I managed with great difficulty to speak. “It’s all right if you stay for a while.”
8
Atalanta
Over the next few cycles of the moon, Procris and I spent a great deal of time together. We ran through the forests, working together to take down deer and even long-horned aurochs. One morning I found to my astonishment that the cold core of loneliness in my belly had vanished, driven away at last by the belonging I’d long sought.
I introduced Procris to the old hunters who’d raised me. “Like a matched set carved from the same piece of driftwood!” she declared, fascinated. “How marvelous. You can scarcely tell who is the man and who the woman.”
I, who had no idea that men and women might be treated differently, only nodded.
We did not stay there for long. The hunters admired Lailaps, but they would not look at Procris when she spoke to them. Procris attempted to gift the old huntress a necklace from the court of Minos, and she recoiled as though she had been offered a snake.
“Too soft, too rich. No good can come of that one,” the male hunter whispered in my ear when he thought Procris could not hear.
Furious at their lack of welcome, I eschewed the hunters’ cabin entirely. We had always lived our own lives, but now we kept fastidiously apart.
I told Procris haltingly about my early life and brought her tothe bear’s den. Procris stared open-mouthed as the mother bear leaned into my touch.
“You must be blessed by the goddess Artemis,” Procris said, her eyes shining with awe. “I have never heard of a child surviving something like that.”
I felt my ears turn red. It occurred to me that the bear was remarkably long-lived, having nursed me when I was an infant more than two decades ago. Perhaps the goddess really had blessed us both.
But I didn’t care about Artemis’s blessings. I was more interested in Procris.
Procris insisted on taking me to the temple at Brauron, which was a wonder. She introduced me to one of the priestesses there, a young royal woman named Astydamia. I was awed by the temple’s grandeur, especially the vast soaring ceiling supported by huge stone pillars like the trees of a forest. Usually being inside stone walls made me anxious, but this place was different.
We danced the bear at Brauron, a custom that Procris explained was usually reserved for young women before marriage. I, who had always longed to be a bear, found it both baffling and enjoyable. We donned costumes made from bearskins and pranced around a fire, an activity that was supposed to tame our wildness but in fact led to much laughter. Procris and I stood out for our age and height; most of the participants were much younger.
I looked at Procris in the firelight, shadows playing over her face. The bear costume threw a tiara of teeth over her forehead, and the heavy pelt prompted a sheen of sweat from her skin. Seeing her, I thought my heart might burst from beauty. Nothing divine could ever be more perfect than her.
Procris turned to look at me, and she must have caught what I was thinking. The smile melted from her face, replaced with anexpression of awed solemnity. Then she grinned and lunged forward to snatch my wrist. Procris pulled me away from the circle of dancers and into the darkness beyond the edge of the fire. The other little bears cheered before returning to the dance.
Out of their sight, Procris took my face in her hands and kissed me.
A fireball exploded in the pit of my stomach, traveling down my belly to the base of my spine. Her kiss left me feeling lightheaded, as though I had been running for a long time and only now paused to rest.
Procris took me back to her tent and pulled off her clothing and then mine, showing me the things that Artemis’s nymphs did together on the nights of the new moon. While Artemis embraced sweet solitude, the nymphs embraced each other, trading kisses and caresses. They might have eschewed marriage, but they did not spurn pleasure.
With Procris I learned that bodies had more uses than running in the hunt and lips could do sweeter things than speaking. When Procris brought her body against mine, I learned that there were wonders in this world that I’d never imagined. In her arms, I tasted something of eternity.
This was only the first night of many. Soon we became like Artemis and Callisto, inseparable. Before long, we spent as much time in her tent as we did on the hunt.
Afterward, our heads resting on the same pillow, Procris would talk to me about many things, like the hunts she’d been on—for lions and griffins, even a failed expedition for the bronze guardian Talos during her time on Crete. She told me of the intrigues of the Cretan palace, the quiet war between the old ways and the new. I drank in her words like parched soil drinks in rain.
But always, the conversation circled back to Cephalus, herhusband. She couldn’t seem to keep from talking about him, in much the same way that you might probe a loose tooth with your tongue.
In the darkness, other stories emerged. Slaps and slights and shoves into the wall, countless little cruelties spanning the length of their marriage. Not to mention the affairs Cephalus pursued with both mortal women and goddesses, Eos being only the most blatant. Procris had left home for many reasons, it turned out.
“It wasn’t all bad, though,” Procris said one night, her head pillowed on my chest. “The victory of the fleeing deer is the tragedy of the lioness, my mother used to say, which I suppose means things look different from someone else’s perspective. If you met Cephalus, he would tell you I’m an empty-headed woman who thinks of no one but herself. And there were good times with him as well. The little jokes, the way he stroked my cheek so softly in the darkness of the bedroom.” She sighed, remembering.
I stiffened with cold rage. I had also stroked Procris’s cheek in the darkness of our tent and had never hurt her. But it was not my touch she seemed to crave. Was I merely a substitute to her, like drinking water to trick your belly into feeling full when you have not been able to catch any meat?
“Cephalus was terrible to you,” I said. “How can you say things like that?”
“Cephalus is my husband,” Procris said coldly. “He and I will always come back to each other. You just don’t understand what husbands are like.”
Yes,I thought.That’s the entire point.I thought of Artemis changing Callisto into a bear and wished she’d turn Cephalus into a slug.
