Centaur

The centaur came through Damon’s gate sideways, taking the gate with him.

One hinge struck the water jar. The jar burst against the workshop wall, and Ione screamed from beneath the workbench. Damon dropped his adze and caught up the length of oak he had been shaping. He held it across his chest, absurdly, as though he could bar a road with a measuring stick.

The creature stopped. His human shoulders were inside the workshop; his chestnut flanks filled the doorway, caught between one upright post and the broken gate. Blood ran from a cut above his beard. He had a whole horse’s body behind him, and nowhere to put it.

Under the bench, Damon’s daughter drew her bare feet out of sight.

“Back,” Damon said.

The centaur looked over his shoulder. Somewhere down the lane men were shouting. He pushed forward instead.

Wood cracked. His forehoof skated on the spilled water, and his knee struck the bench. A clay lamp toppled beside Ione’s head.

“Stand still!”

Damon had shouted as he would at a frightened mule. The centaur’s face turned toward him.

“Then stop waving that.”

His voice was rough and breathless. Damon had expected a roar. The words made him grip the oak harder.

“My daughter is behind you.”

The centaur looked down. He could turn his human waist enough to see the bench, but his horse chest hid the space beneath it. He shifted a foreleg, felt the bench move, and set the hoof down again with care.

“I know.”

Three men appeared beyond his rump. Damon recognized Lykos by the red strip tied around his wrist for the feast. Earlier that afternoon Lykos had brought him a heel of bread with meat folded inside it. Now he carried a spear.

“Keep him there,” Lykos said.

The Guest in the Doorway

Damon could smell wine beneath the sharper smells of sweat and broken pottery. The centaur’s beard was wet with it. From the lower lane came the sound of a woman calling someone’s name, again and again.

“What did he do?”

“Ask him about my table.”

The centaur put a hand against the lintel. His fingers were long, the nails split and packed with earth. A human hand, large enough to cover Damon’s face.

“I broke it,” he said.

“With my brother under it.”

The centaur said nothing.

Damon looked toward the bench. He could see one of Ione’s eyes through the gap between a hanging leather apron and a tool basket. She was waiting for him to say what she should do. He always knew what she should do in the workshop: where to stand, what not to touch, how to carry an edge pointing down.

“Stay there,” he told her.

Lykos lowered the spear beside the centaur’s flank, searching for a way past him.

The horse body tightened. One hind hoof rose.

“No!” Damon shouted.

For a moment the hoof hung above the broken gate. A kick would drive its shattered rails into Lykos’s belly. It would also thrust the centaur’s forequarters into the bench.

The centaur lowered it.

Lykos stepped back anyway. His two companions scattered into the lane.

Damon heard his own breathing. The centaur’s raised hand was shaking against the lintel.

“Let me turn,” the creature said.

There was no room. Damon had built the workshop against his house, with a narrow passage between the workbench and the stacked timber. Even an ordinary horse would have struggled to enter. This one had shoulders and elbows above its forelegs, a man’s chest that could bend where the great barrel behind it could not.

“You must go backward.”

“Into that?”

Lykos jabbed the spear toward the doorway.

Damon set the oak on the floor.

“Move away from the gate. All of you. Let him back out, and you can settle this in the lane.”

The centaur stared at him. Damon would not meet his eyes.

“He’ll run,” Lykos said. “Fetch a rope.”

One of the men hurried off. The other picked up a stone.

Ione crawled a handspan toward the open end of the bench. The centaur moved his forefoot aside to let her pass, but the caught gate twisted against his hock. He lurched. The bench banged against the wall, and she vanished beneath it again.

Damon felt the blow through the soles of his feet.

A rope around that body, men pulling, hooves fighting for purchase. His bench was heavy. It would not move far before it crushed whatever lay between its legs and the wall.

“No rope,” he said.

Lykos had already turned to call after the runner.

Damon stepped forward and struck the spear shaft down with his palm.

“My child is in there.”

Lykos looked past him. For the first time he bent to see beneath the centaur’s chest.

“Then get her out.”

What the Wall Held

The side of the workshop was woven hazel plastered with clay. Beyond it lay the small yard where Damon seasoned his wood. If he opened that wall, the centaur could move forward and turn. Ione could crawl out behind him.

Damon looked up at the roof.

An angled brace ran from the corner post to the beam above the bench. It crossed exactly where the centaur’s human chest would have to pass. Remove it, and the old beam would have to carry the roof without help until they could shore it again.

He had meant to replace that beam before winter.

“Can you hold still?” he asked.

“Not forever.”

“Until I tell you.”

The centaur looked at Lykos, then at the small eye beneath the bench.

“Be quick.”

Damon took the adze from the floor. At his first blow into the plaster, Lykos shouted.

“What are you doing?”

