In the Shape of a Boar Read online

  The breaks in the wood began to widen. Clearings interspersing the densely-packed trees had appeared to him at first as deep shafts dug out of the wood's substance. Now sunlight washed over the canopy of trees and poured down to fill them. He would avert his eyes, tuned as they were to the wood's interior gloom. These slabs of light sank and spread, becoming expansive sanctuaries whose boundaries were raised against him. He halted at the edge of rank meadows until the last of the hunters had disappeared into the darkness of the trees on the far side and then crept across the exposed ground, arrived within the protective twilight and hastened forward to find them again. There was no pattern to their movements. They scattered and regathered, their pace slowing or accelerating, until he wondered if this inconsistency might be their signature and if their path was governed by his own movements about them rather than any impetus of their own. For they were no longer the pursuers, whether they understood this or not. Their quarry was no longer before them and their ceaseless interminglings and jostlings for position put him in mind of panicked deer when the first hind has felt the scrape of claws in her flank and her terror leaps faster than she herself, bounding through the rest of the herd and scattering them. The hunters moved not as predators, but as those for whom knowing, believing, suspecting and fearing were not choices but successive resolutions. They moved as prey. And his own trepidation, he realised as he waited, crouching behind brushwood until the last of them disappeared into the far thicket, was baseless. The only monster in their minds was the boar.

  The sun was sinking when the trees gave out. Tussocks of sedge rose from waterlogged soil. The ten hunters were walking abreast of one another, towards a palisade of tall green reeds. Beyond the reeds, he knew, was the lake. The mountains rose to the north and east. He picked out Atalanta, then Meleager and Ancaeus. The others he could not distinguish. Their figures dwindled and merged until his eye could no more separate them than it could the swaying stems into which they walked and which closed behind them, engulfing them as though they had marched into the waters of the sea.

  They left him then, or he lost them there. He would never learn the precise events of the night that followed. Those who escaped must have passed by him in the darkness. Those who died would have lain undiscovered in the reeds. Of those who survived, Ancaeus alone would push aside the tall green stems, walk back across the marshy ground, his unbloodied axe slung over his shoulder. Grey-faced in the following dawn's grey light, he averted his eyes from the place of his defeat. He would show no surprise at the youth's presence but instead point back to the place he could not look upon and walk on, betraying nothing of what had taken place. Meilanion would know that on the evening of the hunters’ disappearance, the sunset was swift and brilliant, that the succeeding darkness was complete, that the rustling of the reeds reached his ears across the intervening distance, although he felt not a breath of wind, that when the earth on which he lay began to shudder he had believed it was the twitching of his own sleep-lulled limbs, that when the trees behind him crashed to the ground it must signal some subterranean collapse, that when that din was replaced by the pounding of the marshland then the mud thrown up seemed to fill the air like mist, choking him, and that when the reeds too began to crash and he first heard the heroes’ call to one another, it was not to deafen himself against these sounds that he groped in the darkness for the handfuls of mud which he drove into his ears, but against those he knew must follow them, which were the sounds made by aweless men reciting the lesson of terror.

  He would learn none of that, blinded and deafened, stretched out face down in the marsh. She was in there, ahead of him, but she was a question, his single question. There would be nothing else to remember.

  So the reed-spears rose again in the grey light preceding dawn and Ancaeus emerged and told him nothing. A broad swathe of flattened or broken stems formed an avenue leading to a wider area of destruction. He remembered the sons of Thestius and the mutilation of their corpses. But, walking forward into the green channel, he saw no sign of the hunters or their specific fates. The reeds rose around him until the peaks of the mountains disappeared behind them. His feet plunged and splashed in the brackish water, raising cloudy explosions of mud. He moved deeper into the reed-bed, the tall stems waving as he pushed them aside, signalling high above his head. He knelt to wash the mud out of his ears. His hearing restored, he listened to the near-inaudible plashing of the lake and the soft scrape of the reed stems. He was a clumsy intruder.

