Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (2 page)

“One day I’ll ride Sky alone,” Malora boasts to Aron. Malora rides Sky with her father all the time, one of his arms wrapped around her waist while she clutches the saddle horn with both hands, her legs as widely splayed as if she were mounted on an elephant.

When Jayke and six other men dragged Sky in off the plains, furious and snorting, everyone told Jayke that Sky was too much horse, even for him—but Jayke proved them all wrong.

Aron tells Malora, “Sky is not too much horse for you, either, Malora Thora-Jayke. You’re Jayke’s daughter, and Sky knows it.”

By the time Malora is twelve years old, Thora and Jayke have resigned themselves to their daughter’s dreams, but have told her that her formal training can begin only when she can no longer walk under Sky’s high belly without ducking. One evening, Malora goes into Sky’s stall while Jayke is grooming him, polishing his ebony hide with a chamois-skin cloth. Malora loves the stable when it is lantern-lit. With its mingled scents of horse and leather, dung and hay and sweat, it is home.

“Good evening, big fellow,” she says to Sky, and then ducks down to pass beneath his stomach. With a happy grin, she greets her father on the other side. “I’m bigger than a rabbit now, Papa!”

“Very well,” Jayke says, his daughter’s enthusiasm warming his malachite eyes. “We’ll begin training tomorrow, when I return from the hunt.”

The next day, Jayke and the others ride out before dawn, as they always do. Malora busies herself helping her mother arrange herbs on a wooden drying rack and grind roots in the big red stone mortar and pestle. But Malora is too distracted to participate in small talk, a thing her mother loves to do as they work, so Thora shoos her away. Trotting off to the stable, Malora grabs the black-and-white braided rope from its hook and loops it over one shoulder, just like Jayke.

“I’m going up to the nest to watch for Papa. Want to come?” she asks Aron.

Pausing to lean on his shovel, Aron says, “I can’t, Malora. Jayke counts on me, you know. You go on and have fun.”

“I’m going to. Do you want to watch me spin later today?”

“Yes, Malora, I really do,” says Aron.

Malora jogs along the main road, out the city gates, and through the narrow canyon path. Halfway down the path, she scrambles up a grand natural staircase of boulders leading to the nest, her favorite perch high in the cliffs overlooking the plains. There, she settles in to wait, and excited as she is, she begins to doze in the cliff’s shadow. It is because she is up there waiting for her father, and not down in the city, that she is the only human witness to what follows.

She awakes to a low, throbbing hum, like a swarm of angry bees. Sitting up, she looks out over the plains and sees the red cloud of dust that signals the hunting party’s return. She gives a yelp of joy and is just about to leap to her feet and wave to them, when she happens to look up.

The creatures at first appear to be a gathering of vultures, drawn, Malora guesses, by the fresh kill lashed to the cantles of the hunters’ saddles. Then the few are soon joined by many more, and before long, the sky is black with them, the hum having risen to an ear-numbing drone. As they drop down closer to the earth, Malora sees that the creatures aren’t vultures at all. They are bigger than vultures, bigger than eagles, bigger than fully grown men, with black leathery wings that beat the air like giant fans and waft toward Malora an unpleasant odor, reminiscent, on a magnified scale, of rodents nesting in the stone walls of her home. Though small compared to their bodies, the creatures’ round heads have an eerie mannishness, with tufts of dusty brown fur and sharp fangs protruding from thin black lips. Their outstretched arms, trapped in the wings’ sleek leather casing, end in talons, and their taloned legs stretch straight out behind them like the gawky legs of riverine divers.

“Leatherwings!” Malora whispers to herself.

There have been tales of Leatherwings, told around the fire, handed down through the generations, but no one believes them. They are tales told to tighten the arms of young men around their mates, to tame misbehaving children. But as Malora now sees with her own eyes, the Leatherwings are real.

Malora wants to warn her father, but she knows her voice
will be lost in the din. Besides, the dogs already know, freezing on their haunches, teeth bared and fur bristling. The horses know, too. They wheel beneath their riders, unbalanced by terror and the carcasses lashed to their backs. As for the hunters, they are simply too dumbfounded to fit arrows to their bows. Gimpy Gar is plucked from his saddle and borne off in the sickled talons of a Leatherwing. His horse, white-eyed, spins in circles as another Leatherwing alights on its back. A second joins it, and the two, working in tandem, make off with the madly squealing, wildly kicking horse.

