In the Shape of a Boar Read online

  Meilanion watches with the others, a deep unease seizing him as his gaze is led further up the slope by the long chains of men and women who move up and down it. Pens cover the hillside. Those nearest are empty, but the remainder are crammed with livestock. Drenched in the red of the fire, the crude enclosures crawl with movement as the animals within them shift about. It was their noise that the heroes heard from the slope below.

  The goat, like the others, gives up its struggles as it is lifted shoulder-high. The men throw it forward and turn away before it lands. The bullock follows it with as little ceremony. The gangs pass back and forth with their cargoes: the same spectacle is repeated over and over until the moment when the furnace wraps each beast in its burning cloak, hiding their bodies from prying eyes until they are consumed,105

  Meilanion feels his own disturbance ripple among the heroes. Those hauling their livestock to this exorbitant slaughter pay them little attention. And no wonder, thinks Meilanion. This is one of their futures: the future in which the boar is the victor, in which a divine anger rages and will not be appeased, but must be propitiated for ever, through a sacrifice without end. In this here and now, the heroes are no more than memories of the victims they were destined to be, empty-handed ghosts whose corpses lie rotting and unlamented in Kalydon's trackless interior, where they joined with the boar in battle and were overcome. There is no role for them here.

  And there will be no ‘cool wine’ in Kalydon, he knows then. No women to serve them roasted fat and meat, no Oeneus to welcome them to his halls. Perhaps no Oeneus at all. He looks about him at the different comprehensions surfacing on the faces of his companions. Meleager is pushing his way through the men. There is no sign of Atalanta. A gust of wind scoops a cloud of oily smoke and sends it rolling across the terrace towards them. It smells of their defeat.

  Meilanion turns and looks back. The heroes’ giant shadows stretch over the stone terrace until the edge, which cuts them in two. Beyond is darkness. Meleager's dogs burrow through the heroes and cluster about their master, who takes his stand before the mouth of the temple. It is hard to look at him. The fire behind him is too fierce.

  Atalanta and Aura emerge from the dark and pad towards the back of the body of men. Her gaze skates over Meilanion and comes to rest on Meleager, who is addressing them. Meilanion turns from her as she approaches. Meleager's arm sweeps out as though to include the pens which cover the hillside, or higher up perhaps.

  Beyond the first slope is a shallow saddle of land, its spine marked by a road paved with white stones. Its course scores the darkness of the valley beyond as if a fiery arrow has been loosed, its after-image fading and disappearing with distance, but then exploding into tiny pinpricks of distant light. Meleager is pointing there. He shouts louder, but the fire roars, the animals bellow or bleat, those hauling them towards it likewise. The heroes cannot hear him, nor do they need to. They have always known that they would gather here.

  The men around Meilanion are restless. He is jostled by someone behind him but he does not turn. A hand grips him by the shoulder and pulls him about. Atalanta stands before him. He feels the imprint of her fingers, the fire's heat behind him, the slow disturbance of the men surrounding them both. They gather themselves for the last leg of the march. The lights in the darkness are Kalydon.106

  ***

  They had entered the city by the southern gate, found deserted streets, silence, a lightless riddle. The city promised to them hid within a city taken and plundered. They moved through Kalydon's streets, listening and watching, being listened to and watched themselves by shapes that formed beyond their sight. Their fears were the fears of hunters who track in silence or wait concealed, their weapons raised and poised; in the moment before the fatal strike, they see themselves reflected in the black of the quarry's eye and, in the moment following, they feel its terror shuddering through the shaft. The heroes were noiseless, each one listening while the animals gathered around them. They recognised another of their futures. To be the hunted is the hunter's fear.

  ***

  Glowing points of red drifted in the darkness above them, winking in and out of view, tracking the heroes’ progress towards the high ground of the sanctuary at the city's northern limit. Passing through a narrow and high-walled passage, Meleager's dogs began to bark. The heroes quickened their steps. Herded together too close to use their weapons, the knowledge of what was about to take place took hold of them, stranding them between advance and retreat. To where? Atalanta looked up. Bodies swelled behind red eyes, lining the roofs to either side. The men at the head of the column turned and tried to make their way through those behind. Those trying to advance jostled them. Someone shouted for order and a moment later their assailants leapt down from left and right.

