The Centaur's Wife

by Amanda Leduc

  The humans stand frozen in horror.

  Aura feels the unseen man smile at her, and ready himself. He has become part of the mountain but he, too, does not belong here. He is ready to go home, to follow his daughter back to the world below, now that she’s come up to find him. Aura feels him sink back into the soil once more, and this time he is a river that runs through mountain rock, a starburst of energy that travels all the way down the mountain and back to the city.

  He will be there, waiting for them, when they go back down. His unseen hands back in the soil again, coaxing the human gardens to grow. Already she can feel his hands brimming with seeds. The time for starving is over.

  “Come,” she says softly. There will be time to mourn her mountain home, but that time is not now. “We must go down.” She makes her way back to the edge of the meadow and over the knoll.

  The humans follow.

  * * *

  Heather is flying, falling, a great dizzied tumble. The same sequence that has haunted her dreams all these years.

  Not her father’s fall. Her own.

  Then she slams into the earth—only it isn’t earth, it’s warm and close around her, Estajfan, his arms frantic to hold her.

  The wind keening all around them.

  He flails as he tries to right himself, get purchase on the mountainside.

  The space around them endless and huge.

  They tumble, they fall, they crash against the mountain. She feels him hit the mountainside and strain against the incline. A loud crack beneath them and he screams, and lets go. She hits spongy, leafy ground. Estajfan sails over her head, lands with an impact that shudders deep into the mountain.

  The silence that follows is absolute. She can’t hear her heart pounding, she can’t see the sky. Her body is one long bell of pain.

  But she’s alive. She tries to breathe—it hurts, but she can do it. Vicious cramps hit her abdomen and she moans.

  “Heather?” Estajfan calls. He’s alive too. How can this be? “Heather. Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” she answers. Another cramp comes, and she whimpers. “Where are you?”

  He cries out as he tries to move.

  Another cramp, and another. Another. Another. It’s too soon. It’s too soon.

  No, she thinks. No, no.

  A face in front of her, calm dark eyes, dark hair. “You’re all right,” the face says. “You’re all right.”

  Heather blinks. “Tasha?”

  The woman shakes her head. “No.” She puts a hand against Heather’s forehead and takes a deep breath. The fresh scent of leaves flows into Heather’s lungs.

  “It’s too soon,” Heather says. She can’t move her arm, she can’t move her legs. Are they broken? Beside her, Estajfan moans.

  Can he see the woman? She can’t tell.

  “It is too soon,” the woman agrees. “But it is going to happen anyway.” She takes Heather’s hand. “You’ll be all right,” she says. “Whatever happens.”

  “Who are you?” she gasps out. The woman only smiles.

  “Breathe with me,” she says. She touches Heather’s forehead again. “In and out.”

  How long do they do this? Heather isn’t sure. Minutes, hours.

  Something leaks from her, a warm gush out onto the ground.

  “You’re all right,” the woman says again. “You’ll be all right.”

  “Who are you?” Heather cries.

  “I am the flowers,” the woman says. Her hand firm against Heather’s abdomen, her other hand twining through Heather’s fingers, squeezing hard. “I am the flowers, I am the trees.”

  “Heather?” Estajfan calls. “Who are you talking to?”

  “I don’t understand,” Heather presses. “Do you live here?”

  The woman’s face swims before her eyes. “I didn’t live here,” she says, “but now I do. The mountain is my home; I will never leave it. Your father has already left—he has gone to prepare the way.” She nods to Heather’s belly. “He will come, your boy. We might have to pull him out.”

  “I can’t do it,” Heather whispers. “He won’t survive.” I won’t survive, she thinks. The mountain will claim us all.

  The woman shakes her head again, and smiles. “No. The mountain claimed me, but I survived. I came out of the ground with the flowers, and so will you.”

  “I came out of the ground,” Heather repeats, dizzily. “I didn’t change at all.”

