The Scorpio Races

Dove leaps into action, hooves digging up half circles of dirt behind her, and we tear after Finn.



Finn’s path is no mystery; he has to follow the roads, and there’s only the main one, heading into Skarmouth past our house. It’s not the straightest way, though. It winds around patchwork fields protected by stone walls and hedges. There’s no sense following his serpentine progress, marked by a trail of dust. Instead, Dove and I tear across the fields. Dove is not large — none of the natural island horses are, as the grass isn’t great — but she’s scopey and brave. So she and I throw ourselves over hedgerows at will, so long as the footing’s good.



We shave off the first corner, spooking several sheep. “Sorry,” I say to them over my shoulder. The next hedgerow comes up while I’m minding the sheep, and Dove has to twist herself in a hurry to launch herself over. I throw out reins in the world’s worst release but at least keep from jerking on her mouth, and she tucks her legs up tight beneath her and saves us both. As she canters away from the hedge, I gather up the reins again and pat her shoulder to show that I noticed her rescuing us, and she tips her ear back to show she appreciates that I cared.



Then it’s sailing across a field that used to hold sheep but now holds scrubby heather waiting to be burned off. The Morris is still a little ahead of us, a dark shape in front of a tower of dust. I’m not worried about his lead; to get a car down to the beach, he’ll have to either take the road through town, with its sharp right angles and crossing pedestrians, or make a detour around the town, losing several minutes and giving us a good chance to catch up.



I hear the Morris hesitate at the roundabout and then zoom toward town. I can take the road around Skarmouth and avoid any more jumping — or I can skirt through the very edge of the town, popping through a few back gardens and risking being seen by Gabe at the hotel.



I can already imagine being the first to charge onto the beach.



I decide to risk Gabe seeing me. It’s been long enough since we did this that the stodgy old ladies can’t complain too much about a horse passing through their yards, as long as I don’t squash anything useful.



“Come on, Dove,” I whisper. She charges across the road and through a break in a hedgerow. Here there are houses looking like they grew out of the rock, and cluttered back gardens full of possessions that have spilled out of the houses, and on the other side of them, a stretch of solid stone that no horse should have to canter on. The only way across is to tear through a half-dozen yards and past the hotel on the other side.



I hope that everyone’s busily at work at the piers or in their kitchens. We burst through the gardens, half leaping over wheelbarrows in the first, avoiding a crop of herbs in the second, and getting barked at by an evil terrier in the third. Then, inexplicably, over an old, empty bathtub in the final yard, and we’re off down the road to the hotel.



Of course, there is Gabe, and he sees me instantly.



He’s sweeping the walk in front of the hotel with a mighty push broom. The hotel is a forbidding, ivy-covered building behind him, the leaves cut in neat squares to let the sun into the windows with their bright blue sills. The height of the hotel blocks the morning light and casts a deeper blue shadow on the stone walk he sweeps. Gabe looks tall and grown-up with his brown jacket stretched across his broad shoulders. His gingerblond hair creeps down the back of his neck, a little long, but he is still handsome. I feel a sudden surge of fierce pride that he is my brother. He stops what he’s doing to lean on the end of the broom and watch me canter by on Dove.



“Don’t be mad!” I shout at him.



A smile walks over one side of his face but not the other. It almost looks like he’s actually happy, if you’ve never seen one of his real ones. The sad thing is this — I’ve gotten used to this fake one. I’ve become willing to wait for the real one to reappear, without realizing I should’ve been working hard to find it again.



I canter on, urging Dove into a gallop once we’re off the walk and back onto the grass. Here, the ground is soft and sandy, and begins to slope rapidly, the track becoming narrow between the hills and dunes that lead to the beach. I can’t tell if Finn is ahead of me or behind me. I have to draw Dove back down to a trot as the ground grows too steep. Finally, she makes the awkward leap that takes us down to sea level. When we round the final bank, I make a noise of irritation: The Morris is already parked where the grass meets the sand. The scent of exhaust hangs in the air, cupped by the rise of the ground around us.



“You’re still a good girl,” I whisper to Dove. She is out of breath but she blows out her lips. She considers it a good race.



Finn stands half in and half out of the car, the driver-side door standing open, his feet on the running board. One arm rests on the roof and the other on the upper part of the open door. He is looking out toward the sea, but when Dove blows out her breath through her lips again, he looks back to me, shielding his eyes. I can see that his face is worried, so I nudge Dove next to the car. I let out the reins so that she can graze while we stand there, but she doesn’t lower her head. Instead, she, too, turns her gaze toward the ocean, a hundred yards ahead of us.



“What?” I ask. I have a sick feeling in my stomach.



I follow the line of his eyes. I can just see a gray head thrusting its way above the surf, so far away and so close to the color of the tossed ocean that I can almost believe I’m imagining it. But Finn’s eyes wouldn’t be so large unless he was certain. Sure enough, the head emerges again, and this time I see dark nostrils blow so wide that I glimpse a tinge of red in them, even from here. Then the rest of the head follows, and the neck, crimped mane pasted to its skin by salt water, and then the powerful shoulders, glistening and damp. The water horse surges from the ocean and gives a mighty leap, as if the final steps over the incoming tide are a huge obstacle to overcome.



