The day her stepbrothers decided to kill the thing, Thalia was wedged into the cool muddy space beneath the boardwalk at the community pool. A hundred and two out, the bleached air shaking and buzzing. She was reading a tattered book on Ancient Greek grammar. Gobs of sunscreen-laced sweat dribbled off her forehead and chin, blurring the thetas and epsilons.
As was traditional on pool days, she’d clambered over the handrail and scurried into the damp darkness below the clubhouse so she could have half an hour to herself, hunched on a little spit of dirt beside the fishpond. The screams and giggles and splashes from the nearby pool set her teeth on edge.
She closed her eyes and ran through the conjugations of the verb oîda. I know, you [singular] know, he/she/it knows. “Thal,” she heard Marcus call from the pool. “The fuck are you? Time to go home.” She shook her head and didn’t answer. We know. You [plural] know. They know.
I know I hate the summertime, she thought. Oîda miséo tó théros.
Her stepdad insisted on driving her, Marcus, and Neal out to Westville Park every Saturday in that long summer of 1999, dropping them at the public pool while he played a round of golf on the browning, sapling-studded nine-hole course. On paper, Auburn Lake Trails sounded pretty fancy: a gated community with its own golf course, tennis courts, and lakeside clubhouse. But the golf course was mostly weeds, the tennis courts were cracked like old leather, and the lakeside clubhouse was more of a pond-side rec room. The doors were always locked, the windows caked in grime. Thalia had never seen the inside in all her fourteen years.
The “Lake” in Auburn Lake Trails was a misnomer, too. The dam was finally canceled after years of delays and economic studies (a victory for “those goddamn environmentalists,” according to her stepdad) and so the Auburn Reservoir never actually materialized. But the name stuck around. Now ALT was just a loose collection of country folk in their wide, boxy houses, inhaling the stillness and leading their dogs through the steep, silent streets.
It wasn’t so bad: Thalia’s stepdad’s house looked out over a vast green canyon, the hills undulating like the spine of some giant serpent. You couldn’t see the river from up at the house, but you could hike down to it and back if you had a spare six hours.
Perched on the edge of the canyon, packed with stables and gruff patriarchs, ALT was a quiet community of horse-people. As in, people who loved horses. Not centaurs. There was only one centaur, and it lived way down in the bottom of the canyon.
Its presence was keenly felt and frequently discussed at community meetings, but the creature itself hadn’t been seen in years. Sunday nights, according to Thalia’s stepdad, one grizzled old-timer down at the Milestone Saloon liked to brag that his granddad had been eaten by the monster, back when a posse of hard men decided to rid their beloved hills of this abomination. Only one of them came back to sing the tale, and that guy had lost an arm, or a foot, or an ear, depending on the storyteller’s mood that night.
A sunburnt face popped over the edge of the deck, startling Thalia from her studies. Upside-down, Neal flashed a too-toothy grin. “Found ya. Come on, Dad’s waiting.”
She sighed and got up, brushing flakes of dried mud from her rump.
Marcus scowled at her when she scrambled up the embankment and emerged from below the boardwalk, Greek grammar clutched protectively over her bony chest. “Hey,” he said. “Where the hell were you?” Marcus was seventeen, three years older than her.
His little brother Neal, fifteen, rubbed water out of his buzzed golden hair, snatched a corner of the Greek book, and tugged it from Thalia’s grasp. “More nerd shit, huh?” he said, opening the book and grimacing at the conjugation tables.
“Give it,” Thalia said.
“Better watch that tone, Thal,” Neal said, leaning his forearms on the wooden guardrail above the pond as he mock-lazily leafed through the book.
“Give it back,” Thalia said. She darted forward to try and snag it, but Neal shot a hand out and slammed his palm roughly into her shoulder, nearly knocking her over.
“Thalia,” Marcus said. “Quit dicking around.”
Neal grinned. “Oops,” he said as he dropped the book into the fishpond.
Thalia stared over the rail as an entire language slapped the brown surface of the pond, took on water like a doomed ship, and slowly began to sink. Before it disappeared in the murk, two fish swam over to examine the book. They decided it wasn’t food and curled away, disappointed, shimmering.
