Centauriad 1 - Daughter of the Centaurs (7 page)

Over the howling and shrieking of the horses and the harsh scraping of their hooves against the canyon rock, Orion hears an ominous rumbling sound. Can there be a second herd of Furies on the way? Then he feels a sudden downdraft of icy-cold air on the back of his neck. Before he can appreciate how refreshing this feels, he looks up.

A vast and unfathomable purple-blackness has moved in from the south, boiling over the mountains, seething with moisture and bristling with needles of lightning. A deafening
clap of thunder draws exclamations of alarm from the other centaurs.

“Hurry, Excellence!” West runs alongside Orion, bounding on all fours as he herds Orion downhill, slipping and sliding. “Brace yourself. Here it comes!”

The next moment, freezing-cold rain bursts from the sky. Soaking wet, Orion and West arrive under the overhang seconds after the others have also taken refuge. Stomping their boots, the centaurs brush the rain from their hair and tails and wraps. The Twani shake themselves from head to toe, expelling fine clouds of mist. Then, pink tongues unfurled, they begin grooming with their usual thoroughness. Water sluices down the overhang and makes it seem as if they are standing behind a wide waterfall. Suddenly, the group—centaur and Twan alike—goes silent and still, staring into the watery blur before them. Over the roar of the storm, Orion can make out the shrieks of the wild horses as they fight for their lives in the canyon.

Then the rain stops, as abruptly as it began. The sun comes out, striking the rocks with a slick glaze the color of henna. Orion shivers. The rain has drastically cooled the air. West scampers out into the mud and looks up at the sky, then all around him. He nods and beckons to the others.

“Watch your footing in the muck, Your Fine Excellences,” he tells them, licking the back of his hand and running it over his face, first one side and then the other, to wash away the mud splash.

Gingerly, the centaurs splash out from beneath the overhang. From the direction of the canyon, Orion hears a bleak, hollow dripping sound. The horses are silent. He feels an
overwhelming sadness, that all that power and beauty should be stilled and silenced so quickly. Then there comes a sloshing sound, followed moments later by a mighty crack. Water bulges monstrously out of the canyon and crashes over the barricade.

West throws back his head and screams at the sky, “Flash flood! Head for higher ground!”

Frantically, everyone scrambles uphill, all except for Orion. He has to find her. Vaguely aware of West calling out to him, he heads downhill, toward the foaming red river that teems with the bodies of horses. He sees that some are dead, floating sideways like abandoned rafts. Others, stiff-necked and white-eyed with terror, come flailing out of the canyon.

Then he sees her, with her long red hair streaming with water as she races along on the current.

Orion looks around for a stick and sees that a wrangler’s long pole has washed downhill. He grabs it and holds the loop out over the river just as the female centaur shoots past. Snagging the loop over her neck and around her shoulders, he braces his hooves and pulls with all his strength.

Back straining against the current, he feels the weight of her, surprisingly light, lift clear of the water and swing toward him, like cargo in the net of a ship’s boom. Losing his footing, he falls backward, smashing his tailbone and rendering himself momentarily senseless with pain.

When the agony subsides, he gapes at what lies on the muddy bank before him.

Having struggled for so long to hold her head above the floodwaters, Malora suddenly realizes that she is no longer in the water at all, and that it is her own sopping hair, plastered across her face, that is smothering her. Lifting her arm, she clears the hair from her face and looks around. At first, she thinks she is surrounded by a crowd of the People on horseback. Men! They sit astride compact but beautifully conformed horses. She opens her mouth to hail them, and then realizes with a visceral jolt that these are not the People! They are something else altogether, something she has never seen or heard of before, some sublime and unearthly combination of human and horse.

Her next thought, irrational though she knows it to be, is that the bones of the horses and the bones of the People have sprung from their mass grave in the Settlement and become these splendid creatures. With their proud human heads and muscular torsos merging with the powerful yet shapely equine
forelegs and body, surely they are made up of the best features of human and horse. And yet, unlike the horses in her herd, these creatures have hides of all colors, some gray, some black, some golden, some white with brown splotches, with as much variety in the color of their human skin and hair.

