In the Shape of a Boar

Praise for In the Shape of a Boar:

With this novel [Norfolk] has produced a forceful and impressive work. —Library Journal (starred review)

Telling prose of hypnotic sensory immediacy . . . Fiercely brilliant, sustained displays of virtuoso writing.

—The Guardian

An immensely ambitious novel, one which makes most contemporary English fiction look like a game of Scrabble.

—The Spectator

Enthralling . . . Lawrence Norfolk has constructed a seductive tale out of shadowy uncertainties.

—The Times Literary Supplement

A wonderful achievement, as intellectually provocative as it is gripping to read, and it confirms Norfolk's reputation not only as one of the most exciting novelists around, but also as a writer unafraid to evolve.

—The Literary Review

In the Shape of a Boar

Also by Lawrence Norfolk

Lemprière’s Dictionary

The Pope's Rhinoceros

In the Shape of a Boar

Lawrence Norfolk

GROVE PRESS

New York

Copyright© 2000 by Lawrence Norfolk

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

First published in Great Britain in 2000 by

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, England

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS PAPERBACK EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Norfolk, Lawrence, 1963-

In the shape of a boar / Lawrence Norfolk.

p. cm.

ISBN 9780802193674

1. World War, 1939-1945—Underground movements—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Greece-Fiction. 3. Meleager (Greek mythology)—Fiction. 4. Poetry-Authorship—Fiction. 5. Refugees, Jewish—Fiction. 6. Greece—Fiction. 7. Poets—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6064.O65 15 2001

823’. 914—dc212001040156

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

03 04 05 06 0710 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents, and the people they married.

CONTENTS

PART I

The Hunt for the

Boar of Kalydon

PART II

Paris

PART III

Agrapha

Abbreviations

‘I've often asked myself where I might have got my boar.

Boars, my dear Walter Jens, – such things do exist.’

Letter of Paul Celan, 19 May 1961

PART I

The Hunt for the

Boar of Kalydon

They come from the cities of Pherae and Phylace on the plain of Thessaly, from Iolcus on the Magnesian coast, Larissa and Titaeron on the banks of the Peneus. They quit Naryx and Trachis and march inland, westward, by way of the tusked peaks of Mount Oeta and the hot basins of Thermopylae.¹ Rivers lead them out of Argolis, Emathia and Locris – the Asopus, the Axius, the Cephisus – and from Megara and Athens their routes lie across the isthmus of Corinth. They sail east from Ithaca and Dulichion; west from Aegina and Salamis.

The heroes are the outposts of a shrinking country whose centre is the place of their assembly. They march towards its discovery, each step drawing the ring of the tinchel tighter about the ground where their tracks must meet. They are one another's quarry in a bloodless, preparatory hunt.

Those descending the high ridges of Taygetus or Erymanthus join those marching west from Argos and Alea, north from Amyclae, Sparta, Gerenia or Pylos. From Taenarus, on the tip of the Peloponnese, the route must pass by way of Messenia; from Messenia, Arene; from Arene, Elis. Arcadia is a mountain fastness, cool and untouched. One walks out of the thick mists of Cimmeria;² another makes the journey from Scythia.³ One takes a small boat down the Scamander to cross the Hellespont, sails south of the isles of Imbros and Samos, north of Lemnos. Mount Athos is a beacon on the triple isthmus of Paeonia. Soon the coast of Euboea, and a lucky tide or easterly wind to take him down the strait until its brine runs sweet with water from the flood of the mountain-fed Spercheus. Its mouth will be his landfall, the first since Troy.

