I Rode a Horse of Milk White Jade

by Diane Wilson

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1998, 2010 by Diane Lee Wilson

  Cover and internal design © 2010 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by The Book Designers

  Cover images © megumi ito/Shutterstock.com; Oleg_Mit/Shutterstock.com

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  Fax: (630) 961-2168

  www.jabberwockykids.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Source of Production: Versa Press, East Peoria, Illinois, USA

  Date of Production: March 2010

  Run Number: 11973

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Outside Hangchou, China—AD 1339

  1. The Black Mare

  2. Twilight Is a Magical Time

  3. A Discovery, A Decision

  4. Lightning!

  5. Flight

  6. The Night Brings Surprises

  7. Noises

  8. The White Mare

  9. In the Ger of Echenkorlo

  10. “You Are Chosen!”

  11. The Mountains’ Cold Breath

  12. Riding, Riding, Riding

  13. Welcome Once, Welcome Again

  14. The Luck That Lurks upon the Steppe

  15. Wolves in the Water

  16. The Fat Woman withthe Fast Horses

  17. Discovered!

  18. Genma’s Dreams

  19. Bayan Is Lost to Me

  20. Our Heads Brush the Skies

  21. The Morning

  22. In the Grave of Echenkorlo

  23. A Gobi

  24. Ice-Fire, Earth Serpents, and the Jade Green Eyes

  25. At the Court of Kublai Khan

  26. To Test the World’s Wisdom

  27. My Life in the Palace

  28. Spring 1281

  29. Bayan’s Gift

  30. The Festival Race

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  Dedicated to my dear friend Florence Caldwell,

  who shared her love for horses and

  started me on my own journey.

  Outside Hangchou, China—AD 1339

  Grandmother! You came!”

  “Of course I came.”

  “But it’s so far, and with your leg being—”

  “Never you mind what can’t be changed. How is she?”

  “I don’t know. Not well, I think. She’s just been circling all day.”

  “Circling.” The wrinkled face nodded. Papery eyelids drooped, then lifted on dove gray eyes flecked with gold. “That is good. Circling brings luck. Circling…completes the journey.”

  Head bobbing, the heavily robed old woman lifted the latch and limped into the stable’s shadows. She pulled the shivering girl into the sweet-smelling grass piled in the corner. Together they silently marveled at the swollen sides of the white mare that stood, ears pricked, staring expectantly into the night.

  “See?” A knobby finger was thrust from beneath the fraying edge of the deep blue silk robe. “She knows to wait for the right time. We will wait with her.” Opening her robe and pulling the young girl within its warmth, the old woman continued, “Your mother tells me you have many questions—about what happened in the past.” A sigh, like a weak breeze sifting through dried leaves, floated into the darkness. “That was long ago, a different time, a different land even. But perhaps, before the night is through…”

  The white ears of the mare flickered forward and back, trying to catch the low tones drifting through her stall. But the woman whispered her story only for her granddaughter, whose small body curled beneath her arm. It was the ninth day of the ninth month; the moon rose full. The time had come.

  1

  The Black Mare

  I don’t remember on which day it happened. I do remember the earth warm against my back, the dirt soft beneath my fingernails as I cried out. So it must have been June, or maybe July, for the months of summer are but fleeting visitors in Mongolia.

  Before the hands came, pulling me up, before the voice joined mine, wailing, in that brief moment of chaos where all becomes calm, there was the mare. As I lay upon my back, a helpless, whining toddler, she lowered her head to nuzzle me. Like the falling of night her great dark head pushed away the pale sky, for she was all I could see. Warm gusts from her giant nostrils blew across my face. Silky black hide, stretched over bony sun and shadow, framed liquid eyes. I stared into their depths. Like black water on a moonless night, they hid what lay beneath, yet drew me in, breathless.

  I think that in that moment I did hold my breath, stopped crying.

  Then the mare lifted her hoof, passing it over my head, and moved on. She picked her way daintily now, as if fearful of crushing a flower. But there it was already—my crushed foot.

  With the rushing pain came the blood; with the blood, the screams. I remember my mother hurriedly wrapping my foot in a silk sash of pale blue—the color of good luck. The blood seeped through anyway, warm and wet, and I could smell it. It is the same smell as when a baby goat plunges into your hands from its mother’s womb. The smell of birth.

  This was my birth into the realm of the horse.

  2

  Twilight Is a Magical Time

  “Oyuna! Come away from the door flap!” I heard the worry in my mother’s voice, but the horses were galloping along the horizon and my eyes followed where my feet could not. I felt her tugging at my del, trying to pull her stubborn seven-year-old daughter, the one who had shaken loose her braid, letting the hair fall in a long black mane, back inside the ger.

  “Here,” she ordered, pressing my fingers one by one around a long wooden spoon. “You stir the soup.”

  As the newborn baby is wrapped around and around, each felt layer hugging him away from the winds, protecting him, so my family had wrapped me away from a keen-scented world whose laughter I could only hear. Because my foot now dragged clumsily, like a chunk of meat roped to my flopping ankle, I was wrapped inside the thick felt walls of our ger. And told to stay.

