Chapter 1

This short story is my version of the myth of Atalanta and Hippomenes, written for the April Fools Day Story Contest 2024. It is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of the characters to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

This story contains very little erotica.

Much thanks to one of my all time favorite writers, the legendary onehitwanda for her inspiration and feedback!

Hope you enjoy the story!

Atalanta Versus Love

Long ago, an Arcadian man left a baby girl in a wild mountain valley because he had wanted a boy. He left her there for the wolves, but for whatever reason, the Fates decided that it would instead be Apollo, on an early morning stroll, who would find her by a creek, bawling her eyes out.

Struck by the similarity of the baby girl to his sister Artemis in her brown eyes and her curly chestnut hair, he was compelled to help this infant girl. So, he called upon a mother bear and asked her for a favor.

“You want me to do what now?” The bear asked, fixated with horror at the very sight and smell of the pink human thing.

“Take care of her. Give her a home. Raise her as one of your own.”

The bear groaned. “You’re asking me to raise one of those deranged bear killers? Look, Apollo, I like you, but I can barely manage two cubs of my own let alone a human… thing. I must refuse.”

“Who provides you and your cubs wild honey and berries to eat? Streams full of fish? Pleasant summers and short winters? Take care of the child, mother bear, or perhaps my berry bushes and my streams won’t be so productive this year.”

“Fine,” mother bear grumbled. “I’ll take care of the child. But she better not turn out to be just another bear killer.”

“I swear to my father Zeus that if you raise her well, she will not.” Then he bounced the baby in his arms and tickled her fat baby chin and cooed, “You’re not a bear killer are you, you little thing? No… you’re just a pudgy widdle –“

“Just give me the child,” growled mother bear.

Apollo laughed and handed the baby over.

“What is her name? And what god does she honor?” asked the bear.

Apollo pondered the questions for a moment, and decided that the child should be named Atalanta, which means ‘indomitable,’ in the ancient Arcadian language, and that as a child of the wilderness, she shall honor his sister, Artemis.

“The Goddess of the Hunt? Great. That won’t go wrong for me at all,” the bear replied flatly. Nonetheless, she accepted the child. What choice did she have? She needed Apollo’s honey and berries. She needed all the help she could get. Being a single mother wasn’t easy. She sure as Erebus wasn’t going to try at being a single mother without the favor of the Gods.

“Well, there we have it. Thank you, mama bear,” said Apollo with a gracious bow. Then, he turned to the infant and with a gleaming grin said, “You are fierce and tenacious. You are a daughter of the forest and a follower of the moon goddess. Never be with a man, or you will lose your way.”

The bear upheld her end of the deal. She resisted all temptation to eat the child Atalanta, and instead raised her as one of her own.

With bears for siblings, and the deep woods and the sun-drenched hills to roam, and honey and berries and stream trout for her sustenance, Atalanta grew up to be a tall, beautiful woman endowed with muscle-corded legs, arms as taut as marble, thick hair that flowed like a mare’s mane as she ran, and in her heart the spirit of a bear. She had a wild, natural beauty just like her goddess.

Because of her beauty, many men sought her hand for marriage, but she made a promise to her bear mother to keep to Apollo’s accord so that she would remain wild and free and not beholden to the ways of man. But that did not mean the men did not stop trying. What is man, after all, if not the most stubborn of creatures?

Over the years she resisted all men who sought her, but after a time, she grew so tired by their relentless effort that after a little too much wine at the local taverna one day, she pronounced to the crowd, “By the grace of Artemis, I will only marry the man that can beat me in a footrace. So have it. Race me, men of Arcadia, and take your chance at the prize of my hand in marriage. But be warned: he who fails, shall be struck by an arrow from my goddess to die like a boar.”

She sat smugly, rather proud of herself for rustling up such a clever idea to get the village men off her case. At first, it seemed to work. A silence fell across the taverna, and the men all looked at one another, to see what idiot would be foolish enough to risk his life for a chance at her hand in marriage.

Then there he was. The idiot that would answer. In the silence rose a voice, not a manly voice, but a boyish voice that rang shrilly. “I’ll race you.”

All turned to find at the bar, a traveler in a dusty white tunic who looked in every part as delicate as the voice that came from him.

“And who are you, boy, with those slender legs and soft muscles, to think that you can beat me in a race?” Atalanta asked.

The man stood and said, “I am Hippomenes, and though I may not look it, I am fast.”

Atalanta burst out in laughter. The village men of the taverna laughed too, knowing the meagerness of the poor man’s chances.

After she had stopped laughing, she wiped the tears from her cheeks and replied with a somber voice, “are you willing to bet your life on it?”