The landscapes of their childhoods unfold green cloaks and disclose the men they have become: the horsemen⁴ and helmsmen⁵ and runners⁶ and cripples.⁷ The new terrain they tread narrows to the routes which will best bring all to the coincidence waiting in their futures. They are smooth-talkers⁸ and swindlers;⁹ thieves,¹⁰ the sons of thieves¹¹ and their accomplices too¹². Their heavy booty drags along the ground behind them. They would abandon it if they could. They steal cattle and tame horses.¹³ They ride dolphins.¹⁴ They kill centaurs.¹⁵ They are murderers¹⁶ and their victims¹⁷ and their victims’ avengers.¹⁸ They owe one another the blood in their veins; these convergent journeys represent flights from such debts and their collection. A rare respite lies ahead, in the task awaiting them, such as was found by some on the deck of the Argo, or in the dust of Iolcus, where they contested in honour of Pelias. His son is here.¹⁹ His son’s killer is here too.²⁰

They have murdered their brothers²¹ and been cleansed and betrayed.²² Their very beginnings have twinned them with the manner of their ends,²³ which will come as thunderbolts out of the bright sky and burn their images into the ground.²⁴ Their acts drag them fowards like beasts whose nature is to loathe one another: fierce lions and fiery-eyed boars yoked together in the traces, who tear up the ground and rake their drivers over the sharp stones.²⁵ The necklaces of gold which they have looped about their wives’ necks become nooses about their own, ploughing them face-first into the earth.²⁶ They watch their images decay. They feel their skins puncture and split. They bristle with their own broken bones. Their memories are the memories of old men who have seen enough of death, those who watch from the walls, who have ransomed their lives and do not care to survive their sons.²⁷

But they are sons themselves and they remember fathers other than the ones they are determined to become. Leaping out into free air to land on the far side of the culvert, one looks up to find a sunburnt arm, knuckles bunched about a chipped scythe.²⁸ Another watches the grizzled paternal head turn from the sacrifice, his fire-reddened face contorted, hand poised and twitching.²⁹ A third stares into an open mouth spilling a red mash of tendons, gristle and soft bones.³⁰ A wolf's eyes look back from behind his guiltless gaze.³¹ Their fathers are mortals with the appetites of gods,³² or gods with the appetites of men.³³

And yet here, in the gathering coincidence of the heroes’ assembly, and now, between their inevitable beginnings and ends, they may step from the tracks holding them to these destined paths. They may struggle out of the deepening furrows marked and dug by their own footprints, which would bury them deep within the earth.³⁴ They may find the kernel within themselves which cannot be destroyed.³⁵ Their straggling journeys draw them ever closer, their lines trace a new, earth-bound constellation. A tendrilled creature creates itself over the terrain's rough fibre; its inky body will mark their meeting. They are each other's destinations.

The country which yet divides them is a place of accidental transformations. Its hinterland has been foreshadowed, its instabilities prefigured. Here, brothers turn into uncles,³⁶ women may become men³⁷ and men form themselves in the harsh races of rivers, wade out and stand dripping on the banks, a minute old but full-grown.³⁸ The terrain narrows with every step. Its coordinates are their untrammelled bodies and what they do. Those who die here can do so only by fluke³⁹ or carelessness.⁴⁰

But the sons of Aeacus must survive to become the fathers of Achilles and Teucer,⁴¹ just as the son of Acrisius must once again be the father of sly Odysseus.⁴² The ground will close and inseparable allies will find themselves divided between the land of the living and the land of the dead.⁴³ They have heard their futures in the songs of halcyons and crows; they sounded like commands.⁴⁴

Their country is a spattering of enclaves now: themselves. Their bodies are kingdoms which ally themselves with their neighbours and rivals. Some merged long ago, spooned like twins in the womb,⁴⁵ smooth-surfaced and shelled like an egg.⁴⁶ The War-god bellows but his son has fled.⁴⁷ The Argo sails away from the kingdom and kingship she was built to reclaim.⁴⁸ Her captain never returns.⁴⁹

They are the actors of feats they have compelled themselves to perform and others yet awaiting them. Their footfalls shake oak trees to their roots and set off landslides and small thunderstorms. Cattle flee and sheep miscarry. They collapse limestone caverns bunkered deep beneath the earth, or glide over fields of heliotrope without bending a stalk. They wear the armour of their pasts and futures.

