The Horse Road

by Troon Harrison

  The infantry marched in the cavalry’s wake, rank upon rank of peasants and serfs armed by their masters with swords and daggers. Camels rocked past, bellowing in complaint, and laden with extra supplies of bronze-tipped arrows.

  ‘We will be free by sunset!’ shouted a man standing at Swan’s shoulder, and the crowd around us took up the shout. ‘Free by sunset!’ they roared, as the east gate swung slowly shut again behind the last troops, and as the doves drifted back upon the battlements to strut and coo. The sunlight poured over the city walls, bathing us all in warmth, and shining upon the cheering faces.

  ‘We will ride down later and watch them come home!’ I shouted to Lila above the din, and then I wheeled Swan around and we began to ride through the marketplace. When we slid off Swan’s back in the courtyard at home, Lila’s mother rushed out of the house with her gown fluttering in agitated waves around her plump legs.

  ‘My dear girls, where have you been?’ she cried shrilly. ‘The city is filled with strange troops, wild men from the tribes! Traders! Stranded caravan leaders! You must stay safely at home in these dangerous times! Lila, go home immediately and do not leave the house again today! I forbid it!’

  Fardad turned away impassively, his eyebrows still for once, and rattled home the bolts on the front doors. Lila slid her hand down Swan’s face and slipped a ring of dried apple between the mare’s soft, wrinkled lips. Then she smiled at me and darted away through the garden with her mother trotting after her, still scolding.

  Later, in the heat of the afternoon, when I knew that her mother would be dozing on the cushions of a high, padded couch, I slipped quietly into Lila’s house to find her. We climbed to the rooftop which offered the same view down the valley as did my own.

  ‘They are fighting through all the city’s gardens, and in the surrounding fields,’ Lila mused. ‘It is true that Angra’s dark forces make the land barren, and curse the crops.’

  Side by side, we leaned our elbows on the walls encircling the roof, and stared into the shimmering heat haze and the golden dust that rose above the battlefield. It was hard to discern details: only the surge to and fro of dark blocks of fighting men, the wheeling sweeps of cavalry like the sweeps that birds make against a pale sky. Lila was right; they were trampling the millet shoots, splashing through the rice fields, flattening the early wheat. Even if our forces beat back the Middle Kingdom’s army, it would leave a swathe of destruction in its wake.

  ‘No one is winning,’ I said softly, my hand rising to grip the pouch of leopard’s fur that hung always at my throat. For a moment, I remembered the warm roughness of Berta’s hands as she fastened it there.

  ‘I don’t want to watch any more,’ Lila said. ‘Let’s play a game.’

  We sat on the beautiful red and yellow flowers of a knotted carpet, and laid out the tabula board on a low wooden table with an inlay of mother-of-pearl. Lila said it had come from India, and for a moment I traced a finger over the picture of birds with huge tails. Then we laid the tabula board, with its pattern of black triangles, on top of the birds, and began to play with the ivory pieces.

  ‘A hair comb against …’ Lila raised her thin, arched brows.

  ‘Your brooch with the foal,’ I wagered.

  For a long time there was only the rattle of dice in the wooden box, their clatter as they fell on to the board, the click of the gaming pieces, the shriek of a bird, and the muted, distant roar of the army fighting far off below the city walls. Sometimes a breath of air rustled through the topmost leaves of the apricot trees standing in the wasteground beyond my house, and briefly made the cotton awnings above my courtyard billow. Sometimes the breeze carried the note of a trumpet or the scream of a falling horse, and I would feel the sick lurch of my stomach. Then the wind would die again, and my fear would grow heavy and dull, leaning its weight on my sweating shoulders.

  We waited and waited all through the long afternoon for the moment when the great rabble of the Middle Kingdom’s army would be pressed backwards, away from our walls, and would flee out of the broad, shining bowl of our golden valley. But it didn’t happen.

  ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ Lila said wistfully as the sun sank into the emptiness of the west where our valley opened out into shining sky. The Alay Mountains on the southern horizon had become stiff purple walls against the waning light, like mountains painted on with a brushstroke, and the haze above the battlefield was cloudy as a bruise. From the edge of the roof, I could see how the bright threads of irrigation ditches were clotted with bodies, and broken chariots, polluting Ahura’s sacred water beneath the drooping willows.

