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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Emily Hauser 2017
Map copyright © Liane Payne
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Cover design by Becky Glibbery/TW

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For my parents and for Oliver, always

Acknowledgements

There are so many wonderful people who go into the making of a book, and it is one of the real joys of writing to be able to work with and benefit from them all. First and foremost, of course, I am so grateful to my publishers, Transworld: I couldn’t imagine a better home for my books, and I benefit every day from the team’s endless enthusiasm and expertise. Among many, I would like to thank my fabulous editor Simon Taylor, whose shared passion for the ancient world makes working together a true pleasure, as well as Tash Barsby, whose fantastic assistance made everything run more smoothly; many thanks also to Hannah Bright and Patsy Irwin, Viv Thompson, Becky Glibbery, Phil Lord and Candy Ikwuwunna. Beyond Transworld, my sincere thanks go to my agent Roger Field for his advice on everything from books to boar-hunting, and my copy-editor Hazel Orme. I’m so grateful for all you do to help in making these ancient myths a reality.

I am also greatly indebted to many scholars and resources in my research for this book. My thanks go in particular to Professor Vakhtang Licheli at the Tbilisi State University, Georgia, for his assistance in explaining the Bronze Age history of Colchis and its relations with the Greeks, and to Professor Richard Hunter, who first introduced me to Apollonius’ Argonautica at Cambridge. Otar Lordkipanidse’s important Archäologie in Georgien: Von der Altsteinzeit zum Mittelalter (1991) was an invaluable resource on the archaeology of ancient Colchis, and Georgij A. Klimov’s Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages (1998) was particularly helpful in elucidating the Kartvelian/Zan language. The Routledge Handbook of the Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia (2009) was a useful resource for understanding the geography and ethnicities of ancient Anatolia, and Hara Georgiou’s ‘Bronze Age Ships and Rigging’ (1991) was extremely helpful in reimagining the ancient Argo – as, of course, was our visit to the reconstructed Argo at Volos. In this regard I would also like to thank our wonderful host Nasia Chatson for her hospitality during our visit to Mount Pelion, when I was lucky enough to explore the ancient Bronze Age sites of Iolcos, Pagasae, and the slopes of the mountain on which Atalanta grew up. My thanks also go to the Harvard Archery club, especially Natalie Chew, for bearing with me as I got to grips with a bow and learned how to (almost) hit a target like Atalanta.

A writer is only as good as the colleagues, friends and family who support her and make the process of writing not only possible but enjoyable. My colleagues, friends and mentors at Yale and at Harvard – Emily Greenwood, Irene Peirano-Garrison, Diana Kleiner, Linda Dickey-Saucier, and all my colleagues at Phelps; Greg Nagy, Ivy Livingston, Teresa Wu, Alyson Lynch, my Boylston friends and my Latin 1 students – have supported me in my creative endeavours far beyond the call of duty. I am so grateful to all the wonderful people at The Biscuit in Somerville – Hannah, Ryan, Bryan, Ilona, Emmy, Emily, Greta and all the others – whose smiles, conversation and encouragement (as well as their almond chais) powered the writing of this book. My friends – too many to mention them all – in the US, the UK and Austria, have been a constant source of support and inspiration: I am so grateful to Farzana, Athina, Natalia, Bells, Alice and all the others who are always cheering me on from the sidelines.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Andrew and Jenny, whose love and support have managed to reach across the Atlantic and five time zones over the past six years. I am so grateful to you for the important lessons you taught me in life and the encouragement you give me, now that my ship has sailed from the harbour. And I also dedicate it to my wonderful husband, Oliver, whose love and unfailing support along the journey makes living every day and writing every line a joy.

Prologue

The king’s adviser trudges up the side of the mountain. Snow whirls around him, blistering his skin with cold. He clutches the precious bundle he is carrying closer to his chest, as if he could protect it from what is to come. Wind lashes the pine trees, bending them like blades of grass, and the snow swirls across his vision through the darkness, the cold biting at his fingertips through his boar-hide gloves. This is no night to be out on the slopes of Mount Pelion, alone, exposed to the fury of the storms of Zeus, with flakes of snow frosting your eyes and bitter ice crystals forming upon your beard. This is no night to be doing such a deed.

