For the Winner Read online

  Whirling on my heel, I pulled another arrow from the quiver and fitted it to my bow, pulled it to my ear and faced the second beast. It had stopped its charge, amber eyes wary. It started to circle me at a distance, prowling swiftly and silently, choosing the best angle from which to pounce. Aura raised her hackles, a growl escaping her throat.

  ‘Aura, no!’

  The lioness had bounded forwards and was launching herself towards Aura. With one movement I kicked Aura aside, ignoring her yelp, then, with the speed born of years spent upon the mountain slopes, knowing I had only a single moment before those razor-sharp teeth ripped into my flesh, I turned and pulled the arrow off the string, tossing the bow clattering to the ground. The beast was almost upon me, so close that I could see the drool flying from its maw. With a single swift movement I vaulted to the right, stretching out my arm to lay the arrow I was clutching flat against the ground as I somersaulted. The lion skidded around, its huge weight sending it onwards, clawing at the rocks for purchase as I crouched, eye to eye with the beast, both hands gripped around the shaft of the arrow. There was a moment of silence, and then it leapt, uttering a low, throbbing growl from the back of its throat, claws unfurled, teeth bared. In the space of a heartbeat I brought the arrow around and then up, driving the sharp, cold flint tip straight into its belly and heart, fingers pressing it deeper, deeper … In an instant I rolled to the side, feeling rather than seeing my way to safety, fingertips scrabbling at the dark earth. It was barely half a moment later, when I heard the deafening roar of agony and the thud of a gigantic carcass falling to the earth behind me, that I knew I was safe. I stood up, panting hard, gazing down at the huge head lolling, limbs collapsed beneath, blood pooling around the broken arrow shaft into the earth and eddying among the dry leaves. I could hear the sound of something else in the distance, crashing through the undergrowth and coming closer. There is a third, I thought, my heart beating faster. I bent to pick up my bow and nocked another arrow.

  ‘Atalanta!’

  I turned to the place the voice had come from. Aura wheeled around, her black-tipped ears drawn back, tail straight and alert.

  ‘Daughter!’

  The voice came again. I lowered my bow. Through the trees I could make out a stooping, brown-skinned figure, a straw hat upon his head, beating aside the brambles with a wooden stick.

  ‘Father …’ I let out my breath. ‘What are you doing here?’

  He approached slowly, one hand on the small of his back. I waited for him, crouched to the ground, my fingers clutching the scruff of Aura’s neck once more as she tugged against me, desperate to greet him.

  ‘Atalanta,’ he panted, as he sat down on the stump of a lichen-covered tree trunk, wiping his brow, ‘you must not …’ he took a breath ‘… run away like that.’

  I let Aura go. She bounded forwards and began to lick my father’s hand, but he ignored her. His gaze had fallen upon the carcasses of the two lions several feet away. I watched his face blanch. ‘What, by all the gods …’

  Slowly his eyes roved over the arrows sticking from the lions’ bellies, the crusted rim of blood around the edges of the wounds and the dark, spreading stain upon the leaves, then to the quiver on my back and the bow lying at my feet.

  ‘By all the gods on Olympus,’ he said, ‘did you do this, Atalanta?’

  I nodded.

  ‘But …’ he swallowed ‘… but how?’

  I raised my bow and set the arrow back upon the string, kept my gaze steady as I aimed across the clearing, then released my fingers and let the arrow fly. There was a rustle, and then a faint clatter, as a cluster of pine cones dropped to the forest floor, pinned by my arrow. ‘With the bow and arrows that you gave me, Father.’ I turned to him. ‘Do you see now that I am capable of defending myself? That I am capable of more than –’ I kicked at a stone upon the ground ‘– women’s work?’

  He did not reply, but took off his straw hat and wiped his forehead again. At length he stood and clasped my face in his hands. ‘Do you have any idea what might have happened?’ he said, and I heard the low thread of fear in his voice. His eyes flicked once again to the still masses of the lions’ bodies, surrounded by growing pools of thick, trickling blood. ‘Why must you always put yourself in such danger? Bands of thirty huntsmen armed with spears and nets have failed to kill a lion before!’

