The Enchanted Horse

Also known as Yantra Ka Ghoda

• 6 minute read
• Ages 8-12
• Alif Laila Stories

At the new year festival in Persia, the King held court and inventors came from everywhere to show what they had made.

The last of them was an old man in plain clothes leading a horse. The horse was not alive. It was made of ebony and ivory and fitted with a saddle and bridle, and it was very beautiful, and the court thought that was all it was.

"It flies," said the old man. "Turn this peg and it rises. Turn that one and it comes down. It will carry you anywhere in the world in a day."

"What do you want for it?" said the King.

"Your daughter."

The court went silent. The King's son, Prince Firoz, stepped forward furious — and then said, more calmly, that he would test the horse first.

Up

Firoz mounted and turned the first peg.

The horse went up so fast that the palace was a white square below him before he had finished shouting. It kept going, straight into the cloud, and the wind took his breath away.

He looked for a second peg and could not find one. He felt along the neck, the mane, the saddle, and there was nothing, and the ground had gone entirely.

He forced himself to stop panicking and go over the horse handspan by handspan, and behind the right ear, hidden in the carving, was the second peg.

He turned it and the horse began to descend.

Bengal

Night fell while he was still coming down. He landed on a flat roof in a city he did not know, left the horse there, and felt his way down a dark stair.

He came into a lit room where a princess lay asleep, with her servants asleep around her.

This was Bengal, and she was its Princess Shamsunnahar.

She woke and did not scream. He explained himself, badly, and she listened, and by morning her father had heard that a strange prince had come out of the sky, and had decided to be pleased about it rather than otherwise.

Firoz stayed. And when he asked her, some weeks later, whether she would come back with him to Persia on the wooden horse, she said yes.

Taken

They flew together and landed in a garden outside his father's city, and Firoz left her there while he went ahead to prepare the palace for her arrival properly.

While he was gone, the old inventor found her.

He had been in the King's prison since the day Firoz flew away, and had been released only that morning when the prince returned. He came out, went looking for his horse, and found it in a garden with a young woman sitting beside it.

He told her the prince had sent him. She believed him. He put her on the horse and turned the peg.

Kashmir

He brought her down in a meadow in Kashmir, and there, at last, he told her who he was.

He was still telling her when the Sultan of Kashmir rode past with his hunting party, heard a woman shouting, and came to see.

The Sultan had the old man taken away. Then he looked at the princess, and at the extraordinary horse, and decided he would marry her himself the following week.

Shamsunnahar understood that shouting would not help her twice. So she stopped speaking altogether, and when the physicians came she stared through them, and the word went round the palace that the strange princess had lost her mind.

Physicians came from everywhere and none of them could do anything.

And then one more arrived, a young man in a physician's robe, who asked to see her alone.

Home

"They will not let you leave," he said quietly, "unless they think you are cured. So be cured."

The next morning the princess spoke, and smiled, and thanked the Sultan for his patience.

The physician told the Sultan that the sickness had come from the wooden horse, which had brought her here and left its influence on her; the cure would only hold if she was placed on it once more, in public, with incense burning, so the last of it could be drawn out.

The whole court came to watch.

They set her on the horse in the courtyard. The physician stood beside her, lit the incense, walked round her three times — and then swung up into the saddle behind her and turned the peg.

The horse went up out of the smoke with both of them on it, and the Sultan of Kashmir shouted at the sky for a while, and then went inside.