One of them, with a hide of dappled gray and a head of black wiry hair, steps forward. He holds a cloth of pale green to his nose and stares at Malora with a look of withering contempt. Then he opens his mouth and out comes a loud, braying voice: “By the Blessed Hand! It’s a
human being
!”

Malora scowls at him, dislike seeping through her like the poison from a puff adder.

“Yes! It’s one of the People,” another of them whispers in a voice filled with something—awe, perhaps? “What a remarkable specimen. Honus will be
thrilled
.” He stares at Malora with blue eyes as clear and startling as a splash of cold water. His skin is sun-burnished, and both his hair and hide are a lustrous black. If Sky were to become part-human, wouldn’t he look like this creature? But this creature seems younger than Sky and smaller and more compact, with a face that still holds some of the roundness of a child. “I am truly impressed!”

Malora is about to open her mouth and thank him when the donkey-toned one says, “Impressed! How can you say that, little brother? The Apex will be
disgusted
. Just look at her, Orion. She’s wild and filthy. No wonder we killed them all off.”

The little brother replies in a cold voice, “Well, obviously, and quite possibly fortunately, we did not altogether succeed.”

“That’s quite all right,” the older brother says with a wolfish grin. “We can address that unfortunate omission here and now.”

Malora is outraged. Then, as she listens to the exchange between brothers, understanding slowly begins to dawn. These creatures are the ancient enemy, the ones living to the north that her mother warned her against—and here she is, surrounded by them!

“Look at her,” says the brayer, his lip curling. “Not so much as a glimmer of refinement in those cold, dead eyes of hers.”

My eyes are
not
dead, Malora thinks. They are full of life, the same color as my father’s, and they are beautiful. Hadn’t Thora always said so? How dare he insult her and her father? Malora rises up from the mud and goes at him with fists and feet, clawing and kicking.

The one named Orion stands clear of the fray and says in a bemused fashion, “My, she’s quite strong, isn’t she, Theon? And
angry
. It’s almost as if she understands what you said and is taking issue with you.”

Suddenly, Malora feels many hands on her, needle-clawed, pulling her off the brayer. She needs her little knife. Where is her knife? With a sinking feeling, she realizes she has no knife. Her knife is in her saddlebag. Her saddlebag is on Sky. And where is Sky? She hadn’t been riding Sky when they fell into the trap. She had been riding Lightning, stretched out across the mare’s back, exhausted and in a sort of grief-stricken swoon. This would never have happened if she and Sky had been acting together. But now she is in the clutches of the enemy. It is then that Malora notices that
the needle-clawed hands holding her belong to yet another strange order of being she has never seen.

Coming up no higher than her waist, they have short legs encased in knee-high boots and bodies clad in belted tunics. While they appear at first to be miniature men, their faces are flatter, their bodies (what she can see of them) are covered with pale, almost translucent fur, and their eyes are not at all the eyes of men. They are the eyes of cats. Tame cats, Malora thinks. But are even domesticated cats really tame?

She stops struggling and stares down at them, fascinated in spite of herself. She remembers that in the Hall of the People, beneath the floor, was a large chest containing vast treasures: the Grandparents’ Box. Aron had first shown the chest to her when she was little and, over the years, they returned to it often to marvel at its wonders. The chest overflowed with mysterious objects whose function they could only guess at, with strange little black boxes, with precious jewels and fabrics, and with a number of mold-ridden items that Aron called books. The most interesting of these books had colored pictures in it, showing a tall, handsome man and a cat who stood on its hind legs, wearing a wide-brimmed, plumed hat and high boots. Aron’s grandmother had told him the cat’s name. It was Pussemboos. These little cat-men call to Malora’s mind Pussemboos, except that they have human ears and no tails and—save for their short, bandy legs—human bodies. There are four of these pussemboos, two clinging to each arm. As her eye travels from one to the next, they return her gaze, calm and unblinking. She swears she can hear, escaping through the neat little purses of their lips, a rumbling, rattling purr.

