Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (5 page)

Thora leads Sky down to the road. Along the way, she picks up one of the sharpened pikes and walks with it, lethal end pointed at the swarming sky.

“Don’t look up,” Thora says. “If you look up, so will Sky, and he may panic. Lie low in the saddle and give him his head. He will outrun the Leatherwings and keep you safe. But just in case, use this to fend them off.”

She hands the wooden pike to Malora. “Mind you keep the point away from yourself. I’ve dipped the end in a poison serum.”

“From the seeds of the russet bush willow,” Malora says.

Thora’s face lights up. “You were paying attention after all!”

Malora nods and holds tight to the reins with one hand, to the pike with the other, as Sky prances in place. Overhead, giant wings flap. The air is acrid with smoke, and the droning of the Leatherwings is pierced by the screams of the People. For all the deadly commotion, Malora feels as if she and Thora are sealed in a dreamlike bubble of their own.

Thora leads Sky over to a large rock. For a moment, Malora’s heart lifts, thinking her mother has decided to join them after all. But instead, Thora climbs up on the rock and embraces Malora, then kisses her three times—lips, nose, and forehead. She holds Malora’s face in her hands. For some days after this, Malora will feel on the sides of her face the imprint of her mother’s fingertips.

“I love you, Daughter. Always remember that. Now run for your life, and whatever you do, don’t look up and don’t look back! At nightfall, find the biggest machatu tree and camp beneath it. Dig a hole for yourself to sleep in beneath the blanket I’ve packed for you. If the Leatherwings find you, cut Sky loose. He can take care of himself. Whatever happens, you must promise me never to return to these mountains. Prove to me once and for all that you truly are now the Daughter of the Plains.”

Thora steps down from the rock. “Let me hear you promise!”

The tone of her mother’s voice frightens Malora more than the sight of the burning roofs and the sound of screaming People and Leatherwings combined. She nods and whispers, “I promise I’ll never come back.”

Malora leans down for a last hug, but Thora smacks Sky’s flank and he shoots forward. Malora clings to the pommel,
and beneath the heavy saddle, she feels the muscles of the great animal coil and extend as he lunges through the city gates and gallops down the canyon corridor, hooves grinding against the soft red stone, carrying her away from her mother, away from the grave where her father’s bones lie, away from the life she has always known, and off into the night.

Sky carries her steadily northward. At night, they pitch camp beneath the biggest machatu tree in sight. Beneath the tree, she digs a burrow with the pickax and spends the night with the scorpions and the dung beetles rattling in her ears. She continues doing this long after it becomes apparent that the range of the Leatherwings does not extend any farther than a day’s ride from the mountains. It occurs to her that, had the People known this, they might have escaped as she has. Malora is half-tempted to ride back and tell them, but she has made a promise, so she keeps riding.

At first, Sky is the dominant one. It is as if all the training she and Jayke have invested in him over the years has been blown clean out of his head by the wild air of the plains. They trot when he wants to trot, gallop when he feels the urge, and stop to graze wherever and whenever he wishes to. Malora has no say in the matter. She is simply a passenger.

Then one night when they have stopped to make camp, she smells something wilder than usual in the air. It is a smell that makes her stop what she is doing and quiet her breathing. She swivels her head, nostrils twitching. It is a smell like raw meat and fresh dung and damp fur ruffled by a thousand different winds bearing a thousand different seeds and spores.

Malora has never seen a live one before, only a carcass brought back from a long-ago hunt. But when it slinks out from behind the trunk of the tree, she knows it is a leopard. A female, as beautiful as she is terrifying to behold. Malora is in the midst of setting a circle of rocks for their fire, but she
moves ever so slowly—slowly enough, she hopes, not to trigger an attack—to stand behind Sky.

“Smash her with your hooves, Sky,” Malora whispers to him. “Show her how fierce and mighty you are.”

Sky, who moments ago had been avidly cropping the grass at his feet, seems to have been turned to stone by the leopard’s hungry gaze. The leopard has no interest in Malora. The leopard wants fresh horse meat.

“Oh no you don’t!” Malora growls.

