‘Don’t – d-don’t hurt m-me!’ I croaked as the pressure was released over my mouth. My eyes strained to see the attacker who sat on me, pinning me in place, but he was only the silhouette of a wild-haired man against the face of the moon.
‘The starry sky at night –’ my assailant said roughly, in a Turkic tongue.
My mind, slow and dragging with fatigue, reeled in amazement. This was the first half of a phrase that Batu and I had used as a password, for many years, when we played at bandits and warriors in the summer grasslands.
Dry with fear, my tongue stuck in the roof of my mouth. My assailant shook my head, one hand tight in my plaited hair, and I felt the point of the knife pierce my skin. A convulsion of fear twisted through me so that I writhed on the gravel.
‘The starry sky at night –’ he repeated.
‘– is a b-black horse decorated with pearls,’ I replied.
The man grunted in surprise. His grip on my hair eased slightly but the knife was steady at my throat and I could feel the warmth of blood as it trickled across my collar bone. ‘What comes next?’ he demanded.
‘The r-rays of the sun in the afternoon –’
‘– are the tail hairs of a white horse,’ he finished. ‘Who are you and what are you doing here?’
‘I am the lady Kallisto of the House of Iona in Ershi, and I am searching for a tribesman named Batu, from the clan of the Fierce Eagles.’
The man gave another grunt of surprise, and the pressure of the knife blade eased at last. I lay very still, listening to the slight shift of gravel as footsteps approached. ‘Catch the horse,’ my assailant said over his shoulder, and I heard Mountain snorting. When my assailant stood up at last, a dull pain throbbed along the backs of my legs and in my ribs. ‘Kneel,’ the man said, and I obeyed, and held still while he tied my wrists behind my back with leather thongs. Then he prodded me with the hilt of his dagger. ‘Stand up, and walk.’
The valley closed in around us as we moved higher, its steep sides cloaked in a dense forest, and the rush of water growing louder. I stumbled between the two men, my legs weak as those of a newborn foal. The white, spotted blanket across Mountain’s quarters was a dull gleam behind us. My nostrils twitched, catching at a drift of woodsmoke, and abruptly my assailant shoved me around an outcrop of rock into a narrow ravine that arrowed through the mountain flank to meet the main valley. The mouth of a cave glowed like a bowl in a potter’s kiln, and the flicker of campfire light danced on the rocky ceiling. At our approach, the men seated around the burning logs looked up, their hands moving to the hilts of their daggers, their hawk noses casting shadows over their thick moustaches and uncombed black beards. The boy turning the body of a quail spitted upon a spear gazed at me for a long, calm heartbeat. I saw the flames reflected in the pupils of his black eyes.
‘It is a good thing that you practised the password for so many years,’ he said gravely, his face perfectly still. Then it split open in his wild, delighted, flashing grin, and the firelight licked the high slope of his cheekbones.
‘Batu!’ I fell forward into the cave, my legs giving way, and he leaped to his feet to catch me. I smelled the horses, smoke, and mossy forest scents in his orange tunic of padded Indian cotton. His hair hung down across my face, and it smelled like wind and mountain sunshine. A sob of exhaustion shook me as he kissed my cheek, and undid the thongs that chafed my wrists.
‘Sit by the fire,’ he said in the voice he used for tending injured horses, and he lowered me on to a warm rock as the other men shifted to make room. Batu pulled the spear from the flames, and used his dagger to slice pieces of moist meat from the golden and charred body of the quail; he gouged a stuffing of millet and wild chives from inside its small body cavity, and heaped all the food on a copper plate. The steam rose into my nostrils and I thought that I had never before smelled anything as delicious. My mouth filled with saliva and I moulded the millet into a ball with my fingers and ate it, burning my tongue in my haste. I ate and ate while Batu spitted the body of a second bird and turned it slowly over the logs, waiting until I was ready to talk. At last, I had emptied my plate twice, and he handed me a mug of wild mint tea sweetened with mountain honey.
‘You will be safe now,’ he said reassuringly. I ducked my head, suddenly shy beneath the gaze of so many wild strangers, but the men were paying little attention to me. They moved around the cave; one was sharpening a dagger against a whetstone, the rhythmic rasp blending with the crackle of burning logs. Another man held a guitar and began to play, running a bow across the two strings of horsehair.
