Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (9 page)

Malora bristles. “I do not. I said
pussemboos
and I mean
pussemboos
.”

“The ancient tale of the clever cat who wears high boots and assists his human master is, I do believe, entitled
Puss in Boots
.” He wags his head.

Is it possible, Malora wonders, that Aron’s grandmother was as simple as her grandson? She should have known this to be the case.

Orion says, “Actually, now that you point it out, the Twani do bear a rather remarkable resemblance to Puss in Boots. I wonder why I never thought of that.”

“The Twani?” Malora asks. “Is that what you call them?”

“It’s what they call themselves. And they are no more our slaves than you are my enemy.” He flashes her a smile that is full of warmth.

“Really?” she asks, very much wanting to believe both of these things.

“It’s true. We rescued the Twani from an erupting volcano ages ago, and they came to live with us. They have taken care of us ever since because they owe us a debt of gratitude for saving their lives. As for the centaurs and the People, we might have been enemies ages ago, when the People outnumbered the centaurs, but as far as I can tell”—he looks over her shoulder as if the human dead stood massed behind her—“there’s only one of you left.”

Malora sighs. “It’s true. I just buried the last of the People in the Settlement. I think I went a little mad from grief or maybe the heat. I ran the herd all night, and that’s why we fell into the trap your pussemboo—er, Twani—set for us.” She realizes as she says these things that while they are sad and unpleasant, she is happy to be saying them aloud, rather than keeping everything to herself.

“You’re quite sure all of the People are dead?” he asks hesitantly.

She nods.

Orion’s face floods with relief, and she feels the need to point out, “Including my own mother.”

He looks stricken. “I’m so sorry! That was very thoughtless of me. When I lose my lady mother, I’m sure I’ll grieve for the rest of my days.”

“This was my mother’s,” she says, holding up the malachite stone to share something of hers, but also to lessen the sudden onslaught of sadness. “I took it from her before I buried her.”

The centaur looks so genuinely distraught that she thinks
he has had next to no experience of hardship, let alone death. His arms and face and chest are smooth and free of scars. She wonders whether he has any stories to tell, or whether they still lie in wait for him.

“The stone is beautiful, and it’s good that you have something of hers,” he says softly.

“Yes, I have my mother’s stone and my father’s rope. The rope!” Malora cries, clapping a hand over her mouth. It is one thing to lose the knife, but she cannot lose the rope, especially now that she has lost Sky. “I have to find it,” she says, spinning around and heading toward the dark maw of the canyon.

“Wait!” Orion calls after her. “Can’t you look for it in the morning?”

“No, I can’t,” she says. “I need to find it now … before some greedy raptor finds it and uses it to line his nest.”

“Then let me come with you. This lantern will help,” he says. When she doesn’t slow down, he adds, “I’ll be happy to accompany you if only you’ll wait up. You move very quickly for a two-legger.”

Malora is about to say that he moves very slowly for a four-legger, but she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings.

“I just realized,” he says, trotting up alongside her, “I don’t even know your name.”

She stops suddenly. “Malora.”

He smiles. “Very pretty. We’ll call you Malora Ironbound, which is most suitable. My name is Orion Silvermane.”

“I know,” she says.

“That’s right! Of course!” Orion says.

Malora wonders whether to correct him about her last
name, and then decides not to. She thinks Malora Ironbound sounds better than Malora Thora-Jayke. If she carries the dead in her heart, she reasons, why should she need to carry them in her name as well? This is more of the
something different
that she so badly needs right now.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Malora Ironbound,” he says, placing his right hand over his heart, and then raising it palm out to her. He looks at her expectantly. “You’re supposed to do what I’m doing.”

“Why?” she asks. She has gone back to looking for the rope, eyes scanning the ground.

“It’s the centaurs’ salutation,” he says.

She smiles and says, “But I’m not a centaur.” Just then, the familiar black-and-white shape of the rope materializes out of the darkness of the canyon corridor. It has snagged on a gnarled tree limb growing out of the canyon wall. Malora lunges for it, glad she has been saved a trip all the way back into the box canyon, that place of desperation and suffering.