After that, all Malora sees is a roiling chaos of black leather. She is aware of a deafening roar, beneath which she can barely make out the shouting of the men, the howling of the dogs, and the screaming of the horses as they are plucked up and borne off, one by one. By the time the red dust has settled and the last Leatherwings have been swallowed up by the innocent pale blue of the late-afternoon sky, there remains not a single living thing on the plains except for Sky. His saddle is askew, his exposed back raked and bloody. He runs this way and that, as if trapped by an invisible fence, pausing now and then to give off a heartrending, almost foallike whinny as he calls out to the others, who are no longer there. With a stony numbness that will never quite leave her, Malora understands that her father—and all the menfolk and every horse except Sky—is gone forever.

Sliding and stumbling down the cliff side, Malora runs out onto the plains. At the sight of her, Sky rolls his eyes and rears, his powerful hooves churning the air, flecks of pink foam flying from his mouth. Malora shrinks back, her heart pounding, as she makes calming motions with her arms, the
way she has seen her father do with a badly spooked horse. She speaks to him in a rasping whisper. “It’s okay, Sky. It’s okay, boy.”

Grunting, the horse gradually rocks back onto the ground, his ears flicking forward. She continues to talk to him, a combination of nonsense and information: “There’s a good, big boy. There, now. The bad Leatherwings have gone away, and now it’s just you and me, Sky. Just you and me, yes, that’s right, Sky, so we have to stick together and take care of each other, don’t we?”

Sky lets out a wheezy neigh of agreement. Then he rears again, but this time Malora isn’t afraid. She knows he is only trying to shake off the shock of the attack.

“I know, I saw it all from my nest, Sky, and it was horrible,” Malora says, her voice soothing despite her shaking hands. “You were so brave! You were too big for them to lift, but they tried, didn’t they? That’s how you got all those scratches on your back. What a beautiful back you have. It’s all scratched up, but we’ll fix that. I’ll take you to Thora, my mother. She has special healing salves.”

Sky licks and smacks his lips to show that he is willing to go along with her plan. Finally, he heaves a great gusty sigh.

By now, Malora is right up next to his massive bulk. His tail is twitching, but his feet are planted. She stands where he can see her with one large, pale eye and holds up her arms slowly, the one with the rope and the other one, too. “See, Sky? No weapons, no fangs, no talons, nothing but this rope. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to undo your saddle the rest of the way, okay?” Malora reaches up to Sky’s ribs, where the cinch has shifted, and unfastens it slowly, one set
of ties at a time, so he can get used to her hands on him. She releases the last tie, letting the saddle, which is far too heavy for her to hold, slough off to the ground with a
thump
. Sky slews, slamming into her body and knocking her off her feet.

For a moment, Malora sees nothing but a bright-white light shot through with swirling spirals of color. She gasps and blinks and clears her vision to find herself on her hind end staring up at the matted vault of Sky’s belly. He stands over her, ribs heaving, legs splayed, as if aware that a single hoof will crush her. She whispers up at him, “Sorry, big boy, but that saddle was too heavy for me. We’ll just have to leave it here and let Aron pick it up.”

Malora climbs carefully onto her hands and knees and crawls out from beneath Sky’s belly, rising shakily to her feet where he can see her, the rope still looped around her shoulder. “And now I’m going to take this rope. See it? This is Jayke’s rope. Feel it?” She rubs the rope along his flanks. “Smell it?” She places it beneath his nose. He dips his muzzle and sniffs at it, then bobs his head as if confirming its provenance. Malora brings the coiled rope beneath her own nose. “I smell him, too.”

She smells the sweat of her father’s hands, the musky scent of the oil he used to soften tack, the ghost of the wild onion grass he chewed. The mingled scents bring him briefly back to life: a dusky-skinned giant of a man with weedy, wild red hair trapped in a horse tail by a leather thong. She remembers how it feels to ride Sky with Jayke’s long arm wrapped around her middle, the calloused fingers of his other hand scraping, like bars of sandstone, the tender skin at the back of her neck. Slowly, she brings the rope to her breast and lets the
tears spill out. She weeps as much for the loss of her father as in gratitude that this rope, like this magnificent animal, both once his, are now hers. She weeps as if she were emptying her head and her heart of tears. And while she does, she feels herself, with one hand, letting go of her father and, with the other, reaching out for Sky.