Look: the highlands of Taygetus and Erymanthus are deserted, the plains of Elis and Thessaly silent. They have moved on, leaving behind a seismic quiet. The armature of what they mean cases them in its brittle glaze; these are lives which can only be enacted. It will be a weary meeting when they at last look across the gulf and know they may shuck off these encrusted skins.

Almost there.

They are the generation of Heracles: only they would gather in this manner, in the luxury of this long moment. Their sons will destroy one another at Troy. They know this and know that their tale will be twisted there, betrayed by one of their own and recast as policy.⁵⁰ The sadness they will forget here is that the armour they shed must encase them again, that their names must swag themselves in epithets, that the sentences they carry will still be here on their return, patient as ferrymen and reproachful as widows. The boats will be waiting and the earth heaped.

The presences of some will leave no deeper imprint than a stylus in wet clay as it lifts and strands them, frozen in strange attitudes in the following silence. For some there will be only that.⁵¹ For others, the scratch of the quill over the papyrus's surface decrees contradictory lineages and mad progresses which will send them sailing between Argos and Colchis,⁵² drive them from the well polluted by the body of Chrysippus, or tumble them into the labyrinth which will be built by their sons. They glare in the lights from different altars and their shadows battle among themselves. But those dark spartoi are not themselves; they are competing plausibilities.⁵³

Such are the futures which tug at them, from whose grasp they have slipped to make this journey and to whose insistence they now deafen themselves with the noise of their own common purpose. As they near the gathering place they shout out their names to those arrived, to be known among them.

. . . Euthymachos, Leucippus, Ancaeus, Echion, Thersites, Antimachos, Panopeus, Iphiclus, Aphares, Evippus, Plexippus, Eurypylus, Prothous, Cometes, Prokaon, Klytius, Hippothous, Iolaos, Theseus . . .

They are heard here, this once and never again.⁵⁴ Those who survive will remember this clamour as the true beginning of the hunt. Shout follows shout until together their names raise an edifice of air in which all find shelter from the futures racing towards them, be it exile to the islands in plain view before them,⁵⁵ or to fall in the hills rising across the water,⁵⁶ to flee Trachis and be taken at Oechalia,⁵⁷ to know that their prime has passed.⁵⁸

. . . Pirithous, Enaesimus, Hippothous, Alcon, Scaeus, Dorycleus, Eutiches, Bucolus, Lycaethus, Tebrus, Eurytus, Hippocorystes, Eumedes, Alcinus, Dorceus, Sebrus, Enarophorus, Iphikles, Acastus, Peleus, Lynceus, Idas, Admetos, Amphiaraus, Podargos, Toxeus, Ischepolis, Harpaleas, Castor, Pollux . . .

The discus has been launched, thrown so high it will take decades to descend. Beautiful Hyacinthos turns to his brother, as though about to speak.⁵⁹ The heroes shout and each shout is taken up by those gathered here until their names thunder about them.

. . . Caeneus, Cepheus, Pelagon, Telamon, Laertes, Mopsos, Eurytion, Cteatus, Dryas, Jason, Phoenix, Pausileon, Thorax, Antandros, Aristandros, Simon, Kimon, Eupalamus, Lelex, Hyleus, Phyleus, Agelaus, Hippasos, Nestor, Kynortes, Meilanion . . .

The last of these ⁶⁰ shouts loud for the last of all, who is his cousin and the lone huntress admitted among their number. . . . Atalanta. ⁶¹

***

Their first hunt is for each other and now it is done. They search in one another's faces for the men behind the names. To the south, the claw of the Peloponnese grasps at the sea, its peninsular fingers reaching after the islands escaped from its coast. North is where they are destined. They look across the water.

A narrowing plain runs along the face of the far shoreline. A range of hills rises behind it and far inland lies the great spine of the Pindus. The sea glitters in their faces. On the other side of the gulf, the one who called⁶² them here is waiting.

