Nobody's Princess (14 page)

And yet we ate with ghosts. The boar had killed four of the hunters. Two more were gravely wounded. The king swore that they were all heroes whose names would live through the songs of the hunt. No one bothered to count or name the servants who’d died that day, even though they’d lost their lives for venturing closer to the boar than many of the “heroes.” Only the master of the royal hunting pack mourned for the slaughtered dogs.

My brothers couldn’t be bothered by phantoms. Tomorrow the dead would be burned, their ashes entombed with honor, the survivors would compete in athletic contests to please their spirits. Tonight Castor and Polydeuces sat near the king and basked in the congratulations of their fellow hunters. Apparently they’d done great deeds during the hunt—there were witnesses!—and had earned the right to be called heroes. If they’d noticed my presence on the mountainside that day, they washed the memory from their minds with cup after cup of wine.

And still the place between the king and queen of Calydon stayed empty.

“Where is he?” I whispered to Polydeuces. “Where’s Meleager? Is something wrong?”

“Nothing, nothing.” The wine slurred his speech just a bit. “This is all the king’s idea, keeping us waiting for Meleager just to make us cheer him even louder when he finally shows up.” He hiccuped.

As if in response to Polydeuces’s words, Lord Oeneus rose up from his chair, bawled for silence, then spread his arms wide and called out, “Come forward, Meleager, my son!” If there hadn’t been enough oil lamps to light the great hall that night, his face was radiant enough to do the job. “Come and claim your prize!”

Cheers shook the pillars of the hall as Meleager entered, but my cousin seemed indifferent to the praises thundering in his ears. His face was clouded as he approached his father and the boar. Something dark rode his shoulders, something that touched my heart with foreboding. I wasn’t the only one who felt it: I was seated near enough to his mother, the queen, to see how anxiously she leaned forward.

Meleager ran one hand down the boar’s bristly crest. He touched the bloodstained tusks, closed his eyes, and sighed, then opened them and said, “I can’t accept what isn’t mine. This beast would still be alive, ravaging our land, if not for the hero who truly deserves this trophy. My arrow never would have been enough to kill the monster if her spear hadn’t weakened it. Atalanta! Take your rightful prize!”

He seized the hide, head and all, and slung it over his shoulder. He strode down the hall to where Atalanta still sat among the weapons bearers. He dropped it at her feet and gazed at her with all the worship in his heart.

I don’t know who sprang up first, crying out against him, calling her a hundred vicious names. Several men leaped over the tables like deer in order to grab the skin.

“If you don’t want it, Meleager, it’s mine!” someone shouted. “
My
spear made the boar bleed;
I
deserve the prize. You insult us all.”

Atalanta was too wise to try to stop them. I couldn’t hear whether she flung their insults back in their faces, but I could see her laughing at them just as if they were a bunch of rowdy little boys who needed a good spanking. My cousin didn’t share her wisdom. His white face was streaked with feverish color as he drew his sword and attacked the men who tried to take the boar’s hide from Atalanta.

“This is bad,” Polydeuces muttered, suddenly sober. Before I knew what he was going to do, he and Castor grabbed me. As we ran from the hall I heard weapons clashing, Lord Oeneus bawling for his guards, and the queen screaming. My brothers whisked me up the stairs, down the gallery, and into my room, where they barricaded the door with one of my travel chests and spent the night with their swords in hand.

I don’t know whether or not my brothers were able to keep watch all night or whether, like me, they fell into a light doze. I only know that I was startled awake by a loud pounding. As I blinked in the morning sunlight, I saw Polydeuces on guard at the door, demanding to know who was there.

“It’s me, Iolaus! Let me in; it’s safe. I’ve got news.”

Polydeuces admitted him. Iolaus looked terrible: his face haggard, his eyes red with dark circles under them. He moved unsteadily across the floor and sat down heavily at the foot of my bed, head bowed.

“Well, it’s over,” he said. “Artemis has her revenge. Even after death, the boar she sent still had the power to kill. Ah, what a waste! Once the king gave Meleager the hide, it was his property; he could do whatever he liked with it. So what if he gave it to that girl? It was his choice, not an insult to anyone’s honor. Where’s their precious honor now that they’re dead?”

“Who’s dead?” Polydeuces asked.

I bit my lip and prayed that Iolaus wouldn’t say
Atalanta.

