The Scorpio Races

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Scorpio drums pound a ragged heartbeat as I wind my way through the crowds that fill the streets of Skarmouth. The cold air smarts as I breathe it in; the wind carries all sorts of foreign scents. Food that’s only made during the race season. Perfume only women from the mainland wear. Hot pitch, burning rubbish, beer spilled on the stones. This Skarmouth is raw and hungry, striving and unknowable. Everything the races make me feel on the inside is bleeding up through the seams in the street tonight.

In front of me, people shoulder their way through the tourists, who are slow with drink and loud with excitement. If you hold yourself a certain way, though, even the drunk will part for you. I slide through the crowd toward the butcher’s, my eyes wide open. I’m watching for Mutt Malvern. It’s better to see than be seen, until I know what he is up to tonight.

Sean Kendrick. I hear my name, whispered, then called, but I keep walking. There are many who’ll recognize my face tonight.

As I walk, I look past the people at the town that stands beneath them. The stones are gold and red in the streetlights, the shadows black and brown and deep death blue, all the colors of the November ocean. Bicycles lie up against the walls as if a wave has washed them there and then retreated. Girls push by me, their strides ringing from the bells tied around their ankles. Firelight flickers from one of the side streets, flames licking from a barrel, boys gathered around it. I look at Skarmouth and it looks back at me, its eyes wild.

On one of the walls, there’s an advertisement for the Malvern Yard. FOUR-TIME WINNER OF THE SCORPIO RACES, it says. OWN A PIECE OF THE RACES – YOUNGSTOCK AUCTION ON THURSDAY AT 7 A.M.

Everything in that advertisement is my business, but my name is nowhere on it.

I have to stop for the drummers as they crash up from a side street that leads to the water. They’re fourteen strong, driven by enthusiasm rather than talent. They all wear black. The Scorpio drums are wide as the span of my arms, the heads made of blood-spattered leather and rope. The drums throb, replacing my pulse with theirs. Behind the drummers is a woman who wears a horse’s head and a blood-red tunic. A tail curls behind her, and it’s hard to tell if it is rope or hide or a real tail. Her feet are bare by tradition. It is impossible to tell who she is.

The drums thump by and we press against the walls to allow them to pass. Some of the tourists clap. The locals stomp. The mare goddess scans the crowd slowly, the stuffed horse head dwarfing her body. I see someone make the sign of a cross over the front of them and then, again, backward this time. In the center of the street, the horse-headed woman holds out her hand and one thousand tiny pebbles rain out across the street. By tradition, she’ll drop a single shell in the course of the night, and whoever gets the mare goddess’s shell will have a wish.

There is nothing but sand in her hand this time.

One night, many years ago, as I stood beside my father, she looked at me and dropped her handful of sand and pebbles, and the single shell spun across the ground in front of me. I had darted away from my father’s side to catch the shell where it stopped. I had my wish formed before my fingers curled around it.

I turn my face to the side, waiting for the woman to pass, waiting for the memory to pass.

I hear an exhalation, at once human and equine, and I turn my head. The mare goddess stands directly in front of me, inches away. The great old gray head is turned so that the left eye regards me, like Corr would have with his one poor eye. Only this horse’s eye has been replaced with a shiny bit of slate, polished so that it winks and weeps like the piebald’s. This close, I can see the streaks of darker red in the woman’s tunic where the fabric wrinkled and caught more blood in the folds. The costume is fearfully made: Even close, it’s hard to tell how the woman ends and the false head begins, and it’s impossible to determine how she can see. I imagine I feel hot breath on my face, huffing from the nostrils. My heart speeds.

I’m once again a boy and I’m watching her hand open, releasing pebbles and sand. The island, the beach, life stretches before me.

The mare goddess seizes my chin with her hand. The shale eye stares at me. The hair around it is matted with age, too long since death.

“Sean Kendrick,” she says, and the voice is throaty, barely human. I hear the sea in it. “Did you get your wish?”

I cannot look away. “Yes. Many times over.”

The shale glints and blinks.

The voice again takes me by surprise. “Has it brought you happiness?”

The question is not one that I would normally consider. I’m not unhappy. Happiness isn’t something this island yields easily; the ground is too rocky and the sun too sparse for it to flourish. “Well enough.”

Her fingers are tight, tight, tight on my jaw. I smell blood and I see, now, that fresh blood, soaked into the shirt, has dripped onto her hands.

“The ocean knows your name, Sean Kendrick,” she says. “Make another wish.”

She reaches up and smears the back of her hand across both of my cheekbones.

Then the mare goddess turns away to follow the drummers, just a woman in a dead horse’s head. But there is something hollow inside me, and for the first time, winning doesn’t feel like enough.

I can’t get the mare goddess out of my head: the timbre of her voice, the imagined feel of her breath on my skin. My throat burns as if I’ve swallowed seawater. I swim now through the crowd, from my encounter with the mare goddess and back into the real world. I pin myself to the ground with the memory of my ordinary errand at Gratton’s. I need to settle up the account, and I need to place another order for the water horses. But my mind keeps turning over the woman in the horse head, trying to decide whose hands they could’ve been. If I can place her, I can fill the void inside me. It becomes only a parlor game again, then, if I know whose voice it was, made gritty inside the dead skull. I think it may have been Peg Gratton, no stranger to blood on her hands, and no taller than me, even with the horse head on.

I push into the butcher’s. As always, it’s the cleanest place in Skarmouth, and it’s lit to a bright, daylight white inside. Two birds have somehow gotten into the building, and as I press my way in, the lights seem to flicker and dim as their wings flash in front of the bulbs.

I don’t see Peg Gratton behind the counter, so it could have been her in the horse costume. I feel lighter. Less called.

I stand at the counter and Beech Gratton sullenly takes my order. It’s not me he resents, but the job, keeping him in when he wants out to the festival.

“Your face is a ruin.” Beech grunts with admiration, and I remember the woman smearing my face with blood. “You look like the devil.”

I don’t reply.

“I’ll be out of here in twenty minutes,” he tells me, though I didn’t ask.

“Thirty! “ calls Peg Gratton from the back.

I taste blood in my mouth. An eye made of shale blinks at me.

Beech jots down my order, and as he does, I look up at the board behind the counter. There is my name, and Corr’s, and beside us are our current odds: 1-5. Below us are also the names of a score of new entrants from the mainland who have found mounts in the first few days of training. They’ll crowd the beach bad as the first day of training, inept and over-brave. I scan down the list to find Kate Connolly; I see her pony’s name first, and then her name. Her odds are 45-1. I wonder how much of that is because of her pony and how much is because of her gender.

I let my eyes trail down the list to find Mutt’s name on the list. There it is, and his horse’s beside it. By all rights, the name written beside his should have been Edana, the horse that he has not touched for two days, the bay with white markings. The horse that I told his father to put him on.

But it doesn’t say Edana.

The word printed beside Mutt’s is Skata. A good name for a horse, hard and short. Skata is a local name for the magpie. A bird known for its cleverness, for its affection for shiny things, for its black-and-white coloration. There’s only one thing on that beach that’s black-and-white.

Skata is the piebald mare.