Centaur Rising (9 page)

“Where are they?” Martha grumbled.

“The barn!” I shouted.

By that time, Robbie had somehow managed to roll out of the door and down the ramp, but without anyone to push him, he couldn't get across the driveway. And the rest of us were so busy heading for the barn, we left him there. His voice followed us plaintively—“What about meeeeeee?”

We didn't bother to look anywhere but in the corridor of the barn where Agora and Kai were stabled. The blinds Dr. Herks had hung across the inside of the stall windows had all been yanked off. Some had landed inside the stall, and some, crumpled and stepped on, lay on the ground outside as riders and owners struggled to see through windows.

I could hear everyone muttering things like
abnormal
,
defective
,
bizarre
. None of them saw the magic, only the monstrous.

Suddenly, Joey's piercing voice cried out, “My mom calls it a
FREAK OF NATURE
!”

My hands bunched into fists.

Dr. Herks cleared a path to the stall by picking people up and moving them to one side, but in such a quick and gentle manner, no one had time or reason to complain.

I glanced into the stall. Ears back, teeth showing, Agora was straddling Kai. He was on his knees and sobbing uncontrollably for the first time since he'd been born, tears cascading down his face, his cheeks red with what could have been fever spots but were more likely fear. He'd never seen so many people before. So many loud, angry, scary people.

Her back to the door, Mom turned and shouted at everyone, those folks who had been our best boarders and who'd stayed longer and had been more loyal than the rest. She really unloaded on them.

“Move it, you big lump!” she cried to Mrs. Fischer, who is actually a
little
lump, smaller than me.

“
You're
the freaks,” she said to the entire Proper family, who are usually just like their name.

“Get him out of there,” she yelled, pointing at Joey.

Dr. Herks picked him up and set him to one side just like he was a bale of hay. A light bale of hay.

Martha's tongue practically sawed off limbs battling side by side with Mom. She even pushed Angela to the ground, which she hadn't done on purpose, but would have had she known then that it was Angela who'd brought everyone over to gape at Kai after Joey had shown him to her.

Angela began screaming as if she were about to be murdered. She has her mother's lungs, if not her vocabulary.

Me, I took the low route, crawling on my hands and knees till I got to the door. I had a set of keys on the lanyard around my neck, so I opened the door while everyone else was busy shouting and pushing and jostling for position. Then I crawled inside while Mom and Martha were doing their doubles act.

Agora knew me, so once I was in, the door shut firmly behind me, she made no angry move toward me.

I bent down and put my arms around Kai and sang into his ear, “
The eensy, weensy spider, went up the water spout
.” I tickled his nose until, like any toddler, he got distracted and began to smile.

Oddly, everyone outside began to cheer, and the noise set Agora off. She trotted to the door and bared her teeth again, pawing the ground as if getting ready to charge anyone who tried to get in.

But Kai seemed to think it was all part of a game. He clapped his hands and laughed, a fully human sound.

Or rather, he almost clapped them. It would be another day before he got that quite right.

The crowd stopped making loud noises, and Mrs. Proper said, “Isn't he
adorable
?” which seemed to come out of nowhere.

Wherever it came from, it worked. Everyone was all of a sudden agreeing and smiling, and maybe even
getting
it, except for Angela, who stomped off because there was nobody—not even her own mother—who wasn't cooing at the baby.

At which point Mom turned, and said in a controlled voice that probably only Martha and I recognized as her angry voice, “Come into the office, and I'll explain everything.” And then in an undertone, she whispered through the window to me, “You stay here and keep the door locked.” She started to go, then turned back. “No wait, first get your brother off the driveway.”

Robbie
—we'd all forgotten about Robbie!

Martha nodded at me before following the crowd to the office. “Gotta go help your mother feed the multitudes,” she said. And when she saw the puzzled look on my face, she added, “Needing the dough and telling fish stories,” which made less sense at first, since I knew they weren't going to be serving any food. Only after everyone was gone did I realize she was referring to the Bible story about the loaves and fishes and making puns at the same time.

