Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (25 page)

A stocky centaur stands over a hulking metal block set close to the furnace. He wears heavy leather gauntlets, and his dappled hindquarters are swaddled in a stained and scorched leather wrap, beneath which his flanks are singed and his muscle-bound arms and chest are slick with sweat. In his left hand, he grasps a pair of heavy tongs, which hold a square rod of iron across the face of the block. One side of the rod glows cherry red. In a sure, steady rhythm, he brings the flat face of his hammer down onto the red-hot end of the iron.

Malora watches as the end of the iron flattens like glowing clay with each hammer blow. When the centaur is finished, he turns and immerses the flattened end in a pot of water. A hiss of steam rises up as the hot iron hits the water. The steam envelops her. She smells cold rain hitting hot rocks and has a sudden sharp aching in her bones for home. The centaur wipes off the red-hot iron with a cloth and then buries it in the pink ashes at the edge of the fire. Malora imagines one of the Grandparents, her ancestor going all those many generations back, standing at this same forge. And suddenly, she knows that
this
is the place where the little knife Thora gave her was made. She is as sure of this fact as she is of anything she has ever known, and she is equally sure that this place of iron and fire, of ashes and hissing water, of hammers and tongs and anvils is where she belongs. She looks around at the soot-covered walls, with iron hooks hung with hoops and hinges and rails and finials and screens and struts and braces.
As her grandfather did so many years ago, she will make these things—and more. She isn’t sure how she is supposed to declare it.

She turns to Orion and says, “I choose this for my Hand.”

Worry clouds Orion’s brow. “Really? You’re quite sure?”

The smith swings away from the furnace, just now noticing them. He shoves up the glass-fronted visor that protects his eyes from flying sparks, as if the act might improve his faulty hearing. He squints at her, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes white against a mask of soot. “So it’s you, the Otherian everyone’s been yammering about,” he growls. “To what do I owe this intrusion?”

He might be rude, Malora thinks, but at least he is speaking to my face.

“Malora, this is Brion Swiftstride. Brion, this is Malora Ironbound.”

“And I choose blacksmithing for my Hand,” Malora adds.

“Iron
bound
, eh?” Brion asks in a loud, hoarse voice that suggests that his lungs might be as scorched as his flanks. “I think not. I haven’t had a candidate for the Hand in here since the Apex took office.”

“Ironwork’s a bit like alchemy in that it isn’t the most popular Hand these days,” Orion explains.

“I don’t care,” Malora says. “It’s what I want to do.”

“I try my best to scare the youngsters off. They have no idea what this Hand demands.” The blacksmith wipes the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a long jetblack streak. “Blacksmithing is the oldest and noblest and most practical of the Hands. Without the nails and bolts
and hinges and brackets and braces and handles and tools we smiths fashion at our forges, this place would fall apart at its beautiful and enlightened seams. But it is no easy Hand.”

Brion whips off his gloves and comes over to stand before her. He grabs her hand roughly and holds up her arm as if it were a rod of inferior stock. “Look at you!” He drops her arm and turns back to his work. “You don’t have the strength for this work, no matter how much you may want to do it. This is no work for a female—and a spindly two-legged Otherian, at that,” he mutters.

Malora bristles. “I can do it,” she says, setting her jaw and stepping closer to the anvil.

“Oh, can you?” he says, smiling, his eyes challenging. He sets the hammer down and picks up a much heavier version with a bigger handle and a bigger iron head. “Try lifting
this
.”

“Now, wait just a moment,” Orion says.

“Begging your pardon, Silvermane, but I have to know.” Handle-first, he thrusts the sledge at her. She takes it and hefts it in both hands. It is heavy, but there is something immensely satisfying about its heft. She gives it an experimental swing. Orion stands back, a look of trepidation on his face. But the blacksmith seems surprised, and a little disgruntled, that Malora has not dropped the sledge right off.

“All right then,” the smith says. “Try swinging it.” He picks up the smaller hammer and touches it to the center of the anvil. “Lay it into the exact spot where I’m pointing,” he says.

