by Amanda Leduc
He is gentle with her, at first, and then not. He is a man reaching up from a well. His hands in her hair, between her legs. His cock inside of her like its own story, searching for some kind of happy ending. She holds his face between her hands and lets him take whatever he wants.
When they finish, they lie together until the girls start to scream again—sometimes minutes, sometimes a little longer.
One night, in those scant seconds of time before the babies start up again, he asks, “Where did you go?” He is stretched out behind her on the bed, his arm over her stomach. “Just now.”
She pretends to not understand. “I’m right here.”
“No, you’re not,” he says. He isn’t angry, or accusing. He is just tired. “You never are.”
She says nothing. He is silent for so long she thinks he’s gone to sleep.
“I love you,” he says, finally.
Yes, she thinks, he does. She reaches for his hand and squeezes it. “I love you too.”
Then the babies start up again; she pushes his arm away and slides out of the bed.
THE GOOSE GIRL
Once there was a girl who looked after the geese for the queen. In the mornings she brought the geese out of their enclosure and let them run around the yard; in the afternoons she would herd them down to the royal pond and let them paddle in the water and eat the water plants. Before dinner, the queen would come to the pond and visit the geese, bringing them lettuce from the royal kitchens, which she fed to them, piece by piece, her royal gown dipping into the scummy pond water each time she bent forward with a morsel in her fingers.
The geese loved the queen. They loved her more than they loved the goose girl, the tender of their home and protector of their eggs. Each time the queen got up to leave, they would follow her back to the castle, a line of waddling white bodies that made the castle staff—and the townspeople, when they saw them—chuckle. The queen would let the geese trail her until she reached the castle door. Then she would turn and smile at them and tell them they could go no further.
“You belong in the pond,” she would say. “That is your table. You do not belong at mine.” Then she would close the castle door.
Each time this happened, the geese would wait in a cluster until the goose girl came to fetch them. She would coax them home with bread, even though the queen had forbidden this—Geese should eat roots and stems, she said, and she wasn’t wrong—and herd them back down to the pond and from there to their enclosure. It was the goose girl’s job to make sure the geese were safely tucked away at night so that the foxes wouldn’t eat them. Each night she walked the geese up into their coop—a larger, more elegant one than had been built for the chickens—and made sure they were settled in their nests before closing the coop door and locking it tight.
Every night, before she closed the door, the geese asked her the same question.
“Why can’t we eat at the queen’s table?” they said. “Why won’t she have us, if indeed she loves us so?”
“The queen eats bread,” the goose girl told them. “And bread is not good for you.”
“But you feed us bread,” the geese retorted.
“I feed you bread only when you will not listen,” the goose girl said. “If you come with me when I tell you to, I will not feed you bread anymore.”
The oldest of the geese was a matriarch named Dorrie. When she heard this from the goose girl, she shook her head. “But if you give us bread until we listen,” she said, “then what’s to stop us from ignoring you all of the time? You are the goose girl, but you make no sense. Why should we listen to you at all?”
“Who keeps you safe?” The goose girl was growing annoyed. “Who takes you out into the sun each day, and brings you down to the pond so you can splash in the water and attend on the queen? Who makes sure that you’re protected from the foxes? You are ungrateful, goose, and it is very unbecoming.”
“I am not ungrateful,” said Dorrie. “I want to know why I am not good enough for the queen’s table when the queen’s royal gown is good enough for my pond.”
The goose girl looked at Dorrie, then sighed. “Only the queen can tell you that,” she said. “Would you like to ask her yourself?”
“Yes,” Dorrie said. “I would.”
The goose girl made sure that the rest of the geese were locked safely in the coop, and then took Dorrie back to the castle. When the soldier at the door saw Dorrie, he shook his head and refused to let them enter. In response, Dorrie reared up and beat her wings in the air. She was the largest of the geese, and her wings stretched six feet from tip to tip. She beat the guard over the head so hard that he fell; when other guards came running, Dorrie squawked so loud the entire castle heard her.
“Let her in!” the goose girl shouted, and this time the guards obeyed.
When they got to the dining hall, the queen was already standing.
“Dorrie,” she said, in her most regal voice. “Dorrie, what’s all this?”
“I want to sit at your table,” Dorrie said.
“Silly goose,” the queen said. “Geese do not sit at my table—that’s why you have a pond.”
“The world is larger than my pond!” Dorrie cried. “The world is larger than my coop, than the yard, and larger even than your castle. I am not a silly goose.”
The queen looked down at Dorrie, then sighed. “Very well. Come here, Dorrie, and sit down.” She pulled a great chair out from the table and motioned for Dorrie to take it. Dorrie climbed in without difficulty. She wrapped her wings around the silver fork and knife at her place and looked up at the queen.
“That is better,” she said. “Where is the bread?”