“Wow, that really sucks, Thal,” Neal said. Marcus yawned.
She looked at them with her frozen animal eyes.
Marcus rolled his own blue eyes. “Come on, then. Dad’s in the truck.” The brothers jogged on their bare toes along the creaking boardwalk, the wooden slats baked hot in the northern California sun. Thalia reluctantly followed, glancing through the pool gate at the pearl-blue water, frothed and torn apart by a sea of small pink and brown bodies. Last night she’d dreamed that the pool held an annual Thalia Day, where nobody else was allowed and she could slice through the cool water all alone, in pure blue silence, without anyone speaking to her, without having to weave around anyone’s grasp.
~
At the top of the wooden stairs was a notice board, staked into the bushes by two square posts. Marcus walked right past it, his towel draped over his shoulders, but Neal stopped and called out to him. Marcus came back, and the three of them read the new laminated sheet of paper:
NOTICE
WENDELL T. ROBIE TRAIL
AND
AMERICAN CANYON TRAIL
CLOSED INDEFINITELY
AS OF 7.18.99
THE CREATURE HAS BEEN SPOTTED
IN HOBOKEN CANYON
DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES HIKE ON THESE TRAILS
“Shit dude, that blows,” Neal said. “Right down below our house.” He looked at his brother for confirmation.
Marcus narrowed his eyes.
“That’s where you and Ashley always go,” Neal pointed out, waggling his eyebrows a little.
“How about you shut your fucking mouth,” Marcus replied.
Thalia frowned. Anytime she could sneak away—like when her stepdad was at work in Auburn and the boys were playing video games in the family room—she crept out and took long walks down the steep slope behind their house, into the endless forests. Sometimes she’d go as far as the Wendell T. Robie Trail, strolling and reading and smiling at the riders and their snorting horses on the dirt path. There wasn’t much else to do around here, especially not since Mom died. The house was always too raucous for reading, packed to bursting with Marcus and Neal’s sweaty friends or their dad’s drinking buddies.
“People use that trail,” Neal said. “A lot.”
A crowd of people came shuffling up the stairs behind them. Thalia turned and saw Ashley in a dripping neon-orange bikini. Her parents surrounded her in a protective phalanx.
“Hey Marcus,” Ashley said. “Thought you were heading home?”
He grunted manfully, then pointed to the notice board.
“Ah,” Ashley’s dad said. He was a large potbellied man with a blond mustache cascading over his lips like a yellow tarantula. “You saw the trail closures, eh? We were gonna take the horses out tomorrow.” He peered at his daughter, who had snuck over and pressed her thin shaking body against Marcus’ arm. She caught her dad’s gaze and quickly stepped away.
“A real shame, Mr. Henshaw,” Marcus agreed.
“That stupid animal,” said Mrs. Henshaw from beneath her enormous white sunhat. “Why can’t the animal control people just shoot the damn thing?”
“Because, dear,” said Mr. Henshaw, his mustache bristling, “they’ve tried before. People died. Hell, they’ve found the bones of mountain lions in its nests. One guy found a goddamn bear skull. Picked all the way clean.” He grunted. “Sounds like it’s moved uphill quite a bit. It lived down at Poverty Bar last I heard, by the river.”
“Well, I wish somebody would do something about it,” his wife said. “It’s not fair. Call in the government.”
“The who?” Mr. Henshaw roared. “We’re not telling them. Remember what they did to that place up in Oregon, when that farmer found a hydra living in his pond?”
Nods all around. In some ways, the residents of Auburn Lake Trails were bizarrely proud of their centaur. A strict code of silence reigned when it came to telling outsiders about the local monster. It was a nuisance, but it was their nuisance.
“Still, though,” Mrs. Henshaw insisted. “It isn’t right. Feels like there aren’t any men around here any longer.”
Her husband glared at her.
Marcus had been staring at the ground during this exchange, but now something slid through his eyes, something new.
“Don’t you worry, ma’am,” he said, dropping his voice half an octave. “That thing’s days are numbered.”
Mr. Henshaw laughed. “You gonna kill it, kid?”
