The Horse Road (7 page)

I rubbed my eyes; they felt as gritty as though I'd been out in blowing sand. Very late, as the moon sank, we'd stopped for a few hours of restless sleep. I'd lain awake on sheep fleeces covering the wooden planking of the wagon that Berta had given us, insisting my mother might need it. Then, as dawn stained the sky pink like wild rose petals, we had mounted up and journeyed on.

Now the sun was high overhead. Foothills shimmered in the heat, and the smell of wild oregano rose from the shining grass, making me think longingly of
savoury lamb, run through with skewers and cooking over a low fire. At home, our cook often rubbed herbs into meat before preparing it; out here in the mountains, I'd had nothing all day but hard cheese soaked in tea. My stomach griped and pinched as the afternoon dragged past. I stared unseeingly at Rain's black and white haunches moving ahead of me, at the fall of his black tail streaked with white hairs.

Creak, creak, creak.
The two high wheels of the wagon bumped and lurched over the rough ground, over fallen tree limbs and dry stones. Lizards flickered out from beneath the wheels' approach like tiny tongues of lightning. In the ears of my imagination, the wheels of the army were turning, turning, turning.

Thud, thud, thud.
The hooves of our horses rose and fell in the dirt: first Grasshopper's, then Rain's, then Gryphon's. Behind me came the horse pulling the wagon which was being driven by a manservant; Tulip was tied behind the wagon, and behind her rode my mother's second servant, mounted on a horse the colour of winter grass.

In the ears of my imagination, the thousand hoof beats of the army rose deafeningly. They blotted out the song of birds in the juniper trees, and the jingle of Gryphon's curb chain as he tossed his head, biting at flies on his chest. I felt completely alone in this deafening silence, this roar inside my head. Cold sweat beaded my lip. I wanted to kick Gryphon into a gallop, to run and run until I found Swan and saved
her, hiding her in the nomads' high valley under Berta's kind and watchful gaze. Until I found a place where Swan and I would both be free.

Perhaps Batu sensed my fear again for he slowed Rain to a halt, waiting until I was alongside. Rain swung his white face and touched his muzzle to my thigh in greeting before falling into step beside Gryphon. My stallion's golden ears with their black tips pinned back briefly, and he curled his lip at Rain, warning him not to come too close.

‘Walk on,' I said sternly with a tightening of my legs, and Gryphon's ears relaxed, flickering forwards and sideways as he listened to the sounds around us, and tolerated the gelding walking at his side.

‘Why do the men of the Middle Kingdom want your horses?' Batu asked. ‘They already have horses of their own; we saw the cavalry yesterday.'

‘In Ershi, people say that the emperor wants taller, faster and more powerful horses to improve his small cavalry mounts,' I replied. ‘He is doing battle all the time with the tribes north of his Great Wall.'

‘My people's tribes,' Batu interjected.

‘The emperor's spy has carried word to him of our Persian horses, that can run many
li
without tiring, that can walk many hours without water. He has set his heart on acquiring them. And also, my father's heard that the emperor has been searching for Heavenly Horses that bring wisdom and long life to their owners. Now he believes that our horses
are the Heavenly ones. He wishes to own them so that, upon his death, they will carry his soul to heaven, to the Jade Terrace. There, a goddess will hand him a golden peach, and when he bites into it, he will become immortal.'

‘My people believe something like this too,' Batu agreed. ‘Horses bring us into the world, and on a horse's back we leave when it is our time to die.'

I nodded. ‘In the mounds of my mother's people, the warriors are buried with their legs bent, ready to ride with the spirits. Their horses lie beside them.'

Ahead of me, my mother dropped her reins again. Her right hand reached for her dangling left arm and held it briefly; her fingers moved over her tunic sleeve the way they might feel a horse's injured leg. I glimpsed her hand as it came away and saw that her fingertips were pink, as though she had been picking raspberries in the hills.

‘We are moving too slowly!' I said fiercely to Batu. ‘We need to be trotting!'

‘Your mother is weak, and the wagon could not move fast over rough ground, and Gryphon's wounds would break open.'

‘I know all this – I'm not a child!' I muttered, but then I nudged my knee against Batu's so that he would know it was my fear speaking and not my true heart.

