In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  Meleager had loosed his dogs and set them on the trail of the sons of Thestius. The hunters followed the animals and their quarry into night-cooled air which rolled down from the upper slopes leaving drifts of thin mist in its wake. A heavy dew soaked their feet and all except Lynceus blinked as they turned their backs on the glare coming off the surface of the gulf and advanced into the shade. Then, as though the mountain sensed their invasion of its purview, a strange cry drifted out from its slopes, thinned by distance to a single falling note which carried in the still air and reached them as a drawn-out shout. A human cry.

  They looked up, counting one, two, three heartbeats before the sound was cut off. Nothing moved on the mountain. They looked down again, all except Lynceus who listened after the fugitive sound. His gaze carried through the mountain's coarse surface to the successive overlapping washes of alluvial soil which draped the hard limestone in soft armour. The inner mountain churned. Countless tiny shelled creatures swirled in a congealing sea of rock and darkness. Idas tugged at his arm. Lynceus seemed to stare at nothing and yet could not turn away.

  Atalanta watched without curiosity: Lynceus was the farsighted one, just as Theseus and Pirithous were inseparable, as Peleus and Telamon were the killers of their brother Phocus, and Jason the singular captain of the singular ship. Just as she was the bear-girl or the virgin. Or the victor over the boar. Idas dragged his brother forward by the arm. The hunters continued along the invisible trail of the men who had fled in the night.

  The column stretched and the two brothers soon fell far to the rear, joining Nestor and Phoenix, who carried Thersites.

  The flight of the sons of Thestius was a kind of lure or bait, or intended as such, thought Meilanion, who walked at the rear of the column. The cries of a tethered fawn will draw its mother; carrion will breed both crows and maggots. Through the dogs to the fleeing men, through the men to the boar. For the beast would take the smaller group first. And through the boar to Atalanta. Through Meleager too. The one who would lead them into disaster, as he must, just as his dogs were leading them astray now. All but himself. He searched the terrain for confirmation of his suspicion, his eyes sweeping up the mountain, then down to the water, back and forth. There was something in his memory, or something yet to be encountered.

  They inched around the base of Aracynthus and the gentle incline they traversed began to steepen. A ribbon of spiny oak scrub which had paralleled their path for most of the morning thickened now, descended the slope and forced them nearer to the water. The sun cleared the peak of the massif and fell full upon their heads. The lagoon below and to their left narrowed to a waist some way ahead, then broadened into the still lake which was its terminus. The distant dogs had stopped at a fast-running race of water which had cut a channel down the slope on its way to the lagoon below. They sniffed up and down the banks of the streamlet in an attempt to pick up the trail. Up the slope, the gully disappeared beneath impenetrable oak scrub. The dogs moved down towards the water, baffled.

  Little sandbanks broke the lagoon's surface just before its narrowest point. The heroes came off the mountain's lower slope and gathered at the edge, where tall rushes fenced the water. Idas and Lynceus stumbled down, the former guiding the latter, who now moved like a blind man and waved his uninjured arm in a strange motion, as though against malevolent insects. Thersites and his bearers were further back. The waiting hunters looked back for the stragglers, who reached the gully then descended its course until it met the flat ground of the foreshore and split into innumerable rivulets. The dogs now ran among these in frustrated confusion. It was as if the sons of Thestius had ascended into the sky. The trail was dead.

  Meleager tamped the ground with the butt of his spear. Atalanta saw Ancaeus rise, his brow furrowed by a thought she could not read. The Arcadian swung his axe onto his shoulder and looked about him, then frowned again. She tried to catch his eye, but his gaze roved instead over the main body of the men, themselves now rising. The dogs yapped in desultory fashion. Aura snarled in response. The path now was through the reed-beds.

