The Horse Road

by Troon Harrison

  ‘You are touching an elite Persian mare,’ I said, leaning over Nomad’s shoulder to catch the man’s swinging blue gaze. His grip on my boot eased as his eyes focused on Nomad’s arched neck, and his touch suddenly became gentle and calm as he ran his hand, calloused from bowstrings and reins, over her flanks. Then we had passed the soldiers, and they descended the street with ribald laughter. I nudged Nomad into a trot, dodging drains and elm trees and shadows until at last we reached the safety of our courtyard where Fardad bellowed an angry welcome. ‘Half the household is out searching for you!’ he cried. ‘And this mare is in a sweat!’

  ‘I will tend to her,’ I said. ‘Stop fussing. We are not harmed.’

  Sayeh and I twisted barley straw into wisps and rubbed Nomad and the mule dry and clean before staggering into the kitchen for a late meal of stew made from stringy goat, onions, and pumpkin. Afterwards, I lay in my linen sheets, my body humming with fatigue, but my brain whirling with thoughts of a golden harness, a tumbling wall, a wave of enemy troops rising over it. With thoughts of Swan; her pale face somewhere in the gloom of a secret stable with guards posted at the door. Seven nights, I thought over and over.

  Seven. I cannot fail.

  For two days I searched the city for the merchant called Failak. I knocked on countless wooden doors, some smooth, others carved in geometric designs; some painted blue or yellow, others plain wood weathered by sun and dusty wind. With Sayeh beside me, I waited in endless reception rooms and courtyards; thirsty, impatient, and clutching on to my hope as it shrank in my grasp, becoming weak and small, and frightened as a mouse. Over and over again I forced my stuttering tongue into action, forced words from my tight throat, forced myself to stand tall, to raise my chin, to create words as loud and clear as bird calls. I spoke with merchants and bankers, wives and serving girls, grooms and porters and caravan leaders and tinsmiths and sheep herders. I ventured into warehouses filled with trade goods: brocade fabric, barrels of wine, jars of imported olive oil, crates of precious objects wrapped protectively in wool, chests filled with embroideries and camel blankets, caskets of jewellery. I asked questions in tea shops, I chatted with stallkeepers and artisans.

  But still the merchant’s whereabouts eluded me as I laboured through the streets in the suffocating heat, following threads of rumour and gossip, of hearsay and speculation. Meanwhile, the city grew more desperate around me. The vultures darkened the sky, wheeling and turning on the updraughts or settling earthwards like a flung cloak. Disease crept from street to street in the dust; wailing and shrieks of raw grief pierced the air as children died on their bedrolls. Houses stood shuttered in the mounting heat. A woman killed her neighbour, fighting at a well over the last bucket of silty, dirty water being hauled from its dry depths. A grain thief was knifed in the back as he climbed a stable wall, seeking fodder for his horses.

  ‘Our days are numbered,’ Lila’s father intoned on the evening of the second day of my search. We were on the rooftop of the house again; Lila had asked me to play tabula but I was too tired. My head pounded as I stared over the rooftops into the valley, where the enemy campfires spluttered into brightness.

  ‘Last night,’ her father continued, ‘Ershi’s wall was breached on the western side with a narrow tunnel. The enemy was burning bitumen and sulphur crystals, creating a poisonous gas. They forced this gas through the tunnel into the street outside the hippodrome, using bellows.’

  Lila’s mother made a small moaning sound from the couch where she reclined amidst a pile of satin cushions, but her father did not pause in his pacing around the rooftop’s perimeter. Lila, seated by her mother and listlessly embroidering a tablecloth, looked up to watch his pacing.

  ‘I have made enquiries for this merchant you seek, Kalli,’ he said suddenly, and my eyes flew to his narrow face.

  ‘There is a man called Habib who claims that this merchant left the city on the evening when the army of the Middle Kingdom marched down our Golden Valley. He claims to know where this merchant lives, in a valley to our south-west, two days’ ride into the mountains. So whatever your business is with this merchant, on behalf of your father, it will have to wait until after the siege. But by then your father will have returned and can transact his own affairs.