  Lila stacked the ivory gaming pieces back into their case. ‘You lost your wager; you owe me a hair comb. Are you going down to the gate?’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll come over later and tell you about what I see. Which comb do you want?’

  Lila considered; I knew she was thinking about the various items tossed haphazardly inside the jewellery casket that stood, on its golden feet, inside a wall niche in my bedroom. Not even the war could dampen her interest in acquiring something pretty and new.

  ‘The comb with the amber stones along the edge, the one from the northern sea,’ she said at last, and I nodded in relief. For a moment, I had feared that she might ask for my favourite, the ivory comb with the head of a white mare carved into it.

  The streets were crowded as Swan and I rode down to the east gate, weaving between goats, children, dogs, slaves, traders, and women carrying jugs of water from the fountains. Although Swan was accustomed to running free in my mother’s pastures, skimming clumps of flowers the way that a bird skims clouds, she was an excellent mare to ride through the crowded city. She and I had spent so many years together, twisting and turning across the flat dust of the training grounds, threading through poles and executing spinning turns, that she could be ridden now without even a bridle if I chose. Every portion of her sides was sensitive to me; to the slightest squeeze of a leg muscle, the slightest nudge of a boot heel. At mounted games, she was an expert: swift, attentive, capable of stopping so fast from a gallop that her hocks bent beneath her; able to spin so quickly that her tail hair was still flowing in one direction when her body had already taken off in a new one. Now, in the crowded streets, I guided her easily, as though we were playing a different game together. Her elegant pricked ears swivelled constantly, listening to sounds from all around us: the hammering of blacksmiths, a man shouting at a dog, a donkey braying mournfully. When we competed in games, Swan’s ears waited for the shouts of applause. She loved to win, and would arch her neck and toss her long face.

  We found a position against the walls of the caravanserai, as the crowds thickened in anticipation. Quietness hung over the mass of people waiting; the exuberant cheers of the morning were silenced, and the faces below me were sombre. Women clutched at amulets hanging from their necks, and muttered prayers beseeching for the safe return of loved ones. The great gate swung open slowly, creaking, revealing a tiny portion of purple sky, the first wink of starlight. The troops entered in clots and groups, light and heavy cavalry mixed together; exhausted infantry staggering amongst them. Camels limped alongside. Horses bled from shoulder and neck wounds, staining their felt blankets with blossoms of red flowers, and stumbled with fatigue in a lather of sweat. Reins hung slack from their mouths. The warriors drooped on their backs, quivers empty of arrows, bows lost or broken. Some warriors carried tails, cut from the horses of dead enemies and tied into their sashes or on to their saddle blankets. Once I glimpsed a horse trotting along with neither a rider or bridle, its saddle blanket strapped on backwards to signify that its rider had died. Some comrade on the battlefield must have taken a moment to do this last act in honour of a tribal brother. In peacetime, no one would ride such a horse ever again but I knew that in time of war, all traditions changed.

  Swan stood still beneath me, watching the ragged flow of the troops pass by with her eyes sombre and her head low. Perhaps she smelled the dust and fear in the sweat of
the horses; perhaps she had listened all day, in the safety of her courtyard, to the surge of their panicked hoof beats. As the gates swung shut, she carried me home at a slow trot, her pale neck a shimmer in the lamplight falling from windows and doorways. An owl hooted in a walnut tree as we turned into our own street and for the first time, I was glad to hear the bolt rattle shut behind us as we rode into the courtyard. I was glad that Swan had nothing to do now but eat hay, and sigh sleepily through the long afternoons; that the worst that could befall her was boredom.

  After that first day inside the besieged city, my days fell into a strange routine that blurred one into the next. Every morning, as the sun rose into a clear sky, I raked the horse droppings into a pile for the latrine boy to haul to the garden. The horses that had spent the night in the stalls, I led outside. Other mares were led in, to spend the day in the chopped barley straw. In the cool of the morning, the mares were lively; they whickered greetings to me, brushed my arms with their whiskered noses, and pushed each other around as they waited for their breakfast.