‘Who are all these people? What are you d-doing here? Where are the two-year-old mares?’
Batu grinned triumphantly. ‘The mares are with my mother’s herd. I waited four days for you, but then I heard from a farmer in the valley that the enemy had laid siege to Ershi and that no one could escape. I knew, when you didn’t come back, that you were trapped inside. So I drove the mares to my mother’s camp. Then I returned here, thinking you might escape after all. See, I left you a mark in case you found your way here some day when I was not around.’
I followed the line of his gesturing arm and saw, inscribed upon the rock wall of the cave, perhaps with the point of a dagger, the rough drawing of an eagle, a mare, and a stallion. The horses looked as though they were galloping joyfully across the rock, striated with ochre and orange. Their tails flew out behind them.
‘Then,’ Batu continued, ‘I began to meet other men who had not got inside Ershi before it was sealed off; tribesmen, and farmers from the valley. We have formed a raiding band here in the mountains, and we ride out and strike the edges of the enemy encampment swiftly at night, then melt back into the shadows. We destroy their supply lines, and burn their tents; we cut the tracing on the harnesses, and undo the lynchpins in their wagon wheels and throw them into the river!’
Batu’s face gleamed with a mischievous excitement that I knew well. He had looked the same way when we were eight years old and had, on a wager, managed to steal two hound puppies from another tribe’s dog at a summer festival, and play with them for an afternoon before being caught.
‘And Gryphon, is he recovered from his leopard injuries? Where is he?’ I asked eagerly.
‘We have a small band of horses, pasturing on the lower slopes of this valley, and guarded at all times by two men. They are mainly workhorses from the farms, that are more used to threshing grain and pulling ploughs than being ridden. Rain is with them, and Gryphon too. His wounds have knitted back together. I thought that if you came here you might need him. No one else can ride him; he is loyal only to you and none of us can even catch him.’
I smiled. ‘He has never liked strangers. And I do need him.’ I described Swan’s fate, and my urgent mission to bring back the golden harness so that I could save her. Batu’s face darkened with anger as he listened. From one of my leather pouches, I pulled the parchment map and Batu held it open in the firelight, peering at its squiggly lines of ink.
‘You must sleep for a few hours,’ he commanded, ‘and then we will ride for this village. Along the way, you can tell me how you managed to escape from Ershi. Here, use this bedroll.’
I lay on the lumpy mattress stuffed with sedges and Batu threw a sheepskin over me. The firelight played and danced inside my closed eyelids, and the quail meat warmed my belly, and the rock wall of the cave was rough and hard against my spine. I thought of the horses there, galloping for ever on their orange legs, and a smile slackened my mouth. When I opened my eyes a slit, Batu was sitting cross-legged by the fire, scowling as he used marmot fat to oil a bridle’s leather straps. Gryphon’s bridle, I thought, his bridle with the decoration of blue clay beads, gleaming like drops of water in the cave.
‘I have brought another horse for your herd, an appaloosa,’ I said, and Batu’s eyes lit up for, like all the nomads, he loved a colourful horse. I watched him for a little longer, scowling again, rubbing at Gryphon’s bridle, and then my eyes drifted shut in sleep.
It was not yet dawn when Batu roused me, shaking my shoulders. Outside the cave the moon was sliding over the western mountains, and the water of the stream was pale as moth wings as it crashed downhill. Batu and I slipped along a faint track to the horse herd, and muttered the password to the men guarding it.
My heart bounded with excitement. ‘Gryphon, Gryphon!’ I called softly, and gave the special whistle, like a bird’s call, that I used to summon him when he was far out in my mother’s pastures, grazing the alfalfa and shimmering like a flung coin. Now my eyes scanned the slope, flitting across the dark bodies of horses as they rustled through the shrubs and grass. Twigs broke, teeth ground together. The smell of the herd rose around me, and I saw the pale blanket of the appaloosa as he passed by, following a chestnut mare. Something moved behind my shoulder. Warm breath gusted on to my neck. Whiskers tickled me. I felt his presence coiled like a whip, his muscles tensed to spring away, spooked in the strange half-light. Very slowly, I turned around.
