In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  The men's trail led across the meadow, the fading signal of their passage. He thought back to the hard-packed paths of the Arcadian forests, their reluctance to tell of the quarry's passing. He had read signals in terrain more resistant than this. Denuded trees spoke of hunger, muddied pools of thirst. Dens, nests and lairs were the indices of safety and sleep. He had seen a great flock of starlings arouse itself from late-summer torpor and erupt from the canopy of a dense-leaved lime tree. Trouble below. He had stood far downstream of a place of slaughter, had waited for the neighings and bellowings resounding from the upper slopes to fall back into the forest's chatter, to be transmuted there and emerge in the clear run of water as an encroaching bloodstain in which the hot stenches of horse and man were intermingled. He had seen her red signal then: the killer of centaurs. Even Atalanta left her mark.

  But the night-hunter moved in the footprints of others. His places were the forest's spaces. He faded into thickets and rematerialised in the foliar calm of clearings. He moved through undisturbed air and left it still. No trace marked his passing, nor monument the being who had passed. He touched nothing and no one. And she was untouched-terrain on which the lightest step would leave its print, where the soundless brush of a finger would bloom red. Her blood would rise at his touch and flush the surface of her skin: his sign.

  The air rumbled.

  Thunder? He looked up in puzzlement at the unbroken blue of the sky. The noise came again, but fainter perhaps, and then in waves which broke and died in their intervals, softening and merging with the intervening silences until the last was no more than the rustling of the grass and the brush of the air in his ears. Then silence again: a mystery.

  He believed the boar would come in such a manner, leaping out of a deep quiet, hooves thudding and thundering, growing louder and louder again until the noise drove out all thought.

  The sons of Thestius would have heard it, and known what it meant in the last instants of their existence. His eye wandered again over the meadow with its luxuriant cover, its constant movement, and he wondered how far the men he had followed here had progressed before that noise had broken over their heads. And then, rising from the ground all bloody and tattered, what would they have made of the silence which succeeded it? The hush on the far side of that noise was now their language, proper to lost men, their memories and their ghosts. The trail of the sons of Thestius ended here.

  ***

  A hammer formed from water and soil had knocked the air from her lungs and pressed her flat against the smooth rock. The flood had driven itself against the wall of the canyon and risen there, its energies gathering. The first shock of cold had been succeeded by a terrible weight as the water buried her. She felt herself driven beneath its mass, deeper and deeper as though she might never fight her way back to the surface. Then the surface itself disappeared and darkness took its place, a liquid dark that wrapped river-weed fingers about her face. The current driving the head of the flood caught her then, shook her like prey in the jaws of a greater and more powerful animal. It pulled one arm from its anchorage and her lungs screamed for her to let the other go, to strike out for the surface, for air and light. She had clenched her hand and hung on.

  The flood had strung a bow with water and loosed its arrows. Rocks whirled in the slings of its eddies and clattered in the flow. Something tumbled towards her. But the impact was soft. Let go now. She was dwindling, being sucked down into her own darkness. She was drowning and could hold on no longer. She had closed her eyes and let go.

  When she opened them again, the flood had receded. Everything glistened: the humped boulders, the broken-backed crags, the detritus carried down by the flood, the sheer sides of the canyon itself. A slick skin of mud rendered all alike. For an instant.

  The mud began to steam. Soft wisps of mist rose in swaying columns which intertwined among each other, collapsed and rose again, peeled themselves from the canyon's sides and drifted in the humid air until they tumbled down as tiny clouds. A smooth pool of vapour settled on the canyon floor and rolled under the soft blows of a near-imperceptible breeze. The boulders which cleared its surface appeared as islands in a steaming sea.

  One of the boulders stirred. It unfolded, or opened. It sat up and began to cough. A splintered tree trunk sprouted branches in the form of arms and propped itself upon them. Another halved itself midway along its length and stood upon the ends. An archipelago of hump-backed islands extended peninsulas, spits and spurs whose flexings transformed them into mud-coated bodies: chthonic beings disinterring themselves from their formative clay, bones heavy with damp, eyes crusted and hair matted. One by one the heroes rose and blinked in the unfamiliar twilight of the flood's aftermath, stiff-jointed and raw with the ache of resurrection. How did they come to be alive?