She eyes the spot on the anvil, positioning herself with one foot a half step forward of the other. Then, throwing her weight behind the hammer, she swings it up and brings it
down on the anvil, hitting the spot dead on. The sledge head clangs on the anvil and bounces. She feels a metallic tingle coursing up through the anvil’s dense mass, running through the sledge handle and up her arm straight to her heart.

“You did it!” the centaur says, pushing back his visor and scratching his head in bafflement.

Malora grins. “Shall I do it again?”

Brion shrugs. “Sister, if you can hit that anvil on the same spot ten times in a row without your arm falling off,” he says, “I can work with you.”

Malora squares her shoulders and lines up her feet, then swings the sledge up and brings it down again and again and again.

Dinner is a quiet affair without Zephele. Orion has brought a small blue glass vial containing Breath of the Bush. “I hope this will prove to be your personal scent,” he says.

“Thank you.” She handles the vial carefully. “Will we take my petition for the Hand to the Apex tomorrow?”

Honus and Orion exchange a look.

“Is there something wrong?” Malora asks. She can still feel the heat of the forge on her face, the tingle of the hammer hitting the anvil and rising up through her arms.

“Not
wrong
, exactly,” Orion says slowly. “It’s just that we centaurs generally take some time choosing our Hands.”

“How much time?” Malora asks.

“Weeks … or sometimes months,” Orion says cautiously.

“Why so long?” Malora asks.

“It’s an important decision,” Honus says. “Every
afternoon, you will work at it … and longer after you’ve received recognition.”

“The fact of the matter,” Orion says, “is that if we go to the Apex tomorrow with your petition, he will reject it.”

“Why?”

“Because he will believe, and rightly so, that you have made a too-hasty decision. The Apex frowns on the fickle,” Orion says gravely.

“What is
fickle
?” she asks.

“
Fickle
is the centaur who is too quick to settle upon a Hand and who then winds up flitting from one Hand to the next without fixing upon any one. My brother Athen was hopelessly fickle. He must have tried every Hand on the mountain before settling on rope making, and it was only the Apex’s influence that got the craft even admitted to the List of the Hands.”

Malora is discouraged. “How long must we wait, then?”

“At least three weeks, I should think,” Honus says. “And in the meantime, I have a hunch we can manage to keep you busy.”

Orion departs not long after dinner. Before he leaves, he says, “Try sprinkling your canopy with the scent.”

After a long, hot bath, Malora dresses in one of Honus’s nightshirts and retires to her bedchamber. She climbs up on the bed and, opening the flask of scent Orion gave her, sprinkles some of it on the midnight-blue canopy speckled with stars. She is surprised when no pictures come to mind. She gets beneath the covers and her thoughts drift back to the forge. Up until now, she has not realized how badly her
confidence has been shaken since she came to this place. Out on the plains, with a horse beneath her and a bow in her hand, she felt a certain competence. But down on two feet, especially alongside the confident, talkative, poised Zephele, she feels earthbound and clumsy. When she took hold of the hammer this afternoon, she felt some of her old confidence surging back. She can’t wait to get back in the forge. Eventually, she drifts off with the scent of the bush in her nostrils.

No sooner is she on the other side of sleep than Sky appears over the red-rock ridge, tossing his mane, his long white scars flashing in the moonlight. He turns his back and flips his tail. Malora, half running and half flying, in the way of dreams, vaults onto his back. She has just enough time to entwine her hands in his mane before Sky is off at a gallop. All night long, she lies flattened along his extended neck as he races across the plains, through places familiar and strange. Now and then, Sky stops and dips his head into a stream or a patch of high grass.

“What happened to Jayke’s saddle?” she asks him.

Sky says, “I ran all that day, the day you were taken, through the storm and out the other side. Afterward, I got down on my back and rolled in the mud until I worked the saddle off. I kicked it free and left it behind.”

“My little knife was in that saddlebag,” Malora says. “The one that Thora gave me. The one that saved our lives.”

