The Horse Road (12 page)

I halted Swan before Arash, and the palomino's ears flickered forward.

‘She is a fine sight,' Arash said pleasantly. Perhaps I had misjudged him, I thought. Perhaps he was trying to be friendly.

Swan took two steps closer, edging in with her nose outstretched towards the palomino. Arash's hand was like a snake striking fast; I barely saw it as he reached forward and slapped Swan's shoulder.

I heard Lila gasp behind me, before she muffled the sound with her hand.

Heat flooded my face.

‘Take her back in,' Arash said, still pleasant, still dropping words like beads of honey. ‘She is bothering my gelding, Desert Wind.'

I led Swan away, shaking as I walked and as I slid her saddle off. To strike another's horse was the same
as striking the person; it was an insulting gesture. I spent a long time leaning against Swan, letting her breathe into my hair and rub her itchy nose on my back, until I felt calm enough to return outside.

Arash's face lit into a glittering smile at my appearance, and for an instant I thought that perhaps I had imagined the whole thing; that the heat and my aching head were responsible. Perhaps it had been a friendly slap such as anyone might give to a horse to make it step aside.

‘My dear betrothed,' he said, the smile lingering at the corners of his mouth, his eyes remaining dark and unreadable, ‘thank you for the names of your mares. Convey my respectful concern to your mother, and be assured I will send a magus by evening.'

‘One has already c-come today,' I said, but Arash seemed not to hear me for he was already stepping upon the bent back of a slave and mounting Desert Wind. I watched as they went through the wide, double doors of my father's house, then Fardad was swinging them shut.

‘Most improper when your esteemed parents are not here to receive him,' he muttered. ‘Most improper.'

‘I didn't invite him!'

Lila stepped out of the storage room doorway, her eyes lit up. ‘He's so handsome!' she breathed. ‘You are so lucky! My betrothed is pale and pudgy, not elegant and tall.'

‘Thank you,' I said, sarcastic with misery. ‘Perhaps Arash thinks the same of me: pale and pudgy.'

Lila hugged me, her armlets pressing into my back. ‘You are beautiful,' she said. ‘Anyone would think so, with your blue eyes and your black curls. And you are not pudgy, just lovely to hug. And I'm sorry.'

‘He hit Swan,' I whispered.

‘It was more like a hard pat,' Lila hedged, and I stiffened in her long arms. Then I thought that I didn't want to fight with my old friend because, when it came to handsome boys, she was irrational and I had to just accept this. Maybe she couldn't help it; maybe they made her feel the way a really beautiful horse made me feel.

‘I should not have let him get away with slapping Swan.'

‘Oh, but Kalli! Women must learn to hold their tongues and be submissive in the presence of men!'

‘I wasn't hospitable,' I said. ‘Was he mocking me when he thanked me? I should have offered refreshments.'

‘You could not have invited him inside when your parents were not present!' Lila sounded so shocked that a tiny tremor of laughter licked through me. It was no use talking to Lila about such matters; she was not the child of a nomad who had fought alongside men, nor of a man who preferred to collect the horse myths of other nations, and recite them to his daughter, than school her in social etiquette.

‘Tomorrow, come over early if you want to ride with me,' I said. ‘I am riding near the east gate, when the cavalry go out.'

Lila nodded. ‘I'll be here at dawn. Now I must go home for our evening meal. Do you want to come?'

‘No, I must feed all the mares some hay, and then visit my mother.'

I waited until the garden gate had swung shut behind Lila, then fetched a rake and cleared the courtyard of droppings by scraping them into a pile at one end. Fardad said that the boy who emptied the latrines could move the droppings into the garden to rot. I hauled armloads of hay from the floor of the storage room, and dropped them before the mares. The more powerful mares began to munch the hay straight away but the lower ranking and younger mares milled around, nickering gustily, waiting their turns. I carried hay out until each one had her own small pile. Just this one feeding seemed to have used up so much of my supply. Perhaps tomorrow, I could take more coins from my mother's pouch, and send Fardad out again to scour the city for food. If the mares became too hungry, their milk might dry up and then what would happen to the foals?

