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From a distance, they looked almost like the male who attacked him. But the two halves—man and horse, as he’d learned they were called—were not one.
In a way, the division of the two halves exemplified how the young male felt about himself.
He looked like a horse. He saw his reflection whenever he drank water from a stream or pond. But he wasn’t exactly like the horses he saw, bearing men and burdens on their backs.
For one, the largest of the male horses were smaller than him once he’d grown to his full size. For another, they were restrained by ropes around their faces and bodies. They were slaves to the men’s commands.
They weren’t free.
Most of all, when he tried to communicate with them, venturing close enough at night when they were some distance away from the men and it was safe, they only stared dumbly at him, ears flicking, tails swishing.
They greeted him with friendliness and ready acceptance. The females sniffed his face, his sides and rump, rubbing up against him and nickering for attention. The males were strangely docile, not the way he would expect stallions to behave. Until one day he realized that many of the male horses he met no longer had all of their parts.
He’d been astounded and enraged when he found out.
Did humans do this to these noble creatures? His brethren?
It was unimaginably cruel.
They should rebel! How could they stand to be so mistreated and used?
But they never spoke back to him.
He never sensed the fury that he felt on their behalf. There was only placid acceptance and occasionally fear, as if they were uncertain and wary ofhisunrestrained emotions. His feelings and thoughts were too extreme to these beasts of burden. His anger and wildness unsettled them.
Sometimes, they tried to follow him when he left, but their ropes and harnesses held them back.
He was not like them, he realized.
Even though he looked like a horse, he was not only that. He was different on the inside.
Whenever he ventured close enough to men’s encampments to listen to their talk, he realized early on that he understood their languages. There were many dialects, many different tongues, but he comprehended them all.
And yet, in this case, he was the one who couldn’t talk back.
He didn’t have the ability to make those human sounds. Clearly, he wasn’t like them either, though he could think like them.
He felt like a man trapped in a horse’s body. At the same time, he felt like an animal with the mind and heart of a man.
He had a name, at least.
He remembered his mother’s whispered word:
Andros.
But he had no home, no people.
Nothing and no one.
And then one day, he came upon a group of wild horses frolicking across a deserted beach.
None of them wore the harnesses and ropes he’d seen other horses wear.
They were free.
And they were so beautiful in their freedom, he yearned to join them.
He lengthened and quickened his strides to pull abreast of the group, neighing in greeting.