  The sounds of the reed-bed were his protection against discovery, if there were any left to find him out. He thought back to their gathering on the far shore of the gulf. They had thought their names would prove a sanctuary, as though they might step off the paths marked out as theirs and stop within its refuge. His name had been the last but one and Atalanta's had been the last. Now, standing alone in the press of reeds, he understood that one could not leave the path. Outside the limits of the trail and its signs was a wilderness or desert and he was a limping creature, one sandalled foot slapping on packed earth, one naked in the raw weather beyond – a straddler of edges. His eschatia was the green littoral between a forest and a lake and the mountains. The heroes had fallen here. This place might mark his own limit.

  He lifted his feet clear of the water, a fastidious crane. His green kingdom swayed in mockery about him. He stumbled and the tall stems sprang back in alarm. Righting himself, they snapped to attention. A narrow ravine formed from their bent stems marked his passage to this point. His evidence. He could not stir here without leaving it. The sun had risen now and the shadows thrown by the reeds skewed his perpendicular world. Within it, his movements grew careless. Sunlight dashed against the lake's surface and broke against the palisade. He followed little slivers of light through the close-packed stems until they grew to become shafts, then luminous avenues. He found himself at the boundary of the reed-bed. He was standing before the great crescent of the lake, whose surface was a single sheet of light, dazzling him. He blinked and squinted as he searched for the far shore, found it, then followed it as it curved back towards him. A smudge of haze blended the shoreline with a range of hills which rose higher as they approached, becoming mountains which loomed over the wind-stirred waters. A strip of shelving ground ran between the lower slopes and the water's edge, narrowing, then curving in behind a final curtain of reeds. He waded forward and pushed aside the stems.

  He saw their weapons and clothes heaped by the shore. Beside the pile lay its complacent guard, stretched out in the sunshine asleep: Aura. Atalanta and Meleager were bathing in the lake.

  ***

  She held his head in the crook of her arm. Meleager lay back, giving her his weight. His legs floated free in the supporting water. She watched his arms drift out from his sides and the backs of his hands break the surface. The water lapped around his neck. His chest twisted and rippled in the water's refraction and his sex was a blur of white in the dark hair of his groin. She splayed her fingers, ran them into his hair and pulled them free, combing out the knots and burrs.

  She stepped back and his trunk and legs lurched upwards then sank again. The water made small cupped sounds as it closed over his limbs. She dipped his head and he spluttered, but when he had blinked his eyes clear and she looked down into his face she saw no change there. She could have drowned him if she had wished.

  She had loosed one arrow. She might as well have thrown straw.

  There was a disturbance in the reeds: three birds with powder-blue plumage beat their way into the air. She looked over her shoulder.

  Her last memory of Ancaeus was of his clutching his knees to his chest and rolling onto his side, his eyes as dead as Meleager's. He had stood with the man she held now when Peleus and his followers had turned on them. He had faced the boar. But the boar had broken him, and Meleager too. The others had been slaughtered or put to flight, she did not care which. They were nothing.

  She looked down again at Meleager's face, framed by her hands. A soun
d reached her ears. Someone, or something, was in the reeds. The twitching tops of the stems flagged its movements. The blue birds were chasing each other in a wide circle over the lake, dipping and rising. Meleager turned his head as though to watch them. Ashore, Aura dozed. A broad black track of ripped turf and soil scored the ground behind the sleeping dog.

  When the boar at last had turned from its victims and quit the reeds, the excess of its fury had been expended there. It had torn and trampled, throwing clods the size of a man's head high into the air. They had rained down around her as she cowered in the water.

  Now she wondered for whom that fury had been destined, and why they had been spared it. The boar had never come at her, or closed on her. She had heard Ancaeus crying out, like a child, and seen him clutch his spear to his chest to quell his noise as he lay half-submerged in the water. She had seen the worse humiliation yet, which was Meleager's. But if she was intended for the beast's witness, she had failed. She had let fly her single arrow into shadow. She had not set eyes on the boar.

