Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (4 page)

Aron isn’t the only casualty of the latest raid. The women soon discover that the Leatherwings broke through the thatching on Felise’s roof and made off with her and all four children.

While the women can’t blame Malora for this, they do hold her responsible for the loss of Aron.

“She should have stood watch over her own precious horse,” they mutter darkly among themselves.

“Look at her,” they say. “Her best friend, and not one tear does she shed for the poor simple lad.”

Malora retreats from the Settlement into Sky’s stall. She has few words for anyone, including her mother. But the women are wrong. She does weep for Aron. Yet even while she weeps, another part of her is secretly relieved that she won’t have to keep her promise to mate with him.

“Next time the Leatherwings come,” Malora informs her mother tersely, “I’ll stay in the stall with Sky.”

“You will not,” Thora says, for she has a plan.

She moves Malora into her own bedroom and quarters Sky in Malora’s room. Malora’s room proves to be a surprisingly satisfactory stall for Sky. Malora takes some cheer from hearing the
clop-clop
of Sky’s hooves on the stone floors and seeing the place where she and Aron once sat and played with their dolls now covered with hay and horse piss and dung, which it is her daily job to shovel out the window into the yard. Malora secretly likes that the house now smells of stable instead of her mother’s herbs.

Each night, in the bed she once shared with Jayke, Thora tries to bring Malora out, to get her to talk.

“I have no more time for small talk,” Malora says, turning away from her mother.

“There is always time, especially now, for there is great solace in small talk.”

Night after night, Thora talks. At first, Malora listens in silence, her back turned to her mother, curled in upon herself. Mostly, Thora talks about her life with Jayke. One night, she tells about the time they rode up into the mountains and swam in a crystal-clear lake so cold they had to build a fire on the banks to warm themselves. The wood of the fire gave off green-blue sparks, the color of Jayke’s eyes, the color of the eyes of the child they would conceive that same night.

“How do you know it happened that night?” Malora asks, turning around at last to face her mother.

“A woman knows these things,” Thora says dreamily.

“Will I one day know such things?” Malora asks.

Thora brings Malora’s head to her breast. “Yes!” she says, raking her fingers through Malora’s hair.

But Malora doesn’t see how this can be. Where will
her
mate come from when the Settlement holds the last of the People? After this night, Malora rejoins the small talk. The silence of the Settlement swallows their voices. Felise and her brood were a loud, brawling lot, and the remaining children are as quiet as an abandoned nest of baby mice. The second shower of bones falls—and such tiny bones they are, too—and another wave of the dead are consigned. Immediately afterward, Thora orders the women to dismantle the training pen and sharpen the ironwood sticks. The women climb onto the roofs and plant the wooden pikes in the thatching.

The next time the Leatherwings attack, the pikes prevent them from breaking into any of the houses. They go away hungry, their thwarted cries echoing off the canyon walls as they wheel away over the mountains in search of easier prey.

Thora has taken to conducting daily morning walks for the purpose of teaching Malora plant lore. It is the only reason Thora can think of to risk venturing out of the Settlement onto the plains. Malora hears a new urgency in her mother’s voice these days. Every morning they pass beneath the gates, walk down the canyon corridor, and step out onto the open plains. There, they are greeted by the familiar three-beat call of the ring-tailed dove.

“Do you hear that?” Thora says. “She’s talking to you: ‘Ma-lo-ra! Ma-lo-ra! Ma-lo-ra!’ She wants you to listen carefully to everything I have to tell you. And this is
not
small talk. This is important. Hear me, please, O Daughter of the Mountains!”

“I hate the mountains more than ever!” Malora says with a deep scowl at the towering wall of red rock at their backs. “The Leatherwings come from the mountains, and the mountains reek of them. I am the Daughter of the
Plains
!”

“Very well, Daughter of the Plains, listen to what I tell you of the bounty of the plains.”

Malora, exasperated, says, “You can talk forever, but I’ll never remember the names of the plants and flowers the way you do.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Thora says, “so long as you know them by sight and remember how to use them.”

Sometimes it will take them all morning to go only a few steps, so numerous are the plants that grow along the way, so infinite their uses.

