The Horses of Pazyryk
All those long black winter afternoons, I hid in the belly of the museum surrounded by the ghosts of horses screaming. Their golden bridle ornaments shone in the greenish light, their leather death masks crowned with spreading horns and staring down at me through empty eyes. It wasn’t a comforting place to be, but everywhere else was worse.
Sergei had stolen my new winter coat—said a hairy little ape like me didn’t need it. I was freezing in the January dark, afraid of going home to face my grandfather’s wrath and, worse even than that, my father’s disappointment. So I came to the museum because they let schoolchildren in free, even schoolchildren with dark eyes, black hair, and no coat, although they insisted on running me over with a metal detector.
I paced the upstairs galleries a while, rubbing my hands under the warm light of old Dutch paintings. But the crowds made me anxious—the pictures too—so I made my way downstairs, to the treasures of the dead. To the dead themselves.
As I came to the door marked “Pazyryk Burials,” I heard the hooves, a thousand drums beating in crazy time. Whinnies that rose like approaching sirens and ended in terrified shrieks. My first thought was to run, but my second thought was where? So I stayed, fascinated, and at last walked shaky-legged into the center of the room.
The horses and their dead masters’ hoard were a sensation once, but that day they seemed forgotten. There was no old lady sitting on a folding chair to ask why I stood so long stock still; to, creaking, rise and shake a knotty finger at me when I drew too close to the dark wood of the corner tomb and the funeral cart—when I pressed my face to the glass above the sheet of tattooed skin from a man dead before Christ was born: monsters dancing in an inky circle centimeters from my eyes.
No one to hear me when I began to talk to the horses.
“Shhh,” I told them. “Shhh.” I reached out and made a gesture in the air, what I thought it would be like to soothe a horse. “Shhh, shhh. Everything’s all right. Hush.” And I felt—I really felt—their trembling flanks, their hot breath. “Hush.”
Maybe they calmed for me, a little. Or maybe I just got used to the noise. I kept whispering, and slowly the little comforting sounds I made became words. Then I was speaking to them—things I had not told a living soul—in that chilly green-lit room where at least I wasn’t afraid alone.
***
I stayed till the museum closed, and when I got home at last, Granddad was barking something to my father in the old language. They both looked at me as I tried to uncurl my frozen fingers, and in their eyes was just what I’d feared.
“Where’s your coat?” My father asked. “Where have you been?”
“I lost it.”
“You lost it,” he repeated, slowly. “How?”
“Some boys took it.”
“Who?”
“Some guys. Criminals,” I said. “Terrorists.”
Granddad laughed suddenly, a horrible sound, and repeated, “Terrorists.”
Papa looked at him sharply, then back at me.
“People can’t just take your coat. Tell your teacher.”
“My teacher hates me.”
“Tell the police, then.”
I snorted.
Granddad sat forward, his fingers like talons gripping the armrests of his chair. “During the blockade …”
“My god, the blockade,” said Papa.
Granddad ignored him. “During the blockade they killed each other for ration cards. They ate rats!”
“Enough.”
“And bodies! People, understand, corpses! With my own eyes I saw people taking them.”
“Stop it. What are you talking about? Why talk like this to a little boy?”
“Why? Because I want him to know. To know what it was like. And for what? For this? For this? So my grandson can have his coat stolen on the street? Criminals!” He snorted.
“That’s enough.” My father’s voice shook.
Granddad turned his red-rimmed eyes on him. “It’s your fault. You should never have gotten him that coat.”
“You were the one.…”
“You should have taught him some self-respect. You’re a citizen of this country. Aren’t you a citizen?”
My father chewed his lip.
Granddad continued. “Aren’t I a hero of this country? Didn’t I get a medal from Vasilevsky himself? And you can’t even hold a job! You let your son get beat upon by criminals. In the street! In the streets of this city!”
My father looked at him, then at me, then said, with a voice that sounded like it came from a deep hole in the ground, “Your dinner is waiting.”
***
I picked at my plate of cool pink sausages and dark bread.