  Some looked about for their weapons. Others, yet unable to stand, rested their heads in their hands or scraped at the mud which covered them from head to toe. Caeneus held up the remains of his hunting spear, its shaft as thick as his wrist and snapped in two.

  The boulder nearest Atalanta extended a pink tongue, licked her face, then barked, being Aura. Further up the canyon she saw Laertes and Podargos kneeling over a prostrate figure. Laertes pressed the man's chest until a half-choked cry erupted and both ministrants sprang back. The figure jumped to his feet and stood before them, swaying. He scraped the mud from his eyes and looked about as though he did not recognise these strange, mist-draped surroundings. It was Meleager.

  Down the canyon, Jason, Castor and Pollux had drawn together. Ancaeus stood beside them. She recognised them by their silhouettes for the canyon's twilight gloom and the men's encrusted dirt rendered their faces uniform and indistinguishable. The trio were looking back the way they had come and when she stared she too was able to make out a figure which may have been a man. Of Nestor, Phoenix and Thersites there was no trace. Nor of Idas and Lynceus. She thought of the force of the flood as it had struck her, clinging to the side of the canyon. Idas had stood in mid-channel.

  She rose to her feet and followed three men who were walking back to the distant figure. Behind her she heard Meleager calling his dogs: Labros, Methepon, Egertes, Eubolos, Corax, Marpsas, Ormenos, Leukios, Charon, Gorgas, Thera, Podes, Loraos.

  The single sound to come in reply was Aura's growl, prompted by the sound of their names. Meleager called again but she did not turn back.

  Theseus was pressed against the side of the canyon, one arm reaching deep into a narrow crack. He drew back as the three men approached. Sounds of movement came from within the fissure, then a low groan. Atalanta reached the men and peered into the darkness. Two eyes stared back at her. Moments later she made out a mouth. It opened and the groan came again. It was Pirithous.

  Theseus shouldered her aside and reached in once again. But try as he might he could not reach the man. His hand closed on nothing but mud which the flood had driven in after his companion as though to seal him in his tomb. She looked at the crack and remembered Pirithous's broad frame, and wondered at the force which had driven him into such confines. For he was held fast there and it was impossible that he should be freed.

  Castor, Pollux, Jason and herself stood back. Theseus lunged again at the crack and again his fingers closed on nothing. They waited for him to give up the hopeless task, but he would not, or could not, and showed no sign of tiring, jamming his arm into the crack up to the shoulder as though he might split Aracynthus's bedrock with his bare hands. When Jason placed a hand on the man's back, he shook it off angrily. Atalanta shrugged. Even if he should reach his companion, what then?

  The others waited where the canyon angled. Beyond them, Atalanta saw a solitary figure come around the bend. For a moment she thought it was Meilanion, but as the figure drew nearer she noted the heavy-set chest and shoulders. She saw Telamon raise his spear in greeting and she remembered the scouting party that had been sent ahead. It was Peleus, who returned his brother's salute. She made her way back, expecting Acastus to come into vie
w at any moment. Meleager and Telamon went forward to receive Peleus's news. But the man was alone.

  She joined the hunters who had gathered about him to hear how the first weak flood had knocked the two of them off their feet, how they had sheltered from the second in a side-canyon and how Acastus had been swept out in the flood's recession. But he did not say how he came now to hold the dead man's spear. The canyon would bring them out by nightfall, he reported. They would have to move now, if Meleager saw fit to do so, he concluded.

  At that, they looked back to the group gathered about Theseus, who belaboured the rock with undiminished energy. Jason, Castor and Pollux were gone. Meleager took three quick steps forward, fist clenched about his spear as though he had thought to pursue them. But he stopped and pointed at Atalanta, his mouth opening to frame a curse on her presence, or an accusation.

  The others watched him let fall his arm and choke back his words. Then, a gesture of dismissal, he reached for his equipment and motioned for them all to do the same. The survivors walked forward again.

