Читать книгу The Fire Stallion - Stacy Gregg, Stacy Gregg - Страница 8

We were having breakfast in the hotel restaurant the next morning when Gudrun swept in, red curls flying out behind her in a fiery blaze.

“I’ve just read the new script.” She flung the thick wodge of paper down in front of me and it hit the table with a dull thud.

“Is it any good?” I asked.

“Aargh.” Gudrun pulled a face. “If you like fairy tales, it’s excellent. But I’m not interested in fairy tales. It’s the truth that I want to see. The real Brunhilda, a ferocious warrior who takes the throne after her father and leads her tribe to be Queen of Iceland.”

I must have looked doubtful because Gudrun picked up on my hesitation.

“Isn’t this what you want too, Hilly?”

“Yes, I guess,” I said, “if that’s the truth, but what I want doesn’t necessarily count around here.”

Gudrun’s eyes narrowed. “But what do you think?”

I sat there for a moment, gathering my thoughts so that I would say this right. “Why is it that in all the movies I see the Vikings are men? I’ve never seen a girl Viking. Maybe the girls really did just cook and clean and the boys were the only ones who got to do all the cool stuff like swordfights and horse riding.”

“You see history as it’s told by men,” Gudrun said. “And these men know nothing because they weren’t there.”

“I guess so,” I replied, “but you weren’t there either. The only person who really knows what happened to her is Brunhilda.”

I thought Gudrun would be cross with me for saying this. But she looked delighted and threw her arms around me.

“Exactly! Oh, I knew I was right to choose you!” She gave me a kiss on the forehead.

I wasn’t sure exactly what she was going on about, but I smiled anyway.

“Two weeks from tonight, Jonsmessa will be here at last,” she went on. “Then, Hilly, we’ll find out everything we need to know.”

There was even more bounce than usual to her step as she headed back out the door, dashing past Mum, who was heading to our table from the breakfast buffet with a plate of bacon and eggs for us both.

“What’s up with Gudrun?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” My heart was racing.

“She came in and left again without eating anything.” Mum shook her head. “That woman is very peculiar.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “she most certainly is.”

In the weeks of pre-production that followed, Gudrun didn’t mention Jonsmessa again to me. She was still pretty friendly, but her focus seemed to be on Katherine and the script and getting it right. They would frequently sit at a table in the dining room locked in heated discussions. Sometimes I would see Gudrun by herself at the same table late into the evenings as she cast her runes and chanted. One morning at breakfast, before we ate she’d insisted the room needed “cleansing” and we had to wait to eat until she could perform her ritual: waving a burning bunch of sage. Considering the frequent strangeness of her behaviour, being dragged along to bury a cow’s horn didn’t seem so out of the ordinary when I thought about it now. In fact, it had pretty much become a distant memory. Also, I had something else to distract me from the cultural consultant’s enchantments. I had somehow landed myself a job.

It had happened the same morning that Gudrun had cleansed the room at breakfast. Mum was sorting out the room in the hotel that she’d been allocated for costume storage. Mum’s assistant had gone back to London for more items and was due to return that afternoon, and they were on the phone to each other talking about how many racks they needed when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a woman with sandy blonde hair tied back in a messy plait. She was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots.

“I’m Niamh,” she said. “I’m from the equine department. I’m afraid we have a problem.”

“What kind of a problem?” Mum asked.

Niamh pulled a face. “It’s easier if I show you … Let’s go to the stables.”

The stables turned out to be a low block of buildings, just a short walk from the hotel, down by the river. I was shocked at the enormity of the scale of them. There were so many rows of loose boxes! And there was an indoor training ménage with a round pen and a sawdust schooling arena too.

“It’s so lucky they had these facilities here for your horses,” I said as Niamh slid back the barn doors.

“Oh no,” she laughed. “None of this existed before. They custom-built it for us so that it was ready when we got here. The weather was so cold and wet when we arrived. It was the middle of winter – minus fifteen degrees and pitch black outside most days. We were getting up in the dark and working all day in the dark – our lives had almost no daylight for months really. The weather back home in Ireland isn’t great but at least there’s sun! So naturally under those conditions we were really looking forward to summer. We didn’t think about the major problem it would cause.”