The land drops in terraces to the shoreline; two enormous steps lead down to the water. The heroes fell stands of poplars and alders⁶³ and build boats,⁶⁴ or lash the trunks together to fashion rafts.⁶⁵ Or they call up dolphins and ride them,⁶⁶ or throw themselves with a shout into the gulf and strike out⁶⁷ for the far shore.

But they cross the water and its currents wash away their sweat and grime. Nearing land, the brine mixes with freshwater springs which bubble up from the seabed, tasting sweet after weeks of groundwater. The steep limestone peaks of Chalkis⁶⁸ and Taphiassus slide by to the east of them; the coast chosen as their landfall is a triangular lagoon fronted by a line of tiny islands.⁶⁹ Inland, the looping ridges of Mount Aracynthus rise over them. They wade through reed-beds and abandoned salt pans. As prelude to the hunt they will be feasted tonight in Kalydon.

The ground turns from mud to marsh to baked earth. The sun which steals the damp from their chitons takes with it the last taints and tangs of their journey here, the harsh woodsmoke of their campfires, the burnt fat of the animal slaughtered for good fortune when they left their hearths. That was long ago and the rain's black curtain has fallen behind them like sleep or forgetting. They come ashore in ones and twos and comb the water from their hair with their fingers: a colony of individual silences.

A dog barks. Atalanta looks up. The mud on the greaves tied about her shins is drying. She taps at it with her bowstave. She watches her black-eyed and white-haired animal nose its way out of the reeds: Aura.⁷⁰ Next she drops to one knee, gulps air into her stomach and hawks up a thin lozenge of leather. Unrolled, it becomes a tongue of leather cut to the shape of her fingers; within it is the tight coil of her bowstring. Dry.

She unravels the cord and ties it to the bowstave then slips the leather tab over her wrist and fastens its flanges to her fingers. She flexes her knuckles. The twisted rope of cloth is unknotted from her waist and draped over her shoulders. The sun will dry it. Aura barks again. The dog has scented her and approaches now at an easy trot, keeping close to the line of the reeds. Atalanta undoes her pouch and upends it: twelve arrowheads, a bone needle, strips of leather, a pair of bronze ankle guards, a knife. She checks each in turn then repacks them. Around her, the rest of the hunters are absorbed in similar business: unstrapping and cleaning weapons, scraping mud, knotting or unknotting scraps of cloth and leather, fitting blades to shafts. These are well-rehearsed preparations.

A little way down the shore, Ancaeus holds out his double-headed axe⁷¹ between two of the sons of Hippocoon, who sharpen their spearheads⁷² against it. The metallic rasp rings out in a complicated rhythm. Her dog has picked up a different scent. The land slopes up from the shoreline in gentle ridges of powdery yellow soil tufted with scrubby grasses.⁷³ Atalanta watches the line of hackles on the animal's back twist as it climbs the incline and disappears from sight. She frowns, puzzled. One of the spear-sharpeners pauses. Further down the beach a head rises from its task. Meilanion? Too distant. The moment stretches and then is snapped by a volley of sharp yelps.

She snatches the knife and is running before she knows it, taking the ground in long strides. She has outrun stags but this is not her terrain. Cold forests and uplands, freezing streams: Arcadia. She reaches the top of the ridge.

Dogs are snarling and scuffling for position. A pack of them surround her animal: Molossians and Castorians⁷⁴ heavy-bodied brown-and-white brutes. She lunges to get an arm around Aura's belly and feels claws scrape down her forearm. She lifts her dog clear. Jaws snap at her forearm and close on air. She knocks the aggressor to the ground. Then, faint yet distinct through the tumult of yelping and barking, she hears the scrape of metal behind her. A sword being unsheathed.

There is no time to think. To hunt is to guess weights, dimensions, angles. The man is behind her and to her left. She must catch him high up, divide him between ducking his head and protecting his face. Cut his throat. Hang his head in a tree. Take his genitals for trophies. She turns on the ball of her heel, planting her other foot forward and raising her arm. She has not touched a man before today, or been touched herself.

