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PUFFIN BOOKS

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is the not-so-secret identity of Louisa Young and her daughter Isabel Adomakoh Young, who have been writing together since Isabel was seven. They have previously written four books: the LIONBOY trilogy and LEE RAVEN, BOY THIEF. They wander the world in a gilded balloon, and have seventeen pet ducks and twelve miniature grand pianos, as well as the lizard and the dead tortoise.

Books by Zizou Corder

HALO

LEE RAVEN, BOY THIEF

LIONBOY

LIONBOY: THE CHASE

LIONBOY: THE TRUTH

To Flora and Polly Docherty, heroines

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Ποστσχριπτ 1

Ποστσχριπτ 2

Noτεσ

Greek Alphabet

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Something was crawling up the beach. It was a turtle, of course, because it was turtle-sized and turtle-shaped and turtles were the only things that ever crawled up this beach. Kyllarus squinted down at it from up on the cliff. The sun, pale golden in the pearly blue dawn sky out to sea, cast its shining path across the water, so smooth now after that wild stormy night. Already it was a little warm on his brown arms and bare chest.

He was meant to be looking for a goat that had wandered off during the night, and he knew his wife, Chariklo, would be waiting: for the goat, for the milk, for Arko to have for breakfast.

Well, who knows? Perhaps the goat had gone down there on to the beach. It was a mad little runaway, always jumping over things and climbing up them.

He peered over the rough cliff edge.

But it was – unlike a turtle. Its movements were wrong, and its shape. And it wasn’t the season for turtles to crawl up the beach to lay their soft little eggs in the sand. Nor, for that matter, for baby turtles to crawl back down the beach once they’d hatched.

Plus it was too big to be a turtle.

He decided to go and look.

When he reached the beach, scrabbling slightly over the rocks for which his hooves were not designed, he cantered lightly towards where the turtle was still steadily crawling along.

He stopped and stared.

It was absolutely not a turtle.

For a start it was made of wood. And then, the four legs sticking out were not scaly turtle flippers. They were – well. He wasn’t sure what they were. The front two were little arms, like his own, he recognized that – though they were soft and plump and very smooth and pale and very very small. The back two flummoxed him. He had never seen anything like them. They were like the arms, but stronger-looking, and bending differently. He stared and stared, and after a while he sighed deeply.

The not-turtle heard the sigh, and stopped its determined voyage up the sand.

Kyllarus, holding his breath, continued to watch.

The not-turtle pushed itself up on its arms, raised itself – and toppled, flopping over on to its back. As it did so, it let out a wail.

And that, even if he hadn’t now seen inside the wooden turtle shell, Kyllarus recognized.

‘It’s a baby!’ he gasped, and he trotted over to it. He picked it up, still in its shell, and began to cuddle it and sing the little song he always sang to his son, Arko, when he fell or bumped into something. He held it against his chest, and he could feel its little limbs moving and kicking against him. Strong! he thought with a smile. The baby kept on yelling.

He held it out at arm’s length, and got his first look at its face: bright red, furious, howling, with thick black tufty curly hair flopping wetly over it. Cautiously with his thumb Kyllarus pushed the hair back. There was a small starfish stuck behind one tiny ear.

‘By all the nymphs on this beautiful beach,’ he said. ‘If you are a human baby, then why are you wandering about all alone in a turtle shell?’ So he laid it down on the beach and began to unravel it.

The shell, he decided, was some kind of cradle. The child had been strapped in, with a long cloth wrapped round it, which had come loose, and leather straps across the front, which hadn’t. ‘Well, that’s probably saved your life, little turtle,’ he murmured as he undid the straps and took out the child. The cloth, sodden, limp and dripping wet sand, fell away, and there it was: a cross little human baby with fish in its hair and a very very wet nappy.

Chariklo, when she saw the baby tucked under Kyllarus’s arm, the goat under the other – he’d found it eating figs down by the spring – and the cradle on his head like a helmet as there was no other way to carry it, gave a little shriek and dropped the woollen blanket she had been folding.

‘What is that?’ she squawked.

‘It’s a baby!’ he said cheerfully. ‘I found it on the beach, sea-born like Aphrodite. What do you think?’

‘I think it’s a human,’ said Chariklo, and she came closer to have a look.

Kyllarus dropped the goat (which ran off again, bleating) and took the cradle off his head.

‘Here you are,’ he said, and he handed the baby to Chariklo.

Chariklo held it in her hands and peered at it. It glared at her with its ferocious green eyes, kicked madly and yelled.

‘How lovely!’ cried Chariklo. ‘Do you think we can keep it?’