Turning in my saddle, I scrutinised Gryphon's flanks and quarters; his wounds were closing over with
thin scabs, and only traces of fluid leaked from them. When I laid a palm flat against him, there was only a normal heat running below the surface of his thin skin, his silky golden dapples. At least
he
was beginning to heal, I thought, although the flesh was puffy with invisible bruises closer to the wounds. What did it mean? I wondered. Was the leopard attack a bad omen; had some powerful shaman sent it to strike my mother? Or had the evil Angra sent a deva, a dark angel, to rend my mother's spirit from her body?

‘Look!' Batu said suddenly; the excitement in his tone jolted me from my worried thoughts and I lifted my head. Gryphon's neck tightened as he became instantly alert, and his eyes, huge and dark as an antelope's, strained to take in the view.

Before us, the ground dropped away in a final slope and the Golden Valley of Ferghana spread like a lake, calm and broad and flat, stretching far to the north and west, filled with white heat and sky light, a patchwork of fields threaded with the glitter of irrigation canals, softened with the shadows of ash and elm trees. Reining in, I stared at it with delight and relief. There was no end to the valley within sight; it uncurled to the far horizons, hazy and blue. I knew, from my father and other traders, that mountains walled it in: the Chatkal ranges were massed to our north; the Kuramin lay far to our west. Briefly I thought of my brothers with a pang of envy for they had travelled westwards beyond those mountains, to
wade at last in the Mediterranean's blue waters, and bring me coral beads and stories of places I might never see.

I stilled Gryphon as he fidgeted beneath me, his tail whisking across my thigh as though to remind me of his mares waiting in the valley below. Of Swan, with whom he had sired two beautiful foals that my mother and I were training.

‘We will be home before dusk!' I cried to Batu.

A quiver ran through Gryphon's muscles for he was a horse who could find his way home over many miles. In the autumn of his third year, he had strayed from our pastures and driven a small band of mares up into the foothills. My mother's men had spent days tracking them and searching for them. At last, on a night of fine, stinging snow blowing on a north wind, when the land lay bleak and white and the wolves ran in the forest, Gryphon had driven his mares home into the stable yard and trumpeted at the door, demanding grain and warm shelter.

Now, on this ridge above the valley, Gryphon recognised the smell of alfalfa fields growing lush in the summer heat, the smell of flowers on the grapevines, the dust and fresh water smells of home. He bunched beneath me, fighting the bit, jostling against Rain. When the gelding didn't move, Gryphon swung his head in impatience, nipping Rain's glossy neck and leaving a trail of wet, ruffled hair but no break in the flesh. I kicked Gryphon sideways, and circled him
between Rain and the wagon, making him pay attention to my leg commands.

‘Ride on!' my mother cried. Grasshopper broke into a jog trot and, surprisingly, my mother let her go, bouncing weakly down that long track into the valley. Rain and Gryphon trotted too, and I heard the wagon groaning behind us, and the clatter of the servants' horses.

‘Look at the road!' Batu shouted as we descended, and I shielded my eyes and squinted through the shimmering air. I knew where to look for the road that ran across the plain, curling southwards from the city and dividing into tracks that led to villages and farms, and running on to the high mountain passes that disgorged weary travellers at last into India. Now the road's surface seethed and crawled as though covered by a torrent of ants. Clouds of dust boiled from it, for our spring had been exceptionally dry.

‘Everyone is fleeing,' I muttered, and urged Gryphon on down the track, in spite of his wounds.

We broke into a canter when we reached the level floor of the valley, but even above the drum of our hoof beats I could hear the din of sound rising from the road. Ahead of me, Grasshopper and Rain leaped across a drainage ditch filled with still water, and were swallowed into the road's confusion. I collected Gryphon under me, felt his muscles bunch, felt the moment that he became airborne in a soaring leap over the green water. His hard black hooves thudded
on to the edge of the road, beside a camel kneeling in the dirt. A man was frantically tightening the ropes that held a bundle of goods upon the camel's shaggy, two-humped back. The beast roared in shrill complaint. Gryphon dodged around it, while I stared wide-eyed at the melee of people fighting their way both northwards and southwards.

