A Gathering of Wings (36 page)

Najeeb shrugs. “I was a bit of an upstart. This way, please.”

They are in a field of sand and dune grass, densely packed with rectangular huts made from sticks of driftwood lashed together with sinew. The skins stretched across the frames are decorated with colorful designs: flowers and shells and birds and insects. Crushed seashells forming more decorative patterns pave the paths between the stalls. It flashes through Malora’s thoughts that this is a primitive version of Mount Kheiron.

“What about Sunshine?” Malora says.

Zephele freezes. She turns slowly, her eyes filling. “My poor, foolish Twan, in an attempt to save me, charged my abductors. She impaled herself on one of their spears before he could stop her. I saw it with my own eyes. The wild centaur was very sorry.”

“Did Farin Whitewithers also run into a spear?” Malora presses.

Zephele turns away. “I wouldn’t know. I had the sack over my head. They insisted upon it even though I put up no struggle. Archon considered what you did to be an act of war, and I was a prisoner of war. But as soon as we got here, all he wanted to do was show off Ixion to me so that I would appreciate how superior life here was to that in Mount Kheiron.”

“And do you find it superior?” Malora asks.

“Of course not,” she says with a laugh. “Not for me, at least. But there are very many for whom it is.”

They pass a hut that looks no less humble than its neighbors. “Archon lives here with his wife, Tam. Their children stay in the nursery stable, along with all the other young ones. The children here are very happy. Happier than the children of Mount Kheiron, I dare say. Better fed than the Flatlanders and freer than the Highlanders.”

“Your brother has
children
?” Malora asks.

Zephele’s face softens. “I am an aunt five times over.” She claps a hand over her mouth. “I have forgotten to tell Orrie that he is an uncle. Oh well, he will find out soon enough.”

They come to a stall that looks nearly twice as large as the others. “Najeeb does a brisk business there.”

“Business?” Malora asks.

“He is a needler as well as a healer,” she says.

“What is a needler?”

“He makes the body glyphs,” she says. “He is an artist. Aren’t you, Najeeb?”

“I am a
pain
artist,” he says with a wicked cackle. A single tooth overlaps his upper lip like a snake’s fang. His face and head are as rough and sparsely hairy as a coconut, but his eyes are beady and intelligent.

Every inch of the stretched parchment is crowded with pictures set at odd angles, squeezed in without regard for composition.

“These are some of the designs one can choose from,” Zephele says.

While Malora removes the makeshift harness from Sky, she scans the pictures and recognizes snakes and rabbits from
the bodies of centaurs she has seen in the crowd. She sees the leopard and tiger that decorate Mather’s arms as well as the delicate dragonfly that Zephele has embroidered on her shawl.

Najeeb holds aside the skin door as the two centaur escorts, careful not to touch the wounded arm, help Neal out of the sling and into the stall. Neal sags against them. Zephele and Malora follow them into the dim interior. They pass a worn wooden table at the center of which embers glow in a brazier. A pot of water boils, tended by a female centaur very nearly as old as Najeeb. Around the brazier is a rush mat spattered with colored ink. Seashells in a neat half-circle hold the inks next to a tray displaying a lethal array of needles. Gingerly, Malora picks one up.

“The spines of sea urchins,” Najeeb explains.

“The wild centaurs embroider their flesh,” Malora says, setting the needle down with distaste.

“You might say that,” Najeeb says, grinning. “They glory in their bodies.”

“You say ‘they,’ ” Malora says. “Aren’t you one of them?”

“Yes, but I am old,” he says. “I was old when I came here and I am older still now.” He gestures to his thin arms and legs. “There is very little left to glory in. I can at least help others glory in theirs.”

The centaurs have taken Neal to the back of the stall, where a bed of straw is covered with a clean blanket. They lower him down onto the side that is not wounded.

“Thank you,” Najeeb says, dismissing the young centaurs.

The old female centaur wordlessly brings forth the pot of steaming water. Najeeb lifts Neal’s arm. He groans as the healer unwraps the wound. He dips a sponge in the water and
swabs the wound. Zephele, averting her eyes, holds Neal’s hand. She has turned very nearly as pale as Neal.

“The horn of the Beast makes a very clean cut!” Najeeb declares with relish.