“What problem?” Mum asked.

“I’ll show you,” Niamh said.

We walked up the central corridor of the stable block and Niamh went up to the loose box that was labelled in gold with the name OLAFUR.

“This is Olafur, but we call him Ollie.” Niamh opened the top half of the Dutch door. There was a horse inside, standing in the middle of the loose box. He had the look of a prize fighter, stocky and burly, yet he was no more than fifteen hands high. His eyes, which were half-closed as if he had been dozing, were almost completely covered by an enormous bushy forelock. It looked like he had a massive fringe, this giant explosion of sunburnt brown hair that sprang out from between his ears and then crested his powerful neck. His tail was bushy and enormous too, and had the same bedraggled sunburnt colour against his coat, which was quite sleek and almost black.

“What breed is he?” I asked.

“He’s an Icelandic,” Niamh said. “They all are. Connor, that’s my brother, he and I wanted to bring our own stunt horses with us from Ireland, but the rules are strict and it’s impossible to bring any horses in.”

“Why?”

“It’s been the law for centuries now.” Niamh shook her head in wonder. “They’re really serious about keeping the bloodlines of their horses pure. And if you take an Icelandic horse out of the country, even for a single day to compete or for work, that’s the end of it. They’re not allowed to return again. Ever.”

“Really?”

“Banished for life,” Niamh confirmed.

“So, because of this law, you couldn’t bring any of your own trained horses here, then?” Mum said.

“Nope.” Niamh sighed. “Which put us on the back foot. We’ve had to train all of these new horses since we arrived in winter. And the whole time we were sending photos back to the production team of the horses we’d bought for schooling and Katherine was so excited. She loved the way they appeared so rugged with their coats all long and sun-bleached and shaggy.” Niamh seemed like she was about to burst into tears. “And then, just before filming started, summer arrived, and now look!” She waved a dismissive hand at Ollie, standing sleek and black before her. “It’s a nightmare! They’re all like this!”

“So they’ve moulted to their summer coats and lost their shaggy winter fur?” Mum grasped the situation. “And what do you want me to do?”

“I want,” Niamh said, “I want you to make it winter again.”

Mum didn’t bat an eye at the craziness of Niamh’s request. She stared hard at Ollie for a moment and then she dialled her phone. “Nicky? It’s me. Where are you? The airport? You’ve finally arrived? Good. OK, I’m going to give you the number of a contact in Reykjavik. I need you to go pick up some goat hair.”

A few hours later, Nicky was at the hotel with a minivan filled with six commercial bales of coarse-strand goat hair.

This was how Mum made the horse suits. Handfuls of the goat hair were dyed just the right shade of brown and then the ends were bleached to look like they’d been out in the sun. The hair was hand-stitched onto sheer black mesh which had been sewn with a zip that went from jaw to tail beneath the belly of the horse, in much the same way that a human might wear a onesie. A Velcro attachment hooked up onto the bridle to hold the suit in place at one end and tail clips fixed it at the other so that once it was done up there was no way to tell it was there and the goat hair looked exactly like the horse’s own natural long, shaggy winter coat.

Fashioning the horse-onesie was tricky work. The costumes had to be fitted perfectly to each individual horse. And that was where I came in. It was a two-man job to take precise measurements, involving one person making notes and the other lying down on the ground with a tape measure to chart the dimensions of their belly and combine this with their length all the way from their head to beneath the dock of their tail.

Mum and Nicky’s domain was the sewing room, where they had their team cutting and stitching the suits, and I stayed at the stables helping Niamh.

We did forty horses together. I would spend hours lying on my back beneath the bellies of the stallions with Niamh bent down beside me writing down the measurements that I gave her. By the time we were done I knew everything about her. She was eighteen, so only five years older than me, and had left school as soon as she could to go to work for her brother Connor who ran Equus Films.

“Horses are in the blood,” Niamh had said. “Mum and Dad breed point-to-point racers. Connor and I were both in the Irish National team for Pony Club Mounted Games. We’re both daredevils – the stunts we do now started out as things we did at home, like teaching our ponies to bow and rear, or swinging onto their backs off ropes and galloping them bareback.”

