The other nine horses he would lead out to the common water trough to drink. She was a bay mare, as fleet as a gazelle, with eyes that studied him in whatever he did. There was one of the ten horses to whom Agba had lost his heart. Best of all, he wheeled the whole string into the courtyard at one time for their exercise. He fed and watered them and polished their coats and cleaned their stalls. Of the twelve thousand horses in the Sultan’s stables, Agba had charge of ten. And he had cuffed Agba on the head when the boy showed his disapproval. “ It is the order of the Sultan! ” the Signor had announced to the horseboys. But when Signor Achmet, Chief of the Grooms, commanded that the horses, too, observe the fast, Agba’s dark eyes smouldered with anger. The boy Agba had not minded the fast for himself. For this was the sacred month of Ramadan when, day after day, all faithful Mohammedans neither eat nor drink from the dawn before sunrise until the moment after sunset.
He had tried not to sniff the rich, warm fragrance of ripening pomegranates. He had not even tasted the jujubes tucked in his turban nor the enormous purple grapes that spilled over the palace wall into the stable yard. He was waiting for dusk to fall.Īll day long he had eaten nothing.
IN THE northwestern slice of Africa known as Morocco, a horseboy stood, with broom in hand, in the vast courtyard of the royal stables of the Sultan.
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