At his sire’s suggestion, Koray lowered his head and let out a profuse sigh. He did not understand why Orhan could not answer his question himself, and his interest in the topic at hand was not great enough to trouble his mother with it.
Besides, it pained him to hear his mother speak. Koray was six months old now, and old enough to begin noticing that Carisa - even if she spoke remarkably well for a deaf horse - pronounced things slightly differently than a hearing horse. The colt loved his mother with all his might, and would defend her against any who sought to single her out for her disability, yet at the same time he could not ignore that she seemed to be the outcast of the herd, keeping to herself and speaking to almost no one except for Orhan. In his young, naive brain, Koray could only assume that this was related to Carisa’s deafness (and perhaps also her unusual height), and as a result, he had slowly been developing a kind of secondhand embarrassment for her.
It did not help that Orhan repeatedly insisted he was different too, with his red hair and pink skin and pale coat. Koray did not want to be different, any more than he wanted his mother to be deaf.
“How are my guys?” his dam queried as she reached them, towering over them as usual. Koray lifted his sea-green eyes to meet her blue ones, and stepped forward to press his muzzle against the soft crook of her neck. “Fine,” he replied, and from behind him he heard his father say, “Our son is full of questions today.”
Koray twisted his neck to shoot his father a look. “Only because you said if I stood still like a nice young man, you said I could ask you anything at all,” he protested, twisting an ear backwards. Orhan only chuckled in response. Hanging his head and shuffling his hooves in the sand, the colt continued. “Before then I was having fun and you had to stop it.”
“That’s because you were hurting that lizard, Koray,” he heard his father say in a hard voice that made his gut turn cold. “That is not how a son of the desert behaves. You owe every living thing your respect unless it means you harm. You know this; I’ve told you before.”
The young son of the desert said nothing. It was different. It was sick, he thought to himself, and looked up briefly enough to catch his father giving his mother a serious expression. He knew what that look meant, and it hurt. Around his mother, Koray was the perfect son: attentive, affectionate, and well-behaved. Only Orhan knew that he liked to do stupid things sometimes, and up until now he’d been getting away with it.
But that was no longer the case. The look his father was giving his mother said ‘we need to keep an eye on him’.
KORAY
firstborn son of orhan |