Damon struck again. Clay broke inward in broad flakes. Through the exposed hazel he saw the neat rows of timber in his yard: planks for two doors, a lintel already paid for, the pale ash he had saved for his own new roof.

“Making another way.”

“For him?”

“For her.”

It was true enough to say while he worked.

He cut the woven rods low down, tore them apart, then hacked higher. The centaur shielded his face with one arm. His other hand caught a loose rod before its broken point could fall beneath the bench.

Damon reached through the opening and dragged in a length of ash. Too long to stand upright. He laid it across two supports and cut it, every blow taking a little of the new roof out of his future. Ione began to cough in the clay dust.

“Nearly,” he said.

He drove the shortened ash under the beam and hammered a wedge beneath its foot. The roof creaked. He waited until it settled, put his adze against the brace, and cut.

The severed timber sprang against his wrist.

Pain opened his hand. The adze fell. At the same instant, the centaur shifted his weight away from the sharp wood. One forehoof struck the bottom of the new prop.

The wedge shot across the floor.

Damon saw daylight open between the prop and the beam.

The centaur thrust both hands upward.

Tiles rattled overhead. His elbows bent under the weight; then his horse legs spread, finding purchase among the clay fragments, and the beam stopped descending.

Damon stood with his injured wrist against his stomach.

“Now,” the centaur said through his teeth.

The Open Side

The man with the rope had returned. Lykos took it from him and stepped over the fallen gate.

The centaur’s hindquarters were still in the doorway. His hands held the roof inside. He could not turn to watch the spear.

“Don’t come in,” Damon said.

Lykos advanced another step.

Damon could have let him. One thrust, and the creature who had broken a feast table would pay for it. Damon would have done nothing except fail to stop a man with a weapon.

He saw the beam drop the width of a finger.

Ione cried out.

Damon snatched up the ruined brace with his sound hand and thrust it across Lykos’s chest.

“Take that end.”

“Get out of my way.”

“Take it, or the roof comes down on my daughter.”

Lykos looked at the beam. Then he looked at the centaur’s arms, the tendons standing out from wrist to shoulder.

For one dreadful instant neither man moved.

Damon pushed the timber harder into Lykos’s chest. Lykos dropped the rope and caught it. Together they lifted the brace beneath the sagging beam, crookedly, with Damon trying not to use his injured hand. The spear clattered against the wall.

“Higher,” Damon said.

The centaur gave a short, choking breath. They forced the timber upright. Damon kicked the wedge beneath it, once, twice, until the roof’s weight pressed it into place.

“Ione. Toward my voice.”

She crawled out between the centaur’s forelegs. One hoof trembled beside her hand. Damon wanted to seize her and pull, but he could not reach without letting go of the prop.

“Keep coming.”

Her head passed the hoof. Her shoulders. She caught her tunic on a splinter and stopped to tug it free.

“Leave it!”

The cloth tore. She scrambled through the broken wall into the yard.

Damon heard her sob once, loudly, in the open air.

The centaur lowered his hands. The brace held.

Now there was nothing between him and Lykos except a length of wood both men were touching. The spear lay at his feet. He looked at it. Lykos saw him look.

Damon kept his hand on the brace.

“Go through the wall,” he said.

The centaur turned his head toward the yard. He bent beneath the beam, pushed one arm through the hanging hazel, and stepped over the low sill. Clay grated along his flank. His hind legs drew free of the broken gate at last.

Lykos stooped for the spear.

Outside, Ione stood beside the timber stack. The centaur could have passed her at a run. Instead he shortened his steps and went around her, carefully, leaving enough space for her to keep both hands against the wood.

By the time Lykos reached the opening, the creature was beyond the yard.

He did not throw.

Damon let go of the prop one finger at a time.

A Drink of Water

Lykos picked his red feast ribbon from a splinter in the gate. It had torn almost in two.

“My brother will want to know who let him go.”

Damon looked at the broken wall. Through it he could see Ione, upright and breathing, with dust in her eyelashes.

“Tell him.”

Lykos left with the spear and the unused rope.

Damon went to his daughter. She pressed herself against his uninjured side. For a while he held her there, looking at the ash he had cut, the crooked brace, the tools half buried in plaster. Before dark he would have to make the roof safe. He would have to find something to close the yard.

A hoof struck stone beyond the timber stack.

Damon moved Ione behind him.

The centaur stood on the path. He carried the long offcut of ash that had fallen outside the wall. He laid it within Damon’s reach, keeping his hands on it until it rested quietly on the ground.

“This was good wood,” he said.

“It still is.”

The centaur nodded. Blood had dried dark in his beard. He looked toward the fragments of the water jar, then away.

Ione slipped out from behind her father. She took the shallow mixing bowl from beside the lime sack and carried it into the house. Damon heard the dipper scrape the bottom of their other jar.

She came back with water slopping over her fingers.

Damon took the bowl from her and walked to the broken threshold.

The centaur reached for it with both hands.