The Horse Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

man with a smiling face; he said he was the Buddha and could teach men the way to enlightenment through letting go of suffering. Ha! Maybe my mare is getting enlightened here in this pool!’ He laughed, his strong teeth pale in the canyon’s shadows.
    Behind us, my mother stopped humming.
    â€˜War is suffering,’ she said. ‘War is coming into your lives. At this moment, the Chinese are planning victory around their evening fires. They are grinding their sword blades, cleaning their horse harness, filling their bellies with confidence by calling on their celestial gods.’
    A chilly breeze drifted down the canyon and I shivered and tightened the sash holding my robe together. My eyes filled with all those faces, laughing, eating, talking about winning our horses and taking them far away, where they would never be seen again, past the great Taklamakan Desert where nothing lives, nothing flies. How would Swan survive such amigration? And how would I survive without her soaring gallop, her gentle eyes set in her pale, shimmering coat, and the curve of her neck, graceful as the throat of a bird?
    I stifled a whimper. ‘I think Batu’s mare can walk now, I think we should –’
    My mother held up her hand, and I fell silent as she began to speak again. ‘Did I ever tell you, Batu, how your mother and I became sworn to help one another?’
    â€˜No,’ Batu said, for my mother rarely spoke of herself. Now she sat cross-legged on a flat rock, and stared off into time.
    â€˜In the slave markets of Tashkent,’ she began, ‘I was a girl old enough to be wed but now I had lost my people, my fine young men, my fast horses. I had lost my mother-tongue, my bride-wealth chest, my spears, my bronze mirrors, my spinning distaff. I had lost my path, and my spirit wandered alone while my body was bargained for. I wished then that I had fallen upon my spear rather than been taken by the raiders that swooped upon my village on a night without moon. To have died swiftly would have been a mercy but now, in this slave market, I must die slowly every day for I had lost the two most important things in life.’
    â€˜What things?’ I asked.
    â€˜I had lost my freedom, walking my own path, riding my own horse. And I had lost the opposite of freedom: the tie of loyalty and love that holds us likea horse at a tethering post outside its master’s yurt. A person must have one thing, or the other, to have a spirit in one’s body. To find both things is richness, something to fight for.’
    â€˜How can you have them both, when they are opposite?’ Batu asked.
    â€˜You can find that path,’ my mother answered enigmatically. ‘Now listen. In the slave market, a young man bought me, a tall broad man with a big laugh and a curling black beard. He had journeyed many miles alone looking for his own life. Like me, he had left much behind, much that could never be reclaimed. Like me, he had to learn new words for hunger, for loneliness, for home. He brought me to the city of Ershi in the beautiful valley, amongst the pomegranate trees. For two years I cooked in his kitchens, hauled water from the pools, searched the markets for sweet honey. Then the young man gave me my freedom; he told me to choose whether to return to the plains of my people, or whether to stay and marry him.’
    Behind my mother’s shoulders, our horses went on cropping the sparse vegetation along the cliff base.
    â€˜I said that I could not live without horses because they were my freedom,’ continued my mother, ‘and that without them, I would remain a slave. So the young merchant bought me a Persian stallion and mare, and gave me my freedom, and married me.
    â€˜When I was a young mother, with two boys bornand a daughter still curled in my belly – you, Kallisto – a nomad woman came begging at the gate of our outer courtyard. She was without any jewellery, her cloak was