Mark, the third member of the team, was Irish too, a friend of Connor’s from Pony Club days.

“He and Connor started the company together before I joined, so that makes them the bosses,” Niamh explained. “Connor does most of the ridden work. He’s been training the two lead stallions, Troy and Ollie. Ollie is going to be the horse that the prince rides. He needs to be able to do all the usual stunts – you know, drop to one knee and rear on cue, and he also has to jump through fire to do the rescue at the end of the film. Troy has to do stunts too, but he’s also got to act because there are lots of scenes with him and Brunhilda together, so we need a horse that has presence, you know? Like a movie star.”

Considering he was supposed to be a movie star, Troy was not at all what I’d been expecting. He was handsome enough – a deep russet chestnut with a flaxen mane – and he was beautiful, almost feminine for a stallion. I guess he was the right horse for a princess, but he wasn’t quite what I’d pictured when Gudrun had talked about Jotun, Brunhilda’s famous stallion. If Brunhilda really was this ferocious warrior, then Troy seemed a bit tame for her. Not that I said this to Niamh, of course, who was totally in love with Troy.

“Don’t you think Jam is going to look amazing on him?” she said as she groomed his thick, shaggy blond mane.

“Jam?”

Niamh looked at me as if I were from another planet. “Jamisen O’Brien. She’s playing Brunhilda. You must know her! She was in that Hollywood blockbuster last summer – the musical one set in Greece.”

“Oh,” I said, slightly embarrassed that I hadn’t clicked immediately when Niamh called her Jam. “Yeah, of course I know her. I used to love her TV show.”

“Jamisen’s an amazing horsewoman,” Niamh continued. “She’ll be riding all her own stunts. The costume department have this enormous long blonde wig that she wears under her Viking helmet and it will look incredible blowing in the wind next to Troy’s flaxen mane.”

“It must be weird,” I said, “to be not that much older than me and be the star of an entire movie.”

“She’s used to it, I guess,” Niamh said. “What is she now? Sixteen? She’s been famous almost her whole life.”

The arrival of Jamisen O’Brien and Anders Mortenson had everyone talking at dinner. The two stars of the film had finally turned up on a private jet with their entourages in tow, ready to start work the next day.

“Jam’s brought six assistants with her,” Niamh told me as we piled up our plates at the buffet.

My mum had worked on a lot of films and she’d told me some stories but I swear I’d never heard of any celebrity who had that many assistants before.

“What do they all do?” I asked.

“One of them is her personal trainer, one of them is her hairdresser, one of them is her personal assistant …” Niamh rattled them off, counting on her fingers. “Don’t know what the others do.”

Anders Mortenson, on the other hand, had just his personal assistant with him. He’d been famous since he was ten years old when he played a spoilt rich kid in the TV comedy Cody and Toby and now, at the age of fifteen, this was the first time he’d play the hero. He was Prince Sigard, who would fight by Brunhilda’s side as her power grew and eventually marry his queen.

“They get here today and then it’s a week of training with us and the stunt co-ordinators,” Niamh explained, “and then filming will finally begin …”

The sudden hush that fell over the dining room at that moment made me think that maybe Jam and Anders had just walked in. But it was only Gudrun. She stood out from the rest of us in our North Face puffer jackets at the best of times, but today she was particularly wildly dressed in red trousers and a violet cape.

She made a beeline for our table and flung herself down beside me.

“Hilly, we need to talk.”

I saw Niamh tense up in her presence. She couldn’t stand Gudrun; she’d admitted that to me when we’d been working on the goat-hair suits together.

“Don’t you think it’s weird how she always talks to you?” Niamh had said to me once when she was going on about Gudrun’s odd behaviour.

It was true and, yes, I did think it was a bit strange. I was the least important person here and yet Gudrun treated me like someone who really mattered. It made me uneasy but I kind of liked talking to her too.

Niamh stood up to leave. “I have to go. Hilly, let’s meet up at the stables in half an hour, OK?”

“Sure,” I said.

Gudrun waited in silence until Niamh was out of earshot. Her green eyes were even wilder and brighter than usual.