But the man stands with the sun behind him, a black shape against the brightness of the sky. His sword is drawn. Atalanta checks her movement. She can smell him. Was this how she smelled to Rhoecus and Hylaeus?⁷⁵ A crested helmet covers his face to the chin, leather body armour sheathes his limbs. She signals her dog to be still. She is unarmed save for her hook-bladed knife, too small to be of use. Her chance has disappeared. She sees the sword stiffen in his grip as though the hand holding it were bronze too, and the arm, the shoulders, a whole body concentrated in the blade. The man stands a full head taller than her, taller than any of the men on the shore, save perhaps the brutish Idas⁷⁶ No part of him moves except his eyes, which move over her. She waits for his advance.

But instead of approaching he calls off the dogs, one by one and by name.⁷⁷ The animal she knocked to the ground rises last and slinks back to join the pack. The man's shadow almost covers her. Her thread of life continues in its lee, binding her to a confusing tangle of fates, but none of them this one. He shifts balance in a delicate movement which sends his shadow forward as though it were a liquid dousing her and soaking her body, an obscure incursion, or insult. To step back, she thinks, means retreat. But to remain may mean acceptance. She has known no body but her own. She understands movement – pursuit, the flat arc of an arrow. And stasis – waiting, impact, the weakening judder of the prey and its last twitch into stillness. Which now?

Then a footfall. She hears someone climbing up the slope. Her cousin's head comes into view. Atalanta sees his eyes narrow at the sight of the two of them. Meilanion is carrying a bundle of arrow-shafts, a gift for her.⁷⁸ He drops them at her feet and eyes the armoured stranger. She watches both. The man sways back in concession and sheathes his sword. He pulls off his helmet, and then she knows him. His hair is a deep gold in colour, the badge of the one who has gathered them here: Meleager.⁷⁹

***

The men waiting on the foreshore ape craftsmen. They flet and oil arrows. They rub dried salt from their scalps. Soon their weapons will be sharp enough to carve marble, or split stalks of grass. The archers among them gouge deep pocks in the soil as they bend bowstaves to slip the knot between the horns. There is nothing to sustain them on this terrain but what they bring to it. The bowstrings hum as the tensed staves snap them tight.⁸⁰ None of their habits are casual.

Heads rise at Atalanta's return. She walks ahead, nervous Aura settling and snuffling about her calves. The two men follow, her heavy-footed attendants. Meleager's dogs mill behind him. She turns away from them and strides along the foreshore. Her bowstave lies where she dropped it, but her pouch has been tossed aside. Its contents are scattered over the ground.

Her eyes follow the rough arc in which her arrowheads have fallen, the tracks of a brazen bird, the last glinting print its heave into the air. She bends to pick them up. The insult is furtive: a coward's challenge. To whom among the men does it belong? The men do not want her here. Atalanta spits on the ground and looks about for the culprit but no one is watching her. They have turned to Meleager. She moves to join them.

He has mounted the bank to address the men. At first, he speaks as though their presence here were in question, but the the note of supplication soon fades. He throws out names and heads rise. The named men nod and smile. His voice rolls through the words, the dogs motionless behind him, the men silent before him while the sun sinks somewhere beyond the distant terminus of the gulf, turning its waters red. Such challenges have sought them out so many times. He frames the expectation forming among them. Their shadows lengthen until the greater dark of Mount Chalkis overtakes and swallows them. Then they are black silhouettes waiting for Meleager to issue the call. He frames the task and shapes their enemy within it.

Whether by accident or design, at the festival of First Fruits,⁸¹ Meleager's father sacrificed to all the gods but Artemis. In revenge, the goddess sent a boar to this country to lay it waste. The boar is her anger, whose shapes are as numerous as the animals burnt to appease it, for it uproots trees, flattens com, rips the vines from the soil and sends the herds and flocks stumbling down the hillsides with their grey-blue viscera trailing in the grass.

