 o there I was, on holiday, sitting on a stone terrace, gazing out over the rippling olives and rocky outcrops of the Greek island of Zakynthos down to the astounding turquoise sea. Shaded from the brilliant sun, I was looking up from a copy of the Odyssey I had been meaning to read all of for years, and remembering how when I was young and obsessed with ancient Greece what I had wanted above all was a Centaur to be my best friend. All the best Ancient Greek heroes had been brought up by Centaurs. They did tend to be boys, that was true... human girls were generally in the kitchen .... so half the time in my games and daydreams I was a boy.
I used to tuck up my nightie in a belt to be a chiton, and try hiding apples in the fold, to be Atalanta winning the race against all the men. I used to traipse through woods with a water bottle and a homemade bow and arrow. |
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put grapes on my brother's head so he could be Dionysus. I used to build little altars to Hermes and Athena (my favourites), and swimming was my only sport, because it would be the most useful when I finally grew up to be Odysseus, the wisest of the heroes, who worked out the trick of the Trojan horse, and took ten years to get home after the ten-year Trojan War.
Years later I fell in love with a real Greek boy and he took me to Athens and the islands of the Aegean, and I sat with my toes in the wine-dark sea and watched the phosphorescence fly and listened to the murmuring of the ancient stories, the dusty feet, the magic, the horror, the beauty, the smell of jasmine and blood.
Looking down over Zakynthos, I could almost see the Centaurs still, moving carefully along the rocky coastline, playing on the beaches. Swimming in the blue sunlit sea-caves there, I heard a brave and cocky girl and her Centaur brother calling to me. I thought about the reality of ancient Greece, and the grey edges of history where legend has to fade away because historical truth is coming in.
What if the last generations of Centaurs overlapped with the first generations of recorded history? What if a real girl had a real Centaur brother, at the time of the real wars between Athens and Sparta, the plague and the seige? What if she was disguised as a boy at the time? What if she was Athenian, and fell in love with a Spartan warrior boy?
My co-author, Zizou Junior, who helps me to write all my books, glanced down at my gladiator sandals - my holiday shoes - and observed that a) I never grew out of it and b) 'what if' sounds suspiciously like the beginning of a book.
And so it was: the story of Halo, the girl disguised as a boy; Arko, her Centaur brother, and Leon, her soulmate, her enemy, the young Spartan warrior.
We hope you enjoy it. |
