by Stacy Gregg
rince Hassan’s polo mares crane their heads over the loose-box doors at the stables, whinnying and nickering their greetings to the newcomer.
Frightened by their attentions, the filly clings so close to Haya down the ramp, she almost tramples her. She stands in the yard, wide-eyed and trembling, as she takes in the sights and sounds.
The polo mares are Thoroughbreds with muscular necks and Roman noses. They wear their manes hogged down to a stump, the hair shaved away along the crest so that the reins don’t get tangled in the heat of a match.
This is a working yard. Unlike Al Hummar, there are no magnificent grey-green olive trees or elegant fountains. The horses drink from battered plastic water troughs and stretch their legs in dusty pens.
The stable block itself is modern and elegant with high walls like a fortress, the two dozen loose boxes arranged in a U-shape round a large central concrete courtyard for tacking up and washing down.
Haya takes in the scent of manure and horse sweat and her heart immediately leaps, just as it does at Al Hummar. “Come on.” She leads the filly forward. “Let’s see your new home.”
The filly skips alongside her. By the time they reach the loose box her coat is damp with sweat. When Haya unclips her lead rope and lets her loose inside the box, the filly rushes straight to the stable door, her tiny muzzle raised up in a desperate attempt to see over the top, her plaintive whinnies echoing through the stables.
“She doesn’t like it,” Haya says. “Maybe she wants to go back to Al Hummar.”
Santi shakes his head. “It is not her home that she calls out for, it is her mother.”
The filly gives another desperate whinny, her tiny nostrils trembling, and Haya is suddenly in the kitchen at the Summer House, an armful of oranges tumbling to the floor. Poor foal. She thinks that if she cries loud enough her mother will come back for her.
“The filly will settle down soon,” Prince Hassan reassures them. “My grooms will make sure she is well fed.”
Haya is tired and hungry. The last thing she ate was a slice of birthday cake at midday and now the sun is getting low in the sky. Right now she would dearly love to return to Al Nadwa. There are birthday gifts waiting for her. But the filly calls and calls for her mama. Haya turns to her uncle.
“I must stay,” Haya quietly insists. “I have to. She needs me.”
*
It is one thing to be selfless and noble in the daylight, but in the darkness it is a different matter. Santi and Ursula have left to give the horses at Al Hummar their evening feeds. Prince Hassan has gone home and the grooms at the polo stables have finished work until tomorrow. It is just Haya in the yard with her bodyguards outside the stable gates.
After much fretting, the filly has finally exhausted herself and fallen asleep. She lies on the straw bedding in the corner. Haya nestles into the straw on the floor beside her. She wishes she had thought to ask for a blanket. The summer nights are getting colder and there is a bite to the air even inside the loose box. Also, for the past hour, she has been trying very hard to ignore the strange noises coming from the yard outside. She can hear something scratching, but whenever she sticks her head out of the stall, the noise goes quiet. It is probably just the stable cat on the hunt for mice, she tells herself. She clambers up out of the straw to peer over the stable door. It’s very dark, far too dark to see anything. She sits down, with her back against the loose-box wall. It’s OK, nothing’s there. Just the cat.
A moment later, the security lights flicker on and Haya gasps as she hears footsteps coming across the courtyard, getting closer. An intruder! She must protect her foal.
“Haya!”
Two eyes are peering at her from over the top of the stable door. It is only Ali!
“Baba said I could come to see the foal again,” Ali says. “We brought you dinner.”
Her father appears at the door. “Ismail has prepared you a birthday feast,” he says. “Where would you like to eat?”
The tack room seems like the best place. The King finds a wooden bench from the stable yard so they place the food on it and sit on the wooden saddle horses. It feels like they are riding and eating at the same time! Ismail has packed the food into covered serving platters so it has stayed hot. There is nutty and delicious orange-scented chicken and a big platter of rice with sweet apricots.
“So what do you think of Haya’s foal?” the King asks his son.
“She doesn’t do much, does she?” Ali says.
“She’s asleep,” Haya points out.
Ali gnaws a piece of chicken, trying to make his saddle horse trot as he chews.
