In the Shape of a Boar

by Lawrence Norfolk

  He was of a piece with the substance of this place, obdurate and cold, she thought. A pebble skittered out from underfoot and the cold air stung her nostrils, as it would his. She was footsore, as was he. All she felt, saw, touched would be felt, seen and touched by him. The ravine was narrowing.

  Meleager no longer looked up at the sky. Aura no longer growled when she found the scent of their quarry. Her mistress thought the thoughts of the youth behind her before he had thought them himself. Their futures were indivisible. The boar now. She had not imagined she could still be surprised.

  And yet, when the span of the ravine measured no more than that of her outstretched arms, so straitened had its confines become, and the foaming water which before had drenched them from head to toe had shrunk to a tame rivulet contained in a channel no wider than the splay of her fingers, when its course had grown so irregular – twisting, turning, redoubling – that the vista down its length extended no further than the next ten strides, and those at a pace slowed by the expectation of the ravine's final closure and their own eventless defeat, then they rounded a final spur and a single step took them from the confines of the ravine into the place they knew must be their destination.

  They stood at the bottom of a vast crater of stone.

  The floor of the basin stretched before them, enclosed all around by high cliffs, which rose as though a ring of mountains had advanced on this place, collided and merged. The sides curved up from the floor and then climbed sheer into the sky.

  Aura snarled once, a deep gurgle which broke the silence. But the warning was unnecessary. Nothing could exist beyond this place. The boar could be nowhere but here.

  Atalanta and Meleager advanced into the crater, their footsteps over the loose rocks and smooth grey pebbles sounding at once too loud and too puny. They might have been giants or insects. There was no scale. The air was cold and very dry. Atalanta narrowed her eyes against the light. There was nothing in their heads but the thought of the animal they had trailed here.

  Then Meleager halted. He took the leather armour from his helmet. Atalanta watched as he strapped on ankle guards and greaves, wrapped the girdle about his waist, reached for the thongs of his leather cuirass and tied them. Last of all, he gathered his hair and pulled on the crested helmet. His eyes regarded her from behind the slits in the bronze, moving over her as they had at their first encounter. Now she met his gaze. He toted his spear, feeling its weight, turning its shaft in his hands. He was unknown to her again. He turned from her to a point on the far side of the crater's floor and then she understood his purpose.

  The fault in the rock which long ago had allowed a trickle of water to cut the ravine did not stop where they stood. The facing mountain must once have been joined to the massif through which they had passed, for the same fault was visible there too. A shallow incline rose to an opening in the base of the cliff opposite. She might have mistaken it for a shadow. It seemed too narrow, no thicker than the blade of a knife.

  The sounds of their footsteps pursued them as they echoed off the cliff at their backs, then, once they had passed the midpoint, ran to meet them from the one facing it. The crater was vaster even than she had thought, or perhaps their pace had slowed. Her sense of time seemed adrift: the constant glare of the sky, the silence, the bareness of their surroundings and the stillness within them. She thought of those moments of excitement, the brief rushes of exhilaration or terror in which time slowed and its moments stretched, when she would spring and seem to hover in mid-air, unable to descend upon the flash of movement that was her escaping quarry. Nothing happened here except themselves.

  The entrance to the cave rose before them. Meleager's fingers tightened about his spear. She wondered if the boar might break from his lair and charge them out here in the open, half-hoping that he would. The cave's darkness was part of his armature, familiar to him and as potent a weapon as his tusks and hooves. He would come at them low and crush them against the walls he knew so well, grind them to a pulp. Her arrows would find the yellow-haired man and the white-haired dog instead of their target. He would do to her what he had done to Meleager. The slope leading to the mouth of the cave was littered with stones. They climbed.

  She glanced back once before entering. The ravine from which they had emerged was no more than a hairline crack in the rock. Meilanion was standing at its base, a tiny figure whom she understood now. The beardless youth. How still and bare he must find this place where he had hoped to find so much, and how harsh the light of the sky upon it. They were her own thoughts but he could be thinking no others. Her choice was to continue. What was his? He had seen them now. Was he running?

