Taste Test - Centaurfold.pdf - Taste test - renee2010

Edited by Rob Knight

The Teacher by Emily Veinglory - 2

Forgotten Race by Fiona Glass - 12

Pets by Kay Derwydd - 22

Contributors - 31

A Torquere Press Taste Test - 1

The Teacher

by Emily Veinglory

Clarius brought me goose feathers for new pens; I stood at my worktable and inspected

them. No matter how often I told him to gather dropped feathers he would persist in

plucking them from my small flock. Clarius was of the opinion that a scholar of note

should have clean white plumes for pens. Clarius had, in fact, a great many of opinions

about what a certain scholar should be doing.

Clarius returned from the back room with a boar-bristle brush and put his free hand quite

casually on my flank. “Your coat is very rough,” he said.

“Leave it be.”

The equine part of my body requires a little care but Clarius’ attentions had begun to take

on rather a different quality of late.

“The king is visiting tonight,” Clarius persisted. “You must look your best.”

Clarius set to grooming my coat, with my consent or not, so I tried to ignore him. I busied

myself setting down my new recipe for a tincture to treat the green fever. It was still not

an entirely satisfactory treatment and many of the ingredients were probably redundant,

but I was satisfied that it improved upon the mummery perpetuated by most who would

call themselves healers.

I managed to disregard Clarius as I enumerated the tonic’s correct proportions. My work

table was little more than a tall bench set before the window and golden light was

streaming in from overhead. In the brightness and warmth, his rhythmic strokes began to

beguile me. He started at the flank on my right side and moved forward slowly along my

body.

Clarius knew that it took brisk, firm strokes to draw out the last remnant of my winter

coat and make my shabby pelt shine. He wielded the wide, stiff brush with the skill of a

lad who had worked in a stable in his time. Indeed his father had despaired of the boy

ever having any other interest. So when Clarius grew into a young man with a deep

sonorous voice and all the other budding attributes of adulthood, his father sent him to

me. In return for his assistance, I was meant to provide the boy with the rudiments of an

education and some guidance, much as I had to a few youngsters. As it turned out he was

rather more interested in teaching me a thing or two.

I wanted to tell him to desist, but the sensation was too intense. I went back to feigning

preoccupation with my task as best I could as he worked his way to my shoulder. His

right hand lay casually on my body as he worked, coming to the point where a toga

demurely covered my human portion. Many centaurs eschewed human garb but they

were feral creatures and made without human parts that needed covering. I am fully

A Torquere Press Taste Test - 2

human at the groin and the line of connection slants up to the small of my back--a point

that Clarius was drawing close to.

The side of Clarius’ hand insinuated itself quite casually under the back of my toga and I

felt his little finger caress the point were where haired hide gives way quite suddenly to

human flesh. The skin of my haunches twitched as if to ward off flies. Other parts began

to make an entirely different response.

“Enough, Clarius,” I snapped as I skirted aside. “If you are so starved of company you

might take a few days and go into town. It’s only natural that you feel the solitude of this

place.”

Clarius sighed and plied his brushes with slightly excessive vigour. “Is it so impossible

that I seek to touch you not because you are the only man for miles, but because you

draw me?”

I backed up awkwardly and walked around behind him. “I am not a man, Clarius, and

you are a fool if you think otherwise.”

***

My cottage was comfortable enough but it was still built somewhat to a human scale.

Whenever I wish to think or need a little space I go to the cave I had lived in when I first

arrived in these parts. Back in those days, I had been little bothered by the locals who saw

me as a monster best not provoked. But then some of them heard me playing upon my

lyre or saw me picking healthful herbs. It became known that I had healing ways and

could teach the use of bow and javelin. I rose slowly to the status of wise man and

teacher, not entirely because I wished this but because I did not have the heart to turn

needy people away. Indeed, I was now hard pressed to protect my solitude as those I

helped had bestowed upon me a proper shelter, scholar’s clothing and this final intrusion,

boys like Clarius. For some years now, even the king came to speak to me if he was

wrestling with some issue that he thought I might have insight into.

My lyre was still sequestered up in the cave where the air was more conducive to it

staying in tune. I spent most of the afternoon working idly upon a ballad I had been

composing on and off for years. I folded my equine limbs beneath me and lay in the soft

grass at the cave entrance, which had grown long since I’d moved my domicile. It made a

soft and fragrant mattress, and in this comfort it was almost possible to forget that I was

not a man outside, as I felt myself to be within.

