Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (30 page)

The silence stretches out between Malora and Neal, easy
and companionable. She thinks she would like to spend time in the bush with Neal. Unlike the horses, the Twani, and the Silvermanes, he does not seem to require her protection.

Neal clears his throat and says, “It’s possible the ostriches heard you were in the area and are staying away.”

“That’s all right,” Malora says, smiling at his joke. “I like being out here, away from the crowds and the talk and the noise … and the Apex and the Edicts.”

“I love the bush,” Neal says. “I’m always happier out here. Everything is so stark and simple. Nothing in all of Mount Kheiron—no work of art or craft—is as beautiful and enlightened as those hills are at this moment.”

The sun lowering in the west has bathed the Seven Sisters in an orange glow.

“When my mother first turned me out into the wild,” Malora says pensively, “my mind was as empty as a cup. Gradually, it began to fill with the sky, with the animals, with the earth, with the plants, until I was brimming.”

“Look!” Neal says suddenly.

Malora adjusts her eyes to follow the arrow of Neal’s finger as it points to three, four, five, six ostriches dashing from north to south in a loose group. Malora nods and heels Bolt forward into a trot. “Go,” she says.

“Shall I go with you?” Neal shouts after her.

“I can’t think why,” Malora calls back to him. “You said yourself you’re not fast enough.”

Neal shrugs and smiles. “In that case, I’ll stay here and watch to see whether you are.”

“All right, Bolt,” Malora says to the horse, “let’s see what you’re made of. Go!” She squeezes the mare with her legs and
feels the animal gather herself and surge forward. What a gallop she has! Flat and smooth as the floor of the bush. The wind whistles past Malora’s ears as the horse’s hooves seem to barely touch the ground.

They near the flock of ostriches. Malora can see their wide, flat black feathers stirring, the long pink stalks of their necks thrusting their tiny pink heads forward. One of them lunges comically and veers off to the left. Malora chooses this one to chase. If she chases the flock, they will scatter every which way and she will be left with nothing. She and Bolt close in on the solitary ostrich. She can see the bird’s huge eyes fringed with long black eyelashes.

Hugging Bolt’s slender barrel with her legs, Malora sits up straight and readies the loop at the end of Jayke’s rope. When they are within ten feet of the ostrich, Malora swings the rope over her head and sends the loop sailing out toward the swerving pole of the ostrich’s neck. The rope whistles as it flies through the air. The loop lands shy and spooks the ostrich sideways. The horse turns to follow the ostrich without flagging as Malora hauls back the rope and readies it. The ostrich has gained some distance but is still within reach. Malora swings the rope over her head and sends the loop out. She misses again!

Tenacity
. She hears her father’s voice as she gathers the rope in. When she tosses it out again, she thinks she has missed a third time, but then she sees the rope settle on the feathered shelf of the ostrich’s body. She yanks on the rope, sits down hard, pulls back on the harness, and shouts, “Ho!”

Bolt’s hind legs come under her as she skids to a stop in a cloud of dust. The ostrich, which has continued to run, jerks
at the end of the rope and snaps its own neck. The enormous bird flies upward and then collapses in the dust.

See, Zeph? Malora thinks. Quick and painless.

Neal races over. Bolt is lathered with sweat, ribs heaving. Malora pats Bolt’s flank, then leans forward to whisper thanks. As she watches Neal coming on, she realizes that this is the first time she has seen a centaur gallop. He has all the grace of a human man running and a horse galloping, in perfect harmony with one another.

“Well done, Pet!” he says, halting beside her and bending to remove the rope from the ostrich’s neck. “If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I’d never have believed it. We’ll have ostrich steaks tonight.”

He returns the rope to her, expertly trusses the ostrich with his own rope, then slings the feathery bundle onto his back.

“You’ll have to save my steak for tomorrow,” Malora says, eyeing the sinking sun. “If I don’t get home soon, Honus will have my hide.”

Zephele is furious when they get to the market square. They had to stop at the Thunderheart Stable to drop off Bolt and collect Neal’s refund.

“I expected you
eons
ago!” Zephele fumes, her color every bit as high as it had been earlier.

“Malora got her ostrich,” Neal says proudly.

Zephele looks unimpressed. “How perfectly revolting.” Then she asks, “Might I have a few feathers?” an unavoidably embarrassing afterthought.