  ‘If business will ever be done in Ershi again …’ he muttered glumly, trailing off into a dark stare that was not focused upon me, or his wife and daughter, but seemed to travel ahead of us into a time when all was lost to us.

  I turned away and began pacing on the other side of the roof.

  The merchant, Failak, had left the city!

  Such a possibility had not occurred to me. My stomach lurched and griped. I swallowed hard, tasting the bitterness of acid climb my throat. He had left! And now, only five days remained until I had to bring the golden harness to Arash, and when I failed to do this, he would send for the magi in their tall felt hats, and would offer them a pure white mare without blemish, to be sacrificed on the king’s behalf for the salvation of our stricken city.

  At some moment, when the enemy roared at our wall and our soldiers rained arrows upon them, at some moment as the small green stones of the apricots ripened and the lizards ran along the walls, my mare would die. And I would go into darkness, in a two-storey house where my mother fought for her life, and where I would stop fighting at all.

  Two days’ ride to the south-west, I thought. And I have five days left.

  ‘And now I hear too that the enemy has been seeking to enter Ershi through the tunnel that carries the main watercourse,’ continued Lila’s father, the weight of imminent disaster creasing his narrow face into deeper lines. ‘A few spies made it all the way across the aqueduct before they were discovered and killed. Now our men are knocking down walls around the great homes standing near the reservoir, and using the rubble to block off the aqueduct so that the enemy cannot use it to enter the city. The area is heavily guarded.’

  Five days left.

  Tears spilled over my cheeks and I turned my face away from Lila and her mother until my eyes were dry again.

  ‘This merchant, Habib, where does he live?’ I asked Lila’s father.

  ‘In the street running to the fire temple,’ he said. ‘But you do not need to concern yourself with matters of business when your father is away from home. This seeking of merchants is most improper.’

  ‘My honoured husband is right,’ Lila’s mother agreed from her cushions, and I gave an inward sigh and was thankful that I hadn’t shared the real reason that I wanted to find the merchant.

  ‘Young women are becoming most wild and forward during this war,’ she continued. ‘And half the servants are missing. I am thankful indeed that all my daughters are married except for Lila, who stays at home as she should. And today my cook has gone missing! And I am told that people are growing so hungry they are buying dog meat in the market, and eating the horses that return rider-less from combat!’

  ‘It’s terrible,’ I muttered, staring at Lila’s head bent demurely over her embroidery. I was quite sure that her eyeballs, under her downcast lids, were rolling. I wished that I could feel a giggle rising up in me, like a bubble in a pool, but there was nothing inside me tonight but a stone of fear.

  ‘There is a rumour in the palace,’ Lila’s mother continued. ‘I have heard that some nobles are pressuring the king to make a treaty with the Chinese, and agree to trade our horses. But he will not hear of it. And I have heard –’ her voice sank to a whisper – ‘that there are other nobles who think it is time for a different king in our city.’

  ‘Do not speak such words!’ Lila’s father said, sounding aghast. ‘You will get us all imprisoned or worse.’

  His protest was followed by a long silence during which I wondered about what had been said. Perhaps even the king would not survive this battle; perhaps his worst enemies lay within the high security of Ershi’s walls. As mine did.

  ‘The cavalry is preparing to ride out on a sortie tomorrow,’ Lila’s father said fina
lly. ‘The enemy has built siege engines and our men must destroy them before they can be moved against Ershi’s walls. You would do well to stay at home, Kallisto.’

  ‘I must go home now,’ I agreed meekly, but Lila’s parents both shot me a stern glance as they said farewell. Perhaps they were beginning to feel that I was a bad influence upon their sheltered daughter, and not as shyly docile as they’d once believed.