“There is no bread,” the queen said. “We are having goose for dinner.” Then she slit Dorrie’s throat with the knife she’d been hiding up her sleeve. Dorrie could do nothing except watch her blood spill out onto the tablecloth. When her eyes finally closed, the queen nodded to her servants.
“Clean that up,” she said. Then she went back to her meal.
The goose girl, unnoticed, slipped out of the dining hall and away from the castle. She crept into the farmyard and unlocked the coop and brought the geese out, one by one, and told them what had happened to Dorrie.
“I won’t feed you bread anymore,” she said. “The world is much larger than bread, and far more delicious. You deserve to know that for yourselves.”
Then the goose girl and her geese took leave from the kingdom, and were not heard from again.
4
Estajfan runs alone. He’s always run alone. In the mornings he’s gone before Petrolio and the others are even awake. His gallop down the mountain is a whirlwind of light and sound, a tangled fall of dark trees and leaves—in the bitter winter wind, in the summer with the rush and hint of morning sun to come. He jumps and he lands and he lunges and jumps again, his arms spread for balance, his muscles tensing and releasing over and over again.
It feels good to be alive in these moments, possibly because he knows it could all change so quickly—one hoof snagged and down he would go, a foreleg snapped, tumbling in a different way, the weight of his body the thing, in the end, that will kill him. But he doesn’t stumble. He runs and jumps, and always his hooves land exactly where they should. He doesn’t break.
When the mountain meets the ground, he keeps on running. He runs until he reaches the edge of the mountain forest and can see the houses and their already overgrown yards through the trees. And then he stops, and waits.
The ground magic is different here, where the earth is flat. It used to be louder, but it has been muffled by the human houses and human roads, by the pipes that run underground and disrupt the dirt.
It’s getting louder now, day by day.
The trees are moving slowly south—half an inch this day, half an inch the next. He feels them stretch their roots beneath the soil and inch fo
rward the way caterpillars inch along their branches. The way that vines are inching over the houses. The way that slowly, slowly, the human city is sinking back into the green.
No one has noticed this yet, he thinks, except perhaps for Heather.
They will notice soon enough.
He hears her footsteps on the sidewalk long before she comes into view. The city is so quiet now. There are cars, but only rarely—there is no power, so the houses do not rumble and shake. There are noises now and then from the centre of the town, but nothing like they used to be. It isn’t hard to hear the ground bring her close to him. That gait—tap-TAP, tap-TAP—that belongs only to her.
He sinks into the trees as she comes into view. She will go into the forest as far as she is able, and walk amongst the trees with her girls. She tells them stories, or she weeps silently as they wail to the sky.
She is looking for him. He knows she is always looking for him.
* * *
When he was younger, he ran only at night. He ran down the mountain and past the city nestled in its shadow—beyond the foothills, beyond the rivers. He ran through the flatlands—keeping always in the shadows and away from human roads. When he needed to hide, the ground told him where was safe.
Their father had also been restless. Gone from the mountains for days at a time as a horse, and gone for days at a time in his new life as an in-between thing, hiding the way that Estajfan would eventually learn to do. He came back to the mountain with clothing and toys and all manner of human paraphernalia—pots and pans, books that he shelved on a structure he made from dead trees. At night he told his children stories of their village, even though Estajfan had known, from the time he was small, that they did not belong there. Not as a family. He knew their father went back to the village and roamed it at night when everyone was sleeping. The toys that he brought them, the tools that he used to build things on the mountain—all of this came from the village and smelled of the past.
After their father died, Petrolio had wanted to fling these things off the mountain. But Estajfan couldn’t bear to let them go. He wanted more of it—the touch of the human world, the things they made. His longing for their father was so great it brought him down into the world their father had forbidden them to see—down into the midnight darkness of the flatlands, past these squat human houses all bursting with things. He crept through the trees and watched humans make their way down cobblestone streets. The gas lamps on the sides of their roads, the chugging power of the trains.
When he came back up from his first run, Aura met him on the mountain trail.
“Da told us not to go down,” she said.
“Da isn’t here anymore.”
“You want to honour him. So do I.” Her voice was thick with pain.
“Our whole life has been the mountain,” he said. “But what if it can be more than that?”
“They’ll hurt you,” she said. In the moonlight her blue-green eyes seemed frightened and huge and her blonde hair shone white. “They won’t understand.”
“How do you know that? Have you ever been down?” When she didn’t say anything, he felt his bones soften in shock. “You have?”
“Not really,” she said, quickly. “Only in dreams.”
“Dreams,” he repeated, looking at her. He didn’t dream, and neither did Petrolio, but he knew enough about dreams to understand that they weren’t real. “So you don’t actually know what the humans would do.”
“I know what they did to Da,” she said. “I know what they did to us. That’s enough. It should be enough for you too.”