Finn flinches as the horse gallops down the beach toward us, and I lay a hand on his elbow, though my own heart is thumping in my ears.



“Don’t move,” I whisper. “Don’t-move-don’t-move-don’t-move.”



I cling to what we’ve been told over and over — that the water horses love a moving target; they love the chase. I make a list of reasons it won’t attack us: We’re motionless, we’re not near the water, we’re next to the Morris, and the water horses despise iron.



Sure enough, the water horse gallops past us without pause. I can see Finn swallowing, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny neck, and it’s so true, it’s so hard not to flinch until it’s leapt back into the ocean once more.



They’re here again.



This is what happens every fall. My parents didn’t follow the races, but I know the shape of the story nonetheless. The closer it gets to November, the more horses the sea spits out. Those islanders who mean to race in future Scorpio Races will often go out in great hunting parties to capture the fresh capaill uisce, which is always dangerous, since the horses are hungry and still sea-mad. And once the new horses emerge, it’s a signal to those who are racing in the current year’s races to begin training the horses they caught the years before — horses that have been comparatively docile until the smell of the fall sea begins to call to the magic inside them.



During the month of October, until the first of November, the island becomes a map of safe areas and unsafe areas, because unless you’re one of the riders, you don’t want to be around when a capall uisce goes crazy. Our parents tried hard to shield us from the realities of the uisce horses, but it was impossible to avoid it. Friends would miss school because an uisce horse had killed their dog overnight. Dad would have to drive around a ruined carcass on the way to Skarmouth, evidence of where a water horse and a land horse had gotten into a fight. The bells at St. Columba’s would ring midday for the funeral of a fisherman caught unawares on the shore.



Finn and I don’t need to be told how dangerous the horses are. We know. We know it every day.



“Come on,” I say to him. Staring out to sea, his thin arms bracing him upright, he looks very young, just then, my little brother, though he’s really caught in that strange no-man’s-land between child and man. I feel the sudden urge to protect him from the grief that October is going to bring. But it isn’t really the grief of this October I have to worry about; it’s that of an October already long gone.



Finn doesn’t answer, just ducks back down into the Morris and shuts the door without looking at me. It’s already a bad day. And that’s before Gabe gets home.



CHAPTER TWO



SEAN



Beech Gratton, the butcher’s son, has just slaughtered a cow and is draining the blood into a bucket for me when I hear the news. We are standing in the yard behind the butcher’s, the sound of our lack of conversation amplified by the echo of our footsteps on the stone around us. The day is beautiful and cool, and I’m restless, shifting from foot to foot. The stones beneath me are uneven, pushed up by roots from trees no longer in evidence, and stained, too, brown and black, in dots and splatters and rivulets.



“Beech, did you hear yet? The horses are out,” Thomas Gratton addresses his son, emerging from the open door of his shop. He had started into the courtyard but pauses mid-stride when he sees me. “Sean Kendrick. I didn’t realize you were here.”



I don’t say anything, and Beech grunts, “Came by when he heard I was slaughtering.” He gestures to the cow’s corpse, which now hangs, decapitated and legless, from a tripod of wood. The ground’s awash with blood from where Beech was slow to place the bucket beneath the cow. The cow’s head lies off to the edge of the yard, tumbled onto its side. Thomas Gratton’s mouth works as if he’d like to say something to Beech about the scene, but he doesn’t. Thisby is an island well populated by sons disappointing their fathers.



“Did you hear, then, Kendrick?” Thomas Gratton asks. “Is that why you’re here and not on a horse?”



I am here because the new men that Malvern has hired to feed the horses are afraid at best and incompetent at worst, and the hay has been poor and the cuts of meat even worse. There’s been no blood to speak of for the capaill uisce, as if by treating them as regular horses the grooms hope to make them so. So I am here because I have to do things myself if I want them done properly. But I just say, “I hadn’t heard.”



Beech slaps the dead cow affably on the neck and tips the bucket this way and that. He doesn’t look at his father. “Who did you hear from?”



I don’t really care about the answer to his question; it doesn’t matter who heard or who saw what, only that the capaill uisce are climbing out of the sea. I can feel in my bones that it’s true. So this is why I feel restless. This is why Corr paces before his stall door and why I can’t sleep.



“The Connolly kids saw one,” Thomas Gratton says.



Beech makes a noise and slaps the cow again, more for emphasis than for any practical purpose. The Connollys’ story is one of the more pitiful ones Thisby has on offer: three children of a fisherman, orphaned twice over by the capaill uisce. There are plenty of single mothers to be had on the island, their men gone missing in the night, stolen away by either a savage water horse or by the temptation of the mainland. Plenty of single fathers, too, wives snatched from the shore by suddenly present teeth or seized by tourists with large wallets. But to lose both parents in one blow — that’s unusual. My story — father cold in the ground, mother lost to the mainland — is common enough to have been forgotten long ago, which is fine by me. There are better things to be known for.

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