  Spurge: its downy stems rose up among the reeds. The heedless tramping of those at the head broke its stalks and those following felt its milky sap coat their legs and thighs. Soon enough their skins began to itch and bum. Swathes of it lined the lagoon, concealed amid the rushes and alternating with mallow and flax, whose pink and blue flowers guided them through short-lived respites from the stinging sap. They heard Thersites shouting with pain until he fell far behind, his bearers tiring. Further out the reeds grew to head height and the damp ground turned to true marsh. They lost sight of each other and drifted out one by one, splashing through brackish water and pushing aside the the fibrous stems which rose all around them. The sun hung overhead and they wandered shadowless through the tall stems, guided by the depth of the water, which increased as they drifted further from the invisible shore.

  The reeds swayed around Atalanta, their topmost shoots brushed by light gusts which the convecting air sent scudding across the lagoon. There were no winds worthy of the name on this side of Aracynthus. The rustlings and soft commotions swept up the cruder crashings of the men. They moved about her in diffuse formation; the plashing of their feet betrayed them. A soundless shadow swept over, sunlight flaring about a dark span, neck gathered under a heron's yellow-beaked head, gliding. Gone. The boar was known to favour bogs, whose cloudy waters cooled his belly. The after-image of the passing bird hung in the reeds and twitched with the movements of her eyes. Aura panted. The sounds of the men grew fainter. She felt their presence peel away from her and her own luxurious solitude take its place. The idea of the two men retreated. But they would come at her, necks locked like contesting bullocks. She was the arrow to pierce and pin them both. These were vague thoughts, drifting from her as she reached for them.

  The lagoon petered out in shallows. Heads, shoulders, then torsos broke the surface of the bristling reeds: the heroes waded out onto a foreshore in front of a low cliff. Water-starved trees clung to the rising rock-face, their roots bridging the dark splits of the fissures. The widest of these breaks cut the cliff from top to bottom, forming the entrance to a narrow pass. Stands of stunted oleanders and terebinths choked its mouth, suggesting that the level of the lagoon had once risen and lapped at their roots, then receded, leaving them stranded on the hard white limestone. From time to time, the winds probing the far side of the mountain would find this passage and drive a cloud of yellow dust out of the mouth of the cleft. Little stones fell from the heights and landed with loud cracks on the echoing floor.

  The sun emptied its afternoon heat into the sky. Idas and Lynceus, then Thersites’ bearers, pushed aside the last curtain of reeds and stamped their feet on solid ground. There being no shade, the heroes turned their backs to the sun and stared into the white mouth of the cleft. The dogs’ tongues hung in the heat. Sweat ran over Ancaeus's furrowed brow and his eyes moved from head to head. He was counting, Atalanta realised. Meleager moved among the prostrate men, whose limbs were blotched with rashes. When he came to the broad-shouldered Arcadian some words passed between them and then Meleager too scanned the area in which they were gathered. Both turned and looked down the lagoon's long shore. The green of the reed-beds darkened and lightened as the stems swayed in the breezes. Otherwise nothing stirred. She examined her injured hand; the wound had not reopened. Ancaeus was pointing back beyond the reeds. Whatever troubled him now had troubled him first there. It did not concern her. She wondered if the water here at the top of the lagoon was as foul as that below. Aura would not drink it. She thought that their fates would be settled in the mountains of the interior where streams boiled and foamed as they hurtled over pebbled beds. She wanted freezing water, familiar terrain. Ancaeus and Meleager had stepped back from one another. Those nearest were watching this unexpected alliance: Theseus and Pirithous, Jason a little apart from them, four or five others gathered about Peleus and Telamon. Thersites and Lynceus muttered to themselves in the
ir private worlds of pain. Nestor seemed to be asleep. Who else? Castor and Pollux had walked to the mouth of the narrow canyon and were staring up at its walls. Acastus was sharpening the blade of his spear, using a smooth shard of stone which rasped against the iron. The others were idle. They would move off again soon, she thought, then thought again. They would all move off, except one. She looked about to confirm her suspicion, then turned back to Ancaeus and Meleager, who were still staring down the shoreline: reeds, water, the slope of Aracynthus. But no movement there. No sign. Meleager faced her then and she felt herself back on the little ridge above their landfall, his body moving to cover her own and his eyes on her before the younger man had appeared to interrupt the wordless transaction. But there would be no interruption here - the fact was written in his face – and Ancaeus had known before any of them. Very well, she thought to herself. Meilanion had disappeared.