“I’m sorry, Papa.”
He didn’t respond, but dropped my old coat on the chair next to me. The cuffs were rat’s nests of scraps and thread.
“Be careful,” he said. As he left the room, he put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed, hard. Just then, I wanted badly to tell him about the horses, but I took another bite of bread and chewed as he retreated. The pressure lingered in my shoulder for a long time after.
When I finally gave up on my homework, I went out into the main room where Granddad sat with the light off and pulled out my blankets in the dark. From the little divan where I lay, I could see the red light of Granddad’s cigarette and hear the radiator knock and hiss, and as I dropped off to sleep I imagined the smoke and steam and wheezing exhalations of his ancient lungs all twined together, rising up to the low ceiling and out the cracks in the window where the angry wind carried it all into the endless night, whispering, ‘for this, for this, for this.’
***
There is the head of a man in the exhibit—mummified—staring out with smug, blank, scarecrow eyes at the riches of his tomb. I pictured him stalking proud among the horses, beating them with sticks or riding them mercilessly across the hard land. And then one day he was dead, and the horses sent after him, bound to pull him forever through the dark.
I hated him.
The horses did, too. I’d learned their attitudes toward the things in the room. The ghosts shied from their death masks and bucked at the cart. When I pressed my face against the case with the shriveled head of their master, I felt them beside me, trembling and sullen. I could have reached out a hand and touched their switch-broken skin.
But it was the tomb that drew their fiercest, wildest screams.
It was a box made of logs, like a blown-up version of a kindergarten toy. A little wooden sarcophagus was inside, lit warmly and almost invitingly. But by a trick of positioning and shadow there was a space inside that was as black as midnight. When I peered in, the horses were suddenly so loud and desperate—as if I had stuck my head inside a cannon—that I jerked back, and there was no calming them.
I backed away and up the stairs.
***
“Hey, little blackass!”
Sergei detached himself from the gate near the museum and matched my stride. A couple of his crew shadowed us.
“What are you looking at in there every day? Naked ladies?”
I put my head down and kept walking.
“You find a little place to yourself?” His buddies snickered.
He plucked at the sleeve of my old coat. “This thing’s disgusting. You should get yourself a new one. It stinks like an animal.” He paused. “Or maybe it’s not the coat.” His pals erupted in laughter, but his own face wore a thin, tight smile.
The front half of his body jumped forward, and he made a false swing at me. I started back.
“Scared, little bitch?”
I didn’t say anything. I felt a weight in my stomach, like iron. But it wasn’t just fear now.
“Want to run, blackass? Want to race again?”
I didn’t run. I felt the iron harden in my stomach and my legs and through the street and down into the endless night beneath the world. I closed my eyes. I kept them shut while they slapped my neck and punched my arm and pulled my hat off, waited in darkness there in the middle of the bright avenue until someone scolded them and they were gone.
***
Granddad was shouting at Father again when I got home.
“Here I am dying, freezing to death, and you can’t get someone to fix the pipes.”
“I called them,” my father mumbled. “They said they’ll fix it.”
“They said so? They lied to you. They won’t fix it. Because they don’t respect you.”
“Who’s this?” cried Granddad when I came in. “What are you doing out so late? My God, you look like a gypsy. Respect yourself!”
I looked to Father, who looked away.
Granddad lifted his hands to the level of his head and cried, “My God! I don’t know, I don’t know.”
I hung my coat and started to say something, but my father cut me off. “Get to your lessons. You’re late.” Then, a little gentler, “In the kitchen. The stove is on and it’ll be warmer.”
“Yes,” came Granddad’s voice behind me. “Don’t want to freeze out here.”
I wanted my father to yell at him, hit him, something. But there was nothing but his shuffled footsteps and the closing of the door.
***
“What?” I said, frowning at the mummified head while the horses fretted around me. “What are you afraid of? Him?”
I stuck my tongue out at the head, then took a quick look over my shoulder and spat on the glass. The horses shuddered into silence. It was the first quiet I had heard in all the days I had been coming to that place. The little glob slid down the case and my heart hammered.
