The Horse Road (6 page)

I laid my hand on the arch of Gryphon's bent neck as Batu mounted Rain, and pulled his white face up out of the grass. Sunlight gleamed on the curve of Batu's bow, the scales sewn on his helmet. I laid my face against Gryphon's side and pressed my cheek into his golden hair, and cried in silence as Batu and Rain moved away amongst the yurts, assembling with the other warriors around an altar platform for their god of war. I squeezed my eyes shut as their shaman's chanting drifted through the valley, as the sheep bleated and the foals gambolled on their skinny legs. Everything was shining in the sun; everything inside my eyelids was black as the belly of a great storm.

Gryphon's side moved against my face; my feet moved of their own accord as I kept step with my grazing stallion. Finally I straightened and opened my eyes. The group of warriors was already far down the valley, cresting a swell of the land, a thin plume of dust rising from it. I waited until the last rider dropped from view, then dragged my heavy legs back to Berta's yurt and stumbled inside. My mother's eyes were still closed. I squatted beside her cot, with my back against a loom, but her eyelids didn't flicker. I held my ear to her face, listening anxiously to her shallow, light breathing.

Please
, my thoughts urged,
oh please, Mother, wake up! Be strong again! We must ride after the warriors; we must save our horses!

My calf muscles began to cramp and I stood up slowly to stretch, then sat cross-legged by the fire. A pan held a broth of mutton, cold now and skimmed over with fat. Berta had given it to me last night but I had been too tired to eat. Now the feast delicacy that she had saved, the sheep's eyeballs, were pale and puckered. I pushed the pan further away and began listlessly chewing a piece of flat bread that lay on a stone near the fire. The bread formed lumps in my throat.

Swan shimmered in the shadows of the yurt, a ghost mare, as precious as my own heartbeat. As Berta had reminded me, Swan had been born in the summer of my birth, a foal that made people cry out with surprise and delight; a foal that skittered and drifted across the pastures like down from the breast of a wild swan, light and glimmering. She had matured into a filly with legs so long, so fine, that she seemed all white bone as she ran through the alfalfa, fast and pale as Pegasus in my father's tales. My mother tied me on to her back; I fell asleep at night to the memory of her hoof beats and woke in the morning light to be carried into her pasture again.

As we grew older, my mother began to train us in the nomad way; we spent long hours under my
mother's steady gaze, straining to pay attention to her husky commands. Over and over we practised breaking smoothly from walk into trot, from trot into canter, into flowing gallop, into sudden skidding stops. We wheeled through shadows and flowers like two birds changing direction in mid-air. By the time we were seven summers old we could thread amongst poles hammered into the ground as though we were one creature, one long streak of lightning forking between a forest to shoot at last towards the stable door where my mother stood, appraising our progress. My mother taught me to ride without reins, to guide Swan with the pressure of my knees on her pearly sides, to send her one way and then another even at a gallop, shifting beneath me like a sandbank shifting in a spring flood.

Then I learned to shoot arrows, twisting backwards from the waist, tightening the bowstring against my shoulder, forgetting that I was even mounted on a cantering horse as my eyes focused on the straw target, and my fingers notched the arrow against the bow's taut curve. Sometimes Mother would throw a silver coin, minted with the faces of Alexander the Great or Eucratides, upon the dust of our training ground. I would gallop past it, time after time, bending lower and lower over my mare's slippery ribs as I tried to scoop the coin from the ground. On other days, Mother hung rawhide loops from poles and I hurled spears through them as I galloped
past. I also learned to hold a lasso pole in my left hand and drop its noose over the heads of other horses running beside Swan. Sometimes we ran relay races far out along the valley, on dusty tracks and through pastureland, and along the edges of vineyards as the grapes ripened in the simmering heat, Mother and the men from her stable, and I.

At the end of these hard days, we would bathe the horses at a pool, fed from an aqueduct, that stood outside the mud brick walls of our stable. Swan's sweat and dust would slide from her and she would gleam in the thickening purple dusk, a statue of marble in a great square in the heart of a fabulous city. Then I would bring her a bucket of grain, wheat or barley from our own fields, and inhale its sweet smell and listen to Swan's teeth grinding as the poplar leaves trembled in the fading light. Once she had finished eating, Swan would press her muzzle to my face before drifting out to the herd, and I would turn and prepare to ride back to the city, my face burned with sun, my legs so tired they shook beneath me, the inside of my thighs chafed and sore.

