A Gathering of Wings (22 page)

Something about this is worse than her worst imaginings. “And so Athen has turned you into a tribe of horse rustlers and horse murderers.”

Mather says, “That he has. I’m glad I joined the herd after he did. With my luck, I would have drawn the white stone the first time.”

“How does Sky figure in all this?” Malora asks. Her jaw aches with unexpressed rage.

“Oh, well now. Sky … is a legend of a different order,” Mather says. “It took ten brawny centaurs to bring him in, and he killed two of them and wounded several others. But Archon figured that such a magnificent animal might keep the Beast satisfied for longer than a mere seven days. Either that or it would choke on him. So they dragged Sky to the Paddock, pegged him, and offered him up to the Beast.”

Malora’s fists are clenched. Only when she hears Mather say “The Beast apparently did not care for the taste of Sky” do her hands fall open.

“You’ve hurt yourself,” Mather says, pointing to her hand. “You’re bleeding. Did I do that to you?” he asks, sounding almost hopeful.

“No,” she says. Her fingernails have reopened the Dream
Wound. Wiping her hand on the side of her tunic, she says, “Go on, please.”

“When we went to the Paddock the next day, Sky was still there. So we simply left him there, for the next ten nights, where he remained untouched by the Beast. But on the eleventh night, the Beast came up from below and went among us. While the rest of us slept, he made off with five of the youngest centaur colts from the nursery stable.”

“The Beast ate five centaur babies?” Malora asks.

Mather nods. “The mothers were out of their minds with grief. So we removed Sky from the Paddock and put in two ponies. The Beast took the ponies—and life as we know it resumed its brutal course.”

“And because the Beast, for some reason, rejected Sky, you now consider him a god,” Malora says. This makes a crazy sort of sense to her. Sky, having withstood the attacks of the Leatherwings, has now survived the Beast from Below. Lume was right: Sky is a miracle horse.

“That’s really all I can tell you,” Mather says. “And now, before I take you to Sky, do please catch me up on the news from Mount Kheiron.”

Malora briefly tells Mather how the Apex made her his wrangler and how she won the Golden Horse. Even though she knows it will cause him pain, she tells Mather about the upcoming Harvest Jubilation, the first ever to which Flatlanders will be invited. It was at the most recent Midsummer Jubilation that Mather brawled with a Flatlander, leading to Gastin being expelled from Mount Kheiron.

“Is Gastin also here in Ixion?” Malora asks.

“Rorg, as he is now called, is here,” Mather says, his voice heavy with resentment. “They brought him in a few days after they found me, and don’t think he doesn’t enjoy the fact that here we are equals.”

“At home you would be equals now, too,” Malora says.

“Perhaps, what with all this change in Mount Kheiron, there will be a general amnesty?” Mather says, brightening. “Perhaps those who have been turned out will be given the opportunity to return—not that many of the others will take it. They all seem very happy with what they call freedom—the life of the Natural Centaur. I myself find it rather rough going. And the Beast is more terrifying, I tell you, than a whole pride of ravening lions.”

“Why doesn’t the herd move away from this place and let the Beast from Below find his own food?” Malora asks.

“Ixion is the ancestral home of the centaurs,” Mather says. “Much more so, the wild centaurs claim, than Mount Kheiron is to us.” Mather stops and cups a hand to his ear.

All Malora hears is the sound of the wind sifting through the sand, and the waves breaking on the shore beyond the dunes.

“It’s safe now,” Mather says. “Stay close to me and don’t wander off the path.”

The ground is as hard as baked clay. They pass a pen made from upright driftwood slats. From behind the slats there arises the stench of horses crowded into close, unclean quarters. Malora hears them stir and grunt and nicker hopefully. She wants to stop and whisper words of consolation to them. But she resists. It is Sky that she has come for.

They pass three more pens, all filled with horses. “It looks
like you have a good supply of sacrifices on hand,” she comments bitterly.

The narrow pathway soon lets out into a bleak valley surrounded by sandy bluffs. There is a large paddock with high rails. This is the place she dreamed about. It is the place she has struggled to find for such a long time that she can scarcely believe she is finally standing here.

“This is the Valley of the Beast,” Mather says.

