Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (29 page)

Thunderheart says, “I’ll thank you to have her walk the mare across the river and mount up in the bush. The less anyone around here knows of this, the better. No good can come of doing business with an Otherian.”

“On the contrary. Your notoriety will be enhanced,” Neal says.

By way of response, Anders spits in the dirt.

To Malora, Neal says, “As gossips, the Flatlanders are no better than the Highlanders. Gossip might pass for an amusement to the Highlanders, but for the Flatlanders it is more than that: it is a brightener of our bleak lives.”

Neal holds the rope out to Malora. She takes it and
unhitches it from the halter, handing the rope back to Thunderheart. “I brought my own.”

Anders takes the rope with an indifferent shrug.

“What’s her name?” Malora asks. The horse’s head is high. Her neck is stiff. The whites of her eyes flash.

Thunderheart chuckles. “Bolt, we call her. And bolt, she rightly does.”

“Does she know to start and stop?” Malora asks.

“It’s ‘go’ to start and ‘ho’ to stop,” Thunderheart says. “Think she can manage that?”

Malora is grateful to Neal for not dignifying this question with an answer. She ties the end of Jayke’s rope to the halter. “Can I exercise Bolt in one of these empty rings?” she asks Thunderheart. “There’s no sense in my taking her out into the bush if she’s unfit for riding.”

Thunderheart says, “If she’s fit for the Hippodrome, she’s fit for the likes of a two-legger.”

Malora decides to take this as permission to use one of the rings. She leads the horse into the ring and prepares to send the horse out for a spin. But the horse stands with her head high, eyes rolling at Malora with a look of terrified bewilderment on her face.

“You’ve never seen anything like me, have you, girl?” Malora asks.

An idea comes to her. She unhitches the rope from the horse’s harness, and then coils the rope and holds it behind her back. Using the frayed end like a Twan’s tail, she wags it at Bolt’s neck to send her out. Bolt rears slightly but moves away from Malora. Keeping her eyes on the mare’s hip, Malora wags the rope again and says, “Go!” Bolt goes out for
a spin, one, two, three times, then Malora moves her “tail” to the other hand and, twirling it, again says, “Go!” to send the mare spinning in the opposite direction. Malora spins the rope faster and clicks her tongue to get the mare to pick up her gait. The horse lunges immediately into a canter. The three-beat rhythm of her bound is clean and well balanced, her back long and stretched. It is a lovely canter. Still, it is not precisely what Malora asked for.

“That’s perfect, Bolt, but I’d like to see your trot first,” Malora says, slowing down the movement of her feet and the rope. In response, the horse breaks her rolling motion and shifts her balance backward. Malora watches the transformation as the mare’s back rounds, her neck rises and arches, her face moves into an almost vertical position. This is, Malora thinks, poetry even more beautiful than what Shakespeare and Thomas Stearns Eliot and Uzamo and Yeats wrote long ago. This is as beautiful a gait as Malora has ever seen on a horse. Malora stills the rope and stops turning. “Ho,” she says. The horse stops and faces into her, her head low and calmer now.

“Come here, beautiful girl,” Malora says.

The mare hesitates, and then takes a few steps toward Malora. Malora holds up her hand and frowns to stop the horse’s forward motion. She hears Jayke’s voice in her head: “Always keep a zone of safety around yourself and don’t let the horse enter it. If you want to pat the horse, you are the one who steps out of the zone to approach, not the other way around.”

Malora smiles when Bolt halts and remains outside the zone, and she rewards the mare by stepping forward and
stroking her velvety nose, crooning in her ear, “You’re a feisty little thing, aren’t you? But those lady Twani have trained you well. I think we’re going to get along just fine.”

Then she steps away and sends Bolt out again, with a softly uttered “Go!” She tosses the frayed end of the rope as she directs the mare in a straight line toward the ring’s railing. Malora walks to the side of the mare and behind her, facing forward but careful not to cross over her midline, which would cause the horse to stop and turn in.