“Do you know what night it is, Hilly?”

“Sunday?” I offered.

“Yes,” Gudrun conceded. “Sunday, the 24th of June. The Jonsmessa is here at last. It’s time.”

Then she leaned closer so that she could whisper to me: “I’ll come for you just before midnight. We must finish what we’ve started. It’s time to meet Brunhilda.”

That night I sat up on my bed, fully dressed, waiting for Gudrun. She said the ritual needed to take place at midnight but by 11.30 p.m. she still wasn’t here. Finally at around 11.45 p.m. I gave up on her and closed the blackout curtains in my room. I had only just started to get ready for bed when I heard this scratching on the glass of the sliding door. Then another sound, a thin, melancholic whimper. I sat bolt upright and listened. More whimpering, louder this time. I got up, and moved cautiously over to the window and flung the curtains apart.

In front of me, right on the other side of the glass door, stood two enormous grey wolves. They were standing there, side by side, like two statues, eyes blazing intently, tongues lolling from their massive open jaws. We were separated by the glass, so they couldn’t get to me, but that didn’t make them any less terrifying.

I put my hand up to the pane and one of the wolves edged closer. His breath steamed the glass and I could see saliva dripping from his white fangs. The other one cocked his head and moved forward too. They were massive, powerful creatures, and I was sure at that moment that if they’d wanted to they could have broken down the glass to get to me. But they didn’t try. They didn’t even growl. They both stared intently at me. Then, as if they’d heard someone calling them, they turned on their heels and bounded away, into the forest. A moment later, another shape emerged from the shadows of the trees. It was Gudrun! I slid the door open for her.

“Quick!” I hissed. “Get inside! There are wolves out there.”

Gudrun was perfectly calm. “There are no wolves in Iceland,” she said.

“I know what I saw,” I insisted. I wanted her to come in so I could shut the door, but she beckoned me outside instead.

“Seriously, Hilly,” she said. “There’s nothing there. Come on. It’s time. We need to go.”

I didn’t want to stay there arguing and risk waking Mum and so I stepped outside and slid the door shut behind me.

We walked to the Colosseum, Gudrun leading the way. The sky up above was cloudless, and the colour of rose petals.

“Quick, Hilly!” Gudrun leapt ahead of me, taking the stone steps two at a time to reach the grassy expanse of the arena. She grasped my hand and shoved the trowel into it. “Dig up the horn while I prepare.”

The dirt mound from our burial had become overgrown with grass, which surprised me as it seemed like such a short time ago we had done the ritual. Gudrun must have marked the spot somehow because she was quite certain where I should dig.

A few feet away she had placed a fire brazier stacked with logs.

“The Vikings always used mountain ash, from the boughs of the rowan tree, for the midsummer ritual,” she said as she rearranged the wood inside the bowl of the rusty brazier and set it alight with a taper. “They believed that rowan has magical properties to ward off evil.”

The wood caught fire almost instantly with a fairy dust sprinkling of orange sparks at first and then a deep, emerald-green flame as the rowan began to burn and crackle to embers. There was something very hypnotic about watching the fire, almost trance-like.

“Hilly!” Gudrun said. “Please, keep digging – it’s time!”

I plunged the trowel back into the earth and heard a thunk as it struck bone.

“I’ve got it!” I said, using my fingers to prise the horn out of the soil, wiping it clean. I expected the herbs inside to have rotted away but the flowers were still brilliant yellow and the leaves were still green. I was about to reach in and get my necklace out when Gudrun stopped me.

“Be very careful with it. You must not disturb its contents as you bring it to me.”

I held the horn as if it were a baby in my arms and walked to Gudrun, who was stoking the wood with an iron so that the green flames leapt up as tall as me. It was strange, but there was no warmth emanating from the fire. It was as cold as ice.

Gudrun stood and took the horn from me. “You kneel,” she said.

I dropped to my knees next to the brazier. Gudrun lowered her hands into the green flames and rested the horn on top of the logs. All at once the fire changed colour, first to brilliant pink, then to gold.

“Look into it,” Gudrun said to me. “Tell me what you see.”

