In the Shape of a Boar Page 7

  And there was one whose breathings-in and breathings-out could not be distinguished, whose breath seemed to roll in his throat and escaped from his lips in a single continuous sigh. A lament, perhaps, for the city of his father, or for the loss of his men or the drowning of his dogs, or even, she wondered, for herself.

  She could not know. Darkness was the place of their ignorance; the night returned them all to infants whose cries had been damped to the suck and blow of air. She had clamped her day-old mouth to the teats of a she-bear and pulled the milk from her, knowing nothing else. As a child her wanderings pushed back the frontiers of a world of mountain peaks and crags, later the tops of tall firs, pines, oaks and broad-leafed chestnuts, then the forests which marshalled them. But the plains to the north and west of her childhood's demesne remained distant blurs of dust, habitats of all she might suspect and not know. Even the later huntress could gaze into the far distance where the horizon met the sky and not know whether the grey train of low-backed creatures marching out of sight was a range of clouded mountains or a vaporous shimmering sea or a mote of dust floating across the surface of her eye. The shrieks and bleats of her prey unravelled in the air until their threads were finer than spider's gossamer; she could not conceive the chamber in which their racket found its refuge. She dug her toes into the forest's rain-soaked soil which oozed up between them and waited motionless behind tree trunks until she could feel no boundary between her skin and the smooth bark. The shiver of a single leaf, high up, out of sight, struck by a single gust of air and humming down the massive bole would send its faint shudder down her spine. But her world was riddled with cavities and vesicles, places denied her. And when she thought upon them, urged by the rising and falling breasts of her companions, she heard them named in the two words of the sleeping language whose chatter surrounded her, one rising and one falling.

  They were ‘Meilanion’ and ‘Meleager’. She was called ‘Atalanta’. And Oeneus was the king of Kalydon who neglected the sacrifice to Artemis at the festival of First Fruits, for which omission she sent a boar of surpassing ferocity and size to ruin the land. And so the heroes gathered to hunt and destroy the beast.

  Her breath sent its own muted night-cry to join the others. What names did they hear in the filling and emptying of her lungs? The huntress? The bloody-handed virgin? She was all that they did not see in Oeneus’ city and everything drowned out in the thunder of the flood. She was of a piece with the spaces in their ranks. Rising. Falling. The stone's hard fingers kneaded her back. They had not dared to venture further tonight, just as none had dared approach her, or try her. They saw in her their own surrounding darkness.

  Night.

  A tickling of the eyelids and the mind's being goaded back within the body's cage. Aching limbs and grunts and groans and the clang and scrape of metal on stone. When sunrise came she rose with the rest of them, every joint in her body stiff. The tongue of rock on which they had camped extended from the canyon mouth and gave out in still-sodden turf. The flood had battered a stand of wild almond trees and festooned their branches with weeds. The dawn light revealed the ‘stones’ which studded their sleeping place as unripened nuts. The ground before them sloped down into a rough bowl in which the canopies of broad-leafed trees appeared as monstrous fruits. The flood would have paused here, she thought, gathering force before finding its outlet through the canyon. She sniffed the damp air. The woodland continued into the middle distance before breaking at the shore of a great crescent-shaped lake whose surface, still untouched by the sun's rays, appeared dull and grey. Beyond it, to the north and east, rose the mountains.

  The hunters sat to massage life into numb limbs or bent and stretched to ease sleep-stiffened sinews. They gathered and ordered their equipment. The worst of the mud had dried on their skins and flaked off but an ingrained residue resisted their attempts to remove it. They were red-eyed with fatigue. A sour reek rose from them. She pulled at the scabs of mud which clotted her hair and remembered the lice she would pick out of Aura's coat. Ancaeus and Eurytion raised their heads and stared as she rose and walked down the slope towards the wood in search of water.