With one of the rocks still clutched in her hand, Malora comes out from behind Sky and steals toward the leopard, like a hunting dog bearing down on a snake. She growls low in her throat and makes herself as big as she can as she closes in on her mark. Every hair on her body stands on end, and her eyes blaze with ferocity. She waits until she is close enough to see the flecks of black in the leopard’s huge amber eyes, and then she flings the rock with all her might at the creature’s head. She clips an ear, and the leopard ducks her head and turns tail. But Malora doesn’t want merely to discourage the leopard. She wants to drive her off so that she will never return, so that her cubs waiting for their meal back in the den don’t return, either. Picking up more rocks as she goes, Malora chases after the leopard, pelting her with rock after rock after rock until the muscles of her arms burn and her throat is raw from growling.

Afterward, she stays up all night, feeding the fire, hunkered down next to a big pile of rocks, waiting for the leopard to return, but she never does.

The next morning, as horse and rider set out, Sky responds willingly to the cues Malora gives him with her legs
and feet and hands and voice. Exhausted as she is, she is giddy with the discovery that she is the leader now, the way Jayke had been the leader of the horses, the way her mother had become the leader of the women.

One day not long after this, while riding across a land of rocky outcroppings and grass-tufted hillocks, Malora hears a sudden loud snort. She swings around, thinking it might be a zebra colt strayed from the herd. But it isn’t a zebra. It is another horse, a beautiful filly, with a coat as lustrously black as Sky’s. The mare stands on a hillock, eyeing Sky, tossing her wild black mane.

“Hello!” Malora hails her.

To Sky, she says, “I think someone wants to be your friend.”

Sky, having given the mare a cursory glance, turns his back and flips his tail at her.

“Don’t you want a friend, Sky?” Malora asks. “If one of the People suddenly showed up and wanted to join us, I’d say, ‘Welcome!’ Even if it was that old basket-weaving biddy, Betts.”

After many days of being shadowed by the filly, Sky finally deigns to circle around and jog over to her, rubbing his velvety nostrils up the length of her muzzle and down again.

“Good work, Sky!” Malora crows.

She names the newest member of their small band Shadow. It is not long before Shadow’s belly bulges. In the spring, she drops twins. And so the herd begins to expand.

True to her vow to leave no horse nameless, Malora names each one as it slips out of its dam and into the world. First come Coal and Lightning. Then Silky and Raven and
Blacky and Posy. These horses, in various combinations over time, produce Charcoal, Ember, Smoke, Fancy, Streak, and Stormy.

She hears Aron’s voice ask her, “Why aren’t you naming two of them Veracity and Tenacity like in my dream?”

And Malora answers him aloud, “Because they are neither red-coated nor silver, are they?”

Although they are all as black as the depths of a moonless night, Malora knows each one as an individual. Coal is sullen and balky with small, bright eyes. Lightning is nearly as big as Sky. With teeth and lips as clever as her sire’s, she can untie any knot. Silky has a small, shy head and a tendency to wander off by herself. Raven has lopsided nostrils and likes to pull pranks, like stealing Jayke’s rope and dumping out Malora’s elephant-foot water bucket. Blacky has a scar on his neck where Posy bit him. Posy has a bite mark on her rump where Blacky bit her back. Blacky and Posy are inseparable. Charcoal has a beard of white whiskers. Ember has reddish eyes, while the whites of Smoke’s are as yellow as the yolk of an egg. Fancy has long legs and small, delicate feet with hooves that have a tendency to crack. Streak has a long hank of white hair sprouting from the center of his mane, and Stormy more than lives up to her name.

By the third spring—Malora’s fifteenth year—there are fifteen horses in Malora’s care, including Sky and Shadow. But this doesn’t count the twelve horses they have rescued from other herds or found wandering alone. These, too, are black: Oil, Flame, Ivory, Star, Butte, Sassy, Thunder, Cloud, Light Rain, Beast, and Mist. And then there is Max.

While she sometimes mixes up the horses she has rescued, Malora would know Max anywhere by his swayback covered with sores and buzzing with flies, and his huge, limpid, infinitely grateful eyes. She rescued the starving Max from a band of wild painted dogs. Max, she explains to the others—who are reluctant at first to accept the homely, half-dead bay—is the horse of her heart.

