I decided that if I didn’t leave then and there, I’d say something to my aunt’s self-righteous companion that would cause unnecessary trouble for everyone. A guest who broke the peace of her host’s home wasn’t worthy of the sacred bread and salt. I mumbled my tale about the lost mantle, Lady Althea cheerfully gave me a suitable piece of cloth from the basket beside her, and I ran from the room.
As I fled down the corridor, I heard the smug noblewoman tell my aunt, “Such a sweet child. What a pity she’s such a sharp-faced, skinny thing.”
“Exactly like her mother,” my aunt’s voice trailed after me. “And you know what a beauty she grew up to be.”
10
THE BOAR COMES
The cloth I’d been given by my aunt turned out to be useless. I tried several ways of wearing it under my tunic, wrapped and tucked this way and that, but it kept slipping off or bunching up when I walked. I had enough trouble getting up on Aristos without a wad of wool snaring my legs and getting in the way. I wound up leaving it behind in my room before I ran out to meet Atalanta by the pines.
We rode into the hills before the early-morning mist was completely gone from between the trees. The silvery haze held secrets. Once I thought I saw the slim, swift shape of a dryad slipping back into the bark of her tree, but it might have been nothing more than an ordinary shadow. The sun burned the mist away by the time we reached the clearing.
My second morning of riding lessons went only a little better than the first. As soon as I mastered mounting Aristos with a boost from Atalanta, she decreed I was ready to try getting up on the horse without her helping hands.
“Like this,” she said, demonstrating the proper way to do it. It was much the same business as the assisted mount—reins in the left hand, a little jump, a little push upward with the right hand, the right leg swung over the horse’s back, and there she was.
There she was; not me.
The best thing you could say about my attempts was that at least I’d stopped dropping the reins. At first my jump up wasn’t high enough, and I slammed my chest into Aristos’s side. When I jumped harder, I still couldn’t manage to swing my leg over the horse and ended up hanging over his back on my stomach before sliding back down.
Atalanta let me have half a dozen tries before she stepped in and showed me how to use both hands to help me make the midair turn without losing my grip on the reins. That was the only reason I was finally able to mount Aristos, though not without a lot of squirming myself into a proper seat once I was on the stallion’s back.
Then the real lessons began.
By the time Atalanta had to return to the citadel, she seemed pleased with my progress. “Not bad, little squirrel; not bad at all,” she said as she watched me guide Aristos around the clearing at a walk. “You’re still sitting too far forward—that’s why you fell off both times today—but you have the right instinct for balancing control between your hands and your legs. Tomorrow we’ll see if you can stay on him when he picks up his pace. Here’s a taste.”
She gave the horse a light swat on the rump and he went into a lively trot. My teeth clattered together as I bounced along, but I pulled back firmly on the reins, and brought him to a stop before every bone in my back shook loose. I turned Aristos’s head toward Atalanta, touched his side with my heels, and walked him back to her.
“I think I’ll be ready,” I said, smiling feebly through the fresh pains of that day’s lesson.
I wasn’t smiling when she dropped me off at the little roadside pine grove. The insides of my legs were hurting too much. I was used to dealing with aches and bruises from all the time I’d spent learning weaponry with Glaucus and my brothers, but having my skin rubbed raw by a horse’s flanks was something new. My flesh stung as if I’d landed on my behind in a beehive. The simple act of putting one foot in front of the other to walk back to the citadel became a bizarre, agonizing dance.
I was lucky that Atalanta didn’t simply go galloping off as soon as she let me off Aristos. She saw my pain and she knew the reason.
“Didn’t I tell you to protect your thighs?” she asked.
“I tried,” I replied. “I tried, and I really wish I’d succeeded, believe me.” I went on to explain my failed attempts at turning that length of cloth from my aunt into a usable undergarment.
“Hmm. Where’s that cloth now?” Atalanta asked.
“I left it on my bed this morning.”
“Good; easy enough to find. If there’s enough material to make myself a new pair of Mykenaean riding breeches, I’ll swap it for my old ones. They won’t fit you perfectly, but they’ll do, and I could use a new pair.”
“You know how to sew?” I was unwilling to believe it.
Atalanta was amused by my incredulity. “Don’t gape at me like that, girl. It’s not as if I knew how to fly.” And with that, she rode off.
It took me a long, painful time to walk back to the citadel. As I limped through the gates, one of the guards jeered, “Next time work harder, boy, and your master won’t beat you so badly!” I gritted my teeth and ignored him as I made my way back to my room.
Pain or no pain, I had to move much more quickly once I was inside the palace, in order to avoid being seen and questioned. A scruffy, ragged “boy” could have a dozen excuses for passing through those parts of the Calydonian citadel where people did real labor, but next to none for being caught on the upper floor where the highborn had rooms.
I was climbing the stairs to the upper level when I ran into one of the hunters coming down. He took one look at me and his eyes widened. “By Zeus, boy, what happened to you?”
“I fell off a horse.” There was no harm in telling the truth, as far as I could tell. I tried to move past him before anyone else might happen to come along.
He stayed where he was, blocking the narrow stairway. “A horse?” he echoed. “Are you all right? Did you get hurt?”