‘The enemy has stopped the water from running over the aqueduct into our city!’ cried a man in the marketplace, grasping at the long curls of his beard as people crowded around him. ‘The water that is in our reservoir now is all we have left! The king’s guards have surrounded the reservoir to protect it.’
After that, I ran home and climbed on to the roof of the stable block and stared down into the water in the cistern. My distorted reflection stared back: the dusky oval moon of my plump face, the tangle of my black curls, the bright chips of my blue eyes. The ripples of worry that crawled across everything. I jumped down, sweating, feeling the sun suck moisture from me.
‘What has happened?’ I cried, bursting into the kitchen where our cook was slicing cucumbers from the garden and dropping the pieces into a bowl of goat yoghurt.
‘They say the enemy has diverted the river’s flow, and changed the course of the irrigation canals,’ Fardad said, looming in a corner, his eyebrows shooting up and down in agitation. He pulled his dagger from his belt and began to trim his fingernails, nicking himself and starting to bleed.
‘Is it true, about the water?’ I cried, bursting into Lila’s house and interrupting the evening meal. Her father nodded glumly, reclining on one elbow on his couch in a tunic of green and purple stripes. He wiped his lips with a piece of flat bread.
‘There is no more water flowing into Ershi,’ he said. ‘Even the small river flowing along the western wall is nothing but a bed of dry gravel. The aqueduct is empty. The king’s guards will ration out the water that remains, so much for each household.’
‘What about the wells?’ I cried.
‘There are only a few, along the base of the hill,’ he said. ‘They are already low from this dry weather, and will soon run dry especially now that there is no other source of water. Soon, there will be so little water in this city that even gold will not be able to buy it. People will die for water, and for its lack.’
He nodded gloomily over his salad of chickpeas, his thin face carved with lines. Lila flashed me a terrified glance from her couch, and her mother wiped her sweating forehead with a linen cloth and dabbed at her trembling mouth.
‘This is terribly frightening,’ she whispered. ‘This is a terrible time for us all.’
‘But the spring! Outside the caravanserai there is a spring!’ I cried.
‘Only the troops may use that water for their horses. The king has posted guards around it,’ Lila’s father said.
I spun on my heel and flew home. The mares stood patiently, back feet lifted, as they dozed with lower lips hanging, and waited for their evening feed. Their trusting gazes turned to me. I stared into the water trough, and felt weak with fear.
‘They will have drunk this water by morning,’ I whispered. ‘Mother, I don’t know what to do.’
Chapter 9
I could smell myself as I rode Grasshopper behind Lila through the marketplace. I felt as though everything with which I had come into contact in the last two days had left a scent upon me. In my hair lay the bitterness of herbs from my mother’s room; on my hands the sweat of mares and the sweetness of foals; in my tunic clung the cooking oil from the kitchen; all over me lay a miasma of dust. Water flowed through the stone channels, from the reservoir, for one hour each sunrise and sunset. Soldiers guarded the fountains and, at the decree of the king, each household could fill only two jars for its cooking and drinking needs. For bathing, there was nothing left over, and the city’s bath houses stood silent and empty. Households with elite horses might fill buckets so that the horses had just enough to keep them alive, at least for the time being; no one from the mighty king to the lowest slave knew when the siege would end. Or who would be victorious and might claim the horses, if they had survived that long. It was fortunate that our Persian horses were renowned for their ability to survive on small rations of water, even to endure several days without it.
‘I need perfume,’ I muttered. Lila, riding ahead on Iris, laughed, turning her head.
‘And I used to complain when you smelled only of horses,’ she said, reining around a man trying to sell carpets from a stack beside the stall of a coppersmith.
Now that the mares had little to drink, I no longer trotted them around the hippodrome for exercise, for I didn’t want them to lose moisture through sweating. Instead, if a mare was restless, I took her out for a slow amble through the streets, stopping in the shade of walnut trees to rest. Today, Lila had won her mother’s permission to accompany me, and was wearing her prettiest trousers and tunic in an attempt to be cheerful despite the columns of vultures wheeling so high overhead that they were black specks in the brilliance, and despite the stink rising from the city drains. Lining every main street, they were normally flushed with waste water but now they were clogged with debris: bits of rotting flesh, dry bones, fallen leaves, dog faeces, droppings from donkeys, bird feathers.