The boys and girls, she calls the horses in her herd, both the young and the old. They are in so many ways the brothers and sisters she never had. Taking care of the herd lends a comforting and relentless routine to her days. She finds herself remembering Felise, the harried mother of four. No wonder Felise was so cross all the time! Malora even catches herself sounding like Felise sometimes: “How would you boys and girls get along without me?”

Malora picks off burs and ticks, and files their hooves with sandstone; she oils their hooves with sable tallow when they split or grow ragged; she curries their coats with her own hairbrush, treats them for snakebite with the velvet bush willow, nurses them through tick-bite fever, and assists the foaling.

“You’re a poor, defenseless bunch, you are,” Malora says, for it is she who keeps her head when the predators come sidling up, hungry for horse meat. The plains swarm with predators. There are giant snakes that strangle foals, lions that maul, and teams of leopards and packs of wild painted dogs that harry and terrorize those who wander off. Her ability to defend the horses from these predators improves over time as her arsenal of weapons expands. With the little knife Thora gave her, she whittles wood to fashion weapons: spears
and slings to fling rocks, clubs and daggers and ever larger and more powerful bows with which to shoot ever sharper and surer and swifter arrows. Thora was right. The little knife has saved her life, and the horses’, too.

“You ungrateful boys and girls never give me a moment’s peace, do you!” Malora carps at them on bad days. But the boys and girls forgive her these moods. They have their ways of showing their gratitude, with the warmth of their bodies and their honest, steadfast companionship. As she leads her herd from one grazing ground to another, from one watering hole to the next, she keeps up a running patter with them. They respond to her with knowing bobs of their heads and skeptical sidelong looks, with interested flicks of their ears and contrary whips of their tails, with defiant tossing of their manes and stubborn stomping of their hooves, with a vast and intricate vocabulary of nickers and whinnies and licks and neighs and snorts and nibbles and nips. But never, of course, with words.

In the end, it is the words—the small talk with Thora, in particular—that Malora craves the most. She longs for it with a ferocity that sometimes strikes her dumb, lasting for days until Max comes up to her and places his slightly rank head directly over her heart. This gesture of sympathy always makes her burst into the kind of tears the mothers of the Settlement would have lauded. A good, loud squall always brings an end to the sulks, and Malora feels much better afterward, at least for a while.

Every night, as she lies in her great warm nest of slumbering horses, her thoughts return to Thora. In her mind,
her mother praises her for the job she is doing, keeping safe, keeping the horses safe, staying away from the mountains to the south and the enemy to the north. Even Jayke, from his hole of bones, speaks to Malora, advising her how to make the best traps and snares and nets and stews, how to skin and cure and fashion leather into clothing and shoes and bags for storage and water. She breaks her shoulder when Shadow bolts beneath her during a thunderstorm, and it is the voice of her father that instructs her to tear her old hooded robe into strips and bind her shoulder to her body. It is the voice of her mother that guides her to the place where the healing plant called bone knit grows.

In the third spring of her wanderings, when Malora’s shoulder is free of the binding but still stiff, she decides that she can fend off any number of Leatherwings for the chance to see and hear her mother again. On that day—a day when the earth lies stunned beneath shimmering waves of heat—she turns Sky and the herd southwest and makes her way back to the mountains, back to the Settlement, against her mother’s wishes but somehow helpless to do otherwise.

As Malora rides, she wonders with rising excitement what her mother will say when she sees her. Two of the mares, Silky and Posy, will foal soon, and Malora will be able to show Thora how she has learned to midwife the birthing. And won’t Thora be amazed at how tall she has grown? Malora now measures up to the middle of Sky’s neck. The red robes and tunics have all been torn up and used for bandages and rags and fishnets and water filters. She wears a short tunic made from a leopard she slew, skinned, cured, and stitched
together with reebok sinew. Her hair hangs in a long, snarled tail. Her mother will not approve of this, but who has time to brush hair when there is a herd of horsehide and manes and tails to groom and tend? Under the circumstances, Malora thinks that her mother will forgive her. And, if not, then Thora at least will have the satisfaction of once more running a brush through her daughter’s hair as they sit and make small talk far into the night.

As Malora leads the herd loping toward the rising mountains, then trotting single file down the narrow canyon path to the Settlement, she knows something is amiss when Sky pulls up at the gates and refuses to go any farther. Malora sits stock-still in the saddle and listens.