For dessert that night there is barazek – sweet honey sesame cookies that crumble as they bite into them and a flask of hot, tangy lemon drink. They go back to the loose box to see that the foal has woken up and is on her feet, sniffing at the straw and exploring her new home.
“What’s her name?” Ali asks.
Haya looks at the filly, trying to negotiate her way around on gangly limbs. One day those same legs will carry her at a gallop as they race across the desert sands.
“I am going to call her Bint Al-Reeh,” Haya tells her brother.
Ali giggles.
Haya frowns at him. “What’s so funny?”
“Bint Al-Reeh-a,” Ali says with a mischievous look in his eye. “Bint Al-Reeh-a!”
Haya glares at her brother. Bint Al-Reeh is Arabic. It means Daughter of the Wind. But Bint Al-Reeh-a, the way her brother is pronouncing it, means Daughter of the Farts.
“Stop it, Ali!” Haya wails.
But it is no use. Ali has decided that this joke is the funniest thing he has ever heard. He keeps singing “Bint Al-Reeh-a” over and over again. Eventually the King has no choice but to put him back into the car with the doors shut so that Haya can’t hear him.
“Why don’t you come home too now, Haya?” her father says. “One of Hassan’s grooms can take over tonight, then you can come back and check on Bint Al-Reeh first thing in the morning.”
Haya is wearing the warm jersey that her father brought for her, but even so she feels the cold nip of the night air. She thinks about her warm bed back at the palace. She shakes her head.
“Bint Al-Reeh knows me now. She won’t miss her mother so much if I stay with her.”
The King does not dispute her decision. “You must do what you think is best.” He hugs his daughter close, kisses her on the top of her head. “I like the name you have chosen for her,” he says. “It is a name worthy of a great horse.”
“Bint Al-Reeh is going to be a great horse,” Haya says. “One day she will be the best horse in the Royal Stables.”
*
After the King and Prince Ali have gone, Haya sits down on the fold-out camp bed with her sleeping bag, and pours warm camel’s milk from a Thermos flask into the foal’s bottle. She rests the flask on the lip of the bottle to keep it steady as she pours. Then she replaces the teat, screwing it on tight. It is time for a feed.
“Come on, Bint Al-Reeh.” She grasps the filly firmly by her halter and tries to give her the teat. When Santi did it, he held the bottle right up to the filly’s mouth and forced the teat in, pushing until she started to suckle.
Haya tries, but the foal is too strong for her to hold and manage the bottle at the same time and keeps pulling away. She tries manoeuvring Bint Al-Reeh into the corner of the stall, taking the halter in one hand while she tries to force the teat into the side of her muzzle. But the foal refuses to open her mouth. Her jaws are clamped shut.
“You have to drink!” Haya is almost in tears. “Please!”
She takes hold of the halter, but the filly squirms and pulls against her grip, fighting until Haya lets go and falls back exhausted on the straw. She cannot do this alone; it is impossible!
Tears of frustration are welling in Haya’s eyes. If the foal doesn’t feed during the night then she will grow weak and dehydrated – she might even die!
Do not think like that, she tells hers
elf. This is your foal, Haya. You must do this.
She picks up the bottle again, and as she grasps it this time, a trickle of milk escapes the teat and runs down her forearm. It feels warm and sticky. Haya looks at the milk dribbling down and, without thinking, she licks it off, tasting the creamy sweetness on her tongue.
With renewed determination, she takes the foal by the halter again. This time she doesn’t offer the bottle. Instead, she dribbles a few drops of camel’s milk on to her thumb and then, gingerly, she holds her thumb to the foal’s muzzle.
The foal sniffs her hand, ears pricked forward.
“Taste it,” Haya says. “You like milk, don’t you?”
The filly’s tongue darts out. It is rough like warm, wet sandpaper against Haya’s skin. She dribbles some more milk on to her thumb and holds it to the foal’s muzzle and this time, as the filly’s tongue comes out, Haya eases her thumb inside its mouth. It is the strangest sensation and it is all Haya can do not to panic that the foal might bite it. But the foal doesn’t nip her. Instead, she begins to suckle. Her sucks grow stronger and more urgent, and Haya slides the teat in, withdrawing her thumb carefully so that the foal doesn’t notice the exchange.