She must hate this even more than I do, I thought, watching Lila’s tall, slender back as she rode along. The sun shimmered on her blue brocade tunic and on Iris’s quarters.
‘Wait!’ I called, spotting the stall I had been looking for, and Lila reined Iris in under the shade of an awning. I slid from Grasshopper and began to bargain for a jar of sesame oil. I had used all the oil in my terracotta lamp, reading Xenophon’s Art of Horsemanship on the rooftop when I was too frightened to sleep in the dark silence of my room. ‘The horse should trust people, knowing that they are the providers of food and water,’ I would quote in a whisper, drifting off to sleep at last beneath the stars.
While the stallholder haggled over his price, clutching two different sized jars of oil, I saw something move furtively in the corner of my eye. A skinny brown arm came out slowly from beneath the stall. Bony fingers reached tentatively towards Grasshopper’s legs. The mare stamped at a fly and the fingers froze into stillness. Then they reached out again, further, straining to touch the mare’s black knee.
‘Which jar, young lady?’ the stallholder demanded, and I stared at his swarthy face, his dark eyes burning deep in their sockets like coals from a fire.
‘Your price is more than I can afford,’ I muttered, trying to muster my bargaining courage. I cleared my throat. ‘I will find another oil supplier,’ I said more loudly.
I glanced downwards again; the fingers had reached Grasshopper’s foreleg and were stroking it with a touch so light, so gentle, that I understood why the mare was now standing absolutely still despite the flies.
‘For you, this large jar for the price of the smaller one – a gift in this time of need, a great gift and one I can ill afford with my many children to feed, may Ahura take pity upon them and –’
I bent down and peered beneath the stall. The thin arm shot backwards. In the gloom, the face of a slave girl tilted towards me, her lips sucked in as she waited for my reprimand, or perhaps for a slash from the plaited riding whip hanging from my right wrist. Even in our cosmopolitan city, her appearance was strange and foreign. Her hooded eyes were chips of blue in her sallow, pointed face, beneath the matted tangle of her dark hair.
‘You like my horse?’ I asked in Persian.
She ducked her head, her eyes cast down, her bony fingers tracing patterns in the dust. Was it her strange eyes, or her silence, or the gentleness of her touch on Grasshopper’s leg that intrigued me the most? I squatted, the embroidered hem of my tunic trailing on the ground, and stared at the girl.
‘You like my horse?’ I asked again, using a Turkic tongue. Her gaze flew up at me, a brief shine like a glimpse of sky on a cloudy day, and then she bent over again. I saw that she was tied to the stall’s wooden supports with a rope, and that it had chafed her ankles raw and dry. Flies crawled in her hair.
Was it because my mother had once been a slave in the markets of Tashkent that I straightened, and gripped the startled oil seller by one of his own wrists?
‘I will take the slave child,’ I said. ‘She must be worth as much as a large jar of oil.’
‘But my wife, my honourable wife, needs her to help in the kitchens!’ the man protested, clutching at his skullcap. His deep-set eyes blazed with the thrill of a new bargaining tool. ‘My wife is run off her feet with work, may Ahura bless her and keep her, for she has so many children! And this girl is a great necessity and cannot go with you.’
‘And yet I hear that it is very hard to feed slaves in this time of war,’ Lila said sweetly at my shoulder, her face bright with a dazzling smile. ‘Surely this is a good time to take coins home to your wife, and to save your oil for another buyer.’
The man paused, caught off-guard by Lila’s sudden appearance and her wide, limpid eyes with their fringes of thick lashes.
‘My lady friend is in sore need of a slave, for her dearest mother is fighting with demons, and her honourable father has abandoned them.’