  The woman leans in close. “Didn’t you?” Her hand against Heather’s cheek, her expression gentle and knowing. “Heather,” she says.

  Heather. Heather. She hears the words as if from far away.

  * * *

  “Heather?” Tasha calls. “Heather?”

  “There!” Petrolio cries, and he jumps down the path to a large overhang. Two bodies lie crumpled and bleeding.

  “Tasha,” Heather answers, weakly. Tasha slides off the centaur and drops to her knees, then presses her hand against Heather’s abdomen. Heather whimpers.

  “How long?” Tasha asks.

  “I don’t know.” Heather turns her head—she’s looking around for something. “I don’t know—how long—we’ve been down here.”

  Petrolio bends over Estajfan. Voices, another low moan.

  Tasha leans in close. “He’s breech, Heather.”

  “Yes.” She glances over at the centaurs. “Help Estajfan, please.”

  Tasha nods. “His leg is broken,” she says. “I think yours might be too. But we can fix that. Heather, look at me.” Heather nods, meets her eyes. “He’s breech,” Tasha repeats. “I can’t deliver him that way.” She puts a hand against Heather’s cheek. “Do you understand?”

  “It’s too early,” Heather says again.

  “I know. But we have to try.” Tasha reaches into her medical bag and pulls out antiseptic swabs, then she dips into the bag that Aura gave her and pulls out a needle, small and sharp, a coil of translucent thread. The scalpel, smooth and cool beneath her fingertips. It sparkles in the setting sun, sharp and ready. The sun reflects off its surface and sends pinpoints of light over Heather’s face.

  “You’ll take care of him?” Heather says.

  “Yes.” The word is like starlight in her mouth—impossible, unmistakable. “But so will you.”

  * * *

  As they descend, Moira can’t stop thinking about the centaurs that stand far above them, covered in green. She can’t stop thinking about the way Estajfan jumped after the woman. Heather.

  “Do you see them?” she calls to Aura and the others. They’ve been scrambling down for she doesn’t know how long. No one survives a fall like that.

  Beside her, she can see Annie struggling with the same thing. And if they find the bodies—what happens then?

  “We’re leaving,” Annie says, as if she hears that last thought. “We get down from here, and we take what food we have left and go. We’ll find other people somewhere. There must be others who’ve survived.”

  Others, Moira thinks. Others who met their grief and faced it, or knew what to do with it. She thinks again of Heather. Maybe we’ve always been ready.

  “Heather and Estajfan have survived,” Elyse says, with a conviction none of them feel. “We made our way up here. It means something. Nothing else would make sense.”

  Moira wants to laugh—What about this makes any kind of sense?—but she can’t.

  The sun crawls down the sky.

  And then she hears a cry from Aura, and an answering shout—from Petrolio, Moira thinks. Petrolio, and Tasha.

  They stumble down and reach the overhang. They are alive, impossibly. Aura kneels and Moira and Annie lift Elyse from her back, then rest her between them. She seems barely there and yet brighter, somehow, than any of them. Dazed and tired and still surprised to find herself there at all. And triumpha
nt, somehow, in the knowing. Annie lowers her gently to the ground and settles beside her.

  Moira crouches near Heather, then reaches for her hand and squeezes tight.

  “Heather.”

  Heather. Darby. Joseph. Brian and Annie, Tasha and Elyse.

  Aura. She whispers the names to herself. Aura, Estajfan, Petrolio.

  Heather looks at her, eyes wide with fear.

  “Heather,” Moira says again. “It’s going to be okay.”

  * * *

  When Tasha cuts into her belly, Heather screams, but they are holding her down, Petrolio and Aura on either side of her, Moira at her head, Elyse and Annie behind her like blonde ghosts. Another shadow behind them—the other woman, brown-haired and gentle. Estajfan, reaching silently for her through the waves of pain and terror. And then there is a great wrench and something dark that blocks her view of the sky—her son, tiny and screaming as Tasha pulls him from her belly and holds him up. Heather sees four dark legs but then the light shifts and he is only a dark-haired baby boy, crying loud enough for the whole world to hear.