‘Gryphon,’ I whispered, and he bent his head, pressing his muzzle into my open hand. My magnificent stallion, flame and smoke. His black legs, long, hard, dry. His golden chest, and his high-set neck. His coat sleek as rare Chinese silk beneath my fingers. I laid my face against him and let his heat soak into my aching muscles. ‘I am so glad to find you,’ I whispered. ‘I am so glad you are safe.’
I ran my hands over his quarters, feeling the lines where the leopard claws had raked him; the skin in those lines was knotted, but cool and firm, and hair was beginning to grow over them. Batu had been right; my stallion would carry white scars in his coat for the rest of his life, in a pattern like a spider’s web netted with morning dew, or like foam upon a fast river. ‘It only makes you more beautiful,’ I comforted him, holding up the bridle.
Gryphon slipped his muzzle between the supple oiled straps, and I fastened the cheek piece on the near side with the buckle of bone, and smoothed his forelock between his narrow ears. He snorted softly with excitement as I laid the blanket, which Batu had given me, across his back and smoothed it straight and flat. Then I led him to a rock, and vaulted on, and he bounded across the slope, snatching at the bit and longing to gallop.
Daylight met us at the mouth of the valley, and we turned away from it and rode with its rising warmth upon our shoulders. Gradually the aches and bruises in my body softened, and Batu and I ate dried dates and flat bread as we rode, and I told him how I had come out of Ershi’s south gate with a cavalry sortie. He flashed me a delighted glance, and laughed aloud. Then we let the horses ease into a steady trot on a loose rein, and Gryphon swept along, his shadow swooping across the grass as fast as the flight of a bird, his hard hooves striking the ground rhythmically, his mane lifting in the breeze. I turned my face to the blue sky and echoed Batu’s laughter.
We rode through the foothills all day, following the map, and occasionally asking directions from a sheep herder or a merchant caravan. Despite the siege of Ershi, trade was continuing between Samarkand and India, and we passed heavily laden camels and strings of donkeys. By evening, we had left the Golden Valley behind and were heading into the deep shadows of high ridges. We rode until the moon began to climb the sky, and then we stopped at an isolated farm and asked for shelter. Leaving the horses fed and watered in the stable, we entered the one-storey, mud house and sat on the floor while our host brewed tea, and his wife laid the tablecloth upon the faded carpets.
‘Do you know of this village?’ Batu asked, showing our host the map. The man studied it for a moment, and then nodded once, sharply. A cloud seemed to pass across his face.
‘Do you know this man we seek, a merchant called Failak who might have once come from Kokand?’ Batu persisted.
Our host nodded again, and a troubled frown creased his forehead beneath his skullcap. He took a long sip of his tea.
‘This man Failak came from the south,’ he said. ‘He is not from Kokand.’
‘But he does live in this village now, this village on our map?’
The man took another long sip of tea and seemed to ponder Batu’s question, his deep eyes hooded under his shaggy brows. At last he spoke with a strange reluctance. ‘This man Failak has taken over the village you seek. Or so I have heard. He drove the villagers away or enslaved them, in the spring when the snow melted in the high passes. He and his people came from deep in the Pamir mountains. He wanted the turquoise mine that lies on the edge of the village. Now he controls the mine, and the mountain pass, and all the trade in that area.’
Alarm shivered through me; when my gaze flew to Batu, I saw it mirrored in his eyes.
‘This man Failak is a warlord,’ Batu said softly, and our host nodded.
‘His band has taken over the summer pastures around the village, and the tribe that had used them for many generations has been driven eastwards, and been dispersed; their flocks starved without spring grass. This village is a very bad place for you to go seeking anyone, especially this man calling himself Failak, though he is not a Persian but a man of the tribes living in the mountains. You must turn back, and ride home in the morning.’
At the doorway, three small children stared at me with serious, round faces, smooth as river stones. Their bright eyes took in every detail of my hair and clothing until their mother shooed them away and brought platters of food to set upon the embroidered cloth. Batu and I chewed roasted hare in silence. A warlord, I kept thinking. A warlord! The dark meat stuck in my throat.
