The Horse Road (14 page)

At home again, I put her into a stall to cool down, and wiped her off using a sponge from the Mediterranean Sea, and a leather bucket holding water scooped from the trough. I fetched her a handful of millet from the storage room, and noticed how low our supply of food was running. Fardad was asleep in the kitchen, sitting on a stool with his back against the wall, his toes poking into the ashes of the cooking fire, his moustache rising and falling in the light breath of his snores. I smiled to myself, and slipped out of the front gate to run downhill to the market and bargain for grain. One hand clutched the few small coins remaining in my supply; only the price of slaves was falling in this city because no one wanted the expense of feeding them.

At the bottom of our street, a crowd of women had gathered at the fountain. I ducked my head in shyness and hurried around the fringe of the group
with my eyes averted. When someone called my name, I hesitated. A servant from Lila's house broke free of the crowd and rushed over to me, her face creased with agitation. ‘The water has stopped running; the fountain is empty!' she cried, and then she turned abruptly and began to hurry homewards. I craned my neck, looking past the other women's bright tunics and robes, and saw that the stone basin, which usually brimmed with fresh water, was empty and only slightly damp. The stone dried in the hot sun even as I stared at it, becoming chalky and pale. The women scattered like wind-blown leaves, their high voices carrying the news through the streets. I hurried on, my skin crawling with fear. Everywhere I went, the same alarm met me.

In every street, stone channels usually rushed with clear mountain water that was carried into Ershi by the aqueduct, and was stored in the reservoir before pouring like life-blood down through the city. This water was carried home in jars to cook stews, wash babies, water goats. But now, in every street I ran through, the stone channels were all empty. A strange silence replaced the usual gurgling rush of the water, the splash of fountains. I hadn't realised, until now, how water's music was a sound like a warp thread on a loom, holding the city's tapestry together.

‘The enemy has stopped the water from running over the aqueduct into our city!' cried a man in the
marketplace, grasping at the long curls of his beard as people crowded around him. ‘The water that is in our reservoir now is all we have left! The king's guards have surrounded the reservoir to protect it.'

After that, I ran home and climbed on to the roof of the stable block and stared down into the water in the cistern. My distorted reflection stared back: the dusky oval moon of my plump face, the tangle of my black curls, the bright chips of my blue eyes. The ripples of worry that crawled across everything. I jumped down, sweating, feeling the sun suck moisture from me.

‘What has happened?' I cried, bursting into the kitchen where our cook was slicing cucumbers from the garden and dropping the pieces into a bowl of goat yoghurt.

‘They say the enemy has diverted the river's flow, and changed the course of the irrigation canals,' Fardad said, looming in a corner, his eyebrows shooting up and down in agitation. He pulled his dagger from his belt and began to trim his fingernails, nicking himself and starting to bleed.

‘Is it true, about the water?' I cried, bursting into Lila's house and interrupting the evening meal. Her father nodded glumly, reclining on one elbow on his couch in a tunic of green and purple stripes. He wiped his lips with a piece of flat bread.

‘There is no more water flowing into Ershi,' he said. ‘Even the small river flowing along the western
wall is nothing but a bed of dry gravel. The aqueduct is empty. The king's guards will ration out the water that remains, so much for each household.'

‘What about the wells?' I cried.

‘There are only a few, along the base of the hill,' he said. ‘They are already low from this dry weather, and will soon run dry especially now that there is no other source of water. Soon, there will be so little water in this city that even gold will not be able to buy it. People will die for water, and for its lack.'

He nodded gloomily over his salad of chickpeas, his thin face carved with lines. Lila flashed me a terrified glance from her couch, and her mother wiped her sweating forehead with a linen cloth and dabbed at her trembling mouth.

‘This is terribly frightening,' she whispered. ‘This is a terrible time for us all.'

‘But the spring! Outside the caravanserai there is a spring!' I cried.

‘Only the troops may use that water for their horses. The king has posted guards around it,' Lila's father said.

I spun on my heel and flew home. The mares stood patiently, back feet lifted, as they dozed with lower lips hanging, and waited for their evening feed. Their trusting gazes turned to me. I stared into the water trough, and felt weak with fear.

