In the Shape of a Boar Read online

  But instead of approaching he calls off the dogs, one by one and by name.77 The animal she knocked to the ground rises last and slinks back to join the pack. The man's shadow almost covers her. Her thread of life continues in its lee, binding her to a confusing tangle of fates, but none of them this one. He shifts balance in a delicate movement which sends his shadow forward as though it were a liquid dousing her and soaking her body, an obscure incursion, or insult. To step back, she thinks, means retreat. But to remain may mean acceptance. She has known no body but her own. She understands movement – pursuit, the flat arc of an arrow. And stasis – waiting, impact, the weakening judder of the prey and its last twitch into stillness. Which now?

  Then a footfall. She hears someone climbing up the slope. Her cousin's head comes into view. Atalanta sees his eyes narrow at the sight of the two of them. Meilanion is carrying a bundle of arrow-shafts, a gift for her.78 He drops them at her feet and eyes the armoured stranger. She watches both. The man sways back in concession and sheathes his sword. He pulls off his helmet, and then she knows him. His hair is a deep gold in colour, the badge of the one who has gathered them here: Meleager.79

  ***

  The men waiting on the foreshore ape craftsmen. They flet and oil arrows. They rub dried salt from their scalps. Soon their weapons will be sharp enough to carve marble, or split stalks of grass. The archers among them gouge deep pocks in the soil as they bend bowstaves to slip the knot between the horns. There is nothing to sustain them on this terrain but what they bring to it. The bowstrings hum as the tensed staves snap them tight.80 None of their habits are casual.

  Heads rise at Atalanta's return. She walks ahead, nervous Aura settling and snuffling about her calves. The two men follow, her heavy-footed attendants. Meleager's dogs mill behind him. She turns away from them and strides along the foreshore. Her bowstave lies where she dropped it, but her pouch has been tossed aside. Its contents are scattered over the ground.

  Her eyes follow the rough arc in which her arrowheads have fallen, the tracks of a brazen bird, the last glinting print its heave into the air. She bends to pick them up. The insult is furtive: a coward's challenge. To whom among the men does it belong? The men do not want her here. Atalanta spits on the ground and looks about for the culprit but no one is watching her. They have turned to Meleager. She moves to join them.

  He has mounted the bank to address the men. At first, he speaks as though their presence here were in question, but the the note of supplication soon fades. He throws out names and heads rise. The named men nod and smile. His voice rolls through the words, the dogs motionless behind him, the men silent before him while the sun sinks somewhere beyond the distant terminus of the gulf, turning its waters red. Such challenges have sought them out so many times. He frames the expectation forming among them. Their shadows lengthen until the greater dark of Mount Chalkis overtakes and swallows them. Then they are black silhouettes waiting for Meleager to issue the call. He frames the task and shapes their enemy within it.

  Whether by accident or design, at the festival of First Fruits,81 Meleager's father sacrificed to all the gods but Artemis. In revenge, the goddess sent a boar to this country to lay it waste. The boar is her anger, whose shapes are as numerous as the animals burnt to appease it, for it uproots trees, flattens com, rips the vines from the soil and sends the herds and flocks stumbling down the hillsides with their grey-blue viscera trailing in the grass.

  The heroes call back to the gold-haired man who stands before them, as they must. Acceptance issues from their lips and gathers in the succeeding silence, becoming their commission. They are here to hunt the boar.

  Atalanta is not named. She plucks at the folds of cloth about her waist. Her chiton has dried. She covers her breasts and ties the garment in place. The men pay her no attention, gathered together on the twilit shore and melded by the shadows and Meleager's challenge. The dusk settles on them all like a rain of dust or ash, the rain they have fled. Their pasts are carcasses, toted shoulder-high as trophies,82 as is her own. Her father left her wailing on a mountainside. She sucked bear's milk in place of her mother's.83 She was the bear-girl.84 Now she is the huntress, the bitter virgin, the centaur-killer: her own monsters, of which the most insistent and insubstantial is her own circling shadow. A bronze arm points her forward at dawn. Midday, and an arm of iron warns her back. She has looked up through the breaks in the forest canopy expecting vast slow-beating wings but there was nothing and nobody save herself.