  Tasha passes the baby to Annie and then begins to sew Heather up. It hurts, but not as much as she expected it would. After Tasha snips off the thread, she spreads the salve from Aura’s bag over the wound and covers it in cloth, then Annie passes her son to her. He is still crying loud enough to fill the sky, and as Heather gathers him into her good arm she sees flashes of his life the way she saw her own fall from the mountain, the way she brought them to Estajfan, the way she saw Tasha and the flames. The long climb down, the even longer climb they will make to find food, to find others. The family they will become. The sudden blossoming of fruit trees and plants down below, a presence deep within the soil that she recognizes.

  Her father has left the mountain too. He is waiting for her, down below.

  Estajfan, she thinks. Estajfan beside her, around her, everywhere.

  I survived, she thinks. I came out of the ground with the flowers.

  The baby roots for her nipple like her girls did. Tasha cups his head and guides him to it, and Heather feels him suck at her as though he’s been waiting for this, only this, all these months. It’s an ordinary magic, but it’s stronger than the mountain.

  He is so small, but that is all right—he is here now. He is hers.

  EPILOGUE

  In the morning the doctor wakes up early; the sun has barely risen, the sky is still tinged with pink. When she exhales, her breath mists in the air. She shakes out the blanket that kept her warm through the night and then bundles it up and tucks it in her bag. For breakfast, a handful of berries and some dried meat. Not fancy, but she’s survived on much less.

  When she has eaten, she squares her shoulders and readies herself for the climb back up the mountain. Sleeping outside is not as nice for her bones as it once was, no matter how much mountain air she breathes.

  As she climbs, she thinks about the babies. They had cried like all babies do, but in those dark moments when the wife was asleep and the husband stood in the corner of the room not knowing what to do, the babies’ eyes had followed her. They might not have known who she was but they knew she was somebody. By the time she’d finished stitching up the mother and had turned her attention again to the babies, they no longer seemed unusual. Like they’d been born into a spot that had already been waiting. Like the world, whatever the villagers might have said, had been ready for their arrival.

  She picked each baby up in turn and sang to it—old lullabies and holiday carols and songs about sunshine and love—then she wrapped each of them into a blanket and laid them on the table beside their mother. Then she turned to the husband and told him he had to go, and take the babies with him.

  As she climbs the mountain these years later, the doctor wonders if that was a mistake. Should she have stayed there, in the village, and protected the babies? Had she acted too quickly in sending the children and their father away? The mother might have come around. The children were beautiful. It wasn’t hard to see that.

  They aren’t monsters, the doctor might have said to her. They’re only different. And perhaps the mother and her husband might have forged a way together. They might have had to move out of the village, but they could have done it, they could have survived.

  Instead, this.

  Higher, and higher still. The doctor pushes away the flowers that bob in front of her along the path. She thinks about the golden cuffs she brought him yesterday. An extravagant gift, but what was the harm—what was she going to do with golden bracelets anyway? When was the last time she’d had reason to adorn herself?

  She’s not entirely sure that the centaur will find a use for them either. What’s the point of wearing golden cuffs if you live on the mountain and there’s no one to impress? But he did what she thought he would do—he saw the gold and how it shone. He had been impressed—the human part of him, the part that measured worth in things like gold. Sometimes he was so human she almost couldn’t stand it.

  You are the best and most beautiful of creatures, she wants to tell him. The nobility of a horse and the sharp mind of a human, the strength of the mountain beating in each of his hearts. Be worthy of that. It isn’t hard.

  She reaches the last bend in the path before it stops. Beyond that there’s a little hill; she’s never climbed it because the centaur was always here to greet her.

  It’s so steep it’s a struggle, but then she is over the rise, and there they are. Two of them. The father, dark and tall, and the girl, golden in the sunlight. Her long blonde hair shines almost white; her arms are tanned and muscled, and her shoulders slope in the happy way that children’s do.