I stifled a snort of laughter, and bestowed upon the oil seller what I hoped was a smile at least half as dazzling as Lila’s. There was a scuffle at my feet as the slave girl pulled herself out from underneath the stall and began to stroke Grasshopper’s face; I could feel the love that made her dirty hands loose and soft, and that warmed her flat gaze. She scarcely looked at me as I pressed the coins into the man’s hands, or as I hugged Lila in thanks before leading Grasshopper into the shade of an elm tree. Untied now by her oil seller, the girl followed us with one hand laid against Grasshopper’s ribs, and I realised, seeing her standing upright, that she was older than I’d thought. Her head reached to my shoulder although she was as thin as a stray dog.
‘How many birthdays have you had?’ I asked and she lifted her brittle shoulders in a shrug.
‘Eleven? I don’t know,’ she whispered, staring at the ground.
‘Where is your tribe? Speak louder so I can hear you.’
She cleared her throat and began to speak like a child reciting a lesson. ‘My mother was a subject of the Son of Heaven, and taken from the border of the Middle Kingdom and sold as a slave. She journeyed through the northern sea of grass and gave birth to me but my father was a chieftain who disowned me. I was taken in a tribal war two summers ago and brought here to Ershi to be sold.’
I nodded, understanding her strange appearance and those hooded, angled eyes. ‘And now the army of the Middle Kingdom is at our gates,’ I said. ‘Do you wish to join them and return home?’
‘I have no home,’ she said listlessly, but I saw how her eyes lit up again when Grasshopper swung her head around and sniffed curiously at her bare arm and the shoulder of her ragged tunic.
‘Fardad is going to kill me,’ I muttered to Lila, and she laughed and climbed on to Iris from a stone mounting block at the roadside.
‘You still have to buy oil before you return to face his wrath,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope you haven’t yet spent all your mother’s money. You know your mother won’t have slaves in the household.’
I nodded, and swung on to Grasshopper who gave a small leap, almost overturning the stall of a tea seller, his urns shining in the bright sun.
‘Watch out for my wares!’ he cried in alarm.
The slave child did not jump away in fright when Grasshopper leaped; she moved quickly beside the mare, as if she were a foal keeping pace with its mother. I gave her a puzzled stare.
‘You can ride?’ I asked.
She nodded, gripping my saddle’s leather foot loop in her fist, her blue eyes flickering over every detail of Grasshopper’s saddle blanket, the saddle’s leather covering embroidered with stars and heads of grain, the bridle with its reins of shagreen leather that I had repaired myself using a bronze needle. Her fingers traced the mare’s five-pointed brand.
‘From your herd?’ she asked and I nodded. ‘My father’s people had many horses, horses like the wind,’ she said, and then her mouth folded in a tight line, and her soft eyelids swept down.
‘Walk on,’ I said to the mare, and we wound our way after Lila, with the slave girl keeping step. She was still gripping the foot loop when I rode Grasshopper through the open gate at home.
‘Honoured child!’ Fardad bellowed, rushing from the storeroom with his tunic flapping as I dismounted. For one moment in time I thought that he was bellowing because of the ragged stranger standing stiff as a twig at the mare’s side, and then I realised that his cheeks were ashen above his wispy beard, and that his eyebrows had disappeared beneath his skullcap.
‘I couldn’t stop him!’ he wailed, clasping his old hands, with their tracing of blue veins, together. ‘Your father’s household guards are all away fighting! Marjan tried to rouse your mother but she wasn’t able to! And you were not here to prevent it! She has been taken!’
Something like a bolt of lightning flickered through me. The taste of sulphur burned my tongue. The light dimmed as though a storm cloud passed before the sun. I knew then, before Fardad said another word, that something had changed in my life, that something terrible had occurred.
‘Swan?’ I whispered, my throat closing around her name as though I could keep it safe there.
Fardad nodded; behind him, our cook and two servant girls and Marjan stood in a semicircle, staring at me with long, compassionate faces.
‘It was your betrothed, Arash. He came with his retinue this afternoon while you were in the market. And took Swan away.’
‘Where? Where did they go? Where?’
