"Oh, Main God! What's wrong with this horse? Has it gone mad?!..."
The lower deck of the Zheyang Ship was not spacious, only about fifteen paces long and four or five paces wide. Now that baskets of potato and salted meat had been used to partition off a small section as a makeshift horse pen, it seemed even more cramped. Three "tall" Mongol horses were squeezed inside the narrow pen, their bodies giving off a thick, pungent smell.
At this moment, the two Yakut snow mares, only about thirteen or fourteen hands high, were huddled uneasily in the corner, their bodies pressed against the ship's wall. And in the center of the pen, the Jurchen stallion, fully fifteen or sixteen hands high, was thrashing wildly on the deck. Its powerful hooves kicked about at random, and painful neighs came from its mouth, as if it were suffering some invisible torment!
"Neigh! Neigh! Hiss! Chuff!..."
At the sight, Scholar Miki's heart instantly tightened. His expression tense and his eyes sharp, he looked toward the horse keeper Sukeichiro and barked a furious curse.
"The Main God bears witness! Damn it! Ichiro, have you been taking proper care of this horse?!..."
"Ah! Lord priest! This lowly one has cared for these three horses day and night. This past month, I haven't even had a single full night's sleep... Look, those two short snow horses are listless, but they can still eat grass and beans, still sleep and pass dung. Those lumps of horse dung over there were from them, all formed into round balls! I tasted them earlier, and they had the normal sweet-stinking smell too..."
Horse keeper Sukeichiro knelt in the horse pen in terror, almost sobbing as he cried out. First he pointed at the two mares in the corner and