But the king has been firm, and he can only obey. He is a mere adviser, after all, and newly raised to the position. If he denies the king’s orders, what will become of his family? He has his wife to think of, his children, his own little daughter.

The trees are clearing now. He will soon reach the mountain peak where the bare rock reaches up into the sky. A flash of lightning illuminates the path, a steep curving trail up sheer rocks, the only handholds the roots of young trees, the stone slippery with new-fallen snow. It is as if the swirling squalls of wind are pressing him on, on, like the hand of a divine being at his back. The rumble of thunder seems to shake his very bones and sets him mumbling prayers for deliverance as he climbs the treacherous rocks, the bundle clasped to his chest in the howling wind, prayers to gods in which he can hardly believe any more – for what gods could look on and allow King Iasus to order such a thing? What gods could allow him, the powers forgive him, to do what he is doing now?

The top of the mountain is bare, whipped clear by winds that blow hard across the sea from Troy to the east, and shaped into jagged peaks of stone, like waves upon the ocean. He searches for shelter, somewhere that the pounding of the wind and the sweeping snow will not reach, then curses himself for a fool. As if it will make any difference.

But he finds a small cleft within the rocks, and tries to sweep a few dead leaves into a pile to create some warmth. He bends down and places his burden carefully upon the bed of leaves. It is no larger than his two palms placed together, a little bundle of fine-spun cloth and wool. The baby stirs in her sleep, clenching and unclenching her tiny fists.

He stands up. His fingers are trembling as he turns back towards the path, back into the dark, cold night.

Back on Olympus, the home of the gods where eternal beings live in endless time, a goddess is hurrying through the empty halls of Hera’s palace. The only light comes from beneath the door of the chamber at the far end of the hall: Hera’s bedroom, her refuge when she is plotting against Zeus or too furious to sleep beside him. Iris knows that Hera, queen of the gods, will be awake at this midnight hour, pacing up and down the cool marble floors, awaiting her return.

Hera is standing at the centre of the chamber, as Iris had known she would be, back turned, curling dark hair knotted beneath a golden wreath of oak leaves, determined to the last, it seems, not to show how much she wants to hear this news. Hera turns slowly.

Iris bows her head. ‘It is done.’ Her face is blank, expressionless, except for a tiny crease in the centre of her forehead where her brows are drawn together. As she tilts her head up to look at Hera her tunic ripples slightly, iridescent in the lamplight.

Hera lets out a breath. ‘It is done, then,’ she repeats, in a whisper. She moves to her bed and sits upon it, gazing at her hands, thinking. Then she looks up. ‘And no one saw you go? Hermes?’

Hera laughs, and the sound echoes off the marble walls. ‘You have done well, Iris – very well. Not even Hermes could have done such a good job.’

‘I’m sure he couldn’t,’ Iris says. She glances at the ceiling, which opens to the night sky and shows a velvet-black darkness dotted with a veil of stars.

Hera blows out one of the guttering oil-lamps, and the silvery stars become a little brighter. ‘Indeed,’ she says. ‘So the girl will die.’

There is a pause, and it is as if, for a moment, Iris and Hera can see the three Fates seated together in the gaping chasms of darkest Hades, slowly unwinding the golden thread of Atalanta’s life from their spinning wheel and slicing it through with their teeth, until only an inch of thread remains; as if they see one take it between her ancient, time-weathered fingers and flick it over the cavern’s edge, floating down to the infinite depths of the Underworld, to be piled with all the other remnants of mortal lives that were never lived. The two goddesses move softly around the room, extinguishing the remaining oil-lamps hanging on their bronze stands and sending wafts of smoke drifting through the darkness.

