Loyal Creatures by Morris Gleitzman

me and Daisy didn’t fall in love with the local horse dealers. We didn’t even like them. I was very tempted to do to them exactly what they did to their horses.
    â€˜Much kindness, much comfort, effendi.’
    Hanging from the belt of every dealer who said that was a vicious-looking whip and a couple of canes. And every poor nag we saw, in a whole street of dealers’ yards, was in a tragic state.
    Starved.
    Beaten.
    Diseased.
    I could hardly look at the poor blighters.
    Daisy looked at them for a long time, whinnying softly and blowing air at them.
    Horses don’t cry, everyone knows that, but Daisy came close that day.
    I tried to think it through.
    Healthy horse like Daisy would be sold quick. So she wouldn’t spend much time with these cruel mongrels.
    Plus the four pounds six shillings would pay for decent feed while she was here.
    If she was lucky.
    Then I remembered the working horses we saw the day we got off the boat. Dropping with exhaustion. Beaten where they lay.
    Daisy had seen them too.
    Which was why she wanted to get closer to the poor wrecked horses in the dealers’ yards. To give them a moment of sympathy in their unhappy painful lives.
    But she didn’t want to be one of them. Not permanent. I could see that for a fact.
    â€˜Come on, mate,’ I said to her. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

We got out of there alright.
    All the way out.
    After dark I led Daisy out of camp. She was saddled up and kitted out and loaded with extra food and water. Which technically I was stealing from the army. But as I wasn’t going to be around to get my demob pay, it seemed fair.
    â€˜Where’s your pass?’ said the guard at the gate.
    I didn’t have one so I gave him the four pounds six shillings, which did the trick.
    Daisy and me rode into the desert.
    South.
    I wasn’t exactly sure where we were heading. Not long term. When you leave school at eleven, you don’t carry much in the way of geography around with you. I had a notion Africa was ahead of us somewhere.
    Persia maybe.
    Didn’t matter. Important thing was we were headed away from the machine-guns. Which, if you were a horse, smashed your legs and punctured your lungs and left you in agony on the ground until some bloke with a pistol strolled over and finished you with a bullet in the head.
    â€˜You alright, Daisy?’ I said.
    I could tell from her easy breathing and relaxed gait as we jogged across the sand in the moonlight that she was.
    â€˜Dunno where we’re headed,’ I said. ‘But I’m glad we’re going there together.’
    Daisy didn’t slow down, so she must have felt the same way.
    Every so often I glanced over my shoulder to see if we were being followed.
    We weren’t.
    But something was nagging at me.
    Was there something I’d forgotten that could be coming after us?

    It wasn’t behind us, it was ahead of us.
    In a shallow gulley. I didn’t see it till we’d almost reached it. By then the moon had climbed a smidge and lit up the full horror of them.
    Horses and men, on the sand.
    I’d seen plenty of death, but I’d never seen the bodies of horses and men treated like these had been.
    They were troopers and their walers, doing the same as me and Daisy.
    Getting out.
    But like me, they’d forgotten about something.
    The Bedouin.
    I buried the bodies. Couldn’t leave them for the jackals. Not that the jackals could have done much worse to them.
    Daisy stood patiently, watching.
    While I dug, I explained to her about the Bedouin. Desert nomads. Of all the local people, they were the most angry. Felt the desert was theirs. Hated us foreigners coming in and shooting the place up. Wanted to make their point before we left.
    â€˜We’ve got a lot of desert ahead of us,’ I said to Daisy. ‘Lot of Bedouin ahead of us too. Can’t promise we won’t bump into them.’
    I didn’t tell her I thought we