The Horse Road by Troon Harrison

spears through them as I gallopedpast. I also learned to hold a lasso pole in my left hand and drop its noose over the heads of other horses running beside Swan. Sometimes we ran relay races far out along the valley, on dusty tracks and through pastureland, and along the edges of vineyards as the grapes ripened in the simmering heat, Mother and the men from her stable, and I.
    At the end of these hard days, we would bathe the horses at a pool, fed from an aqueduct, that stood outside the mud brick walls of our stable. Swan’s sweat and dust would slide from her and she would gleam in the thickening purple dusk, a statue of marble in a great square in the heart of a fabulous city. Then I would bring her a bucket of grain, wheat or barley from our own fields, and inhale its sweet smell and listen to Swan’s teeth grinding as the poplar leaves trembled in the fading light. Once she had finished eating, Swan would press her muzzle to my face before drifting out to the herd, and I would turn and prepare to ride back to the city, my face burned with sun, my legs so tired they shook beneath me, the inside of my thighs chafed and sore.
    My father took great interest in the education of my brothers; they went each day to school with their pedagogues carrying their wax tablets and metal styluses, their extra cloaks in case of cold. Seated behind their wooden desks, they laboured over arithmetic for my father wanted them to be shrewd traders able to check the ledgers and accounts in thewarehouses and granaries. Outdoors, my brothers were taught wrestling and gymnastics; back at their desks again, they laboriously wrote out Greek and Latin script and learned to read Homer’s
Iliad
. But my father left my education to my mother; asking only that I occasionally wear a gown and smile at his dinner guests, and play the stringed lyre pleasantly on winter afternoons, and be able to read. Beyond this lay my mother’s realm. It was in the pastures and stable yard that my mother chose I should learn. Whilst my friend Lila and other girls sat at home working at their looms, I became dirty and dishevelled, stained with grass and dust and horsehair. Gradually, I became a stranger in the city, just as my mother was. She taught me how to choose which mare to breed to which stallion, how to blanket a racing horse in layers of felt so that it gained no weight, when to feed a horse the extra nutrition found in mutton fat. She showed me how to first saddle a green young horse; how to poultice a foot abscess; how to deliver a foal, wet and filled with the promise of joy, into a bed of fresh barley straw.
    Although my brothers competed with each other to see who could recite the longest passages of poetry, or win a wrestling match, waiting hopefully for our father’s delighted belly laugh, it was my mother’s approval that I longed for. Sometimes, she would lay her hand along my shoulder as I dismounted, and tell me that I had done well. On other evenings, myfingers cut with bowstrings, my ribs bruised from a fall over a running shoulder, it was to Swan that I went for comfort. It was Swan whose ears flickered as I mumbled my fear that I would never ride as well as my mother wished me to. It was Swan who blew into my hair and comforted me.
    Now, I was stuck here in Berta’s yurt, and Mother twitched and moaned softly in her deep sleep, wandering far away into her lost days, and the Chinese army was drawing closer, closer, closer to Ershi. To Swan, who trusted me.
    I choked on a piece of flat bread and doubled over, coughing. The yurt was a trap; surely Angra had laid his evil hand upon us. I fumbled for the leather pouch of leopard’s fur, and clenched it tightly.
    There was a shuffle of sound. Someone pounded me on the back. I swallowed the lump of flat bread, and wiped my streaming eyes. Batu swam into focus, his face creased with concern as he squatted beside me. The bruise around his right eye was darker this morning, a