‘Of course,’ said Kyllarus. ‘What else? It’s clearly clever, and lucky, because it managed to ride the stormy seas in its little cradleboat last night, and then, when it came to land, it turned over and clambered up the sand – so it’s strong too. Maybe it’s a new hero, like in the old days!’

‘It can be a friend for Arko,’ said Chariklo. ‘It must be hungry, too. Bring some milk, sweetheart. Oh, Mama Demeter, where’s that goat now?’

Kyllarus cantered over and grabbed it, just as it thought it had made good its escape. ‘Oh no you don’t,’ he said. ‘Come here and be milked for our new baby.’

Chariklo was unwrapping the infant. She took off its sea-sodden nappy. ‘It’s a girl!’ she said. ‘Hello, little girl. Oh! Kyllarus – look.’

‘What is it?’ said Kyllarus, turning to her and squirting a bit of warm smelly goat’s milk on his leg as he did so.

Because of the sand and the cloth and the wet hair, Kyllarus had not noticed before what Chariklo now pointed out. Knotted on to a fine leather thong about the baby’s neck was a tiny gold amulet.

‘Look, it’s a little owl.’

‘So it is,’ he said. ‘Look at those big eyes. Well, maybe she belongs to Athena, not to Aphrodite after all.’

Chariklo was wiping the baby’s damp, sandy face with a clean cloth.

She gasped. ‘Oh – Kyllarus! Look at this!’

‘What now?’ said Kyllarus. ‘This baby is full of surprises.’

Kyllarus looked, and gave a little gasp himself.

‘What in all Hellas can that mean?’ he asked.

It was not surprising that he hadn’t seen it before, for her face had been very dirty and the mark was fine and delicately done. But it was unmistakable. Across her forehead was a small, feathery, blue-black symbol, right between her brows, looking almost as if it were part of them. A down stroke, and two semicircles crossing it, the lower, wider one cradling the smaller upper one, lying as it were on their backs, like two new moons speared to the ground by an arrow; or a tree with four wide, symmetrical branches; or a four-armed woman spinning in a dance, her hands held out and up in joy.

‘It doesn’t come off,’ said Chariklo, wiping at it.

‘How odd!’ said Kyllarus. ‘To tattoo a baby! It must mean something, but Zeus only knows what.’

Chariklo gazed at it a while longer. ‘It’s not a symbol I’ve ever seen,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t even look Greek, does it?’

‘Maybe our baby is foreign,’ said Kyllarus.

‘Maybe she is,’ said Chariklo. ‘She’ll have a foreign mother somewhere, weeping and sighing because she has lost her baby…’

‘Well, maybe,’ said Kyllarus, and Chariklo bit her lip, and said, ‘Oh – yes, I suppose… Well, wherever she’s from, she still needs her breakfast.’Without thinking, Chariklo put the baby on the floor.

The baby promptly fell over, and squawked indignantly.

‘Oh no!’ cried Chariklo, who, being accustomed to Centaur babies, hadn’t realized that human babies couldn’t walk. Centaur babies can stand up on their slender little foal legs soon after being born – though their human torsos are still quite soft and weak. They don’t start galloping about until they are around a year old, and then they get into all sorts of trouble, because their horse legs are quick and strong to take them into situations their human toddler heads aren’t wise enough to deal with.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she squeaked, and hurriedly scooped the baby up again. ‘Are you all right? Oh dear… I wonder how you’re meant to carry her,’ she said to Kyllarus. ‘It can’t be like this,’ she mused, holding the baby in both hands, ‘or human parents would never get anything done… Oh! I know!’ She had an idea, and slipped the baby on to her hip, just where her human torso met her horse flank. ‘There. That’s better,’ she said, holding the baby in place with her left arm and feeling the little legs wrapping round her waist. She strolled across and filled a basin with water from their well. ‘I wonder how old she is,’ she said.

‘Hard to tell with a human,’ said Kyllarus.

The baby, meanwhile, had discovered Chariklo’s hair, which was long and curly and dark red, and fell down her back in some rather untidy plaits, one of which the little one was now chewing. Chariklo disentangled her, put her in the basin and poured fresh water over her. She made sure there was no sand left in the creases of her knees and neck, and no more fish in her hair. Then she rubbed olive oil all over her, and poured some of the warm goat’s milk into the little clay bottle she used for giving water to Arko. She put the cloth teat over its spout, and she cradled the little turtle-child in her arms to feed her. How strange, she thought, to be able to hold your whole baby! It was rather nice – cuddlier than a Centaur foal baby. She’s quite normal, she thought, if you don’t look below her middle. Chariklo peeked again at the funny little human legs, smooth and soft and pinky-gold. She started giggling.