  I trudged down the stairs into the courtyard below. The garden lay in darkness but I felt the rasp of a cucumber vine against the back of my hand as I passed through. A bird gave a sleepy cheep of alarm in the pomegranate tree before subsiding into its feathers. A quick peek into the kitchen showed me that Fardad was sleeping. I felt my way between the mares, running my hands along their silky necks, until I found Nomad again. She was the oldest and quietest of our herd, and had experienced so many different situations that I could trust her to follow me into the dark streets without protest. I bridled her by feel, slipping the bit between her velvety lips and the headstall over her flickering ears. Without bothering with a saddle blanket, I led her out through the door, gritting my teeth as the bolts rattled in protest. Then I mounted, and rode for the house of Habib who thought that he knew where the merchant Failak lived in the mountains.

  A servant let me in, and roused his master from poring over his accounts. After listening to my plea, the merchant shook his head ponderously. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You have been misinformed. This Failak whom you seek does not come from the city of Kokand as your betrothed believes. He lives in a mountain valley … how to describe it? I shall make you a map.’

  He spread a roll of birchbark upon his desk, and I leaned over his shoulder to watch as he drew a map upon it. ‘Here is Ershi,’ he said, ‘this dark circle. Here lie the mountains.’ He drew little points of ink as uneven as waves. ‘Here is a river, I do not know its name,’ and he added a thin line of coolness to the birchbark. ‘Here lies a green valley, aligned southwestwards, two days’ ride from our walls. Here is the village, where the river begins in the high slopes, and where the merchant Failak lives.’

  I stared at the dot on the map as I thought about this man who could tell me whether or not there existed a second golden harness. The man who could help me save Swan, if I could find him, if he would trade with me.

  Taking the map with many thanks, I rolled the birchbark and slid it into the leather pouch that I wore at my belt, then mounted Nomad again. It was very late when I stumbled at last up the stair from my courtyard to the upper floor, and crept along the dark passageway, running my fingertips over the texture of tapestries and the smooth gloss of wall paintings. The sweetness of opium drifted from my mother’s room and on an impulse I turned and pushed against her door. It swung inward and I stepped to her bedside. The sesame oil was growing low in the terracotta lamp that sat on a table inlaid with tortoiseshell. It cast flickering shadows across my mother’s sunken cheeks. I laid a hand gently on one of hers where it lay slack across a satin sheet, stained now with blood and seepage from her wounds. Gently I pulled the sheet back and stared at her shoulder and left arm. They were puckered and shrunken, but I thought that some of the evil was leaving them for the wounds were not as puffy and fiery as before. My mother would have many scars if she lived to heal from the dark eye that had been cast upon her, that had loosed the leopard on to her like an enemy spear.

  I smoothed the sheets over her again, and collapsed into the chair where Marjan often sat, and laid my head against its smooth back of walnut wood where carved antelope fought with long, thin horns. My head pounded. Despair seemed to swirl around me in the room; was it only the shadows fluttering in the lamp’s dying light, or was my eyesight clouding with horror? I could feel the stiff track of dried tears on my face. Now my eyes were dry, staring into the future, the unthinkable future that I was too weak to face. The future without Swan, and perhaps without my mother.

  I clutched at the leather bag containing its tuft of leopard hair, the amulet that Berta had given to me. But I didn’t know how to wrestle with that rushing feline strength and make its power my own. Perhaps Batu could have helped me but he was missing from my life; I was sure that he wouldn’t have waited in the valley all this time for our return.

  ‘What can I do?’ I muttered. ‘Mother, wake up and tell me what to do.’

  I stared imploringly at her face but no muscle twitched.

  ‘Ershi is a trap. I must get out. I must find this man, Failak, and get the golden harness, and save Swan.’

  But I was trapped here in Ershi, for even the aqueduct and the tunnel were closed off now and guarded, and I could see no way to ride south-westwards with the wind and the sun on my face.

  ‘Swan and I are both trapped,’ I moaned in anguish, bending forward into my hands so that I didn’t have to stare at the shadows whirling through my mother’s room. ‘Trapped. We have lost our freedom.’

  Her fingers were light and dry, like dead leaves, as they touched my face. I held very still; perhaps I was dreaming. Perhaps I would awake and find this was all unreal: the enemy assault, the dying city, the threat to Swan, my weakened mother, my anguish and terror.