Suddenly the foal’s tail begins to spin like a little furry catherine wheel. The milk begins to disappear rapidly from the bottle.
“Good girl, Bint Al-Reeh!” Haya almost cries with relief. She holds the bottle with both hands as the sucks grow even more vigorous as the bottle empties. “Good girl.”
Two more times during the night Haya wakes up to feed her foal. Each time she uses the same trick and by morning, when her father returns, he finds the Thermos of milk empty at the door and Haya fast asleep, curled up in the straw, with her filly beside her.
aya does not leave Bint Al-Reeh’s side. She eats her meals in the loose box and at night she sleeps on the cot with Bint Al-Reeh next to her in the straw.
Each morning, at Frances’s insistence, she comes home to shower, get dressed and eat breakfast before promptly going back to the stables.
“It is only the child’s health I am concerned about,” Haya overhears Happy Frances telling Baba. “She cannot possibly continue like this; she is pale and exhausted.”
“She is smiling,” the King says, “and laughing and talking. For the first time since her mother died, there is a light in her eyes again.”
“The foal is taking up so much of her time.” Happy Frances tries a different tack. “A growing girl needs fresh air and the company of other children. And what about her studies? She has not done anything all week other than tend to the foal.”
“Some lessons are more important than school,” replies the King. “And our best teachers have four legs.”
*
“Are you going back to the stables again?” Ali asks as he watches his sister packing her bag. “I don’t see what’s so special about that foal anyway. Most of the time she just sleeps.”
Haya smiles. Men and boys never seem to find the endless things to do in the stables that she does. Ali and her uncle come to ride, and care for their horses, feed and treat them well, but Haya is happy just to be there.
Ali has a football tucked under his arm. “Stay here and play with me,” he offers. “We can have kicks in the garden.”
Haya shakes her head. “I can’t, Ali. It is almost time to feed her.”
Ali mutters something about horses being boring and stomps off. Haya feels bad. She knows her brother misses her company, but the filly needs her too. It is impossible to explain to Ali how she feels when she is with her foal. It is as if they are two halves of the same heart and one half cannot beat without the other.
“Bint Al-Reeh-a!” Ali sticks his head back round the bedroom door. “Daughter of the Farts!”
“She is called Bree,” Haya tells him firmly. It is the filly’s new nickname, short for Bint Al-Reeh.
“Bint Al-Reeh-a,” Ali chants again, delighting in being able to annoy his sister with the addition of just one letter.
Haya sighs in defeat and leaves for the stables once more.
At Prince Hassan’s yards, Bree is always waiting, with her tiny muzzle barely visible, nostrils twitching over the stable door.
When Haya enters the loose box, the filly nickers happily, nuzzling up against her, pushing Haya with her muzzle, searching for milk. There is no need for Haya to do her thumb trick any more. Bree takes the teat as soon as it is offered and drinks with gusto, her tiny tail twirling a vigorous circle as she suckles.
Haya watches the camel’s milk disappearing from the bottle in her hand and feels satisfied as she thinks about it filling up Bree’s belly.
Bree keeps drinking, even when the bottle is completely empty, suckling optimistically for a while longer. Then she pricks her ears forward and gets a wild look about her, her nostrils widening. Haya has seen this look before – the filly is in one of her playful moods. Haya has just enough time to get out of the way before Bree surges forward, putting on a sudden burst of speed, and begins tearing madly about the loose box, circling Haya at a chaotic canter, her long legs plunging into the thick straw bedding of her stall with each stride.
After a few laps, she stops and raises her head to give a shrill-pitched whinny, then she goes up on her hindquarters like a stallion, her front legs striking out, lashing at an imaginary foe.
Haya giggles at her. Bree snorts indignantly and does one more mad lap of the loose box before finally pulling up to a halt and collapsing back down into the straw. In just a few moments, she is fast asleep.
