The Horse Road

by Troon Harrison

  ‘May the great angels ride on either side of you!’ Lila said fervently, and I turned away on my booted heel and left before the tears rising into her eyes could spill over. Silently, I rushed down the stairs and through the dim garden. In my own courtyard, I dived into the granary where I had assembled my pile of equipment. I pulled leather leggings on over my roughest trousers of dull, worn linen; they were the ones I used when training young horses and they had been washed, and repaired with small stitches, many times. My fingers shook as I fumbled to tie the thongs, holding up the leggings, around my waist. Next I fastened a wide leather belt, with a buckle of red and white stone, over my tunic. To this I fastened a leather drinking flask filled with water, and a pouch containing a flint for making fires, and a little food: dried apricots stuffed with almonds, dried dates, rings of dried apples, golden raisins.

  Then I lifted the light chain mail armour from the dusty floor where it lay shimmering with a dull gleam. It belonged to my brother Petros and he had almost outgrown it before he travelled away trading with our father. The many, finely-wrought rings of iron slipped over me in a cool, hard cascade and the folds shook themselves straight under their own weight. The armour hung from my shoulders, close fitting across the bulge created by the jewel casket tied beneath my tunic, slightly longer than need be, and heavy. I felt braver, just for a moment, although my fingers trembled as I secured my dagger in place, then tugged a leather helmet over my plaited hair.

  A cock crowed again, far off, as I ran into the harness room and, closer to home, a dog barked. I was breathless with panic. At any minute, our servants would rise to stir the fire into life in the kitchen and to go out into the street for the morning ration of water. I must not be discovered by them!

  Most of my mother’s weaponry was stored at our farm in the valley, but I found an old quiver, with a faded pattern of running antelope stitched upon it in red leather, and fastened it around my waist over the chain mail tunic. The strap holding it in place was soft with age and wear; I hoped that it wouldn’t break before this day was over. Bows stood stacked against one corner and I sorted through them, running my palms down their double curves, strumming my fingers over their strings of gut to feel for weaknesses or slackness. I hefted several bows in turn to my shoulder and pulled on them, testing their tension and spring as I notched imaginary arrows. This one would suit me, I thought, choosing a bow with a weight and tension that I knew I could manage to handle whilst fitting arrows to it at a gallop.

  I slung the bow over my shoulder and then turned to the basket of woven grass where my mother’s supply of arrows was usually stored. My heart lurched. The basket stood empty; only one stray white feather, broken from a shaft, lay in the bottom on the woven coils. Perhaps my mother’s horsemen had taken all the arrows to use in the war. Perhaps already their finely polished shafts of willow wood lay strewn across the trampled gardens outside the city walls, or broken in the long grass of the plain. Perhaps they had pierced enemy armour, or were being burned in enemy campfires.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Surprise jolted through me. I spun on one heel and met Sayeh’s blue gaze. For a long moment, we stared assessingly at each other. Would she still serve me, I wondered, now that I was riding out against her mother’s people? Would she keep my departure a secret?

  ‘Sayeh,’ I whispered, ‘I need your help.’

  ‘You’re riding to find the golden harness that your betrothed spoke of in his red pavilion.’

  Surprise jolted through me for the second time. ‘Help me,’ I entreated. ‘I am going to ride Nomad down to the hippodrome and then try to buy a horse. I don’t want to take one of my mother’s mares to war. After I buy a horse, you can bring Nomad home again. And while I am away, I am entrusting all the mares and foals to your care, Sayeh.’

  Her eyes widened in wonder and I heard the quick intake of her breath. ‘Truly?’ she asked. ‘All the mares?’

  ‘Lila will make sure that the servants help you. It is only for a few days.’

  ‘All the mares,’ she repeated, and I knew that she would devote her every waking hour to them; that she would sift the grain with her own hands to remove stones; would brush their flanks with loving strokes; would stagger twice daily into the courtyard to pour the precious rationed water into the stone trough from pottery jars.

  ‘Hurry!’ I whispered. ‘Bridle Nomad!’