It wasn’t. As the years went by he went down more and more. He stole children’s toys and items abandoned around a country farm. He stole picture frames propped against the side of a darkened house. When he brought them back up the mountain, it felt as though their father was still alive.
Their father’s eyes had been mossy brown, like the eyes of the new centaurs birthed by the mountain. Centaurs who looked and talked like them but were comfortable in their bodies in ways that the three of them were not. The new centaurs didn’t cry. They didn’t laugh. They had no interest, whatsoever, in the world below them. A world that moved so quickly—gas lamps that gave way to electric lights. Trains that soon ran beside highways and cars. Subways. Children who so soon became adults. Every time Estajfan went down it felt like a jump into the future. He brought back a music player that ran on batteries, a handheld mirror that was one thing the mountain centaurs adored. Sometimes he caught Petrolio with it, and teased him, but the mirror unnerved Estajfan a little. It was the same feeling he got whenever he saw his face in the stream—his father’s face, his mother’s eyes. He wished that no part of him had reminded their father of her.
This had been his life. It was not enough, but it had been bearable.
Then, the girl and her father on the mountain.
* * *
Today when Heather comes she is already weeping, the babies squalling and squirming in pain. He watches her stride through the field and into the trees. She passes so close he can smell the dampness of her hair. Beneath that, her sweat and fear and sorrow. She is thinner than she was a week ago. In the night, when he creeps among the houses in the dark, he hears the whispered worries of the people in the city. No one has come to help them. There has been no news.
I can’t do this anymore, she’d said those months ago. I want to be up on the mountain with you.
He’d told her again that the mountain was not her home. It’s barely even my home, he said. He could tell that she didn’t believe him.
You’ve lived there all your life. It’s the only home you know.
He tried to make her understand. It is an in-between place, he said. For an in-between thing.
Rigid with anger, she’d gone back to the city.
The next time he saw her, she was pregnant.
I think it would be better, she said, if we didn’t do this anymore. You’re right. I belong here. You belong there. I was stupid to think otherwise.
He didn’t think she was stupid. He wanted to tell her that. But in his head, he heard his sister.
They’ll hurt you, Aura had said. They won’t understand.
And so he let her go.
After the meteors came, he stood vigil in the forest, day in and out, until he once more heard her footsteps on the streets of the city. Unmistakably hers. Tap-TAP, tap-TAP. He shouldn’t have been able to hear them, but he did—the ground, he knew, was giving him a kindness. Only then did he make his way back up the mountain.
Now he comes down every day and waits for her, though he stays hidden. The trees bend around him, obscure him in leaves.
With her babies, she is not an in-between thing, even though she might wish to be. She does not belong on the mountain.
He sees the fox tempt her at the edge of the forest. He sees the portal open up. He is ready to yell when she unwraps the children and lays them before it, ready to come crashing out and scoop up the babies. She grabs them just in time.
When she walks past him again this time, oblivious to the centaur hidden in the trees, he lets out a breath and a prayer.
On the way back up the mountain, he encounters Fox on the mountain path.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.
Fox only shrugs. “You cannot control what she wants forever.”
“You aren’t offering her what she wants!” he cries. Through that portal is the mountain’s deep gorge and a long, heedless fall to the ground.
Fox licks her lips. “The world is no longer a place for in-between things,” she says. “If you decide to speak to her, you would do well to tell your human that.”
“No longer a place?” he says. “What does that mean?”
Fox blinks. “It means you have a choice to make.”
* * *
Farther up the mountain,
his sister waits for him.
“You need to stop going down,” Aura says. “You can’t help her, Estajfan. You can only make things worse.”
“They have no home. Their home has been destroyed.”
“What can you do?” Aura says. “Nothing. You need to stay here.”
He turns to her, incredulous. “I expect that from the mountain centaurs. Not from you.”
She flushes. “Estajfan, we aren’t meant to be down there. With them. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” he almost shouts. “Aura, they are going to starve.”
“You don’t know that,” she insists. “Fox says they’re storing food.”
“Do you think that food will last forever?” he asks. She’s never been down off the mountain. She hasn’t seen their cities, their malls. The cars that used to scuttle along the roads. Their bicycles, their buildings. Their mirrors and their music players, their batteries, their gas lamps, their electric trains.
They are magic, he wants to tell her—a different kind of magic from the mountain. Raw and selfish and angry, yes, but magic all the same.
“They’re planting gardens,” he concedes. He doesn’t want to fight with her. He thinks of the magic in the ground around the city—how much louder it is now, how gleeful its rage. “But I don’t think that’s going to help them.”
Aura doesn’t meet his eyes. “We don’t belong there,” she says.
The mountain centaurs sang when fire rained down from the sky. They raised their arms and cheered.
Why not? he wants to say. Why can’t we belong anywhere we want to go? “We don’t belong on the mountain either,” he says instead, and walks on past her.
* * *
