Occasionally she travels to the wife’s village. She has five children now, all thriving and happy. The mother is happy too, most of the time. She never mentions her other children now, even when she and the doctor are alone. She is afraid for the safety of her five children in the village; she doesn’t like it when they’re away from her, she doesn’t like it when her husband takes them on trips. But she never goes. Once upon a time she had wanted a different kind of life; now the possibility of a different kind of life for her children terrifies her. The doctor knows that if the mother had her way, her children would never leave her.
The doctor has no children, only secrets.
The doctor brings the centaur medical supplies and history books and maps. She brings novels and books of poetry and mathematics texts that hold delicate equations; she brings dinner plates and wineglasses and cutlery.
She brings the centaur dried herbs and a mortar and pestle and shows him berries on the mountain that will help when his children have a fever; leaves to crush into a salve that will help with cuts and bruises. She brings him a surgeon’s needle and thread and teaches him how to stitch a wound. She points out other plants that he should harvest and dry and use.
“For pain,” she says, “and infection.”
As the years go by, the doctor continues to travel—growing slower as her joints stiffen, but her heart and her mind as strong as ever. Eventually she begins to hear stories of a monster in the old village, and stories of another monster in the city by the mountain. The village and the city are far enough apart that no one would ever note the similarities, but the doctor does. She is tired of people who lie and are afraid.
The village monster, so the story goes, is tall and black as night. It sweeps through the streets in the early-morning darkness, stealing random things. A cooking pot, a toy that lies in a child’s crib. No one can figure it out. What use would a monster—or even a thief—have for such things?
The monster in the mountain city is much the same—stealing furniture, coming and going like a ghost.
The city people tell her that spirits from the mountain come down to strike fear into the hearts of those who want to climb it. Leave the mountain alone, they tell her. As years pass, they tell her this more and more. People have gone up the mountain and disappeared, they say. It’s best to stay away.
And yet despite the stories, the doctor can’t determine if anyone from the city has ever actually gone missing. A friend of a friend of a friend disappears. A girl goes missing, a boy too. Perhaps they ran away together. People tell themselves all kinds of stories when they grieve.
One year she asks the centaur what he knows about the rumours.
“The humans are right to stay away” is all he says.
And yet he loves humans. He can’t get enough of them. Doesn’t he run among them and bring back their treasures? He boasts to her of all the things the children know—he’s taught them their letters, he’s shown them so much. Of the humans far below, he says, “They have only one heart,” as if she doesn’t already know. As if he, too, did not have only one heart himself long ago.
She brings the centaur blankets and jewellery, music boxes and more books. He never even tells her if the children have said thank you. One year a rich patient pays her with a series of handmade golden cuffs; she brings them to the centaur and drops them in a bag at his feet.
The centaur is struck almost speechless by this gift. He picks one up and puts it on his wrist right away.
“You’re supposed to say thank you,” the doctor says. Once more, she wonders if the children are still alive. Maybe there’s no one on the mountain but him and a shrine of human artifacts to his first love.
The centaur says, “Thank you. They’re very beautiful.”
He is very beautiful, the doctor thinks—the cuffs look ridiculous on her thin wrists, but on the centaur they are an adornment for a king.
“I want to see them,” she says. “I want to know that they’re all right. I want to know that they are happy.”
“They’re happy,” he says.
The doctor shakes her head. “I don’t believe you,” she says.
His face darkens; he looms over her, fists clenched. “I am not lying.”
The doctor stands her ground. In her head is a darkened room and a woman drugged and terrified on the table, three versions of a secret suddenly there before them all, screaming. “Maybe they are happy. But I would like to see. I brought them into the world; I deserve to know how they’re faring.”
The centaur is silent for so long that the doctor doesn’t know what to do; she’s hurt him, she thinks. All she meant to do was push. She wants to apologize but the words won’t come out.
“If you feel that way,” he says at last, “then perhaps you shouldn’t have sent them—us—away in the first place.”
“I was trying to save them! And you!” the doctor cries. “Surely you can understand that.”
But the centaur turns from her. “Do not come back,” he says. “I thought you were a friend, but you are no friend at all.”
She watches him walk away from her. She doesn’t follow him; she wants to, but she doesn’t. As she makes her way back down the mountain, her head is full of sadness, her eyes blurry with tears.
On the descent it starts to rain. When she was younger, the doctor would have kept walking, but she worries about slipping now, so she shelters under a large overhang and sets up camp for the night. In the morning, the sky is clear and the warmth of the sun soon dries her clothes. As she makes her way down, she ponders his words over and over.
You are no friend at all.
In the mountain city, she stops and writes a letter to her sister. I will be late, she writes. I have something to attend to here. Please give the girls my love.
Is it a betrayal to want to see the children, to know that they’re all right?
I only care about you, she wants to tell the centaur. I only want to see you happy.
She posts the letter and makes her way back to the mountain.
26
When Tasha finishes her story, Heather doesn’t know what to say. She can tell that Estajfan and Petrolio don’t know what to say either. Aura might know, but it’s hard to look at her. There’s too much in her face.
Finally, Annie clears her throat. “You knew,” she says to Tasha, incredulous. “You’ve been lying to us this whole time. You knew about the mountain. You knew about—them.”
“I didn’t think it was real, Annie—I thought they were only stories.”
“Stories are never only stories,” Heather says. “Remember?”
Tasha shakes her head. “My mother told me stories about the mountain when I was small—she made them up, Heather, to try to help me sleep. Not because she thought that they were real.” And then she is telling them all about her family’s stories, fables passed down from mother to daughter, all the way back to twin sisters, and an aunt who was beloved. The doctor and her sister. The nieces, rapt in bed and listening to the words.
Estajfan says, “We never met the doctor. Our father never said anything—are you sure this is true?”
Tasha throws out her hands. “I don’t know if any of it is true. But I thought you weren’t real, and here you are.”
Heather moves to stand beside Estajfan. “How does it end? The story with the doctor.”
Tasha glances at Annie, and Annie looks away. “I have no idea,” she says. “One year she went up the mountain and that was the last anyone ever saw of her.”