Marcus smiled. “You have a nice one, now. Our pops is waiting for us.” He leaned in and pecked Ashley on the cheek. “See you around. Come on, guys.”
He walked toward his dad’s Chevy in the lot, with Neal and Thalia in tow.
~
There were two or three other towns across North America with centaur legends: one in Manitoba, another in Wyoming. The three of them probably crossed into the New World together and then went their separate ways, according to Silas Bollinger, ALT’s local amateur historian. Maybe they were pariahs, outcasts from their original herd. Silas figured that the ALT centaur had split off from its herd in Greece a couple thousand years ago and walked up through China and Russia and across the Bering Strait to Alaska. All the centaurs in Greece had been hunted to extinction long ago, Silas was sure, so this was one of the last ones left. Thalia liked crossing through the Bollinger horse pasture sometimes on her way to the Rec Lake, and if Silas was out brushing Flapjack, she’d stop and talk to the old man a minute.
Not a liminal being, he said. Not a half-man, half-horse; that was a children’s legend. A real centaur was a terrifyingly intelligent animal, neither man nor horse but some wild third thing from the darkness of the old world. You could hear its screams sometimes, late at night, on the wind. A throaty snarl, a ragged howl.
“It ain’t never come where men dwell,” Silas said, patting his horse’s chestnut flank. “It hates us.” He handed Thalia half a carrot to feed Flapjack.
She nodded. “Sounds kind of nice.”
~
That night, Thalia was sprawled on her stomach in bed, reading through Euripides’ Medea in the original Greek, when she heard the boys’ low voices coming from their room next door. She rose and pushed her rolling desk chair against the far wall, directly below the air vent in the ceiling. She climbed up on the chair and listened to the voices coming through the vent.
“You must be out of your goddamn mind,” Neal said quietly. “We can’t—”
“How much of a pussy can you possibly be right now?” Marcus interrupted. “Seriously, how much? You going for the record, or?”
“Fuck off,” Neal said. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m dead serious. This is it. Our legacy. Monster slayers. That thing’s got to die.”
“It’s fucking immortal, genius.”
“No,” Marcus said. “It’s an animal. A really old one, but still an animal. We blast it. Two to the face from Dad’s shotgun, then we’ll see how immortal it is.”
“You are actually an insane person. People have died—”
“Which people?” Marcus asked. “When? From like a hundred years ago? Nobody’s tried it with modern weapons. Nobody’s even seen the thing for decades. Not in person. It’s just those camera traps the homeowners’ association has set up all over the forest. We know roughly where it’s living. We creep up on it, we do some crazy heroic shit, and we bring its fucking head back and show everyone.”
“If you could just shoot the thing, don’t you think someone would’ve tried by now?”
“They don’t want to,” Marcus said. “The folks around here, they like it. It hunts all the bears and mountain lions, and it never comes up here into the neighborhoods. And obviously, the old folks? They like that it keeps their kids from having a secret spot down in the canyons, to smoke or fuck or whatever. Keeps the kids in line. Well I’m sick of it. They’re just a bunch of pussies.”
Thalia shuddered. Were they serious? She kept listening for the next hour as Marcus slowly talked his younger brother into going hunting with him.
“We’ll be heroes,” said Marcus.
“We’ll be careful,” said Neal.
~
The next day was Sunday, which meant Thalia’s stepdad was home with them all day. That was too much heat, so the boys planned their hunt for early Monday morning, when their dad went to work. On summer-break weekdays, he left them alone at the house. “Just make sure Thalia gets outside for a few hours,” he’d tell Marcus. “Otherwise she’ll read all day. It’s creepy.”
Sunday went by like it always did: agonizingly slow. Her stepdad tinkered away at his motorcycle in the open garage for most of the afternoon, his tinny radio showering the hills with Alan Jackson’s whoops and yips. The boys dragged Thalia down to the Rec Lake at their father’s insistence, then left her on the sandy bank with a book of Greek poetry while they scurried off to work on their plan in secret.