  The girl turns and sees the doctor first. Her eyes are blue-green, like her mother’s.

  Far away, the doctor imagines that the mother stands up and listens.

  She looks like her mother, the girl—the same face, the same scattered golden freckles. The same tilt of neck and chin. The resemblance is so strong the doctor almost cries.

  I have a secret, the doctor wants to say. I’ve been waiting all these years to tell you.

  Long years ago, on that second morning of labour, the doctor had reached into the mother and felt a leg where a baby’s head should be. A leg that was not human—a tiny leg, an impossible hoof. She’d felt it with her fingers. She’d known it with her heart. She had taken her hand out and reached for her scalpel knowing full well what was to come.

  She’d felt it, that centaur-shaped hole in the universe, and recognized it instantly. She thought the world would recognize it too.

  That was a mistake. The doctor knows this now. She should have tried harder. With the father, with the mother. With the world below the mountain.

  You belong here, the doctor wants to say. You belong everywhere. You are not a monster.

  The girl looks about to smile, but then the father speaks.

  “These ones, Aura,” he says, then he looks up and follows his daughter’s eyes to where the doctor stands.

  And he is up, he is coming toward her in a blur of fury.

  It’s all right, she wants to call, and she puts her hand out, opens her mouth. Aura, she thinks. The sun comes over the edge of the mountain and sets the girl’s hair on fire. Aura. That’s beautiful.

  Then his hands are around her and she knows in that instant that she was wrong about this, too. Sometimes there is no healing. His hands are stronger than the hands of any man she’s ever known. He lifts her into the air like the feather she’s always known herself to be.

  She isn’t sorry, even as the split seconds fall around her and she feels him let go. She isn’t sorry. She saw magic all those years ago and there is magic here, too, at the end. She catches the eyes of the daughter in one last tilted moment and then she is flying, she is falling, and the mountain comes to meet her.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks above all to
Anne Collins, who took a chance on a wild idea for a story that then became a wild mess of a book. Under your expert hand, it has gradually become far less messy while also retaining its wild bones, for which I am so grateful.

  Thanks to my agent, Samantha Haywood, for your faith and encouragement, and for always being so staunchly in my corner.

  Thanks to the Canada Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Program, Hedgebrook, and the Banff Centre, for your gifts of financial support and space in which to nurture this unpredictable story.

  To Heather Cromarty, who read the earliest draft of The Centaur’s Wife while I was still under the delusion that it was “almost finished” (LOL oops), and was so very kind.

  To Sarah Taggart, dear friend and best reader, for your incisive and thorough comments. Thank you so much.

  To Julie Gordon, bookseller extraordinaire and first cheerleader, who was there for me at countless bookish breakfasts at the Hamilton Farmers’ Market and patiently listened to me worry about how this book was Never Ever Ever Going to Get Done.

  To Piyali Bhattacharya, Vero González, Mira Jacob, Ashley M. Jones, Lisa Nikolidakis, and Yaccaira Salvatierra. Hedgebrook coven love is the best kind of love.

  To Gary Barwin, whose words brought encouragement and strength when the writing of this book seemed impossible.

  To Jael Richardson, #workwife and friend, who is a gift that lights my days.

  To Ron Read, physician and medical expert, for fact-checking the medical details of an entirely unfactual novel and for automatically assuming (correctly) that the centaurs all have six-packs. Also, for rescuing Estajfan from a terrible death due to sepsis. I am grateful, and so is he.

  To Cara Liebowitz, for your careful and considered thoughts on this book.

  To the friends who’ve stood by and cheered, silently and aloud, during the ups and downs of writing: Elissa Bergman, Trevor Cole, Pamela King, Jaime Krakowski, Jen Sookfong Lee, Sabrina L’Heureux, Lisa Pijuan-Nomura, Stacey Bundy, Adam Pottle, and Ria Voros.