“The fruit of the poison apple bush soothes a bad tooth.”

“The roots and leaves of the velvet bush willow treat bites from ticks and snakes.”

“The lavender fever berry’s bark, when pulverized, is a stomach purgative.”

“A branch of the puzzle bush works as a twirling stick, against a rubbing stick cut from the silver bush, to make fire.”

“A branch from the wait-a-minute bush makes a good snare.”

“The marilla tree’s fruits, when eaten fresh, are tasty. A little tart perhaps, but most refreshing on a hot day. The stones are nuts. The bark, boiled in water and made into a tea, treats fever.”

“The violet tree’s bark makes cloth and also fishing nets.”

“The leaves of the wild camphor bush, when dried, make a sedative.”

“The fruits of the russet bush willow are edible, but beware the seeds, for they are poisonous. The powdered bark of the silver cluster leaf neutralizes the poison, but you must
catch it in time, within the day. Are you listening to me, Malora?”

Malora’s head swims. “I
am
listening, but what I really want is Jayke’s bow and quiver. It’s all very well to heal, but I must learn to kill.”

Jayke’s spare bow and quiver still sit in the corner by the front door, like the ghost of their owner standing sentry over his family.

Thora says, “That? That bow’s not for you.”

Discouraged, Malora barely listens to the rest of the plant talk. When they return to the Settlement after their walk, Malora follows her mother to the shed behind their house. Thora brings forth a bow Malora has never seen. It is smaller than Jayke’s but beautifully made.

“Whose is this?” Malora asks. It is almost too beautiful to touch.

“It was mine,” Thora says. “And now it is yours.”

“You never told me you shot a bow,” Malora says.

“You don’t know a lot of things about me,” Thora says, the faintest trace of a smile on her lips.

The bow, made from golden wood, has a graceful shape. The quiver, which is packed with arrows, is made from impala skin. With one foot bracing the bottom of the bow, the muscles in her arms bunching, Thora bends the bow and strings it. “Your father made this for me before we mated. He taught me how to shoot, and I will teach you.”

The skin on Malora’s face is tight and hot as she holds the bow for the first time. She is conscious of the gift’s worth. Like her rope, anything that was made by her father now
has a sacred value. Malora plucks the string, which gives off a deep
twang
, like the call of a winged predator, poised to launch itself at its prey in a single swift shot. She fears this power; something in her wants to fling the bow away and never lay hands on it again. And yet something else even stronger wants to master it, to harness its force to do her bidding.

“Before you were born,” Thora says, “your father and I used to go hunting every day. We had such fun together.”

Malora imagines a day long ago when her parents were a young and laughing couple.

Thora is saying, “The bowstring is made from silk. The sinew of animals will work but it will eventually crack and break. Better to use the stuff of the silkworm, if you are able to obtain it. The nock of each arrow is reinforced by a sliver of horn from a kudu. The glue is cooked down from the hooves of the wildebeest.”

Thora removes each arrow from the quiver and sights along it, setting aside the two that are crooked. “A crooked arrow is as useless as a wandering eye. To get the arrows straight, lay them over a pot of steaming water and weight them with flat rocks. The tip is sharpened slate. It will pierce the hide of an impala or a small lion.”

“Or a Leatherwing?” Malora asks.

“Only if you aim for their vile little potbellies,” her mother says, her voice grimly matter-of-fact, her eyes not meeting Malora’s.

Each arrow is fledged with the dark blue feathers of Malora’s favorite bird, the lilac-breasted roller. First, Thora shows Malora how to lay the arrow across the bow stave, trap
the arrow with her left thumb, and stretch the cord with her right thumb until it engages the small nock at the arrow’s fledged end. To demonstrate, Thora hauls back the cord with a single finger. As Malora watches her mother pull back the string, she sees this woman through new eyes. She is no longer Thora the Healer. She is Thora the Huntress.

Now it is Malora’s turn. It requires all the fingers on her right hand to pull back the string. Sweat beads on her upper lip, and her entire arm trembles as she draws the cord all the way to her right ear, the way she has seen Thora do it with the one finger. She looses the arrow, not when she is ready to but when her arm gives out on her. She tracks the bright feathers of the escaped arrow, watching as the shaft speeds toward the tree trunk she has chosen as a target. It misses! She frowns. Her shoulders sag, and she groans in discouragement. Put the bow back in the shed, Malora tells herself. You are not meant to be Malora the Huntress. You are neither healer nor huntress. You are nothing.