I closed this horrible thought inside a box in my head, and went to wash the dust and prickly hayseeds from my face before going upstairs to see my mother. A waft of jasmine in the hallway alerted me to the fact that Lila's mother had been visiting; perhaps she
had come to spy on the courtyard scene and carry home gossip about Arash. She was a woman who could sense the nearness of a social event in the way that a horse could sense the presence of a ghost.

My mother lay unconscious on straightened sheets. Her head lolled sideways on the pillow, and her skin looked dry as an autumn leaf. I stared in shock for she seemed to have aged many months in the space of a few days. When I touched her cheek with my lips, there was no response. ‘Mother,' I whispered. I wanted her eyes to snap open, and for her to start questioning me sternly about my care of the horses. I wanted her to fling aside the covers and pull on her boots before striding outside. Would any of these things ever happen again?
Yes, they must!
How could I live without her? And how could her bold spirit remain caged in a sick body? I held her sweating hand, twisting her rings and feeling helpless, until Marjan came and told me that my evening meal was prepared.

After eating the rice, flavoured with basil and garlic, and skewers of braised lamb, I wandered though the house, restless and frightened. Our grand rooms with their high stuccoed ceilings seemed to echo my footsteps. My fingertips ran across the bright wall paintings of court life: tribute being brought to kings, a party of nobles hunting from horseback. An appaloosa showed off its spots as it reared up in the path of a roaring lion. Between the wall paintings, many precious objects
reposed in wall niches: a copper hookah, candlesticks carved from the white bone called ivory that came from a huge animal in a country called Africa, and silver-chased drinking rhytons.

My favourite things in our house were the objects depicting horses that my father brought back for my mother and me as gifts from faraway places: the vases with chariot scenes, a bowl showing the god Poseidon riding a hippocamp, a wheel from the winning chariot at the last Olympic Games. Tonight, although I ran my fingers and eyes over all these objects, my thoughts strayed away in anxious turmoil.

Why had Arash come here today? Was he truly making a census of horses for the treasury, or had he lied to me? Why had he slapped Swan? Did he mind the fact that I liked to ride in the mountains, feeling no walls but grasses and sky? Was it true that his father had fallen from royal favour into disgrace? What was going to happen to us all?

Finally, to calm myself, I fetched a terracotta lamp filled with sesame oil, and looked in my father's chest of book scrolls until I found my favourite:
The Art of Horsemanship
by a man named Xenophon. My father had had a copy made for me in the city of Alexandria where there was a library with a great collection of texts. Stretching out on the rooftop, on my summer mattress, I pored over Xenophon's thoughts on training horses, by using kindness, until my vision blurred.

When I blew out the lamp, stillness settled over me. I could sense the hostile army, waiting out there in the darkness, gathering its strength. I wished that Swan indeed had wings like Pegasus, or like the great winged Heavenly Horse that the nomads talked of and that they believed was a protector of the people. My father said he had once seen a carving of a winged horse in an Indian temple, and once on a stone seal from the ancient civilisation of Mesopotamia.

When Swan galloped through the grass with me, it felt as though we both took wing and soared. I hoped that we would have that freedom again in our lifetime.

The cavalry came down the road to the east gate with a thunderous roar of hooves. It was packed so tightly that the riders' knees were pressed between a moving mass of horses. Swan flung up her head in excitement, her nostrils sucking in deep breaths as she smelled all those strange horses. She sidled and danced in the side street where we had been waiting for sunrise so that we could watch the cavalry ride out. I gripped her with my knees, feeling her warmth through the quilted blanket, and the clasp of Lila's hands around my waist as she balanced behind me. All around us in the street, crowds of people jostled together, craning their necks to watch, and gave a great cheer as the massive east gates swung ponderously open.

The light cavalry was the first to pass by. The tribesmen wore leather armour sewn with scales of
hoof and bone, and carried recurved bows slung over their shoulders. Their wood and leather quivers, painted with wild animals locked in mortal combat, bristled with arrows. Some of their sweating horses were protected with layers of heavy felt blankets stretched from the poll at their ears to the croup above their tails. Other horses wore leather and scale protection, and looked like strange monstrous beasts from foreign lands, or as if they were turning into marine creatures like hippocamps with scaly tails and horses' heads.