‘They will have drunk this water by morning,' I whispered. ‘Mother, I don't know what to do.'

I could smell myself as I rode Grasshopper behind Lila through the marketplace. I felt as though everything with which I had come into contact in the last two days had left a scent upon me. In my hair lay the bitterness of herbs from my mother's room; on my hands the sweat of mares and the sweetness of foals; in my tunic clung the cooking oil from the kitchen; all over me lay a miasma of dust. Water flowed through the stone channels, from the reservoir, for one hour each sunrise and sunset. Soldiers guarded the fountains and, at the decree of the king, each household could fill only two jars for its cooking and drinking needs. For bathing, there was nothing left over, and the city's bath houses stood silent and empty. Households with elite horses might fill buckets so that the horses had just enough to keep them alive, at least for the time being; no one from the
mighty king to the lowest slave knew when the siege would end. Or who would be victorious and might claim the horses, if they had survived that long. It was fortunate that our Persian horses were renowned for their ability to survive on small rations of water, even to endure several days without it.

‘I need perfume,' I muttered. Lila, riding ahead on Iris, laughed, turning her head.

‘And I used to complain when you smelled only of horses,' she said, reining around a man trying to sell carpets from a stack beside the stall of a coppersmith.

Now that the mares had little to drink, I no longer trotted them around the hippodrome for exercise, for I didn't want them to lose moisture through sweating. Instead, if a mare was restless, I took her out for a slow amble through the streets, stopping in the shade of walnut trees to rest. Today, Lila had won her mother's permission to accompany me, and was wearing her prettiest trousers and tunic in an attempt to be cheerful despite the columns of vultures wheeling so high overhead that they were black specks in the brilliance, and despite the stink rising from the city drains. Lining every main street, they were normally flushed with waste water but now they were clogged with debris: bits of rotting flesh, dry bones, fallen leaves, dog faeces, droppings from donkeys, bird feathers.

She must hate this even more than I do
, I thought, watching Lila's tall, slender back as she rode along.
The sun shimmered on her blue brocade tunic and on Iris's quarters.

‘Wait!' I called, spotting the stall I had been looking for, and Lila reined Iris in under the shade of an awning. I slid from Grasshopper and began to bargain for a jar of sesame oil. I had used all the oil in my terracotta lamp, reading Xenophon's
Art of Horsemanship
on the rooftop when I was too frightened to sleep in the dark silence of my room.
‘The horse should trust people, knowing that they are the providers of food and water
,' I would quote in a whisper, drifting off to sleep at last beneath the stars.

While the stallholder haggled over his price, clutching two different sized jars of oil, I saw something move furtively in the corner of my eye. A skinny brown arm came out slowly from beneath the stall. Bony fingers reached tentatively towards Grasshopper's legs. The mare stamped at a fly and the fingers froze into stillness. Then they reached out again, further, straining to touch the mare's black knee.

‘Which jar, young lady?' the stallholder demanded, and I stared at his swarthy face, his dark eyes burning deep in their sockets like coals from a fire.

‘Your price is more than I can afford,' I muttered, trying to muster my bargaining courage. I cleared my throat. ‘I will find another oil supplier,' I said more loudly.

I glanced downwards again; the fingers had reached Grasshopper's foreleg and were stroking it
with a touch so light, so gentle, that I understood why the mare was now standing absolutely still despite the flies.

‘For you, this large jar for the price of the smaller one – a gift in this time of need, a great gift and one I can ill afford with my many children to feed, may Ahura take pity upon them and –'

I bent down and peered beneath the stall. The thin arm shot backwards. In the gloom, the face of a slave girl tilted towards me, her lips sucked in as she waited for my reprimand, or perhaps for a slash from the plaited riding whip hanging from my right wrist. Even in our cosmopolitan city, her appearance was strange and foreign. Her hooded eyes were chips of blue in her sallow, pointed face, beneath the matted tangle of her dark hair.

‘You like my horse?' I asked in Persian.