‘Did you require anything else?’ Iris asks, as the last of the lamps goes out and the goddesses are left shining in the moonlight, slim and pale as two columns of Parian marble.

‘No,’ Hera says. ‘It is done. I can sleep in peace at last. I have won.’

But as Iris closes the door behind her and makes her way through the silent sleep-filled palaces of Olympus, she cannot help but wonder whether the Fates, and the snip of their teeth against the thread of mortal life, are always where the story ends.

PART I

Eighteen years later

GREECE

1260 BC

There grows corn without measure, and grapes for the wine: rain-showers are there always and sweet dew; it is a land good for pasturing goats and oxen, and upon it grow trees of every kind, and pools that never dry.

Homer

Mount Pelion

The Hour of Offerings

The Fourth Day of the Month of Sailing

I was running, beating away thorny brambles and ferns, trampling the shoots of saplings. Thighs tensed, breath coming hard, soles of my feet arched, arms pumping by my sides. The path was barely there, a hunter’s trail criss-crossed with overgrown wild grasses and tree heather, but I knew my way through the mountain forest as well as any seasoned huntsman. My eyes were stinging with sweat, a few strands of chestnut hair stuck to my forehead, but still I ran, determined not to stop until I had put as much distance between myself and Kaladrosos as I could. I skirted a low-hanging branch and jumped a fallen tree trunk, moss-covered and damp, landing sure-footed.

Aura, my father’s hunting dog, increased her pace to match mine, panting, her ears flat against her head as she ran. The oaks were packed close here, twisting grey-green trunks ploughing into the earth on every side, roots snarling across the path. The afternoon sun was a faint disc above, flashing through the canopy. I ran faster, heart pounding, my aching thighs shining with sweat, my leather quiver – one half lidded for my arrows, the other open for my bow – bouncing on my back. A waterfall flew by, tumbling over rocks into a green-blue pool, and then I was leaping through the stream of the Kissos, Aura splashing through the shallows, and up, up through the oak forests to the spreading beeches that climbed the flanks of the mountain towards the peak.

The light was filtering through the dense branches more insistently now, brighter, pooling over the leaves in puddles of gold. A clearing was opening between the trees, and I paused, hands resting on my thighs, breathing hard. Aura stopped too, flanks heaving, as I looked around me. Bare outcrops of rock alternated with low buckthorn shrubs and yellow-flowering broom, surrounded by a circle of pale-trunked trees, and there was the scent of fresh growth and the iron tang of water from the Kissos nearby. I took a deep breath. My anger was beginning to ebb, rinsed out of my body by the blood pumping through my veins, though I could still feel the frustration smouldering in the pit of my belly. She does not understand, a voice in my head said. She thinks her life in Kaladrosos is all there is, spinning wool to thread, weaving it to cloth all year long, seeing the same people, staying always within the village.

There was a rustling in a thicket of wiry hawthorn on the other side of the clearing. I turned, listening. Aura started to growl, her hackles raised.

‘Quiet, Aura,’ I whispered, putting my finger to my lips, and she stopped immediately with a whimper. I laid my hand on the scruff of her neck and held her, tightening my hold on the dagger in my other hand. She was straining to move forwards, her black nose sniffing at the trees. The undergrowth rustled again, louder this time. A twig snapped as it was crushed under a heavy weight, the sharp crack echoing around the forest glade.

Without a sound, I sheathed my blade, reached back to the quiver behind me and slid out my bow with practised ease, looped the bowstring over the peg and pulled it taut. Kneeling behind a broom shrub, I took an arrow, nocked it and stretched its feathered fletching back to my ear, feeling the familiar bite of the string against my fingers. My blood was pounding in my ears, the mixed thrill and terror of imminent danger pulsing in my veins as I peered through the branches, trying to get a glimpse of the animal.

I aimed the tip of the arrow towards the lowest of the boughs in the thicket opposite, a little above the ground. I could sense where the creature’s movement was coming from. I felt its heavy body prowling across the forest floor; I could almost hear paws padding over the moss and the guttural throb of a growl. I drew the arrow back to its fullest extent, the edge of its flint head biting into my thumb, and aimed. Remember, Atalanta, I thought. You do not miss.