  She hovers at the rear of the gathering. The outsiders have already found one another here: Pausileon, Thorax, Aristandros, and others85 whose names she has forgotten or never knew. High above them the west-facing peaks and highest ridges of Aracynthus are still sun-lit, but fading into the dusk. Meleager's voice sounds again. Tonight they will march to Kalydon, where his father Oeneus holds court and awaits the men who will rid his land of Artemis's beast.

  The men nod as Meleager falls silent. Their succeeding murmurs echo then amplify his words: they talk of the bowls of cool wine and the women they will enjoy in the palace of Oeneus. Their tones are unsurprised, weary. Drifts of briny air roll off the waters of the gulf. The dark body of men breaks up.

  The heroes move off the shore. The ridges bring them on to level ground, a plain bounded by the sea at their backs and by the slopes of Aracynthus. Ahead, beyond the interruptions of Chalkis and Taphiassus, a break in the ground snakes towards them then veers away again. The terrain rolls upward, into the vale of Kalydon and the mountains of the interior. They hear the soft scuffs of their sandals over dusty ground, spears and axes held high. Atalanta ties her arrow-shafts in a bundle and slings them over her shoulder. Her arrowheads chink in their pouch. The heads and weapons of the heroes bob, merge and separate in noiseless intersections of metal and flesh.

  To their left, the gentle descents of Aracynthus's foothills descend to the plain, subsiding into humps and long mounds, or shallow buttresses which echo one another and mark the stages of a deceptive progress. Distances stretch forward, or disappear. The river is to their right but they cannot see it yet. The rising of the moon restores their shadows and flattens the bare scene before them. When they round a rise in the ground and reach the first of the orchards it seems to have been dusted with grey powder, or petrified. For a moment they do not recognise the evidence of their eyes.86

  Broken branches are strewn between the fallen trunks. Those few still standing have been cut and gouged; milky sapwood glistens in the wounds. The ranks of ruined trees stand as an army of wounded and dying men who, unable to muster arms, hold up between them the corpses of the dead. Comprehension arrives here and there among their number. The boar has visited his violence here, according to his compulsion, just as they must visit their own upon him.

  They thread paths between the broken trees, their feet sinking in the mess of rotting apples. Atalanta moves to the head of the men about her, five or six, who soon slow their pace. Slipping light-footed around the splintered boughs, Aura keeping close, she hears the squelching progress of the men behind her grow fainter. The fumes thicken in her throat. She stops and thinks. The main body of the men is ahead and to her right. She swings out, away from them. The gold-haired man and her dark-browed cousin will be watching for her. They wanted her. Or have wanted her, or will want her. But they cannot be rivals here. Not yet.87 Faint laughter sounds somewhere behind her. She finds a rhythm which takes her through the breaks and gaps in the fallen trees. The arrow-shafts bump against her shoulder. She has left her companions behind. Then the trees give out and the ground rises. She is clear. Turning back, she overlooks the ruinous scene through which she has passed, ash-grey in the moonlight.

  She is standing on a ridge of land, a rib which curves up behind her to join the slope of Aracynthus. A ribbon of darkness marks the treeline. Her head begins to clear. The dizzying fumes masked some more virulent poison: the boar's musk? But the smell is no longer in her nostrils and slips from memory as she reaches for it. The
boar obliterates, she thinks.

  Tiny movements in the orchard signal the progress of the men within it. Some have regrouped on the far side. She sees that they might have skirted this obstacle, had they wished. Meleager chose to lead them through it. There he is, pacing the far perimeter, gathering those who have chosen to follow him. An obedient tail of dogs sweeps back and forth at his heels. Her gaze ranges again over the orchard. The men who accompanied her into the trees, and whom she outpaced, have not emerged. She can hear but not see them. She picks out Meilanion's slight figure. Aura waits beside her. Her late companions crash about, stumbling and falling, rising again. But each time they resume the interval of silence is longer and the last reaches after a moment in a future too remote to be conceived. There is no more sound. They fell behind, she thinks. All gathered here have thrown themselves among their possible futures, which may end with the boar, or in the city they march on, or here.