Monday, she woke early to a white-hot sunrise. Peering through her blinds, she saw her stepdad’s Chevy pull out of the driveway. Then she heard her stepbrothers pad down the hall past her door, the floor creaking. She waited almost an hour, listening to the boys pack whatever they were packing and poke around the kitchen, grunting to each other. Finally, at about seven a.m., she heard them stomp down the back stairs and head outside. Thalia tugged on a pair of jeans and a green t-shirt, walked out to the kitchen, and grabbed two water bottles from the fridge. She found a note on the door:
thalia-
me and neal are going out today for the whole day. be back by the time dad gets home but if he calls just tell him were at jeremys. theres corn dogs in the freezer. go in our room and i will literally kill you.
peace,
marcus
She tore the note down and threw it away. Her stepdad wouldn’t call—he never did.
She had no clear plan, just a direction, a magnetic tug. She tried to imagine what Mom would’ve done. Mom had been a Classics professor at a university clear out in Sacramento—an hour’s drive each way—and she’d had a linguist’s breathless reverence for the power of language to right all the world’s wrongs. Even as a kid, though she inherited her mother’s love of cold ancient grammars, of the icy feel of alien words on her tongue, Thalia thought this was a silly opinion. What good were words against physicality, against the raw bloodlust of men and boys?
Mom probably would’ve tried talking them out of hunting the centaur, laying out a clear and well-reasoned argument. Charts on a whiteboard about how the potential cons outweighed the pros. Etymologies of the word hunt. And it wouldn’t have worked. Words never worked. They didn’t work when Mom leapt into the river for a summer swim in her black one-piece and was pinned to the bottom by an errant current, her verbal protestations muffled in her throat by the muddy water. They didn’t work when Thalia’s stepdad stumbled home that night, damp and exhausted and silent, or when the sheriff’s deputy with him sat Thalia down to try and explain what had happened. “Freak accident” wasn’t a useful phrase; it was sonically interesting but empty of meaning. It may as well have been Latin or Hittite or some lost mountain dialect no longer mutually intelligible with the rest of the language.
But all right, yes. Thalia clearly had to do something. Right now. Snap out of it. She stuck the bottles of water into her backpack along with a box of granola bars, and then walked out the back door into the bathwater-warm half-light.
Down the slope, she could just make out the boys’ heads bobbing in the limp gray grass before disappearing into the folds of the forest. She half-slid, half-walked down the long hill after them, into a sloping tunnel of chirps and rustles and other alive sounds.
She had no idea what she was going to do.
~
Up ahead, she watched the boys follow the narrow deer track through the brambles of the blackberry patch, the twisted thorns clinging angrily to the side of the hill. Picking her way a few hundred feet behind them, Thalia plucked a couple of sour, plump berries and popped them into her mouth. Remember this sharp taste, she told herself, and that’s when she first became aware of how terrified she was. She tried not to gag on the strange feral flavor of the juice. I’ll figure it out, she thought, I’ll think of something, I’ll stop them.
After twenty minutes or so, they stumbled onto the Wendell T. Robie Trail and followed its snaking path through the woods. Thalia kept off the trail itself as much as possible, sticking to the low slope above it and staying well behind the boys. Blue morning light slanted through pine needles, the hot wind whispering in some hidden language. It was hard to keep quiet—there were no voices, no engines, just the birdsong and the dull babble of distant water—but Marcus and Neal seemed too focused to notice Thalia’s occasional stumblings, chattering to themselves about heroism and power and death, their voices deeper than normal. They were on the hunt. Thalia watched their skinny shoulders heave through the black trees.
A memory wriggled its way to the front of her mind: Neal and Marcus begrudgingly bringing her down this trail on a hike last year, after their dad insisted they take her outside for the day. They’d left her right here, at this same bend, saying they had to duck into the forest for a simultaneous piss. She’d heard them laughing through the trees. Then they’d vanished. A prank. It had taken her over an hour to find her way back home. After that, she’d made a point of memorizing the bends and switchbacks of the trail system, studying a map so she’d never get lost again.
Remembering this, Thalia nearly turned around and left them to their hunt. They could go eff themselves, for all she cared. Maybe they deserved the centaur. Maybe they’d become best friends with it and have a new buddy to terrorize their stepsister with. Maybe the centaur also had a stepsister it hated.