When he is finished, he wraps the wound in a fresh, clean cloth. The old female, who has been brewing something rank-smelling over the brazier, hands Najeeb a cup. Najeeb lifts Neal’s head. Neal slurps up what is in the cup. Although he makes a terrible face, the lines of pain etched around his mouth and eyes begin to ease.

“He will sleep, and while he sleeps he will sweat out the toxins. Nakira will stay with him and ply him with water.”

“Can I stay with him, too?” Zephele asks.

“You should rest, my child. You have been through a terrible ordeal. But I am glad to see that the Beast has left you unharmed.”

He looks down at Neal and smooths the damp hair off his forehead. “As for this young brave, he is to be congratulated. He has liberated us from the monstrous masters from below. And now, what will we do with ourselves?” He chuckles softly to himself.

“Stop killing horses?” Neal murmurs without opening his eyes.

“Thank you!” Malora says, for she could not have said it better herself.

“Ah yes,” Najeeb says, his bright eyes finding Malora. “You are the miscreant who stole all of our horses, leaving us defenseless.”

“I
saved
those horses,” Malora says.

“After we discovered the horses were all gone, we sent out
a raiding party. But as luck would have it, there were no caravans passing through and no horses to be found within ten days’ ride. Archon refused to hold a lottery. That would be marching backward into barbarism, he claimed. Instead, he posted a guard of twenty on the empty paddock, including himself, and when the Beast came up for his horse, they went at him with everything they had. When the dust settled, three of the centaurs lay gored and dying. Another was dragged down below to the Beast’s lair, screaming.” As he speaks, Najeeb smiles at Malora in a strangely gentle fashion.

Malora stares back at him, numb with shock. She hadn’t given much thought to what would happen to the wild centaurs without the horses. She assumed they would simply round up more in time for the next sacrifice.

“Come outside in the sunlight, dearest,” Zephele says. She rubs Malora’s arms as if she were cold rather than guilt-stricken.

The sun in Malora’s eyes nearly blinds her. Sky and Baby are waiting. Sky nuzzles her, and Baby butts her knee. She strokes them both absently, in a daze.

“Please don’t fret,” Zephele says. “I still think what you did was right. And everything turned out perfectly in the end, didn’t it? The monsters are dead, at least the two most fearsome ones, and the world is now a safer place for centaurs, horses, and caravans. I wonder what will happen to the third beast? They will mostly likely bury her alive in the morning. Imagine how flattered I was to learn that my brother was so angry to have lost me, he was willing to give up the treasure. The treasure was just legend, of course. None of them had ever seen it with their own eyes, although many have died
trying. I think the wild centaurs thought of it as being theirs. And I suppose it is, now.”

“
Four
centaurs …” is all Malora can say.

Zephele bows her head. “Archon took pains to introduce me to their widows and mothers when I first came.”

Malora rouses herself enough to remark in a dull voice, “You call him Archon.”

“I do, don’t I?” Zephele seems surprised. “I suppose that’s how I think of him now. Malora, I know it’s terrible that the wild centaurs sacrificed horses and, worse, killed witnesses at the scene of their crimes, but this is my brother and my cousin and my uncle’s brother and my mother’s friend’s daughter, and my best friend’s older sister.… They are a bit rough around the edges—some of them even savage, yes—but they are also my kin and my countrymen, and I have tried very hard to understand the forces that caused them to behave in such a reprehensible fashion.”

Malora stares at Zephele so intently that Zephele, catching her lower lip in her teeth, adds, her voice laced with doubt, “Isn’t that the right thing to do, rather than be angry and vengeful? Isn’t that what Kheiron would want me to do?”

Malora smiles. “I don’t know about Kheiron, but I am very proud of you.”

“Will Belerephon bite?” A pretty little centaur hovers outside Najeeb’s stall. She has a fountain of rippling golden hair and big brown eyes. A firefly glyph adorns her shoulder. Malora recognizes her from the circle of centaurs that bore down upon her in the paddock.

“His name is Sky, Duna, not Belerephon, and he won’t bite,” Zephele says. “He is a very good horse.”

“Archon told me I would find you here. I am so happy that you are alive, Moonbeam!”

“Moonbeam?”
Malora says, darting Zephele a look.