  Her questions would not be answered. It was too late and apparent that he, the night-hunter, was the one to be spared.

  Consider our ends, she thought, and the ends of our trails, the moment when the prey stumbles and the hunter does not, how the cries of an animal in extremis may sound like human cries and how human cries can be taken for those of an animal. The boar too has his song. His guises change but he does not. He has waited a long time and longer. He waits now in the darkness of the cave.

  ***

  The mouth of the cave tapered to a point, framing a blade of light. Outside, there were pebbles and stones. Here, the floor was smooth sloping rock. The boar took his stand below the lip of the entrance and waited for his assailants.

  Here, the outer cold mingled with warmer air which rolled up from the depths of the cave. It settled in the nap of his bristles and he smelled his own compound scent: dried scours, a midden of bones, urine, the lingering whiff of a must which had driven him to grunt through a mouth of streaming saliva and grate the tender tip of his sex in frustration against the unyielding floor. Now these scents were the beacons – his own beacons – which guided him through the twists and turns of the passageways and chambers, warning him of jutting obstructions and sudden drops. His hooves made a clacking sound when he trotted over the bare stone, skipping over treacherous ridges and wheeling himself around the sharp bends.

  But the first time the boar had awoken here the darkness had seemed to press upon him and smother him. He did not know how long he had blundered within the bowels of the mountain, nor how he had come to be there in the first place. There were dim memories of panicked charging, collisions and screams – perhaps his own. Exhaustion had felled him. When he awoke, his grazes and cuts had scabbed and begun to throb. He had whined to himself in the darkness.

  The old enemy had driven him forth: hunger. Hunger and stone. He had offered his lament to the surrounding cliffs and they had returned it to him. He had recognised nothing in his new surroundings and remembered nothing of his old surroundings. He had awaited signals. None came.

  His belly was a cauldron of acids; it had growled at him, urging him away. The terrain grew easier the further south he moved. After the mountains, a final ridge had given him a vantage point over a different landscape, gentler and greener. A lake had tempted him down. He had cooled his underbelly in its waters and wallowed in the reeds which sprang up in its shallows. In the woods beyond he had rooted in the friable soil and rubbed his mud-encrusted sides against rough-barked trees. A massif of hills merged and rose on the far side, cut by a crooked pass of bare white stone. He preferred to climb and so reached the plateau at the summit. Tall grasses grew and he sported among them for days on end. It might have been longer. The air was cooler there, he recalled.

  Now he stood and waited for his pursuers. They would be here soon enough with their weapons and irrevocable intentions. This place was the socket into which they fitted. He had pared them to its dimensions. He scraped his hooves on the cave floor and gauged for the thousandth time the weight of his bones and the dense flesh massed about them. A boar's power resides in his hindquarters, whose haunches are wound tight with wiry muscle. Confronted by hills, his most natural mode of movement is the gallop. But descents are difficult, a boar's forelegs being thick but brittle staves and unused to an animal's full
weight pressing down upon them. Overtoppling is a danger. It could not have been any natural urge which had impelled him to descend from his grassy plateau to the lower slopes of Aracynthus. Nevertheless the boar found himself shouldering aside fallen tree trunks, enduring the more or less pleasant scratching from the thorny thickets through which he forced a path, leaping over spring-fed rills and dry meltwater courses. Descending and circling, then descending again, but in a thickening fog of puzzlement. His was not to question and yet, like the reawakened ache of an old wound, or the sudden unclouding of the sun's rays, or the escape of some slippery prey (as slippery, almost, as memory), and so circling and descending.

  Why was he here?