  ‘You … are … a warrior,’ my mother whispered.

  I stared at her between my laced fingers. Her words drifted out through her dry lips, and sweat broke out on her forehead with the effort of speaking. Her fingers fell away from my face and I clasped them on the fine wool coverlet embroidered in scarlet thread.

  ‘A warrior does not … give up her … freedom.’

  I waited, while the lamp guttered and smoked, and the stars climbed westwards, but my mother sank deep into her opium-induced dreams and said nothing more. I lay on the bed beside her with my face against her chest and listened to the light catch of her breathing, my ringed fingers threaded through hers.

  Yes, I thought, a warrior was what my mother had trained me to be. And now, at last, I would become one.

  When I awoke, the lamp had sputtered out and darkness filled the room. Faintly, far off, a rooster crowed and I knew that dawn must be seeping over the Tien Shan mountains. My mother’s breathing was even and deep. Her cheek was cool when I pressed my lips to it. Then I rose and strode softly into my room, lighting a lamp. In my wall niche stood the rectangular golden casket that my father had brought back for me from a trip to Isfahan; it had a lid decorated with golden grape leaves, and four small feet shaped like a lion’s paws. On its shining sides was engraved the white horse, Pegasus, his great wings held above his curving back. The reins hanging from his bitted mouth ran to the hands of a man, and all around them were engraved sunflowers and grasshoppers. Rotating the casket in my hand, I stared at the goddess Athena standing by a spring of water, her arms outstretched towards the white horse as she gave him as a gift to help the man slay the fire-breathing dragon.

  I hefted the casket in my hand, and wondered how its weight compared to the weight of a golden chariot harness complete with breastplate, bridle, and crupper. On the trade routes running through Ferghana, all goods were traded by weight; a thing was worth only its own weight in gold however fine or glorious its craftsmanship might be.

  The twisted golden torc that Berta had given me, with its bright blue eyes, still lay against the base of my throat. I fingered it thoughtfully before opening the jewel casket and looking inside. Here were my favourite earrings and forehead jewellery, the silver ones inlaid with lapis lazuli that I had worn to beg at Arash’s booted feet. Here were my finest rings, my armbands, my necklaces of amber and coral. My father traded in luxury goods – frankincense from Arabia, precious stones from the Mediterranean, Italian faience glassware, perfumes and ivory and marble statuettes and drinking horns of solid silver – and he had been giving me jewellery since I was a stumbling toddler. I had never considered its value, until this moment. Thank you, Father, I thought now, as the early light gleamed in the amber’s golden depths and sparked in the facet of an emerald.

  There was surely enough wealth here to tur
n a girl into a warrior; surely enough to purchase an ancient chariot harness, and the life of a white mare.

  Chapter 12

  ‘This is madness!’ Lila protested, her eyes stretching wide beneath a curtain of shining hair. ‘I am going to tell my parents and they will stop you!’

  I stepped closer to her bed and caught hold of her slender hands. ‘No! I must do this because it is the only way I can escape from the city! Come to my house after daybreak, and make sure that Fardad and the other servants will help Sayeh care for the mares and foals while I am gone. Please.’

  She stared at me for a long moment while the grey light preceding dawn lapped at the window sill. A shiver ran through her. ‘What will I tell your mother?’ she asked at last.

  ‘You don’t have to tell her anything. I have left a piece of parchment beside her bed. You know her tribe had no written language, and she has never learned to read Persian. So I have drawn pictures on the parchment so she will know I have gone out with the cavalry. And give this to Fardad to buy food for the mares.’

  I slid three golden armbands over my wrists and pressed them into Lila’s hand.

  ‘But what will you use to purchase the harness?’ she asked.

  ‘I have my jewel casket here, under my tunic,’ I explained. I patted the bulge that lay across my stomach, its weight pressed into my skin beneath the strips of linen that I had used to tie it in place. If I bent over, the corners of the golden box poked uncomfortably into me.