THE DOCTOR AND THE MOUNTAIN
The doctor walks for days and weeks and months, stopping in a hundred little villages along the way, and gradually the mountains come into view on the horizon. She grew up by the sea—she’s never been to the mountains before. They seem higher than it is possible for anything to be, shimmering in layers of fog. Most of them are capped in white, but one mountain is green all the way into the clouds. The sea air tastes of salt. Here, the air tastes like the sky.
There is a city near the green mountain, nestled in its shadow. The doctor makes her way to one of its clinics and asks if they need help. The answer is yes. The answer is always yes. They give her a room in the physicians’ lodge. The city folk bring her flowers as a welcome—great red bursts of amaryllis and shining white lilies. She puts them in her window.
The people are happy and fit and superstitious. There are a few houses built closer to the mountain but not many. Almost everyone lives clustered together. The elders sprinkle salt across her doorstep early in the morning on the first day of spring. For wealth, they tell her. Wealth and prosperity and protection from death. For a family, a man.
The doctor has no money except what the world gives her. She has a twin sister whom she sees several times a year, and twin nieces. They are all the family she needs.
And protection from death? She herself is protection enough.
When she isn’t working, the doctor walks the streets and wanders out into the fields at the city’s edge. Sometimes she walks in the evening, even late at night, when there are no other souls around. No one else in the city goes where she goes.
“There’s something strange about that mountain,” another one of the doctors at the clinic confesses to her, late one night over drinks at the pub. He too has come from away. “The people here tell all kinds of strange stories. Monsters and ghosts. Animals that talk, that kind of thing.”
The doctor laughs. When her mother was thirty-seven years old, a man came to their house and called her a witch. His wife had run away with another man, and the husband was convinced the doctor’s mother had helped her do it.
“She wouldn’t have fallen in love if it hadn’t been for you,” he said. “She wouldn’t have done that on her own.”
The doctor’s mother was also a doctor, of sorts. She grew herbs in their backyard that she made into medicine, and she delivered babies when she needed to and got rid of pregnancies when that needed doing. Sometimes a heartbroken girl or boy would come to her and demand a love potion. The doctor’s mother would brew tea and sit down and tell them that you cannot make anyone fall in love with you. And sometimes people fall out of love, and there is nothing you can do about that, either. It will hurt. But while you can’t see it now, that hurt is building a mountain inside of you. One day you’ll climb that mountain. One day, your hurt will allow you to be and do great things.
When the husband came to her, the doctor’s mother told him this same thing. But he refused to listen.
“I don’t want a mountain,” he said. “I just want my wife back. I deserve my wife back!” He was shouting like a madman, and the neighbours came to wrestle him away. When they were gone, the doctor’s mother closed her front door and let out a long sigh of relief.
That would have been the end of the story except that a few days later, the man came back to their house in the night and burned it to the ground with the doctor’s mother inside it.
The doctor had been ten years old at the time. She and her sister had been sleeping over at a friend’s house. Her father had managed to get out of the house in time and never forgave himself for it. The guilt was its own kind of ghost.
So when other people warn her about ghosts on the mountain, about animals that hide in the trees—the trickster foxes, the river sprites that wait to drown you—the doctor shrugs and makes her plans. Ghosts don’t lurk in the shadows, or in the places people are afraid to go.
One day, after she is finished her shift, the doctor packs her life into her satchel once again and makes her way to the foot of the mountain.
The climb is hard and slow, but the doctor is used to hard journeys. Heights don’t scare her and she’s slept in the rain countless times; she rests when she’s tired. She hacks a little path as she climbs, switchbacking slowly up the mountainside. It’s relatively easy—someone has been this way before.
When the centaur comes to greet her, she’s only halfway up the mountain.
The centaur seems at once exactly the same and more alien than she remembers—like he belongs to the mountain and she does not. For the first time in her life the doctor feels bedraggled and foolish.
“Why are you here?” he asks.
How long has it been since that night at the house in the village—a year? Impossible, but yes. Weeks wandering away from the village, months spent in the city at the base of the mountain. It feels like no time at all.
“I wanted to see you,” she says.
“How did you know I was here?” he says.
She has no real answer. “I don’t know.”
“No one comes up this mountain,” the centaur says. “No one dares.”
“Fear and strange stories won’t keep people away forever,” she says. “Humans climb. Don’t you remember?”
“This is my home. Humans do not deserve to be here at all.”
“Well, I’m here,” the doctor says.
There’s a loneliness in his face that she remembers from the last time she saw him. “Your children,” she says. “Are they all right?”
Unexpectedly, he smiles. “They are beautiful. More beautiful here than they would be anywhere else.”
“I’d love to meet them,” the doctor says. It’s been two years since they were born, but horses would be on their way to fully grown by now. Perhaps centaurs, too.
The centaur frowns. “Perhaps,” he says. “One day.”
“I could teach them, if you wanted,” she says.
The centaur considers her for a long time, then shakes his head. “Not yet. They won’t trust you. Give me time.”
“They won’t trust me?” she says. “Or you won’t?”
“I could use your help,” the centaur admits. “But not with the children.”
“Anything.” She feels—not sorry for him, but something.
“I want to teach them all I can about the world that they’ve come from, and their history,” he says. “I want them to know about the things that the humans have made far below. I’ve been building a collection.”
The doctor remembers the first time she saw him in this form, so striking and terrifying in that godforsaken room. He was beautiful then, but he is even more beautiful now, set against the backdrop of the mountain.
“I can teach them about the human world,” she says.
“No,” he says, his voice fierce. “I was human once. I remember. I do not need your help with that.”
The doctor looks at the ground and then nods. “I could bring you things,” she says, after a moment. “For your collection.”
“I would like that.” He looks down at her. “My children,” he allows, “are rambunctious.”
The doctor laughs. “Most children are.”
“I worry about them. I’m afraid that they’ll tumble down the mountain and hurt themselves. I’m afraid that they’ll get tired of the mountain and run down to the land below and somebody will see them.”
“You run down to the land below,” she reminds him.
“That’s different,” he says. “I know human ways. I know how to hide. I am careful. They are…not.”
“They could learn,” she says.
“Yes,” he says, that fierce anger back in his voice, “but the world will not learn, will it?”
She closes her eyes and feels the wind cool on her face. “Even so,” she says. “You shouldn’t hide them away.”
“I’m not hiding them,” the centaur says. “I’m keeping them safe.”
It occurs to her—not for the first time—that the babies might have died after all. Maybe they died on the journey. Is she ever going to know? “Tell me what you need and I will bring it.”
The centaur stares at her for so long the doctor wonders if she’s hallucinating. Has she been dreaming this whole time? Then he nods.
“Thank you,” he says. “I would like that. Bring me things that I can use to teach the children, and I will look forward to seeing you when you come back.”
He doesn’t say goodbye—he only turns from her, his black tail fanning the air, and jumps up the steep mountainside. The doctor stands listening to his absence for who knows how long. When she is absolutely sure he’s not coming back, she turns and makes her way back down the mountain.