  Eagerly she snatched at the bridle that I held out, its iron snaffle bit ringing as it swung against my armour, so that in the courtyard the mares pricked their ears and blew through their nostrils. I took another bridle, an old one with plain undecorated leather, and a worn felt blanket, and my own saddle with its dangling toe loops and the handgrip of leather thong fastened to the wooden supports at the front. We had had fun, my mother and I, experimenting with those thongs and loops as our horses galloped across the training ground, raising puffs of dust as we swung on and off, or hung upside-down from our saddles.

  Today, it would not be a game for me. And my mother would not be there to help me if I fell, if I was dragged, if I failed to dodge an arrow.

  My heart bounded in my throat as I hurried into the courtyard and slung the saddle on to Nomad’s back. My fingers fumbled under her belly, fastening the band, and under her tail with the crupper. Sleepy voices sounded in the kitchen and I led Nomad through the mares, saying goodbye to them with my eyes. Perhaps I would never see them again: black Pearl’s whiskered chin, Peony’s sleek gleam, or Iris’s eyes, huge in her grey face.

  Sayeh was at the door ahead of me, dribbling sesame oil on to the bolt so that it slid across without a sound. In a moment, we were in the empty street. ‘Get up behind me,’ I whispered and the servant girl swung nimbly on to Nomad’s loins as I nudged the mare into a trot. The streets became crowded as we neared the hippodrome, filled with soldiers in armour, horses, strings of goats, wagons carrying the last dwindling supplies of grain, files of servants carrying water.

  ‘W-when do we ride out?’ I called as a band of horsemen jostled past; although my voice quivered with fear, they barely glanced at me and their faces, beneath their helmets, were hollow and strained.

  ‘As soon as we are all assembled,’ muttered one man; he had a tattoo of antlers across his cheeks.

  Nomad snorted as we entered the great arched gateway in the stone wall surrounding the hippodrome for now we were being swept along in a jostling throng of servants and slaves, all rushing with arms filled with harness, armour, boots, and weapons. A sea of battle standards rose near the far side of the hippodrome amongst a clattering expanse of lances, and over a sea of tossing heads. Voices shouted and yelled, horses gave high whinnies of nervous excitement.

  A great fist squeezed my heart. For one moment, it stopped beating. Was I truly going to do this? Perhaps Lila was right, and madness had stolen my mind. I licked my dry lips and pulled Nomad to a halt, surveying the chaos all around.

  ‘A horse … I need a h-horse,’ I stuttered.

  ‘And arrows,’ said Sayeh. ‘I am going to walk now, for no warrior would have a servant girl riding behind.’

  She slid down into the crowd and caught at my foot loop for balance. As the sun rose, casting brightness upon spears and decorated bridles, I moved as if I was in a terrible dream; I swayed through rushing waves of noise and a babble of tongues, through the hot dark fear that sucked at me, through the roar of smithy fires and the ring of hammers on glowing spearheads, through the trampling of horses. Dust clogged my nostrils. I couldn’t breathe, and the jewel casket was heavier and heavier, flattening my stomach against my spine.

  From far away, I heard my young, hesitant voice stammering over requests for arrows, over questions about horses. Warriors’ faces blurred in and out of my vision; they all seemed to be dark and lined with fatigue, scowling, shouting through stretched mouths. I stared over their shoulders, shaken by shyness, unable to meet their fierce gazes. I saw that now the cavalry was hundreds of horses deep, massing at the hippodrome�
��s far side in preparation for riding out of the city’s southern gate; somehow, I learned from the voices around me that we were riding out against siege engines, just as Lila’s father had said the previous evening. Our task was to cut a swathe through the enemy lines and clear a space around the great towers so that they could be set alight and burned.

  Now I was pushing my way through the crowd towards a string of kneeling camels being laden with bundles of new arrows; I purchased enough to fill my quiver. Their shafts were of peeled willow but rough, made in great haste overnight in city workshops where men bent their backs to their tasks all through the long hours. All night, in the forges, the smiths had worked by their fires, hammering the iron arrowheads as slaves worked the bellows, sending hot air fanning across the embers.

  Now I was asking for a horse, bartering, bargaining. Searching. I was buffeted, hemmed in. I was going to be sick. I clamped my mouth shut and rode along the lines of tents and picket ropes. Now my voice was raised in a cry, a despairing cry for help, for a horse. At last a tribesman led an animal forward; a rawboned appaloosa with a dark head but a blanket of spotted white across his sides and hindquarters. His eyes rolled wildly, ringed with white.