  She found leaf-mould, nettles, a shallow stagnant puddle and then Meleager, sitting on a toppled tree-trunk, his back to her, with a stick in his hand. If he heard her approach he gave no sign. The stick moved this way and that over a patch of earth in front of him; he might have been directing a war between rival colonies of ants or prescribing some complicated dance. She watched in silence. From time to time he would pause and the stick would rise and fall in a measured fashion, then he would continue his scratching. Taking no interest in this, Aura sank onto her belly and fell asleep.

  When he reached down to smooth the earth with the flat of his hand, she saw him wince, as though injured. He was filthy, as they all were. His hair – the colour of gold, she had thought, when he first pulled the helmet from his head and stood before her in full sunlight – was lank and matted. She waited. Meleager's arm moved along a concluding arc and then he looked up from his task. She followed his gaze into the recesses of the wood. A thicket of hawthorn scrub grew in a break between the trees. Beyond it, canopies of leaves furred everything in grey shadow. He dropped the stick and rose to his feet. She listened until the sound of his footsteps dragging through the damp leaves and undergrowth was replaced by the faint rustle of the trees. Then she roused Aura and advanced on the image he had left.

  Her first thought was the boar. Meleager had scored the damp soil with shallow furrows whose curves and straight lines intersected and cut across one another. Rough crosses decorated the areas thus defined, together with little pits whose excavation she had taken for idle flicks of his drawing tool. Her eye ran over the curve of the boar's belly, found its tusks, its back and then an eye. But where were its legs? And its hackles? She pursed her lips. Aura dabbed an inquisitive paw. She shooed the animal clear. Perhaps its secret was that there was no image to be discovered, that it meant nothing. Yet he had been intent upon it, thinking himself unobserved. There was no animal to be found in these scratchings, nor the means to track one. Perhaps Meleager had groped for a future here and been thwarted. The terrain before them would offer signs but the course that led to the boar's death ran far beyond this country. This Kalydon was no longer the Kalydon of Oeneus, nor even of his son. She swept her sandalled foot back and forth, obliterating the image, then turned on her heel and walked back.

  The surviving hunters were readying themselves. She brushed past the man she had espied and bent to gather her equipment.

  The country through which they were to pass was broken woodland stretching to the north and east, where it was curtailed by the lake. She wound her bowstring around its staff then joined the men, who leaned on their spears and attended to their leader in sceptical silence, looking beyond him to the country ahead. Morning sunlight touched the crowns of the trees. Atalanta traced the line of the distant shore and her eyes narrowed.

  Meleager spoke now as one whose course was inevitable, its stages marked by the irrevocable acts of the hunt: their gathering by the shore, the march on the city, their journey to this place. The men shifted from foot to foot. They would dig a pit and drive the beast before them. It would run at them and they must drive it back or kill it. It would be forced from its cover and spitted on their spears.

  But she saw that they no longer believed this. They nodded, but would not meet Meleager's eye. Peleus alone grunted his assent and grinned at the prospect of the animal's death. The others looked at the ground, then up again as though willing the boar to show itself in the landscape's stillness, to stamp hoofprints in its soil or rip a furrow through its green calm.

  For the woodland to the north of Aracynthus tented the plain in a protective canopy of leaves, which softened its ruptures and irregularities so that it appeared to the hunters as a vast empty meadow. When they descended within it and began the trek towards the lake, it seemed impossible that anything might break in upon them save the su
nlight which fell in slanting shafts through the branches. The ground rose and their feet crunched in a mulch of leaves bedded on dry soil. They filtered through the woods, dividing about the trunks of the trees and reuniting in the groves. Their loosened assembly loosened further.

  Atalanta tasted dust thrown up by the footfalls of the men ahead. She smelt their sweat. Their wake was an airborne river of sour musk. Its vague rampart would confound baffled deer or bears, then, toppling and dispersing in the still air, it would breathe itself into the dry ground, rolling down rabbit holes and filtering through the dens of their enemies, panicking both. Pigeons clattered out of the trees and whirred through the woodland's half-light. The rising hum of wasp's nests signalled rainwater which collected in pools; creeping vegetation hung from the trees which ringed their margins. The merest disturbance of their surfaces sent slow clouds of black mud exploding in silence through the water.

