The Centaur Read Online Free PDF

the centaur’s chest again, as if to reassure herself that he had not turned to stone. “You knew your father. I envy you. Had I seen Uranus’ face, heard his voice—were I not the afterthought of his desecrated corpse—I would be aschaste as Hestia, my aunt, the one god who truly loves me. And now she is demoted from Olympus, reduced to a household trinket.” The girl’s darting thought took another turn. She said to Chiron, “You know men. Why do they revile me? Why is my name a matter of jokes, why is my caricature gouged into lavatory walls? Who else serves them so well? What other god gives them with the same hand such power and such peace?
Why am I blamed?
”
    “Your accusations, my lady, are all from yourself.”
    Her flood of confession drained, she dryly mocked him. “So prudent. So wise. Good Chiron. Our scholar, our propagandist. So docile. Have you ever wondered, nephew, if your heart belongs to the man or the horse?”
    He stiffened and said, “From the waist up, I am told I am fully human.”
    “Forgive me. You are kind, and I repay you in divine coin.” She stooped and plucked an anemone. “Poor Adonis,” she said, idly fingering the starlike sepals. “His blood was so pale. Like our ichor.”
    A gust of remembrance ruffled her hair, in whose feathery crown the moisture had evaporated. She turned her back and in half-secrecy brought the flower to her lips, and her still-damp mane dripped in sympathetic curves down flesh as white and smoothly molded as that fabled powder, the earth of Olympus, snow. Her buttocks were pink and faintly roughened; there was a golden tinge of pollen on the backs of her thighs. She kissed the flower, dropped it, and turned with a new expression—tremulous, flushed, diffuse, shy. “Chiron,” she commanded. “Make love to me.”
    His great heart jarred against his ribs; he waved her back with a trembling hand. “But my lady: below the waist, I am fully animal.”
    Gay, she stepped forward on violets. The towel fell. Her breasts were already tipped with desire. “Do you think you will rupture me? Do you think us women so negligible? We are weak in the arms; but strong in the thighs. Our thighs must be strong; the world is rooted between them.”
    “But a goddess, and a centaur—”
    “Men are reeds; they no longer fill me. Come, Chiron, don’t insult your lady. Disrobe of wisdom; you will be wiser when we rise.” She cupped her palms below her breasts and stood on tiptoe against him, so that her nipples thrust against his own, the male’s vestigial ornaments. But their chests were of unequal spans; she giggled with the game of making the double opposition, and Chiron even in his distraction saw that the problem might be expressed geometrically.
    “Are you afraid?” she whispered. “How do you do it with Chariclo? Do you mount her?”
    His voice rose small and parched in his constricted throat. “It would be incest.”
    “It always is; we all flow from Chaos.”
    “It is day.”
    “Good; then the gods are asleep. Is love so hideous it must hide in the dark? Do you disdain me because I’m a trollop? But as a scholar you know how after every bath I am restored to virginity. Come, Chiron, crack my maidenhead; it hampers my walking.”
    More in weakness than in strength, as one would embrace in despair a fevered child, he put his arms around the wiggling girl; her body was slippery and limp with complaisant dissolution. The hollow of her back felt downy. The crest of an erection grazed his belly; a neigh seethed through his nostrils. Her arms were clenched around his withers, and her thighs, lifting weightlessly, murmured among his forelegs.“Horse,” she breathed, “ride me. I’m a mare. Plow me.” From her body issued a swift harsh scent of flowers, flowers of all colors crushed and tumbled in the earth of his own equine odor. He closed his eyes and was swimming through a shapeless warm landscape studded with red trees.
    But his joints held rigid.