by Amanda Leduc
That would have been the end of the story except that a few days later, the man came back to their house in the night and burned it to the ground with the doctor’s mother inside it.
The doctor had been ten years old at the time. She and her sister had been sleeping over at a friend’s house. Her father had managed to get out of the house in time and never forgave himself for it. The guilt was its own kind of ghost.
So when other people warn her about ghosts on the mountain, about animals that hide in the trees—the trickster foxes, the river sprites that wait to drown you—the doctor shrugs and makes her plans. Ghosts don’t lurk in the shadows, or in the places people are afraid to go.
One day, after she is finished her shift, the doctor packs her life into her satchel once again and makes her way to the foot of the mountain.
* * *
The climb is hard and slow, but the doctor is used to hard journeys. Heights don’t scare her and she’s slept in the rain countless times; she rests when she’s tired. She hacks a little path as she climbs, switchbacking slowly up the mountainside. It’s relatively easy—someone has been this way before.
When the centaur comes to greet her, she’s only halfway up the mountain.
The centaur seems at once exactly the same and more alien than she remembers—like he belongs to the mountain and she does not. For the first time in her life the doctor feels bedraggled and foolish.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
How long has it been since that night at the house in the village—a year? Impossible, but yes. Weeks wandering away from the village, months spent in the city at the base of the mountain. It feels like no time at all.
“I wanted to see you,” she says.
“How did you know I was here?” he says.
She has no real answer. “I don’t know.”
“No one comes up this mountain,” the centaur says. “No one dares.”
“Fear and strange stories won’t keep people away forever,” she says. “Humans climb. Don’t you remember?”
“This is my home. Humans do not deserve to be here at all.”
“Well, I’m here,” the doctor says.
There’s a loneliness in his face that she remembers from the last time she saw him. “Your children,” she says. “Are they all right?”
Unexpectedly, he smiles. “They are beautiful. More beautiful here than they would be anywhere else.”
“I’d love to meet them,” the doctor says. It’s been two years since they were born, but horses would be on their way to fully grown by now. Perhaps centaurs, too.
The centaur frowns. “Perhaps,” he says. “One day.”
“I could teach them, if you wanted,” she says.
The centaur considers her for a long time, then shakes his head. “Not yet. They won’t trust you. Give me time.”
“They won’t trust me?” she says. “Or you won’t?”
“I could use your help,” the centaur admits. “But not with the children.”
“Anything.” She feels—not sorry for him, but something.
“I want to teach them all I can about the world that they’ve come from, and their history,” he says. “I want them to know about the things that the humans have made far below. I’ve been building a collection.”
The doctor remembers the first time she saw him in this form, so striking and terrifying in that godforsaken room. He was beautiful then, but he is even more beautiful now, set against the backdrop of the mountain.
“I can teach them about the human world,” she says.
“No,” he says, his voice fierce. “I was human once. I remember. I do not need your help with that.”
The doctor looks at the ground and then nods. “I could bring you things,” she says, after a moment. “For your collection.”
“I would like that.” He looks down at her. “My children,” he allows, “are rambunctious.”
The doctor laughs. “Most children are.”
“I worry about them. I’m afraid that they’ll tumble down the mountain and hurt themselves. I’m afraid that they’ll get tired of the mountain and run down to the land below and somebody will see them.”
“You run down to the land below,” she reminds him.
“That’s different,” he says. “I know human ways. I know how to hide. I am careful. They are…not.”
“They could learn,” she says.
“Yes,” he says, that fierce anger back in his voice, “but the world will not learn, will it?”
She closes her eyes and feels the wind cool on her face. “Even so,” she says. “You shouldn’t hide them away.”
“I’m not hiding them,” the centaur says. “I’m keeping them safe.”
It occurs to her—not for the first time—that the babies might have died after all. Maybe they died on the journey. Is she ever going to know? “Tell me what you need and I will bring it.”
The centaur stares at her for so long the doctor wonders if she’s hallucinating. Has she been dreaming this whole time? Then he nods.
“Thank you,” he says. “I would like that. Bring me things that I can use to teach the children, and I will look forward to seeing you when you come back.”
He doesn’t say goodbye—he only turns from her, his black tail fanning the air, and jumps up the steep mountainside. The doctor stands listening to his absence for who knows how long. When she is absolutely sure he’s not coming back, she turns and makes her way back down the mountain.
12
Petrolio and Aura are in the mountain clearing when Estajfan reaches them, Heather curled and silent in his arms. The mountain centaurs immediately gather around them, wary and stiff.
A mountain centaur with brown hair and their father’s brown-green eyes confronts him. “She should not be here. You put us all in danger.”
“In danger of what?” Estajfan looks at the mountain centaurs, who know, and his siblings, who do not. “What danger could humans possibly pose for us? They’re all dead.”