The heroes call back to the gold-haired man who stands before them, as they must. Acceptance issues from their lips and gathers in the succeeding silence, becoming their commission. They are here to hunt the boar.

Atalanta is not named. She plucks at the folds of cloth about her waist. Her chiton has dried. She covers her breasts and ties the garment in place. The men pay her no attention, gathered together on the twilit shore and melded by the shadows and Meleager's challenge. The dusk settles on them all like a rain of dust or ash, the rain they have fled. Their pasts are carcasses, toted shoulder-high as trophies,⁸² as is her own. Her father left her wailing on a mountainside. She sucked bear's milk in place of her mother's.⁸³ She was the bear-girl.⁸⁴ Now she is the huntress, the bitter virgin, the centaur-killer: her own monsters, of which the most insistent and insubstantial is her own circling shadow. A bronze arm points her forward at dawn. Midday, and an arm of iron warns her back. She has looked up through the breaks in the forest canopy expecting vast slow-beating wings but there was nothing and nobody save herself.

She hovers at the rear of the gathering. The outsiders have already found one another here: Pausileon, Thorax, Aristandros, and others⁸⁵ whose names she has forgotten or never knew. High above them the west-facing peaks and highest ridges of Aracynthus are still sun-lit, but fading into the dusk. Meleager's voice sounds again. Tonight they will march to Kalydon, where his father Oeneus holds court and awaits the men who will rid his land of Artemis's beast.

The men nod as Meleager falls silent. Their succeeding murmurs echo then amplify his words: they talk of the bowls of cool wine and the women they will enjoy in the palace of Oeneus. Their tones are unsurprised, weary. Drifts of briny air roll off the waters of the gulf. The dark body of men breaks up.

The heroes move off the shore. The ridges bring them on to level ground, a plain bounded by the sea at their backs and by the slopes of Aracynthus. Ahead, beyond the interruptions of Chalkis and Taphiassus, a break in the ground snakes towards them then veers away again. The terrain rolls upward, into the vale of Kalydon and the mountains of the interior. They hear the soft scuffs of their sandals over dusty ground, spears and axes held high. Atalanta ties her arrow-shafts in a bundle and slings them over her shoulder. Her arrowheads chink in their pouch. The heads and weapons of the heroes bob, merge and separate in noiseless intersections of metal and flesh.

To their left, the gentle descents of Aracynthus's foothills descend to the plain, subsiding into humps and long mounds, or shallow buttresses which echo one another and mark the stages of a deceptive progress. Distances stretch forward, or disappear. The river is to their right but they cannot see it yet. The rising of the moon restores their shadows and flattens the bare scene before them. When they round a rise in the ground and reach the first of the orchards it seems to have been dusted with grey powder, or petrified. For a moment they do not recognise the evidence of their eyes.⁸⁶

Broken branches are strewn between the fallen trunks. Those few still standing have been cut and gouged; milky sapwood glistens in the wounds. The ranks of ruined trees stand as an army of wounded and dying men who, unable to muster arms, hold up between them the corpses of the dead. Comprehension arrives here and there among their number. The boar has visited his violence here, according to his compulsion, just as they must visit their own upon him.

They thread paths between the broken trees, their feet sinking in the mess of rotting apples. Atalanta moves to the head of the men about her, five or six, who soon slow their pace. Slipping light-footed around the splintered boughs, Aura keeping close, she hears the squelching progress of the men behind her grow fainter. The fumes thicken in her throat. She stops and thinks. The main body of the men is ahead and to her right. She swings out, away from them. The gold-haired man and her dark-browed cousin will be watching for her. They wanted her. Or have wanted her, or will want her. But they cannot be rivals here. Not yet.⁸⁷ Faint laughter sounds somewhere behind her. She finds a rhythm which takes her through the breaks and gaps in the fallen trees. The arrow-shafts bump against her shoulder. She has left her companions behind. Then the trees give out and the ground rises. She is clear. Turning back, she overlooks the ruinous scene through which she has passed, ash-grey in the moonlight.