Zephele shrugs. “That was my tribal name. This is my hostess and stall mate, Duna. Isn’t she the most impossibly pretty thing?” Zephele fusses with Duna’s hair, tucking errant strands back into the ponytail. “Duna and I did nothing but talk, talk, talk, didn’t we, dear? She is quite curious about the world outside of Ixion. And I was curious about Ixion, so it
suited. Duna dear, this is the extraordinary friend I told you about. This is Malora.”

Duna steeples her fingers beneath her chin. She clears her throat expectantly. At a suggestive nod from Zephele, Malora steeples her own fingers.

“I, Duna, am at your service,” she says, bowing over her steepled hands, her golden ponytail flopping over her face.

“I, Malora, am happy that you are,” Malora says, for want of something better to say.

“Archon wants me to show you to the seaside, where we are preparing for the feast,” Duna says.

“Didn’t I tell you the wild centaurs loved their feasts?” Zephele says. “I never saw such a group for celebrating. We Kheironites are staid and restrained by comparison.”

“Shouldn’t you rest?” Malora asks.

Zephele makes a face. “Why? Neal and I are alive and in love. I have my own cause for celebration.”

Duna leans in close and whispers behind her hand, “I would very much like to meet your brother. You told me he was handsome, but I never imagined he was
this
handsome! I saw him being led down the seaside path. We can catch him if we hurry.”

“Oh, my brother is quite the catch, all right,” Zephele says, her smile impish. Zephele is in her matchmaker mode and, thinks Malora, wanting nothing more than to dash the hopes of so many eligible females back home.

“We mustn’t waste any more time,” Duna says. “Come!”

They follow her away from the field of stalls along a winding path through the dunes. The sun is hot as it beats down on the top of Malora’s head, but the breeze blowing in from
the sea cools it. She finds the combination almost unbearably sensual. How long had they been underground? A day? Two days? She has no idea. She wants to soak up the sun like a sea sponge.

They emerge from the dunes and there it is, shining like a million diamonds on a vast tray: the sea. Sky and Baby wander off in search of edible plants. Malora follows Zephele and Duna in a state of bedazzlement. The sun on the sand sparkles. The shore is swarming with life. Seagulls dip and squawk and skim the surface of the ruffled sea. Smaller birds scamper along the wet sand, chasing the waves on twiglike legs. A group of young centaur stallions near the shoreline is playing a game with some sort of a gourd wrapped in a net. They are galloping back and forth, shouting and kicking up a great deal of sand.

“Sand rally,” Duna says. “The object is to touch the ball with only your head and hooves.”

Malora sees centaur children making sand sculptures and older ones digging a pit in the sand. Others stand beneath a canopy sorting catch on long driftwood planks: tiny silver fish and shells and crabs. Further down the shore, Malora sees Athen, along with others, wading into the surf and hauling a huge dripping net loaded with fish.

“Look there,” says Zephele, pointing at the waves closer at hand.

A group of young male centaurs is submerged in the water just beyond the line of the breaking surf. Their ponytailed heads rise and fall with the churning sea. One of them—Malora thinks it is Drift—shouts and waves at Zephele and Duna. Then, seemingly as one, the young centaurs rise up on
a swell and ride the curl of a large wave as it rolls toward the land and breaks on the shore. They stagger up onto the shingle, pausing just long enough to hoot and shake the water from their hides and ponytails. Then they dash back into the surf with fearless abandon.

“That, my dear, is wave riding,” Zephele says.

“I want to try it,” Malora says.

“Oh, you will, I’m sure,” Zephele says.

“There he is!” Duna says, pointing inland.

Orion and Honus are farther up the shore where the dunes start, helping wild centaurs to stack driftwood. Orion waves them over.

“How is Neal?” he asks Zephele as they approach. His eyes take in Duna in a way Malora has never seen him look at the females back home. There is, she thinks, a suggestion of heat in those cool blue eyes.

“Sleeping,” Zephele says. “Najeeb says it is a clean wound.”

“That’s good.” He turns to Duna, steeples his hands, and bows to her. “I, Orion Silvermane, am at your service.”

The way he says it, it seems to mean rather more than wild centaur custom would dictate. Duna blushes to the roots of her hair and returns the greeting. Malora catches Honus’s eye. He winks.

“Our hosts have favored us with a little refreshment to tide us over until the feast,” the faun says, bringing forth a wooden plank tray on which there are juicy sections of cut fruit and flakes of dried fish along with something dark green Malora doesn’t recognize.