“By all means,” Neal says. “That’s the least we can do to pay you for participating in our uprising against the Edicts.”

“Perish the thought!” Zephele says, scanning the late-day
crowd for eavesdroppers. “And I suppose you two will be wanting to repeat your little escapade on the morrow?”

“Well … Malora hasn’t had a chance to enjoy her ostrich steak yet,” Neal says, cocking an eyebrow at Malora.

“I do like ostrich steak,” she says longingly.

Zephele shudders. “Very well. I’ll expect my feathers tomorrow. Be sure to wash off the blood.”

“It was a bloodless kill,” Malora says.

“Oh, excellent,” Zephele says in a flat voice. “I’m sure the ostrich appreciated your neatness to no end! Come along, Malora. Say good night to the barbarian and hello to civilization.” She glances at Neal. “Wipe that satisfied smile off your face, Flatlander.”

Zephele’s uphill pace is surprisingly robust, and Malora, exhausted from her first real ride in weeks, finds herself huffing and puffing to stay abreast of her. “I thought you liked him,” Malora says.

“I am
unbearably
infatuated,” Zephele says without missing a step. “How could I not be? Have you no eyes in your head? Did you see his pectorals and his biceps? The centaur looks as if he were chiseled from marble. Flawless golden marble. And those flanks! Sheer, unadulterated bliss!” She shivers.

“If you admire him so much, why were you so rude to him?”

“Number one, he’s a Flatlander, and that’s all he deserves; number two, if he knew I liked him, he’d be more insufferable than he already is; and three … I am so nervous around him that, frankly, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Mostly very mean things,” says Malora, holding back a chuckle. “Try being nicer to him next time, maybe.”

“Coming from the killer of poor defenseless ostriches, that’s very rich,” Zephele says.

“Please try to understand,” Malora says in a small voice, “that I was born to hunt just as you were born to …”

Zephele halts in her tracks, takes a deep breath, and raises a hand. “Don’t say it,” she says. “You’ll only make me sound even more frivolous than I know I am. You’re right. I should make a more concerted effort to understand your nature—and his, as well. And now we must compose an elaborate falsehood about our visit to the mosaic studio.”

The falsehood turns out to be unnecessary because Honus waxes eloquent on the subject of mosaics during the entire meal, for which Malora arrives in the nick of time, slightly breathless and a little dusty. Malora and Honus are joined by Orion and attended by West, who takes care to serve Malora before the others. Throughout the meal, she feels him brushing up against her back. At one point, he whispers in her ear, “You have been back to the bush.”

She shoots him a startled look. “How can you tell?” she mouths at him.

“Because you seem more like yourself today,” he whispers.

Honus is saying, “The earliest-known examples of mosaics were found at a temple building in Ubaid, in Mesopotamia, and they are dated to the second half of the third millennium. They consist of pieces of colored stones, shells, and ivory. Some of the finest examples were in the ancient
city of Ravenna, where Emperor Justinian and his wife, the Empress Theodora …”

Malora, hungry from the afternoon’s hunt, eats all her Barley Surprise, which West replenishes without her even having to ask, while Honus discusses the mosaics in a place called Venice, where something called the tree of life was depicted in over one million pieces of colored glass.

“I’m sure Malora finds the history of mosaics as riveting as I do, but is she interested in pursuing the Hand, is what I want to know,” Orion says, searching Malora’s face closely.

Malora lifts her shoulders. “Who knows? But I’ve asked Zephele to take me back there tomorrow for a second visit.”

Orion clearly finds this an encouraging sign. “Excellent!”

“Can you tell us what manner of project was laid out for the
opus regulatum
?” Honus asks.

Malora’s eyes widen in desperation as she attempts to decode his question.

West comes to her rescue. “It was a tree of life,” he says.

Orion and Honus blink at West in puzzlement.

“How do you know this?” Orion asks.

“Because Malora whispered it to me just now, didn’t you, Malora?”

Malora nods energetically. “A tree of life, yes.”

She is immensely relieved when Honus nods. “A most popular, if derivative, centaurean motif,” he says. “What method were they using?”

Malora stares at Honus, at a total loss. This time, West has left her to her own devices.

Orion offers a gentle prod. “What he means is, were they using the indirect or the direct method?”

“Oh!” Malora says. “The indirect … I think.”