‘She’s really nothing like a turtle,’ she said. ‘We could call her after one of the sea nymphs. Amphitrite, or Halosydne, or Amathea – Oh! Is that Arko?’

A cry had caught her ear. It was indeed Arko, waking up in the open vine-covered arbour where they all slept in the summer. ‘Fetch him, darling, would you?’ she asked, and Kyllarus brought him over, holding his hand, as he wobbled on his long baby legs.

‘You feed him and I’ll feed her,’ said Kyllarus, and they folded their legs under them and sat in the shade together, the four of them, as the sun rose higher up the sky, and the babies gulped their milk.

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There are two tribes of Centaur: the Sons of Ixion, who were wild and bad, and the Sons of Cronus, who were wise and kind. In the dawn of time Ixion, who was a human, had a mad passion for Hera, the Queen of the Gods. Her husband, Zeus, the most powerful God of all, made a fake Hera out of clouds to trick him, and Ixion got the cloud-Hera pregnant, and the result was the wild Centaurs. They lived in Thessaly, in Greece, but after getting drunk and trying to steal the bride from a wedding they had to leave there. Those that weren’t killed in the fight wandered off into the woods, and some of them died, and some, it is said, turned into bandits, and some, it is said, turned into horses.

One of them, though, was lucky enough to meet one of the wise Centaurs, a young daughter of Cronus, descendant of Chiron, the wisest Centaur of all, who trained Asclepius, the God of medicine, and the heroes Heracles and Jason and Achilles. Well, the two young Centaurs fell in love, and after a bit of fuss with her family they got married, and he came back to live with her herd. Soon after, the whole herd, in search of peace and quiet, emigrated, leaving Thessaly, crossing the forests and mountains, swimming the deep channel by moonlight to the beautiful and fairly empty island of Zakynthos – but that’s another story.

Those two were the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents of Kyllarus, and nobody in his herd ever forgot that his family had wild and naughty blood.

So when Arko’s two big sisters, Pearl and Lucy, the lovely twins, came prancing into the agora,1 chatting about their new human baby sister, a couple of old ladies said, ‘If you’d asked me which family would adopt a human, I could have told you it would be that lot.’ Pearl and Lucy didn’t care. They carried on about how she was so sweet and lovely and they were going to teach her all the ancient stories and how to plait her hair and oil her skin and read and write and weave and dance and hunt and use the bow and arrow and make honey baklava2 and perfume out of roses.

The leader of the herd, who was also called Chiron, sent Lucy and Pearl back to get their parents. The whole family came: Kyllarus, Chariklo, Lucy, Pearl, Arko and Grandma. And the baby.

‘Chariklo,’ asked Chiron. ‘What is this?’

Chariklo said, keeping a straight face, ‘It’s a baby, Chiron.’

‘Thank you, Chariklo,’ he said. ‘I know it’s a baby. What is it doing here?’

‘Dad thought it was a turtle!’ said Pearl.

‘It was all rolled up in a cloth with its legs sticking out!’ said Lucy.

‘We’ve been thinking probably it fell off a ship,’ said Kyllarus, ‘during the storm. But somebody loved it. Her, sorry. She had a very nice cloth wrapped round her, and a golden owl round her neck. She wasn’t… you know…’

The Centaurs all went quiet. They knew what he meant. He meant – abandoned.

Sometimes, when humans had too many children, or when they didn’t want a girl baby, or they thought the baby was too weak or had something wrong with it, they would just leave it outside, on the hillside, to die.

Several of the Centaurs shivered at the thought. They were kind creatures. In the old days, before the time of Homer the Poet, the Centaurs had quite often taken in abandoned human children. But most of the Centaurs of Zakynthos had never even seen an actual human, and if they had, it was safely far away, at sea, on a boat.

Chiron looked at the baby. She looked back at him – not the furious glare now, because she was clean and dry and full of goat’s milk, and furthermore Pearl and Lucy had been tickling her tummy with their long hair, so she was happy. She gave Chiron a big smile with six little teeth in it, and waved her arms at him, and burped.

He smiled back.

‘We should have a vote,’ he said. ‘Put the word out, and we’ll vote tonight. And that means everyone!’

‘But what’s the vote between?’ said Chariklo anxiously. ‘I mean, what’s the alternative? I mean, if the vote says we can’t keep her, then…’

‘We have to have a vote, you know that,’ said Chiron. ‘It’s the law. No one can join the herd without being accepted.’

‘But she’s an orphan!’ said Kyllarus. ‘She has nowhere to go. And how would she get there if she did? We can’t put her back in her turtle shell and send her back out to sea… What’s the law on orphans?’

Chiron thought. ‘I don’t think we have one,’ he said.

