When they heard her scream, the villagers began to pummel the house with shovels and sticks. The doctor swaddled the children as best she could, and when she placed them in the husband’s arms, he gathered each child numbly to his chest. He could barely understand what was happening. The doctor put goat’s milk in a couple of bottles, tucked them in her own satchel along with her provisions, and slung it over his shoulder. “It’s not a lot of food,” she said, “enough for a day, maybe two. Protect their heads,” she added, and then she swung open the door and stepped outside.
Such was her power—even now, after delivering these monster children—that the villagers fell quiet.
“They are leaving,” the doctor said, pitching her voice to reach all of the crowd. “They will not bother you anymore. Let them go.”
“They’re monsters!” someone cried. Inside the house, the wife began to wail. “We don’t want them here!”
“They are going and will not come back,” the doctor said, and the husband slipped out into the space that her words made. The villagers looked at the bundles in his arms and shrank back, and they let him walk past them and vanish into the darkness beyond their fires.
The man headed back to the mountain from which he’d come, grief and anger struggling in his heart. He fed the children the goat’s milk and soothed them when they cried, then found and milked more goats. When they reached his mountain, he climbed as far as he could, to where the magic of the mountain was the strongest, and he dug them a grave there, in the reddish-brown dirt beneath three weeping willows. It was not a night bright with stars, but he hoped the magic would still save them. The mountain—his home for so long—would save them. The magic of the trees around them, the roots that they pressed into the soil—all of these things had brought him to his love once, and they would do so again. They would make his children whole and human.
When the night deepened, he lowered the babies into the grave and, when they began to wail, settled himself in beside them and held them close. He pulled enough dirt over them to bury them almost but not quite. The babies, comforted by the closeness of his heartbeat, went silent. When he slept, they slept too. In his dreams, he stood beneath the sky and begged the mountain and the ground: Make them like me. Give them what you gave to me. In the dream he saw them all, two-legged and free, running in the village with the other girls and boys. Their mother smiled at them as they played—everyone whole now, everyone happy.
In the morning, though, when the father pushed aside some of the dirt, he saw that the babies were unchanged. And when he stood up and looked down at himself, he saw his old black stallion chest and legs, though his arms were still the arms of a man and his human head still ached with grief. Because, as the mountain knew, he had a stallion’s heart but a man’s love and longing. Like the babies, he belonged neither to one world nor the other, but somewhere in between. He wept then, for the first time. When he was done weeping, he woke the children, who’d grown bigger overnight, and they crawled out of the hole to him. They stood on spindly legs and looked around at the morning, as though they had new eyes.
So it came to pass that the father and his children spent the rest of their days on the mountain. After a while the father stopped dreaming about his two-legged children running in the village, and eventually—long years later—he dreamed less of his wife. His children grew happy and strong; they’d known no other life. Though sometimes a rage would break in them and the father would be reminded of his wife, his human love, whose anger had erupted like a volcano, whose rage still burned bright at his betrayal. Other times, the fierceness of their anger would remind the father of himself, and the dark things he harboured, the grief that never went away. He tried to be gentle with them when they raged, but the children grew wary of their own anger, the same way they grew wary of their father’s love for them and the way he so jealously guarded their home.
When their father died, after many more years, they buried him beneath the three willows and wept over his grave, then slept there, sprawled beneath the stars. The next morning, when the sun came up, new beings pulled themselves out of the dirt where their father had been, beings that also had the heads and arms of humans and the strong bodies of horses. When the children looked at all of these new siblings, they saw the mountain’s own glimmering anger in their deep and darkened eyes, and understood that though the mountain had taken their father back and given the children companions so that they would not be alone, it had also not forgotten their father’s betrayal in leaving the mountain so long ago. It had given them a gift, but also a warning.
And that is how the centaurs came to be.
PART ONE
1
Heather is sleeping when they come, the meteors, raining from the sky. The twins, born only the day before, lie in a crib next to her hospital bed, their fingers laced together even in sleep. Greta and Jilly. Jilly and Greta. B is rumpled in the corner chair, snoring softly. Heather opens her eyes in the seconds before it happens, something having jolted her awake. Some dark dream or memory, her father tumbling down the side of that mountain so long ago. She lies silent, eyes open. The clock reads 5:00 a.m. In that tiny flash before the world ends she thinks about crawling out of bed, sliding out the door in her slippers, and running far away.
But then she hears a whistle, so loud the walls tremble. A whistle, and then a great crash outside. The ground shakes. Heather turns to look out her window—so slow—and all she sees are flames.
B is awake now and moves to the window like a ghost. The girls are crying; someone outside in the hall is screaming. Heather hasn’t moved from the bed. B looks outside and then back at her. She can see that he thinks he’s still dreaming.
“The world’s on fire,” he says, too confused to be afraid.
Heather swings her legs over the side of the bed and joins him at the window. Walking hurts. She can hear people running in the hall, more crashes, more screams. She stands beside B and watches giant balls of fire rain down from the sky and smash into buildings, cars, the orderly trees that line the roads. The smell of burning metal permeates the room.
The rock—is that what it is?—that slams into the hospital hits close enough for them both to feel the heat of it. They run to the babies and scoop them from their crib, and then they slip out of the room, bent and shaking. Basement! someone shouts. We all have to get to the basement! There are many people moving through the halls, and even more crying out from their hospital beds. Help me. Help me, please.
Basement, she thinks. Basement. Basement.
The elevators don’t work, so they stumble down the stairs, B breathing hard beside her, his hand on her elbow as she limps as fast as she can go. The babies crying, the screams of everyone else ringing in her ears. Another crash outside, another flush of heat that trembles through the wall. They climb down and down and down.
At last, they find themselves in an old stone foundation. The air is damp and musty here, but also hot with panic. People jabber and weep, shout into their cell phones. I can’t hear you. I don’t know what’s going on.
Heather collapses softly against a wall and tries to breathe. B huddles beside her.
“Are you all right?” he says, pitching his voice low so it can find her in the din.