  The movements in the reeds drew nearer. She raised the man she held to his feet and scrubbed at the dirt ingrained in her skin. Meleager stood apart from her, waded a few paces further out, then stopped. Her eyes scanned a line of reeds set a little way out from the rest and she wondered at her own lack of concern. If she ran now she might yet reach the shore with time enough to string her bow. From there she would not miss. She would never miss again. But she stood still, realising first that there was no danger, and only then why this was so. Meilanion would again have the pleasure of seeing her bathe. She scooped a handful of water and let it run down the back of her neck, waiting for the intruder to show himself.

  ***

  Box, lentisc, myrtle and broom brushed their legs and coated them with resins and gums. Aura alternated between slinking along with her belly to the ground and proceeding by a succession of leaps. Sprays of rock roses pinked the grey-green brushwood of the hillside; the animal sniffed at unfamiliar scents and barked.

  The vegetation thinned as the slope rose – gnarled wild olives, sun-blasted gorse – but the trail was too obvious to lose. A line of trampled bushes and broken branches marked the boar's path up the hillside, punctuated by areas of more thorough destruction. The soil was redder here and stonier. The boar had scraped, gouged, scattered and climbed on up the hillside.

  Above them to left and right, two crags extended ridges which met to form a saddle. The slope steepened as it rose towards the crest. Their pace slowed. Atalanta paused and looked back down the hill. Meilanion was halfway up, near enough for her to see his head come up but too distant to make out his features. He halted, as she had known he would.

  It had been the same at the lake. He had watched, but he would not approach. She had strode ashore and covered herself. Meleager had wrapped himself in his chiton, dressing in silence beside her. Both had gazed at the youth as he emerged from the reeds, took a few steps forward through the water, then stopped. Aura barked just once, as puzzled as her mistress. She glanced at Meleager, who regarded the younger man without expression. Meilanion stood there with the water lapping about his waist, making neither sign nor sound. It was then that she had wondered how he came to be here after the mystery of his disappearance. He must have tracked them to this place, she realised, but his sudden halt upon finding them had baffled her. Meleager and herself had set off. When they looked back from the foot of the hill, they saw him wade ashore. He had been waiting for them to leave.

  Now she turned away from the distant figure and began to climb again. Meleager moved with a new ease a few steps ahead of her, his helmet swinging from one arm and his armour within it. His battles were over, she thought. If the youth imagined he would find an opponent in the older man now, then he understood nothing. She redoubled her efforts and pulled abreast of Meleager. His eyes ranged over the ground ahead, then herself, mild interest showing on his face, or surprise, but that was all.

  The late afternoon sun began its slow fall behind a saw-toothed ridge far off to the west. Soon the ground would begin to return its heat to the cooling air. The final stage of the ascent was steeper yet: a bank of dry earth and loose stones Atalanta scrabbled up on all fours and which Meleager scaled by driving in the butt of his spear and pulling himself up by brute strength. Out of breath, their limbs aching, they gained the ridge, felt the cool dry breeze gusting down from the north and turned their faces into it to gaze upon the vista before them.

  Mountains aimed their peaks at the sky for as far as the eye could see. Rank after rank succeeded one another, marching down from the north and in from the east. Where they met, a harsh chaos reigned, as though two rivers of molten rock had collided and dashed each other so high into the cold air that they had solidified there, forming pinnacles, cliffs and overhanging crags. The mountains seemed to ripple in the red light of the sunset. Rivers and streams sliced their way between them, their fiery wires cutting deep ravines in the stone. Rock-faces swept up to blade-like ridges and fell sheer into shadowed canyons. Scars of white unweathered stone showed where overhangs had pried themselves free and crashed down onto the lower slopes, ringing them with walls of broken rocks.