‘Well, why don’t we have a vote on that?’ said Chariklo. ‘A vote to have a law to say we have to look after orphans. And helpless babies.’

‘It’s our custom, traditionally, after all…’ said Kyllarus.

That night all the adult Centaurs, after their dinner with their families, came back to the agora, and voted without exception to pass a law saying what they all felt in their hearts anyway – that they had to look after orphans and helpless babies.

Halosydne, they decided, would be her name. Pearl and Lucy chose it. It meant ‘The Girl Who Was Fed by the Sea’, but they thought of it more as ‘Saved by the Sea’. ‘With a name like that, the sea can never harm her,’ they reasoned. Most people called her Halo, but Kyllarus always called her Chelonakimu – my little turtle – or Little Aphrodite, or some other affectionate nickname: Schnussy because that was the noise she made when she pulled at his earlobes; Owly-baby because of her amulet and her big round eyes; Captain Thumpy when she hit her fists against his chest in fury at being picked up and saved from some childhood peril; Dolly Dolphin when she started swimming underwater; Figling when she fell out of the fig tree.

Arko had lots of different names for her too. ‘Pigling’, at first, when he was jealous of her and was being mean, because she was pink like a pig, and had no proper glossy chestnut horsehide. But as soon as she could run about she was in the sun all day so she didn’t stay pink and plump for long – soon she was a fine golden brown all over. Really all over, because she didn’t wear clothes in the summer either – why would she? Chariklo and the other Centaur women wove cloth for cloaks for the Centaurs to wrap around their shoulders when the north winds came, and for Halo they made a chiton3 because, as Chariklo’s mother said, ‘She does seem a lot more naked than us, in that delicate skin. The fine, soft cloth that Halo had been wrapped in they put carefully away. ‘It would last no time here,’ Chariklo said, so she folded it with lavender flowers and wrapped it in another piece of cloth and put it in the stone barn where they stored their nuts and olives and dried grapes and wine. Only occasionally would Chariklo take it out and tell Halo the story of how she was found – a story which delighted all the young Centaurs. They would often ask for it round the fire on winter nights, along with the ancient stories of the Centaurs, and the tales of the Greeks and the Trojans, the heroes and the Gods.

And so it came about that Halo’s first memory – one that stayed with her all her life – was of the deep, dark, star-spattered night sky above Zakynthos. It was so beautiful she could hardly bear to close her eyes to sleep. The night sky above her, cool and velvety, was the same deep blue as the deep sea by day. The stars and constellations hung against it so very bright that the patterns they made were printed on her eyes, and when she woke before dawn she saw them hanging on the other side of the sky. The air was cool and the ground beneath her was hard, but the woolly goatskin she lay on was warm and snug. The faint sweet scent of sea lilies rose up from the distant beach on the cool breeze. The quiet voices of the adults drifted over from the fire, where they sat late into the evening drinking the dark pink wine, which tasted of sunlight and dust. At her back, for her to curl against, was the warm chestnut flank of Arko, her dear friend, gently rising and falling, safe and warm, fast asleep. So her first memory was of something she felt almost every night of her childhood: that peaceful feeling of looking up at the stars, night and morn, warm and snug, with the cool fresh breeze on her nose and Arko beside her.

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One day, Halo was running and playing with Arko: he was teasing her, as usual, and she was trying to run as fast as him, still believing that if only she tried harder her human legs would be able to keep up with his horse legs.

She ran too fast and too bold. She tripped. She fell. She put her arm up to shield her face.

Her shriek of pain called the whole herd to attention and they came galloping up.

She had landed awkwardly. Her arm had hit a rock. The angle was wrong, her arm was… oh and the pain…

There was a bend where no bend should be. No blood. Just a strange bend in the middle of her forearm, and the skin misshapen over it. She could feel her hand and wrist dangling, wrong, agonizing, limp.

Chiron came. He knelt by her side, took hold of her arm.

‘Watch,’ he said to her. ‘Watch through the pain and learn.’

She stared at his kind, ugly face and tried very very hard to do as he said. The others were standing around them, silent and attentive. Chariklo cantered up with a basket of equipment, including a jar of wine. Chiron gave Halo a cup to drink, unwatered. It was rich and strange.

‘Watch!’ said Chiron again. ‘It will be all right. It’s not all right now, but it will be all right.’

A fine sweat stood on her brow. A sweep of overwhelming pain overtook her, worse than anything, ever, ever… She shrieked again.

She forced her eyes open, and stared at Chiron’s strong brown hands on her arm.

He was pulling her arm apart: one hand firm around her forearm just below her elbow, the other circling her wrist. The bend was between his two hands.

He was pulling her broken arm apart.