  I rationed out the food; on some days, the mares chewed hay, grinding it slowly with their wide back teeth, looking as though their thoughts were drifting far away in other places. Sometimes I fed them dried peas soaked in weak wine, or handfuls of dried dates that made them slobber brown, sticky juice. Lila complained that my mares were ruining all her gowns because they kept wiping their mouths across her shoulders. Our cook killed the hens, and made kebabs for the servants and me to eat. The chicken bones were boiled to create a broth, and I soaked millet in this and fed the mares a thick porridge in copper buckets and in ceramic bowls that I took from the kitchen when our cook wasn’t watching.

  As the sun rose higher, and the mares finished their food, they became dozy. By midday, the sun hung high in a sky burnished like a bronze mirror. Heat held us all, human and animal, as though we were shamans entering a state of trance. Heat distorted our vision: buildings and trees shimmered as though turning to water, and heat pressed upon us, making us thin and insignificant. It was the hottest month that I could recall, and the driest.

  ‘My mother says that Apaosha, the demon of drought, has come with the enemy army,’ Lila said one day. We were sitting side by side on the carpet, with our legs pushed beneath a vertical loom on which was stretched a rug with a floral design. Lila was supposed to be finishing it to add to her bride-wealth, and I was helping her out of friendship, although sitting there made me feel fidgety and gave me a backache.

  ‘Perhaps your mother is right,’ I said, and I imagined Apaosha mounted on his black stallion, galloping up and down our golden valley in a cloud of angry black dust, such as desert storms raise into the air. I thought of how the kettle drum of that stallion’s hoof beats would ring from the mountains.

  ‘Wind, Rain, Clouds, and Sleet,’ I recited the names of the four grey horses of the goddess Anahita, divinity of waters. These greys pulled her heavenly chariot; I thought that perhaps now, as Lila and I sat weaving, those pale and beautiful mares were being stampeded over the horizon by the demon’s angry black stallion.

  I called their names again later in the day when I climbed on to our stable roof to check on the water cistern. I called softly, as though I were cajoling shy young mares in from the pasture, as though I longed to run my hands down their dappled faces, over their smoke-soft muzzles. The level of water in our cistern, usually replenished by rain, was sinking lower. Surely Anahita’s four chariot mares would take pity upon their sisters trapped in the courtyard, and would bravely sweep over Ershi, dragging the clouds around their hooves. I climbed down from the roof and watched helplessly as the mares sucked up long draughts of water from their trough, dribbling it on to the baked mud of the yard. For how much longer could they drink this water, when no rain was falling to fill the cistern with its cool sweetness?

  ‘Wind, Rain, Clouds, Sleet!’ I called softly again, like a prayer, and tipped my face to the sky. In the cracks between my cotton awnings, it remained a hot, brassy blue.

  In the late afternoons, I stood amongst the mares with a fly whisk. I flapped and swished its long plume, made from the hair of horses’ tails, across the legs and bellies of the mares. They stamped and fidgeted, tormented by stinging bites. One windy afternoon, my lattice of ropes and cotton broke loose as ropes became untied from stones, and cotton became unstitched from rope. Three servants balanced on the walls, holding it down, while Lila and Fardad and I worked from below, making everything secure again. The spooked mares circled the courtyard at a trot, snorting nervously and stirring up clouds of gritty dust that filled our mouths and stung our eyes.

  Then it was time for the evening feeding, for me to pace the length of the storeroom, gripped by fear as supplies diminished. Fardad complained, when I sent him into the city, that there was no more hay to be found, and that the prices of all foodstuffs were spiralling upwards even as the coins dwindled in my mother’s pouch. One evening, Fardad slaughtered a sheep, and we all ate mutton and vegetable stew. The next day, when the meat had cooled, I cut off white, congealed fat and mixed it with barley and raw eggs to form balls that I could feed to the mares.

  By the time that darkness fell, the sky turning purple above the battlements of the city wall, it was time for me to rake the dung from the courtyard again, to rotate the mares from the stalls into the yard. When true darkness fell, I stood alone on the rooftop, watching the myriad fires burning in the enemy encampment like fallen stars. I thought about Batu, wondering if he and the two year olds were safe in the valley, and how long they would wait there for me. How Gryphon’s wounds were, if they had healed. I ached for Batu’s fierce, flashing joy, and for Gryphon’s elegance and speed.