‘There's Batu's father!' I cried to Lila, reining in Swan as she plunged restlessly around in the crowd. I flung out my arm, pointing as the black horse, Starlight, surged down the street; briefly I glimpsed the hawk profile of his chieftain rider. An image of Batu, waiting and waiting alone in a valley, flashed through my mind. Perhaps, in his bones, he felt the earth shiver as the cavalry of his people rode to battle; perhaps the skin on his face tingled as the sun touched it this morning. Part of me wished he was here, rushing fiercely down the street in the torrent of riders, but another part of me felt glad that he was far off in a place of safety.

I stared, fascinated, at all the horses trotting past, noting a strong leg, a cracked hoof, a nervously tossing head, a foaming mouth holding a cruel, spiked bit. Spotted, sorrel, black, golden bay, they passed me by, all those hundreds of horses with their bronze bits, their
decorated bridles, their brightly embroidered blankets, their woollen tassels and jewelled neck collars. Their strength and willingness in the face of death.

I stared into the faces of the warriors swaying higher, above the horses' backs; some were fair-haired and pale-skinned; others were dark, swarthy, and tattooed with the strange black markings of various tribes. Several times I glimpsed the blue eyes and fiery red hair of Yeu-chi tribesmen. Women rode in that long procession too, their hands calloused on the reins, their bows slung over their shoulders, their eyes alight and intent. This is how my mother would have looked, I thought, and felt an ache of pity for her, trapped in the sweet stench of pain-relieving opium and her own feverish sweat.

Pouring beneath the high arch of the east gate, the tribesmen shook tambourines of horse skin, and gave long, high battle cries that stopped my heartbeat and made the hair stand up on my scalp. Lila's hands tightened on my waist, and Swan swung around so wildly that her hindquarters collided with a doorway. Someone in the crowd gave a shout of alarm.

Now the rising sun glittered on the chain mail that protected both the men and the horses of the heavy cavalry, and on the tips of their long lances. These troops were mainly aristocrats. ‘Look for Arash!' Lila shouted in my ear but I didn't see him although I strained for a glimpse of his golden gelding. The heavy cavalry passed out through the gate,
beating kettle drums that made their horses plunge and jump in nervous excitement, and that made the doves on the battlements take wing, scattering across pale blue and golden sky like flurries of almond blossom.

The infantry marched in the cavalry's wake, rank upon rank of peasants and serfs armed by their masters with swords and daggers. Camels rocked past, bellowing in complaint, and laden with extra supplies of bronze-tipped arrows.

‘We will be free by sunset!' shouted a man standing at Swan's shoulder, and the crowd around us took up the shout. ‘Free by sunset!' they roared, as the east gate swung slowly shut again behind the last troops, and as the doves drifted back upon the battlements to strut and coo. The sunlight poured over the city walls, bathing us all in warmth, and shining upon the cheering faces.

‘We will ride down later and watch them come home!' I shouted to Lila above the din, and then I wheeled Swan around and we began to ride through the marketplace. When we slid off Swan's back in the courtyard at home, Lila's mother rushed out of the house with her gown fluttering in agitated waves around her plump legs.

‘My dear girls, where have you been?' she cried shrilly. ‘The city is filled with strange troops, wild men from the tribes! Traders! Stranded caravan leaders! You must stay safely at home in these dangerous
times! Lila, go home immediately and do not leave the house again today! I forbid it!'

Fardad turned away impassively, his eyebrows still for once, and rattled home the bolts on the front doors. Lila slid her hand down Swan's face and slipped a ring of dried apple between the mare's soft, wrinkled lips. Then she smiled at me and darted away through the garden with her mother trotting after her, still scolding.

Later, in the heat of the afternoon, when I knew that her mother would be dozing on the cushions of a high, padded couch, I slipped quietly into Lila's house to find her. We climbed to the rooftop which offered the same view down the valley as did my own.

‘They are fighting through all the city's gardens, and in the surrounding fields,' Lila mused. ‘It is true that Angra's dark forces make the land barren, and curse the crops.'