She is standing on a ridge of land, a rib which curves up behind her to join the slope of Aracynthus. A ribbon of darkness marks the treeline. Her head begins to clear. The dizzying fumes masked some more virulent poison: the boar's musk? But the smell is no longer in her nostrils and slips from memory as she reaches for it. The boar obliterates, she thinks.

Tiny movements in the orchard signal the progress of the men within it. Some have regrouped on the far side. She sees that they might have skirted this obstacle, had they wished. Meleager chose to lead them through it. There he is, pacing the far perimeter, gathering those who have chosen to follow him. An obedient tail of dogs sweeps back and forth at his heels. Her gaze ranges again over the orchard. The men who accompanied her into the trees, and whom she outpaced, have not emerged. She can hear but not see them. She picks out Meilanion's slight figure. Aura waits beside her. Her late companions crash about, stumbling and falling, rising again. But each time they resume the interval of silence is longer and the last reaches after a moment in a future too remote to be conceived. There is no more sound. They fell behind, she thinks. All gathered here have thrown themselves among their possible futures, which may end with the boar, or in the city they march on, or here.

Leave them.

Let them rot with the apples, thinks Meleager. The early drop⁸⁸ is the earth's due.⁸⁹ He sees Meilanion walk clear of the trees to be greeted by Ancaeus. What had the younger man decided, watching his, Meleager's, shadow creeping up Atalanta's body? Meilanion had avoided his eye and the two men had exchanged no word as they followed her back to the others. Might the youth have understood his intention so soon? Where is he?

Atalanta rounds the last rank of trees and sees Meleager ahead, unmoving, his dogs scuffling behind him. The leather soles of her sandals unpeel themselves from her feet and readhere with every step. The sugary juices of the fruit dry on her calves. The men stand in groups, as they had on the foreshore. Before she reaches them the nearest begin to move off.

The slope of the land becomes shallower. Grasses rustle and crunch beneath their feet. Atalanta keeps to the higher ground on the right, a coincident satellite to the rough mass of the men. The sound of gurgling water reaches their ears, growing louder as they near the lightless break in the ground glimpsed earlier. At the bank, they look down into the river.⁹⁰ Heads turn upstream and downstream. She watches from a distance, sees Meilanion striding along the water's edge and thinks of the cool water washing over her skin. The men resume their march. Meleager she cannot see.

She and Aura loop behind them all to reach the river's edge. She looks down on a shelf of crumbling earth. Beyond it, a sheet of fast-flowing water is broken here and there by the smooth rocks of the river-bed. This would be a torrent in spring. Now, late summer, the descent is an easy jump. She splashes water against her calves and works her fingers between her toes. Aura dabs her paws one after the other in the flow. The streams familiar to Atalanta do not flow like this. They tumble, or skid, or foam. Whorls and jets of their icy waters strike rocks then leap up and break against one another, or stand in perpetual fountains. These streams are nameless, each one sounding its single liquid syllable until the confluence of their croaks and gurgles melds in the great valley rivers and their names: Alpheus,⁹¹ Ladon,⁹² Erymanthus,⁹³ Eurotas.⁹⁴ Such rivers and their valleys have never been her place. Soon they will run as black by day as the Evenus does here and now by night. They may be dark now.

Across the water from her, thorn bushes⁹⁵ choke the opposite bank. Atalanta looks downstream to where the river narrows and the ground is bare. A cairn stands - to mark a crossing, she thinks. But then she sees that the cairn is built from bones: ribcages, knouted femurs and segmented spines are piled up to form a platform. Four horse skulls rest on top. To mark a death, she decides, and wonders whether it lies in the past or is yet to come.⁹⁶ Here a once-living being found the hadal current which twists in the waters of all rivers: Or a still-living being was moving towards it now, unknowing as the men who entered the orchard behind her, never thinking that its broken trees would mark their graves. The cairn might even be her own. The ordination of the hunt will loosen and the boar's marks grow contradictory. One of them may deal the death-blow: hurl the fatal spear, swing the double-bladed axe, thrust the sword, or loose the single arrow that may find the animal's red eye. Their roles wait to claim them, hovering in the instants outside their beleaguered present.