She howled but no sound came out.

A flaming blaze of pain.

Agony.

And within the agony, she felt a click. A clunk. A snap.

She looked at her arm. Chiron’s hands were still in place. But the bend, the broken wrong bend, had disappeared.

Her bones were whole. It was all back in place. Tender, bruised, unbelievably painful still, but whole. It was as if he had slotted them back into place. He had slotted them back into place. Pulled them apart, and slotted them back.

She was shaking but she still tried to watch as he gently wrapped her arm in aromatic herbs, telling her their names as he did so, and bound it with a piece of soft cloth. She tried to repeat the names of the herbs, concentrating to keep the pain from overwhelming her. She stared as he laid a straight smooth length of wood under the soft inside of her forearm, and carefully, so kindly, bound it in place with strips. Chariklo had folded a third piece of cloth into a triangle: now they set her arm to rest in its fold, and tied it behind her neck in a sling. Another cup of wine; a cup of bitter herb tea, instruction to rest. She spent the time while she healed learning to read. Chiron came to see her.

‘The ancient Chiron had to do that for Jason, you know, when he was a lad,’ he said. ‘And he taught Apollo’s son, the God Asclepius, how to do it, and all the medicine the humans know. Do you think you could do it? Were you paying attention?’

‘Maybe,’ said Halo cautiously. She was only about seven. She was pretty sure she would never be able to do it. At least – she hoped she would be brave enough to do it. But she was far from sure.

‘You can’t go around breaking people’s arms on purpose, to practise mending them,’ said Chiron seriously. ‘You’ve got to learn when you can. So what herbs did I use?’

She ran through the names of the herbs, and what they were for.

‘Good girl,’ he said. ‘Remember the cures, and you’ll always be able to help people. And animals.’

Within a month she could play her flute again; within two she started practising her archery again; within four her arm was as strong as ever, or stronger. Next time somebody broke a bone, Halo was at Chiron and Chariklo’s side, helping and learning.

‘All right, I’ll never be as fast as you,’ she said to Arko. ‘I’ll be a better shot instead. And better at curing people.’

‘As if,’ he said.

‘You wait and see,’ she said.

‘Dad,’ said Pearl, one evening some years after this, as they sat around admiring the rich red full moon rising over the sea. ‘If that’s the harvest moon, then it’s ten years since Halo came. We should have a party for her.’

‘What, with music and dancing and we’ll invite all the boys?’ said Kyllarus.

‘Of course,’ said Pearl.

She and Lucy were fifteen now, and would be getting married in a year or two. They loved music and dancing. And the boys.

‘OK by me,’ said Kyllarus. ‘What do you think, Chariklo?’

Chariklo smiled. ‘I’ll tune my lyre,’ she said, ‘and make yoghurt. We’ll need honey and wine.’

‘Halo can go up a tree and find some honey,’ said Lucy.

With her skinny brown legs, Halo could go all sorts of places that Centaurs couldn’t reach: up trees, over rocks, down cliffs, right into the backs of caves. Arko would give her a leg-up, or she would climb up over his back, and he carried home her booty – figs, blackberries, sea urchins and octopuses for the grill, olives from the very tops of the silvery trees for oil, wild honeycombs.

Even though it was not really allowed, he would carry her on his back, and she would clutch him round his waist as he galloped about. Chiron had told them off for it: ‘A Centaur carries only himself,’ he said. ‘He is not designed to carry any other person.’ But Arko and Halo had just giggled about that as soon as he had gone. She could stand on his back, or his shoulders, and jump and do all sorts of tricks.

‘And we’ll go and get some figs,’ said Arko innocently. There were reasons why Arko and Halo always volunteered to get the figs.

‘I’ll make baklava,’ murmured Kyllarus.

‘Tell us a story, sweetheart,’ said Chariklo, leaning against her husband affectionately. ‘Tell us… about the first Kyllarus, and Hylomene.’

Kyllarus went quiet for a moment.

‘Are you sure?’ he said to his wife.

‘Tell us, tell us!’ clamoured their children, but then Lucy saw that her father’s face was serious, and she hushed the others.

‘They’re old enough to know,’ Chariklo said. ‘Tell them.’

‘Well,’ said Kyllarus. ‘All right.’And he took a sip of wine, and cleared his throat, and sat up, and began.

