Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (3 page)

“Better to be spurred by anger than hobbled by sadness,” Thora tells her. “I learned that a long time ago.”

“I
hate
them!” says Malora.

“Don’t hate them,” Thora says. “Hate the Leatherwings. The Settlement has been dealt a mortal blow. For these women, blaming someone helps ease the pain.”

In the days to come, the women castigate Malora for not crying.

“She’s a stonyhearted one, that Malora Thora-Jayke,” they mutter behind her back just loud enough for her to hear.

“It’s unnatural,” they say.

“I do feel sad,” Malora says one night while Thora combs out her daughter’s long red hair, “but I can’t
make
the tears fall. I have cried, and now I’m like a streambed in a drought.”

“That’s just as well. Too many tears will only addle you,”
her mother says. “It’s important to keep your head clear, given the circumstances.”

The dead cannot be officially consigned to the Grandparents because there are no bodies to bury. So every evening, the women kneel beside the canyon wall and keen, sending their voices soaring out over the rooftops. Their children, left at home, cry and fret and whine. Thora and Malora, wringing cold, wet cloths over Sky to quell his fever, continue to speak over the eerie lamentations of the women.

“I wish they’d stop,” Malora says. “They’re so loud I’m afraid the Leatherwings will hear them. Mama, I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid all the time.”

“Fear is good. Fear can keep you alive. Only fools don’t fear,” Thora tells her. “And you’re right to want them to stop. Crying is an indulgence we can ill afford right now.”

“Do you think the Leatherwings will return?” Malora asks.

“Of course they’ll return,” Thora says. “They’ve gotten a taste of the People and they’ll want more.”

At the weekly meeting in the Hall of the People, Thora—who has become the leader of the women, as Jayke had been the leader of men—forbids anyone from leaving the city. Better to survive without the bounty of the plains, she says, than to be part of it. Within the city gates, there are gardens: corn and yams and other root vegetables growing year-round. There are chickens and some cows, sheep for wool, and a small herd of goats to give milk and cheese. This will suffice. But the women and children complain of hunger.

Thora and Malora go about the canyon setting snares for rabbits and snakes and squirrels and partridges. Then mother and daughter go from door to door, delivering braces of small
game. The women receive these gifts with sullen gratitude. Spoiled by years of the hunters’ big-game kill, they are used to serving sizzling ostrich roasts stuffed with doves, slabs of eland and kudu meat that the older ones can sink their teeth into while the little ones teethe on the bones. The women curl their lips at the idea of rabbit and snake stew, but Thora tells them they are lucky to have it.

Ten days pass, and then the bones start falling, more every day, picked clean and scattered here and there, pelting down from the heavens.

It is raining bones.

With only one horse to care for, Aron is free to serve the women. He feels important, needed. Malora thinks the women treat Aron worse than a dog. She is outraged on his behalf, and yet he seems inordinately happy, his life filled with purpose as never before.

“I am so busy,” he tells Malora. “These women keep me working harder than Jayke ever did.”

The women, squeamish about the bones, order Aron to retrieve them. The bones are horse and hound and human. Aron digs a big hole near the Hall of the People. He claims to know which bones belong to whom, which are horse and hound and which are human, but only Malora and her mother believe him.

“The very young and the simpleminded have insights the rest of us have lost,” Thora says.

The women want Aron to dig a second hole for the animal bones, but Aron refuses.

“It isn’t right. They died together, they lie together,” he says stubbornly.

The women tire of arguing, so into the big hole all the bones are lovingly placed, one by one, by Aron. He leaves the hole open. The women ask him to fill it in so the dead can be consigned to the care of the Grandparents. But Aron says, “Not yet.”

Over the next few days, more bones rain down. Only when Aron announces that the last bone has landed does he fill in the hole. Felise makes a clay tablet into which she incises the family mark for each man. Malora wants marks for the horses to be inscribed there, too. Her father has marked the hide of each horse with a sign that matches the marking on its tack. Thora tells her daughter not to be unreasonable. Most of the horses didn’t even have names. While this is true, Malora finds it sad, even in the midst of all this unspeakable sadness.

“When I have my own herd of horses,” she vows to Aron, “I’ll name every one of them.”