  There was clumsy chaos, a confused grappling. The first victim cried out, and then there was panic. The hunters could not win there and weakened by that first assault they had split, had tried to reunite, had failed. One group had continued to the precinct of the sanctuary. The other had scattered.

  Atalanta, Meilanion, Ancaeus and the Cimmerian found themselves running together. Something had scraped against her face. She batted it away. Then something caught her ankle. She had lost her footing and would have fallen, would have been left there. A hand had hooked itself under her arm and scooped her up. They were running again.

  The city raised walls of darkness around them and the heavy bodies of the men thudded against one another until their flight slowed, their pulses pounding. The street widened and ended in a courtyard with a cairn of stones at its centre.

  Ancaeus muttered then that they were Arcadians, ignoring the Cimmerian, and had cursed Meleager, the captain who had led his men into ambush.

  They took their stand about the shrine, each facing out to quarter the open ground but seeing nothing. She did not know how long they waited before they heard a scrabbling, moving towards them over the roof tiles. She watched the hot points of their eyes blink into being all around them. Six, eight, ten, twenty. She slipped on her finger-guard and reached for the first of her arrows.

  The Cimmerian had loosed his own shafts until no more remained, then had unstrung his bow and used the cord as a garrot. They had massed upon him. Meilanion had moved to help him and she had heard her own voice blended with that of Ancaeus, both barking at the youth to hold still. There were two sharp cries of pain from the lost man and then a brief respite for the three survivors as the smell of his blood drew the pack. She fought with her knife between her teeth, Aura at her feet darting out to dispatch those she could not finish. Ancaeus swung his axe in a never-ending roll, left and right and left again, swapping it between his hands, his legs rooted and immobile as oaks. She felt the blood from his kills splash her back and shoulders. Meilanion jabbed with his spear, grunting with the effort, but it was she and Ancaeus who bore the brunt of the assault. For the animals attacked in waves - she lost count how many times - and a strange weariness draped itself about her neck, a monotony that hummed and murmured to her in a voice she remembered but could not place. She waited until the last moment before loosing each of her arrows, eyes finding the target, arm reaching back, fingers notching the shaft, bending the bow, her heart slowing and steadying. Then the wait, a yawning interval in which she heard the thin cries of men in distant parts of the city, the grunts of the men guarding her back just as she guarded theirs, the skittering of claws more suited to earth and grass than to Kalydon's smooth stones. These intervals seemed to stretch moments into seasons; there was so much time in which to let the arrow fly. The bodies fell at her feet and when the kill was clean she gripped the shaft below the head to pull it through the corpse and fire again.

  When dawn had come they had faced each other filthy from the slaughter, as though they, not their weapons, had pierced the slick flesh of their victims, had cut their sinews and felt the suck of their fat as they were drawn out again. But no trophies would be taken from their victory. The battle had left no trace.
The cadavers of their victims had disappeared and of the Cimmerian there was no sign.

  The three survivors skimmed the scum off a water trough set against the far wall and cleaned themselves. Atalanta watched the two men watching as her skin shed its crust of drying blood, then she gave herself up to the sensation of the cold water washing over her body. A burst of laughter from Ancaeus brought her head up in time to witness Meilanion, and his excitement at the sight of her. She felt blood race to her cheeks. The younger man turned away and she plunged her head back into the water until it throbbed from the cold.

  Those who had survived the night gathered beyond the west wall of the city, their faces grey from fatigue. Meleager strode about the walls, calling to the missing. But by midday, when the sun drove them to slake their thirst from a stream running off a spur of Aracynthus, the names called were met by silence. Atalanta recalled the thud of the Cimmerian's body when their dark assailants had pulled him down: a soft sound. Meilanion's grunts of effort had been higher-pitched than those of Ancaeus, almost gasps. His manhood was new to him and untried. The hand which had pulled her up off the street had felt smooth, even as its fingers dug into the hollow of her armpit and twined themselves in the tangled nest of her hair: a man's touch. The nightmare-monotony of the attacks was rolling back and away, a dying thunderclap.