“True enough. But you will be coming to live among centaurs,” Orion says with a disarming smile. “You’re going to return with me to Mount Kheiron, in triumph, leading those beautiful horses.”

Malora frowns as she untangles the rope from the limb. She says, as much to herself as to him, “I guess I am.”

“Good! It’s settled, then. After all, you’re the last human, and the last human can’t very well go wandering about in the bush by herself,” he says. “You might get eaten by a hippo.”

She laughs shortly. “Hippos don’t eat humans,” she says, looping the rope. “I swim with hippos all the time, and they’ve never taken even a small bite out of me.”

“They eat centaurs,” Orion says. The lantern swinging back and forth makes the canyon floor appear to be rocking. “At least twenty centaurs disappear every year, and hippos are the culprits. I ought to know. My brother Athen was one of them.”

“Well, Athen must have come too near a cow with calves. Hippo mothers will do
anything
to protect their young,” she says, adding silently,
like my mother
. Then she dislodges the lump in her throat with a joke. “It’s too bad the hippos didn’t eat Theon instead.”

Orion laughs. “Oh, Theon’s all right. He has a slight tendency toward hysteria. I keep pressing him to accept a lavender-based scent called Serenity to calm his nerves, but he claims it dampens his spirit. I assure you, the centaurs back home will be charmed to make your acquaintance. Like me, they’ve never seen a living human being before.”

She stops and catches his hand. “They have seen
dead
ones?”

Looking flustered, Orion says, “Not exactly. But there is a mass grave of the People on the flats below Mount Kheiron. It is very old, and there is a mural on the side of the monument marking the burial place. It depicts … well, People who look very much like you.”

“Really?” Her pulse quickens. “I would like to see this monument.”

Orion’s look of discomfort deepens. “I’m not really all that sure that you would.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the painting is called the Massacre of Kamaria. It shows centaurs … well … 
slaughtering
the People,” he says.

“Oh.” She blows air out between her lips.

He looks startled. “You sound just like a horse!”

Malora glances at him briefly, and then grins. The grim moment passes. “I’m probably more of a horse than you are.” Not waiting for a response, she asks, not entirely in jest, “So, can I take it that it is not your intention to slaughter me?”

“Never!” Orion says, aghast, then hastens to add, “It would be in direct violation of the Fourteenth Edict. The Apex and Herself would never allow it.”

“The Apex is the leader of your herd?” she asks.

Orion looks mortified. “He is leader of our
nation-state
,” he says. “He is also my father.”

“And Herself is …?”

“My lady mother,” he says, “Hylonome Silvermane. But everyone calls her Herself.”

“The Apex and Herself rule together?” Malora asks. She likes the sound of this. She sometimes wonders whether the People would have lasted longer had the men and women not divided the labor quite so strictly.

“He is first among equals,” he says. “And Herself, well, she rules him.”

Understanding dawns upon Malora. “Like the lead stallion and mare of a herd.”

“You might put it that way,” he says, his teeth glinting in the lantern light. “But I don’t suggest you do so. Centaurs, as a rule, prefer to overlook their horse halves.”

Malora nods slowly. This confirms her theory about the scented cloths they hold to their noses. “That’s an awfully big part of yourselves to overlook,” she says.

Smiling, Orion puts his finger to his lips. “Shhh,” he says, “it’s a secret. You mustn’t tell.”

Malora feels a laugh bubbling in her throat. It is good to appreciate a joke, other than one of her own.

Girl and centaur walk together back to the camp. Malora notices that their heads are of equal height. “How old are you?” she asks.

“Seventeen.”

“I am fifteen,” she says. “I think.”

“You seem both older … and younger,” he says. Then he grabs her hand and squeezes, his voice excited. “Look there, Malora! One of the horses is still alive!”

Malora breaks away from Orion and runs toward the horse, then staggers to a halt. Stomach churning, she backs off. This is no horse struggling to stand, but a horse, quite dead, being ripped open by a scavenger. It is pulling the horse’s entrails up and out of the body, unraveling them like a long, gory ribbon.

She takes a deep breath and roars. “Be off!”

It stops tugging and stares at her, its eyes alight with ancient grudges and insatiable greed.