But she shook her head and kept walking. Couldn’t have said why, really. That same magnetic tug.
The trail curved back southeast for a while, then met up with the American Canyon Trail at a fork. They took the new path north and northwest, no longer traveling steeply downhill but instead following the curve of the hill above a deep shaded gully. Even in the shadows, the heat was spreading out its tentacles. Thalia rolled up her sleeves to her shoulders and shook a burr from her sneakers. She downed her first water bottle in one go.
After a mile or so, the dirt trail led them down into Hoboken Canyon, a lonely fold in the foothills. Thalia looked around but could only see a nest of pine and fir trees everywhere, a vast carpet of green and her a tiny bug skittering through it. The boys slowed their pace as they came into the canyon, jerking their heads from side to side nervously. Marcus hauled out his father’s Winchester and loaded it, the shotgun’s stock, grip, and barrel all painted in backcountry camouflage. He held it out in front and followed the barrel like a dowsing rod, while Neal gripped a silver Desert Eagle pistol in both hands, both stolen from their dad’s never-locked gun cabinet in the garage. They took a minute to steel themselves, then left the trail and began crunching down the slope into the valley.
Thalia bit down on her clenched fist and followed. Was there maybe some hidden layer of her, some hard dark marble of cruelty, that wanted them to get what they deserved? While she watched? Was that the secret engine pumping her legs like pistons?
It was another two hours of hard hiking up and down the canyon before they found anything. The heat was getting unbearable, but the boys tramped clear up to the eastern fork of the Robie trail again, then back down into the valley the way they came, searching for hoofprints or bones or signs of blood. They crossed over Canyon Creek and Hoboken Creek, slipping a little on the moss. Sweat poured down Thalia’s back, her hair stuck in wet clumps to her forehead and neck. A cloud of black gnats smeared across her vision.
Finally, they tried moving further west. A bit below the spot where the American Canyon Trail intersected the Dead Truck Trail along the ridge, the boys found a bare treeless slash on the southern slope of the knoll, just this side of the river. The clearing was big, maybe a hundred feet wide, steeply graded and splotched with red dirt like the hill had skinned its knee. They came at it from above, and the first thing they saw was the gnarled ribcage of what looked like a small bear bleaching in the sun, flecks of purple muscle and matted fur still stuck to the bones.
Then she heard the screaming.
It was the worst sound Thalia had ever heard, a hoarse and hollow and somehow voiceless shriek, like a sheet of metal being ripped apart. She collapsed to her knees and peered out from behind a tree.
A few trees downhill, Marcus was lying on his stomach, aiming the shotgun farther downhill. Neal was sitting with his back propped up against a tree, his eyes closed, breathing hard.
Thalia wrenched her gaze away from her stepbrothers. In the clearing below them, she saw it.
It was huge, twice the size of any horse. A dark shape moving along the rocks, stopping every few paces to tilt its head upward and pour its horrible metallic screech into the hot blue sky. Its legs were thicker than a horse’s, squat and powerful like a rhinoceros. Its patchy gray coat was striped with black along the spine. Silas was right, Thalia thought giddily, her mind struggling against shock. He was right: It didn’t look like a man’s torso welded to a horse’s body. It looked wrong, it looked melted, the long bulk pulled out behind it like taffy. Its hooves were giant slabs of flint, pawing in the dust.
The centaur’s back was still toward her. Rising up above its front legs was a wide, angular torso that looked clumsily carved from dark stone. Two long arms dangled from its shoulders, impossibly long, the sharp bladelike fingers reaching almost all the way down to the ground. It was still fifty feet away from Thalia, but from the back it looked like the head was covered in some kind of black hood or mask.
Poking up through the hood were two enormous antlers, pointed and branched and webbed like a fourteen-point buck’s. Horribly, the two antlers weren’t symmetrical at all; each took its own arduous zigzagging path toward the sky, the right side noticeably taller.
Thalia started to hyperventilate. She pulled her inhaler from her backpack and took four long puffs, her hands shaking uncontrollably, never taking her eyes from the monster. Running through her head were the words forest-god, forest-god.