Into that cold silence I said, “Look at him. He’s nothing. Little shit.”
Then I was kicking and punching at the air in front of the case, whispering every curse I knew. The horses began to wail and rear, but I didn’t care. I turned to the tomb and felt the horses going mad.
“What?” I yelled. “This?” I kicked the wood of the tomb, hard. The horses shrieked insanely, the alarm screeched, and I ran and hid in the restroom, tears running down my face.
***
For almost a month I went along with Sergei’s games, meekly accepted his taunts and punches, let my notebooks and spare change fall into his hands. He seemed satisfied with that for a while, and then one day, without warning, he beat me within an inch of my life.
Maybe he understood that he couldn’t touch the part of me anymore that I kept curled and waiting for my basement afternoons. Maybe he didn’t like that. Or maybe it had nothing to do with me, and I was just in the way of his directionless anger.
But I rounded a corner and there he was, his crew making a circle to cut off my retreat. He didn’t even say anything. I could see his big pale hands and his pale blue eyes above that tight-lipped smile. He hit me in the chest, almost gently. And then again, harder.
“What for?” I gasped.
He didn’t answer, just twisted his lip and shook his head. Then he started hitting me for real. His pals had my shoulders now and there was nothing I could do.
I kept saying over and over, “what for, what for, what for,” and he never even said a word—like I was no fit subject for language.
He hit me again, and again, in the face and stomach and chest, until I fell.
My head hit the grey ice of the sidewalk and Sergei kicked me twice and walked off while his buddies laughed. I heard their little feet skittering away, and I felt the blood running down my nose into my mouth. I hated them, hated all of them, and inside me was growing something bigger than I could understand or hide from or master.
***
My father looked at me as though he was seeing me for the first time. My old coat was covered in blood. As he held a cloth to my face, he asked me what happened, and I told him. As if it hadn’t been happening for years.
That evening, once the bleeding had stopped, he fixed his soft brown eyes on me and said, “You have to fight them. You have to stand and fight them.”
“They’re too big,” I said through the cold cloth on my face. “There’s half a dozen of them. I’d lose all my teeth.”
“Better your teeth than your self-respect. All you have in life is your self-respect.”
I heard a hiss from Granddad’s corner rise above the radiator scream.
My father’s voice went high. “What are a few teeth?” he yelled. “Respect yourself!”
“It’s alright, Papa,” I said.
“Alright? Alright? These boys will keep after you your whole life! People like them! You’ll end up … if you don’t fight them now.…”
I felt a tether snap, and I yelled through my cloth. “Self-respect! You should talk!”
“Son …”
“Maybe if we didn’t live in this shithole, I wouldn’t have to walk around and get ambushed by criminals. Maybe if you had a car you could pick me up from school. Maybe if I had some good clothes, didn’t look like an orphan gypsy …”
My father stood and left the flat. I felt sick.
Granddad’s corner was full of wheezing, and I couldn’t tell what came from the radiator and what from the old man’s lungs.
***
The night peeled away slowly. My father hadn’t returned. The heat pipes wailed and banged and hissed and Granddad coughed and muttered to himself as his cigarette light bobbed.
I sank in and out of sleep, and the noise of the pipes bled into horse screams and hoof beats; louder and louder it went, and then hissed and went off. None of the plaques in the museum told how the horses were killed. Strangled, maybe. Throats cut. Poisoned. I writhed on the couch, feeling fire in my throat. I thought myself into the dark place in the tomb, into nothingness.
Granddad’s voice jumped out the tail end of a doglike cough, startling me fully awake. “Listen,” he said.
I didn’t answer.
“Listen. Asleep, are you?”
I made a noise.
“They’re working on the pipes,” he said. “At this hour. They shut off the boiler and they’re working on the pipes. This country’s gone crazy. We’ll freeze to death.” There was a long silence broken only by his coughs.
“During the blockade …”
I rolled over and faced the wall.