Malora hears Orion gasp. “It’s one of them! A scavenger!”

“A hyena,” she says, wiping the spittle from her mouth. She knows the animal serves a function in the natural scheme, but that doesn’t mean she has to like anything about it.

“I have heard of them but have never seen one at work,” Orion says.

“Then you are lucky,” Malora says, her voice dead. “Usually they don’t come slinking around until the bodies start to bloat and stink. By tomorrow night, the plain will be crawling with them.”

She loathes the sight of the hyena, with its small ears cropped close to its knobby skull and its body swarming with spots. The hyena’s eyes go on challenging her, devoid of fear or shame. It is the look of death, and there has been too much death in her life. Although she knows it is a futile—even ridiculous—act, Malora picks up a fallen tree branch and swings it at the hyena’s head. It flinches, drops the string of horse guts, and slinks off.

“What a despicable creature,” Orion says, staring after it. “Still, Honus will be tickled to learn we saw one. I don’t believe he’s ever seen a hyena, either. I wish I had some souvenir of it I could bring back for his collection.”

Malora sighs. “Hyenas aren’t so bad … unless they happen to be feeding on someone you once loved. They serve their purpose. The hyenas come first, then the jackals and the painted dogs, then the vultures and the bustards and the crows, and, finally, the insects, until all that’s left is bones. Very little goes to waste here.”

“You know so much about the bush,” he says admiringly.

Malora wonders what this
bush
is he keeps speaking of. It isn’t until this moment that she realizes she has been caught up in the first real talking she has had since leaving the Settlement. This feels like something even better than small talk. She wants the talk to go on, but they have come to the horse pen.

Malora leaves Orion and steals past the gate where the Twani snore in a pile. Inside the pen, the horses sleep, standing in groups of five or six, arranged head to tail. At her approach, a nearby cluster wakens with startled snorts, lifting their heads and swinging their noses toward her. Whinnying softly, they trot over to where a series of shorter uprights create a low spot in the fence.

Malora boosts herself up and lowers herself into the pen. The horses offer their long black heads, which she holds in her arms and strokes, breathing into their nostrils as they breathe into hers, butting her head softly against theirs. She nickers at them, and they nicker back. The others soon wake up and come to take their turns. She wades deeper into the herd, the animals slipping around her as she passes from one to another like a swimmer in a flowing river of horses.

Malora counts twenty-two heads and does what little she can in the darkness to take stock of them, running her hands up and down their legs to detect the heat that might mean a break or a sprain, checking their hooves for splits and their hides for open wounds or tears in the flesh, damage wrought by the flood or the capture.

In the far corner of the pen, Malora comes upon Lightning, standing next to Posy, who has just foaled. The mare
nudges the bloody lump with her nose, trying to breathe life into it. Sometimes some stubborn instinct in the mare makes her keep up this futile effort for days following a stillbirth, until the tiny dead horse is just a rolled-up ball of flesh lying in the dust. But the knowledge of her loss is already weighing heavily upon her. Her tail hangs lank, her ears are limp, and the light is gone from her eyes. Malora approaches with care and starts to stroke her side, speaking to her in soothing tones. “It’s okay, Posy. You’ll have another chance, you’ll see. Everything’s going to be all right.”

Lightning erupts in a loud snort. She paws the earth, ears flattened to her skull, nostrils steaming.

“Easy, big girl!” Malora says, placing a calming hand on her neck. “What’s the trouble?”

Malora follows the mare’s baleful look and sees, through the low section in the fence, Orion looking on. In his wide blue eyes, pale as milk in the darkness, she thinks she has found a kind of consolation for what is past, and a hope for things to come.

“It’s okay, girl,” Malora tells Lightning. “He’s a friend.”

She awakes in the morning to the smell of molasses and grain. The Twan who has come into the pen, waddling beneath the weight of the feed buckets hooked over his shoulders, nods warily at her.

“Orion Silvermane knows I’m here,” Malora tells him, rising hastily from her bed of cloud grass and dusting herself off.

“He came by first thing and explained how things are,”
the Twan says. His voice is high-pitched, a little sharp and whiny, the way Malora would expect a talking cat to sound.