, and tiptoe round the fire in the temple. But today daughter you know the mystery behind their mysteries. That all of the world is suffused with that pleasure. That what you feel stir in you is the light that is all of life. You know now the pleasure of myrtle flowers and quince fruit and oak leaves opening. But remember, at the root of the fruit you have picked dwell the dead. At the beginning and end of all Earth’s pleasure, the dead. This is what we dance for, what we love for. The eternal return. Gods is it terrible, is it sweet.”

 + + +

I have never forgotten those words. In my memory that autumn stay among her people is suffused with them. I was, like she said, the pleasure of the ripe earth. The acorns sleek and plump and shining. I thought for those brief days I understood everything. The language of every tree and stream and stone and rutting stag. Even the language of the dead. My mother often sent me and the young singer off with an acorn basket, bemused, not confident that we would be very diligent, and so gathering enough of her own too. She was right to. We came back with spined oak leaves in our hair.

When we left I wept as if I were dying. Though it was a small thing, compared with what I have known and wept for since, I do not belittle her yet, my girlish self, for to my young heart leaving the singer was the sorest ache I had ever known. What I had felt was all pure and wild as new fawnskin, as the softest berries, for all my mother’s words of death. Now I understood just a little of it, the danger of feeling so strongly, of love. She let me weep. She held my hand and picked me autumn hawthorn berries and strung them on a thread.

Oh, to have lost only that. An autumn crush, the first young taste of love. That is a gentle fruit, a quince eased pink over embers. I have since been bared, been stripped, been cut to earth and trampled. Only I know still my mother’s truth. But now I know it better than I ever wanted to, better than any woman should, for I am not just a woman any more. I know it like the river knows it now, like the roots of trees that once grew beneath the city of Rome, and will again.

 + + +

Not long after we returned, my mother found she was carrying a child. She had tried so many years to bear my father a son but none of her pregnancies since me had held. A son to be king when he was gone—this my mother had wanted as much as my father did, for she had a dread of Amulius ascending the throne of Alba Longa one day. So for the next four years we did not go to the wooded mountain of her people, though we sent word of her pregnancy to her brothers, and the day of the boy’s birth in early summer. She doted on him, her late, miraculous boy. She would not leave his side. Much to the scandal of the women she refused a wet nurse or even a maid to help her. Only I was allowed near enough to change him or dress him, the little prince of Alba Longa.

I had never seen her so happy, not even among her people making acorn cakes with a niece or gathering elderflowers with an old aunt. She nursed my brother in the courtyard in the sun, where my father long ago had planted orange trees for her, traded from the Greeks because she loved the smell of their blossoms. When my brother was born the last blossoms were falling. The people of Alba Longa, who loved my mother and my father equally, left votives at the gate—rough figurines of women, handfuls of crocus or chamomile—that she might bless them, she who had borne a son so late.

My father refused that his son should go to the mountain to meet her people and for once my mother, docile as a milk cow, agreed, her big dark eyes bright on their son. And so I did not see the young singer called Vare for many years. But that ache, a small thing really, passed by the first winter as I helped my mother with her tasks while her belly swelled. Spinning and weaving; shaping clay votives for the sanctuaries; preparing offerings for our ancestors, for the wood genii, the local gods, the river and wild birds; feeding, stoking and banking the Vestal fire at the center of the palace. I was busy, and forgot him soon.

It was a good time, the time of my brother’s birth and those first three-odd years of his life. A window of peace, impossibly still and calm. Like a high summer noon when nothing stirs but the welling songs of the bronze-winged cicadas. Now I see it as the stillness before a storm. I could not see it then. I was young and blooming still. I was only aware of my own blossoming. I often ran off to the river with or without the washing, with or without my handmaids. I had a hidden place I liked to swim where the water pooled under ancient sycamores and the banks were broad. Sometimes I thought the river watched me. I daydreamed of him, splashing in the clear water between lime banks, imagining what kind of man he would be, that river with a thousand hands.