  ‘We were going to eat him!’ shouted the man holding the lead rope. ‘But you can make me an offer for him!’

  I reached under my chain mail, up inside the rough sleeve of my tunic, and pulled out three golden armbands inlaid with Egyptian emeralds.

  ‘I can’t eat these!’ the man shouted with an oath but he took them anyway.

  ‘Horse armour?’ I asked, holding up a fourth armband, and he turned away, muttering, to a tent. After a pause, he reappeared with a long thick felt which he threw over the appaloosa, covering him from poll to croup. I took the horse’s rope and led him away to where Sayeh waited with Nomad. We unfastened my saddle from the mare and fastened it on to the appaloosa as he swung heavily around, almost knocking a slave down. I bridled him with my extra bridle, the one of plain leather, and attached a weighted tassel beneath the reins so that, when I dropped them to shoot arrows, they would not fly around and trip my horse but would hang taut from the bit. I boosted Sayeh on to Nomad’s bare back.

  ‘Take her straight home, and water them all!’ I cried and for one moment her eyes locked on to mine.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as solemnly as if she were taking an oath, and then the crowd swallowed her small straight back and the mare’s golden gleam, and I was alone with the hard-mouthed gelding and my devouring fear. I kicked the horse towards where the cavalry was already beginning to move through the hippodrome’s far gate into the street beyond. With a dull roar of voices, with a thunder of hooves, with a clash of spears upon shields, we poured through the streets of Ershi towards the south gate.

  I am riding to war, I thought. I am going to faint and fall off.

  The appaloosa surged along; he was strong and sturdy and willing even though hard in the mouth. But untrained, a voice in my head kept repeating. Untrained by me, by my mother. A horse that has never learned to gallop straight ahead whilst his rider jumps on or off, hangs from one side, hangs upside down from a loop in the saddle. He is a horse I have no bond with, a horse whose trust I haven’t won. But we are trusting each other now with our lives.

  The walls of Ershi loomed above, broken only by the open gateway and a patch of clear blue sky. A hot breeze puffed in off the plain, and the battle standards lifted and snapped, red and purple and golden, and decorated with the symbols of the noble houses: eagles and stags and leopards all soared and ran above our heads as the kettle drums boomed and the tambourines rattled.

  Now we were flushing through the gate, faster, the appaloosa’s wide shoulders breaking into a rough trot, wind filling my mouth. I wasn’t breathing. My heart had stopped. I couldn’t swallow. Darkness filled my eyes, then brilliant sunshine, then darkness. I swayed in the saddle, faint with fear. Before me swung the trampled fields, the stripped gardens, the far-off blue thread of a river.

  The great mass of the enemy, filling the valley.

  I lifted my head, fighting to breathe. Over the appaloosa’s dark pricked ears, I glimpsed the line of the mountains, clear and blue with the snow-capped peaks turning to gold as the sun licked them. Strength poured into me and my vision cleared. I gripped tighter with my thighs and urged the horse on faster, neck and neck with the men on either side of me. The edges of my eyes filled with cavalry, with the magnificent plunging gallop of brave horses, with the flap of saddle blankets embroidered with bright patterns, with red tassels flying from reins, with the glitter of silver inlay and glass stones on bridle straps, and the wink of gold-plated bit rings.

  The roar and whoop and wild yells of the tribesmen lifted me upwards, out of my dark trap of fear. I soared over the ground. The valley vibrated with our headlong rush, our streaming power. A whoop flew from my own mouth and the appaloosa’s stride lengthened. Everything became a blur.

  We plunged down and over a drainage ditch, dry and cracked; we hammered between the long avenues of trees in an almond orchard; we sprinted over the hard packed ground of a roadway. Sheep scattered. Far ahead, the enemy gathered itself like a wave, a dark wall, and began to move towards us. I screamed again, a long high note that was swept into the river of the cavalry and surged forward with it.

  Now I could see the siege towers rising from the plain; their frameworks of wood stood as tall as the valley’s elm trees had once been, before the enemy felled them. The frames were covered in oxhide to protect them from flaming arrows, and at the top of the towers were long pivoting beams ending in sharp metal claws. When the towers were pulled forward by oxen, and rolled up against Ershi on their many wheels, the great claws would dig and gouge into the city’s walls of packed mud. Then the cloud ladders would be rolled forward, with their tall tower and high ladders, and with enemy soldiers packed inside them. The men would scale the walls and enter the city through the holes that the claws had broken open.