  At the bend, the canyon began to widen. She saw Ancaeus step aside and wait for her, nodding as she drew near. Together they turned and looked back at Theseus. Ancaeus filled his lungs and his voice boomed and echoed off the stones. But Theseus remained where they had left him, inseparable from his doomed companion and in the grip of the same strange dance as before, only now it appeared that he was manacled to a twitching sinew anchored deep within the mountain whose random spasms pulled him hard against the rock then released him, over and over again.

  Ancaeus turned away. The men walked on and Atalanta fell to the rear again. But the hunters’ shunning of her was perfunctory. A dwindling deference to Meleager compelled it, the leader who had led them into this place, who had pointed to herself. She counted the survivors, those the flood had brushed aside. Then she counted the vacant spaces between them, left by those the flood had chosen to take: Eurytus, Harpaleas, Idas and Lynceus, Thersites, Nestor, Cepheus, Echion, Phoenix, Acastus perhaps, and Theseus bound to doomed Pirithous. The palace of their names was crumbling, insubstantial as smoke. All of them except one. Between her own name and Meleager's was the outline of the youth who had seemed to disappear into thin air, or who marched now along his own shadow-trail. Was he lost too?

  ***

  There were animals whose toes and claws were reversed. Their tracks would lead the credulous hunter backwards to musty dens and middens of bones and dry droppings: the places they had quit. The ripples in the pools from which they drank radiated over the water's stillness and sank in its inertia. They slithered from the womb into shallow bowls hollowed from dry soil and green havens of flattened bracken. He wondered, did such lairs mark beginnings or ends? Beyond birth or death were the unknowable places, where trails became the presumed heavy-bellied stagger of the animals which bore their young and then sank into the haunts of their non-existence. Crows left ragged arcs of clawprints, scatterings of arrowheads or dragon's teeth sown in soil where signs alone would grow. Flightless birds foraged grubs along the forest paths by scraping ovals in the soft soil, whose series the careless tracker took for hoofprints of unknown ruminants. Impossible beasts ambled in cloudy dapplings of broken light, spectres of an eye which scanned for patterns and their disturbance. Meilanion's eye. Meadow-mites crawled down the stems of tall grasses to reach the corms where they laid eggs whose larvae would hatch and feed on the sweet-juiced subterranean stems and thereby reveal the course of the original colony through the meadow, its random drives and turns charted by the destructive hunger of its offspring which toppled the high stems in a single morning, great swathes of them falling as though some vast and low-slung beast had dragged itself through the field, flattening everything in its path and cutting the mark of that progress in the lush shoots, so it seemed.

  But that, the night-hunter understood, was not what had happened here.

  He found the sons of Thestius in the trees beyond the meadow. The grass gave out at the sun-starved ground beneath the trees whose tops he had glimpsed earlier, and which must have drawn the men here in the first place. Through the sparse branches of the firs he scanned the slope below, which dropped, levelled, then dropped again. The brighter green of chestnut trees ousted the silvery needles of the firs as the second of these giant steps descended, and the same needles, dropped and browned, lay thick on the ground beneath his feet, accumulating in spongy, prickly drifts where the tree roots formed accidental corrals. To his right he saw the gash of the ravine cut its way down the mountainside. The slopes below might have been parched grass or stone for all he could tell. A deep fault broke the bare terrain down there. A bend midway along its course sent it towards the north-west. Meleager's hunters must be within it, there being no other route save his own. He looked down on the landscape, where twilight had fallen. His muscles ached. Each soundless thud of his heart announced a throb of pain in his foot.

  Then, a single viscous pearl of liquid eased itself out of the branchwork and fell into the fir needles about his feet. Meilanion looked down at where the liquid had landed, a bright red bead, and then up at whence it fell.

  So it had been here, he saw then, among the clustered firs standing sentinel about a field of wild grass, through which the passage of five men might ape the heavy tread of the boar which had tracked them, or the myriad destructions of a feeding colony of meadow-mite larvae. Here was where the prey's trail had ended and the predator's trail would begin. Their encounter was marked – his eyes roved about the ground – by gouges in the boles of the firs and by great plates of uprooted and overturned turf which lay scattered like the abandoned shields of a routed army.