‘You have all heard about the night of the great shame of the Centaurs, when the Sons of Ixion betrayed their honour as guests. The daredevil human Pirithous, himself a son of Ixion, invited his Centaur brothers and sisters to his wedding. The feast was generous, and the guests cheerful. Kyllarus, my ancestor, was there with his wife, the beautiful Hylomene, who wore jasmine and rosemary in her hair… As the night grew late and the moon rose, too much strong wine was drunk, and in drink, bold Eurytus, the fiercest Centaur, stole Hippodamia, the bride of Pirithous, to his eternal shame. You have heard how the other Centaurs joined battle to defend Eurytus even though he was in the wrong; how Thereus, who could capture mountain bears and bring them home snarling, was killed, and Phaecomes dressed in six great lion skins laced together, and Dorylas in his wolf-skin cap with bull’s horns… The hero Theseus was Pirithous’s twin soul and fought magnificently for him… Enough of that, blood and shame.

‘There was, that awful night, one moment of honour.

‘That night Kyllarus, after whom I am named, tried to stop the fighting. But he was caught between his brother Centaurs and his human brothers, and in the heat of the violence his voice was not heard. Everyone was mad with bloodlust and drink.

‘Peaceful Kyllarus, that night, was killed. A spear pierced his heart from behind, pierced right through him. And as he fell, Hylomene, seeing her husband bleeding to death, threw herself into his human arms, on to the blade of the spear that pierced him, so that she could die with him. Beautiful Hylomene, who wore jasmine in her hair, and loved her children…’

Kyllarus fell silent. There were tears in his eyes, and his children stared. Only the sound of crickets singing disturbed the night.

‘Is that true?’ whispered Pearl.

‘True,’ said Kyllarus.

‘What happened to the children?’ whispered Lucy, finally.

‘The eldest son wandered the woods until he met his true love under the pomegranate tree, and the grandparents looked after the little ones,’ said Chariklo softly. ‘They grew up, they survived. They swore themselves to peace, and against fighting.’

‘It was difficult for the boys, because in those days if you didn’t fight you were nothing,’ said Kyllarus. ‘But my ancestor who combined with the Sons of Cronus learned that there are other roads to respect. He learned that if you have wisdom you don’t need to shed blood.’

‘I didn’t know Centaurs had human brothers. I mean blood brothers, not like us and Halo,’ said Arko.

‘Nor did I,’ said Pearl. ‘Why weren’t they Centaurs too?’

‘Because their mother wasn’t a cloud,’ said Lucy.

‘How can a cloud have a baby anyway?’ asked Arko.

‘It’s because of Zeus,’ said Pearl. ‘He was always turning himself into different things to have babies – a swan, and a bull, and a cloud of gold…’

‘It was the old days,’ said Chariklo. ‘All sorts of things went on in the old days that couldn’t happen now.’

‘So does a human have only one heart?’ asked Halo. ‘Because they were pierced through their human hearts, but they still died even though they still had their horse hearts.’

‘That’s right,’ said Chariklo. ‘We need both our hearts to live.’

Arko was about to tease Halo for only having one heart, when an idea occurred to him. ‘So will Halo marry a Centaur or a human?’ he asked, and suddenly a silence fell.

Chariklo and Kyllarus shot each other a look. They had, as their older daughters grew near to marriageable age, thought of this.

Well, the question had been asked, and so they had to answer it.

‘A human,’ said Chariklo, trying to make it sound as normal as possible.

‘What?’ Halo squawked. ‘What?’

‘Eyurgh,’ said Arko.

‘Shut up, Arko,’ said Kyllarus.

‘Must she really?’ asked Lucy. ‘Ooh. How odd.’

Halo was staring at them all.

‘I can’t marry a human,’ she said, panicking. ‘I’ve never even met a human. I’ve never even seen a human. I’m not a human…’

‘Well, you are, darling,’ said Chariklo. ‘I’m afraid you are.’

Halo did not sleep well that night. She couldn’t free her mind of the image of Kyllarus and Hylomene, torn between their human brothers and their Centaur brothers, lying speared and dead together. But alongside that was another, almost more frightening image. Herself, with humans.

On the day of the party, Halo and Arko, with a set of panniers across his back, set off to the big fig patch by the bay. The land was scrubby and dry with wild fennel and old hay, but it was cool beneath the ilex and hibiscus trees, and mostly downhill. Coming back up would be a different story – it would be hot.

At the fig patch, they unloaded the baskets, but they didn’t start picking yet. They had another plan first, and the figs would only rot and get ants in them if they were left lying around.

The cool blue water twinkled in the sun ahead of them. Arko started heading across the smooth white sand, but Halo grabbed his tail, shouting, ‘Oi!

Wait!’Then she clambered up on to his broad chestnut back, and grabbed him round his waist. He cantered out into the shining shallow waters, kicking up froth and bubbles behind him until the cold bright sea was up to his human chest. He paused, and she stood up easily on his back, the friendly little waves breaking against her shins.