My father took great interest in the education of my brothers; they went each day to school with their pedagogues carrying their wax tablets and metal styluses, their extra cloaks in case of cold. Seated behind their wooden desks, they laboured over arithmetic for my father wanted them to be shrewd traders able to check the ledgers and accounts in the
warehouses and granaries. Outdoors, my brothers were taught wrestling and gymnastics; back at their desks again, they laboriously wrote out Greek and Latin script and learned to read Homer's
Iliad
. But my father left my education to my mother; asking only that I occasionally wear a gown and smile at his dinner guests, and play the stringed lyre pleasantly on winter afternoons, and be able to read. Beyond this lay my mother's realm. It was in the pastures and stable yard that my mother chose I should learn. Whilst my friend Lila and other girls sat at home working at their looms, I became dirty and dishevelled, stained with grass and dust and horsehair. Gradually, I became a stranger in the city, just as my mother was. She taught me how to choose which mare to breed to which stallion, how to blanket a racing horse in layers of felt so that it gained no weight, when to feed a horse the extra nutrition found in mutton fat. She showed me how to first saddle a green young horse; how to poultice a foot abscess; how to deliver a foal, wet and filled with the promise of joy, into a bed of fresh barley straw.

Although my brothers competed with each other to see who could recite the longest passages of poetry, or win a wrestling match, waiting hopefully for our father's delighted belly laugh, it was my mother's approval that I longed for. Sometimes, she would lay her hand along my shoulder as I dismounted, and tell me that I had done well. On other evenings, my
fingers cut with bowstrings, my ribs bruised from a fall over a running shoulder, it was to Swan that I went for comfort. It was Swan whose ears flickered as I mumbled my fear that I would never ride as well as my mother wished me to. It was Swan who blew into my hair and comforted me.

Now, I was stuck here in Berta's yurt, and Mother twitched and moaned softly in her deep sleep, wandering far away into her lost days, and the Chinese army was drawing closer, closer, closer to Ershi. To Swan, who trusted me.

I choked on a piece of flat bread and doubled over, coughing. The yurt was a trap; surely Angra had laid his evil hand upon us. I fumbled for the leather pouch of leopard's fur, and clenched it tightly.

There was a shuffle of sound. Someone pounded me on the back. I swallowed the lump of flat bread, and wiped my streaming eyes. Batu swam into focus, his face creased with concern as he squatted beside me. The bruise around his right eye was darker this morning, a squashed grape.

‘I have returned; I am not going with the warriors,' he said fiercely, regret and determination kindling in his gaze.

‘What? What has happened?'

He didn't answer but searched amongst the pots on the women's side of the yurt until he found a shallow dish. He poured a gurgle of red wine into it from a skin bag, and dropped an arrowhead into the
liquid. Then, as I watched in silence, he drew his iron dagger from his sash and nicked the end of his finger; the blood splashed into the wine's clarity in a tiny cloud. Now I began to understand what he was doing. When he handed his dagger to me by the hilt, I turned the point towards myself. It was honed so sharp on a whetstone that I barely had to touch it to my skin to break the surface. Batu held out the bowl and I added my blood to its contents. The arrowhead shimmered in the bottom, like a treasure in a pool.

‘Swear,' Batu said solemnly.

‘I don't know the right words, the words of your people.'

‘I make this oath before Uha Soldong, the Golden Sorrel, light of the dawn, creator of horses. I will not leave you, Kallisto. Horses have bound our families together. We are companions in this war with the Middle Kingdom. We are horses yoked in the same chariot. We are eagles circling in the same sky. May great Tengri, master of all the world, favour us, and look kindly upon us, and show us mercy if we are true to one another in this time of battle. I will be your true companion, Kallisto; I swear it.'

‘Before the Golden Sorrel, I will be your true companion, I swear it,' I repeated, and then Batu tipped back his strong brown neck where the torc glinted, and drank from the bowl before handing it to me. The arrowhead shifted as I tipped the bowl up, and the wine tasted sweet and thick, clearing
away the flat bread from my throat, filling my chest with warmth.