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, “but it was dangerous to keep the saddle on. Sooner or later, it would have caught on something, or a big cat might have snagged a claw in it and brought me down.”

“I understand,” she says to him. “I’m going to make a new knife soon. I’m learning new things among the centaurs, Sky.”

“That’s good,” says Sky, “but never forget that you are the Daughter of the Plains.”

When she wakes up in the morning, her thighs are sore from riding and her fingers smell like the wind in Sky’s mane. It is the smell of Breath of the Bush.

To make the time pass more quickly, she throws herself into her lessons. She learns her letters quickly and well enough to decipher the pages of the tattered book, which, it turns out, is about a cat in a hat, although neither cat nor hat bears the slightest resemblance to Puss in Boots. It is a funny story that doesn’t make a lick of sense. Still, it crackles with life, and soon she can read it faster than the powdery pages will let her turn them. She sits at the table and scrivens until her fingers stiffen into claws. To make the practice less onerous, Honus instructs her to copy down the famous sayings of his favorite thinker, a great-great-grandparent of the very Grandparents themselves by the name of Epictetus. As she writes the words over and over, learning to recognize them as she copies them down, she suspects that Honus has chosen these particular sayings as a way of teaching her a lesson quite apart from the scrivening itself.

“First say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do” is the first wise saying. She will be an ironworker, a blacksmith, as soon as the Apex approves her petition, and will learn to make beautiful objects from fire and
iron, for she is Malora Ironbound, last of the People, and this is her fate.

Another saying Malora copies is “Practice yourself, for heaven’s sake, in little things; and thence proceed to greater.” To her, this means that she is practicing these letters and words so that one day she will be able to write down all the words that come into her head at will. There were times in the bush when her mind was as perfectly empty as a sheet of Honus’s paper, scratched clean of letters. But here in Mount Kheiron, she finds that her mind teems almost feverishly with thoughts.

Malora also copies: “No great thing is created suddenly any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer that there must be time, let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.” It will take time, she now understands, for her relationship with the centaurs to ripen. The sight of her walking down the street can still stun a talkative centaur into silence. When she despairs of this to Honus, he gives her a book of poems. With Honus’s help, she reads the poems of a Grandmother named Emily Dickinson. This is an ancient human Malora has never met, who, in fact, lived many lifetimes ago. And yet Malora has the uncanny sense that this Dickinson not only knows Malora but is writing directly to her.

In spite of her loneliness, Malora continues to believe centaurs to be the Perfect Beings who will one day warm to her. Every night, she sprinkles Breath of the Bush on the canopy of her bed and falls asleep, only to gallop all night across the plains on Sky’s back. And in the morning, she wakes up to the hummingbirds and the butterflies and the taste of the burstingly ripe fruits she plucks from the trees in her own beautiful bower.

One night, Theon and all the cousins come over after the evening meal. The centaurs and their Twani crowd into Honus’s big room and suddenly make it seem quite small. Mather and Devan and Brandle and March and Felton and the brothers Marsh and Elmon fill the room with their lively talk and their various personal scents, held to their noses in colorful cloths, all mixed up with the warm, honest smell of horse. Zephele has invited them there to discuss the theme for the Midsummer Jubilation. West, on loan for the night from Orion, slinks about, serving cake and tea from delicate cups with a pattern of pink roses.

“Our heroine!” Theon says when he spies Malora sitting at the scrivening desk, doing her homework exercises. He trots over to her, his arms full of woven goods. “We’ve missed you. I made these for you. They’re half wraps, so you won’t have to slice them in two like you did to all of Zephie’s garments.”

Such finery, Malora marvels. Theon introduces each of them by name. One of them,
brocade
, leaps with blue and green lightning. Another,
voile
, has thin pale stripes of purple and blue. A third,
raw silk
, has a pattern of red and orange
leaves. And a fourth is a tawny color in a fabric that Theon calls
velvet
. It has a matching fringe.

“I call this the Lioness,” he says with a wink.

The other cousins crowd around Malora and admire the attire Longshanks has made for her. Tonight she is wearing blue breeches with paler blue boots.