  Leave them.

  Let them rot with the apples, thinks Meleager. The early drop88 is the earth's due.89 He sees Meilanion walk clear of the trees to be greeted by Ancaeus. What had the younger man decided, watching his, Meleager's, shadow creeping up Atalanta's body? Meilanion had avoided his eye and the two men had exchanged no word as they followed her back to the others. Might the youth have understood his intention so soon? Where is he?

  Atalanta rounds the last rank of trees and sees Meleager ahead, unmoving, his dogs scuffling behind him. The leather soles of her sandals unpeel themselves from her feet and readhere with every step. The sugary juices of the fruit dry on her calves. The men stand in groups, as they had on the foreshore. Before she reaches them the nearest begin to move off.

  The slope of the land becomes shallower. Grasses rustle and crunch beneath their feet. Atalanta keeps to the higher ground on the right, a coincident satellite to the rough mass of the men. The sound of gurgling water reaches their ears, growing louder as they near the lightless break in the ground glimpsed earlier. At the bank, they look down into the river.90 Heads turn upstream and downstream. She watches from a distance, sees Meilanion striding along the water's edge and thinks of the cool water washing over her skin. The men resume their march. Meleager she cannot see.

  She and Aura loop behind them all to reach the river's edge. She looks down on a shelf of crumbling earth. Beyond it, a sheet of fast-flowing water is broken here and there by the smooth rocks of the river-bed. This would be a torrent in spring. Now, late summer, the descent is an easy jump. She splashes water against her calves and works her fingers between her toes. Aura dabs her paws one after the other in the flow. The streams familiar to Atalanta do not flow like this. They tumble, or skid, or foam. Whorls and jets of their icy waters strike rocks then leap up and break against one another, or stand in perpetual fountains. These streams are nameless, each one sounding its single liquid syllable until the confluence of their croaks and gurgles melds in the great valley rivers and their names: Alpheus,91 Ladon,92 Erymanthus,93 Eurotas.94 Such rivers and their valleys have never been her place. Soon they will run as black by day as the Evenus does here and now by night. They may be dark now.

  Across the water from her, thorn bushes95 choke the opposite bank. Atalanta looks downstream to where the river narrows and the ground is bare. A cairn stands - to mark a crossing, she thinks. But then she sees that the cairn is built from bones: ribcages, knouted femurs and segmented spines are piled up to form a platform. Four horse skulls rest on top. To mark a death, she decides, and wonders whether it lies in the past or is yet to come.96 Here a once-living being found the hadal current which twists in the waters of all rivers: Or a still-living being was moving towards it now, unknowing as the men who entered the orchard behind her, never thinking that its broken trees would mark their graves. The cairn might even be her own. The ordination of the hunt will loosen and the boar's marks grow contradictory. One of them may deal the death-blow: hurl the fatal spear, swing the double-bladed axe, thrust the sword, or loose the single arrow that may find the animal's red eye. Their roles wait to claim them, hovering in the instants outside their beleaguered present.

  Atalanta looks up from the surface of the river in search of the peaks seen earlier from the shoreline. The stars overhead mark out the lesser of the Bears;97 the moon is sinking. She looks over her shoulder to find the Virgin,98 glimpses bright Arcturus99 off to the west. Then she springs to her feet.

  Meleager stands on the bank above her. He wears his helmet as before. His body appears to lean out over the water, as though his feet were rooted in the ground above her. The current tugs at her and her toes curl about pebbles concealed by the water. She holds herself still, waiting for him to speak, or act, to disclose his purpose. But he does none of these. She turns her head to spit in the river. When she turns back he has gone.

  ***

  The moon disappears. The landscape loosens. The heroes march up the valley to Kalydon.

