Here are the coordinates: Five hours, thirty minutes right ascension (the coordinate on the celestial sphere analogous to longitude on earth) and zero declination (at the celestial equator). Any astronomer can tell where you are.
It’s different, isn’t it, from head back in the garden on a frosty night, sensing other worlds through a pair of binoculars? I like those nights; kitchen light out, wearing Wellingtons with shiny silver insoles. On the wrapper there is a picture of an astronaut showing off his shiny silver suit. A short trip to the moon has brought some comfort back to earth. We can wear what Neil Armstrong wore and never feel the cold. This must be good news for star-gazers whose feet are firmly on the ground. We have moved with the times. And so will Orion.
Every 200,000 years or so, the individual stars within each constellation shift position. That is, they are shifting all the time, but more subtly than any tracker dog of ours can follow. One day, if the earth has not voluntarily opted out of the solar system we will wake up to a new heaven whose dome will again confound us. It will still be home but not a place to take for granted. I wouldn’t be able to tell you the story of Orion and say, ‘Look, there he is, and there’s his dog Sirius whose loyalty has left him bright.’
The dot-to-dot log book of who we were is not a fixed text.
For Orion, who was the result of three of the gods in a good mood pissing on an ox-hide, the only tense he recognised was the future continuous. He was a mighty hunter. His arrow was always in flight, his prey, endlessly just ahead of him. The carcasses he left behind became part of his past faster than they could decay. When he went to Crete he did no sunbathing. He rid the island of all its wild beasts. He could really swing a cudgel.
Stories abound: Orion was so tall he could walk along the sea bed without wetting his hair. So strong he could part a mountain. He wasn’t the kind of man who settles down. And then he met Artemis, who wasn’t the kind of woman who settles down either. They were both hunters and both gods. Their meeting is recorded in the heavens, but you can’t see it every night, only on certain nights of the year. The rest of the time Orion does his best to dominate the skyline as he always did.
Our story is the old clash between history and home. Or to put it another way, the immeasurable impossible space that seems to divide the hearth from the quest.
Listen to this.
On a wild night, driven more by weariness than good sense, King Zeus agreed to let his daughter do it differently. She didn’t want to get married and sit out some war, while her man, god or not, underwent the ritual metamorphosis from palace prince to craggy hero. She didn’t want children. She wanted to hunt. Hunting did her good.
By morning she had packed and set off for her new life in the woods. Soon her fame spread and other women joined her but Artemis didn’t care for company. She wanted to be alone. In her solitude she discovered something very odd. She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about the history-makers and the home-makers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it, she had simply hoped to take on the freedoms that belonged to the other side. What if she travelled the world and the seven seas like a hero? Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?
She found that the whole world could be contained in one place because that place was herself. Nothing had prepared her for this.
The alchemists have a saying: ‘Tertium non datur.’ The third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element into another, from waste matter into best gold is a mystery, not a formula. No one can predict what will form out of the tensions of opposites and effect a healing change between them. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a free and vast plain without any movement at all. Something new has entered the process. We can only guess.
One evening, when Artemis had lost her quarry, she lit a fire where she was and tried to rest. But the night was shadowy and full of games. She saw herself by the fire; as a child, a woman, a hunter, a Queen. Grabbing the child, she lost sight of the woman, and when she drew her bow, the Queen fled. What would it matter if she crossed the world and hunted down every living creature, as long as her separate selves eluded her? When no one was left she would have to confront herself. Leaving home left nothing behind. It came too, all of it, and waited in the dark. She realised that the only war worth fighting was the one that raged within; the rest were all diversions. In this small space, her hunting miles, she was going to bring herself home. Home was not a place for the faint-hearted; only the very brave could live with themselves.
In the morning she set out and set out every morning day after day.
In her restlessness she found peace.
Then Orion came.
He wandered into Artemis’s camp, scattering her dogs and bellowing like a bad actor, his right eye patched and his left arm in a splint. She was a mile away fetching water. When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat, raw. When he finished, with a great belch and the fat still fresh around his mouth, he suggested they take a short stroll by the sea’s edge. Artemis didn’t want that but she was frightened. His reputation hung about him like bad breath.
The ragged shore, rock pitted and dark with weeds, reminded him of his adventures and he recounted them in detail while the tide came in to her waist. There was nowhere he hadn’t been, nothing he hadn’t seen. He was faster than a hare, stronger than a pair of bulls.
‘You smell,’ said Artemis, but he didn’t hear.
Eventually he allowed her to wade in from the rising water and light a fire for both of them. No, he didn’t want her to talk, he knew about her. He had been looking for her. She was a curiosity; he was famous. What a marriage.
