The Centaurus

“But my mother was herself a daughter of Oceanus,” he said, and instantly knew that, in giving her light self-abuse an answer even so delicately serious, he had presumed.

Her brown eyes blazed with a force that struck from him all consciousness of her body; that shining form became the mere mounting of her angered divinity. “Yes,” she said, “and Philyra so loathed the monster she bore that rather than suckle you she prayed to be metamorphosed into a linden tree.”

He stiffened; with her narrow woman’s mind she had cut through to the truth that would give most hurt. But in recalling to him the unforgivable woman, Venus fortified him against herself. In contemplating the legend wherein on an island so tiny it seemed glimpsed through many refracting layers of water there lay neglected a half-furred and half-membranous squid of fear that was his infant self, in contemplating this story, one among many stories save that an unrecognized image in it bore his name, Chiron had arrived as an adult at a compassionate view, framed in his experience of creatures and his knowledge of history, of Philyra as a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, more beautiful than bright, set upon by savage Kronos who, surprised by watchful Rhea, transformed himself into a stallion and galloped free to leave his interrupted seed work its garbled growth in the belly of the i

She studied him as she passed the towel across her body; her. skin was transparently beaded everywhere. Her shoulders were lightly freckled. “You don’t like women,” she said. It seemed to be a discovery that did not excite her.

He made no answer.

She laughed; the brilliance of her eyes, through which a lavish Otherworld had poured, turned to an opaque animal lambency and, jauntily holding the towel about her with an arm crooked at her back, she stepped forward out of the pool and touched his chest with one finger of her free hand. Behind her, the water of the pool retreated in wide rings from her disturbing motion. It lapped low banks lined with reeds and narcissus and phallic, unflowered iris; the earth beneath her narrow, veined feet was a tapestry of moss and fine grass interwoven with violets and pale wood anemones sprung from the blood of Adonis. “Now had it been I,” she said, in a voice that curled around the whorls of his mind even as her carefully revolving fingertips intertwined with the bronze fleece of his chest, “I would have been pleased to play nurse to a creature combining the refinement and consideration of a man with”-her lids lowered; her amber lashes flared on her cheeks; the plane of her face demurely shifted, and he felt her gaze include his hindquarters-”the massive potency of a stallion.” His nether half, an imperfect servant of his will, preened of itself; his hind hooves cut two fresh crescents into the spongy pondside turf.

“A combination, my lady, often cancels the best of its elements.”

For the space of her smirk she seemed a rather common young flirt. “That would be true, brother, if your head and shoulders were those of a horse, and the rest human.”

Chiron, one of the few centaurs who habitually conversed with cultivated persons, had heard this jest often before; but her powerful nearness had so expanded him that its humor pierced him afresh. His laugh emerged a shrill whi

The goddess became pensive. “Your trust in us is touching. What have we done to deserve our worshippers?”

“It is not what the gods do that makes us adore them,” he recited. “It is that they are.” And to his own surprise he discreetly expanded his chest, so that her hand rested more firmly on his skin. In abrupt vexation she pinched him.

“Oh, Chiron,” she said, “If only you knew them as I do. Tell me about the gods. I keep forgetting. Name them to me. Their names are so grand in your mouth.”

Obedient to her beauty, enslaved to the hope that she would drop the towel, he intoned, “Zeus, Lord of the Sky; cloud-gathering king of the weather.”

“A lecherous muddler.”

“His bride Hera, patron of holy marriage.”

“The last time I saw her she was beating her servants because Zeus had not spent a night in her bed for a year. You know how Zeus first made love to her? As a cuckoo.”

“A hoopoe,” Chiron corrected.

“It was a silly cuckoo like in a clock. Tell me some more gods. I think they’re so fu

“Poseidon, master of the many-maned sea.”

“A senile old deckhand. His beard stinks of dead fish. He dyes his hair dark blue. He has a chest full of African pornography. His mother was a negress; you can tell by the whites of his eyes. Next.”

Chiron knew he should stop; but he secretly relished scandal, and at heart was half a clown. “Bright Apollo,” he a

“That prig. That unctuous prig always talking about himself, his conceit turns my stomach. He’s illiterate.”