The words from her dream, “Feed her to the Beast!” enter her mind.

Over to one side, away from the paddock and at the foot of one of the bluffs, is a smaller round pen with high walls tightly woven from weatherworn sticks. This is Sky’s prison. “You keep Sky in the Valley of the Beast?” Malora asks.

“He’s almost as terrifying to us as the Beast,” Mather says.

Malora walks around the pen in search of a way in. There is none. “Where is the door?” she asks.

Mather turns his palms upward. “There is none.”

“You
walled up
my horse?”

He waves his hands about. “Keep your voice down!” he whispers, his eyes wide and frantic. “We blocked off the door because he got loose from the pegs and opened the latch with his teeth. By the time we caught him he had broken into two of the pens. It took us a week to round up all the horses. That stallion is very clever with his teeth. This is the only way we could contain him.”

Malora simmers. So this is how they treat a god? “How do you feed him? How do you clean the pen?” she asks.

Mather has the grace to be ashamed. “We lower his water and feed down to him. We clean his pen not very successfully
by standing on scaffolds with rakes with very long handles. But he bites the rakes in half. In fairness to us, your horse doesn’t make it easy to care for him. One would have thought he
liked
living in his own dung.”

She leans her cane against the pen and, fitting her toes into the cracks, scales the wall. She knows she is behaving precisely as she did in her dream, but she is powerless to do anything else. She peers over and sees that the top of the pen is covered with netting.

The big horse stands with his back to her, facing into the fencing in the one space that is not covered with manure. In this small clearing, there are two buckets of dirty water attached to ropes and a half-eaten pile of dried grass. Except for his tail switching at the flies, he is immobile and listless, his coat so thickly coated with manure she can barely make out the distinctive pattern of the Leatherwing scars on his back. His right rear leg is pegged to a stake.

She asks Mather, “Why the netting? These walls are high enough to hold him.”

“The netting keeps him from flying away. You never told us that your horse could fly,” Mather says.

Malora chuckles. Sky can jump higher than any horse she has ever ridden. But she doubts even he could clear walls this high, particularly not from a standstill.

“Oh, Sky!” she sighs. “Look at you!”

Sky swings his head around, his pale eyes seeking her out.

“Up here!” she says, making a kissing noise.

Looking up, Sky wheels around and turns to face her.

“Malora!” Mather’s frantic whisper reaches her ears. “Get down! Get down
now
! They are coming! You must hide.”

“Malora, I’m leaving you!” Mather whispers. “Forgive me!”

But she only half-hears him as she leans over the top of the pen and works a hand through the netting toward Sky’s nose. She feels the warmth of his breath on her skin. Climbing up higher, she reaches down to him, bracing herself with one hand on the top of the fence. She feels a sudden sharp pain in her supporting palm where the Dream Wound has, at long last, been made real.

“I’ll get you out of there,” she says as she hears the shuffling of approaching hooves, a murmuring of voices. She starts to swing back down when the murmuring explodes into shouting.

Strong hands pluck her off the fence and bear her away. She stops struggling when she sees there are at least a dozen of them. They set her down on a mound of dried horse dung. A circle of curious, sunburnt faces stare down at her.

Like Mather, these centaurs are wild-haired, naked,
tattooed, and pierced, without any of the elegant draping of the Mount Kheiron centaurs. As Lume warned her, they are a breed apart.

“Oh, but she’s pretty!” one of them says.

Malora finds the face belonging to the voice: a female, with a high golden ponytail and big brown eyes. Except for the delicate design of a dragonfly that adorns her shoulder, her body is without decoration.
A bronca
, Malora thinks.

“What hibe
is
she?” asks a male centaur with a sword strapped around his waist. The sword is big, made for hacking and whacking. He also holds a stout spear that is taller than she is. The Peacekeepers would not stand a chance against the wild centaurs.

“I’ve never seen the like, I’ll tell you that!” another centaur says.

The centaurs jostle each other to get a closer look at her. Malora sees bejeweled daggers jutting from the belts of the females and enough spears to form a picket fence around her.

A new face enters the circle. Except for those who hold her, the centaurs back away to make room for him. “By my worthy horse half, it is one of the People!” he declares.

It is the Apex’s resonant voice and lumbering body but with Orion’s handsome face, his bright blue eyes offset by a tattooed pattern of red and orange fish scales. Just as she opted for silence in her first encounter with centaurs, so does she now.

“One of the People?” says a female with hair so fair it is nearly white. “Who knew how much like us they looked! She will fetch us a goodly sum from the scouts.”

“Calm your hooves, Tam,” Athen says. “We found her in
the Valley of the Beast. She is meant for the Beast. I say:
feed her to the Beast!
”

The other centaurs roar in agreement, pounding the ground with the butts of their spears. Malora hangs limp as they lift her up and carry her into the paddock. With surprising swiftness, they stake her to the ground, as once the Twani had tied her to a tree, only much more tightly. She struggles no more now than she did then. Then it was because she didn’t want to hurt the Twani. Now it is because she knows she cannot hope to hold her own against so many heavily armed wild centaurs.

As quickly as they came, they go, leaving her alone with a pony tethered to a fence post across the paddock from her. The shaggy, speckled pony grazes.

Poor thing, Malora thinks.

Over the top of the bluffs from the direction of the centaurs’ village, music starts up, haunting and plaintive. As if stirred up by the music, the ground begins to tremble. The pony looks up from the grass briefly and then returns to grazing with renewed intention, as if he wants to grab up all he can in the time left to him.

Suddenly the earth erupts in a giant flume of sand. The pony screams. Sand showers down, stinging the skin on Malora’s arms and legs, filling her eyes and nose and mouth. When the eruption subsides, she shakes the sand from her face, blows it out of her eyes, and spits it from her mouth. She looks over and sees that the pony is gone. A torn rope hangs swinging from the fence post.

It is just a matter of time, she thinks, before the Beast returns for her. She knows that if she cries out for Sky he will do
nothing. He will sense trouble and remain where he is. He has an instinct for saving himself that she does not begrudge him. But what if she were to invite Sky to come out and play? Wouldn’t he do just about anything to be with her, including bash his way out of the pen with his hooves?

Putting as much welcoming warmth into her voice as her parched throat will permit, she calls out to him eagerly: “Hey, Sky! It’s me again! Come on out of that pile of dung and play with me. I’m over here, boy. Just on the other side of that wall of sticks. Come on, big boy, you can do it. I know you can. They haven’t built the pen yet that can hold you.”

She has to raise her voice, for the music is louder now, more raucous and cheerful, as if the centaurs, sensing that the sacrifice has been taken, are celebrating the seven more days of safety it has bought them. Above the music, she hears Sky snorting and shuffling, followed by a loud, steady pounding: the sound of Sky’s hooves smashing through the walls of the pen.

“That’s my boy!” she urges him on.

She hears a loud splintering crack, and moments later, a dark shape looms overhead. Sky lands beside her in a cloud of dust.

“Good boy, Sky!” she says.

As the dust settles, Sky paws the ground as if to say: What are you doing lying there on the ground? I’m here, aren’t I? Get up and greet me properly!

“I need some help here,” Malora tells him.

Sky stomps and tosses his mane.

“You should be able to handle these knots, no?” She gestures with her chin to her wrist.

Sky paws the ground.

“What’s the matter? Can’t you handle it?”

He grunts and mutters, then walks over and noses her hand. His hide is lathered, and Malora is overcome by the odor of piss and dung and sweat, sweeter at this moment than all of Zephele’s wild jasmine. Up close he looks smaller than she remembers, and the bones of his shoulders and his hips seem oddly angular. He doesn’t look malnourished so much as
different
.

Sky clicks his teeth.

“Untie this knot, please,” she says. “The Beast may come back any time.”

His lips, warm and velvety, twitch against her wrist, then his teeth work at the knot until the rope falls away. Malora shakes her numb hand back into usefulness.

Untying the other three knots herself, she rises and stomps the blood back into her feet. Sky nuzzles her.

“Oh, Sky!” Tears spring to her eyes. She throws her arms around his neck and squeezes him so tightly that he lets out a snort of protest.

“I can’t help it,” she says, standing back and wiping the tears away. “I was afraid I’d never see you again.”