  ‘But nothing happened, did it, Father? I defeated them!’

  ‘This time, Atalanta, but what about the next? And the one after that? You are too young to think of such things, but we are worried for you, your mother and I. You cannot always win, and when you do not …’

  He bent to pick up his hat and put it on his head, tying the cord in a knot. He beckoned to me. ‘Come, Atalanta. We must go home. Your mother wishes to speak with you.’

  I said nothing. I tried to turn aside but he took my chin and turned my face up to his. I met his gaze and saw that his forehead was creased with worry. ‘Ah, my daughter,’ he said. ‘You always knew your mind, even as a child.’ He smiled a little, and I saw the memories flit across his eyes. ‘But there is more to this than simply a quarrel over women’s work. There is something I must tell you.’

  I ducked as I entered the mud-brick house in Kaladrosos, my eyes adjusting to the smoky darkness. The wooden ladle flew over my head and clattered into the wall behind me, then dropped to the floor with a hollow sound.

  ‘What by all the gods did you think you were doing?’

  My mother picked up a second ladle and stood pointing it at me accusingly, like a warrior holding a bronze sword on the field of battle. She was standing by the hearth at the centre of the room, her apron smoke-stained, her hands covered with ash from the burning logs beneath the meat roasting over the fire. I took the bow and quiver from my back and set them against the wall.

  ‘Atalanta! Answer me!’

  ‘Peace, Tyro,’ my father said, stooping to enter behind me. He took off his hat, hung it on a wooden peg on the wall and propped his walking stick beneath it.

  ‘And what of the goat left untied, which I had to chase over the fields in the heat of the day?’ she demanded, hands on hips. Irritation bubbled up inside me. ‘What of the stew I told her to watch – burnt?’ She gestured towards the fire, where a clay cauldron had been set to one side, its contents blackened. ‘Why is it that you cannot simply stay,’ she shook the ladle emphatically in my direction, ‘and do as you are bid?’

  I sat down upon a stool, pulled my bow, a wool cloth and some beeswax from the kit-pack in my quiver – dagger, linen strips for bandaging, a whetstone and a few squares of oil-cloth – and started polishing the ash-wood handle, determined not to meet her eye. ‘Perhaps it is because I desire more,’ I rubbed harder than I usually would, feeling the smooth wood beneath my fingers, ‘than to sit by the hearth in the same place I have always been,’ I found a mark upon the upper limb and burnished it, ‘doing the same things I have always done.’

  ‘Come, wife,’ my father interjected. He laid a hand upon her arm, and although his face was grave, his mouth was twitching into a smile. ‘There will be time enough for reckoning Atalanta’s errors later. I would speak with you a moment.’ He glanced towards me. ‘Atalanta, watch over your brother and sisters while I talk to your mother.’

  I nodded, looking at little Corycia in her cot, swaddled in a patched and frayed woollen cloth, then at Maia and Leon, chattering as they played with a wooden doll in the corner by the family shrine, where a simple wood statuette of Artemis, goddess of the mountain, watched over us all. My father pulled aside the curtain leading into the room where we all slept, and followed my mother in, letting the thick material fall behind him.

  I tapped my foot against the tiles in frustration, running the cloth up and down, up and down the length of the bow’s limbs. Nothing here had changed, in all the eighteen years of my life: the bricks surrounding the hearth, slightly charred from the flames; the cot in the corner, made from planks of pinewood; the bleating of the goat outside
the window. How could they not understand that I wanted more – that I was capable of more? My father had sat me upon his knee beside the fire in the long winter nights when I was young, and told me tales of the greatest heroes the Greeks had ever known: Hercules, slayer of the man-killing Amazons; Perseus, who destroyed the Gorgon Medusa; Bellerophon, rider of the winged horse Pegasus. I had dreamt of being such a hero, with all the single-mindedness of a child. Each night I had placed beneath my pillow a dagger the fishermen had crafted for me from a sharpened conch shell; each day, when my mother’s back was turned, I slipped out into the woods to race the hares along the rocky trails. As I grew older I taught myself to aim arrows at the trunks of the pine trees, to fight the branches with sword and spear, to hunt deer, foxes and wild birds, and to run faster than any of the farmers upon the slopes of Mount Pelion. Yet all they wished was to see me inside, sitting upon a stool with my spindle and distaff, cramping my limbs into the postures proper for a woman.