  ***

  A shape gathers at the back of his mind. But reach and it recedes. The night-hunter understands these things: that a dog thinks with its nose, that the prey will reek when chased, that water carries no scent but its own. The dogs’ confuson at the gully running down the slope of Aracynthus had given him another point of the forming shape. The channel ran up as well as down, ascending and disappearing beneath the impenetrable thicket which covered Aracynthus's lower slopes. The flight of the sons of Thestius had taken them into the stream which cut its way to an invisible destination high above. And then?

  Meilanion glanced about at the other hunters, a casual turn of the head. The gully was a steep-sided trench half the height of a man cut by an agitated flow of water which flexed and quivered as it raced down the slope. A single moment and its single movement would take him out of view. The others had turned to the lagoon below; the hunt recorded in their footprints would give out at the water's edge and be resumed wherever they regained land. His own would leave no trace at all, but his would be the one to succeed. The losses in the abandoned city, Oeneus's absence, the inordinate sacrifice in which their prefigured failure resounded in the cries of the animals as they burned. They were all beyond the hunt's posterity now. And this trackless territory was his, proper to the night-hunter: himself.

  He jumped down into the channel, crouched and waited, counting seconds. No shout pursued him. He crawled forward.

  The day-hunter is solar. The night-hunter's double lives in the fall of sunlight. He glows with heat. The day-hunter becomes one with his prey, bound to it by the mutual pounding of their feet along the trail or of the blood within their veins. They are close, at the finish. But the night-hunter drapes himself in nets and bristles with lime-twigs and little cages. He knows the moon's face better than his mother's and the forest paths are more familiar to him than the lines in the palm of his hand. The light by which he hunts is cold.

  The spiny branches of the dense oak scrub closed over Meilanion's head. A little further up and he would be indistinguishable from the shadows. He paused and listened again for the sound of pursuit. He heard the yapping of the dogs far away down the hillside. Water surged against his wrists and knees. The sides of the gully were formed from slick yellow-brown clay into which his hands sank as he advanced. His knees bruised themselves on the stones collected in its bed. The oak scrub thickened above him and prickled with glints of sunlight. It was a half-lit world. He braced his feet against the sides of the channel and forced himself on, marvelling that the sons of Thestius had left so scant a record of their passage, for the clay recorded his own scrabblings and scrapings in the form of gouged handholds and footprints.

  The shaft of his spear tangled in the dense branch work above. He pulled it free. His knees were raw; he felt the sting of the water in the cuts. The gully was too narrow to turn about and inspect them. Clay smeared him from head to toe, dried on his skin, flaked, and was replaced by a fresh coating whenever he missed a foothold, for he was forced to flatten himself in the bed to prevent his sliding down the incline. The thorny canopy above reached down and scraped at his back. From time to time the stream received trickling tributaries. Above each of these his narrowing channel would shrink and press him harder. The incline seemed to extend to the height of the sky. He measured his progress in the jerks and lunges by which he pulled himself forward and which grew clumsy as his limbs tired. He stopped to rest but it cost as great an effort to brace himself as to continue. Sunlight broke through the screen of branches, the hot shafts falling on his back. His mind drifted about the clay-coated body which housed him and which the sun's kiln baked to a brittle skin. He was outside the man climbing the slope of Aracynthus, in a future where he rattled in a tomb of sun-baked clay which aped the form of his flesh. His memorial would be shards of empty armour. The spiny branches would wreathe his shell and wind themselves about its limbs until they too dried in the hot wind, burned, and left his soot-blackened carapace exposed to curious eyes and inquisitive fingers. Whose? And whose lips would then form the name inscribed upon his parchment skin, the record of the creature he had been: Meilanion?

  He had halted. He drew breath and pushed forward again. Ahead, the course of the channel bent to the left where an outcrop of limestone broke through the soil. He pulled himself around the obstacle. Was the thorn-scrub less dense than before? The sunlight seemed stronger.