  The boar was not possible here, she thought, tramping her own winding path among the winding paths of the men. Aura darted out to left and right and looped her in distracting detours. She felt the tight circle of her awareness break and reform about the dog's peculiar route. When the trees broke, juniper scrub and small-leaved limes sprang up, which they would skirt to re-enter the woods. The scuffing feet of the men preceding her exposed the black soil beneath the dropped leaves. The network of branches above their heads, the pendant leaves, catkins and emerging yellow blossom conspired together to bleach the sunlight pure white even while shielding them from its harshness.

  Theirs was a zone of abeyance, an anomalous interruption between the earth's slow chum and the air's unbodied exposure, an eventless enclave. The men were loose in it. Their rambling paths criss-crossed, coincided and parted; they met and would mutter together then drift apart amid nods of agreement, mutual shrugs of absolution. She saw them but was not included. Meleager was apart from this. Meleager and herself.

  They walked through the day, slept and walked again. The canopy of leaves which had shaded them began to break up as the gaps between the trees grew wider. They crossed little clearings choked with tall grasses and brambles. These breaks grew larger and more frequent, the ground shelving gently downward, until they passed through a final stand of oaks and hornbeams and, emerging on the far side, they found themselves at the edge of a sea.

  No boats floated upon it, nor ever would. Its surface bristled beneath the gusts of a westerly breeze which plucked feathery crests from the green depths, raising them high in its sway, to drop them again in its sag, over and over. Sunlight skimmed the rolling surface, bounced and broke in a tumble of light and shade. The hunters stood and watched the play of wind and light and saw in it a deceiving camouflage. They thought of their quarry, shaping him in their minds’ eyes. Then they raised their weapons and walked forward together until the gentle heave of sprays and shoots closed over their heads and they disappeared into the depths.

  ***

  He had found them sleeping at the mouth of the canyon. He was to lose them in a sea of reeds.

  Or they were to lose themselves. For how else could Peleus's javelin reach Eurytion, the brother of his wife, the man who cleansed his hands of his own brother's blood, save through blindness and accident? How else might their failure prove so abject and how else could the hunt reach a conclusion so remote from the palace raised on the shore of the gulf, with Kalydon before them and their names shouted high in the air?

  Meilanion watched for dawn from the brink of the canyon, where the hollow of a limestone tusk curled up in defence of Aracynthus's flanks. A scrambling descent through firs and chestnuts had brought him to slopes of grass rooted in thin topsoil and then to the bare white stone beneath. He crouched on his haunches, motionless. Below, the bodies of his former companions sprawled in fitful sleep, arrayed as the scattered spokes of a broken wheel.

  He waited for their reveille. He counted their losses and stared in puzzlement at the bare stone passage of the canyon through which they must have passed. Whatever depredation had reduced their numbers remained mysterious to him. Meleager stirred first, reached for his helmet and pulled out the pieces of his leather armour. At first it seemed as though he would put them on, but after examining them one by one he stowed them again in the helmet, rose to his feet and walked down into the woods. Then Meilanion saw Atalanta's head rise and the slow movements by which she stretched her limbs. He sensed his own thought pass between the other huntsmen, themselves awakening now, heads turning to watch her. Her dog stretched and sniffed at the ground. Meilanion glanced up to see if he might work his way about them. A short slope marked the boundary of the limestone and beyond it was the safety of the trees, but the ground between here and there was bare. He could not cross unseen. Atalanta looked about, then climbed down the incline and disappeared into the woods.

  Where Meleager was: the night-hunter's red thought. He saw Ancaeus's bulky figure heave itself upright. Another huntsman joined him and some comment passed between them. The others gathered about Peleus. Meilanion watched for what he could not see, in the woods, whose rough verdure extended the false solidity of its surface forward almost to the shore of the distant lake. The light began to prickle there. The mountains sank as they approached its gleam, or rose as they fled it, half-formed animals petrified in the moment of flight. He waited.