  I sat for a moment, thinking.

  Then quickly, quietly as I could, I set my bow upon the floor and pushed the cloth back into the quiver. Corycia was sleeping, one fat thumb pressed into her mouth, and Aura had lain down in a patch of sunlight upon the stone flags, her snout quivering as she snored. Maia and Leon, now occupied with building a house for their doll from wood shavings and straw, noticed nothing as I crept across the room, avoiding the spitting fat from the meat upon the hearth, towards the opposite wall.

  I pressed myself flat against it, feeling the coolness of the stone against the bare skin of my arm, my ear as close to the gap between curtain and wall as I could keep it without being seen.

  ‘… time that she was told,’ I heard my father saying, in a low voice, barely audible over the hiss of the meat upon the fire and Leon’s delighted giggles.

  There was a silence, in which the fire upon the hearth crackled.

  ‘But now, Eurymedon?’ came my mother’s voice, a little higher than usual, though muted in a whisper. ‘I thought we had said when she reached twenty years of age …’

  There was a pause.

  ‘We always said, my dear, that the time would be hard enough when it came.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘We have held it from her long enough.’ My father’s voice was calm, but firm. ‘She deserves to know the truth.’

  ‘And how will you tell her?’ My mother lowered her voice until it was the merest murmur of breath. I pressed harder against the wall, listening. ‘How can any child be told that she is not her parents’ daughter?’

  My father said something in return – I could hear that he was speaking – but what he said, I did not know. A shocked buzzing had filled my ears, as of a thousand angry bees, growing louder, louder …

  How can any child be told that she is not her parents’ daughter?

  The words echoed in my head as I struggled to take in their meaning. My eyes were fixed upon the flagstones as if I would memorize every ridge, every crack, and I could feel the grainy roughness of the carved limestone against my fingertips, as though my senses were sharpened by shock.

  Not her parents’ daughter.

  My heart thudded against my ribs, as fast and hard as if I were in the midst of the chase.

  Not her parents’—

  A loud wail split the air. I whirled around, blinking. Corycia was crying, flailing her fists, her eyes pressed shut, tears squeezing out. Maia was prodding her sister with the wooden doll, gurgling with laughter, and Leon was jumping about, crying, ‘Again, again!’

  ‘Gods be damned!’ I hissed, under my breath. Quick as a snake slithering through the undergrowth, I darted across the room, waving the smoke of the fire from my eyes. Leaping past Maia and Leon, I had just scooped Corycia from the cot when the curtain drew aside.

  I busied myself hushing the baby, rocking her back and forth in my arms, avoiding my father’s gaze as he approached me. I hummed an old lullaby under my breath, and her crying eased a little.

  ‘Sleep, my child, sleep sweet and light—’

  ‘Atalanta.’

  ‘Sleep, my love, my little child—’

  ‘Atalanta.’

  I turned my back to him, moving towards the cot as I finished the last line of the song: ‘Gods send you sleep, and may you wake again tomorrow.’

  I bent and tucked Corycia back beneath the covers, my heart still racing, the words I had overheard thrumming a beat in my head as if they, too, were part of the song I had sung.

  Not her parents’ daughter …

  I straightened at last and faced my father. The tips of my fingers were tingling and warm, a sensation of dread for what was to come, or perhaps anticipation that something, at last, was happening – which, I could not tell. ‘Yes, Father?’

  He gestured to the stool where I had polished my bow.

  ‘Sit,’ he said, his face grave, and drew up another stool beside me, carved from green oak on three sturdy legs. I had watched him make that stool, when I was barely twelve years old. I remembered the rustling of the leaves on the summer breeze as I traipsed after him, wanting to watch the tree felled upon the slopes of Pelion, the sound of the sharpened blade of the axe biting into it, the men from the village – how tall they had seemed to me then! – who had helped my father to carry it down, and the warm, comforting smell of the wood as he sawed it and chiselled it, polished it with beeswax, drilled holes in the seat for the legs and bound them with twine. I smiled a little at the memory, and my father’s lips turned up too.