  The roof of his world broke open. One moment there was nothing but the sides of the gully, whose lines converged until they merged in the thickening shade, the next he was pushing aside a swathe of thick grasses, rising and standing upright in full sunlight.

  He had reached a truncated ridge which jutted from the cliff. The face continued above him, riven with cracks from which water seeped, running down and pooling between the tussocks of lush grass. To either side, the ground fell away into deep ravines. The air was thinner and colder. He looked down at the lagoon far below. Nothing moved there except a single bird making a wide circuit of the shoreline. He turned and gazed up at the cliff, shielding his eyes from the glare of the sunlight reflected by the white stone. Its base offered handholds and little ledges, but thereafter its slope appeared sheer and smooth. He thought of the clay which lined the gully, in which nothing and no one had left its mark. Except himself.

  He scooped water from the shallow pools and began to wash the clay from his body. Could Meleager, following his dogs, have been right and himself wrong? Might the sons of Thestius have descended to the lagoon and waded out far enough to lose the pursuing pack in its waters? For all its heat and light, this was a night-hunt, a pursuit through country where paths would double back on themselves or lead into traps. The real trail would always be the least likely. And the quarry he pursued, that too was a lie: a shape-shifter. The sons of Thestius were huntsmen who had become the hunted, bait for the boar, who would replace them. They led to the beast, and the beast led further, being the token for the final prize.

  The cool water was red with clay rinsed from his skin, red as the water in the trough that morning, after the slaughter. He frowned then, recalling Ancaeus's laughter and the sight of Atalanta, unperturbed, plunging her head into the tainted liquid. Straightening, her face had seemed to run with the blood of those they had killed. She had said nothing, her thoughts turning to his sun-blessed double. He did not know. She had turned away in search of other survivors and Ancaeus had drawn him aside to tell him that the tales told of her were partial. Rhoecus and Hylaeus had tried her in the forests of Arcadia, it was true, but she had not shot them. The huntress had cast away her bow; the virgin had feigned willingness. And then, Ancaeus had continued, in the midst of their pleasures, she had torn off their genitals. The centaurs’ howls had echoed down the valleys as she harried and tormented them, allowing them no respite while they bled to death. She was untouched because untouchable. Ancaeus had laughed again at the expression on his face. The boar alone would give her to him.

  He looked down from the cliff, into the ravines to either side, two steep chutes gouged from the stone as though by gigantic heels scraping down Aracy
nthus's sides. A furring of brushwood concealed the final footprint. He picked out heaps of stones which the winter frosts had prised from the face and sent tumbling down. He felt a heaviness in his limbs; his knees and ankles were stiffening. He would have to move soon. Patterns of handholds led right and left, then disappeared. Which to take? He thought forward to the ebb of his energy as he clung to the rock-face, unsure whether to press on or turn back, the stumps of his fingers being peeled from their handhold and the final lean back into airy space.

  He remembered the drawn-out cry which had raised their heads to the cliffs that morning. He had tried to remember something then, but it had lain in his future not his past: here. That morning it had been a man. He screwed up his eyes against the glare and stared down. One of the sons of Thestius had walked with his brothers that morning, had scrambled with them up a clay-lined channel, had rested here, and then had begun to climb. But he had tired, or slipped, or lost his head. He had fallen, and now he was no more than a blood-stain baking on a limestone boulder far below.

  Meilanion turned from the distant dead man to the rockface. The sons of Thestius had climbed from this ridge. One had fallen. But eight had survived. He slung his spear over his shoulder and began to climb after them.

  ***

  Behind them were the lake and the reed-beds. Before them lay the break in the cliff, the entrance to a canyon. The hunters pushed through the trees choking the mouth. Beyond was a channel cut from white stone and the sunlight beating into it. The camber of its floor pushed tamarisk scrub and tufts of grass to its sides, where their roots scrabbled in drifts of gravel and pebbles or sought out cracks in the stone.