Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast

CHAPTER TWO

THE RING

ATALANTA KEPT THE WALL of the house to her back for protection. Step-by-step she edged her way around the cottage, spear point raised to meet any sudden attack.

Large footprints, one of them outlined in blood, led from the window. Four great claw marks were gouged out of the door.

The footprints led to the middle of the clearing and then—impossibly—vanished.

She found her knife lying on the grass, a streak of dark blood staining the blade. Picking it up, she saw a tuft of orange fur sticking to it.

“So…” she whispered. “You pulled the knife out with your teeth. Smart boy.” She stuck the bit of fur down the front of her tunic and glanced quickly around the clearing. The sun was about gone. It would be too dangerous to remain outside in the dark.

As soon as she returned to the cottage, Atalanta set the bar across the door again.

“Not there,” she told her father. “Not anywhere.”

He nodded. “Now you must tend my wound, child.”

She felt tears start in her eyes, hot and prickly. “You’ll be fine, Papa. I’ll take care of you.”

First she built up the fire, for he was shivering with cold. Then she began to wash and dress the wound with folded lengths of sheepskin. But no matter how many bandages she wrapped around his side, the blood still seeped through.

Her father didn’t stop her. Her touch seemed to soothe him.

“What sort of beast was it, Papa?” she asked in a trembling voice. The tip of her dark braid was now sticky with his blood. “I saw a back as high as the window, a paw with claws like a mountain cat’s, but bigger.”

The huntsman shook his head, shutting his eyes tight against a surge of pain. “I don’t know.” He took a deep breath. “Perhaps it’s some beast migrating from one land to another and only passing through Arcadia. It must have come upon us by accident.”

Pulling the hank of orange fur from her tunic, she showed it to her father. In the firelight, it looked flecked with gold. “Look what I found, Papa.”

He touched the fur with a stained finger. “This is my last trophy.”

She didn’t tell him it was her knife that had cut that swatch.

He coughed, a thread of blood sliding from the side of his mouth into his white-streaked beard. “Whatever it is, the creature has dealt me my death blow.”

The tuft of fur dropped from his feeble fingers.

“Papa!” she whispered. He didn’t answer, but she could tell by the rattle of his breath that he was not asleep.

She added more wood to the fire till the room was uncomfortably warm. Then she made him a tisane of heal-all, feeding it to him as if he were a baby, using a leather bottle and a cloth teat. After that he dozed until midnight.

When he woke, he whispered hoarsely, “I’m dying, Atalanta.” His watery eyes were the color of an autumn sky.

“No, Papa, no,” Atalanta cried. But looking down at him, she knew he was telling the truth.

“You must be a brave girl,” he said.

When had he become so small? she wondered. All her life he’d seemed tree high, a big man, striding ahead of her in the woods, following tracks and spoor as surely as if they were signs engraved in stone. He could throw his javelin with deadly accuracy across the widest glade. The arrows leaped from his bow like hawks taking flight. As his only child, she’d always been his constant companion, learning all the lore of the forest at his side.

But since her mother’s death three years earlier, he’d seemed to shrink a little every day. And now, coughing out specks of blood, he was scarcely her own size.

He struggled to sit up in the bed and she helped him. “But I must tell you now how you came to us,” he said. “I’ll not die until you know it all.” He coughed again, groaned, and the wound seeped like a bog.

Atalanta shook her head “Do not speak, Papa, it wearies you.”

“You must know.”

“I know you found me in the woods, Papa, when I was four years old.”

“Found you by a great she-bear who was long dead,” he said between coughs.

She brushed his thin fair hair back from his forehead. The skin was burning hot, his blue eyes cloudy.

“I know, Papa.”

“And you covered with bites, some…” He bent over with the coughing and she held him till he was done.

“Some long healed and some quite new,” she whispered. It was a story they had often told together. “I know, Papa.”

“You were like a wild thing yourself,” her father resumed. “Abandoned on Mount Parthenon by uncaring parents and by some miracle of the gods suckled by that she-bear for who knows how long. How slowly I had to approach you, how softly I had to speak to keep you from fleeing.”

“It was only by luring me on with food that you were able to make me follow you,” Atalanta continued for him as he stopped to suck in a few last breaths.

“And I brought you home to Mama who wanted a child and had none.” His voice faltered twice, on “Mama” and on “none.” He caught himself, then said, “A miracle of the gods she called it. How else would a wild beast give life to a helpless baby? I told her that most likely one of the she-bear’s cubs had been stillborn so that she accepted a human child in its place.” It was the most he had spoken since getting his wound. The speaking had exhausted him and he fell forward.

Atalanta caught him and rocked him as if he were a child. She knew the story, even though her own memory of the events was dim. When her father had found her, she couldn’t even speak, only growl and snap like an animal. She had run about on all fours. Had eaten raw meat. Perhaps—she thought—perhaps it was because she had no words to form her memory of those early days that all she could recall was the sharp smell of the old she-bear, the warmth of the fur when she pressed her face into it, the rough-and-tumble company of the cubs who suckled at her side.

She patted her father’s hand. “It doesn’t matter now, Papa.”

Her father sat up, eyes now shining brightly with the fever. “But it does matter. There is one thing you don’t know, my daughter. And you are my daughter, for all that you were born elsewhere.”

She would humor him and then maybe he would sleep again.

“What don’t I know, Papa.”

He reached a trembling hand beneath the pallet and pulled out a leather pouch. “Open it. I can’t…”

She took the pouch, pulled it open, drew out a signet ring.

“This ring was strung on a leather thong around your neck.”

She held the ring up to the flickering light of the hearth fire. On the stone was an engraving of a great boar.

Her father whispered weakly, “I kept that from you all these years. I was afraid, you see, that you would seek out your real father and leave me.”

“You are my real father, Papa,” Atlanta whispered, setting the ring aside. But she spoke to a dead man.