Free The Horse Healer by Gonzalo Giner Page B

the night in the stable or not.
    Galib crossed the threshold without saying anything and the boy remained at the entrance. He felt as though again he had nothing but the sky over his head. He embraced Sabba and they set off, looking for somewhere to take shelter. He didn’t know where, but they would find it. Suddenly, the creaking of the door of Galib’s house made him turn around. There was his master. He had dismounted from his horse and was inviting him in.
    â€œYou can spend the night in the stable. You’ve earned it.”
    Diego spurred Sabba with his heels and entered triumphantly through the gate of that house which would become the school where he would embark on an exciting future.

X.
    S cience spoke in Arabic.
    That language. Its sound was a torment for Diego, but he also knew that it harbored the secrets that Galib possessed. For many afternoons and many long late nights, he had watched Galib pass candlelit hours in silence amid books and writings. One day, he explained that he was reading the works of the wise Greeks, gathered and translated into Arabic by Persian scholars. Sometimes, when Diego was leaving from the stable to approach the house to share some bit of information with Galib, he would see him surrounded by books, reading, concentrating, taking pleasure. Galib whispered words that seemed like poetry to Diego, but when he least expected, his head would be filled with bloody, vicious thoughts.
    The memory of his sisters was always horrible for him. Each time they popped into his mind, they always ended up lost in a cloudy mental labyrinth, where not even with his imagination could he come up with a way to help them.
    Six months had passed since that first visit with Galib, and for Diego things had gone a bit better. With his first wages he had been able to rent a bed in a Frankish quarter, in a modest house where he shared a room with two other men.
    Sajjad, besides living in his own world full of contradictions, had begun to show an alarming jealousy toward Diego. That was primarily because Diego had received his first important responsibility: taking charge of the workshop.
    Galib, more impressed every day by his talent, began to give him some simple tasks, like making sure the horseshoes were of the same thickness or filing off their sharp edges. But given his skill, after a short while, he ended up tasking him with forging new ones.
    At times, when Diego left early, he would leave off drawing whatever he wanted in a square of sand on the floor of the stable. More than once Diego found Sajjad erasing it with his canvas shoe, though afterward he would beg for forgiveness and insist on the purity of his intention.
    â€œSajjad good, Sajjad help Diego,” he would repeat over and over.
    Forging the horseshoes took up half the morning and the rest of the day Diego dedicated to the other chores, like carting hay, spreading straw out for the beds, or brushing and cleaning the animals.
    After a year, Galib entrusted Diego with administering cures to those sick horses that were kept in the stables and that needed to be watched over closely.
    Diego was meticulous in preparing their doses, paid careful attention to the progress of the animals, intuited their responses, and, moreover, could remember each one’s treatment, although many included more than ten ingredients. He memorized with remarkable speed.
    None of this escaped Galib, or Sajjad either.
    One day, when he had passed more than a year working for Galib, something very serious happened.
    â€œSomeone must have fed her bad oats. …”
    Galib, agitated and beside himself, tried to reanimate the animal. He had found it with a high fever and intense diarrhea. It had only spent a single night in his stables.
    Diego and Sajjad huddled down, witnessing the disaster, without knowing what to do or say.
    â€œAnd the mare of the justice of Toledo to boot,” Galib blabbered in desperation.
    He had no idea how to explain to