But before I could let the arrow fly, there was the sound of cracking branches from my left. I swivelled around. Another beast was charging towards me from the other side of the clearing a hundred paces distant, roaring, teeth bared, its paws thudding against the earth. My heart leapt to my throat as I turned back towards the thicket where I had heard the first beast, and saw another wall of muscle tearing through the undergrowth the same distance away. Aura was barking again, and the two beasts flashed gold, their jaws full of white teeth, claws ripping at the ground.

With a roar that seemed to shake the trees to their roots, one leapt forwards, charging towards me faster than the torrent of a river pouring over rocks, huge muscles heaving, a bronze blur against yellow flowers and dark leaves. My fingers shook on the bowstring, the twisted ox-gut cutting into my skin, but I was ready. I narrowed my eyes until only the very tip of the arrow existed in my vision and, beyond it, the target of moving muscle. I held my arm steady as the curve of the bow moved to follow the lion’s progress. As if time had slowed to an infinite progression of moments I saw the tightening of the beast’s haunches as it prepared to spring over a fallen tree, heard the crunch of the dried leaves beneath its paws as it leapt, and in that instant I let the arrow fly. It whistled through the clearing, spinning unwavering around its point. I did not stop to hear the bellow of pain from the animal as the arrow met its mark, tearing through the thick muscles of the chest to the unprotected heart, but pulled the dagger from my belt once more and flung it after the arrow to lodge deep in the animal’s chest. It gave a terrifying roar of pain, the life force wrested from it in that final blow.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!’

‘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.

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.

‘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.

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.

‘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 …’

‘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 …

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.

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

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.

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.

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?’

‘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.’

‘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.

‘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.

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.’

I opened my eyes. It felt strange to see the sunshine pouring in through the open windows, to smell the familiar warm scent of Aura upon the air, mixed with the roasting meat and the straw from the goatshed, when a moment ago I had been there upon the mountain with my father, the snow swirling around us, the wind bitter. I looked down at my bow in its slot within the quiver, the arrows I had sharpened upon this very stool, the fletching feathers I had plucked from a tufted duck we had caught together upon the lake in the woods.

‘I was not wanted,’ I said. ‘They left me on the mountain to die. Is that it?’ I turned to my father. ‘They did not want me?’

I had grown up in Kaladrosos, raised to think I was cared for, that I was loved – too much at times, perhaps, too close, yet as constant and steady as the mountain rocks. And now to find out I had been consigned to death, that the mother who had borne me had given me up to the snows and the winds in the dead of winter. That I had been saved only by chance … that my fate had been to die …

A sob caught in my throat, and I banished it with difficulty. The tears were threatening to spill down my cheeks as a yawning emptiness filled me, terrible, desolate, and every certainty I had ever known fell away.

My father said nothing in reply but stood, went over to the wooden chest by the wall where he and my mother kept their few precious things, unlocked it and brought out a small square of linen wrapped around an object I could not see. ‘You had this around your neck,’ he said, pressing it into my hands, ‘when I found you. The workmanship looks Pagasean to me – they have more goldsmiths than Iolcos, at any rate.’ He sighed. ‘If I had to make a guess, I would say you came from a family in the city, though whether this belonged to a wealthy noble or was a gift to his slave, I cannot tell.’

Fingers trembling, I lifted back the edges of the cloth. Inside was a golden medallion on a long leather cord, beaten thin into a circle, an image of two huntsmen chasing a stag hammered into it. I lifted the medallion and felt the cord slide over my hand, saw the disc sparkling in the light cast by the fire. The loss I was feeling inside was changing slowly, growing, kindling into a burning desire – and with it, a question: who am I?