“Listen.” His voice sounded different, smaller. “It was so cold. We were starving. You don’t know what that’s like, thank God. And every night I thought, this is it. And every morning I got up. That’s all. I did what I had to. To live, understand. And you get so tired. City of heroes.” He coughed or laughed. “I just kept going. That’s all.”
I stared at the wall, but other than his wheezing there was no more sound until I heard the heat start up again with a smooth hiss.
Sometime along the hard edge of morning I heard the door to our flat open and softly close.
***
A week later the old man was dead. I didn’t cry—didn’t know what to do. Like if a mountain you had seen every day were suddenly gone.
My father made phone calls while I stood staring at the body, and after a while some women that I didn’t know came and put Granddad in the bath and dressed him all in white and laid him out in the main room.
A few cousins and distant aunts came and sat and wept with him, while my father sat with his brother in the kitchen and drank in almost total silence. At one point two ancient men came in wearing their medals and roared toasts in the kitchen with my uncle while my father watched the wall.
I felt like a shadow with no body attached. Crying women were sitting on my divan, and I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in my father’s bed like he asked, so at night I lay on the rug in his room and thought of the little sketch drawings of the Pazyryk burials.
When I slept, I dreamed I was riding on my father’s shoulders around and around Granddad’s chair, laughing, and then I was lying next to the old man in his coffin, and he turned and looked at me and hissed and I woke with a little moan.
My father tried to get me out of the apartment, but some useless loyalty kept me there with him. I don’t think it helped him, having me around moping, but I didn’t know what else to do.
On the second day he sent me out to get new clothes and shoes for the funeral, with more money than I’d ever had in my hands at once. I went to one of the stores in our block where a friend of my father’s worked. He looked at me with pity and helped me pick a stiff suit and shiny black shoes. I felt swallowed by the suit, but I loved the shoes. I couldn’t resist putting them on in the unlit threshold of our building and savoring the hard ringing sound they made on the crumbling stairs.
***
The funeral was paid for by the state, and it was like Granddad’s little corner was wrenched open and flooded with light. A military band was there, and the sun was shining through the bitterly cold air. People in uniform were saluting. Saluting us. My father stood straight and tall, and met the eyes of the men in uniform when they shook his hand. I kept looking down to the shine on my shoes and then up to the sun until my eyes hurt, and when the brass band played, I imagined Granddad’s soul going up like a wisp of smoke into the clear blue sky.
***
My father all but threatened to kick me out of the wake, and I felt that I had somehow done my duty, so without bothering to put on boots or change out of my suit I ran through the ghastly chill to the museum.
An older couple was in my room, looking blandly at the tomb and the great wooden cart, making dull comments about the brilliant gold. At last they wandered off, and I stood below the great horned mask. I felt the ghosts make their shuddering way in. The air was electric. I wanted to say so much to them—to tell and ask things about the living and the dead.
Then the lights went off.
Almost instantly, I could feel the winter sliding in like a knife through skin. The darkness was absolute, but I knew this room now like our own flat. I wondered if the security system was off and reached out my hand to touch the wood of the tomb.
No alarm sounded.
I thought about climbing inside while I had the chance, to stay there until I was dead as Granddad. I knew they would be coming around with flashlights any minute, or that the generators would kick on.
Maybe it was only a second. Half a second. But suddenly I was there in the cold wind of the steppes, and I felt my arms raw against the chill, inked with black beasts dancing.
And I felt the horses. I felt them screaming, terrified, dying. Buried alive under all that weight of earth and stone and wood. To pull someone else into eternity. To live that nothing life without end, beaten and cursed by a small, cruel master. But they were not for this. Not for this. I heard them kicking, kicking like mad things at the walls.
Then they were there.
I said I had talked with their ghosts that winter—felt them there. But what I had felt before were little echoes compared to this. Little memories of ghosts. But these now were no echoes. Maybe they were not even ghosts.