“Can I help you name them?” Aron asks eagerly. “Let’s name one Tenacity and another one Veracity,” he says.

“Tenacity and veracity,” as Jayke had repeated tirelessly to Malora and Aron, “are the two most important requirements for a good horse trainer.” Tenacity, because every new thing, in order to sink in to a horse’s head, bears patient repeating hundreds of times. Veracity, because you must always tell a horse the truth. A horse knows when you are lying.

“I had a dream about them last night,” Aron says on the morning of the consignment. “Tenacity and Veracity were twins, and they both looked just like you. They were so beautiful! One had red hair like you, and the other had silver hair.”

Hearing this fills Malora with longing and loneliness, imagining these twins in the world somewhere. As she does often these days, she shakes off the feeling. Standing beside the grave, she must shake off, too, the pictures in her mind of the Leatherwings swooping down upon the Settlement and making off with Sky and her mother and Aron. She tries to imagine, instead, Jayke and Gar and Eld and all the others, on horseback, riding to join the Grandparents in a place where there is plenty of game to hunt but no Leatherwings.

Thanks to Sky’s robust constitution—and Thora’s salves—the wounds have begun to scab over and heal in long pinkish-white stripes radiating back from his shoulders to his haunches, in perfect symmetry, as if they had been painted on by someone with great dramatic flair. Malora catches Aron one day trying to color in the pink stripes with wet charcoal. “Don’t be simple, Aron,” she tells him.

“His back was so beautiful, but now it’s ugly,” Aron whines.

“It’s even more beautiful for the scars,” Malora says. “His back has great character and tells a story.”

“It is the story of the Leatherwings, and I
hate
them,” Aron says bitterly, his face crumpling. “They have ruined
everything
.”

Aron cries all the time, about Jayke, about the horses, about the loathsome Leatherwings.

“I hate them, too,” Malora says soothingly, rubbing his broad back as he blubbers into his hands like a small child. After a while, he lifts his face, streaked with snot and tears.

“There, now. Do you feel better?” Malora asks.

Aron nods and smiles beatifically. “Leatherwings are
going to get me next,” he says, stretching his arms toward the sky as if he can’t wait for the day.

“Don’t say that!” Malora scolds him, pulling his arms back to his sides because they seem to be offering such an open invitation. She wonders what’s gotten into him. When she asks her mother, Thora says that she thinks Aron has spent too much time handling the bones of the dead; it has made him morbid. Malora’s efforts to cheer Aron are unflagging, even though they begin to weigh upon her. “The women depend upon you, Aron. What would they do without you?”

“Die!”
he says as he grabs the shovel. “Leatherwings going to get them, too. Malora! Leatherwings going to get everybody here! Everybody except you and Sky!”

Malora shakes this thought from her head. She tries to stay busy. Every day, she goes to the stable and leads Sky to the training pen. Aron and the children line up along the fence posts and peer through the chinks. Day after day, she spins Sky every which way at the end of Jayke’s rope until she unfastens the rope and tosses it aside. Now she mimes the use of it. When the miming is reduced from broad gestures to subtle movements of head—mere flickers of her eyelashes—Malora knows it is time for her to mount up. Aron helps her bridle Sky and then boosts her onto his back. She will ride him bareback until his scars have healed.

Aron stands back and stares up at her admiringly. “See? He’s not too much horse for you.”

The fact is, Sky
is
too much horse for her, but Sky is sensitive to this in a protective way. His ears are cocked, listening for her cues. As her legs squeeze him into a walk, she remembers Jayke’s words: “You must have a clear idea of what you
want the horse to do. If you aren’t clear in your own mind, the horse won’t be able to read your intention.”

Without her father’s arm to brace her, it is such a long way down to the ground. For all her bravery, Malora gets flustered. Her clear intentions fly from her head, or else crowd in upon her in contradictory profusion.
Stop. No, go. Go right. No, left. Back up. Trot. Stop. I mean go, and go faster!

Sky strains to interpret her muddled meaning, to sort through her garbled cues. He does everything he can to keep his body beneath hers. Over days and weeks, she calms her mind and clears it, learning to present one discrete intention at a time and, finally, the two of them begin working together in earnest. She rides him in circles, one way and then the other, first at a walk, then at a trot, and finally at a big, lolloping canter. The training ring is too small to contain them.