‘Go on, before I buck you off!’ he cried, and she stretched up in the hot sun against the blue blue sky and dived off, SPLASH, into the cavernous, luminous turquoise light of the sea.

When she came up Arko was laughing at her. ‘You look like a mermaid when you dive,’ he said. ‘Like a sea nymph. I could see your flicky scaly tail.’

‘Well, you look like a human!’ she retorted.

He did – all his horse body was underwater. He glanced down. ‘Ugh,’ he said, ‘human, how revolting,’ so she splashed him, and he splashed her, and then they set off. Warm sunshine bounced all around them. Cephalonia drifted far off ahead, misty and pearly, and they swam round to the Caves.

Neither Arko nor Halo had seen anything of the world beyond Zakynthos, but they both knew for a fact that the Gods couldn’t have made anything more beautiful than the Caves. Two Gods had come together to make them: Poseidon and Chronos, carving them out of the white cliffs, leaving arches and gateways, walls of rock and caves within, all the colour of clean bone. Inside the caves, in the morning, Phoebus threw his lancing rays through the water, filling it with clear, crystalline turquoise sunlight, which refracted and reflected until every movement you made left a trail of silvery-blue bubbles, and rainbows danced where the sea foamed on the rock.

They had two special caves. One was much further south, just where the high hills where the Centaurs lived met the flat, low plain where the humans lived. This cave’s water was pale and milky and smelt of eggs, and strange bubbles rose in sparkly wobbly strings from the seabed. Halo and Arko could capture the bubbles in their hands and breathe their sweet other-worldly smell, and it would make them giggle and laugh and act foolishly. They argued a lot about where the bubbles came from. Halo thought maybe they came up from Hades, the underworld where the dead go;Arko said it was probably just invisible nymphs farting underwater. They talked a lot of nonsense when they had been breathing the bubbles.

But they didn’t often go there. Although the humans didn’t seem to know the cave, Halo and Arko didn’t feel safe so near their territory.

The other was Arko and Halo’s special beautiful cave, where you swam in through a low dark entrance with less than a metre to spare above the sea level, and inside all was turquoise dancing light and flashing bubbles when you splashed, and your whole body turned blue.

So Arko and Halo were playing and splashing about in there, and sitting on the friendly rock at the back to rest from their swim, and soothing their sun-weary eyes in the cool, refreshing sea shade. They were discussing sea nymphs, and regretting that there seemed to be none around there for them to be friends with, and perhaps get magical favours off.

‘Perhaps they don’t exist any more,’ said Arko. ‘Or they’ve gone somewhere else. It’s not like the old days. The Gods aren’t popping up all over the place, like they used to, getting mixed up in stuff. Just as well, probably. I think they’ve just sort of stopped, and it’s all humans now.’

‘Do you think there are any other Centaurs?’ Halo asked. It had only just occurred to her that there might be.

‘Dunno,’ he said, making little silvery patterns in the water with his fingers. ‘What, you mean elsewhere in Greece?’

‘There could be,’ she said.

He just grunted, and she left it, because at that moment, a dark shape crossed the water at the mouth of the cave.

Instinctively, they pulled back against the wall of the cave, into the shadows.

Dark shapes did not cross there. Nothing came there. The other Centaurs didn’t come that way. Only Arko and Halo swam in the sea for fun – the others preferred to play in the fresh-water springs back up in the forest. The dolphins played further out to sea. The birds – the big birds – flew higher, and further from the cliff. The goats and foxes and porcupines – none of them swam, and there was no way to the Caves, except by swimming.

Or by boat.

At which thought Halo’s throat dried up and her head began to quiver with fear.

She’d never seen a human. She knew about them. They looked like her, with black curly hair and smooth brown limbs. They lived on the south end of the island, and their king had a great white marble palace. They took over wild places and made animals move on. They kept animals for their own use. They built cities – Athens! Sparta! – and told stories. Some of them were noble, such as Homer the great poet who had recorded the stories of Gods and heroes from the old old days, and some of the heroes themselves: Odysseus and Achilles. But they were violent. They fought wars. They slashed each other with great iron swords, and speared each other with murderous iron spears, and shot each other with sharp, death-dealing arrows. They had never learned to be peaceful, as the Centaurs had. They took revenge on each other. They killed each other. And they left their little babies out to die.

Sometimes, from the clifftops, she had seen them sailing past – small boats fishing, or bigger boats heading off to Cephalonia or Ithaca. Once, standing on the clifftop with Kyllarus, she had seen a flock of long, low, swift ships heading north, dark and fast. ‘Triremes,’ Kyllarus had told her. ‘Warships. Do you see all the oars?’ They stuck out along each side, like an insect’s legs, scudding across the water. They looked so determined. She had tried hard to make out the tiny figures on board, but she had seen nothing.

