Centaur Rising - Softcover

Yolen, Jane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250068134 ISBN 13: 9781250068132

Verlag: Square Fish, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

One night during the Perseid meteor shower, Arianne thinks she sees a shooting star land in the fields surrounding her family's horse farm. About a year later, one of their horses gives birth to a baby centaur. The family has enough attention already as Arianne's six-year-old brother was born with birth defects caused by an experimental drug-the last thing they need is more scrutiny. But their clients soon start growing suspicious. Just how long is it possible to keep a secret? And what will happen if the world finds out?

At a time when so many novels are set in other worlds, Jane Yolen imagines what it would be like if a creature from another world came to ours in this thoughtfully written, imaginative novel, Centaur Rising.

A Christy Ottaviano Book

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jane Yolen

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Centaur Rising

By Jane Yolen

Square Fish

Copyright © 2015 Jane Yolen
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-06813-2

1

Agora’s Surprise

A MARE IS PREGNANT between 320 and 370 days, about a full year. Ponies give birth a bit earlier, more like eleven months. Mom taught me about that when we first came to the farm as renters, long before we bought out the old owner with the money she got from the divorce. When we moved here to Massachusetts, I was three, Mom and Dad were married, and Robbie wasn’t even a blip on the horizon, as Mom likes to say.

Mom grew up in Connecticut with horses and knows everything about them, even though her old farm, Long Riders, is long gone. As are my grandparents. A cul-de-sac of new houses sits on the old ménage and pasture, and the old farmhouse has become a gas station and general store. We drove past it once. It made Mom sad. Still, she knows horses inside and out, and what she doesn’t know, Martha does.

If Mom’s the owner of our farm, Martha McKean is its heart. Our riders call her “a regular horse whisperer,” and sometimes “the Queen”—except Mrs. Angotti, who once called Martha “Ivan the Terrible,” and the name stuck. Mom explained to me that Ivan was some Russian king nobody liked and who was really awful to everybody. Now everyone says it as a joke, and even Martha smiles at it.

Martha’s not awful at all, she just doesn’t like people much. Except she tolerates Mom and bosses Robbie and me around something fierce. Martha prefers horses, and it’s easy to guess why. The horses listen to her, and they do what she tells them to, almost as if she’s their lead mare. The rest of us listen when we want to, which isn’t often enough to please Martha.

So, near Thanksgiving last year, when Martha came into our house at dinnertime, a green rubber band in her hair, and said to Mom, “Old Aggie’s got something in her belly,” we listened, horrified.

Martha’s the only one to call Agora “Old Aggie.” I once asked her why, and she shrugged, saying, “Aggie told me to,” like it was no big deal that horses talked to her.

Mom’s hands went up to her mouth. She looked over at me, green eyes shining strangely, like a cat about to cry. Then the little pinch lines between her eyes showed up as she struggled to control herself, and I knew that there’d be no tears. There never are.

“Colitis?” I whispered to Martha.

It was the worst thing I could think of. If colitis hits a horse’s belly, it usually dies within hours, a day at most. We’ve never lost a horse to colitis, or anything else.

Martha warns us about once a month that losing a horse is bound to happen someday and we’d best be prepared. Times she talks like that, Mom calls her Aunty Dark Cloud.

Strangely, Martha laughed, a high whinnying sound. “Nah, not colitis. That old pony’s up and got herself pregnant.”

“Can’t have,” I said. “She’d need a stallion for—”

“Must be three months gone.” Martha’s hand described a small arc over her own belly.

Counting back on my fingers, I got to August, the month of the shooting stars.

Mom must have done the same counting. She said, “That darn Jove. I’ll call over and…”

Jove, the big Suss stud, had gotten out more times than we could count. It’s why we finally had to build the double-rowed fence between our fields and the Suss farm. We couldn’t really afford it, and Mom had called it “the most expensive birth deterrent ever,” but if we left it to Mr. Suss, it wasn’t going to happen.

Robbie laughed. “Aggie’s gonna have a baby!” he said. “Will it be bigger than her if Jove is the dad?”

Martha ignored him, shook her head, and said to Mom, “Old man Suss would have been over here yammering away at you had that rascal Jove got loose again. Suss would already be charging you a stud fee, like he’s done before. But he’s said nary a word, Miz Martins.” She never called Mom by her first name.

“Then how…?”

It was the one question that troubled us the entire year of Agora’s pregnancy. But eventually I thought the two of them were looking in the wrong place for answers. I knew this was true magic in our lives at last, and the answer was in the sky.

*   *   *

I’ve never seen Martha out of uniform: those rumpled and stained blue jeans, a white or gray T-shirt in the summer and, in the winter, a dark-blue sweater with a hole in one sleeve. She wears sneakers in sun, rain, or snow, not like Mom who’s almost always in jodhpurs and boots with a well-ironed shirt during the day and a long Indian print dress in the evening after barn chores are done.

Martha’s gray hair is usually tied back in a ponytail with a fat colored rubber band, red when she’s feeling good, green when worried, blue when it’s best to leave her alone. Mom’s hair is pulled back in an ashy blond French braid when she rides, though at night it sits like a cloud on her shoulders. Is she beautiful? Dad used to say so. He called her the princess of ice and snow. He was dark to her light, heat to her ice. Or so Martha said once, and I never forgot it.

Sometimes I think Martha is probably part horse herself. And that’s what my English teacher calls a GOM, a good old-fashioned metaphor. Of course she’s truly human through and through, something I came to understand during the year after that night in the pasture when the stars fell all around us and a ball of lightning leaped over the fence.

*   *   *

Mom and Robbie and I live in the big farmhouse. It has fifteen rooms. “Far too many for just us,” Mom says whenever we have an all-family cleaning day. We can’t afford help, except for Martha, who only does the barn work. So Mom and I do the mopping and dusting while Robbie in his wheelchair is piled high with cleaning stuff that he hands out as we make our way around the house.

Maybe the house is too big for us, though I remember when Dad was here, how he seemed to fill the place up with all his stuff. In those days, we had a guitar room, a pool table room, plus a band room attached to two recording rooms that Dad called The Studio. And then there were bedrooms for all his band mates and roadies to stay over in as well. These days we just have empty rooms and loads of doors in the hallway that we keep closed year-round.

The old band room on the first floor is now Robbie’s bedroom, with its specially made shower that a friend of Mom’s built in one of the old recording rooms, trading his work so that his kids could have a year of free riding.

When Robbie was born, Dad left and took with him all the people who’d moved in—including the special nurse who was supposed to help care for Robbie but instead became a special backup singer in his band. We never got another nurse, because Mom just didn’t have the money for one. She moved her bed into the old pool table room so she could be right next door to Robbie. That left me with the entire upstairs. So I have a playroom and a music room and a room for my riding trophies. And there’s two extra rooms for friends, if I ever have any friends who want to stay over.

We even have room...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Square Fish
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250068134
• ISBN 13: 9781250068132
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 271
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland