Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

The meteors fall on the city without mercy, without rhyme. They smash into the lowland trees. She watches fire hit the far-off river, imagines steam rising into the air, the riverbed dried up in an instant, all things lush and green burning away.

The mountain centaurs raise their arms and cry out with joy. Beneath her hooves, she realizes, the ground is rejoicing. Green things will grow again, tendril their way over human death. New seedlings will love the richer soil. They will love how much more space they have, the freedom to grow unchecked.

Petrolio squeezes her hand.

She doesn’t want to think about the people in the city, but she does. Estajfan has told her stories. That other daughter, the one that they met on the mountain. She is down there now, buried somewhere in the mess.

It’s been years since she dreamed of the house (she was a good daughter, in the end), but Aura thinks of it now as the world burns below them. Time passes differently here on the mountain; years since the last dream, longer than that since their mother grew old and died. Centuries? She isn’t sure.

The mountain centaurs begin to sing. They are many but when they sing they sound as one—eerie and sad, angry and beautiful and triumphant as the city far below them catches fire. Aura and Petrolio stay quiet. The other centaurs don’t care about what happens off the mountain. The mountain speaks to them in ways that it doesn’t speak to Aura and her brothers. They aren’t lonely, the original three—not exactly—but they’re alone.

She casts her mind toward her mother’s house, but doesn’t see it. She imagines a fiery piece of the sky coming down to claim it—a gaping crater where their birthplace used to be, the bleached room gone forever.

It’s a small, hard thing to be glad about.

The doctor walks for days and weeks and months, stopping in a hundred little villages along the way, and gradually the mountains come into view on the horizon. She grew up by the sea—she’s never been to the mountains before. They seem higher than it is possible for anything to be, shimmering in layers of fog. Most of them are capped in white, but one mountain is green all the way into the clouds. The sea air tastes of salt. Here, the air tastes like the sky.

There is a city near the green mountain, nestled in its shadow. The doctor makes her way to one of its clinics and asks if they need help. The answer is yes. The answer is always yes. They give her a room in the physicians’ lodge. The city folk bring her flowers as a welcome—great red bursts of amaryllis and shining white lilies. She puts them in her window.

The people are happy and fit and superstitious. There are a few houses built closer to the mountain but not many. Almost everyone lives clustered together. The elders sprinkle salt across her doorstep early in the morning on the first day of spring. For wealth, they tell her. Wealth and prosperity and protection from death. For a family, a man.

The doctor has no money except what the world gives her. She has a twin sister whom she sees several times a year, and twin nieces. They are all the family she needs.

And protection from death? She herself is protection enough.

When she isn’t working, the doctor walks the streets and wanders out into the fields at the city’s edge. Sometimes she walks in the evening, even late at night, when there are no other souls around. No one else in the city goes where she goes.

“There’s something strange about that mountain,” another one of the doctors at the clinic confesses to her, late one night over drinks at the pub. He too has come from away. “The people here tell all kinds of strange stories. Monsters and ghosts. Animals that talk, that kind of thing.”

The doctor laughs. When her mother was thirty-seven years old, a man came to their house and called her a witch. His wife had run away with another man, and the husband was convinced the doctor’s mother had helped her do it.

“She wouldn’t have fallen in love if it hadn’t been for you,” he said. “She wouldn’t have done that on her own.”

The doctor’s mother was also a doctor, of sorts. She grew herbs in their backyard that she made into medicine, and she delivered babies when she needed to and got rid of pregnancies when that needed doing. Sometimes a heartbroken girl or boy would come to her and demand a love potion. The doctor’s mother would brew tea and sit down and tell them that you cannot make anyone fall in love with you. And sometimes people fall out of love, and there is nothing you can do about that, either. It will hurt. But while you can’t see it now, that hurt is building a mountain inside of you. One day you’ll climb that mountain. One day, your hurt will allow you to be and do great things.

When the husband came to her, the doctor’s mother told him this same thing. But he refused to listen.

“I don’t want a mountain,” he said. “I just want my wife back. I deserve my wife back!” He was shouting like a madman, and the neighbours came to wrestle him away. When they were gone, the doctor’s mother closed her front door and let out a long sigh of relief.

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.