Daughter of the Centaurs sprang from two impulses. The first is my love of horses. The second is my hankering for adventure. I took up horseback riding as an adult because every ride on a horse is an adventure. You never know what is going to happen. It could be nothing, which is to say a fabulous but uneventful ride through the beautiful countryside. Or it could be running into a nest of bees, getting thrown, and having to walk four miles back to the barn. Or, as happened one Christmas Day when I went out riding in the new-fallen snow, meeting a man with a long white beard in a red jacket riding a big white gelding with sleigh bells on its reins. (I kid you not.)
The day I bought my first horse my three sons heartily approved. The gist of it was: “Great, Mom! Now you’ll have a way to get way from the zombies when they attack.” Unlike my sons, I don’t have a thing about zombies but I recognize whence their zombie obsession springs: from that same impulse—the hankering for adventure, the jonesing after the adrenaline rush. The simple fact of the matter is that daily life, such as most of us know it, offers far too few opportunities for adventure; far too few chances to test our heroic mettle. If we can’t find it in life, we go looking for it in books.
So horses were a key ingredient for the book I wanted to write. The idea of including centaurs in my equine adventure stemmed from the simple desire to write about centaurs. I felt (and my editor fortunately agreed with me) that, as fantastical creatures went, centaurs have been woefully under-represented in fantasy literature. Vampires, werewolves, zombies, fairies, elves, even unicorns have been dones. But centaurs had surfaced only as walk-ons in someone else’s story. What I wasn’t sure about was how to bring horses and centaurs together in a single coherent world.
Then my husband and I (seeking adventure, naturally) went to Africa, on an extended horseback safari, riding six hours a day across the bush, camping in tents, cooking over fires, seeing wild animals every day at close range and having a few close-calls in the process. For instance, I went swimming one hot afternoon in an ice cold spring where, I realized with a jolt, there were hippos frolicking with their calves. Hippos with calves are the single most dangerous animal in Africa next to the Cape Buffalo. Needless to say, I backed out of that water very quickly. Another time, three lions visited our camp. Fortunately, they had brought with them their own food, the freshly-killed carcass of an impala. But trying to sleep that night while the lions chowed down on Impala al Fresco and later had a very noisy post-prandial romp, was one of the more unnerving experiences of my life.
Six hours a day in the saddle under the African sun was exhausting and so, one day, we went to a spa for a little pampering. The spa, with its shimmering white doric columns and classic Greek statuary and fountains in the middle of the African bush was powerfully and eerily incongruous. Then I saw the mosaic on the wall of the reception area of centaurs racing across the bush side by side with zebras and giraffes and Wildebeest.
What can I say? Somewhere between my massage and my facial I got the idea and jotted it down in my travel journal: a young woman in the bush with a herd of horses encountering a band of centaurs. On the spot, I gave the young woman the name of one of our wranglers, a plucky gal named Malora. Malora would have to protect the horses from predators. And in Africa, as I saw first-hand, all the predators thought horses were yummy and delicious. Every day would have its routines (grooming the horses, finding water, finding good grazing for the horses and food for Malora, finding safe places to rest) but every day would also bring its adventures, usually in the form of predators trying to get at the horses. Malora would have to be brave and resourceful. But the horses, in turn, would provide Malora not just with transportation but with companionship too. They are her only society…until centaurs capture them all and Malora has to adjust to life in captivity, to civilization, and to the very different ways of the centaurs.
Daughter of the Centaurs is the story of Malora emerging from the bush and discovering and adapting to a new society. In the second book of the trilogy, The Backbone of Heaven, Malora travels north with her centaur companions, to famed trading center of Kahiro, in whose vast and bustling marketplace you can find anything you could possibly want. It is the ultimate mall, complete with a cast of hibes that is reminiscent of the Mos Eisley canteen in Star Wars. But this is our world, millennia in the future. And I hope readers will embrace it and enjoy exploring it side by side with Malora.
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