His brother and sister jump in shock. In his arms, Heather whimpers, and seems to come to, then moves to climb down from Estajfan’s arms. Aura reaches out to her as Estajfan lets her down gently, until she is on her feet, her belly protruding in front of her. The other centaurs hiss.
“She should be down with the others,” the mountain centaur says. “The world has decided—the time of humans is no more.”
“Aura.” Heather’s voice is ragged with grief. If she hears the other centaurs standing around them, she doesn’t let on.
“Are you hurt?” his sister says.
Estajfan sees the bleak mirth in Petrolio’s eyes—Of course she’s hurt, he can almost hear his brother saying—and addresses the question, and the other centaurs, at the same time. “She’s alone,” he says. “What do you think, Aura?”
Aura flinches again and balls her fists. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “Heather—I didn’t know.”
She didn’t know, and neither did he—not until that moment of the scream, the sudden unleashed power of the vines and flowers, the world gone green and terrible. But he should have known. He should have suspected.
What happens when you choose a new life? You die to the old one, as their father had done so many years ago.
What happens when the world chooses a new life without you? He thinks of the months of going down the mountain and out into the cities far and wide—creeping through abandoned streets, finding food wherever he and Petrolio could. The slow grip of human madness the very thing that kept them safe. What was that? Nothing. You’re seeing things. That’s all.
He thinks of the small blonde woman down by the greenhouse. Elyse, Heather had called her. What was that? she had cried. And Heather, so determined to keep their secret. Elyse. Dead now, like all the rest.
Heather takes a step forwa
rd, almost falls, and Aura steadies her. “You’re all right now,” she says. “We will keep you safe.”
“She is pregnant,” another centaur hisses. “She cannot be here.”
“She is my responsibility,” Estajfan calls out, his voice carrying to the edge of the clearing. Countless green-brown eyes simmer with rage. “I will watch her. You are to leave her alone.”
“She doesn’t belong here!” another centaur cries.
“Where does she belong?” Estajfan calls. “Below, with the rest of the dead?”
The mountain centaur who protested moves through the crowd and spits on the ground in front of him. It’s the palomino, the one who spoke to him those months ago. “You have betrayed all of us.”
“I will watch her. I will be responsible for her. I want all of you to leave her alone.”
“And when the child comes?” the centaur says. “What then?” She moves to strike Heather but Estajfan knocks her to the ground with one swipe of his arm.
“Take her to the cave,” Aura says to Petrolio. Estajfan spares a glance behind him to see his brother gather the woman gently into his arms and carry her away. Heather doesn’t look at Estajfan. She doesn’t look at anything.
The palomino, still on the ground, snarls, “If you want a life with a human so much, then leave. Like your father did.”
Aura bends to help the other centaur up, but the palomino pushes her away, her mouth set and furious. Aura addresses them all. “She won’t stay here forever,” she says. “For now, leave her alone.”
Not forever, Estajfan thinks. What does that mean? When his sister turns to look at him, there’s a warning in her eyes, and he stays silent as the mountain centaurs disperse.
“She is only one person,” he says at last. “The mountain is not going to change because of one person.”
His sister only smiles—a sad smile that makes her look, Estajfan imagines, like the mother none of them have ever known. “Change is already here, Estajfan. There is nothing any of us can do about it now.”
* * *
Still, it surprises him how quickly they adapt to having Heather around. For the first few days she sleeps in the cave that their father had made ready for their mother all those years ago. Sometimes she eats what they bring her—mountain fruits, the nuts and berries that Estajfan has eaten since he was very small. Sometimes she curls against the wall and refuses to eat, or to look at him, or to speak.
Aura is Heather’s shadow—guarding the door, leading her out now and then to walk among the mountain trees to relieve herself. Estajfan and Petrolio resume their runs down the mountain, this time looking for life instead of food. Carrion birds circle slowly overhead and the streets are empty. Estajfan and Petrolio bend through the doorways of house after house and find only bodies. Children on the floor and parents sprawled near them, dead of madness and grief. Plants have already wound through the windows and into the rooms, taking back the houses.
It is so strange to find the world of humans as silent as his mountaintop home. Maybe more so. There is, at least, no screaming, for which he’s very grateful.
How had he not known this destruction was coming? How had he not seen it? The ground had been starving the humans out, yes, and he’d thought that was the thing making him so uneasy—the casual cruelty of it, the willingness of the mountain centaurs and the animals and the plants around them to let the humans starve.
You have a choice to make, the fox had said, and so he’d made it. He couldn’t stand by and watch them disappear. And so he had done what he had done, had gone down and found food where he could and ensured that Heather and her family survived. Even that had not been enough, in the end.
Tonight he’s in the mountain city, alone in the gathering dark. There is movement at the end of the street; he slinks into the overgrown space between two houses and freezes. Ahead of him, a deer, young and cautious, steps into the twilight. It is eating the vines that grow up the sides of the buildings. It stops to look around, then lowers its head to the vines again.