“Five men that I know of, though I couldn’t tell you who four of them were. You know how many of us were here, and I don’t pretend to have a praise singer’s memory for names. I can’t even figure out who they were by seeing who’s missing this morning. After what happened last night, a lot of the hunters left Calydon at dawn. Some of the ones who stayed are saying that the dead men were Meleager’s uncles.” Iolaus made a disgusted face. “That’s the way to heap filth on a man, calling him a kin-slayer when he can’t defend himself anymore.”

“What are you saying?” Castor asked. “Our cousin’s dead?”

Iolaus nodded. “Those four men…well, Meleager killed them. He slashed the neck of the first man to lay hands on that stinking trophy. That was when the whole room erupted. Half the lamps were knocked over; it’s a marvel that the palace didn’t catch fire and burn to the ground. By the time Lord Oeneus’s braver servants brought fresh light, the floor was red with blood and five bodies lay over the boar. Your cousin was the fifth. He had a few minor wounds, nothing that should have killed him. His skin was scarred with fire too—someone must have flung one of the lamps at him—but again, nothing serious enough to take his life.”

“Then how
did
he die?” Polydeuces demanded.

Iolaus shrugged. “Depends whose story you hear. They say that when Lady Althea saw that her son had killed his uncles, she ran back to her room and—”

“The log.” I hardly spoke above a whisper, remembering what Pirithous had told me, but Iolaus had good hearing.

“That’s right, the one from the tale about the Fates coming to his mother when he was a baby.” He stood up again and sighed. “They say she was so blinded by grief for her brothers’ deaths that she threw that log back into the flames. It burned to ashes and Meleager died.”

“But it’s not
true,
” Castor protested. “Althea is our mother’s sister. We
know
that none of their brothers is still alive!”

“The truth steps aside for a good story,” Iolaus said dryly.

“Let people entertain themselves some other way,” Castor snarled. “To say that the queen killed her own son! If I catch any man spreading that slime about Lady Althea, I’ll—”

“Save your anger,” Iolaus said, resting one hand on my brother’s shoulder. And as kindly as he could, he told us my mother’s sister was dead too.

The best lies hold a small, withered seed of truth. The queen
had
rushed back to her room after the slaughter in the feasting hall, but not to throw some nonexistent piece of wood into the fire. As soon as she saw her son’s dead body, her heart broke, her mind shattered. She hanged herself with her own sash from one of the beams in her room before any of her maidservants could reach her.

My brothers and I remained in Calydon for ten days after that cursed feast. We attended too many funeral pyres—for my cousin, my aunt, the victims of the boar, and the victims of stupidity. Castor and Polydeuces won enough prizes at the funeral games afterward to confirm their budding reputation as heroes. I sat on the sidelines like an ordinary girl, feeling the sting of the hidden, slowly healing scrapes and scratches I’d gotten during the hunt. I didn’t see Atalanta anywhere.

The palace of Calydon was a house of mourning. Meleager’s father moved through the corridors like an avenging wraith. The slaves and servants walked softly, afraid of the king’s sudden, senseless outbursts of rage. Once I saw him beat a boy black-and-blue with his own fists for whispering the queen’s name to one of his fellow slaves. When I tried to stop him, he gave me a crazed, red-eyed look that reminded me of the maddened boar. I fled, terrified and ashamed.

Many times during those ten endless days, I wished that my brothers and I could have left Calydon as soon as the other boar hunters did. Once the funeral games were over, my uncle’s former guests couldn’t wait to put plenty of distance between themselves and Lord Oeneus. Castor and Polydeuces and I were among the last to go. Our family ties forced us to linger. Meleager was my cousin, and the lady Althea was my aunt. I dreaded having to tell Mother that both of them were dead.

As I watched my uncle perform the daily sacrifice for his dead wife and son, I wondered whether anyone but my brothers and I would ever tell the truth about what happened that night. As Iolaus said,
The truth steps aside for a good story.

At least Iolaus had the kindness to remain in Calydon a little longer. Men like Theseus and Pirithous might have sneered at him behind his back, calling him a poor substitute for his uncle Herakles, but they were the cowards who ran away as soon as possible. Iolaus stayed. I saw how he took pains to approach Lord Oeneus at meals, even when the king was sunk deep in despair, and spoke words of comfort to him. It wasn’t his fault that my uncle’s grief had left him too numb to respond. I loved Iolaus for trying. I wanted to tell him so, but the thought of saying something like that to a man was more daunting than facing the boar all over again. By the time I found the courage to do so, he’d traveled on.