It made me extra glad to be running off to get Robbie just to stay out of that crowd.

 

11

Games

T
HE OFFICE IS ACTUALLY THE FIRST TWO STALLS
on the house side of the barn. Long before we'd come to live there, the former owner had renovated and insulated them. Now it's a comfortable workroom, heated in the winter, air-conditioned in the summer, with two deep, brown leather sofas and an armchair with a striped seat, where Mom can talk with boarders and visiting riders.

Mom changed none of the decorations or furniture when we took over. She said we'd better places to put our money, meaning—I think—into food for horses and new tack. Still, with a desk full of pictures—Mom and me, Robbie and me, Martha and me (though Martha's clearly snarling in the photo)—it looks like we put the room together ourselves. There's also a picture of me holding Robbie when he first came home from the hospital. Pretty much all you can see is a bundle.

Any pictures of my dad were removed after he left. Mom may have thrown them away or put them in the burn barrel along with his jodhpurs and riding jeans. What she doesn't know is that I found a couple of pictures of him in an old album. I keep them in a box in my closet, along with his riding crop and the two blue ribbons he won on Bor at the county fair. I've never shown them to Robbie.

*   *   *

It was sure to be crowded in the office, what with the Angottis, Mr. and Mrs. Proper and their three children, Mrs. Fischer, and Professor Harries, who usually rode only on Sunday and was just here to collect her horse.

I turned and winked at Robbie. “Aren't we glad not to have to be official?” I said.

“It might be interesting,” he said.

“It might be hot and full of angry people,” I told him.

He nodded. “It might be full of Mrs. Angotti's words.”

“And Joey picking his nose.”

“And Angela sulking.”

We ran out of
mights
, and I glanced over at Agora and Kai.

It would probably take some time before Agora could relax enough to let her ears come forward again. But Kai was already fine, lying down in the straw and playing with his fingers as if counting them.

I knelt down in the straw next to him and began to teach him a real game—peekaboo. After the first two times, he couldn't get enough of it, breaking out into peals of laughter every time my face appeared from behind my hands. I got tired of it long before he did.

Next I taught him patty-cake. And when I said, “Put it in the oven for Kai and me,” he said, “Kai, Kai, Kai,” and pointed to himself. So I taught him “Mama,” for Agora, “Mom” for Mom, and “Marmar” for Martha, and of course “Robbie” and “Ari,” though he had known some form of all those already. But this time we worked on proper pronunciation, no more baby talk.

Boy, was he quick!

Getting bored with the names and the patty-cake game—too tame, I suppose—he started back on peekaboo again, only this time getting to his feet and trotting over to play with Robbie, who had much more patience for the game than I did. They went on and on for such a long time, I walked over to Agora, who was getting anxious again because the two boys were laughing so loudly.

Brushing her mane almost did the trick. I could still see those little ripples of irritation running like rivers under her skin, but what finally soothed her was that Kai remembered that he was thirsty and came over to nurse.

Of course, as soon as he was done, he trotted back to Robbie. “More,” he said.

“Should I tell him some nursery rhymes?” Robbie asked.

I nodded and he started on the horse rhymes he could remember, like “Ride a Cock Horse to Banbury Cross,” “Trot, Trot to Boston,” and “All the king's horses…”

Kai was standing by Robbie's chair and smiling and nodding his head to the rhythm of the rhymes when his eyes began to go half-mast. And between one recitation of “Humpty Dumpty” and the next, he fell asleep standing up.

“Wow,” whispered Robbie, “isn't that
something
!”

“Just the way you used to fall asleep,” I told him. “Milk and nursery rhymes and”—I snapped my fingers—“out you went.”

He giggled. “I bet I didn't do it standing up!”

“You aren't a horse.” I smiled at him. Neither one of us said that he couldn't stand by himself either. We didn't have to.

I turned to Agora. “He's all yours now.”