Malora smiles up at the horse through the haze of her tears. He peers down at her and grunts, nudging her with his nose.

“I know. It’s a bad idea for us to stand out here in the open, isn’t it?” She wipes her eyes and looks up at the sky.

Red streaks of dusk now remind her of smears of blood. Never again will she see the sky in quite the same way. From now on, even on the finest days, the sky will always hold a hint of menace. “Okay,” she says, “I’m tying this rope around your neck. I know it’s insulting to your dignity, but I can’t risk losing you. Let’s go home, big boy.”

Having looped one end of the rope around Sky’s neck, she stands just behind his left shoulder and points toward the Settlement gates. She makes a kissing sound. Sky hesitates, and her heart lurches. This really
is
too much horse for her, she thinks. Then Malora remembers her father’s words: “If the lighter cue doesn’t work, add more to it.” She waves the frayed end of the rope at Sky’s haunch. When Sky stays rooted, she points ahead, waves the rope, and then throws in the kissing sound. He gathers up his mighty hindquarters and, ears swiveling back to her, moves off exactly the way he would have done for Jayke. Malora feels the exhilaration surging through her.

The dance is beginning.

Malora tethers Sky to a post and then goes to the gong that stands in front of the Hall of the People in the Settlement’s main square. She bangs it long and loud, bringing the women and children pouring forth. When they have all gathered around her, Malora begins, with clear eyes and a steady voice. As she speaks, she turns in a slow circle, as if she were a hub. Instead of spinning a horse, she is spinning the tale of what happened out on the plains. When she stops, a bleak silence descends.

Aron is the first to react. He screams and covers his head with his arms. As if invisible Leatherwings were pursuing him, he runs off to the stable, where they can hear him baying like an abandoned hound for its master.

Thora holds the polished malachite stone she wears on a thong around her neck, a gift from Jayke on mating day. Her eyes glitter with tears. “They are with the Grandparents now,” she says.

Felise, the potter, steps forward and spits in the dust. “Malora Thora-Jayke lies. Grown men being taken away kicking and screaming by giant bats?” she hisses. Her four small children cling to her, their eyes wide and scared.

Betts, the basket weaver, joins in. “It’s the part about the horses being carried off that I don’t believe. I can see an owl lifting a rabbit, a hawk lifting a pup, perhaps. But how could any air-bound creature be big enough to carry off a full-grown horse?”

Frustrated, Malora fights her way through the crowd and comes back, leading Sky into their midst.

The women gasp when they see the wounds on the stallion’s back. The scratches are deeper and wider and more vicious-looking than those on the flanks of a horse whose rider was dragged off into the bushes by a lion. That horse later died of his wounds; all that remained of the rider was a bloody foot retrieved by one of the hunting dogs.

A few of the women break down and begin wailing. To those who still disbelieve her, Malora gives directions to the site. Thora, taking charge, sends Aron and some of the women out to investigate.

Meanwhile, Malora leads Sky to the stable, where Thora sees to his injuries. Malora holds Sky’s head and croons to him while Thora cleans the wounds, applies a salve, and then packs the wounds with a poultice. “To draw off toxins,” she explains to Malora, ever hopeful that her daughter will take a practical interest in the healing arts. But all Malora says now is, “Will the wounds leave scars?”

“To be sure,” Thora says. “The wounds are deep and the hair will never grow back.”

When Malora turns pale, Thora says, “Think of the scars on your papa’s body. A body without scars has no character. A body without scars hasn’t really lived. Scars tell the story of your life and how you have lived it. From now on, Sky will have a big story to tell.”

Aron returns lugging the saddle, with the women close at his heels. They report seeing no sign of man or horse, but there is a vast black pool of blood clotting the sand near the place where they found the saddle. Darting reproachful looks at Malora, they shuffle off to comfort their children.

“You might as well get used to it now,” Thora says to her daughter. “They’ll never forgive you for being the bearer of this news.”

“But it wasn’t my fault!” Malora says. Anger bubbles up in her, melting her grief.