Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

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.