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Prince Kit and his centaur uncle, Relkot stumble across three white centaur children; the sole surviving members of the mysterious Ivory herd. Read the first chapter of this trilogy free before purchasing as a browser readable e-book on CD-ROM from Antelope Publishing. Price $24.95

Part One

The sleeping boy had been carefully wrapped in a thick, long, white fur coat. The coat had once been of the finest, literally fit for a prince. But as it sheltered the youth from the cold, muddy ground it was clear that it had seen better days. Half-frozen mud, sticks, and brown, withered leaves had been ground into its fur. Its rich whiteness was covered with gaping, ugly burnt holes. It stank of smoldering fur and less pleasant things, including the reek of half-dried blood from a thick, sticky smear along one of its left sleeves and half of the back. As the boy moaned and stirred slightly in his exhausted sleep, the mud of the slim, forested riverbank upon which he was lying ground itself even more deeply into the rich, white fur.

The youth had been hidden carefully in the depths of the dense, tropical-like forest. He was pressed up against a fallen, rotting old log that was nearly as thick around, lying on its side, as the boy himself would have been if he had been standing. The large-leafed, towering trees and shorter, tangled bushes that surrounded him on every side but that of the brook made an almost impassible wall. Where he was lying he was naturally protected from discovery from anyone who wasn't actually standing in the waters of the stream itself.

The boy was young, barely twelve years of age, with pale white skin and shining, long black hair. His bones were thin and long for his age, giving promise of a tall, lean manhood to come, and if he had four arms and four legs, that was not entirely unknown for that place or time. Beneath the white fur coat, he was dressed in a deceptively simple tan-colored tunic tied in a single knot over his left shoulders, cinched at the waist with a fine-linked golden chain and then dropping down nearly to his knees. He wore soft, low-cut tan boots that looked like the slippers of a prince.

The boy was not without his injuries. The hair on the right side of his head had been burnt nearly to the scalp. His ear, cheek and neck on that side of his body were red and blistered. His right rear leg was wrapped in an ugly, seeping bandage that had been tied, hastily and with no great skill, around a deep cut that extended from just above his ankle nearly to his knee. A bruise was slowly turning purple on his forehead. His thin, youthful hands were covered with burns and small cuts that bled and scabbed quietly as he slept.

The forest surrounding him was strangely quiet. There was none of the chirping of birds or chittering of insects that might have been expected in such a place, even though the sunlight filtering down through the thick canopy of leaves and branches overhead was rich and summer-warm. If any small forest animals wandered that way, they were careful not to approach to closely. Their passing was as quiet as the shadows of leaf and branch that slowly moved across the youth's face as the sun passed through the sky overhead. He was left undisturbed, or if he was troubled at all, it could only have been by his dreams as he moaned and groaned occasionally in his sleep. The forest on every side of him was calm, quiet, and peaceful, as if it were holding its breath for fear of waking the young boy from his enchanted slumber.

At some point in the quiet afternoon there came the sound of splashing over the gentle tinkling noises of water trickling like silver wind chimes down the narrow, shallow stream. If the boy heard, he didn't move or even open his eyes as the splashing grew louder and louder, stopping finally as a shadow fell over the boy's body.

For a moment there was silence against the background of quiet stirring leaves and dripping water. Then a tall, lean form leaned forward and touched the boy's right front shoulder.

"Are you going to sleep all day, lazybones?"

The boy opened one eye, peeked up at the golden male centaur bent over him, and groaned. He shut his eye and tried to roll away from the newcomer, but that brought the burnt side of his face against the ground and he cried out with pain. Pushing himself to a seated position, he threw back the white fur coat and gazed petulantly up at the centaur.

"I want to go home," he said in a voice with only a faint promise of approaching manhood.

The centaur sighed and leaned back to rest his large hands on his front flanks, where a man would have had hips. "I suppose you do, kid," he said. "But I'm afraid right now that's just not possible, so we'll have to make the most of what we've got, won't we?"

The boy pushed himself to his feet and flinched, reaching down with his right front arm to touch lightly the wound on his right rear leg. "Why CAN'T we go home?" he asked, looking up into the sympathetic eyes of the great centaur. "You're not lost, are you?"

The centaur shook his head, sending his long, golden hair flying. "No, not lost, my prince. I know exactly where we are."

"And you know where my father's castle is, don't you?" the boy asked. "From here, I mean. You can take us there, can't you? The fighting must be over by now!"

The centaur sighed and reached down to lift the boy lightly by his armpits, sitting him down on the thick log beneath which he had been lying. "I'm afraid it's not that simple, kid," he said softly. "Just because I know where home is, that doesn't mean I can take you there. Not right now, anyway." He reached up and pushed a lock of fine, black hair out of the boy's long, lean face. "Look, Kit, you're old enough, now, to be able to handle the truth, aren't you?"

The boy looked up with a serious expression into the golden centaur's face. "I suppose so," he sighed. "They're all dead, aren't they? My dad, I mean, and everybody else back in the castle. All dead."