Now, she so desperately wanted to see nothing.

Let whatever it was just pass by, she thought, and we will wait, and wait, and be late with the figs but we will be safe.

But the dark shape had paused. They could see its shadow, just in the sunlight beyond the cave’s mouth.

They heard movement. A cry, a splash.

Silently, glancing at each other with quiet desperation, they retreated to the very back of the cavern.

Poseidon, don’t let them see us, she prayed silently. He might be listening. After all, hadn’t she been blown safely on to the beach, and named ‘Saved by the Sea’?

‘Please, Poseidon,’ she murmured.

A louder splash – bigger, nearer. Voices. Humans!

They were at the mouth of the cave.

She glanced at Arko. His chestnut eyes caught hers, and he gestured with his head. She knew what he meant. He knew what she meant.

Together, they breathed in deeply, and slowly, silently, sank down beneath the water.

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It’s a different world underwater. The sudden silence, the adaptation to different, underwater sounds. The stinging saltiness on the eyeballs. The clear heaviness of water all around you that you have to carve your way through.

Blue light shone down the underwater passage for about fifty metres, and after that they were in the dark. It didn’t matter. They knew this passage as they knew all the caves and passages – for five years now they had been exploring and playing here.

Halo knew that if she kicked her legs gently and let her breath out bit by bit, she could make it to the Hole. Arko knew that the passage was deep enough to let him pass, and he knew where the rocks were so he could avoid skinning his knees and hooves – he’d skinned them often enough before. They both knew that they couldn’t spend that long in the Hole, because there was no ledge wide enough for Arko to stand on.

Eyes alert, Halo spotted the light ahead, filtering through from the Hole. She speeded up towards the pale turquoise glow. In truth, she was scared, and as a result she went faster than she might have, and used too much breath, and it was with relief that she burst to the surface, salt on her face, the heat of the sun overhead, the blue sky at the top of the Hole, many metres up, and the joy of air flooding into her tight, empty lungs. Behind her, Arko burst up too, splashing and gasping. He swam straight to the wall with the jutting rock he could cling on to, and rested his hooves as best he could against the wall, trying to support his big body. Halo swam over to him and perched on the little rock shelf she always used.

‘What do we do now?’ she panted, as she got her breath back.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘We wait.’

‘Do you think they saw us?’ she said.

‘No idea,’ he replied, his breath returning. ‘But I don’t see how they could have. I think we went soon enough. If they saw movement in the water, bubbles and so on, they’d assume it was an octopus, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, or a big fish,’ she said.

They were silent for a moment, as it occurred to each of them that the humans were almost certainly fishermen, and that a big octopus or a big fish was probably exactly the kind of thing they were after.

‘How will we be able to tell that they’ve gone?’ she asked after a while.

‘Don’t know,’ said Arko, swapping arms and paddling his legs.

‘Shall I go and look?’ she said.

‘No!’ he said firmly.

‘Or I could…’ She glanced up the high rock walls of the Hole. Years ago, the Hole had been a cave like any other, but almost as many years ago the roof had caved in, leaving a deep shaft, about ten metres across, with deep water at the bottom, connected via the underwater tunnel to the sea. The walls were mostly bare rock but there were plenty of ledges, and various small trees that clung on.

‘Perhaps I could climb up,’ she said.

Arko glanced at the almost sheer walls. ‘Perhaps,’ he said drily. ‘Probably best to wait. You can’t swim out again with a broken leg.’

‘How long can you hold on for?’ she asked.

‘As long as it takes,’ he said, with a cheerful grin, but she knew from the way he was shifting around that he was already uncomfortable. He couldn’t tread water, or hang by his arms, forever. And nor could she stay in the water forever. The sun was already passing from overhead, and without it the sea was cold and the bottom of the shaft chilly even out of the water.

It was beginning to dawn on her that they were in a very tricky situation.

She climbed a little way up the wall, to be out of the water at least. It became apparent that she would not be able to climb to the top. The little plants she grabbed at came out in her hand; rocks tumbled down into the water below, and she scraped her knee quite badly before realizing that there just weren’t enough things for her to hold on to. She couldn’t get a grip.

‘Halo,’ he said, when they had been there for about twenty minutes. ‘I’m going to swim back, and see if they’re gone. I’ll be very quiet…’

‘No,’ she said. ‘How can you come up for air quietly after a swim like that?’

‘But what’s the alternative?’ he said.

‘I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I’m smaller, and quieter. I’ll just peek out of the darkness…’

‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you.’

‘I can’t let you,’ she said. And they stared at each other.