  This was the boar's world. Atalanta looked upon it and breathed its thin cold air. She thought of the soft slopes of Aracynthus and the woods which fringed its northern slopes. The boar had led them from that world to this one, culling the heroes until Meleager and herself remained. And Meilanion. Where was his place in the wilderness before her?

  She looked back down the hillside. The youth was traversing the slope, taking a rising diagonal to a higher point on the ridge. She knew his thought. The stags she spied from the ridges of Cyllene and Sciathus would bolt at the sight of her and she would pursue, running after them with a loping stride, losing sight of them as often as not, until they stopped and waited, then bolted again as her form flashed between the trees in pursuit. She drove them up and down the wooded slopes until they would halt and look about, awaiting her inevitable reappearance, a terrible weariness in their eyes. Then she would do as Meilanion did now: move out wide to outflank the prey, which, worn down and habituated to the hunter's presence, would watch as the trap was sprung, even in plain view.

  So Meilanion circled her – patient, attentive – just as he had at the lake. But an animal hunted thus and not taken could never be taken again and to hunt it then was to begin an endless pursuit. The quarry's path became the hunter's path, its bed the hunter's bed. Chained together in the chase, the prey would drag its predator forward like a bullock to the altar. But there could be no outcome, for where was the altar here? Where was the priest with his bright knife?

  She watched the youth's slow movement up the hillside until he disappeared behind the curve of the slope.

  Then Meleager, Aura and herself began the descent into the first of the ravines. Looking up from the bottom, she saw their pursuer clambering down after them. Huddled together to shiver their way through that first night, she knew that he too shivered from the same cold, heard the same torrent foaming below him as they heard and awoke to the same cold light. Wherever they passed, Meilanion was the creature who came after them.

  She thought of lying in wait for him, knowing he would prove no match for her, suspecting that he would offer no resistance at all. But she marvelled at him too, for the days that followed were harder than she could have imagined when she first looked down upon this wilderness of stone.

  They moved along the bottoms of gorges so steep that the sun seemed never to reach their depths and whose torrents soaked them in icy spray. Aura leaped from rock to rock, searching for the boar's scent. From time to time she saw Meleager look up at the strip of bright blue sky framed by the sides of the chasm and fancied she saw in his expression a placid regret for the unreachable sun-warmed world that they had forfeited. It would not have mattered if the boar had left no scent or trail to follow. All their paths had shrunk to one. They shivered in a world of shadow, rock and chill. They
slept, and woke and continued.

  Meilanion was always there. The track gave out where the stream had cut into the base of the ravine leaving a buttress suspended over the water. They clung to the overhanging rock, feeling for finger-and toe-holds, Aura content to be slung from Meleager's back. Atalanta pressed her cheek to the cold stone and a tiny vein of mica gleamed in her eye. They were making for a low spur further on and when she looked back from that vantage point she saw the youth clinging there just as she had, feeling the same cold stone against his cheek, the same glittering thread stitching his eye to the bare rock as had her own. The chain that bound them was the trail. When she climbed and looked down he was there below her, hauling himself onto the same ledge, scraping his stomach over the same sharp lip. She examined the grazes and bruises which marked her body and wondered if they might not be matched by his, the record of their progress and its damage inscribed twice: in his flesh and her own.

  The cold sank into her bones. More than once she thought to take the leather armour which Meleager still carried, without purpose it seemed, in his helmet. He would have yielded it if she had wished. They slept when they could no longer see to walk or climb and woke to resume the march which took them ever deeper into the mountains. Sunlight glittered high above them where mountain springs broke out of the ravine walls and tumbled down in silver cords of water, glancing off ledges and overhangs to thunder into the fast-flowing stream. The cliffs glistened with meltwaters which froze by night and frosted the rocks in the stream's rare meanders. The three of them skated and slithered over thin black ice. Then, after the interval which corresponded to the separating distance between her self and her shadow, her every act and its repetition, Meilanion too picked an unsteady path across the treacherous surface and came after them again.