The bowl was empty when I laid it on the felt carpet. For a moment, Batu's gaze held mine in a blazing grip. I felt courage rise in me. Then the wind gusted in the door, bringing the tang of wild mint and the oiliness of sheep, and my mother moaned softly.

Batu's gaze flickered to her and he frowned. ‘She has been cast upon by an evil eye,' he said. ‘We must get her into a wagon and ride for Ershi. When my mother and I first came to your mother's door, we were starving to death. Only your mother's kindness saved us. Now it is my turn to repay this. And Swan is a mare of special quality; white as a perfect egg. White is the colour of good omen amongst my people, and how could I ignore that now?'

I lifted my head, bent as I listened to Batu's explanation. Outside the door of the yurt, Rain blocked the sunshine; he swung his head and looked at me with his blue eye.

‘Come,' Batu said, ‘the horses are ready for our journey.'

‘Well spoken.'

We turned, startled, to see that my mother had raised herself upon one elbow.

‘We will leave now,' she continued, only determination holding together the weak thread of her voice. ‘But I will ride Grasshopper and not lie in a
wagon like a corpse going to its sky-burial. Batu, please fetch my horses. Kallisto, bring me my clothes.'

‘But, Mother –'

‘We must make haste; we must fetch our herd and drive it back here to the nomad camp where it will be safe. No army shall have it.'

And my indomitable mother swung herself free of the blankets, as Batu stepped outside to catch Grasshopper and Tulip.

‘Mother!' I called anxiously. ‘Are you well?' Riding at the head of our small party, she dropped her reins and waved to me with her right arm, but said nothing. Then she ran her hand over Grasshopper's withers, her rings glinting in the light, and picked up her reins once more.

With a chill of fear, I watched her back, slumped and swaying on her horse where usually she was dignified and upright. Her left arm hung against her side, motionless. Her legs dangled slackly and her booted feet, usually held away from Grasshopper, swung and jostled against the mare's ribs. It was horrible to see my proud mother riding like a slave, like someone who always walked and never mounted a horse.

‘She is very weak,' I muttered to Batu, riding just ahead of me.

‘The evil eye is still upon her,' Batu said. ‘It must
be the curse of a powerful shaman. When we reach Ershi, perhaps one of your magi can turn it aside.'

I nodded doubtfully, wondering how we would find time to fetch a priest, and to round up our horse herds, and to drive them out of the valley, before the army arrived. Although we had ridden all yesterday afternoon, and through much of the night, northwards and westwards under the moon's silver stare, I felt the army of the Middle Kingdom pressing like a cold wind on the back of our necks. We were travelling perhaps only a half-day's march ahead of it.

I glanced at Batu's wiry form swaying easily along ahead of me, clad still in his leather armour covered in scales of hoof.

‘Batu,' I called softly, ‘are you frightened?'

He glanced back; the sun gleamed along the high angle of his cheekbones and the dark slant of his eyes, and burned blue in the mane of his hair.

‘No! I have been training to fight our enemies since I was old enough to walk. The cavalry of the nomads, and of Ershi, are more skilled with bows and arrows, and horses, than any other. As soon as we have moved your herd to safety, I shall join the battle! It will be over quickly!'

He grinned fiercely, but then perhaps he felt my eddying fear. ‘What is wrong?' he asked.

It was hard to find the right words. I shrugged miserably and stroked Gryphon's black mane, separating strands of it between my fingers; they were as
calloused, and decorated with many rings, as were my mother's.

‘I can guide a galloping horse with knee pressure alone,' I said at last. ‘I can pull arrows from a quiver and shoot them true and straight. My mother has given me her greatest gift: her warrior skills. But no one will let me fight, Batu.'

‘Saving your horses, driving them to up into the mountains, is more important for you to do,' Batu said kindly. ‘My own mother is a warrior yet now she is at home guarding the flocks.'

I nodded. What Batu had said was true and yet I knew that he didn't live where I did, lost and drifting between separate worlds: the nomads' roaming freedom, my father's opulent home; my mother's foreign tongue, the Persian poetry of my betrothed. Only on horseback did it all cease to matter; only there did I truly feel at ease.