The polo mares recognise Haya now when she comes to the yard. They nicker cheerful greetings in the hope that she will feed them. Sometimes she helps Hassan’s grooms mix their morning feeds, slopping the boiled barley in with the alfalfa chaff.
“Would you like a job here, Your Royal Highness?” the head groom asks Haya. “I could do with an extra pair of hands and you are always here bright and early.”
Santi comes to check on Bree most days and one afternoon he arrives at the stables with the horse float behind his car. “Come and see, Titch!”
The mare that he unloads from the trailer is old and her grey dapples have faded so that she is quite white. Her legs and neck are skinny, but her belly looks huge and sticks out at the sides.
“Is she for me?” Haya asks.
“No,” Santi says. “She is for the foal. I drove all the way to Wadi Rum to get her. Her name is Latifah. She can be a nurse mare for Bree.”
Santi strokes the mare’s neck. “She had her own baby, but it died. You see how her udders are swollen still with the milk? She can be a mother for the filly.”
“But I can feed Bree,” Haya says defensively. “I can care for her all by myself.”
Santi sees the hurt look in the girl’s eyes.
“Titch, I know that you have been working very, very hard,” he says. “If you had not cared for Bree with such devotion these past days then the filly would not have lived. She has grown to depend on you. Perhaps she even thinks of you as her mother now. And this is a wonderful thing,” Santi hesitates, “… but it can also be risky. A foal learns manners from its mother, and an orphan like Bree can become bossy and aggressive.”
“But I’m teaching her good manners,” Haya insists. “She picks up her hooves for me and lets me brush her.”
“Haya,” Santi says, “you are doing a very good job, but some things only a mare can teach a foal. What will you do if Bree decides to lash out at you with her hind legs because she demands more milk? A mare would bite her and kick her straight back, put her in her place. This filly is growing up fast. One day very soon she will be bigger than you and the little habits that you thought were so cute will become dangerous.”
She doesn’t want to admit it, but Santi is right. Already Haya can feel the filly shoving so hard against the bottle when she feeds her that Haya finds it difficult to hold on. And the filly is barely a week old! Imagine when she has grown stronger, how tough it will be to feed her then
. If Haya is the mother, like her father said, then she must do what is best for Bree.
“OK,” she agrees reluctantly.
Haya expects Santi to put Latifah in the same box as Bree, but he leads the mare into the loose box next door to the foal. “We do this slowly,” he tells Haya. “That way there is less risk the mare will attack.”
Attack? Santi did not mention this before!
Haya watches anxiously as Latifah approaches the small window with steel bars that connects the two loose boxes. The mare can smell the foal and she thrusts her slender muzzle up to the bars, her nostrils flared wide, her breath coming hard in short, inquisitive snorts.
On the other side of the wall, Bree is intrigued. She comes close enough to look through the hole and then, without actually moving her legs, she stretches her neck, extending her muzzle closer to Latifah. She gives the mare a sniff and then suddenly her tail starts swishing madly back and forth with delight. Bree starts to nicker vigorously to Latifah, imploring the mare to come to her and Haya feels her stomach make a hard knot. How heartbroken the foal will be if the mare rejects her!
“Santi.” Haya’s voice is anxious. “What if Latifah doesn’t want her?”
Latifah takes a step towards the foal and when their muzzles connect the mare takes a deep snort. Suddenly her ears flatten back in anger as she lets out a vicious squeal, lashing out at the filly with a swift blow of her foreleg!
“Bree!” Haya panics and tries to open the loose-box door to get to her, but Santi stops her. “She’s OK. The mare cannot hurt her through the wall.”
Haya isn’t so sure, but she does as Santi says and waits and watches, scarcely daring to breathe as Latifah steps forward again to sniff at the foal through the gap in the wall. Miraculously, the mare seems to have a change of heart. Her ears prick forward and she begins to nicker affectionately, nuzzling at the foal through the bars.
“She likes her!” Haya is almost in tears with relief.
Santi does not rush things. He lets the mare and foal continue their greeting ritual through the bars for what seems like forever, before he grunts his satisfaction and moves Latifah at last into Bree’s stall.