  Or the fading crash of the pillars wrenched last night from the airy palace they had raised on the far shore of the gulf, composed of their shouted names, she thought, as Meleager echoed their calls, shouting out to the missing for the last time, expecting no answer now and the catalogue serving as obsequy for the lost: Agelaus, Dryas, Panopeus, Eurytus and Cteatus, Amphiaraus, Panopeus . . .

  And all the sons of Hippocoon, and a dozen besides, as she counted them. She looked up at Aracynthus, which rose over the remaining hunters, its blunt peak filling the sky. Their proper rites could not be observed here.

  The survivors prepared for the march ahead. Down the valley, the animal pens were empty and there was now no sign of Kalydon's dispossessed citizens. The temple stood deserted. In daylight it appeared diminished, no more than a lodge marking the entrance to some far grander construction, obliterated long ago. The fire had scorched a black tongue of soot into the stones of the terrace. Meleager walked between the seated huntsmen. Their glory would be all the greater, the fewer of them survived to share it. It would bum brighter, prove more durable. He pointed to the route, which led back down the valley, towards the sea and along the shore between the water's edge and the foot of Aracynthus. His dogs rose to their feet.

  Thersites’ foot had been cleft in two, as though a claw had hooked it and his panicked motion had drawn the talon through the flesh, tearing it along its length. Acastus and Peleus supported him between them. The sons of Thestius closed about their injured brother Cometes as though to guard him from the curiosity of the others and bore him along on a crude palanquin improvised from their spear-shafts. Podargos limped. Lynceus carried one arm in a sling. The others bore the cost of their survival in gashes and cuts which stung and throbbed as the sun dried them. Their feet dragged in the dust, which soon enough rose to coat them and parch their throats. Atalanta and Aura took their own path off to the left.

  At the foot of the valley their route swung west. Below them, to their left, the salt marshes through which they had waded on the previous day shimmered as the sunlight glinted off the brackish waters and the gulf breezes set the reeds and rushes quivering. Above them, the heights of Aracynthus were a jumble of vast boulders tumbled off the mountain long ago and embedded in the earth wherever chance had brought them to rest. They rose in perspectiveless tiers which turned the dense maquis into a seeming forest, gullies into valleys, sand into scree. Giants had played here once and later conjured themselves into the battered mortals who stumbled in broken line beneath the ruins of their pleasure-ground. Meleager led. Atalanta felt her presence in his thoughts, something flickering at the edge of his vision. He had not spoken to her or approached her since appearing above her on the river-bank.

  The wound in her hand was oozing a clear fluid which would scab by sundown. She had not felt the barbs puncture her skin as she pulled her shafts from the bodies of her victims, nor the deepening of the cut with every repetition. The fingers were stiffening. She flexed them and looked up as Thersites yelped. He was being transferred to the supporting arms of Nestor and Meilanion, who avoided her eye. What kept the younger man distant now? Meleager? The presence of the others?

  It took them the best part of the day to reach the last spur of Aracynthus. Beyond, the upper part of the lagoon came into view. Yesterday's landfall was now far behind them. The sun turned the water red, as it had the previous night. Dusk tried the air and was accepted. The line of little shoals standing sentinel between the lower lagoon and the gulf which sought to include it studded the water and cast lengthening shadows, little wakes of lightlessness towed by smooth-backed sea-creatures swimming after the fireball now sinking into the western sea. More of them clustered further down the coast, more than she remembered, although who among them had troubled to count when they had looked across the water on the previous day, when their shouts had built the palace of sound in which they had set their names one by one, as refuge from the sentences suspended over them, in which their tales were foretold?

  None.