This Hippomenes, who looked like a child given an older brother’s tunic, and whose face was soft and pretty like a maiden’s beneath his dusty-brown short-cropped hair, nodded, and replied, “name the time and place, and I’ll be there.”

Atalanta first reacted with anger at this stranger’s arrogance — to think that he could beat her who had spent her days running with antelopes and horses? But the anger soon turned to admiration for his boldness, and then finally to remorse, as she realized that he may know nothing of the name Atalanta to believe that he could come even close to beating her in a race. He must not know the certainty of the doom to which he subscribed, but to refuse him the race after blustering in front of all the village folk and the huntress above would certainly reflect poorly on her character. She had no choice but to accept the man’s challenge.

“Very well. Tomorrow at sundown, we meet where the road starts at the hill above the vineyards,” she said. “There we will have our race.”

“I’ll see you there,” Hippomenes replied, too enthusiastically for Atalanta’s conscience.

The following day, as the sun sank into a windless sea to cast a rosy twilight, while the red clay earth still gave off the heat of a dry Arcadian summer day, Atalanta found waiting at the top of the vineyard hill the dauntless Hippomenes and most of the village. Hippomenes, standing erect, looked as sure as ever.

Atalanta spent the better part of the day contemplating the race, not because she worried about losing, but because she had been moved by Hippomenes’ eagerness to race her in the face of death. Just a fool or a man with a death wish, she had told herself, but she could not help but wonder if there was something more than that. A courage there that she certainly never found among the villagers, and that she could not deny was praiseworthy. So taken by the delicate-skinned Hippomenes that the previous night, she lamented to her goddess for dooming a soul with such virtue. But her goddess, glowing between the sailing clouds that night, who listened to her uncharacteristic lamentation with confusion, offered her no pity in return. “You made an offer, and it was accepted. Be a woman of your word now lest you be dogged forever by men,” said Artemis.

It was with a heavy heart that she agreed with her goddess, and with a heavy heart that she found the maiden-faced young Hippomenes awaiting her arrival above the vineyards where the road began.

“Are you ready, Hippomenes?” Atalanta said, using his name because at least the soon-to-perish, whether unwittingly or not, deserve the respect of being called by his first name.

Hippomenes nodded. “Ready as I’ll ever be,” he replied with an anxious smile. His eyes were beautiful, soulful, and innocent, and because of that, Atalanta could not look into them.

“Then we’ll start here,” she said as she drew a line in the red dirt with her foot. “The rules are simple: We race to the main gate of the village by the sea, then back to this line. The first to cross shall be the winner.”

“And the luckiest man alive,” Hippomenes replied, drawing laughter from the onlooking villagers and even a smirk from Atalanta.

“We shall see,” Atalanta said, and with that, she doffed her tunic and her sandals, not to be lightened, but to run as she always ran in the wilderness. She did not mind the gawping stares of virile eyes upon her naked body. For all their staring they can never possess her. For her, it was a natural state and to run as such — to feel the rushing wind against her skin was akin to breathing the cleanest air or feeling the vigor of her heartbeat.

She took her mark, and Hippomenes followed suit. The village mayor came to their front and raised a hand and dropped it to start the race to a rambunctious cheer.

Hippomenes started strong, sprinting faster than Atalanta expected. But then, all manner of creatures have the capacity to perform incredible feats when their lives are on the line.

He pulled ahead, but this did not worry Atalanta. In fact, though she trailed him, she maintained pace without drawing a harder breath than she might have while resting in bed, and she did not come even close to drawing a sweat. After a while, and after considering that to give the man false hope was cruel, she quickened her pace and came alongside him. “Not bad,” she said to him, “but I’m afraid you’re going to have to be much faster than that if you think you can beat me,” and then she took off sprinting to demonstrate the fruitlessness of his effort.

But before she could get too far, something sailed across her eyesight, glinting golden in the setting sun. As soon her mind had comprehended the peculiar thing to be an apple, she felt a sudden ravenous desire to seek out the fruit where it fell in a thicket of tall wild wheat.

Her feet took her off the road. She dove into the thicket and crawled like a hound sniffing after its quarry. “That apple!” she muttered, pushing aside the wheatgrass. “Where is that apple! I must have it!”

When she found the glimmering prize, she swiped it and clutched it to her heart.

“Ah-ha! Sweet thing, I have you!” she cried, then took a large bite from the ripe fruit. How beautiful the taste. How it filled her up and gave her a feeling of satisfaction and wholeness that she had never felt before! So joyous was the feeling that she laughed and cried and took another bite before she swallowed the first. When she finally did swallow, her mood shifted as if a storm cloud had just blotted out a bright sun. She blinked once, twice, then, when the spell had completely faded, found the bobbing shape of Hippomenes not larger than a tiny dot on the road ahead, already near the gate of the sea village.