In the morning, in the stable, I smoothed my hand across Gryphon’s shoulders. ‘Will you still come with me?’ I asked Batu in a small voice.
‘I have sworn to be your companion in this war, and we will find Failak together by nightfall,’ he replied, leaning his shoulder against Rain, his jaw set in a determined line and his eyes a steady, fierce gleam in the dim light. ‘I am not afraid, Kalli.’
We rode on whilst our host and his wife, with the three small children pressing against their trousers, stood in their doorway and watched us leave, their faces long and frightened between their black hair and earrings. Gryphon and Rain were fresh after their night confined to a stable, and trotted hour after hour until at last the track grew too steep and narrow and they were forced to walk. The thin air sang in my ears. Beneath us, long ridgelines and rocky scree fell away in vast expanses of grass and stunted junipers. The track was marked now with piles of curved ibex horns and the bleached skulls of mountain rams; in winter, these cairns of bone would mark the way for travellers in the drifting snow. We skirted a canyon, and came at last down the slope from a high pass, and saw a village of one-storey homes clinging to the far side of a valley in a jumble of stone terraces. Blankets, draped over a rope to dry, snapped in gusts of cold wind. The shadows were purple and deep as we rode towards the village, skirting a herd of shaggy yaks. I felt the village’s many windows staring down at us like eyes. My skin crawled.
A warlord, I thought.
‘You must turn back and ride home,’ said the voice of our host.
Swan, Swan. I am doing this for you.
I pressed my lips in a tight line and rode on, silent behind Batu, although my knuckles were white on the reins. The leather-clad men, mounted on shaggy ponies, seemed to appear on the wind like snowflakes, riding along on each side of us and to our rear, cutting off our escape. Rough dogs with glinting eyes and open mouths trotted beside the men.
‘Ignore them,’ Batu muttered ahead of me, and I stared at Rain’s black and white quarters, and willed myself to keep moving towards the houses of that village, built like a fortress in the side of the mountain.
The horses waded through a rushing stream, and then Batu reined in, and turned to me. ‘We should walk from here,’ he said, and I nodded; it was a sign of respect to lead one’s horse towards a nobleman and, in the tribes, if you failed to show this respect to a chief, you might lose your horse.
We walked, my legs stiff and tense, and with our mounted guard drawing closer, flushing us into the village like a hunting party flushing pheasant from the grass. I could hear the dogs panting. Gryphon snorted gustily, uneasily, his ears laid back and eyes rolling. I laid my palm upon his withers, and then clasped the amulet of leopard hair, in its bag of golden leather, lying at the base of my throat, below where the knife had nicked me the previous night.
We were halted at the edge of the village, where the track led into the first dusty alley, and faces – their cheeks glazed dark with sun and wind – peered out from doorways with sills painted bright blue. ‘We seek the honourable Failak on a matter of business!’ Batu cried clearly, standing very tall, to the man who had halted us, his battleaxe held horizontally to block the street.
‘Give me your names, and wait,’ the man commanded. He disappeared up the street with long strides, and our mounted guard closed in around us, eyeing us with suspicion and muttering to each other in their harsh, foreign tongue. I bent my head, staring at the ragged hem of my oldest tunic of brown linen. I remembered the days I’d worn it before, long ago before the war; I had worn it to train Gryphon, a hot-blooded colt, eager to run. Now, beneath the tunic, my jewel casket was a hard, heavy rectangle.
I turned my thoughts quickly away from it, as though the men guarding us might follow the direction of my thoughts and strip me of my wealth before I ever reached the warlord.
The hooves of the shaggy horses stamped and shuffled restlessly in my line of vision; at last, the boots of the man with the axe reappeared.
‘Give me your weapons,’ he demanded, and a terrible chill slid over me. My eyes flew to Batu’s face; it was set in proud lines, but he unbuckled his dagger from his belt and held it out stiffly, followed by his quiver and bow. After I had done the same, the men took the reins of our horses and led them away to a stable. We walked on, feeling naked, and climbing upwards past the houses’ flat roofs, and women toiling in patches of garden surrounded by stones.