“Sky and I are getting dizzy riding in circles,” Malora tells Thora one night while Thora brushes her hair. “Can I take him out on the plains and let him gallop?”

“Absolutely not,” her mother says.

“But it’s been weeks since the Leatherwings attacked,” Malora says. Working with Sky every day has made her forget not just her grief, but her fear as well.

“It’s only a matter of time before they come back,” Thora says. “And Sky might not be so lucky next time.”

In her frustration and boredom, Malora teaches Sky tricks. She trains him to count by pawing his hoof in the dust, to untie knots with his teeth, to bow, to rear, and to prance prettily in place. She teaches herself how to run and vault onto his back, how to dismount by sliding off his hindquarters and then slip off each side, all while Sky is in motion.
She learns how to ride standing with her bare feet planted on either side of his spine, holding an ironwood pole to keep her balance.

The children, whose spirits the Leatherwings have sapped, revive at the sight of her antics. They whoop and cheer and run along the outside of the pen, goading her to perform ever more daring feats.

More weeks pass, and the sky mocks them with its clarity and mildness. Every few days, Thora rings the gong in the Hall of the People and conducts drills. In the event of a Leatherwing attack, Sky will be put in his stall and Aron will stay with him, Thora having forbidden Malora from doing so. Malora will stay with her mother in the root cellar beneath their house.

“But the Leatherwings are noisy,” Malora says, “and Aron hates noise. It makes him scream.”

“I’ll make him lambs’ wool plugs for his ears to block out the noise,” Thora says.

Aron takes to wearing the plugs all the time, and Malora often has to pluck them out so she can talk to him.

“You won’t hear them coming if you wear these silly things all the time,” Malora warns him as, together, they groom Sky.

Aron stares at the ground and scuffs the red dust. “I wear them because I don’t like what the women are saying.”

“What are they saying?” Malora asks, ducking under Sky’s belly and coming face to face with Aron.

“I can’t tell you,” Aron says, his face reddening. He turns away and bursts into tears.

Sky heaves a horsey sigh, as if to say,
Not again!

Malora goes to Thora. “The women are saying things that are upsetting Aron.”

Thora is pouring ground herbs into jars. She sets her mouth in a hard line. “I’m sorry he’s upset.”

“What are the women saying? If I know what they are saying, I can convince Aron that they’re wrong.”

Her mother says, “They say that you and Aron should mate.”

Malora is baffled at first, then incensed. “Like you and Jayke? But Aron is a boy, and he will always be a boy. He is my friend, but he will never, ever be my mate.”

Her mother’s eyes are soft with regret. “It is our most immediate hope for the People’s survival. You are the eldest woman child, and he is a boy in a man’s body. It will not happen until you are older, and by then you will understand. For purposes of propagation, this will have to do.”

Malora says airily, “It will not do for me.”

Later, Malora finds Aron crouched in an empty stall, weeping almost hysterically. “I heard what you said to Thora,” he sobs, his chest heaving, his nose gummy with snot.

“I’m so sorry, Aron,” she says, moved to pity by the sight of him. “I didn’t mean it. I will be your mate one day.” She will say anything to stanch his tears.

The next day, Malora hears the hum of angry bees just as she and Aron are oiling Jayke’s saddle. Thora rings the gong. Aron plugs up his ears and leads Sky into his stall. Malora runs home to join her mother in the root cellar. The others barricade their windows and doors.

Afterward, they learn what happened from Betts, whose need to see the Leatherwings with her own eyes drew her to
a chink in the window barricade. Betts tells them that Aron ran out of the stable into the open and held out his arms like a small child begging to be carried off. Betts screamed at him to take cover, but Aron wouldn’t listen. He seemed fearless.

“Only a fool has no fear,” Thora says, wagging her head as she listens to Betts’s report.

Malora takes this in, wide-eyed and dry-mouthed, understanding that this is exactly what Aron had said would happen. Would all his other predictions also come to pass? Would she and Sky, alone of everyone in the Settlement, survive? And would she one day give birth to two girls named Tenacity and Veracity? If so, who would be their father now that Aron has been taken?