The centaur stopped screaming and cocked its head to one side, smelling or listening. Then it slowly swung its bulk around, facing uphill. Toward them. Now Thalia could see that its bulbous head was indeed covered in a black hood, with two eyeholes torn out. The eyes were dark and red. She couldn’t make out any other features beneath the hood.
Then it screamed again, reared up on its back two legs, and shot toward the treeline at a gallop. Straight at Marcus. The pillars of its legs rumbled along the ground like boulders scraping against each other.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Marcus yelled. “Neal!” He pulled the trigger and filled the valley to the brim with thunder. Pumped and fired again.
Thalia couldn’t tell if his shots went wide or just glanced off the centaur—did it have armor under that pelt, plates of hide like a rhinoceros or armadillo? But the thing didn’t even slow. Its scream chased the echoes of the shotgun’s blasts. Marcus leapt away from the tree, away from the path of the monster, but it reached out a long jagged claw as it rushed by and scraped it along Marcus’ back.
Marcus screamed.
The centaur heaved its body around to slow itself, but it crashed its hindquarters into the tree Thalia was hiding behind. Branches and leaves poured onto her head as she crab-walked backward, whimpering. Away, away.
But it didn’t turn, didn’t see her. All its attention was on Neal, who was standing directly in front of it now and firing round after round from the pistol, the explosions echoing back on themselves in an endless drumroll. Neal’s lips were moving rapidly, chanting something Thalia couldn’t hear. Behind him, Marcus lay moaning on the ground, his back a bloody raw mess.
Once again, the shots didn’t seem to bother the creature at all. The centaur’s mountainous back blocked most of her view, but Thalia saw it reach one of those horrible arms in front of it, knife fingers splayed. The other arm dragged in the dirt. Neal yelled out in pain, and the gun went glinting away through the sunlight.
Sucking in small lungfuls of air, Thalia rose and sprinted back the way she came, darting from tree to tree. Up the hill. Back along the ridge. Up.
She paused to catch her breath, plugging her ears against the screams from the clearing below. To block out the images, she pictured a page from her diary, a list headed “Adikías” (“Grievances”). A list she had memorized, going over each item again and again in bed at night when she couldn’t sleep:
-when marcus locked me in the garage because his stupid girlfriend was coming over
-when neal pushed me into the blackberry bush and laughed and laughed
-when marcus rode my bike into the rec lake and it sank into the mud and he never took it back out, just swam away whooping
-when marcus shot that cat i was petting with his bb gun
-when marcus and neal tied me up and put me in the bathtub with all my clothes on and turned the water on and locked the bathroom from the inside and shut the door from the outside and then went around and broke in thru the bathroom window so that they could “rescue” me from the water
-when marcus stole a playgirl at the store just so he could hide it under my pillow and tell his dad i was hiding it there and i got in really bad trouble
-when neal threw my greek book in the fishpond
Thalia whispered each grievance to herself, over and over. Plus, what could she even do? They were the ones dumb enough to go fight the thing. Right? That’s right. Was that her fault? No, it was not her fault. Terrorizing a centaur like they terrorized her every single day. Well guess what you guys, centaurs can fight back. Bet you didn’t think about that, did you.
They deserved what they got.
Another shriek from below, a long drawn-out “please.” She couldn’t tell which of her stepbrothers it was.
Thalia sweated. She pulled a strip of chalky bark from the nearest tree and threw it in the dirt. She closed her eyes and whimpered. I’m sorry, Mom, I can’t do it. I can’t save them or anything. Why aren’t you here? Why can’t you just come back and we can order Chinese and conjugate some Greek verbs together? Why can’t—
She opened her eyes. Turned back toward the clearing, her face shining.
An idea.
She burst into the clearing and heard herself yell out at the top of her lungs:
“Khaîre, Kéntauros! Khaîre!”
She repeated it three times, her small voice cracking. Hail, Centaur. She greeted it like a lord or king. Hail.
It turned the upper half of its body partway around toward her. She could see one raw red eye through the hood. The boys had wedged themselves inside a hollow log; the centaur had torn half of it away.
Frantically, she thought back to the Euripides play she’d been reading the night before.
“Paûsai pónou toûd’,” she quoted. Cease from this toil.