  Get on the flank, I told myself. Get on the flank!

  Only if I could break free of the main thrust of the cavalry, and make my way to the edge, could I ride away towards the mountain valley where I hoped that Batu still waited. Only then could I ride southwestwards searching for the merchant called Failak who perhaps owned a second golden harness.

  We pounded on. Horses were pressed to me, their riders almost touching my knees on either side. I hauled on the appaloosa’s bit but he braced his thick neck, and his strong legs didn’t waver in their galloping. He opened his mouth, setting his jaw against my pull, and thundered on. Now I could see the enemy soldiers ahead, massing around the bases of their siege towers, sun shining on pikes and the heavy shafts of their deadly crossbows. The bowmen stood behind the kneeling pikemen, covering them, and the sun shone on their armour of lacquered oxhide and of iron. Silken banners rippled in the hot wind. We were wheeling now, turning sideways on to the enemy, horses straining to swing around, legs flashing, necks bending, nostrils flaring wide and red, eyes rolling. Foam flew back from horses’ mouths and spattered my cheek. I was pulling the appaloosa around, trying to work my way slowly across the oncoming rush of horses, finding small openings and breaks that I could shoot through like a mouse shooting into a tunnel. Gradually, stride by stride, I manoeuvred for a place on the far flank.

  Now everything seemed to be happening at a speed so blinding I could barely follow it. A shower of glinting arrows, fast and bright as summer stars, flew through the air ahead of me as the lethal enemy crossbows unleashed their volleys. I had heard, in Ershi, that some of the bows were so huge it took twenty men to release them, and that their arrows flew, without feathers on the shafts, for many, many paces. I had heard that the tips of those darts were tipped with a poison so strong that even a scratch from one of them would kill a man.

  Just ahead of me, a horse screamed and went down with an arrow embedded in its chest. The appaloosa’s front hooves skimmed against the fallen horse’s thrashing legs; for a moment, I thought he
would be entangled in the reins. Then he jumped strongly upwards, and we were past. A woman beside me took an arrow in the arm; I saw the pain flare in her eyes and whiten her cheeks. Then I dropped my reins and pulled an arrow from my old quiver with its red leather patterns, and began to shoot. I was alongside the enemy now, could see their eyes beneath their helmets, and hear their wild foreign cries as they loosed their shining hail of arrows. I kneed the appaloosa, making him twist and dodge through the shadows of the great siege towers standing like a nightmare forest against the sky. He was neither as nimble as Swan nor as fast as Gryphon, and it took most of my strength and concentration to guide and control him.

  Shooting arrows, though, was something I could do without thought; one hand gripped them by the shaft and pulled them smoothly from the quiver; then my other hand notched them to the bow, drew its springing tension back against one shoulder, felt the thrum of the gut as the arrow flew away, released.

  Now we were beneath a great siege tower taller than the city wall of Ershi; carpenters were still scrambling down through its framework, seeking the safety of the ground behind the enemy soldiers. I saw a man take an arrow in the leg and fall through the wooden beams, yelling as he plunged head first. Then the appaloosa tripped and I tightened my legs and clung on. He surged to his feet again, and a fresh volley of crossbow arrows flew towards us, hissing like serpents.

  I’m going to be killed here, I thought. I will never escape to the mountains.

  I threw myself over the appaloosa’s back and lay along his off-side, one hand gripping the leather thong at the front of my saddle, and my leg bent beneath me in the foot loop. The horse’s blanketed shoulder surged against my face; I could hear his breath whistling. Now we were swinging around again, out of range of the crossbows, and I hauled myself back into the saddle. We dodged motionless bodies and fallen horses writhing on the chewed ground. I wrenched the horse’s head around and shot southwards, still trying without success to work my way on to the cavalry’s flank. Once more we came around, shooting arrows at the troops beneath the siege engines, and as we wheeled away this time I saw a tower blossom into flame; our second wave of warriors had been able to come close enough to set it on fire with flaming arrows. Black clouds of pungent smoke billowed into the valley’s pure air.