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

of sound rising from the road. Ahead of me, Grasshopper and Rain leaped across a drainage ditch filled with still water, and were swallowed into the road’s confusion. I collected Gryphon under me, felt his muscles bunch, felt the moment that he became airborne in a soaring leap over the green water. His hard black hooves thuddedon to the edge of the road, beside a camel kneeling in the dirt. A man was frantically tightening the ropes that held a bundle of goods upon the camel’s shaggy, two-humped back. The beast roared in shrill complaint. Gryphon dodged around it, while I stared wide-eyed at the melee of people fighting their way both northwards and southwards.
    Gryphon trotted past whole caravans of camels, their bells clanging. He dodged a string of donkeys, roped one behind the other and almost invisible under bales of trade goods, trotting with bent heads. Their pale muzzles shone like clam shells. Men shouted orders, women and children rushed along with robes and tunics flapping, some astride horses and asses, some seated in chariots whose spokes whirled brightly, others jolting in wagons. Gryphon leaped and plunged beneath me as a heavy whip cracked over the backs of oxen straining at a wagon loaded with grain.
    A trio of small children, their hands linked together, ran screaming ahead of us and I reined Gryphon in sharply and pulled his head sideways, dragging him across the road before his hammering front hooves could knock down the fleeing bodies. He was fighting his curb chain again, trying to break into his smooth canter that would carry us swiftly through this panicked crowd. Sometimes I caught a flash of my mother’s pale face, bent over Grasshopper’s neck, or of Batu’s scale-covered helmet as they rode along.
    â€˜The merchants are fleeing the city!’ Batu cried once, as we trotted closer together. We dodged rich men in embroidered gowns, and camel drivers running barefoot. The caravans were leaving our city, trying to avoid being trapped there by the approaching army, trying to get their trade goods safely away before Ershi fell into enemy control. Meanwhile, the valley’s farmers were abandoning their peaceful villages to crowd towards the safety of Ershi’s walls, trying to get their wives and children, their goats and sheep, behind the sandy battlements. But, I wondered, was the city a place of safety, as the villagers believed, or was it a trap that the merchants were wise to flee? I felt a shiver of panic at the thought of being held inside those high walls; my greatest fear was always of entrapment. My friend Lila owned a pair of finches that sang sweetly, hanging in their cage in a shaft of sunlight in the house next door to my father’s, but I hated the sight of their folded wings that never lifted into blue sky.
    We are only going to fetch our horses, I reminded myself. Soon we will be back in the mountains again, free and safe.
    The fear that eddied through the crowd had taken hold of Gryphon, and he no longer paid attention to my voice or to the tight pull of the curb.
    â€˜I can’t hold him!’ I shouted to Batu; he was over to my right, half obscured by dust and a flock of sheep being driven by tribesmen in woolly astrakhan hats.
    â€˜We’ll meet at the farm!’ Batu yelled back, coughing. ‘Where’s our wagon?’ I glanced over my shoulder but could see no sign of it in the pressing throng. Perhaps the servants were still searching for some place where they could cross the drainage ditch.
    â€˜I don’t know! Try and stay near my mother!’
    A herd of horses rushed up behind me, their eyes rolling white, their nostrils flaring, and Gryphon broke into a canter. The horses swept us along ahead of them; we were like a leaf riding on a spring flood. Fields of pea vines, and of melon plants, flashed past, and we clattered through the narrow streets of a village where people threw bundles of clothing, and pots and pans, out