Carnaiea, Master?' he asked.
The dark eyes surveyed us. We were naked, as he was, and Cheiron handled us as though we were horses. A hard hand ran down to my loins, cupped my genitals, tested my pubic hair and the hair under my arms, tugging. Then a thumb ran across my chin where down was sprouting. He grunted, then treated Jason alike. Then he nodded toward the boar spears, and ran to get one each.
'At last!' said Jason with satisfaction, choosing the longest spear and feeling the edge. I nodded, taking a shorter but thicker spear, and tried not to remember the terrible strength of the boar, the filthy tusks dripping with poisonous saliva, and the death of the centaur boy the year before - exactly a year. They had brought him into the camp, limp and dying, and as they laid him down beside Cheiron's house his guts had spilled onto the earth, a flash of curving blue and red intestines, uncoiling, and he had so died. I hoped I could die silently, as he had. I did not think it likely.
The centaurs did not approve of idle speech, considering it a valuable commodity to be used sparingly and for effect, so that every word was treasured and remembered. Jason and I, said our master, talked far too much, wasting precious words.
'A man has a measure of words, as he has a measure of semen,' Cheiron said. 'More will not be made if he has wasted his substance. Keep silent, humans, on this hunt at least. The boar can hear a hunter's footfall across the mountain forest. He can smell us from a hundred paces. No words, young men.'
We nodded, overwhelmed by the honour of graduating from children to young men. There would be no manhood ritual for us. The eldest priest cut the foreskins of the centaur boys, wounding their breasts with a bronze pin dipped in soot and rolling them in the skin of the sacrifice; the only horse ever killed by the horse-people.
We would not mate as our first gift of seed with a young mare in her first season. She who receives all of the brotherhood into her body, symbolising their kinship with the goddess of horses, whom we Achaeans do not know. Then the queen-mare is garlanded with flowers and led to the sacrifice, and all of her lovers eat of her flesh and drink of her blood, and thereafter are centaurs.
Jason and I were fosterlings, not centaurs. The boys our age had gone from us, joined the clan of men, and we were left with the children, unable to join our friends, cut off from the ones we had known. We had been feeling lonely, but now, it seemed, we were to be admitted to the life of the tribe, to be young men.
Jason and I had lain together since we were children. When we grew newly sensitive flesh, we had touched and caressed, fascinated with the gush of seed, the strange scent, the jolt of pleasure. Cheiron had caught us, beaten us and forbidden us to lie under the same covering, saying that we would waste our strength.
I did not believe it. It might have been so for the centaurs, but not for a human. The earth soaked up my seed every night in silence, and I muttered the only prayer I remembered from my mother's teaching. It was a prayer to Aphrodite, goddess of love, and my mother had told me to say it to my lover, the first woman I lay with:
Lady of Cyprus, delight your supplicant.
Lady of Doves, receive my offering.
Foam born, teach me thy mystery.
I began not to burn, as the stories of lovers told grudgingly by Cheiron described - he did not approve of the Achaean fascination with love - but to thirst, as though there was something inside me parching for lack of water. I could not imagine where I would find a human woman to lie with me. Jason, doubtless, would be provided with a bride after he had achieved his destiny. Perhaps she might have a slave or a maiden sent with her who would be given to me.
I wondered what she would be like as I lay in my cold wrappings, apart from my bedmate. Not beautiful, that would be too much to expect. Old, perhaps, even crippled - Nauplios, the net-man Dictys' son, could command no beauty of face or body - but possessed of those parts which could enfold me, take me into her body, give me joy. Her arms would wrap me close, hold me to her breast - ah, her soft breast! - and I would lie in her arms all night.
Such musings usually ended with me turning my body into the soft earth. She always accepted my libation graciously.
That night I slept intermittently around the fire. I was afraid of the dawn. I was even more afraid of my own fear. I must not fail at this hunt.
As soon as the goddess whom we call Eos trailed a pink garment over the horizon we were awake. I had polished and oiled the stone head of the boar spear, had tended my feet, too, which were as hard as hoofs, and tightened the belt and loincloth which held my shrinking genitals in some kind of safety. For a cornered boar strikes for the fork of the biped which assails it, tusks and tears for the belly and the sex, to bring the insolent attacker to his knees to be savaged. From my belt hung a bronze knife, one of a pair which Jason had brought with him. It was as sharp as I could make it. I tied up my hair and joined my friend, who was leaning against the corner of a hut and looking irritatingly relaxed.
'Which way are we going?' I asked, not wanting to trust my tongue overmuch.
He pointed and touched his ear, hunter's talk for 'Listen!'
I listened. Far up the mountain I heard the baying of the hounds. They had found prey. The boar was moving, from the sound, down the valley between Centaurs' Mountain and the next, which they called Axe Head because of its shape. That was bad. That valley was thickly wooded, with deep undergrowth. Jason and I had penetrated there in search of a lost goat once, and it had taken hours to find our way out again - with the burden of a new kid and a very affronted mother, who had chosen, she thought, the safest place in the world for her delivery.
The thorned red vines which the centaurs call wolf's fruit, because of a resemblance to the berries of blood dripping from a predator's jaws, were high enough to cut off the sky. I had drawn a deep breath of relief as we had paused on Centaurs' Mountain as the goat suckled her kid and I sucked my scratches, under the benign gaze of heaven again.
But there was no fighting the dictates of Fate, so I hefted my spear and we joined the soft-footed hunters.
In twos and threes we drifted down the slope, over the grass and the flowers of Adonis, stepped across the stream at the bottom and began climbing the other side.
I was lost in the space of time in which a man drinks a cup of wine. Jason at my side was fighting his way through the scrub, and I could not speak to remind him that we were supposed to stand still, unwind the vine, and slide through the bushes, making little sound. This slowed the progress but reduced the damage to human skin. I stopped for the thousandth time to unwrap my thigh from the cruel embrace of thorns as sharp as daggers, and then I saw him.
The hounds bayed, higher up. The hunters whistled, calling in the dogs, and I heard a crash and a short bitten-off scream on the slope above my head. They were seeking him on their own level.
But out of the coiled tangle of undergrowth, the head was emerging. A high-shouldered king boar - tall as a colt, wide as a doorway, scarred with many encounters, ten years old and cunning as a serpent. His eyes were red with rage and dark with calculation.
I froze. I could not move or speak.
He shook himself, tossing his head. His tusks dripped with blood. He was hideous and proud, lord of his world, and we mere humans could not dent his arrogance. The stench of him encompassed me. Almost human, the scent of a boar. An unwashed human who reeks with maleness and blood - that is the smell.
Then Jason screamed a challenge aloud, and thrust a spear into the creature's side.
The boar turned quicker than sight; I heard his jaw snap closed on the boar spear, and the splinter of breaking wood. Jason was shaken as the boar shook his heavy head and then, as the spear broke, my lord was thrown to one side.
I had to distract the attacker. I grounded my spear, braced it with my foot, and whistled. The boar spun again, moving like a snake, and pawed the ground, grunting with fury. I saw the red wound in his side, bleeding fresh red in gouts, not slowing his advance. I cried to Jason, who was caught in the thorns, 'Help!' and he felt for his knife, shaking his head.
Everything was moving very slowly. The boar gouged great