At last it was our turn to leave. My brothers agreed that we’d done our family duty to our uncle and to the spirits of our dead kin. Polydeuces came bearing the good news to me as I sat alone in the room where my aunt’s loom stood untouched and abandoned. None of the palace women had found the backbone to return to that place just yet; Lady Althea’s last weaving still waited unfinished in the tall wooden frame.

“We’ll leave tomorrow,” Polydeuces said, sitting beside me on the bench before the loom. “Can you be ready?”

“Of course.” I spoke listlessly, even though he’d brought me the news I’d been hoping to hear for days.

He got up to go, then looked back at me. “You don’t sound like yourself. What’s troubling you, little sister? Are you still mourning Lady Althea and Meleager?”

“Yes,” I whispered, because it was easier than telling him the truth. But then I set aside the easy answer and told him, “No. No, that’s not it. I’m sad because…because…Oh, Polydeuces, do you know what happened to her, to Atalanta? I haven’t seen her since that night when—”

“No one has,” he replied, his face stern. “Vanishing like that, avoiding the funeral games for the man who
died
because of her, running away—”

“She didn’t
want
him to die!” I shouted, springing to my feet. “You were there! You
know
she didn’t ask for the boar’s hide! And you know she’d never run away.”

“Then where is she, little sister?” he asked softly.

I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I sank back onto the bench, tears rolling down my cheeks. “I don’t know.”

He sat beside me and hugged me. “I’m sorry, Helen,” he said. “You’re right. She’s gone, but she didn’t run away like a coward. I can’t blame her for leaving, not with Lord Oeneus out of his mind over what happened. If he’d seen her at the funeral games, the gods know what he’d have done to her. May the gods protect her, wherever she is. It was an honor to be her companion in the hunt.”

It was a greater honor to be her friend,
I thought as I clung to my brother.

The morning of our departure was glorious, with fat white clouds gliding across a brilliant sky. Our soldiers were gathering by twos and threes, chatting with one another or just standing around patiently until they were given the word to go. Some of them were awkwardly saying good-bye to teary maidservants, while their comrades looked on and laughed.

I was standing beside the oxcart, waiting for my brothers to finish the official ceremony of farewell inside the palace, when someone called my name. It was the same slave boy who’d earned my uncle’s mindless wrath for whispering my aunt’s name. He clung to the shadow of the palace’s outermost defensive wall, gazing at me through a thatch of dirty brown hair with owl eyes, huge and golden. He looked about my age and even skinnier than I was, if that was possible. Even at that distance I could see the fading marks of my uncle’s fists on his scrawny arms and chest, the purple and red bruises dappling his pinched cheeks. He clutched a cloth-wrapped bundle under one arm and beckoned me.

As soon as I came near, he bowed his head and held the bundle out for me to take. “She left this for you,” he said.

I didn’t need to ask who
she
was. I opened the bundle and found the bronze head of Atalanta’s broken spear. It was still flecked with the boar’s blood.

“I wanted to clean it, lady,” the boy said. “She said no. She said that even if the blood ate up the blade, you’d earned it all, blood and bronze together.”

“When was this?” I asked, my eyes never moving from the trophy in my hands. “When did she give this to you?”

“The day she left,” the boy replied. “The day before I—the day before I angered the king.” He lowered his eyes.

So she hadn’t disappeared right away. She’d stayed to honor the dead, even if from a distance. A hunter knows how to hide.

I held the spearhead to my heart. “What’s your name?” I asked the boy.

“Milo.”

“Milo,” I repeated. “How did she come to choose you to bring me this?”

His smile was hesitant. “The cook sent me out to gather mushrooms in the hills. I found her there, camped high up on a slope that had a view of the citadel. She asked me if I was going to tell Lord Oeneus where she was. She wasn’t
afraid
I’d tell; she just wanted to know. I said no. I was the one who fetched fresh water to the hunters’ rooms. She always thanked me, and sometimes she’d even give me extra food. While she was still up there”—he gestured out the open gate, toward the mountains—“I did the same for her, when I could.”