The centaur made a slight face and tried to smile. "You don't know that, Kit," he told him. "Just because the raiders managed to get inside our defenses and burn the city to the ground, that doesn't mean everybody's dead. I mean, we managed to get away all right, didn't we?" He punched the young prince affectionately on an uninjured shoulder.

Kit shook his head. "Don't lie to me, Uncle Relkot," he said gravely. "You just said yourself, I'm not a kid anymore. And if they're not all dead, then why won't you take me back home?"

Relkot sighed. "Because the enemy holds the city, that's why," he explained. "I don't know who survived the attack and who didn't, but I do know that we can't go back there, at least not now. All we'd do is run up against the whole Prokuran army, and I don't think we want to do that!"

"Why not?" Kit asked. "My dad always said you could beat anybody, in a fair fight. Why don't you- you know, go back and throw those thugs out of our castle?"

The golden centaur smiled wryly. "I'm just one centaur, Kit," he reminded him. "Your father- well, sometimes he liked to flatter me by saying things like that. But I never was much of a warrior. Your dad's a thousand times better than I am."

"I know that," Kit said with childlike loyalty to his father. "But even so, you still can fight, can't you?"

Relkot threw back his head with a strangely equine movement. "Seems to me I recall getting us both safely out of the city, kid," he reminded him. "You didn't take too many blows to the head on the way past those thugs, back there, did you? Scrambled your brains, did it?" He reached out and affectionately touched the side of the boy's head with his large, muscular hand.

"I remember," Kit said softly. He shut his eyes and for a moment he was reliving the horrible flight from the city, huddled down on the golden centaur's back, desperately clutching his own swords in the half-light of midnight, with the black sky outlined in the fires of the burning city, and Relkot slashing wildly through the mass of the enemy troops like a living force of nature. He remembered the men's bodies flying wildly in every direction as Relkot simply reached down, caught them up in his mighty hands, and threw them aside as if they were nothing but unarmed children confronting a raging bull. For an instant he felt ashamed that he had even hinted that the centaur couldn't fight.

"But- but then why did you run away and let them kill my dad?" he added in a smaller voice, shyly not meeting the centaur's eyes.

The golden centaur sighed. "I didn't 'let' them do anything, Kit," he said patiently. "There were too many of them for us to defeat, not with Neko off visiting his friends to the west and- well, anyway," he caught himself, "I would have stayed there to fight, and I would have laid down my life for your father. You know that."

"Well, then why DIDN'T you?" the boy insisted. Then he flushed. "I don't mean- I don't want you to die, or anything, but why did you run away?"

For just an instant he saw an expression of such naked pain pass through Relkot's eyes that his own heart turned over and he reached out reflexively to touch the centaur's naked chest, but Relkot stepped back and avoided his fingers.

"I guess you have a right to know, Kit," he said. "Like I said, you're old enough, now, to know the truth. Sometimes- well, sometimes adults do things they don't want to do. I wanted to stay and fight, I really did, but your father ordered me to leave."

"But WHY?" Kit protested. "All those stories you and my dad are always telling, about the adventures you had back when you were kids, when the two of you were together nobody could ever beat you! So why didn't you-"

"I told you!" Relkot said with a touch of anger. Then he relented at the expression of pain and confusion in the boy's face and he shook his head. "Look, Kit," he said earnestly. "No matter how strong anybody might be, there's always somebody stronger out there somewhere. You can't expect to win every fight you come up against. You just can't. So instead of going muscle for muscle, sometimes you have to use your brains and try to outsmart your enemy. When you look over a situation and realize you can't win by just plowing your way through it, you have to sit back and think what you're going to do next.

"When your dad realized the city was going to fall, no matter what we did to try to stop it, he had to make some hard decisions. And once he passed those decisions on to me, I had to go along with them, whether I liked it or not." He smiled wryly. "You don't expect me to start arguing with your dad, right in the middle of a battle, do you?"

Kit shook his head. "I don't understand," he said. "How is running away supposed to help defeat those awful Prokurans?"

Relkot ran his long fingers through the butter-colored hair on the left side of his head, above his pointed, vaguely equine ear. "Well, for one thing, we can go and get help," he pointed out. "Remember, your grandfather has a whole army of centaurs he can call on, doesn't he? Not to mention the other allies your dad has, off to the south and in the western mountains. If we can just get to them, any one of them should be willing to help us."

"Well- well then, let's get going!" Kit said, looking around as if he expected an army to appear suddenly out of the forest on every side of him. "Maybe if we hurry we can rescue the city and- and everybody!"

Relkot looked down at the boy for a moment without speaking, but then he sighed. "Of course we'll do what we can, Kit," he told him. "But I think you should know, the city fell so fast, there's not much chance we can save anybody who got caught there. The most we can do is marshal the armies to drive the Prokurans back to wherever they came from, and maybe get some revenge for the harm they've done us." He hesitated for just a moment. "I think you might start preparing yourself for the fact that you may now be the king of Hyperborea."

Part Two

Antelope Publishing
Browser Readable E-Books on CD-ROM
Centaurs of Ivory and Gold a Trilogy
By Gary Raab
Price: $24.95

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