  At another corner of the room, my mother’s hand slipped on a clay pot as she lifted it to the cupboard. It fell to the floor and shattered. ‘Oh, by the god of mischief! Not the stewpot …’ She dropped to her knees and gathered the sherds into her apron, muttering.

  My father laid a hand upon my knee. ‘Even the greatest trees upon the mountain grow from a seed,’ he said. ‘An oak from a small acorn, a beech from a soft brown nut. What you are born determines who you will grow to be. My daughter …’ he swallowed, and continued, his eyes unusually bright ‘… this you must know, because I see the world calling to you, and I know your spirit.’ He took a breath. ‘I always said you were a gift to us from the gods, but I did not tell you all. I—’ He stopped and swallowed again, the skin around his throat constricting.

  I rested a hand on his arm, my heart leaping wildly in my chest. ‘I already know, Father.’

  He stared at me. ‘You know? How – how can you know?’

  ‘I heard you talking with my mother, just now, in the bedchamber. I am no daughter of yours.’ The words sounded so strange upon my lips. Eighteen years in Kaladrosos … eighteen years, knowing where I came from, who I was, who I was meant to be … and now … what? I felt the same inexplicable surge of mingled fear and excitement. ‘Truly, Father, I have had the best parents in you.’ Stinging tears welled in my eyes. I took his hand in mine and pressed his fingers tight.

  ‘You are not – you are not surprised?’

  ‘I was shocked, of course,’ I said, swallowing hard. ‘I still can hardly believe it. And yet, in truth, I have always been different from you, and Mother, Maia and Leon, have I not?’ I looked aside at Maia as my mother scooped her into her arms, her cloud of golden hair the exact colour of my mother’s plait, at Leon and baby Corycia, both with my father’s grey-blue eyes. How had I not seen it before? ‘It feels more as if – as if I always knew, but did not know it.’

  Silence fell between us, broken by the spitting fire and the soft bleating of the goat outside. I sat beside my father, my hand clasped around his, and listened to my mother cooing to Maia as she turned the meat upon the spit.

  I could pretend it never happened, I thought blankly. I could pretend I never knew, and all would be as it was. I would hunt upon Mount Pelion, my mother would scold me, my father would chide me with a weary smile, then let me off again to the mountain slopes to run and chase the deer in the shade of the forest.

  Except that everything would be different.

  ‘
I found you upon Mount Pelion.’

  I started, my mouth suddenly very dry. ‘You – you found me?’ I repeated.

  He nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I was gathering firewood upon the mountain, in winter – our stores were low and the damp had reached the last logs in the outhouse, else I should never have ventured out so late in the season, and so near to dark.

  ‘I was just turning for home when one of the winter storms came down upon the mountain – so sudden I scarce had time to run for cover before the thick clouds rolled down the slopes and I was enveloped in howling winds and snow.’

  I opened my mouth, not sure if I wanted to stop him speaking or beg him to go on. He seemed to know, and placed his other hand over mine, patting it gently. It was a gesture of such familiarity, and I felt a sudden rush of affection, warm in the pit of my stomach. I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands to distract myself: I would not let him see me cry. I turned away and shut my eyes, and as I did so it was as if I could see before me the scene he described: the ice hanging in stiff crystals from the branches of the trees, the snow crunching beneath his boots.

  ‘Zeus’ thunder was raging around me,’ he went on, his voice all I could hear. ‘The wind whipped me so hard and cold that I almost turned back home, though I had collected barely enough dry wood to last us a few days … and then a gyrfalcon, pure white, swooped out of the air before me. Though it was madness, I felt in my heart that it was leading me, and I followed it. Up and up we climbed, following the most perilous paths to the very peak of the mountain where there is nothing but rock and a few bare pines. The wind was lashing my cheeks, and the gyrfalcon soared above me and away into the snow-clouds – and then I saw you. A tiny bundle of white, like new-fallen snow. You were left there upon the rocks to die, barely a day old, your little eyes still closed … I could not bear to leave you. I brought you with me, to Kaladrosos, bundled with the firewood on my back.’