The Horse Road Read Free

leg. See?’
    I squatted beside him and ran my hand down the mare’s left hind leg, feeling the heat and the swelling in the flesh above the fetlock joint.
    â€˜So now we’re both riding in dust,’ Batu said with a rueful grin. ‘I’m sorry, Kalli. I should have ridden Rain instead.’
    â€˜It doesn’t matter,’ I replied, trying to feel my friend’s worry and even the pain that perhaps throbbed in the mare’s leg; trying to ignore the heavy lump of disappointment that filled my stomach. I straightened, stared at the mare’s hanging head, and at Gryphon’s neck where the sweat was drying and leaving his coat stiff and salty. It wasn’t fair! Now Gryphon had lost his chance to win, even though he was the fastest horse I knew! This might be the lastyear that I raced. Perhaps at this moon next summer, I would be behind walls in Ershi, smelling mountains far off in the wind like a horse that tries to smell its way to water across a desert.
    I kicked at a stone in the track, and fought against the fresh sting in my eyes.
    â€˜Kalli,’ Batu said kindly. I glanced up into his dark, angled eyes; the bruise a blue stain like spilled water. His wide brown face, framed by his mane of long hair, was as familiar as my own for I had known him all my life. Now his forehead was wrinkled in a worried frown.
    I was suddenly ashamed of being such a child. ‘It’s fine,’ I reassured him, mustering a smile. ‘I wanted a summer walk. I love dust!’
    Batu’s face broke into his flashing grin, then suddenly his gaze sharpened on something above me. I swivelled to look upwards. High against the light, a golden eagle soared on the mountain wind. The shadow of its wide wings slid across us and passed on; I glimpsed the cruel curve of its yellow beak, the glint of its eye. It wheeled in against the face of the mountain, and swooped around a pinnacle of grey rock to disappear from view. Batu breathed in sharply, like an excited horse.
    â€˜Maybe there’s a nest there!’ he cried, the race forgotten. His father was a white bone chief, a fearless hunter who rode a dark horse and carried an eagle on a leather gauntlet upon one arm. Together,man and eagle hunted for rabbits to cook, or for the foxes that attacked the nomads’ herds of sheep. Batu had told me that a trained eagle might even fight the great grey wolves that roamed like vengeful ghosts. The eagle, he said, flew right at their eyes.
    â€˜I must climb up and see if there’s a nest!’ Batu said. ‘Then I can return here another day and capture an eaglet! It is time, Kalli, for me to train an eagle of my own! Do you want to climb with me?’
    I looked where Batu gestured and saw that a narrow ravine led up the side of the mountain to a ridgeline that lay between two peaks. Where the ravine and the ridgeline merged, there was a dip like the curve in a horse’s back, the place where you lay a saddle.
    â€˜From there, we might be able to see around the rock outcropping into the nest!’ Batu said. ‘Also from that ridge, you can see down into a large valley, where the track from Osh runs out of the mountains into the Ferghana Valley. The merchant caravans travel eastwards on that track towards the great Taklamakan Desert where nothing lives. Come on, Kalli!’
    â€˜We will be late returning to camp!’ I protested. ‘My mother might worry.’
    â€˜She is drinking
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with the other women, and forgetting her troubles,’ Batu said, flashing another grin. He caught me by the arm and tugged. ‘Come on! Help me find my eagle!’
    Batu’s excitement was contagious; suddenly I wanted to see if the eagle had landed on a pile ofsticks larger across than a chariot wheel, and to peer down into a valley where traders passed by with their long strings of donkeys, yaks, horses and two-humped camels.
    And if my mother was drinking
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, the