The high whinny of a horse distracts her. She looks up to see the other cat-men, five or six to a rope, hauling the horses out of the river and leading them over to a pen. The cat-men treat the horses gently and with skill. She remembers the cats in the Settlement and how, when they came to the barn to hunt the mice, they would wind their lithe bodies around the horses’ legs, fearless and oddly compatible with much larger animals capable of crushing them with a single hoof. She is about to say something to the cat-men but decides instead to hold her tongue.

Meanwhile, the two brothers are still arguing over Malora’s fate. Finally, the younger one throws up his arms. “I will engage no further with you, Theon!” he shouts. “There will be no slaying. Enough life has been lost today. We will keep her.”

Keep
her? Who is he to
keep
her, Malora fumes. She is no one’s pet!

“Bind her up, just to be safe,” he says to the cat-men holding her.

While she could easily swing these pussemboos over her head and dash them against the tree, Malora allows them to tie her arms behind her back and bind her to the base of the machatu tree. She overhears their talk and understands that they mean her no harm. They are only following the orders of the horse-men, who are obviously their masters. Although they speak with an odd inflection, both the cat-men and the horse-men speak the language of the People. Had the horse-men, Malora wonders, when they defeated the People and drove them into the wilderness, stolen their language as well as their homeland?

Sky is gone. Malora knows this much. Had he been close at hand, he would have come crashing into their midst, untied the knots, and set her free. He is alive, somewhere. She senses him running free, even as she watches the little cat-men straining to drag off the bodies of Streak and Smoke and Mist and either Sassy or Butte—she can’t tell from this distance. Somewhere far off, she knows that Sky’s legs are churning, carrying him away even as the pussemboos, one by one, round up the surviving horses and herd them into a pen made out of a circle of ironwood tree trunks pounded into the earth.

Malora is struck by the irony, for it is one of her father’s pens. His pens, the wood silvery with age, dot these canyons like the ruins of other lost civilizations hereabout. How unhappy it would make Jayke to know that one of his pens is now being used to trap Malora’s herd. The herd isn’t particularly happy about it, either. Without Sky or Malora, they mill about, ears pinned, nipping at each other’s flanks.

Bound to the base of the tree, Malora watches her captors from behind the thicket of her hair. Close to the pen, the pussemboos pitch camp for the horse-men, who lounge about in the grass on their haunches, twirling wildflowers in their fingers, laughing and talking.

“That storm,” one of the horse-men says, “saved us. It brought us the horses, and it took away the heat.”

“The human brings us good fortune,” Orion, the blue-eyed centaur, says. The others pelt him with pebbles, but Malora can tell it is meant in fun.

The pussemboos erect a wide half circle of pretty silken
tents striped blue and white. As the tents billow in the late-afternoon breeze, they give off a spicy perfume.

Malora surveys the camp as it gradually takes shape before her. One of the tents appears to be meant for bathing. A line of horse-men proceeds into the tent while, from above, one of the pussemboos stands on a ladder and directs a spray of steaming water down on them. The horse-men emerge from the other side of the tent, rosy-skinned and wrapped in fleece. From there, they disappear into other tents and emerge dressed some time later.

Malora has to keep her jaw from dropping, for their fashion of dress is splendid. The horse-men wrap their bodies in a shimmering fabric that drapes over one shoulder, leaving the other bare, and winds around their bodies clear down to their horse tails and hiding their private parts. Malora can tell that the garments are made from one piece of cloth, beautifully woven. She wonders how they avoid soiling the fabric when they need to relieve themselves. Around their necks, arms, and waists are bands and chains of silver and gold studded with precious stones.

Other than what was preserved in the Grandparents’ Box, the People never knew fine fabrics but dressed in simple clothing, coarsely woven wools dyed red to help them blend in with the canyon. The People’s precious silver and gold was also kept in the box. Surely, flaunting all their finery in the open like this, these horse-men must be powerful princes, like the human companion of Pussemboos.

Malora finds herself longing to wash off the mud and douse herself in spicy scents and wrap her body in shimmering
finery and gold. These lush trappings of civilization draw her, like a wild animal to a hearth. She toys with the idea of making peace with these creatures and going north, she and the horses, to live among them. But how can she win them over now that she has started things off so badly? She needs a plan worthy of Thora, and right now she is too hungry to think straight, much less form a plan.