Next to the fence, she spins Bolt again so that the mare is forced to navigate the narrow passage between Malora’s body and the rail. If Bolt doesn’t kick up a fuss doing this, Malora knows she will be safe to ride. The horse passes close to the fence. Malora dips her head and stares hard at Bolt’s hindquarters. The mare’s back legs slide sideways into a halt. Malora tries this same exercise going in the other direction, with equal success. Malora works with the mare until she is satisfied that she can move all the parts of the horse, forelegs, middle, and hind legs, from the ground using her eyes and the rope “tail.” The horse will probably never be exactly calm, but Malora is reasonably confident that she will be able to ride Bolt and stay safe. She nods to Neal. Neal nods to Thunderheart.

As she and Neal are leaving, she hears Anders say something to Neal. Malora turns to Neal. “What did old Thunderheart say to you just then?” she asks.

Neal laughs. “He says if we manage to kill anything—apart from you when you are thrown on your head by his horse—he will refund my nubs.”

“That seems fair to me,” Malora says.

“Try not to get killed,” Neal Featherhoof says. “If you die, Orion will have me turned out for a certainty, and despite all its shortcomings, Mount Kheiron is my home.”

“I’ll do my best,” Malora says. “How far from the bush are we?”

“It’s right across the river, just ahead of us. There is a reliable supply of ostriches over there, probably because I’ve never come close to killing even one.”

Malora says, “Give me a hand and I’ll mount up here. Bolt and I might as well continue to get to know one another.”

Neal makes a stirrup of his hands and boosts her up onto Bolt’s slender back.

“
Now
you look much more like yourself,” Neal says approvingly.

Malora grins down at him. She
feels
more like herself. It is good to have a horse beneath her again, even if it is a delicate and skittish one.

Neal stands back and eyes the shimmying horse uneasily. “Will she tolerate you on her back?”

“That is the idea.” The skin beneath Malora’s seat twitches. She senses that Bolt is itching to rid herself of this strange new burden. “Easy, now, girl. Let’s give you something to do to take your mind off bucking me. Go!” She squeezes the mare with her calves.

Bolt’s ears flick doubtfully, but she does go. Malora turns her body to the right and points her right toe to cue the mare to move right. When Bolt doesn’t respond, Malora prods her with the heel of her left foot. She lays a hand on the left side of her neck to offer additional prompting. Finally, Bolt bends her neck and moves to the right. Malora tries this a few more times, receiving increasingly more ready responses from Bolt. Then Malora reverses the cues to get the mare to move left. As Neal attempts to stay out of their way, Malora and Bolt weave back and forth along the trail as if under the influence of monkey weed. Malora notices that Bolt moves more flexibly to the left, and thinks the horse may be urged to run around the track more often to the left than to the right. Apart from that quirk, the animal seems to have been well trained. She gets the horse to stop and go and back up on cue. Gradually, Bolt grows calmer and begins to move with something approaching willingness.

When they come to a tributary of the Neelah, a narrow ribbon of water running over a bank of smooth rocks, Neal splashes across, but the horse balks on the bank.

“We’re crossing this river, Bolt, even if it takes us all afternoon,” Malora says, steadily heeling Bolt’s barrel.

Neal, already halfway across, turns and beckons.

“Follow the four-legger,” Malora says, pointing to Neal. Bolt stays stock-still. Malora bangs her heels against the mare’s rib cage until Bolt starts to move. Malora is careful to look outward, toward the bank.

“Good, brave girl,” she croons to the mare.

Halfway across, the horse stops and dips her nose into the water. Malora feels the horse’s forelegs begin to buckle. Bolt is about to drop into the river for a roll!

“Not with me on your back, you don’t!” she says, pounding Bolt’s rib cage anew with her heels.

The horse gives this some thought, then snorts and continues sloshing across the river. “Good girl, Bolt,” Malora says.

On the other side of the river, there are no farmlands, no houses, no rustic towns, just tawny grassland dotted with dark green shrubbery stretching off to the hills, which rise up in the east in a low, jagged purple wall.

“We Flatlanders call these the Sisters,” Neal says. “Can you see them? You ought to be able to … they’re horses. A team of seven, the seventh being volcanic. That’s the mountain that spewed on the poor Twani and sent them scurrying in our direction.”

After a few moments of staring, Malora begins to see, rising up out of the mountain rock, the shapes of seven horses galloping abreast toward the north, their manes streaming behind them. “I see them. Have you ever been there?”

Neal shakes his head. “They are farther away than they look. The Hills of Melea, the Highlanders call them. They say the cave where Kheiron lived is somewhere in the middle sister. I’ll visit there someday. Not to see the cave, of course—that’s
all Highlander superstition. But to explore, hunt the game, see what’s there.”