I stared at the flames. Suddenly, in their flicker, shapes emerged. I was getting really weirded-out now, but the fire held me steady, entranced in its flames. “I see the two wolves,” I said to Gudrun, “the same ones who came to me earlier. But they are with a man this time. He’s very tall and very old.”

“And his face?” Gudrun asked me.

I looked hard at his face and I saw that on one side there was a black pit where an eye had once been.

“He’s got one eye,” I said. “And a long beard and there are these birds; big, black crows. They sit on his shoulders.”

“They are ravens, not crows,” Gudrun said. “Hugin and Munin – Thought and Memory. And his wolves, the ones you saw earlier, are Geri and Freki. They are his constant companions. I knew you were special, Hilly, the first moment I met you.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Odin,” she replied, as if this were obvious. “The All-Father. Greatest of all the Norse gods. Odin, who decides which warriors are honourable enough to lift up after death to sit at his side at the feasting table in his heaven, Valhalla. He is here with us now. This is a good sign. We can begin the ritual.”

And with that she produced a bunch of sage from her robes, lit the tips of it in the fire and began to move around me in a circle, chanting. The flames were mesmerising, licking up and then falling away to low-burning embers. The vision of Odin, his wolves and his ravens had disappeared and I looked up and saw blue eyes staring back at me from the fire, a girl no older than me, with blonde hair in tight braids.

She reached out a hand to me and my pulse quickened as Gudrun stepped forward to the brazier. Putting her hands directly into the embers, she pulled out the horn. The flames had turned it white, and now there were carvings in the bone surface – intricate patterns and symbols like the runes that Gudrun kept in her velvet bag. She reached inside the horn and pulled out my silver chain and beckoned me to her so that she could clasp it back around my neck. Even though it had been in the heat of the fire just a moment before, the filigree felt like ice at my throat.

“From ancient times, we bring you forth, Brunhilda. Let the exchange be complete so that we may know your truth!”

Gudrun tossed the bundle of burning sage into the flames and it exploded in a burst of golden sparks.

“Springa!” she cried out as the fire leapt once more. And even though she was speaking ancient Norse, this time I knew somehow that the word meant Jump!

Inside me, my spirit soared and left my body and suddenly I was in the flames, the fire so brilliant all around that it blinded me.

Later, when Gudrun explained to me how the Cross-Over had happened, how she had “transmogrified me into Brunhilda” as she transported me back through the fire, I would understand more deeply what had happened. At that moment though, as I felt myself shift shapes, I had no idea about transmogrification and no way to explain it. All I knew was that somehow I wasn’t Hilly Harrison any more.

And when I opened my eyes, the stone steps of the Colosseum were no longer empty – they were filled with people and horses. Two stallions, one pale grey, the other a chestnut. Both had their ears flattened back in anger, squealing and threatening each other with teeth bared. The men who held them tried to avoid being hurt as the horses reared up and lashed out with their hooves. The men were struggling to restrain them as they fastened the ropes to bind the horses together.

At last they had tied the final knot and the horses, now bound to each other, were let loose. As soon as the horses realised they were free from the men’s grasp, they turned their attention on each other. They rose up on their hind legs, hooves thrashing the air, and then, with a battle scream, the grey horse lunged to attack. As he bit into the neck of the chestnut, there were cheers from the crowd.

It was a horse fight! I couldn’t watch. I turned from the arena and ran. I was sobbing so hard I could barely breathe and the tears blurred my vision so that I couldn’t really see where I was going and then with a hard thud I was stopped in my tracks. I had run right into something. No. I’d run into someone.

A giant of a man was standing before me. His head was shaved right up the sides but he still sported a thick, full red beard. On his head where the hair had been shaved off he was tattooed with the symbols of the runes. He wore ragged clothes, but the golden bracelets that decorated his bulging arms showed that he was a man of power and influence, a chief, a king.

With a massive hand on each of my slight shoulders he grasped me and held me out from him as if to examine me, before he pulled me hard to crush me against his chest, embracing me in a hug. He held me so tight he choked the breath out of me as he said my name:

“Brunhilda.”

I smiled as I gazed up at him.

I had never seen him before in my life and yet I knew exactly who he was.

“Hello, Father.”