My voice, usually so soft that people had to ask me to repeat myself, bounced around the courtyard like a pebble ricocheting off the mud walls. Doves rose in protest from the rooftop and spiralled upwards. The slave girl moved away from me, drifting amongst the mares with her hands touching each one of them: fondling their muzzles, their silken tails, their shining coats. In all that golden gleam, there was no flash of white, no shine like cool water, no eyes to greet me.
Oh, Swan!
Lila had her arm around my shoulders but I barely noticed.
‘I don’t know where he took her,’ Fardad said, tugging at his thinning beard in his agitation. ‘I don’t know why he wanted her.’
I snatched at Grasshopper’s reins so fast that the mare swung her head up and away, her neck tense and her eyes rolling white. I leaped into the saddle without using the foot loop, my heels kicking into her ribs even before my weight had settled fully on to her back. I wrenched her around in the courtyard’s confines, scattering mares and foals. The stricken faces of the servants, Fardad’s wild rheumy eyes, Lila’s open mouth as she cried out, and the slave girl’s curious, flat gaze all spun around me in a whirl. Then the mare’s front hooves were through the door; I heard her tail lash against the frame as we shot past and as I pulled her head northwards and drove her uphill at a gallop. The hard pounding of her hooves alerted people ahead of me so that they scattered to the sides of the street, calling out alarmed questions. Their voices were like bird calls, meaningless, insignificant.
I kicked Grasshopper onwards as she faltered and she gave a soaring buck across a drainage ditch, and galloped hard and fast, her back flattening out, across a stretch of wasteground beyond. We careened around the corner of a fire temple, the pillars on its portico flashing by, pale as the trunks of trees in a birch forest. Hens scattered around us like leaves. The mare snorted loudly but kept galloping, her powerful hindquarters driving us uphill between the houses of merchants and bankers until we were against the very walls of the inner citadel. We shot through the archway into the outer courtyard of the Royal Falconer’s sprawling house, knocking aside two porters who ran after us with their daggers drawn. The mare skidded on her haunches, her nose inches from the solid doors that led to the second courtyard, and I leaned over her shoulder and hammered upon the door with my whip handle.
The porters with their drawn daggers were beside me, reaching for the mare’s reins. I swung my whip in a circle. ‘Keep your hands off!’ I shouted, and collected the mare under me, making her hop and leap sideways across the courtyard. They stayed outside the range of her slashing hooves.
‘Open the door!’ I shouted. ‘The hono
urable lady Kallisto of the House of Iona is here to see your master’s son!’
I kicked the mare hard as the doors began to move and we barrelled through the crack like a fish going between rocks in a canyon’s torrents. The porter sprawled backwards, clutching his cap as it slid over the back of his curly black hair. I wheeled Grasshopper in a tight circle on the paving stones laid in a pattern of golden and black around the pomegranate trees. My voice echoed from the stuccoed walls painted in brilliant colours – red, white, yellow – and carved into flowing designs. The porters and guards, still with their hands on their dagger hilts, stared at me, dishevelled and desperate in my grubby tunic, my oldest boots, and alone without a single servant or family chaperone.
‘Our master and his son are fighting with the cavalry,’ one said at last. ‘Will you wait in the reception hall and take a cool drink?’
‘Arash is not fighting, and I will wait,’ I said, glancing upwards to where the last rays of setting sun kindled the palace’s rambling facades into brilliance. They led Grasshopper away after I gave instructions for her to be groomed and fed; then I stepped inside the first reception hall through which I had entered this house once before, on a feast day, with my parents. I paced the hall’s cool length. I stared at its walls with their paintings, tapestries, and niches filled with marble busts of kings and statuettes of goddesses. A servant woman brought me a tray holding a bowl of melon soup flavoured with cardamom seeds, and a damp cloth to wipe my hands. I ate and drank in a daze for I had become a stranger to myself. I was freezing cold as though it were winter and the wind was blowing down over the Alay Mountains with snow in its wings. My skin crawled and shivered.
The Horse Road Page 11