In my mother’s language the river and the tree and the woodpecker all looked back with their intelligence at me. The Tiber seemed to hold me gently, enjoying the words I spoke to him in her tongue. Sometimes I brought my little elderflute and danced naked on the warm rocks, thinking I might conjure him. Some days he looked like Vare, who I longed for fervently for a little while. Later he was more grown, a man like the farmers I saw working strong-backed in the fields with their shirts off in the heat, muscled and big-armed.

I dallied. I was a girl of fourteen, of fifteen, of sixteen, naïve and lusting after wild irises, honeycomb, rainstorms, the touch of men, music and dance. I was a giddy, feral thing. I do not know that I was beautiful the way men sought, but I had more life force in me than a young doe, than a grape vine, than any other girl of Alba Longa, and I could feel the eyes of boys and men and women too, and trees and rocks and birds and the river god, and savored them all. I must have been such a painfully innocent sight back then. It makes me sorrow to remember.

When my little brother turned four, everything changed. My uncle Amulius had been quiet those years. We took his seeming meekness for acquiescence, even fondness for his nephew. A son had been born. His hopes for the throne were lost. And he played the part of a good uncle, even a doting one. He brought wooden toys from his travels north for horses—a miniature cart, a carved red stallion, a duck with wheels. He was gone often on such trips in those years.

We hoped he was looking further north for some bit of country to seize for his own. We should have suspected something worse. Perhaps my father did, but could not see what else to do but trust his younger brother, who he loved, and continue to raise his son, to husband his flocks and herds, to carry out the rites that kept the land fertile, the river’s flood regular, the harvest rich.

But not long after my brother’s fourth birthday, when I and my maids were up ladders barefoot in the walnut trees, gathering green-husked nuts to make our yearly spiced wine, my uncle rode through Alba Longa right into the courtyard of my father’s great house with an army at his back.

I saw this all from the top branches of a walnut down in my father’s orchards just outside the palace walls. Men streaming through the peaceful city, armed and armored, shining like a hundred cicadas, their horses’ hooves loud on the stone streets. People hid inside. I could see some running at the sound of armed men. In the fields, farmers and their wives and children hid, watching from behind wagons or the stands of barley.

From up the tree the red of the summer poppies that bloomed in the fields looked to me for a terrible moment like a seep of blood. I bade my maids be silent and those nearer the ground to run, and quickly, somewhere hidden. I knew my uncle’s colors from a distance. I understood the language of their armor. They did not come in peace or in negotiation. My father’s standing army was loyal and fierce, but a fraction of this one. I heard fighting already from the courtyard.

I could see my hill city gleaming white in the hot sun all across the rising land. I could see the Tiber flowing pale green between farmland, past the orchard, and on for several miles toward the sea. Everything that had been held for my lifetime in peace still looked peaceful, still carried peace. Only the sound of bronze on bronze, and men’s screaming, proved that it had been broken.

My father surrendered Alba Longa without much of a fight. He ordered his men lay to down their arms, for he saw that this would be a massacre if they did not. Already all those at the gates had been cut down. So my mother told me later. Numitor negotiated with his younger brother. He agreed to live in exile among his wife’s people in the mountains, if Amulius would spare his men, would not cause his beloved farmers to take up weapons and be killed.

“You do not make the terms, brother,” my uncle spat. “It is I who make them now, for I could kill you with stroke if I chose, and your son.”

But he did not. My mother thought it was lost love that stayed his hand. In the final moment, she said, he could not, after all kill, his own brother. He was being merciful, she said as we rode out in the dusk in plain clothing.

We rode shaggy work horses through the moonlit fields. We did not want our people to know and follow us—their king and queen in exile, in shame, running away like dogs. But my mother and my father both would have done anything to keep their children their people safe. The barley and the wheat brushed our feet. The climbing beans looked so eager in the moonlight, little green hands and tendrils.

I don’t know why I remember them still, and the quiet. No dogs barked as we passed. My mother was knotting and re-knotting a piece of red wool in her fingers. A charm for protection, tying up the voices of the dogs. My little brother rode in front of me on my mount. His hair and head leaned on my chest. He was half asleep after a short time, though at first he had been entirely thrilled to be on the run, not understanding why.