She nickered, and her head bobbed as if saying,
Yes, he is
.

But he'd been hers from the very beginning. Unlike any of us humans, who looked at him funny, or who fainted when we saw him, or called him names like
freak
and
monster
, Agora had never shied away from Kai. Not once.

Nor—I thought fiercely—had Robbie.

So I left, checking Agora and Kai one last time before wheeling Robbie out of the stall and locking the door behind us. I peeked through the window, thinking that we needed to rehang those blinds. Not something I could do on my own.

Agora was nuzzling Kai, whose thumb and forefinger were both jammed into his mouth. He leaned against her as he slept but didn't wake up.

It had been a rough day for a young centaur.

*   *   *

As Robbie and I got to the office, I was hit by the silence. I thought we'd missed the entire meeting, but I was wrong.

Pushing open the office door, I called, “Mom, listen…” Then I stopped.

What I'd thought was the quiet of an empty room was anything but. It was filled with people silently scribbling down their thoughts. So without finishing my sentence, I pushed Robbie in.

They glanced up at us, heads swiveling in a single motion.

It seemed Mom had handed out paper and pens as a way of calming everyone down, asking them to write out suggestions about the best thing to do to keep a baby safe.

A
baby
.

Not a horse. Not a freak of nature. Not a monstrosity. A baby.

“Ari!” Joey cried out, waving his paper at me, our previous fight obviously forgotten.

Angela was not so forgiving. She sniffed—that sniff perfected with all the other high schoolers in town—and turned her back as if she'd more writing to do, but her pen never touched the paper again.

However, the rest of the folks in the office stared at me without a word.

They seemed to think I was the enemy.

Or the freak.

“Arianne, who's watching the foal?” Mom asked.

“His
mother,
” I said. I hadn't meant it to come out quite that way, implying she should be watching out for Robbie and me, but there it was.

Mom got the pinch mark between her eyes, and Martha huffed through her nose at me. Dr. Herks shook his head, like I'd somehow disappointed him, and maybe I had. But someone had to say it.

“He's sleeping,” I said.

Joey dropped his paper on the floor. “Can I go see?”

“No!” At least five voices answered him at the same time: Mom, Dr. Herks, Martha, me—and Mrs. Angotti, the last a surprise.

“I'll be quiet,” Joey said and made a cross over his heart.

Mrs. Proper put her hand on his arm. “Joey, do you like people tiptoeing into your room when you're asleep?”

“If I was
asleep
, I wouldn't care, would I?”

But Mrs. Proper, in her quiet way, persisted. “But, Joey, what if you woke up and saw a stranger in your room?”

He gave a yelp. “I'd call the police!” He made it sound funny, but I could see in his eyes that he understood. At least he didn't ask again.

“In a nutshell, folks,” Mom said, “
we
have to protect him. So let's read out those suggestions now.”

Dr. Herks whispered to me, “She's bringing them all into the process. Helping them seek and possibly reach consensus, Quaker style.”

I knew what he meant. Quakers don't make decisions by majority rule. They keep talking about a problem until
everyone
agrees with the next step. It can take a
really
long time. But in the end, everyone is on board with the decision, and everyone feels that their objections have been fairly heard and fairly dealt with.

Dr. Herks stared at me. “You're frowning, Ari. What do
you
think?”

“I think it's
our
farm,” I muttered, “and he's
our
centaur. And it's none of their business.”

“But magic,” Robbie whispered, “belongs to everybody, doesn't it?”

“Do you mean Kai is magic?” Dr. Herks asked.

Robbie thought about that for a minute, head cocked, jaw moving from side to side as if he was chewing on something.

Dr. Herks smiled and rubbed Robbie's head. “Well,
I
think that
all
birth is magic and all babies are magic as well.”

Maybe
, I thought
. But if he's not magic, then we've got
real
trouble
. Because all at once I remembered the stories about those nasty centaurs and the horrible things they did in ancient Greece. What if Kai turned out to be like them?