  Often, I would sit beside my mother, holding her hand. Sometimes she opened her eyes and stared at me without knowledge, sometimes she tried to speak to me but the words made no sense, or were in her childhood tongue. On other occasions, she slept in a drugged stupor, burning with fever. The magus that Arash had sent came every day, chanting hymns in my mother’s room and waving his bundle of larch twigs while Marjan sat patiently, waiting to smooth the sheets.

  Outside in the city, crowds flocked to the fire temples, while the magi in their white robes made sacrifices before the sacred and eternal flames, symbol of Ahura Mazda’s power of light. White doves, unblemished oxen, crates of chickens, donkeys, bleating lambs; all were brought to the altars and sacrificed as the priests entreated Ahura for power and help in defeating the enemy that encircled Ershi. The smell of burning hung heavy in the still air.

  In peacetime, the human dead of Ershi were carried outside the gates to lie in the ground of sky-burial where the grave maker dogs, and the vultures, could pick their bones clean and let their spirits rise into high heaven. Now, in this time of war, this was no longer possible. A temporary sky-burial ground was created in unused land beneath the aqueduct’s many-legged shadow on the city’s western side. Columns of vultures rode the afternoon air in great looping spirals above it like campfire ash rising aloft. The grave maker dogs ran in ragged packs through the alleys, bloated and drooling.

  Then there came the day when the water stopped running.

  I had ridden Swan, with Tulip alongside on a rope, to the hippodrome for exercise. The great oval track was packed all night long with troops, with felt tents and campfires and lines of exhausted horses, but today the army had ridden out to harass the enemy, and to destroy their catapults. The hippodrome’s expanse lay quiet. I circled it, keeping the mares to a steady trot that raised a light pinkish sweat on their necks and shoulders. I remembered the races that were run here in peacetime; the flash of chariot wheels, the blur of horses’ legs eating up the ground, the roar of the crowds, the frenzied betting. I remembered the great moan that rose from the crowd when a favourite horse went down, or a chariot veered from the track. Even my brothers, who cared little for horses, knew the names of the winners. Now only the shadows of my mares drifted alongside me, and only the drumbeat of their eight
hooves marked the passage of the afternoon. Swan’s hot smell wafted into my nose; to someone else, she might have simply smelled like a sweating horse, but to me she smelled distinct and individual. I could find her in a horse herd in darkness simply by pressing my face to her neck and breathing her in.

  At home again, I put her into a stall to cool down, and wiped her off using a sponge from the Mediterranean Sea, and a leather bucket holding water scooped from the trough. I fetched her a handful of millet from the storage room, and noticed how low our supply of food was running. Fardad was asleep in the kitchen, sitting on a stool with his back against the wall, his toes poking into the ashes of the cooking fire, his moustache rising and falling in the light breath of his snores. I smiled to myself, and slipped out of the front gate to run downhill to the market and bargain for grain. One hand clutched the few small coins remaining in my supply; only the price of slaves was falling in this city because no one wanted the expense of feeding them.

  At the bottom of our street, a crowd of women had gathered at the fountain. I ducked my head in shyness and hurried around the fringe of the group with my eyes averted. When someone called my name, I hesitated. A servant from Lila’s house broke free of the crowd and rushed over to me, her face creased with agitation. ‘The water has stopped running; the fountain is empty!’ she cried, and then she turned abruptly and began to hurry homewards. I craned my neck, looking past the other women’s bright tunics and robes, and saw that the stone basin, which usually brimmed with fresh water, was empty and only slightly damp. The stone dried in the hot sun even as I stared at it, becoming chalky and pale. The women scattered like wind-blown leaves, their high voices carrying the news through the streets. I hurried on, my skin crawling with fear. Everywhere I went, the same alarm met me.

  In every street, stone channels usually rushed with clear mountain water that was carried into Ershi by the aqueduct, and was stored in the reservoir before pouring like life-blood down through the city. This water was carried home in jars to cook stews, wash babies, water goats. But now, in every street I ran through, the stone channels were all empty. A strange silence replaced the usual gurgling rush of the water, the splash of fountains. I hadn’t realised, until now, how water’s music was a sound like a warp thread on a loom, holding the city’s tapestry together.