  He listened to the wash of air in the trees. The boar's fury was wanton and would be expended on anything which stood in its path. So the trees were slashed and the earth broken up. He walked to the edge of the terrace and peered down into the undergrowth, then made a slow circuit of the battleground, but if there were hoofprints to be found he failed to spy them. He turned back to the damaged trees. The cuts were cleaner than he had first imagined, as though some tool had been used. And the rounds of turf were too perfect, as though cut by a blade. He squatted to examine one. Teeth, tusks, snout and hooves: but which of those might have produced this?

  It was almost dusk and the morning would reveal the boar's tracks, he thought, which would lead down the mountain to the ravine, where Meleager and the others moved. The boar would stalk them from above. Sunlight pinked the tops of the mountains to the north. There, he thought, among the untrodden peaks. The heroes’ dowsing in the waters of the gulf, the bloody flurries in the city of Oeneus, his own route up the mountainside, every footprint and snapped twig, ripple and rustle would come to silence and stillness in the mountains. And the sons of Thestius would be wound in the trail that had brought them here and led him after, bound tight in the record of their ended lives.

  They were dangling from the branches. They had been spitted on their spears and their cadavers hung as trophies in the trees above his head. Pierced through the neck, or the shoulder. One through the mouth. The protruding shafts were lodged among the forks of the trees and it seemed that the beast had sported with them for their bellies were slashed and their viscera dangled. The lolling heads of the eight sons of Thestius bent to show him their waxen faces.

  The boar could not be satisfied: appetite was its nature. He looked at the distant break in the mountain's lower slopes, a black crack of shadow in which the hunters moved, invisible to him: Meleager and those he commanded, his quarry among them, black-haired, long-limbed Atalanta. He could come at her only through the boar himself, through a spray of his splintered bone and blood, his squeals and grunts cutting the thin air, hooves clacking on ground which yielded the animal and the night-hunter nothing and recorded no mark, being stone. The boar's course led into the mountains.

  ***

  Now: Ancaeus, Caeneus, Telamon and Peleus, Eurytion, Podargos, Laertes, Admetus and Meleager. Her companions numbered ni
ne.

  The canyon walls fell to low ramparts and the canyon itself widened, becoming a shallow channel whose mouth flared and spat them out on the far side of Aracynthus. The sun had fallen below the mountain's dark bulk long before. In so complete a darkness they could go no further and, muddied and bruised, they lay down on the stony ground to rest. The night settled itself upon them.

  Stones dug into Atalanta's back. Her world was a rough oval of sun-warmed stone defined by the span of her arms and the sweep of her hands. In the moonless darkness, she could know nothing beyond its boundaries. From time to time came the scrabble of Aura's claws on the rock as she roused herself from sleep, then the rustle of mud-caked hair as she settled herself once again. Atalanta heard the men's breathing, which rose around her in little towers of sound whose collapses were soundless dispersals, the plumes of dying fires whose smoke rises and disassembles in still air. The night damped their names to near-inaudible whispers which sighed and wheezed, invisible and interchangable. The broken-backed rhythm of the nearest sleeper might have been Telamon or Peleus, both breathing out the death of their half-brother as a column of stagnant damp air lifted whole from the well in which he rotted. Or did its stertorous stops and starts mimic the last thrashings of poor Acastus, throat slashed and head pushed under the rising flood until his limp body's final breath bubbled through the bloody water and burst between the hands of his killer? For Peleus had murdered him near the head of the canyon, she believed, and yet the murderer breathed himself. The softer double-susurration rising under it would be the exhalations of Caeneus and the inhalations of Caenis – breathing out as a man, breathing in as a woman – or Eurytion, whose lungs’ inflations and deflations counted the great chain of moments leading to the final rattle. How many now before the succeeding silence? A million? A thousand? A faint bass-rumble pricked her ears and seemed to sink away as she sought its origin: Ancaeus. Podargos and Laertes rasped back and forth between one and another and sent two rough-skinned serpents skywards, their intertwinings rising to the point where they would part and seek out their futures by chasing and fleeing the sun. Admetus panted like a drunkard.