They say that a centaur is a horse vomiting up a man and a man farting out a horse--and

that pretty much captured my feelings in the matter; two creatures combined into one ill-

made chimera. Such was my fate: to be only half human no matter how I struggled or

aspired.

A Torquere Press Taste Test - 3

I captured the old half-remembered melody and ran it through my fingers one more time.

I closed my eyes and tried to locate some words that would fit to it, but the music

gambolled in a way no words ever seemed quite to match. I played it through a dozen

times in different ways and moods, but with no greater success. A string broke beneath

my finger, and with a sigh I stopped.

I opened my eyes and found Clarius standing in the cave entrance, leaning upon the stone

archway. “Has music soothed you?”

“Am I a beast then, to be soothed?”

He laughed, and for a moment my feelings were too acute to deny. He was a tawny

creature with curling hair and the full stature of a man but still the slenderness of youth.

Ganymede must have looked so when Zeus bore him off; a man so well made that even

the light of the sun caressed him like a lover. I daresay that my eyes gave me away, and

made him bolder.

“Not as a habit,” he replied. “But I seem to have a gift for annoying you. I daresay you

will be making the king take me back to the capital with him. But not, I hope, before I

groom your other side. I would not have him thinking I neglected my duties, and you do

look rather ridiculous.”

In truth, I had not thought of ridding myself of the lad, but that would be a good way of

doing it. The king owed me many favors and could easily find a place in his household

for an able man. In fact, it would rather improve Clarius’ position and more than satisfy

his father.

I struggled to my feet and set the lyre back upon its graven peg. “Have it as you will,

Clarius, but my human parts should not concern you.”

I stood in the cave entrance with my left side toward the dying light. He set to work with

focused vigor.

“Strange that you think of yourself that way,” he said. I made no comment but he

continued anyway. “As having human and equine parts, I mean. It seems to me that you

are a whole, all parts are parts of you, indivisible.”

“You might think otherwise if you knew the pains I get in my back, lacking those

muscles a horse neck might have to hold an upright posture. And the trial of finding food

that sustains me properly, or clothes that accommodate my form.”

He kept brushing briskly, working up again from flank to shoulder. “You should tell me

these things. I am meant to serve you, after all. My brother got pains in his back and

could always relieve them through massage.”

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Now that was an alarming thought and all too easy to imagine. Clarius had such strong,

broad hands, and a definite willingness to use them. I began to wonder what excesses his

father might have sent him here to curtail. Clarius stood by my left side, and even given

my form, I had no more than four or five inches of height on him, for he was a tall youth

and I more pony than horse. He reached up and tucked a stray lock of hair behind my ear.

“Your hair and beard are little tidier than the rest of you,” he chided.

“I can tend to that for myself,” I said as I turned my head away in annoyance.

“Aye, you could if you cared to, but as you don’t…”

He ran his fingers against the grain of my short beard and pressed close against me. I had

a moment when I might have pulled away. And then it was gone.

He leaned toward me and kissed me as his fingers curled around the back of my head.

And I kissed him, hard and with a passion. The impulse welled up within me too strongly

to deny. He was a beautiful young man and his touch was more than I could bear.

I pressed forward, pushing him against the hard wall of the cave mouth. He embraced me

eagerly. He raised one thigh to press against my equine shoulder. I struggled to pull back

but my body would not answer. Clarius reached up, cupping my face in his hands.

“You are not so indifferent as you pretend.”

“You are beautiful and you know it. Clever also, and not cruel except in pressing me…

but foolish, Clarius. As I have said, I am not a man .”

“Man enough, by the feel of it,” he said slyly with his belly hard against mine. “Man

enough for this.”

He untied the waist of his short toga and pulled it over his head. My eyes were drawn to

the long, golden length of his body. I was afraid as much as enflamed, but I did not step

away when he reached forward and undressed me. He moved firmly but not quickly like

any man might handling an uncertain beast.

He slid down onto his knees and I felt a flash of embarrassment, subsumed by a wave of

pure pleasure. He swallowed my half-proud human cock deep into his throat, his wet

tongue laving against its head. He was deft in his movements and firm. I trembled along

the whole length of my body and steadied myself with one hand upon the jagged rock

face. He teased me, drawing in my cock slowly with his tight lips.

I heard myself moan and felt his hand reach up along my equine shoulder, partly on the

smooth flesh that journeyed sinuously along my abdomen, partly on the dense coat whose

grain wended in whorls over my forequarters. He stood slowly, his hand lingering on my

aching cock. So far my animal parts remained almost quiescent and I prayed they would

A Torquere Press Taste Test - 5

Taste Test - Centaurfold.pdf

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