  The filtered glow of each morning’s sun found me limping fitfully behind my mother, confined to learning the skills of the hands. Only in the rare moment was I allowed, blinking, into the bold sunshine: to lug water from a stream, to quickly squeeze milk from a goat, or to set fat slices of aaruul to dry on our slanting roof. Every day was like the one before it and the one after it.

  Stirring. Always there was a pot in the fire to stir: mutton boiling, yogurt thickening, tea leaves brewing. I was still but a child then, sitting lopsided by the fire, clutching the wooden spoon in my small hand, yet I remember feeling—no, I remember knowing, even then—that I was misplaced. You b
elong with the horses, my mind whispered. My eager heart could only whicker a soft response.

  When my fingers weren’t wrapping a spoon, they were pinching a needle. I was taught to mend the tears in the silk dels of my mother and father, but as my stitches grew straighter, other members of my ail began leaving me their torn clothing. “Too busy,” they would say, smiling. I could do it. The gods had at least blessed me with skillful hands. Sometimes I wondered if the sadness I stitched into a del followed its wearer, like a shadow, out across the steppes.

  And of course there was the beating. For hours each day, until my shoulders ached, I banged a big stick within the bulging sides of the goatskin bag holding ayrag. Day after day I pushed that stick through the foamy mare’s milk, waiting for it to ferment into the drink so enjoyed by my father and his brothers. The most stifling of tasks, until I discovered that the sloshing echo could be coaxed into hoofbeats: Thud. Sl-slosh. Thud. Sl-slosh. Thud. Sl-slosh.

  The cadence reawakened my heart, sent it bucking. So much that at nightfall, when my father poked his head through the door flap, I threw myself at him. Rubbed my face against the sleeve of his brown silk del, sucked in the sweet, sweaty smell of the horse. And begged to go with him.

  “Carry me in the saddle with you,” I cried.

  Always his stubby fingers tousled my black hair. “No, Oyuna,” he would answer, shaking his head. “You are our only child—too precious to let bad luck find you again. Better you stay inside. You are not made to ride.”

  He tried to fasten his words on me like hobbles. But I, too, shook my head: No! And later, frowning at my twisted foot, I wondered what my parents saw that I didn’t. While I was always thinking about horses and what I wanted to do, my mother and father, it seemed, were always thinking about my leg and what I couldn’t do. “Bad luck,” I heard them whisper to each other. They blew their words into the fire and silently watched the smoke rise, with their prayers, out of the ger.

  For many years after “that time,” as my mother called it, a stuffed felt doll dressed in the bloody silk sash that had once wrapped my crushed foot sat propped upon the painted wood chest in our ger. One foot was dyed red. Oh, how I hated that doll!

  Before each meal, before any one of us was allowed to lift food to our lips, an offering of food and drink was first smeared on her staring face. My mother and father made prayers to the doll with the red leg that my own leg might suddenly grow right. Over the years the doll’s face grew dark, stained and smelly with food, yet my leg remained crooked.

  Every moon or so, our ail moved to fresh grazing and then we often crossed the paths of other clans. I learned to cringe at the sight of oxcarts marching along the horizon. For that meant that yet another drum-beating, white-robed shaman would examine my foot. Again prayers were offered, incantations sung, ointments that stank and burned rubbed into my flesh. And sacrifices made. It wasn’t until I was older that I learned that the black mare that had stepped on my foot had, at the command of a shaman, been killed. It was her blood that had dyed the foot of the felt doll. The day I learned that, I couldn’t eat. Kneeling at dinner across from the dirty-faced doll with the bloody foot, I felt the food stick in my throat.

  At one of these meetings of clans I remember noticing a certain boy sitting proudly upon a prancing brown horse. Around the horse’s neck was tied a shiny scarf of sky blue silk. I tugged at my mother’s sleeve and pointed.

  “That boy won the long race at the festival,” she explained, bending to whisper in my ear. “His mother says he and that brown gelding of his galloped faster than a hundred others. And so he carries the winner’s scarf—and great luck—to both his family and his clan.”

  She straightened. And as I watched my mother watch the boy’s mother stroke the horse’s brown neck and clap her son upon the back, how I wanted to press that proud smile onto my own mother’s face. But, dropping my gaze to the twisted foot wrapped in its felt boot, I could feel only shame. Wrinkling my nose, I stuck out my tongue.

  That night, and for many days and nights afterward, I humbly cringed beneath the leer of the red-footed doll. I began to believe in my parents’ prayers. The gods had certainly stamped bad luck upon me. Such was to be my place in this world then: always to huddle within the smoky half-light of a ger, only to watch as others galloped upon the backs of swift horses, to startle and quiver at every passing cloud. My childhood seemed defined by what I could not do.

  Then one day, just at dusk, I discovered what I could do. Limping through the grasses to fill a bag with water, I came upon a spotted gelding drinking at the stream. Holding my breath, I looked over my shoulder—and saw that all heads were buried in their work, hurrying to finish before dark.