Atalanta looks up from the surface of the river in search of the peaks seen earlier from the shoreline. The stars overhead mark out the lesser of the Bears;⁹⁷ the moon is sinking. She looks over her shoulder to find the Virgin,⁹⁸ glimpses bright Arcturus⁹⁹ off to the west. Then she springs to her feet.

Meleager stands on the bank above her. He wears his helmet as before. His body appears to lean out over the water, as though his feet were rooted in the ground above her. The current tugs at her and her toes curl about pebbles concealed by the water. She holds herself still, waiting for him to speak, or act, to disclose his purpose. But he does none of these. She turns her head to spit in the river. When she turns back he has gone.

***

The moon disappears. The landscape loosens. The heroes march up the valley to Kalydon.

Darkness raises low humps and ridges from the terrain, spectral exaggerations which nudge them hither and thither across the valley-floor. Gradients curve into cliffs which dissolve on approach, becoming terraced slopes which slant down to the river whose dull gurgling is an unreliable guide, batted back and forth between invisible walls of stone. Sometimes the river seems to sink into the earth on one side and re-emerge on the other, and then a moment later the reverse. At times its faint splashings come from both sides at once and their land-home Argo sails down a canal of terrafirma, which closes behind them, becoming an isthmus, then before, an island: they are marooned, or adrift, or landlocked in the valley's beaconless night. Coarse grasses and asphodel crunch underfoot. The stars are white-hot splinters marking any number of shapes in the darkness of the sky.

The Athenians move to the fore, the Arcadians to the rear. Meilanion lingers, allowing himself to fall back through the men. Atalanta was towards the rear when last he saw her. He cannot see her now. Ancaeus draws level with him and grips him by the arm. They will be eating their fill in Oeneus's halls soon enough. The bowls of cool wine, roasted fat and meat, the women who will serve them . . . Meilanion nods. The older man will not let him go.

The column stretches. Behind and to his left, he hears someone send a cascade of pebbles skittering. Someone else coughs, further back again. Male footsteps, by the rhythm. He calculates such matters without thinking. He was named for darkness¹⁰⁰ by his father Amphidamas of Tegea,¹⁰¹ brother of Iasus, who was the father of Atalanta, who carries the arrow-shafts she accepted from him, slung over her shoulder, somewhere in the surrounding lightlessness. Tegea too has its dark places,¹⁰² its trails set with snares and bristling with lime-twigs, its night-hunted woods.¹⁰³

He glances about. Atalanta is not in view. He tracked her into the orchard and found the men who had followed her, slumped against the fallen trunks or face-down in the rotting fruit. She was gone.

The men pass through bushes whose stems scrape at their greaves and tangle about their ankles: vines, but all broken or uprooted. They cross the dry bed of a gully. Ancaeus nudges him. The Athenians have stopped.

Ahead, a corona of red light glows above a rise in the ground. The men advance, then veer around to the left. Again the Athenians at the head signal a halt.

The heroes are still and their sudden silence lifts a thin sound high into the night air. Animals. Meilanion distinguishes the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep. The men around him ready their weapons. The gully narrows and deepens as it continues. There is a smell of burning in the air. The bank to their right has become a wall, a foundation for a great stone terrace which looms over them as they pass along the length of its base. The light is corning from above. They hear the dull roar of a fire and voices shouting. The smell is recognisable now. The wall shields them in shadow from the firelight which pours its red glare over the edge, still high above their heads. But the ground is rising and brings them up at last at the far comer of the terrace: heads, shoulders, then bodies emerge as though struggling out of the soil.¹⁰⁴ The first men to clamber onto the stone apron of the terrace walk forward and come to a halt at the sight which meets them.