Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast (21 page)

“You can’t just leave me here by myself!”

“Be sensible, Atalanta. You’re not by yourself,” he said. “You
belong
here. You’re the rightful princess of Arcadia. This is the home of your family.”

“My family?” said Atalanta in a choked voice. “They left me on a mountainside to die.”

He held up his hands. “Be fair, child. The queen knew nothing of that, and Iasus isn’t the first man ever to act out of anger and disappointment. He has long since regretted his act.”

“I haven’t told them, you know. And I never will.”

“Of course you will,” said Evenor. “If not today, then one day. Truth is like good wine. You can’t keep it bottled up forever. You have to share it.” He leaned his head to one side. “I think the queen suspects anyway.”

“That’s why I must go—and quickly.”

Putting his arms around her, he gave her a hug. “Whether you visit us as your friends or your subjects, you know that you’ll always be welcome in our home.”

“I know that, Evenor. Tell Herma and the children I will see them soon. I promise.”

He left the room without looking back.

She locked the door behind him, turned, and threw herself onto the bed.

“I’ll never be able to sleep,” she whispered. But soon enough, sleep claimed her. She slept without dreams.

Dawn was just beginning to spread its rosy fingers over the land when she got up. Putting on her hunting clothes, she slung her bow and quiver over her shoulder.

“Maybe one day,” she murmured to herself, fingering the boar’s head ring. “Maybe one day I’ll return to tell them the truth.” She glanced out the window where a small wind was puzzling through the olive trees. “But not today.”

The cub had stirred from its sleep and was rubbing its face with its paws. Bending down, she called to it softly and it scampered toward her. She caught it up under one arm.

“You don’t want to stay here either,” she said. “You’d rather be free under the sky. An eastern sky. Not an Arcadian sky where everyone still wants to kill you. But you’re not old enough yet, not strong enough. So you’ll have to stay with me a while longer.”

She climbed out the window and onto a ledge. Tossing her bow and quiver and spear to the ground, she then lowered herself carefully until she was hanging on by one hand, the cub clutched in the other. Dropping the last few feet, she hurried into the cover of the olive trees.

“This is going to spoil the king’s celebrations, you know,” said a familiar voice. Melanion stepped out of the shadows into plain view. “He’s planned a week of feasts, some even for the common people.”

“What are you doing here?” Atalanta asked crossly.

“I’ve been watching your window all night, and…” He stopped, suddenly too embarrassed to go on. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”

“Yes, and you have to promise you won’t tell anyone,” said Atalanta.

“Of course not, though they’ll figure it out soon enough. I understand, though. I know what it’s like to be cooped up in a stuffy palace when you can hear the outdoors calling to you. But we’ll meet again.”

“Did an oracle tell you that?”

Melanion grinned. “No, I just know it. Here.” He placed his hand over his heart.

She put her hand over his. “I know it, too.”

When she caught up with Evenor, she found him among the trees some miles north of the city. He had three shepherds with him, helping drive the cattle and sheep.

“Atalanta!” he said when he saw her, but there was no surprise in his voice, just pleasure.

“I’m not ready to be a princess,” Atalanta said by way of explanation. “Not yet, anyway. I may not belong in the wild with the animals, but I don’t belong here either.”

“You’re going to ruin their celebrations,” said Evenor with awry grin.

“So I’ve been told.” She looked back down the road as if she could see Tegea. “They’ll soon find someone else to gossip and sing about. As for me, I’ve had enough of kings and gods.” She smiled and signaled the herders. “Let’s go home.”

D
ID THE HEROIC AGE
, the Age of Heroes, really exist?

Yes and no.

No—there was not a time when gods like Pan and Artemis actually took part in human affairs, nor was there ever a mantiger—a winged lion—preying upon the kingdom of Arcadia.

But, yes—there was once a rich and powerful civilization in ancient Greece, which we call Mycenaean, where each city was a separate state with its own king, but the people were united by a single language.

Arcadia was a district of ancient Greece, chiefly inhabited by shepherds and hunters. According to the poet Virgil, it was the home of pastoral simplicity and happiness, but actually it was a poor relative of the rest of the mainland, a mostly mountainous and infertile land, though grain was grown in some of the valleys. Surrounded on all sides by mountains, it has been called the Switzerland of Greece. Because of those mountains, when the rest of Greece was invaded in the Iron Age by the Dorians, Arcadia was left alone and the ancient speech of the Greeks survived there.

What also survived were anecdotes such as the one about Charmus, the runner, coming in seventh out of six runners, and a great deal of poetry. And—of course—stories. One of the most famous Arcadian stories is of the female hero Atalanta. She was known as a fantastic runner, and the story of her part in the Calydonian boar hunt was a standard in the Greek bardic recitations.

Did she ever meet Orion, the great hunter of myth, who was loved by Artemis and by the nymphs? Not that we know. But surely if these two hunters ever met, it could have been as prickly comrades. As for Orion’s death, there are many stories—some that he died when Artemis shot him by mistake, some that a scorpion proved his death.