Thora is neither surprised nor disappointed. “Remember always to look at what you are aiming at, never at the arrow,” Thora instructs her. “Burn a hole with your eye into the target and the arrow will seek it.”

Malora practices that afternoon and for weeks thereafter, until her arm is strong enough to hold the string to her ear without trembling and her eye can direct the arrow directly to the target every time.

Another gift follows the bow and arrow, this one small and wrapped in a leather wallet. Unwinding the leather tie, Malora finds a shiny little knife with a very sharp blade, as she discovers when she runs her finger along it. It draws
blood and yet she feels no pain! She sticks her finger in her mouth and sucks the salty blood.

“Where did you get it?” Malora asks. “And what is it made of?”

“It is a material called metal. It is taken from the earth. The knife was made in a forge long ago when the People, the Grandparents, lived in a grand city north of here.”

“What is a forge?” Malora asks.

“It is a place where metal is heated by fire until it is soft, and then pounded with a hammer into useful shapes,” Thora says. “Your grandfather, many generations back, made this in his own forge. Now most of our knives are chiseled from stone. They serve well enough, but they are nowhere near as sharp as this one. Cherish this knife. One day, it will save your life.”

It is only a few days later when, in the dead of night, Thora shakes Malora roughly awake. Sitting up, Malora sees reflected in her mother’s dark eyes two bright, dancing flames.

“Get up, Malora!” Thora says in an urgent whisper. “Get up this instant.”

Malora knows right away that something is wrong. “What is it? What’s happening, Mama?”

“The Leatherwings have set fire to the thatching,” Thora says, clenching the malachite stone. “You have no time to lose.”

“Me? What about you?”

Without replying, Thora bundles Malora into a robe and boots and hooded cape, then leads her down the hall and out
the front door, where Sky stands, restless and already saddled. Malora realizes that her mother tacked up Sky while Malora was still fast asleep.

“It’s time for you to ride away from here,” Thora says.

“By myself?” Malora asks in a tremulous voice. “There’s lots of room for you on Sky’s back. Jayke and I rode on Sky together all the time. Now
you
can ride with me.”

“No, I cannot,” says Thora wearily. “I’m the only leader the People have.” She bends and makes a stirrup of her hands. “Come now. I’ll hoist you up.”

Malora obeys, and her mother lifts her high into Jayke’s great saddle. Thora, looking small from where Malora sits, grasps her feet firmly and fits them into Jayke’s stirrups. “Keep your toes pointed up,” she says, working Malora’s feet to show her how.

“When will I see you?”

Thora’s face closes like a flower at dusk. For the first time, Malora takes a good look around her. Screaming women and crying children run everywhere, seeking shelter from the Leatherwings.

“If I leave, they die. I’m their only chance of survival,” Thora says, eyes glittering, her hand squeezing Malora’s calf so hard that it hurts. “You must go and never return here. Promise me,” she says, her eyes fierce, “that you will never return.”

“I promise,” Malora says sadly, when all she wants to do is climb off Sky, crawl back into their cozy bed, and lie in her mother’s arms. She watches Thora lash the bow and arrow to the cantle and knows she will never again lie in bed with her mother and make small talk. This knowledge brings on a torrent of tears.

“Won’t you need the bow?” Malora asks, swabbing her face on the sleeve of her cloak.

“You keep it,” Thora says. “I have your father’s.”

Next, she hands up Jayke’s rope. Malora slips it automatically over her shoulder.

“Ride north,” Thora says. “Follow the river, but go no farther north than the place where the two rivers run together into one.”

“Why?” Malora is confused.

“Because our old enemy lies to the north,” her mother says.

“More Leatherwings?” she asks.

Thora sighs and shakes her head. “Not Leatherwings. An older enemy. The ones who stole the Grandparents’ homeland and drove them here. I meant to tell you the story one day, but now there’s no time and you’ll just have to take my word for it. Stay to the south.”