  Darkness raises low humps and ridges from the terrain, spectral exaggerations which nudge them hither and thither across the valley-floor. Gradients curve into cliffs which dissolve on approach, becoming terraced slopes which slant down to the river whose dull gurgling is an unreliable guide, batted back and forth between invisible walls of stone. Sometimes the river seems to sink into the earth on one side and re-emerge on the other, and then a moment later the reverse. At times its faint splashings come from both sides at once and their land-home Argo sails down a canal of terrafirma, which closes behind them, becoming an isthmus, then before, an island: they are marooned, or adrift, or landlocked in the valley's beaconless night. Coarse grasses and asphodel crunch underfoot. The stars are white-hot splinters marking any number of shapes in the darkness of the sky.

  The Athenians move to the fore, the Arcadians to the rear. Meilanion lingers, allowing himself to fall back through the men. Atalanta was towards the rear when last he saw her. He cannot see her now. Ancaeus draws level with him and grips him by the arm. They will be eating their fill in Oeneus's halls soon enough. The bowls of cool wine, roasted fat and meat, the women who will serve them . . . Meilanion nods. The older man will not let him go.

  The column stretches. Behind and to his left, he hears someone send a cascade of pebbles skittering. Someone else coughs, further back again. Male footsteps, by the rhythm. He calculates such matters without thinking. He was named for darkness100 by his father Amphidamas of Tegea,101 brother of Iasus, who was the father of Atalanta, who carries the arrow-shafts she accepted from him, slung over her shoulder, somewhere in the surrounding lightlessness. Tegea too has its dark places,102 its trails set with snares and bristling with lime-twigs, its night-hunted woods.103

  He glances about. Atalanta is not in view. He tracked her into the orchard and found the men who had followed her, slumped against the fallen trunks or face-down in the rotting fruit. She was gone.

  The men pass through bushes whose stems scrape at their greaves and tangle about their ankles: vines, but all broken or uprooted. They cross the dry bed of a gully. Ancaeus nudges him. The Athenians have stopped.

  Ahead, a corona of red light glows above a rise in the ground. The men advance, then veer around to the left. Again the Athenians at the head signal a halt.

  The heroes are still and their sudden silence lifts a thin sound high into the night air. Animals. Meilanion distinguishes the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. The men around him ready their weapons. The gully narrows and deepens as it continues. There is a smell of burning in the air. The bank to their right has become a wall, a foundation for a great stone terrace which looms over them as they pass along the length of its base. The light is corning from above. They hear the dull roar of a fire and voices shouting. The smell is recognisable now. The wall shields them in shadow from the firelight which pours its red glare over the edge, still high above their heads. But the ground is rising and brings them up at last at the far comer of the terrace: heads, shoulders, then bodies emerge as though struggling out of the soil.104 The first men to c
lamber onto the stone apron of the terrace walk forward and come to a halt at the sight which meets them. Those at the back shoulder their way through and stop too.

  A furnace of heat and light roars across the distance of the terrace. The roof and walls of the temple on the far side struggle to hold the blaze. At a hundred paces the men shield their eyes from the red flames which lash the interior walls and sheet the roof in fire. The columns of the temple shimmer, melting and re-forming. The men who toil to feed the conflagration are charcoal-black- stick-like figures scratched in a wash of blazing orange. One or two glance across at the gathering heroes but most do not look up from their labours.

  The men and women carry animals. Four men are wrestling a goat towards the fire. They look up as the heroes fan out across the platform, but then bend themselves again to their task. Braces of chickens beat their wings against the hands which grasp them by the feet and a bullock being manhandled onto the terrace tries to kick against its puny guards.

  But such rebellions are rare. Cattle, sheep, goats and pigs appear to quiet themselves as the temple is approached and its deep roar begins to shudder through their skulls. Their resistance ends, or their rage and panic is home by their sacrificers, who bellow to one another as they take hold of a leg or clutch a fleece to raise the animal high. Then the fire appears to suck each body through the air, breathing its own fierce life into placid flesh and bone. The animals seem to dance.