The Horse Road by Troon Harrison Page A

imagine how you could escape if you were stuck inside.
    People pressed against my legs. Horses snorted and gave shrill neighs of fear. Grasshopper hopped on the spot, nervous and edgy; she didn’t like the feelof being hemmed in. A clotted pool of people and wagons was jammed against the gate entrance, and along the base of the wall beneath the walnuts.
    â€˜Hurry, hurry,’ I muttered under my breath, but my mother heard me.
    â€˜Slide off and run ahead,’ she said. ‘Start getting the horses ready to leave. I will join you soon.’
    My feet hit the ground with a thud and I pushed my way into the crowd, feeling as though I were suffocating as bodies and animals squeezed tightly against me. I could see nothing except what was right before my eyes: a woman’s gauzy veil, an embroidered tunic, a horse’s tail. I caught hold of it, in danger of being swept off my feet and dragged underneath by the crowd. I knew the horse was too confined to kick me, although I heard it give a nervous snort. ‘Steady, steady,’ I said to it and it quietened, although its rider never even knew I was there. Presently I spotted an opening in the crowd, darted into it, clenched my jaw and struggled on towards the east gate.
    Swan, oh, Swan!
I cried in my thoughts.
Wait, I am coming for you! Trust me!
    She will be confused and afraid
, I thought;
she will wonder what is happening to her, why she is penned up in this noisy, crowded city. She will be happy again though when we reach the valley, when she wades into the cool water.
I imagined the reflection of her white face in the river’s surface, and the way that waterdroplets would spill from her lips. I imagined the long, kind, considering gaze she would give me.
    Now I was jostling into the deep shadow lying directly beneath the soaring wall.
    I craned my neck, watching doves wheel above the waving treetops and the sandy battlements. The stalls of tea sellers were adrift in the tide of people that crushed towards the gate’s high entrance. Then I was under the wall itself, being swept along like a stone grinding through a canyon. Panic tightened around my ribs, and I struggled to breathe. All around me in the long gateway rose a babble of tongues: Turkic and Persian, Greek, Bactrian, Mongol, Sogdian, Kushan, Indian, and others that I couldn’t recognise, for traders entered our city from many far places. In any tongue, the language of fear sounded the same.
    Now I burst through the other side of the gate, squinting in the sunlight, and the crush of the crowd eased. I drew a ragged gasp and began to run, dodging a wagon heaped high with hay, freshly cut with a scythe. The caravanserai lay to my right, where travellers found lodgings for themselves and stabling for their animals. I skirted the water fountain built against the entrance, fed by an underground spring. The great yard was filling with cavalry units; I glimpsed their masses of shields and spears, their curved bows and shining scale armour. Perhaps Batu’s father was in there with his men, and so perhaps were my mother’s horsemen and my father’s servants,all called on to fulfil their duty to the king and to fight for our city. And perhaps some of our horses were there too, our geldings harnessed in their bright blankets, their decorated bridles. I hoped that there was enough horse armour to keep them all safe.
    I took a short cut through a warren of narrow streets where laundry dried on ropes and women shrieked. I struggled across a vast open marketplace; it seemed to stretch on endlessly. The hammering of the tin and coppersmiths was submerged in the din that roared through the entire city.
    Swan, Swan!
I cried longingly.
    I dodged piles of spices from Arabia; skirted a pile of early melons; pounded past a kite-maker’s stall festooned with bright ribbons of cloth.
    Now I was running slightly uphill along a broad street where merchants’ houses basked in the sun behind