But Artemis did talk. She talked about the land she loved and its daily changes. This was where she wanted to stay until she was ready to go. The journey itself was not enough. She spoke quickly, her words hanging on to each other; she had never told anyone before. As she spoke, she knew it was true, and it gave her strength over her fear, to get up and say goodbye. She turned. Orion raped Artemis and fell asleep.
She thought about that time for years. It took a few moments only and she only aware of the hair of his stomach matted with sand, scratching her skin. When he had finished, already snoring, she pushed him off. His snores shook the earth. Later, in the future, the time would remain vivid and unchanged. She wouldn’t think of it differently, she wouldn’t make it softer or harder. She would just keep it and turn it over in her hands. Her revenge had been swift, simple, and ignominious. She killed him with a scorpion.
In a night, 200,000 years can pass, time moving only in our minds. The steady marking of the seasons, the land well loved and always changing, continues outside, while inside, light years move us on to landscapes that revolve under different skies.
Artemis, lying beside the dead Orion, sees her past changed by a single act. The future is still intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was. Every action and decision led her here. The moment had been waiting, the way the top step of the stairs waits for the sleep walker. She had fallen and now she is awake. As she looks at the sky, the sky is peaceful and exciting. A black cloak pinned with silver brooches that never need polish. Somebody lives there, for sure, wrapped up in the glittering folds. Somebody who recognised that the journey by itself is never enough and gave up spaceships long ago in favour of home.
On the beach the waves made pools of darkness around Artemis’s feet. She kept the fire burning, warming herself and feeling Orion slowly grow cold. It takes some time for the body to stop playing house.
The fiery circle that surrounded her contained all the clues she needed to recognise that life is for a moment in one shape, then released into another. Monuments and cities would fade away like the people who had built them. No resting place or palace could survive the light years that lay ahead. There was no history that would not be rewritten, and the earliest days were already too far away to see. What would history make of tonight?
Tonight is clear and bright with a cold wind harrying the waves into peaks. The foam leaves slug trails in rough triangles on the sand. The salt smell bristles the air inside her nostrils; her lips are dry. She’s thinking about her dogs. They feel like home because she feels like home. The stars show her how to hang in space supported by nothing at all. Without medals or certificates or territories she owns, she can burn as they do, travelling through time until time stops and eternity changes things again. She has noticed that change doesn’t hurt her.
It is almost light, which means the disappearing act will soon begin. She wants to lie awake, watching the night fade and the stars fade and the first blue-grey slate of the sky. She wants to see the sun slash the water. But she can’t stay awake for everything; some things have to pass her by. So what she doesn’t see are the lizards coming out for food or Orion’s eyes turned glassy overnight. A small bird perches on his shoulder, trying to steal a piece of his famous hair.
Artemis waited until the sun was up before she trampled out the fire. She fetched rocks and stones to cover Orion’s body from the eagles. She made a high mound that broke the thudding wind as it scored the shore. It was a stormy day, black clouds and a thick orange shining on the horizon. By the time she had finished she was soaked with rain. Her hands were bleeding and her hair kept catching in her mouth. She was hungry but not angry now.
The sand that had been blonde yesterday was now brown with wet. As far as she could see there was grey water white-edged and the birds wheeling above it. Lonely cries, and she was lonely, not for a friend but for a time that had not been violated. The sea was hypnotic. Not the wind or the cold could move her from where she sat like one who waited. She was not waiting; she was remembering. She was trying to find out what had brought her here. The third is not given. All she knew was that she had arrived at the frontiers of common sense and crossed over. She was safe now. No safety without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.
She stood up and in the getting-dark walked away. Not looking behind her but conscious of her feet shaping themselves in the sand. Finally, at the headland, after a bitter climb to where the woods bordered the steep edge, she turned and stared out, seeing the shape of Orion’s mound, just visible and her own footsteps walking away. Then it was fully night and she could see nothing to remind her of the night except the stars.
And what of Orion? Dead but not forgotten. For a while he was forced to pass the time in Hades, where he beat up flimsy beasts and cried a lot. Then the gods took pity on him, and drew him up to themselves and placed him in the heavens for all to see. When he rises at dawn, summer is nearly here. When he rises in the evening, beware of winter and storms. If you see him at midnight, it is time to pick the grapes. He keeps his dogs with him, Canis Major and Canis Minor and Sirius, the brightest star in our galaxy. Under his feet, if you care to look, you can see a tiny group of stars: Lepus, the hare, his favourite food.
Orion isn’t always at home. Dazzling as he is, like some fighter pilot riding the sky, he glows very faint, if at all, in November. November being the month of Scorpio.