We have made up the mantiger, a combination of the dreaded manticore (a mythic beast that hankers after human flesh, born in the Indies with the body of a lion, the face of a man, a tail like a scorpion’s) and the revolting Chimera (part goat, part serpent, part lion, with wings).

But we have not made up Astarte, who was one of the great Semitic goddesses and whose name appears in the Bible as Ashtoreth. She was the nature goddess of fertility and childbirth, as well as patroness of the hunt—so surely she and Artemis would have been rivals.

And what of Pan, the goat-footed god of flocks and shepherds and wild creatures? Arcadia was always the principal seat of his worship. He is described as wandering among the mountains and valleys there, either amusing himself with the chase or leading the dance of the nymphs. He loved music, invented the syrinx, or shepherd’s pipes, and was dreaded by travelers whom he startled with sudden awe or terror, hence the word
panic.

A woman like Atalanta—even a mythic hero—must have had a childhood and adolescence that foretold her future deeds. This is what we know from the old stories about her: She was the daughter of King Iasus (or Iasius) and Queen Clymene of Arcadia. Expecting a boy, her father was distraught when a girl was born, and so he had her exposed on Mount Parthenon where she was found and suckled by a she-bear. Some passing hunters discovered her and brought her home, training her up as one of their own. Her birth and youth have always been as a footnote to the later stories.

Those later stories are all about her heroic adulthood. Hearing about a monstrous boar sent by Artemis to devour humans in Calydon when the king there neglected to perform his yearly sacrifices to the goddess, Atalanta took part in the hunt for the boar, despite some grumblings from the other hunters, all of whom were men. Only Meleager, the king’s son, welcomed her. When Atalanta dealt the boar its mortal wound, Meleager gave her the spoils of the hunt. His uncles taunted her, and in a passion Meleager killed them and was, in turn, killed by his own mother. Atalanta then went back to her father’s kingdom where she was finally accepted by him, for he had no other heir, and there she was expected to marry. She refused to do this unless she married a man who could beat her in a footrace. No one could until her handsome cousin Melanion (or Milanion or Hippomenes), having gotten Aphrodite’s protection, won the race with a trick, using golden apples given to him by the goddess to tempt Atalanta off the track. They married and had a son who was a hero and was eventually killed in battle by one of Orion’s grandchildren…but that’s another story altogether.

We have taken the Atalanta of the legends and tales and projected her backward, using what archaeologists and historians have told us about the civilization she would have inhabited if she had been a real young woman.

Or a young hero.

Jane:
When we began the first of the four Young Heroes books,
Odysseus in the Serpent Maze
, we were quickly heads down in the thirteenth century BCE. I remember feeling amazed each time we swam up to the surface, where we were using computers to write the books, not scrolls, and sending emails back and forth, even when we were living in the same country.

And look where we are now: We have cell phones that can take us from point A to point B and take and send photographs from any location; we have twitters and tweets and more. Does all this technology make it even harder to get into the Heroic Age mindset?

Bob:
When I try to think about being in a “mindset,” my mind goes completely blank. To give an answer worth reading, I would just have to make something up. In other words, lie.

Jane:
Well, after all, lying is what we do professionally—in other words, telling stories.

Bob:
I’ll give you the truth. Having written stories that span more than two thousand years, I’ll say that there is no mindset for each period. There is only a storytelling mindset, which is about plot and character.

Jane:
Absolutely. The story tells us where we are. Though I have to say, Plot Man, that I would have been well lost in the past without your compass, and your background in the classics. While we can both do the necessary research for details, you are the one who Finds Us a Plot. Me, I am the Follow-Your-Characters-and-Shout-at-Them-to-Slow-Down-and-Wait-for-Me kind of writer.

How do
you
invent plot?

Bob
: You’ll remember that we reached a point early in the
Odysseus
novel where Odysseus and his friends are lost at sea in a small boat. It took us quite a while to decide what would happen next: that they would come upon a ship, but one that appeared to be deserted.

It was asking questions about that ship that unfolded the plot for the rest of the book:
Why is the ship deserted? Who built it? Where did it come from?
Once we had answered those questions, the rest of the book almost wrote itself.

OK, it’s not that easy—but it was something like that.

Jane
: So, if you are stuck without a plot, ask questions! It’s a bit like being lost without a compass or a GPS. But you can find your way if you turn to the nearest friendly resident and are not afraid to ask questions.

Now that I have that handle on plotting . . . you may have talked your way out of being my cowriter, Bob!

The thing is, though, when we have two of us working on the same short stories (and we’ve done a bunch of those) as well as novels (four Young Heroes, four Scottish novels), we always come to a place where two heads really
are
better than one. And sometimes, when we can get your wife, Debby, in on our plotting sessions, the three of us come up with enough plot twists and turns to write a dozen more books. So look out, world!

I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!

We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.

When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.

I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book,
Owl Moon
—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.

And I am still writing.

I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in
Newsweek
close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.

The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are
Owl Moon
,
The Devil’s Arithmetic
, and
How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?
My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called
Once Upon a Time
.

These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including
Not All Princesses Dress in Pink
and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like
Wild Wings
and
Color Me a Rhyme.