At the top of the village, we came into a flat space before a high wall, beyond which rose the facade of a three-storey house with wooden beams, and a watchtower reached by a ladder of poles. In the midst of this dusty flat space, a man stood waiting for us, a tall pillar of brilliance. Although I was too shy to steal more than quick glances at him, I saw that he was clad in a brocade tunic of azure blue, trimmed with the costly fur of the black sable and held with a belt encrusted with turquoise stones. His cloak of black sable hung elegantly over his shoulders, and his trousers were stuffed into knee-high boots of four different colours of leather. I noted, in my quick glances, that everything he wore was clean and perfectly cut, and richly embroidered. His hands, clasped loosely before him, were as hard and lean as talons, and rings of turquoise flashed on every finger. His face too was lean and smooth above his oiled beard, and his hair was a cascade of perfectly curled waves. In the streets of Kokand, merchants and artisans, and even wealthy traders, would have made way for him.
The earring in one of his ears glinted in the setting sun as he considered us intently for a long moment and, although his face remained impassive, his eyes were sharp points of interest. Then a muscle twitched at one corner of his mouth, as though he might smile.
Perhaps he is not a warlord after all, I thought, but merely a rich trader who prefers not to live in the city. He does not seem like the leader of a bandit horde.
‘The honourable lady Kallisto,’ he said at last. ‘What a great and most unexpected pleasure to welcome you here. I know your father; we have traded together in the past. Perfume, I believe it was, that I obtained from him. And coral beads.’
His voice took me by as much surprise as his appearance already had, for it was mild and soft. A glimmer of hope rose in me and I flashed a glance at Batu but his face remained set in stiff lines. Perhaps all would be well now, I thought, and by tomorrow we could ride home. We must ride home tomorrow! There were only two days left of the seven days that Arash had granted me to bring the treasure and save Swan.
‘My guests, you look weary. You shall dine with me, and only later need you state your business. Come.’
Failak’s sable cloak swung as he turned to a door in the wall; we followed him through it. Inside, on the second floor of the house, I stared in wonder at the furnishings: the tapestries and thick knotted carpets, the couches with satin bolsters, the stools of inlaid wood. A glance out of a window showed me only bleak slopes dotted with yaks, and I heard the cold wind gusting against the wooden poles of the ladder leaning against the watchtower.
We ate shortly, our host sprawled on a striped divan, and guards posted at the doors. Women carried in dishes of chased silver, heaped with rice and braised lamb in a creamy sauce flavoured with cumin. Over the table’s low surface, Failak watched us with the same intent, expectant look with which he’d considered us outside. It was the expression that a cat wears, waiting for a mouse to venture from its burrow. He wiped his ringed fingers fastidiously clean on a linen cloth, and picked his teeth with the point of a very narrow dagger, its handle encrusted with pearls and turquoise.
‘And what is it?’ he asked softly at last. ‘This matter of business?’
Batu stared at me, his eyes sending me strength, as I struggled to find my voice. ‘It’s about – about a g-golden harness,’ I stuttered. Failak bent his head encouragingly towards me, his gaze impassive now, and sipped wine from his golden drinking horn as I explained how I knew about the harness in Ershi that had been given to Arash’s father after a lion hunt, and then promised to a prince, and finally lost in a drunken wager. ‘Is there – is there another harness?’ I dared to ask.
Failak ran his hand down the drinking horn’s golden curve, as though he were stroking a pet. ‘I really don’t know if there is another harness,’ he replied. ‘Just after my men found the first one, I was called away on a matter of urgency, and I have only returned home within the last few days. Matters to do with the war, and involving business ventures, detained me. So now I too am anxious as to whether there is a second such golden harness. Shall we ride out and search in the morning?’
‘Ride where?’ I asked.
‘To the tombs,’ he said. ‘Where else do you think that such an ancient treasure could have come from? There are burial chambers all along the ridge behind us, where the nomadic peoples – who used to pasture here – once buried their dead. You are not afraid of ghosts, are you?’
And he smiled at me in the lamplight, a slow smooth stretching of his lips like a cat stretching after the mouse has come out of its burrow at last, and been devoured.