Chapter 27 #2
“Who cares?” He pulls me back to him.
“I think I can hear other hunters,” I say. “In the trees.”
“So long as they stay there.” His head blocks out the sun above me, and the noise recedes. I wait a moment, listening for it to return.
“Adonis,” I say, “wait—”
But I can’t finish my sentence before a tumult of thundering paws erupts, and his dogs hurtle past us in a panic, scattering in opposite directions.
In an instant, Adonis leaps to his feet, his eyes on the gap between the trees from which they ran while I’m still staring after the terrified hounds. A terrible mistake.
The boar bursts out from the forest, barreling toward me, and Adonis flings himself to intercept its path.
I’m not fast enough to stop him. Its hooves pound the earth, foam bubbling from its snout, tusks curving sharp and lethal into the air.
It charges for him, tossing its head upward, and its tusks pierce Adonis before I can even move.
They plunge into his navel and his beautiful face contorts.
There’s a sickening moment where everything stands still, and then the boar jerks itself free and flees across the meadow, swallowed up in the distant sweep of the forests.
I’m speechless, unable to comprehend how it could appear so suddenly and then be gone, and how Adonis can be stretched on the earth, his blood trickling onto the flowers that are crushed and torn beneath his body.
It happened so quickly. A brutal, mortal ending.
I drop to my knees, cradling his head in my lap, but his shallow breaths quickly dwindle to nothing, and the light deadens in his eyes. I could have made him a god when he was still alive, but now I have nothing, no means to summon his life back from the Underworld.
The birds have fallen silent. What sounds like a hollow wind circling through the leaves belies the stillness in the air, and I realize it’s the lamenting chorus of the Dryads, a soft and eerie sound.
I’m tensed for the emergence of whichever hunter pursued the boar this way, but no one comes.
Almost as though the prey wasn’t the boar at all.
The Dryads emerge from their protective trunks, each of them slight and delicate, ethereal in their flowing dresses and leafy crowns.
They usually shrink from sight, only ever glimpsed fleetingly as they dart between their beloved trees, but this tragedy draws them out.
Averting their eyes, they advance cautiously toward Adonis.
I lay his head down on the grass and kiss his forehead. Then I stand, taking a shaking step back from his body, and then another.
The Dryads sink down around him, a circle of nymphs clad in shades of green, joining hands with one another.
One of them, Kraneia, lifts her head to me. “We’ll bury him,” she says softly. There is no rancor or recrimination in her voice, only gentle sorrow.
I nod, trembling. It’s better that his body stays here, in the woods that he loved, than returned to the family that he came here to escape.
If I’d told him who I really am, he wouldn’t have leaped in front of the boar. It was a misguided attempt to save me, never knowing that I couldn’t be harmed. Not realizing that I was the one who should have jumped in its way.
I stare at the quiet forest, wondering. Could it have been Artemis who spooked the boar and set it on its rampage or was it just a terrible accident? Startled by the dogs, it just happened to charge in this direction, without any malevolent divinity guiding it.
I don’t know.
I walk blindly into the forest, searching. For Artemis, for the boar, for a hapless hunter, for some kind of answer.
All I find are his two dogs, whining and afraid. I stroke their soft heads, their silken ears. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
I step back and that’s when I see her. Tall and slender, with braided hair and eyes as cold as moonlight, bare legs and sandals dusty from the earth; girlish and fierce at the same time. She’s poised, but Artemis always looks as though she might spring forwards to run—or attack—at any moment.
“Have you come to gloat?” I don’t sound like myself; my voice is hoarse and cracked, a stranger on the edge of desperation.
Her voice is low, imbued with the music of the wind rushing through the leaves, touched with the wildness of the forests. “I didn’t kill your boy,” she says.
“Why should I believe you?”
She tilts her chin. “I don’t care if you do or you don’t,” she says. “But it’s true.”
“You wanted me gone.” Tears well up in my eyes. “What better way than this?”