  At that shadowy instant I felt as if the horse and I were the only creatures in a far-off place, in a land where all was possible. I just had to try! And at that twilight moment all was possible.

  Gently I laid the pouch in the dirt. I spoke to the gelding and he raised his head, ears pricked toward me, water dripping from his lips. Slowly I limped toward him. Placing my hands around his moss-soft muzzle, I blew into his nostrils. He exhaled his warm breath into my face. I ran my hands along his brow, under his thick mane, and down his withers. Then my left hand closed on a hank of mane. Leaning into the warm body, I bounced—once, twice—pushing against the hard earth and finally pulling my crippled leg over his back. Free.

  Happiness rose within me, blossoming into a wide grin. At last I was where I belonged.

  3

  A Discovery, A Decision

  No hobbles could hold me then. At every turn of my mother’s head I sneaked away from my chores to pull myself onto the back of a horse and race across the steppes. Loud whoops of joy scattered behind us, mingling with the echoing hoofbeats.

  My father sighed. My mother fretted. But finally they pulled aside the door flap to our ger and released me to the outside world. My mother still worried that my “bad luck” would somehow find me again, so she placed around my neck a braided leather thong on which dangled a small horse of misty green jade. She said it had been given to her by her mother, a shamaness, and held powers to keep me safe. Only then did she agree to teach me the tasks of the outdoors: gathering dung, combing the sheep, helping deliver the animal young. I worked hard, truly I did, yet always my heart thundered with the horses. I was not afraid of bad luck then, for even if it waited along the steppes, I would gallop on by.

  One day, in my twelfth spring, my father traded for some barley flour, which was highly prized. My mother and I were inside our ger, kneading the dough, and through the smoke hole I could see the blue sky dangling like a brilliant jewel just out of reach. I was supposed to be helping shape the dough into small rounds for frying. But to kneel in the shadows on a day when the winds whispered of secrets just over the next rise, well…

  “Oyuna!” My mother’s voice was scolding but, when I looked up, I saw her brown eyes twinkled. “Barley cakes are supposed to be round, like this. Yours look more like”—squinting, she cocked her head—-“like horse hooves! Now, tell me, what will your father say when we serve him horse hoof cakes tonight?” Her tinkling laugh burst forth with mine, for we both could picture my father slapping his hands to his forehead, exclaiming to the gods that they had mistakenly given him a horse in place of a daughter.

  In a sweeping motion my mother’s arm gathered toward her the lumpy attempts at fetlocks and pasterns. Tongue flitting between her teeth, tsk-tsking noisily, she jerked her head in a direction over my shoulder. “Take the basket, then, and gather some dung for the cooking fire. And don’t be a tortoise. Rain comes.” With a joyous shriek I hugged my mother’s waist and bolted outside.

  The afternoon sun glinted in my eyes as I bent to retrieve the large basket used for gathering dung. Tengri, the blue sky spirit, was pleased, for soft puffs of wind fingered my black hair, lifting the plaited ends. Heart beating happily, I balanced the basket across my b
ack like a saddle, clutching the wide leather strap to my chest. Then, whinnying softly, I bent to my task, an honest horse, though a lame one. I knew that had I actually been a horse, my role would have been as dinner for the dogs rather than as worker for the clan. With my long silk del—the tawny color of a sandgrouse’s underfeathers—rustling against my trousers and stirring a spicy fragrance from the purple and red flowers shivering in the breeze, I gratefully hobbled toward the low rise where the horses had spent the day grazing.

  Already this season promised to be my happiest—for at last I fit in. Looking down at my fingers wrapped around the leather chest strap, I saw past the stained nails and cracked skin. I saw hands that knew how to coax a wet and trembling lamb from a birthing ewe, hands that knew how to comb the soft underbelly of a goat without pulling the skin and how to ease between a nursing foal and its protective dam long enough to squeeze a little of the mare’s milk into a leather bag. I had shaken off my bad luck, I thought proudly. The shaman came no more. Even my relatives let me work among them without pointing.

  My breath was coming hard now with the climb, so I stopped to rest, turning around to gauge my progress. The five round white gers of my ail, each door facing the south for luck, sat clustered in the valley below me. Already long green shadows stretched protectively across them. In another direction grazed our herd of sheep, like little round clouds dotting the earth, and beyond them I could see that my uncles were rounding up the goats for the evening milking.

  Crouching like a predator just above the horizon was a long band of blue-black clouds and I knew that I must gather the dung quickly or there would be little fire within our ger that night.

  Hobbling up the rise, the basket swaying upon my back, I must have resembled a small camel. Yet in my mind I was a horse, halting at the crest to sniff the air for danger—an angry boar whose yellowed tusks could rip through the belly of a fallen animal, or a hungry long-fanged wolf, roaming the grasslands for an easy dinner. Turning my head from side to side, I strained to catch the low growl of a leopard squatting, tail swishing, in wait. But only a plaintive mewing met my ears.