The Horse Road by Troon Harrison Read Free Book Online Page B

Sunlight gleamed on the curve of Batu’s bow, the scales sewn on his helmet. I laid my face against Gryphon’s side and pressed my cheek into his golden hair, and cried in silence as Batu and Rain moved away amongst the yurts, assembling with the other warriors around an altar platform for their god of war. I squeezed my eyes shut as their shaman’s chanting drifted through the valley, as the sheep bleated and the foals gambolled on their skinny legs. Everything was shining in the sun; everything inside my eyelids was black as the belly of a great storm.
    Gryphon’s side moved against my face; my feet moved of their own accord as I kept step with my grazing stallion. Finally I straightened and opened my eyes. The group of warriors was already far down the valley, cresting a swell of the land, a thin plume of dust rising from it. I waited until the last rider dropped from view, then dragged my heavy legs back to Berta’s yurt and stumbled inside. My mother’s eyes were still closed. I squatted beside her cot, with my back against a loom, but her eyelids didn’t flicker. I held my ear to her face, listening anxiously to her shallow, light breathing.
    Please
, my thoughts urged,
oh please, Mother, wake up! Be strong again! We must ride after the warriors; we must save our horses!
    My calf muscles began to cramp and I stood up slowly to stretch, then sat cross-legged by the fire. A pan held a broth of mutton, cold now and skimmed over with fat. Berta had given it to me last night but I had been too tired to eat. Now the feast delicacy that she had saved, the sheep’s eyeballs, were pale and puckered. I pushed the pan further away and began listlessly chewing a piece of flat bread that lay on a stone near the fire. The bread formed lumps in my throat.
    Swan shimmered in the shadows of the yurt, a ghost mare, as precious as my own heartbeat. As Berta had reminded me, Swan had been born in the summer of my birth, a foal that made people cry out with surprise and delight; a foal that skittered and drifted across the pastures like down from the breast of a wild swan, light and glimmering. She had matured into a filly with legs so long, so fine, that she seemed all white bone as she ran through the alfalfa, fast and pale as Pegasus in my father’s tales. My mother tied me on to her back; I fell asleep at night to the memory of her hoof beats and woke in the morning light to be carried into her pasture again.
    As we grew older, my mother began to train us in the nomad way; we spent long hours under mymother’s steady gaze, straining to pay attention to her husky commands. Over and over we practised breaking smoothly from walk into trot, from trot into canter, into flowing gallop, into sudden skidding stops. We wheeled through shadows and flowers like two birds changing direction in mid-air. By the time we were seven summers old we could thread amongst poles hammered into the ground as though we were one creature, one long streak of lightning forking between a forest to shoot at last towards the stable door where my mother stood, appraising our progress. My mother taught me to ride without reins, to guide Swan with the pressure of my knees on her pearly sides, to send her one way and then another even at a gallop, shifting beneath me like a sandbank shifting in a spring flood.
    Then I learned to shoot arrows, twisting backwards from the waist, tightening the bowstring against my shoulder, forgetting that I was even mounted on a cantering horse as my eyes focused on the straw target, and my fingers notched the arrow against the bow’s taut curve. Sometimes Mother would throw a silver coin, minted with the faces of Alexander the Great or Eucratides, upon the dust of our training ground. I would gallop past it, time after time, bending lower and lower over my mare’s slippery ribs as I tried to scoop the coin from the ground. On other days, Mother hung rawhide loops from poles and I hurled