She tosses her head, impatient. “It’s true I wanted you out of here. You aren’t any more welcome than the men who come sniffing after my girls. My woods are full of dangers—bears, wolves, boars and lions. Anyone who trespasses here takes their chances.” There’s no shred of sympathy in her tone.
My pulse quickens, a flame kindling inside me. “He meant no harm.” My voice is stronger, my fingers curling into my palms as I take a step closer to her.
Her eyes widen.
“We did nothing to you,” I say. “Why did it matter that we were here?”
“You meddle,” she says, and there’s a hint of defensiveness now. “If I allow you near my nymphs, if you fill their heads with thoughts of men—”
“Then what?”
“I see the harm men do,” she hisses and the power crackles from her like silver lightning. “In the towns and villages every day, when women call to me from their childbeds. When girls flee to my forests, hunted like deer, and I find them broken and discarded. They come to me for safety.”
“Adonis wasn’t like that!” I cry. “He never looked at any of your nymphs. I know he had no ill intentions toward any of them—I was with him. I knew his heart.”
She doesn’t soften. I don’t think that Artemis is capable of softness. But she doesn’t lash back. Instead, she jerks her head stiffly—an acknowledgment, if not acceptance of what I said. “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “You have no cause to be here now, do you?”
A dozen bitter responses swirl inside me like bile. Before I can utter any of them, she emits a brief, piercing whistle and Adonis’ dogs prick up their ears.
“Come,” she commands them, and they obey at once, trotting to her side. She reaches down, caressing their heads, and both dogs lean into her touch, soothed by her presence.
She glances back at me. “I’ll take care of them,” she says. She tosses it out begrudgingly: maybe a peace offering, maybe not. Without waiting for an answer, she stalks away, swallowed up by the trees in a moment, the dogs close behind her.
I take a long, shuddering breath. I think she was telling the truth. She didn’t send the boar, not deliberately.
But Adonis is still gone, and nothing will bring him back.
When I’m sure the Dryads will have dispersed to their trees, I return. In the meadow where he died, the grass is still flattened, stems broken where the boar trampled.
On the earth where his blood spilled, I kneel and place my hands on the ground.
A flower emerges from the stricken soil, its petals a starburst of white, stained with a crimson ring that frames its black center. It looks delicate, as though a breath of wind could carry it away, but, when I touch it with one gentle finger, I feel life humming through it.
“These flowers will grow here now,” I whisper. “I wanted to leave you something beautiful to look at.”
I won’t let the world lapse back into lovelessness. Adonis returned beauty to my life; he restored my hope. I know that I can’t let it slip away again.
The trees stay silent, but, as I leave, their branches ripple gently as if to wave goodbye.
—
The years pass swiftly, seasons slipping into one another, the time feeling like nothing at all in the heavens.
I think of the mortals I’ve cared for: Pandora, Phaon, Galatea and Adonis, and of the hold they have on my heart—a hold that will endure long past the span of their lifetimes.
I don’t return to the forests of Artemis, but from the gates of Olympus I see that Galatea still runs through them with dogs at her feet and a bow in her hand.
Her hair has turned gray and her sun-darkened skin now folds into pleats.
She looks stronger and happier than I could ever have guessed she would be, freed from an inert existence into a life made all the more precious by its transience.
When she dies, she is mourned by those who know her and love her for who she truly is.
All her life, I’ve watched her covertly, my lingering sense of responsibility for her never quite lifting from my shoulders.
I’ve seen the bonds of devotion between her, her goddess and the nymphs.
Her life became something real, imbued with meaning and significance, not a dream turned into flesh that was to be enjoyed but never really valued.
Her death leaves sadness in its wake, but the happiness she gave those around her will be remembered long past that pain.
I keep my vow, and I don’t let my heartbreak drag the world into misery, not this time. If anything, it feels more urgent and vital to me than ever before that gods and mortals love fiercely, tenderly and wholeheartedly. Hurt and grief are not the price of love; they are testaments to its strength.
In the meadow of Adonis, his flowers still bloom, a heartbeat of time for us but more than a mortal decade since his death.