The blade is out of his hand and plunging into the deer’s jugular before he has time to think about it. The deer drops, instantly. It makes no sound.
He tries to ignore the shiver of rage that rustles through the plants around him. How long has it been since deer ventured into the city? Years, most likely. He withdraws the knife, wipes it clean on the grass.
When he leans forward to lift the body, the vines have already begun to gather it in, green tendrils winding around the deer’s legs and chest and heart.
No, he thinks, and pulls. The vines do not release it, and the body begins to decompose before his eyes. He slices into the deer again and rescues a haunch as tendrils and roots pull the rest of it into the earth.
You made your choice, he hears the ground whisper. The green things curl around his feet and pull at his hooves. He steps out of their clutches, then heads back up the mountain. The haunch stays fresh in his hands and does not rot.
* * *
In the mountain clearing, under the moon, he gathers dead branches from the forest and lights a fire. The mountain centaurs mill about, suspicious as always.
“You killed it,” one says to him.
Estajfan shrugs. “She needs to eat.”
“The human has been eating,” says another. A female. Green eyes and brown skin, silver hair. “Aura feeds her every day.”
“She needs protein,” he says. The mountain centaurs do not eat meat—they barely eat at all, from what he can see, subsisting on sunlight and anger.
He and his siblings haven’t eaten meat since their father died.
The centaur glowers at him. “The animals will fear you now,” she says. “The mountain is changing.”
“The mountain was already changing!” Estajfan shouts. “I want to survive,” he says. “And I want the humans—her—to survive. Is that so wrong?”
“Look what the humans did to the rest of the world,” she hisses.
Estajfan sighs and does not answer. He roasts the leg until the smell changes to what he remembers from the days when their father cooked for them. Yes, he knows the stories. The way the dragons vanished, the way the sprites in the salt mines dwindled as humans dug deeper and deeper into the mountains, as they mined for salt, as they hoped for diamonds and gold. The ships that spread death in the water, the airplanes that belched death in the sky.
“They weren’t all bad,” he insists, to himself and to them.
The mountain centaur is unmoved. “Enough of them were.”
Estajfan pulls the roasted meat from the fire and carries it to the cave where Heather waits, just beyond a copse of trees. Aura, keeping watch, takes the meat from him.
“Where’s Petrolio?” he says, following Aura to where Heather lies on the bed.
Aura breaks off little chunks and feeds them to Heather, piece by piece. “Up in your spot at the top of the mountain,” she says. “Hoping Da will give him wisdom.”
He snorts. “How much wisdom has Da given us lately?”
“Not much,” Aura admits. “But Petrolio is ever hopeful.”
“What are the desks for?” Heather asks, as if she’s just noticed them. She points to a corner of the cave, where three children’s school desks sit covered in a layer of dust.
“Our father brought them to us when we were young,” Aura says. “He liked us to stand in front of them when he was teaching lessons.”
“I thought maybe they were for young centaurs,” Heather says. “Though that doesn’t really make sense, does it?”
“There are no children here. The centaurs have no young.” Aura stands up and brushes the dirt from her legs. “Do you think you have the strength to come outside for a little while?”
Heather blinks at both of them, then glances at the desks. “None of this makes sense,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” Aur
a whispers. “I wish everything was different.”
He watches Heather sit up, slowly, and brace herself against the bed.
“So they’re really gone,” she says. “It wasn’t just a dream.”
He’s gone past her house, down in the city. He hasn’t looked inside.
“Yes,” he says. “But you’re here.”
She only looks at him, and her eyes are very far away. “Was it worth it? The mountain has the world now?”
To this, he has no answer.
She turns away from both of them and looks back to the wall.
13
Heather sees, and yet she cannot see. Long stretches of sleep peppered with even longer periods of lying awake, unable to get off the bed, unable to move at all.
Where are they, her girls? Far below her, hanging in the kitchen. When she closes her eyes, the image is imprinted on the back of her eyelids. Their tiny faces going black and green.
Come back.
Come back.
Come back to me.
They do not answer. They are gone.
She sleeps.
* * *
She eats what Aura feeds her, but cannot taste.
Estajfan brings her a plump avocado that Aura opens with a small knife she keeps tucked in her shoulder bag, her hands at once alien and also so human. The desks in the cave, the picture frames that gather dust. Everything is familiar and strange.
Sometimes Aura hums wordlessly and sometimes Estajfan hums along with her. Sometimes he sings the words. Heather hadn’t known he could sing.
The walls of the cave are dotted with shelves and lined with cupboards and cabinets filled with surprises. Dishes and cutlery. A child’s wagon, a butter churn. Lanterns, empty and dry.
A laptop computer sits on one of the desks, a small handheld video game atop it. On another are the paints and pencil crayons she gave to Estajfan those years ago.