I looked up into my father’s face, seeing the hesitation in his eyes as he watched me, waiting for a reaction. I wrapped it back in its cloth, feeling the thin edge of the medallion with my thumb, and bent to place it in my quiver. The burning in my chest was flaming, leaping higher and higher – whether it was shock or anger or excitement I could not tell: all I knew was that I had to do something. To do nothing would be unbearable.

‘I could not have asked the gods for a better father,’ I said, my throat tight. ‘But, Father, would you understand if I said I wished to go to Pagasae? To find my parents – to prove to them they were wrong to abandon me to die?’

He squeezed my hand. ‘I would have expected nothing less of you, Atalanta, my dear.’

There was a sound from beside me, and I turned. My mother had approached, unnoticed, and stood beside me, Maia still on her hip. She reached to her girdle and untied a leather pouch that hung from it, then handed it to me. It chinked softly as I opened it and looked inside to see a handful of silver and bronze coins. ‘We do not have much, Zeus knows,’ she said, her expression fierce, as if challenging me to say otherwise, though her cheeks were glimmering with the tracks of tears, ‘but I put this aside knowing that this day would come, sooner or later. It is enough to keep you in the city for a month or so, maybe more.’

I nodded, swallowing hard. ‘My thanks to you – to you both. I shall return – I promise you.’

And in my thoughts, that flickering, spreading, burning desire: I have to know who I am.

Kaladrosos

The Hour of the Middle of the Day

The Thirteenth Day of the Month of Sailing

I left Kaladrosos nine days later when the sun was halfway to the arch of the sky, my father standing by the door in the porch watching me go, my mother inside with the smoke and the children. I looked back down the slope of the hill. He was leaning on his wooden walking stick, his hat askew upon his head, one hand on the scruff of Aura’s neck as she strained against the rope tethering her to the doorpost, her ears flapping as she leapt and barked and tried to follow me. I nodded to my father, tears at the corners of my eyes, trying, with one gesture, to tell him why I had to leave. I saw him smile a little and wave me on. I hesitated, looked back one last time, a lump rising in my throat as I thought of my mother within, fighting an urge to turn back and allow myself to be held once more in her arms, to inhale the scent of soot on her tunic, to kiss Corycia a last time on her plump pink cheek and to tell Leon to remember to practise with his little wooden bow while I was gone.

I had fastened the medallion my father had given me around my neck, and the disc leapt against my chest beneath my tunic as I went. For the first part I was pounding along paths I knew, following the steep flank of the mountain south and west through the woods, the dappled shade cooling my limbs and the scent of the pines on the breeze. I stopped now and then to drink and splash water upon my face at the streams along the way. The path wound back and forth, following the contours of the foothills, and to my right the towering rocks shrouded in olive shrubs traced the route north towards the mountain’s peak. Those first steps from Kaladrosos were harder than I could ever have thought, each bend in the track filled with memories – the carpenter’s hut in the village of Lechonia, where my father had had my first bow made; the glade where I had picked branches of silver fir sacred to the goddess Artemis to cover our door when my mother was lying in with Maia; the mountain lake where Aura and I used to swim together, with its veil-like waters and pine-edged sandy banks. But as the sky above became more expansive, and the ground fell away at my feet, revealing a vista over the rolling olive-clad slopes towards the vast blue bay and the distant mountains on the other side, my excitement mounted, as my thoughts turned from what I had left to what I might find ahead.

Pagasae lies furthest to the west of the cities of the bay beneath Mount Pelion, past the citadel of Iolcos at the place where the land curves back towards the sea. My father’s words echoed in my head as I ran, each word beating with the slap of my sandals against the rocks. I had never been so far from Kaladrosos – we had never needed to venture further, exchanging the wood my father cut from the forests for fish at Kaladrosos harbour and spices from the merchants that sailed the open sea – yet already I was savouring the new sights and sounds: the warmth of the sun sinking over the mountains to the west upon my face, the burning golden disc turning the sky to orange and pink, then to a pale purple, a myriad of colours. Cicadas were chirping gently in the boughs of the pines, calling to and answering each other, while swifts circled overhead, shrieking and swooping towards the bay. I felt myself thrill with anticipation, and ran on down the winding path.