“To mother’s people?” he had cried as I saddled the horse. “Will I learn to skin a rabbit as fast as you, Rhea? Will I learn to talk to trees like mother?” His excitement made me want to weep. He did not know it was his head as much as my father’s that my uncle sought. The boy might grow up to lead an uprising and depose him; he could not be let to live. I did not know this then, but I sensed it I think. I sensed the doom around him, my young brother with his skinny dark neck craning eagerly as a little bird’s as I hoisted him up into the saddle and followed my parents out of the sweet-smelling stable where the field horses were kept, out through the back lanes, toward the mountain.

We rode all night. I wondered at my uncle’s clemency more and more as we went. It seemed too generous that he would let us flee this way, choosing our own exile. And yet, I reasoned, trying to quell my dread, he was our uncle. He had sat me on his knee when I was a girl and sung old rhyming songs, and once had given me a blue ribbon and a copper bell from Scythia, where he had gone to trade for fine metalwork and horses. In truth there was only once or twice that I recalled when he actually had the patience to sit and sing to me and give me gifts, and then probably after a long dinner and several cups of father’s finest vintage, but still, he did not want us dead, surely not. So I soothed myself.

The moon moved over us, and faintly the constellation called the Scorpion wheeled in the south, her navel glinting red. Now and then an owl screamed. My brother’s head lolled, smelling of yesterday’s sun and wheat and a last sweet hint of babyhood, when he had smelled entirely of rising bread and honey. I kissed the top. We ascended into darkness, beyond the river valley, into the foothills.

My mother knew the way in the dark. Once or twice I thought I heard something behind us, but faintly; animal noises only, I told myself. My mother and father didn’t speak at all except to bid me hurry, or slow, or go more quietly. Once when my father turned his face back for me I saw it glint under the setting moon with tears. All the lines around his eyes looked deeper, like wounds.

The air was damp and cold as we went higher between stones and twisted oaks. My mother took us a circuitous way. She too had heard noises, and didn’t trust my uncle. But it seemed too elaborate, too cruel, to send a brother into exile only to follow and kill him. It would have been much easier to kill us all right there in our great hall in Alba Longa. So we were not overcautious, and reached the cave by dawn, where we slept all day in a kind of heartsick daze. My father would not eat or drink. He shook, not from fear but from loss, and from anger at himself for his own stubborn pact with peace. In his face flashed the desire to kill.

At sunset my mother went to the ridge above the cave and called out in the voices of the cuckoo and the tawny owl, as she always did, to tell her people we had come. They arrived a short time later as silent as deer, suddenly all around us, weeping with happiness to see my mother and me after so many years. They were wary of my father, until my mother explained. I was passed between arms and kissed on both cheeks by aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, in a great ululation of grief and gladness both—that we were in exile, that we were home. Vare was there, but we seemed a little distant, and embarrassed. I will never forget the look of terror and delight on my brother’s face when he first saw our mother’s people, brown as the trees and dressed in soft deerskins that clicked with amber beads and coral.

“Are they spirits?” he whispered to me when we laid down that night to sleep, well-fed and warm by their fire. “Is mother a dryad like people say?”

At this I laughed. “I don’t think so,” I replied, stroking his dark hair. “But I wonder too sometimes.”

We fell asleep that way, my hand on my brother’s hair, there among the old beech trees on the mountain where the first people still lived, thinking of our mother…

© Sylvia V. Linsteadt from Our Lady of the Dark Country (2017)

Rhea Silvia, PART 1- Recording here:

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 Preview of Part 2, Coming December 3rd ....

We woke in hell.

We woke to betrayal and slaughter, to the war god Mars stalking through our hidden camp in the form of my uncle and two dozen of his armed and mounted men. And yet in the haze of kicked embers and smoke and terror, I saw not many men but one, larger than all of them, the bloodlust that moves through men in battle animated into a single awful looming figure.

War Himself, with a hundred arms and legs, a hundred bows and knives, a hundred hooves, a body hard as bronze and hungry for what lived.

I saw him very clearly for a moment as I woke to a scream and the ring of metal. Then he broke apart into men…

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