  Pleasant basks in the afternoon sunlight which washed the middle slopes of Aracynthus were good occasions for considering matters such as these. He found a hollow there, a gentle-sided and grass-lined bowl which was congruent with the spread of a boar's belly, well-suited too to the slack bathing of the striped skeletal muscles in their sheaths of oozy sarcoplasm and the regular contractions of the smooth visceral muscles within, meaning digestion. Anything from the excrement of rodents to the hooves of a bull would pass through a boar. The latter produced pleasant acidic tingles in their through-passage to the sphincter. He observed the city in the valley below and the actions of its inhabitants. They seemed designed to unsettle him. True, his own acts grew more random. Uncontrolled. There were periods of time for which he could not account.

  If he could divine the yellow-haired man, the boar had believed, then his own purpose would be clear. Or perhaps that thought had struck him later. The city dwellers had expelled one of their own. They had tossed him out with his hands bound and a sack tied over his head, then beaten him to make him run. He had stumbled down the valley surrounded by his dogs, who were torn between following their master and launching themselves at his tormentors. The animals had tumbled and scrambled about him, carrying him off on a raft of noise. Their barks and yelps had reached his twitching ears as the squeaking of mice. The man had worked his hands free and pulled off the hood. Watching from the cover of the undergrowth on the overlooking hillside, the boar had seen him shake free his hair and known that there was another as singular as himself.

  But he had not descended further then, nor even when the city dwellers themselves had fled their city, streaming out by the gates and spreading over the valley with axes, sickles and scythes in their hands. He had welcomed the sight of their glittering blades, their glinting signals meaning – he was sure of it – the resolution he awaited: they were coming for himself.

  No.

  They had carried their tools to the orchards and begun cutting down the trees, then hacking and slicing their roots. The largest trees had been rigged with ropes to the trunks of their neighbours and the ropes tightened until the wood split. The vineyards had followed. Then they had gathered and penned their livestock and lit the pyre in the temple, which had glowed yellow, then orange and red. And then they had begun the burning.

  There had been three nights of that, each one seeming longer than the last. The stench of roasted flesh drove him ever higher up the side of Aracynthus and the firelight which illuminated those labouring in front of the temple cast its red glow over all. He recognised one, rose at the sight of him and would have careered down the slope had he not been surrounded by men the like of which he had not seen before. Different from the inhabitants of the city, and a woman among them. The yellow-haired man had gathered them and returned as their leader.

  The boar watched as they tramped towards the city, tracking them, his agitation growing. The moon sank from sight and the darkness which followed was blacker than any he had known, save that of the cave. A distant storm flashed and rumbled in the distance to the north but illuminated nothing save itself. He was locked in his blindness as though still pent within the mountain.

  The same darkness must have blinded the men, immured that night within the walls of Kalydon. It was a darkness he knew too well, which stretched and flattened, settled itself in the angles of the city. The boar thought of the men crawling through streets and courtyards, stumbling over toppled stones and broken walls while their predators padded across the roofs, mapping their routes. The boar watched for first light to scratch its claws against the underside of the eastern sky, waiting for the weals of pink and yellow-tinged whites when the light reached west and sought purchase in the dark folds of the night's fat, probing for its bones.

  But the boneless body of the sky came apart, disintegrating and dissolving, its flow pulling streams of light through the craggy valleys of the east where frost-fractured rock felt the same claws searching for cracks and flaws, prising at its legacy of secret scars as though both light and dark were sleep-blinded animals who had dreamed themselves fighting and then awoke to find it true. The sun vaulted the horizon. A lake of shade drained from the vale of Kalydon. Morning, noted the boar.

  The boar took shelter among the trees. Gorse and scrubby grasses tufted the descending slopes. The city lay like a piece of battered armour cast away in the panic of battle, dull-grey in the pre-dawn light, now yellowing to bronze as the sunlight fell full on its stones. Those who had found safe haven were scattered through its length and breadth. From the tree-shaded heights of the valley's head, the survivors appeared no larger than ants and their weapons as tiny fragments of twig or stalk carried by blind instinct. The dawn which had come too late for so many was signal to the living that they must rise and count the dead.