It slowly began to turn its entire body her way.
“Ei…ei dokeî,” she added hastily. Please or, more literally, if it seems right.
It trotted around in a wide circle and finally faced her. It was only a few paces away now, its breath reeking of rotten meat.
“Thalia,” Neal called weakly from somewhere behind the creature. “You stupid little…”
Thalia’s entire body was shaking and spasming, but she repeated:
Cease from this toil. Please.
The centaur stared fully upon her, its massive matted chest heaving. Its red eyes blinked inside the hood.
After a long minute, it sucked in a sharp breath and began to make a strange splintering sound in its throat that Thalia eventually realized must be its voice. It was like nothing she’d ever heard, like someone bashing two trees together to try and form sentences. But incredibly, she found that she recognized a few of the words. They were, as she’d hoped, vaguely intelligible Ancient Greek, though the pronunciation was wildly different than what Mom had taught her.
Straining, she caught what might have been the words glôssa (language) and neóteis (youth). Piecing it together, she guessed the centaur was trying to say something like The language of my youth, or maybe Thy language is young. She had an impression of butting up against a vast dark restless intelligence, a feral one that only reluctantly used language.
“Ei dokeî,” she said again. Then, Please. These are my brothers. They are young, and fools.
The centaur replied with another long stream of words. She didn’t catch any of them this time.
Do not kill them, she said in Ancient Greek. Stay thy hand. I beg it.
It glared down at her, twelve feet tall. She steadily avoided looking at its face. Finally, it croaked out one word she recognized: Why?
An…exchange, she said. A plan, or half a plan, sloshed through her mind, riverlike and roaring.
The creature began a strange chant, almost a song, that was so elaborate and bizarre that she only understood a few words: crave, blood, age, battle, death. She caught the gist of it, though: You cannot give me anything more than what I crave: blood, battle, death.
Thinking fast, inventing wildly, she came up with the plan’s other half.
If thou spare them, I will take thee to a…a hidden enemy. An enemy great enough that even thou, Kéntauros, may struggle to defeat him. A far greater kill than these.
Enemy? the centaur asked, incredulous. It gestured around the forest with its long silver arms, as if to say, where?
I know thou hast…lived here long, Thalia said, pausing every few words to mentally translate. But this enemy has been here longer. Even thou, living here for centuries, has not recognized him. For thou knows not our…our tongue in this land. I speak the tongue, and I can speak to him. He is a god. Wilt thou fight the god?
Where? the centaur said.
She pointed uphill. I can guide thee there. A few hours’ walk. Only let my brothers live.
It leaned toward her, sniffing through its mask. Then it half-turned back toward Neal and Marcus, who were still lying inside the hollow log, crying and bleeding.
Please, she thought.
The centaur twisted back toward her. It pointed one long, scythe-like finger up the path.
She nodded quickly. In English, she called out to her stepbrothers: “Walk slowly out of the glade, but don’t turn your backs. Neal, you need to carry Marcus, if you can. Go back through the canyon until you hit the trail again. Hurry.”
But Neal stared at her in horror. “What…what the fuck are you?”
“Go now,” she said, then turned and went up the path, shrugging off her backpack and tossing it into the dirt. “There’s water and food in my pack.”
She could feel massive hoofbeats following her.
~
Thalia walked in a nightmare, her arms loose at her sides, her mind a yawning white blank. She pushed all conscious thought away, shoved it down into the fueling of her body. Keep stepping, keep hiking. Up the trail. Ignore the boiling stench behind you, the hot breath on your neck.
The thing did not speak to her. She led it up and down the trail, winding over and under small ridges and switchbacks, past waterfalls groaning behind green curtains of leaves.
She finally came out of the woods into burning sunlight and the loud rushing gurgle of the American River. The trail ended in a wide stretch of sand and gravel along the riverbank. She found a shallow narrow section and crossed the river, picking her way over the rocks. Massive splashing behind her. She stopped briefly to cup some of the icy wine-dark water over her head and into her mouth. On the north bank, she kept following the river across the brown meadow of Poverty Bar, littered with bones and refuse from the thing’s earlier habitation. She pointed upriver, north and east.
