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.
Chapter 4
‘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.
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 u
p 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.
The Horse Road Page 5