  But the depredations which reduced their numbers had taken place in darkness, their exact character unknowable, even to the boar. Curtailed shrieks and screams had disturbed the night-air. The citizens labouring in the pens further down the hillside had raised their heads, some of them slipping away now their work was done. The cries spoke of brief flurries of pain preceding the crunching of windpipes, or the gurgle of blood-clogged throats, fatal slashings and maulings. Matters the boar understood. Acts, he knew, which had been marked out for him.

  Now, in the morning light, the survivors ran clear of the silent walls. Kalydon's shadow began to slide down the hillside, stretching towards the outermost pens, deserted now. The temple stood empty, a shimmer of heat rising off its roof.

  The hunters gathered. Arms were raised and waved. The vale of Kalydon became a sheet of baked earth indistinguishable from the plain below. The tiny figures who moved upon it blurred and then fused in its heat; their column was a segmented insect that dragged itself down to the stream to drink and on its return broke apart. It was midday before they moved off the hillside, turning their backs on the mountains, retreating down the valley. Breezes coming off the gulf far below swept their scent up the hillside as far as the concealing tree line, mingling it with wild thyme and the stale charnel-reek of the temple: their fresh sweat, the dogs and their hot nerves. One turned and barked, head angled beyond the ruined olives, eyes probing beneath the dark canopy of the trees. But the boar did not stir. The hunters continued, past the abandoned pens, past the temple, and then, rounding one of the low foothills by which Mount Aracynthus anchored itself to the coastal plain, they disappeared from view.

  The boar rose then. He stretched and felt his hackles prickle upright along the ridge of his back. He arched, to prolong the sensation. When the upright bristles extended to his tail, he knew, the red mist would begin to descend. His mouth would fill with saliva and the saliva would begin to foam. Beneath the saddle of compacted fat armouring his shoulders, back and sides, his temperature would rise. His forelegs would itch and he would rub them together – slowly at first – hooves kneading the ground, then faster and faster until his heart would pump his eyes so full of blood that they stained his vision with swirling red. But the twitching muscles of his hindquarters would not be denied, nor his splayed toes and pricked ears. His tusks. He must charge.

  And then he would be hurt, for the aftermath meant pain. There were acts which took place – always the same acts – but they were unclear to him, los
t somewhere in a glorious and greater loss, which was of himself. He was ecstatic there, dissolved in his own fullness. To gallop as fast as one might gallop, to leap and feel the heart's pounding almost to bursting point, to cut and to feel nothing. The boar's pleasures. All too brief.

  They had disappeared one by one, he thought now, counting to himself in the cave: one by one by one by one. He waited for the yellow-haired man, and the woman too. Her dog had been the one to bark at him. They had a secret together, an accord which both bound them and held them apart. He should have stayed close. He should have shadowed them. Instead, that day, he had climbed.

  Swathes of yellow stonecrop and silverweed had rustled and crunched beneath his hooves, then mulleins and knapweeds when the slope became rocky. Higher yet were deadnettles and broad-leafed borage. The mimosa-smothered walnuts and wild olive trees gave way to chestnuts and oaks, then pines and struggling sun-blasted beeches. Last of all came the endless perpendiculars of the firs which surrounded and sheltered the plateau of Aracynthus. The tall grasses waved their greetings. He stamped his own. The sharp tangs of starch and sap filled his snout and he thought of roots.

  Above ground: hunger. Below: sustenance. The surface of the earth was a mirror in which each tree, bush, creeper or flower–even the poisonous walnut and shy crocus – was reflected and distorted. Fibrous mats and thrusting tap roots oozed through the soil in imitation of the colourful sprays and great green canopies above. But these subterranean branches were bare and blanched, all colour washed away by the flow of air-sucked water to the bright greenery of the sunlit world above. A boar's snout could cut a furrow into ground so hard with frost that an iron plough would bounce upon its surface. His own snout twitched and tingled, sensing the soil-cased meadow below the one so abundant and verdant above. Rooting, and then more rooting. He stood in the grasses’ soft palisade. The sunlight which pushed through the tall-standing firs fell about him in ragged bars.