She ducked her head, her eyes cast down, her bony fingers tracing patterns in the dust. Was it her strange eyes, or her silence, or the gentleness of her touch on Grasshopper's leg that intrigued me the most? I squatted, the embroidered hem of my tunic trailing on the ground, and stared at the girl.

‘You like my horse?' I asked again, using a Turkic tongue. Her gaze flew up at me, a brief shine like a glimpse of sky on a cloudy day, and then she bent over again. I saw that she was tied to the stall's wooden supports with a rope, and that it had chafed her ankles raw and dry. Flies crawled in her hair.

Was it because my mother had once been a slave in the markets of Tashkent that I straightened, and gripped the startled oil seller by one of his own wrists?

‘I will take the slave child,' I said. ‘She must be worth as much as a large jar of oil.'

‘But my wife, my honourable wife, needs her to help in the kitchens!' the man protested, clutching at his skullcap. His deep-set eyes blazed with the thrill of a new bargaining tool. ‘My wife is run off her feet with work, may Ahura bless her and keep her, for she has so many children! And this girl is a great necessity and cannot go with you.'

‘And yet I hear that it is very hard to feed slaves in this time of war,' Lila said sweetly at my shoulder, her face bright with a dazzling smile. ‘Surely this is a good time to take coins home to your wife, and to save your oil for another buyer.'

The man paused, caught off-guard by Lila's sudden appearance and her wide, limpid eyes with their fringes of thick lashes.

‘My lady friend is in sore need of a slave, for her dearest mother is fighting with demons, and her honourable father has abandoned them.'

I stifled a snort of laughter, and bestowed upon the oil seller what I hoped was a smile at least half as dazzling as Lila's. There was a scuffle at my feet as the slave girl pulled herself out from underneath the stall and began to stroke Grasshopper's face; I could feel the love that made her dirty hands loose and
soft, and that warmed her flat gaze. She scarcely looked at me as I pressed the coins into the man's hands, or as I hugged Lila in thanks before leading Grasshopper into the shade of an elm tree. Untied now by her oil seller, the girl followed us with one hand laid against Grasshopper's ribs, and I realised, seeing her standing upright, that she was older than I'd thought. Her head reached to my shoulder although she was as thin as a stray dog.

‘How many birthdays have you had?' I asked and she lifted her brittle shoulders in a shrug.

‘Eleven? I don't know,' she whispered, staring at the ground.

‘Where is your tribe? Speak louder so I can hear you.'

She cleared her throat and began to speak like a child reciting a lesson. ‘My mother was a subject of the Son of Heaven, and taken from the border of the Middle Kingdom and sold as a slave. She journeyed through the northern sea of grass and gave birth to me but my father was a chieftain who disowned me. I was taken in a tribal war two summers ago and brought here to Ershi to be sold.'

I nodded, understanding her strange appearance and those hooded, angled eyes. ‘And now the army of the Middle Kingdom is at our gates,' I said. ‘Do you wish to join them and return home?'

‘I have no home,' she said listlessly, but I saw how her eyes lit up again when Grasshopper swung her
head around and sniffed curiously at her bare arm and the shoulder of her ragged tunic.

‘Fardad is going to kill me,' I muttered to Lila, and she laughed and climbed on to Iris from a stone mounting block at the roadside.

‘You still have to buy oil before you return to face his wrath,' she said. ‘Let's hope you haven't yet spent all your mother's money. You know your mother won't have slaves in the household.'

I nodded, and swung on to Grasshopper who gave a small leap, almost overturning the stall of a tea seller, his urns shining in the bright sun.

‘Watch out for my wares!' he cried in alarm.

The slave child did not jump away in fright when Grasshopper leaped; she moved quickly beside the mare, as if she were a foal keeping pace with its mother. I gave her a puzzled stare.

‘You can ride?' I asked.

She nodded, gripping my saddle's leather foot loop in her fist, her blue eyes flickering over every detail of Grasshopper's saddle blanket, the saddle's leather covering embroidered with stars and heads of grain, the bridle with its reins of shagreen leather that I had repaired myself using a bronze needle. Her fingers traced the mare's five-pointed brand.