Gryphon trotted past whole caravans of camels, their bells clanging. He dodged a string of donkeys, roped one behind the other and almost invisible under bales of trade goods, trotting with bent heads. Their pale muzzles shone like clam shells. Men shouted orders, women and children rushed along with robes and tunics flapping, some astride horses and asses, some seated in chariots whose spokes whirled brightly, others jolting in wagons. Gryphon leaped and plunged beneath me as a heavy whip cracked over the backs of oxen straining at a wagon loaded with grain.

A trio of small children, their hands linked together, ran screaming ahead of us and I reined Gryphon in sharply and pulled his head sideways, dragging him across the road before his hammering front hooves could knock down the fleeing bodies. He was fighting his curb chain again, trying to break into his smooth canter that would carry us swiftly through this panicked crowd. Sometimes I caught a flash of my mother's pale face, bent over Grasshopper's neck, or of Batu's scale-covered helmet as they rode along.

‘The merchants are fleeing the city!' Batu cried once, as we trotted closer together. We dodged rich men in embroidered gowns, and camel drivers running barefoot. The caravans were leaving our city, trying to avoid being trapped there by the approaching army, trying to get their trade goods safely away before Ershi fell into enemy control. Meanwhile, the valley's farmers were abandoning their peaceful villages to crowd towards the safety of Ershi's walls, trying to get their wives and children, their goats and sheep, behind the sandy battlements. But, I wondered, was the city a place of safety, as the villagers believed, or was it a trap that the merchants were wise to flee? I felt a shiver of panic at the thought of being held inside those high walls; my greatest fear was always of entrapment. My friend Lila owned a pair of finches that sang sweetly, hanging in their cage in a shaft of sunlight in the house next door to my father's, but I hated the sight of their folded wings that never lifted into blue sky.

We are only going to fetch our horses, I reminded myself. Soon we will be back in the mountains again, free and safe.

The fear that eddied through the crowd had taken hold of Gryphon, and he no longer paid attention to my voice or to the tight pull of the curb.

‘I can't hold him!' I shouted to Batu; he was over to my right, half obscured by dust and a flock of sheep being driven by tribesmen in woolly astrakhan hats.

‘We'll meet at the farm!' Batu yelled back, coughing. ‘Where's our wagon?' I glanced over my shoulder but could see no sign of it in the pressing throng. Perhaps the servants were still searching for some place where they could cross the drainage ditch.

‘I don't know! Try and stay near my mother!'

A herd of horses rushed up behind me, their eyes rolling white, their nostrils flaring, and Gryphon broke into a canter. The horses swept us along ahead of them; we were like a leaf riding on a spring flood. Fields of pea vines, and of melon plants, flashed past, and we clattered through the narrow streets of a village where people threw bundles of clothing, and pots and pans, out of their front doors in preparation for flight. A boy, with a willow crate containing a rooster and two hens, jumped away from Gryphon's hooves. An old woman ran past in the opposite direction, shrieking words that I couldn't hear above the din of hooves, the cries of animals. The wheels of a chariot spun past and I glimpsed the frightened faces of two Parthian women clinging inside it, their veils torn away in the wind of their flight.

Finally, Gryphon and I rushed down to the stretch of road beside the river. The water lay beside us, broad and rippling. This river ran down from the mountains, cold with melting snow, and sometimes swept across the valley in spring floods. Along with numerous smaller streams, it moistened the crops in the fields, filled the troughs where animals drank, and
was diverted into aqueducts and channels to provide water for the city of Ershi. The crowd parted and I glimpsed a long procession of white-robed magi wending its way towards a fire altar built upon the riverbank. A white ox was held at the base of the rectangular altar, bellowing as though it knew its fate was to be sacrificed.

The priests are trying to ward off the army
, I thought. They are appealing to Ahura Mazda for help, for the intervention of his glorious angel, Sraosha, leader of the forces of light.

Maybe I could push my way through the crowds and find a magus who would sing hymns over my mother, who would have the herbs to heal her from whatever evil power wrestled with her spirit. I fought Gryphon to a dancing walk as we approached the line of stately priests in tall felt hats with lappets that hung down over their ears. Now I was close enough to see their carefully curled hair, their freshly combed beards, the bundles of tamarisk twigs grasped in their hands. Light winked on the brooches pinning their cloaks. I leaned forward over Gryphon's shoulder and opened my mouth. Now I was close enough to see the stern, inward-focused solemnity of the priests' eyes.