  The huntsmen waited too. One or two peered out from the huddle formed about Peleus, drawing back for the time it took to glance down into the black of the woods, then leaning in again to catch the man's words. Peleus gestured, his bearded chin jutting forward, stabbing a finger at each of them in turn and then at the ground. They nodded, or remained impassive. Meilanion did not need to hear the words. When Meleager reappeared and gathered them about him, they shifted and fingered their weapons. He saw Atalanta emerge from the undergrowth, her dog in tow. They were preparing to move off. Meleager pointed north, towards the distant lake, or perhaps the mountains beyond. If he fostered any awareness of the men's new disposition he gave no sign of it. When the last of the hunters had disappeared within the greenery and the crash of their footsteps through the undergrowth was little more than a whisper in his ears, Meilanion climbed down and started after them. Meleager's time must be near, he thought, as he passed the mouth of the canyon. Meleager had failed them. He had bound his men to each other and to him. Now he clung to Atalanta.

  And here, Meilanion told himself, was where they had lain together. He looked down at the patch of ground where their feet had scuffed the soil, at its scrapes and shallow gouges, noting too an attempt to erase these marks. He dug his hand into the loose soil and rolled the friable grains between his fingertips, imagining her splayed legs and the drumming of her heels, feeling for their fading heat in the bed of dry earth.

  The sun dragged its leaking sack of moments across the sky. The night was its exhaustion, emptied of all but a rasping heat. The huntsmen colluded about a drifting fulcrum, a transitory patch of forest which they tugged from side to side, whose centre was the sum of their divergent paths: the here, where Eurytion shaded his eyes against an improbable sheaf of sunlight which slotted itself between decked canopies of foliage and Peleus inclined his head to speak in his ear; or here, where Ancaeus brought down his axe with a powdery thud on a tree trunk dry with rot and urinated into a clump of ferns; or here, where nothing happened save the patient dismemberment of a beetle's carcass by a horde of forest ants; or here, where the faint rustle of leaves overhead signalled a breeze too weak to penetrate the forest canopy and stir the still air trapped beneath, where Atalanta paused to glance up and did not see Aura turn and point her snout at something on the far side of a tangle of elder-scrub, something moving among the tree trunks. The dog turned back as her mistress looked down and the night-hunter faded into the undergrowth.

  He walked the rolling line of the hunters’ periphery, circling, nearing, retreating. The open ground of clearings drove him from his quarry in search of cover. When the trees again closed over his head and the brok
en sunlight dappled everything in its camouflage, then he could approach. His zone was the margin of their awareness, where a disturbance in the woodland's chiaroscuro might be a wind-bent branch or a thrush flicking itself into the air, where the dry crunch of a careless footfall in a drift of leaves filters through the trees and bushes, disperses its signature in echoes and dull impacts, becomes ambiguous, innocuous, a meaningless anomaly: the ribbon of doubt-riddled terrain in which their eyes and ears could be relied upon to deceive them. Her dog had caught his scent. That he could not disguise. The night-hunter hoards his signals, watches unseen and listens unheard. The quarry feels nothing of the hand which tightens about its neck.

  He was imperfect, the zone where he was possible being so narrow and its line so fine. The hunters’ wandering paths cut swathes through the concealing woods, sometimes isolating him in the necks of narrowing peninsulas; he could not resist the temptation to move among them. Once he found himself marooned in a leaf-filled hollow ringed by wild pear trees and waited, listening as two sets of careless footsteps moved in from right and left. They passed to either side and he breathed again. Another· time he blundered across a long natural avenue of sumacs and oaks and found himself in plain view of a huntsman traversing the same vista, each one too distant to make out the face of the other. The man raised an arm in hesitant acknowledgement. He returned the salute and moved on, smiling.