I spent the night at a woodcutter’s hut set just above the harbour of the little village of Aphussos, and ate companionably outside with his family around a small fire built up from dry underbrush. The stars began to glimmer overhead, and I sat tearing bread, cutting the skewered meat from the spit and talking with the man’s wife, all the while gazing towards the dotted torchlights of the towns to the north and west of the bay, wondering which was Pagasae and what I might find there.

I left early the next morning as the sun’s rays broke through the mists rising from the water, and turned to run north as the sun climbed towards its peak, following the sandy shores of the bay, fording rivers running down from the mountain to the sea, passing olive orchards and small clusters of dwellings surrounded by cypress trees, the many-ridged slopes of Mount Pelion rising green-clad on my right. As I rounded the north of the bay, away from the mountain, the ground became drier, dustier, swallows swooping overhead, the grass a paler green and tufted beneath my feet. The path forked to the right, leading up the plain towards a distant hilltop fortress set back from the sea, but I followed the track on, running past fishermen, tradesmen and pedlars with trays slung around their necks, keeping close to the bay as my father had said. I was aiming towards a headland curving back into the ocean. Above it, a long, low hill was coming into view upon which another city was built, its fortified limestone walls tracing the contour of the rocks, the rooftops of the buildings behind just visible, the path winding up the slope to a pair of wide gates and a tower. My stomach churned and I slowed to a walk, breathing hard, brushing my fingertips through the marram grass and rushes growing nearby.

I swallowed, doubt and fear leaping in my chest like cold flames as I contemplated the enormity of what lay before me.

Lady Artemis, I thought, turning my eyes to a nearby pine, willing the goddess to speak to me from its branches. Tell me, was I a fool to leave Kaladrosos?

I was deserted upon the mountain, left to die … What if I find my family, and am told they do not want me?

I bit my lip, glancing back over my shoulder towards the mist-tinged outline of Mount Pelion on the other side of the bay. I had left my family behind, my whole way of life: the familiar crowing of the cockerels in the village at dawn, the smell of hay, smoke and burnt wood in our house, the breeze through the olive leaves in the yard just before the sun dropped behind the mountain, and the evening light that tinged the leaves with gold, like first-pressed oil. My heart tugged as I remembered Aura, barking and straining at her leash to follow me as I ran away, as I thought of the tear-tracks on my mother’s cheeks, and my father waving farewell. Had I done wrong? Should I, perhaps, have stayed, pretended I had never known, as my parents had done all my life?

I shook myself. You have to be strong, I thought, clenching my fists. Free from fear, as your father and mother taught you, as you taught yourself upon the mountain slopes.

With that, I took a deep breath and started to run up the hill towards the gates of the city ahead.

As I neared them I saw two guards stationed on top of the gate-tower, clothed in tunics and cloaks, carrying bronze shields and long, horn-tipped bows with quivers upon their backs. A small bronze bell hung beside them on a wooden frame, a rope dangling from its clapper. They watched, hands resting on the curved ends of their bows, as I approached.

‘I wish to enter the city!’ I called to them, shading my eyes against the bright rays of the sun. An olive tree nearby, its trunk twisted and knotted with age, offered some shade and I moved towards it.

‘What is your name, and where do you come from?’ the guard on the right called down, a swarthy, bearded man. I could see him taking in my short wool tunic, leather sandals, and the quiver hanging at my back.

Contents

Also by Emily Hauser

For the Winner

Emily Hauser

Acknowledgements

Prologue

PART I

Eighteen years later

GREECE

1260 BC

The Hunt

To the City

Loved by the Gods

The Heir Returns

The Killing of the Boar

The Quest Begins

Mount Pelion

The Hour of Offerings

The Fourth Day of the Month of Sailing

Kaladrosos

The Hour of the Middle of the Day

The Thirteenth Day of the Month of Sailing