Amanda Leduc - The Centaur's Wife

The girls are not with her. It is as if they’ve never been.

Instead there is the baby, who kicks every now and then as they go higher.

She thinks back to those moments on the highest part of the mountain. The dirt that almost choked her, the taste of earth like copper in her mouth. The weight of it. She hadn’t, as it turned out, wanted to be other than what she was in those moments. She only wanted to be herself, to be alive.

The baby kicks so hard she stumbles and falls, landing on the path on all fours.

Estajfan is beside her, his hand on her arm. “You’re all right,” he says. “You’re safe.”

She breathes in and out, her forehead against the soil. She shuts her eyes against the sting of tears. It hurts, climbing the mountain again. She doesn’t want to climb anymore. The only mystery she wants to unlock is herself. “I understand now,” she says. “I do.”

“Yes,” Estajfan says, and he bends to help her up. “I know.”

She wants to ask him what he means, but the others are far ahead now and they need to catch up. She starts to climb again.

Some time later he picks her up. She wants to protest— You’ve been injured, put me down— but he doesn’t falter.

I’m all right , she thinks. I am safe, and I am climbing.

As she climbs, Aura thinks about her father—how kind he could be, how patient, and also how jealous and bitter. Don’t ever leave the mountain. The human world will break your heart and kill you.

What would he do, she wonders, if he was still alive and waiting for them up ahead? Would he welcome these humans into their home or hide from them the way he’d hidden Aura and her brothers? Enveloping them in a magic made of love and pain and stories, weaving a net all around them that was hard to escape. Humans will betray you. Humans will not love you. Look at your mother, look what she did.

But look at the humans around them. Elyse, so sickly but so determined to hang on. The woman, Moira, who had saved Estajfan even though she feared him. Tasha and Annie, who kept the humans alive even as the ground tried to starve them.

Heather, always Heather, who saw a grief in the centaurs before even Aura herself knew what to call it.

Even Joseph, she realizes.

They’ve endured, these humans, in a way that surely even the mountain would understand.

Da, she thinks as she leads them past the place where Heather and her father had stopped those years ago. Da, tell me what to do.

He does not answer. He never does.

They climb for hours. They climb until the path stops in front of them, and then Aura crests the small cliff before them and sets Elyse down onto the ground before reaching down to pull Tasha up, and then the others. The other centaurs follow, one by one. Aura leads them down a path and around a little hill to a place where the ground opens into a tiny, improbable meadow filled with flowers. Forget-me-nots and larkspur and lilies. Black-eyed Susans that bend softly in the wind. Dark-red amaryllis that pop up through the grasses. Daisies, hollyhocks. A peach tree, an apple tree. Sunflowers that stand tall and proud. The plants here have none of the darkly beautiful menace that infuses the flowers down below.

In the centre of the flowers, there are two bare patches of earth. Aura turns around to face them.

“This one.” She motions to the patch on her right. “She’s here. Where the flowers do not grow.”

Tasha takes a step forward and the others part for her. She falls to her knees before the grave.

“We came down to pick flowers,” Aura says, her voice far away. “My father and me. That’s when she came around the corner. He wasn’t expecting her.”

“What happened?” Tasha says.

But Heather knows. She sinks down in front of the other bare patch of earth. “He threw her over,” she says. “He picked her up, and he threw her over the side of the mountain.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Petrolio is the first to break the silence. Sharp, raw, betrayed.

“He was afraid for us,” Aura says. “I think that made him into something he didn’t want to be.”

“He forbade us to go down!” Petrolio cries. “But he went down because there were things there that he loved? He didn’t tell us any of these stories. How could he do that?”

Aura nods. “When I looked at him after that, all I could see was her face as she fell. And he knew it—I think he saw her face too. I went down and found her body. I carried her here, and buried her. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Your bag,” Tasha says. “That belonged to her.”

Aura’s hands go to the old satchel slung over her shoulder. “Yes,” she says. “I carry her with me wherever I go.”

“And you?” Estajfan says. He is not as angry as Petrolio, but the hurt in his voice is deep. “What were you afraid of, Aura? You’re the one who insisted we stay here.”

“People have died!” Aura points to the graves. “Every time humans and centaurs come together, something happens, Estajfan. Someone gets hurt. The doctor wanted to help, but she died. Our father only wanted to love, and the house that we were born in—it almost took him. I was there. I saw it.”

“You went down with him?” Petrolio says, betrayed.

“In a dream, or a vision, or—something.” Aura shakes her head and her eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t leave the mountain. We aren’t meant to be off the mountain. And humans aren’t meant to be up here.”

“We aren’t meant to be anywhere!” Estajfan cries. “We don’t belong below the mountain with the humans—but we don’t belong here, either, Aura, and you know it.”

“Yes, we do,” she whispers. “This is the home Da made for us. Da didn’t think we were monsters.”

“Da isn’t here anymore!” he shouts. “It was the mountain that made Da into an in-between thing, Aura. It was the mountain that made it so that Da didn’t belong.” Estajfan clenches his fists. “And the mountain did that because it knew that he wanted a different kind of life.”

“We’re safe here,” she says, stubbornly. “Look what just happened to you! We’re safer here than we’ll ever be down below.”

“Aura.” Petrolio steps closer to her. “The mountain centaurs—when we left, you know what they said—”

“I don’t want to leave the mountain only to get shot by the side of the road!” Aura is weeping in earnest now.

“Yes,” Annie says, surprising them all. “And I don’t want to be in a world that’s starving us to death. But it doesn’t seem to matter what we want, does it.”

“I don’t know,” says Elyse. She’s resting with her back against the peach tree. “I never thought I’d get up to the top of this mountain, and here we are.” She laughs, and then doubles over, wheezing. When she catches her breath again, she locks eyes with Aura. “Here we are,” she says, “no matter how hard the world tried to starve us. And you helped us up the mountain despite also saying that it tried hard to keep us away. Maybe Tasha’s right. Maybe there’s a reason we’re here. Us, and all of you, and no one else.”

Heather laughs then, unexpectedly. They turn to look at her. “ Maybe you were ready to survive, ” she quotes. She looks at Estajfan. “Maybe we’ve always been ready.”

In the silence that comes after this, Moira clears her throat. “There are two patches of bare earth,” she says. “What is the other one for?”