These were the horses around me. Fearfully alive. I felt the hard strike of hooves, the sides like shuddering engines. These were no longer things that I could talk to about Sergei and Papa and Granddad. They were the biggest things in the world. Pulling with all their might up and away from the endless blackness of that wooden tomb.
Dozens of them, hundreds, thousands. All the long dead horses packed into that little room, straining and screaming. I felt ice all through me. I reached out and touched what might have been the cord keeping visitors away from the tomb and might have been a bridle rope millennia old. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I don’t know how I did it in the middle of that noisy midnight chaos, but I loosed that cord. I set them free.
There was a noise like thunder. The pounding all through the body like on Victory Day when the drums come by, but as if there were ten million drums and I was not beside them but somehow inside them. How Granddad said the artillery sounded when the Germans were bombarding.
The horses were free of their masters, free of their tomb, and they went galloping around me, past me, through me, and I couldn’t help running out after them, bounding up the stairs as the lights came back on, and—ignoring the shouts of the guards—running out into the street.
I ran heedless of the cold and dirty ice on the sidewalks—ran off the island into my long shadow—ready to run all the way home, all the way to the plains and cold mountains of the east.
As I turned down the narrow street to my block, I almost ran into Sergei. I skidded to a halt and nearly lost my balance.
Sergei smiled with his lips only.
“Nice shoes.”
My heart was pounding. My limbs were electric and weak.
“You look stupid in them.”
He reached into his pocket.
“Take them off. You look stupid.”
I shook as he moved slowly forward. He flicked his thumb and a blade appeared in his hand.
“You speak Russian, right? They teach you Russian in your tent? Take them off, bitch. Or what do you think I’m going to do to you?”
He held the knife out in front of him and took another step toward me, his smile widening. He was a big guy, and fast, and I didn’t have a knife.
But there was a thing in me now bigger than myself—bigger than Sergei with his bright steel. Bigger than my father trying to carry a load too heavy, and bigger than my grandfather dying worn and lean with all the evil hungry years.
I screamed. I saw Sergei’s eyes widen, because I wasn’t screaming a human scream.
He managed a little laugh. “That’s it. Squeal and I’ll gut you.”
But I smelled his fear. He ran at me with the knife, but I kicked at his shin, and he slipped. The knife went down on the ground. He was so slow and clumsy. He didn’t know what speed was, what steadiness was, what strength was.
He scrabbled to get up, but I was faster than he was, and my feet were hard and strong in my new shoes. I kicked him. He reached for the knife, and I kicked that away too. Then I screamed again, and my eyes rolled, and I was so much bigger than him, and my feet and legs were strong with centuries and big as mountains, and he was so small—so small and weak and nothing.
I don’t remember anything else until I was at home in the bath, the hot water reddening my skin and my father with a cloth over me, the steam rising up around us. His eyes were gentle, full of care.
“Are my shoes okay?”
He burst out laughing. I think it was the first time in years I’d heard my father laugh.
“Yes, yes. The shoes are okay. And you’re okay. You’re okay.” Then he was laughing and laughing until I couldn’t help laughing too.
***
Sergei was out of school a week, and when he came back he wouldn’t look at me. His friends tried for a while to tease him into getting me back. But they hadn’t seen what he saw, and Sergei never troubled me again.
I don’t go down much to the basement anymore, although it’s a pleasant place to be once in a while on a hot summer afternoon. The empty eyes of the horses’ masks stare calmly out, like beasts half asleep standing. The ghosts are gone. There is no weight on the horses’ shoulders, nothing pulling them back toward the dark center of the tomb, and their angry, fearful spirits are untethered, quiet, free.
S. L. Harris is a writer, educator, and sometime archaeologist who can be found digging in gardens, libraries, tea cabinets, and ancient houses. His fiction has appeared in venues like Strange Horizons, Apex, and Lightspeed. Originally from Appalachia, he currently lives in the Midwest with his wife, two children, and many books. You can find him online at ifchanceyoucallit.wordpress.com and @slharris.bsky.social.
Copyright © 2025 S. L. Harris.