“Look out for Leatherwings if you do,” Malora says.

“For
what
?” he asks.

“The monsters that killed my People. Raptors with leathery wings and human heads. They live in the Ironbounds and, for all I know, in all mountains. They prey on People and they prey on horses, so I imagine they’d find centaurs the perfect dish.”

“I’ll be sure to bear that in mind,” Neal says, laughing blithely. “For now, most of my travels take me north, where there are no mountains and, so far at least, no Leatherwings. Kahiro has its own surprises, however.”

“Really?” Malora asks. “What kind of surprises?”

“Kahiro teems with every hibe on earth. It is a great, sprawling, brawling, rowdy city, nearly half of it given over to the market. There’s a mountainous wall of sand dunes and, on the other side, the sea.”

“What do you mean by
the see
?” she asks. “See
what
?”

Neal gives her a look that suggests her ignorance surprises him. “The sea is a great body of water,” he explains.

“Like a river?” she asks.

“Wider and deeper than a river,” he says, “stretching out beneath the sky and every bit as vast and endless-seeming. The water is salty, like blood, like tears. It’s alive with fish and snakes and serpents and all manner of beasts that swim and breed and prey on each other and live out their whole lives in the watery deep. The sea is even home to some hibes.”

“I’d like to go there,” Malora says, trying to imagine something so immense.

Human and centaur are standing on a grassy rise, staring off into the middle distance, when Malora feels Neal nudge her. She turns to see that he is holding out a crude flask covered with the skin of a baby leopard.

“What is it?” she asks.

“It is gaffey,” he says. “I usually take a nip or two before I hunt. I get it from an old Dromadi crone in the marketplace at Kahiro. She’s a fortune-teller, but I am always too busy tasting her wares to listen to much of her babble.”

Malora takes the flask. It is nearly empty, so she has to tip her head far back in order to shake a few drops onto her tongue. A strange, bitter but nutty taste invades her mouth. Suddenly, the air grows cooler and damp with mist. Bolt’s slender body has vanished from beneath her, replaced by Sky’s familiar girth. Sky springs forward from a standstill into a full gallop. Someone big is sitting behind her, making her feel as small as a little girl again, his strong arms bracing her. It is Jayke, she thinks—and yet Malora sees none of the familiar scars running up and down these arms. She cranes her neck to see who it is she is sharing the saddle with, and her breath catches.

The man mounted behind Malora is not her father. He is younger than Jayke, she can tell, even though the hair on his head, wild and wind-tossed, is silver. If such a thing is possible, this man is even bigger than Jayke, with skin the color of dark honey and eyes the gray of clouds heavy with rain. The scent of him is heady, like the way the air smells just before a thunderstorm. She opens her mouth to speak to him, but his lips close over hers and he sucks the breath right out of her. She moans far back in her throat and feels herself tumbling
off Sky’s back, down through layers of clouds as she hurtles toward the ground.

“A little goes a long way,” Neal Featherhoof says.

Malora starts and grabs Bolt’s mane to keep from falling off the mare’s back. Neal snatches the flask just as she is about to drop it.

“Yes, it does,” Malora says, righting herself and trying to settle the fluttering in the pit of her stomach, which is like none she has ever felt. “You should have warned me.”

“It affects everyone differently,” he says, tightening the lid on the flask. “I’m almost out of it. I guess it’s time to return to Kahiro.”

They settle back into stillness, scanning the terrain, looking for the distinctive, bottom-heavy profile of ostriches. Kudus and impalas come into their sights, as do zebras and giraffes, but not a single ostrich.

Feeling unsettled and restless, Malora says, “I might as well make good use of the time.” She dismounts and unfastens the rope from Bolt’s halter, then ties a loop in the frayed end. She practices tossing the loop over each of Bolt’s ears, then over the mare’s head.

“What in the world are you playing at
now
, Pet?” Neal asks.

“Something I should have thought of doing before. I am getting Bolt used to having this rope fly over her head.”

Bolt is startled at first, but after Malora has tossed the rope several more times, the mare begins to ignore it. When Malora is sure that the horse no longer fears the rope, she coils it over her shoulder and remounts and resumes the watch.