They followed the river for hours, crossing and recrossing when the slope grew too steep on the hither bank. Past United States Canyon, past Oregon Bar and the old Greenwood Bridge. The pale sun scraped at her shoulders. She walked in silence, reciting the names of landmarks to distract herself. She was in the land of the dead.
Finally, after five or six miles, she stopped at Ruck-a-Chucky Falls, where the river hissed and foamed and lathered itself angrily over a jumble of boulders. She clambered up the red hill north of the falls, yanking herself higher along the scrubby skeletons of trees. Exhausted, drenched in sweat, she pointed down at the screaming rapids.
The centaur stood behind and slightly above her, gazing down, its enormous antlers buzzing with flies.
Her voice creaking, Thalia spoke to it again in Greek:
The god of the river lives there.
The centaur growled low in its throat.
Only one immortal, Thalia said, can do battle with it. Only one without death.
The centaur rattled out some rapid words of Greek. She couldn’t understand much of it except, possibly, the phrase I do not see.
He has not a body as thou or as I, she said, the words flowing easier now. In thy home, in Hellas, there were Naïades and river-nymphs, were there not? He is one such as them, but more powerful. He hides his face in the white water. Shall I speak to him? Thou knows not the language.
The monster glared at her for a long minute, its mask flapping in the hot breeze. Then it inclined its head, once.
She prayed the centaur hadn’t picked up any English in its long centuries dwelling here—she knew it avoided men except to kill them. So she took a deep breath, raised both hands, and shouted, “Hakuna matata! What a wonderful phrase! Hakuna matata! Ain’t no passing craze!” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She tilted her head as if listening to the river’s loud static over the rocks.
After a minute, she turned and said, The god says he will challenge thee, Kéntauros. If thou can stop his flow and destroy his waters, thou wilt defeat the god and gain his crown and his domain. Wilt thou challenge him?
The centaur scratched its long fingers in the dust and trained its beady crimson eyes on her. Then it emitted a high-pitched metal shriek that made Thalia’s ears feel like they’d burst. It began moving toward her, enraged. She slapped her hands over her ears and fell to the ground, crouched in the fetal position as the monster galloped down the slope toward her, its sharp hands raised. She closed her eyes. This was it.
But she felt only a rush of air passing over her body, followed by a shuddering splash and a clatter of rocks.
She opened her eyes. The centaur had leapt clear over her, landing awkwardly in the middle of the whitewater below. Its upper half rose from the swirling maw of the river, its lower half hidden beneath. It shrieked again, lifted a colossal bone-white boulder, and threw it upstream where it landed with a huge splash. It began pummeling and scratching at the water with its massive silver hands.
Horrified, delighted, Thalia watched as the monster tore off its black hood and threw it away. Through the mist and whitewater, she could just make out a burnt-looking wreck of flesh, the mouth stretching impossibly wide like a jagged tear in the thing’s face. There was no nose and no brow, just a pulsing red knot of muscle and that awful torn mouth, dotted unevenly with curved teeth. The centaur lowered its face to the water and bit at it, then stabbed its huge antlers into the falls. It moved faster and faster, its body a gray blur beneath the crimson beacon of its face. It hacked and grappled and snarled at the rapids, the green water foaming white around its flanks.
With its lower half underwater, it looked almost like a man, like some horribly burnt corpse newly awakened, wearing a crown of antlers, baptizing itself frantically.
She watched for hours, fascinated, as the river got what it deserved. She imagined the pain the water must be feeling as the creature stabbed at it, the thin liquid flesh sliced apart over and over. That’s what you get, she thought.
It was nearly dusk when she finally turned away and trudged up the slope. She stopped at the Old Greenwood Bridge Road, staring west toward the long path home.
Instead, she turned east. The thin dirt trail along the river.
Today, she decided, would be the first Thalia Day. A day of pure blue silence, without anyone speaking to her, without having to weave around anyone’s grasp. The first of many.
She hauled her small, exhausted solitude along the trail east, into the buzzing golden wilderness. The splashes grew distant behind her.
~
It’s been years now, decades. But if you make the long hike down the canyon, you’ll see it: The centaur is still there, fighting the river.