  But there were more of them – she saw it now – and the little islands moved. They were closer and smaller than she had first thought. They emerged from the mouth of the Lycormas, twenty or thirty of them. A flotilla of tiny craft was crossing the gulf, inching behind the sandbanks which they aped and whose own stasis betrayed them, in which creatures who must be men were carried, one to each, and which were bestirred by their motions. She thought first of the townspeople, disappeared that morning, who had abandoned their mad sacrifice. But there had been hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. She shook her head and turned to shout her discovery.

  Meleager stood before her, a man-shaped absence against the red glare of the sun. He too had seen the flecks of darkness moving over the water, or had known that they were there and had held his tongue just as he held her in his gaze now. The grey shadow of dusk sped into the gulf to blend together its waters and whatever moved upon them. She held him too: by an acquiescence which was part-submission to the man who had stood above her on the bank of the river but had not dared to approach and part-bestowal of the gift he sought from her now, beneath the shadow of Aracynthus, and here, surrounded by men he had led into disaster, and which took the form of her silence.

  Meilanion might track the beast they sought; Meleager might kill it. But neither both. Her choosing between them must weaken her, she reflected, when time should come to choose.

  ***

  The hunters’ dream that night was of the boar. To the north and west a storm flashed and fizzed over the low peaks of the Acamamian range, lighting their slumped bodies in its flashes. Rolling over the lake of Trichonis it broke against the northern mountains, sending down rain in silent sheets which pooled on the unaccepting ground. Thunderclaps rumbled south, stretching, fading, redoubling so that their din reached the sleeping men and entered their dreams. They lay where they had sunk and the distant storm echoed in their heavy heads, becoming the drumming of hooves. For when the beast rouses himself from his marshy hide and leaps onto hard ground the earth seems to rumble.

  The hunters had been listening for his signal and listened for it now. It was the last sound that Idmon heard, gored in the groin and buried in the lee of Cape Acheron by the Argonauts. There, Peleus and Idas dispatched the beast and left the hide and head to spoil. The thunder rolled on, echoing between the stilled Symplegades and speeding back over the sea to the country about Phthia, where a brother once listened for the same sound and another two dissimulated. This hunt is a pretext. The hapless Phocus will be bundled down a well. Peleus and Telamon will be guilty, and then banished, and then find themselves here, in the dream. Laertes sees two men, one young,
one old, picking their way through a forest of myrtles and laurels. They carry spears of comel wood. The younger looks up: a faint rumble has hovered at the threshold of their hearing and now leaps to a new, urgent level. The older fixes his eyes on the underbrush. The two men resemble himself: as he was and as he will be. Their heads come about with such agonising slowness. Some other force operates this dream, a pervasive languor which turns their limbs to lead and the dreamer's teeming brain to wind-smoothed and sun-warmed stone, whence the dream shimmers in radiated heat. Admetus strains against the chain leashes which gyre and tug as lion and boar resist the traces that will give him the daughter of Pelias. Their roars and snorts grate on his ears. His back is flecked with their foam.

  The boar leaps and capers about the red circuit of their campfire. Their heads twitch from the impact as the animal lands with a grunt among them and piles up small earthworks. They are breathing citadels under siege. Their futures are undefined, compounded of their pasts, which are tangles of obligation and challenge. The ground bristles and ripples, then settles. The fire's red eye dulls with the passing of the hours. Morning comes. The surviving sons of Thestius – Iphiclus, Aphares, Evippus, Plexippus, Eurypylus, Prothous, Prokaon, Klytius and Hippothous - are gone. The hunters raise their heads from slumber and find the deserters’ token, which may signify good or ill and prove either a gruesome totem or melancholy relic: Cometes’ abandoned cadaver sits propped against the broad trunk of an alder at the edge of the grove, his spear tied to his hand.

  ***

  The dogs fanned out and scampered forward, heads dipped and noses sweeping, sniffing after scent. Aura barked at them, wanting to follow. Soon the animals were white or tawny dots of movement, indistinct against the bare earth and rain-starved grass. They had rounded the southernmost spur of Aracynthus. It was early morning and the western slopes were in shadow.