Honus says, “Where will the work eventually sit?”

“I have no idea,” Malora says brightly. “But I’m sure I’ll find out when I return tomorrow.”

Malora goes to bed that night reliving the hunt and recalling the vision that came to her with the sip of gaffey. All night in her dreams, she rides Sky across the plains, searching in vain for the mysterious man with honey-dark skin, silvery hair, and the scent of the air just before a thunderstorm. “Who is he?” she asks Sky. Sky tosses his mane and says, “He is Lume.”

“This is Pel, and this is Mel,” Neal says the following afternoon, indicating the two hounds that sit just outside the gatehouse, guarding the bows and quivers he has parked there. The dogs are white with brown spots. Pel has a speckled muzzle, and Mel has a brown circle around her right eye. When they see Neal, their feathery tails beat the ground. Then they catch sight of Malora and start to growl, moving stealthily forward on their haunches as if unsure whether to grovel or leap at her throat.

“Easy, girls,” Neal says to them. “They’re sour on two-leggers, I’m afraid, Pet.”

Malora approaches the dogs slowly, holding out her cupped hands to let them sniff her. They remind her of the hunting dogs in the Settlement, except that these two are healthier-looking and better fed and they wear collars, one silver, one gold. Their cold noses graze her hands. Jayke believed in keeping hounds hungry. It sharpened their instincts. Neal obviously doesn’t hold with this philosophy. Then again, dogs, like horses, are always hungry.

“To seal the new friendship,” Neal says as he slips her two strips of dried bush meat.

Malora holds out her hands to the dogs, realizing that she is offering them the same food she once ate. The dogs sniff at the offering, then delicately take it from her hands and chew it. Afterward, they lick their chops, then her palms. Their tails wag in a more friendly fashion now, and Malora kneels and gives them her face to lick. The dogs’ tongues tickle. They jump onto her and knock her backward into the dirt, clambering over her. She feels their feet in her ribs and their hot breath and rough tongues on her face and neck. She giggles, pushing them gently away.

Neal stamps his hoof, and the dogs pull back and hasten to settle on their haunches on either side of their master.

Malora sits up. “They are very affectionate,” she says, wiping the canine saliva from her face.

“You’re the first two-legger they’ve ever taken to. In Kahiro, I have to muzzle them. They’re inclined to attack every two-legger they lay eyes on.”

Neal reaches out to hoist her to her feet. He has both bows and quivers strung over his shoulder.

“I thought we were roasting ostrich today,” Malora says. She skipped the midday meal to hone her appetite.

“We are, but I thought we would go to my camp via the bush and see if any tempting targets present themselves to us.”

“Those are very handsome bows,” Malora comments. “Did you get them at the market in Kahiro?”

“No,” he says, “these I made myself. I seasoned the yew
wood for two years. The stave was made from the heartwood of an ash tree, the string from silk, and the arrows—”

“Fledged with the feather of the lilac-breasted roller,” Malora says, remembering Thora’s arrows.

Human and centaur walk through a stretch of deserted farmland. Up ahead, Malora hears the refreshing sound of water rushing over rocks. Neal hands her a bow and a quiver. She straps the quiver over her shoulder but holds the bow high over her head as they wade across the river. The water comes up to the middle of her thighs, soaking her breeches, and she wishes she had Bolt beneath her. They walk south along the riverbank.

“The game is nearly always plentiful here,” Neal says.

Soon they spy a small herd of bachelor impalas grazing near the river. The wind carries their scent downriver, and the dogs lift their twitching noses to it.

By unspoken agreement, Neal and Malora leave the river and cross inland until they are standing between the impala and open bush. They stop. The hounds whimper.

Malora reaches back to the quiver and pulls out an arrow. She lays it across the bow stave, trapping it in her left thumb. With her right, she stretches the cord until it connects with the small nock at the arrow’s fledged end. Hauling back on the cord with her forefinger, she draws the cord all the way to her right ear. As she sights an impala, she hears her mother’s voice say in her ear, “Burn a hole with your eye into the target and the arrow will seek it.”

Malora lets loose the arrow and hears a distant thud. The herd scatters, leaving behind a single slain impala.

“Fetch,” Neal says to the dogs. The dogs hightail it through the grass, Pel returning with the arrow clenched in her teeth, followed by Mel, dragging the limp body of the impala.