Mercury's Flight - The Story of a Lipizzaner Stallion

by Annie Wedekind

  He was trotting, if this springy, floating, dancing rhythm could be called a trot, but he wasn’t moving forward, and not because the pillars’ ties were holding him back. No, he was holding himself back, creating a kind of loop of action: motion that flowed forward, only to be arrested, like a frozen waterfall. This gait, or dance movement, was familiar, too: It was the illustration of excitement, pride, longing. As a yearling, you would call it prancing in place. As a senior stallion, Maestro was executing the piaffe. His eyes shone with delight as he swayed rhythmically from legs to legs—his very forelock bristled with pride. I was amazed by the power of his hindquarters, how far they reached under his belly, and how much weight they bore to free his forelegs. This was not merely lovely—this required strength, stamina, and focus. The more I watched, the more impressed I was.

  And then, at an invisible signal from the man standing beside him, and as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Maestro stopped, waited a few beats, then rose up on those magnificent hind legs and became as much of a statue as any of the snow sculptures above our heads. In fact, it was at that moment, when the fine old stallion executed his renowned levade, holding perfectly still with his elegant forelegs tucked neatly before him, that something of the connection between this place, the Winterreitschule, and our work as horses and with men came together for me. My feelings were jumbled, but I could sense the relationship between Maestro’s pose and the ageless school, with its elaborate sky and hushed atmosphere, the endless patience of the men and the slow, measured pace of our days. Suddenly I knew that I was part of something greater than myself. And if this place, this palace of horses, was housed in the cosmopolitan heart of Europe, then what we did must matter even to the people beyond our walls. After all, they came to see us every day, lining the balcony and peering down at us. I had often wondered what they were looking for, or what exactly they saw when they stared at us. Now, staring myself at Maestro, I thought I understood.

  “Let him look,” came a quiet voice by my shoulder. I was surprised to see Polak there; I hadn’t even noticed his approach. Poor Max, I could feel his anxiety that I was being so disobedient during our first ride before the Oberbereiter. But he could not defend or explain from the saddle—he had been reprimanded for this before. He sat, stiff with embarrassment, radiating annoyance through the reins.

  “It is absolutely right that he should be interested in his neighbor’s actions. Of course, we cannot allow him to be so distracted by other horses in general, but if he wants to watch Maestro perform, he could not have a better example to follow.” Max relaxed, and I continued to study the movements of the grand stallion between the pillars.

  Later, back in the Stallburg, he asked me, “Mercury, were you actually learning something from Maestro, or were you just messing about?” He laughed. “Myself, I think you were messing about. Glad Polak had another explanation, though!”

  “That might be the least intelligent thing I’ve heard Young Max say,” Maestro remarked in a sour tone.

  * * *

  Looking back, that afternoon was a turning point in my training. Between the example of Maestro and the introduction of Oberbereiter Polak as our primary instructor, a threshold had been crossed for both Max and me. By the end of my second year at Die Spanische, we were making steady progress—progress I could feel in the strengthening of my body, in the increasing suppleness of my joints, and in the way I thought about our exercises and how best to perform them. I was no longer an ignorant first year; now I did my best to provide a buffer for the new horses sent up from Piber against the new generation of bullies (Pluto Adrina, among them, I’m afraid). Slava and Bonny still butted heads, but Bonny had bigger things on his mind than fighting with another stallion, however provoking. As he had long hoped for and predicted, Bonny was following in his father’s hoofprints and was being trained as a capriole artist.

  Ned was quite desperate to master the capriole, too. We had watched Bonny launching through the air (some attempts more successful than others) in this most beautiful and dramatic of the Airs Above the Ground, as the advanced movements were called. Ned wanted to fly—and if any horse could fly, I was sure it would be Ned. I had no particular ambition, except to please Max and Oberbereiter Polak. These two, plus Ned and to some extent Maestro and Bonny, had my heart.

  They worked in concert, and their different energies were quite engrossing. Max, like me, was young, eager, and intense. Polak, who started riding me occasionally at the end of my second year, was unflappable. I felt excited trying new things with Max, and I felt like a genius when Polak was in the saddle. His aids were so clear, his seat so calm, his spirit so encouraging—well, I’m raving. But he was a rider, and a dear man, worth raving about.

  By the end of my second year, I was ready to graduate to the campagne for my third year of training. Ned graduated with me, and so did Pluto Adrina. It’s true that they always outpaced me in learning new movements and exercises, but somehow, perhaps through my sheer persistence, or perhaps because the other two had a tendency to backslide, we usually ended up at about the same level. Which meant, at this point, that we could walk, trot, and canter in a straight and forward fashion, under a rider. More, we could perform all these gaits with a degree of collection as well. My collection, if I do say so myself, was good. Pluto Adrina’s was not—he had weak hindquarters—but he was such a nice mover overall that his élève, Stefan, had high (and boastful, to my ears) hopes for him. Ned had flashes of brilliance, but he was erratic, and he and his élève, Georg—high-spirited, forever whistling—were a volatile combination. In comparison with these four bouncing, proud boys, Max and I were a sober pair indeed: dark where they were fair, quiet where they were rowdy, and deliberate where they were charging full steam ahead. It didn’t matter. They seemed rather to love us, just as we were.

  I had started to learn the piaffe, and was working on my passage. I had learned to bend my body in a number of ways, and to place my feet with deliberate care. I had watched the few stallions who could perform the Airs Above the Ground … the flying capriole, the gravity-defying courbette, the Maestro’s levade. According to Maestro, these movements, besides being formalized versions of what stallions did naturally, had their roots in warfare, both horse and human.

  “Never forget that our exercises—no matter how elegant, how artistic—have been formed by the partnership of horses and humans in battle,” he told me seriously. “What is the capriole but a form of evasion? What is my levade but a posture to strike down one’s enemies from above? Or, in our terms, what is a courbette but an aggressive challenge to a stallion making an incursion on one’s territory?”

  War. A stallion understood it instinctively, of course—even me. I was no Slava, no Pluto Adrina, but we are born with a need for rank, for mares, and for ownership of a place. In the world that humans have made for us, these needs—molded, necessarily, by our circumstances—are expressed differently, but they still exist. Some stallions boss other stallions. Some stallions boss the humans that take care of them. Some become followers. Some become possessive of the space around them, creating a territory wherever they trot. Some, like me, put a human at the head of their ranking system. Max was my general, my alpha, and I had a feeling that if ever called upon, I would carry him into battle without blinking an eye. I wish, in many ways, that I could have.

  CHAPTER 7

  The spring of 1939 was remarkably beautiful. The heavy, sweet smell of the chestnut trees perfumed the Sommerreitschule during our evening strolls, and the doves and blackbirds whirled in the fragile gray-blue of the evening sky. I loved when it was our turn in the courtyard—we trained there, too, of course, but I especially prized my hours of liberty, surrounded by the timeless arches. I had my own fancies, my own memories, though their clarity faded with each passing year at Die Spanische. I liked to conjure up the feeling of solitude I had relished on my mountainside. I had little chance, in my new life, to maintain the position I most preferred: that of belonging
to a herd, and to people, but having the luxury to observe them from some distance. To not mix so much, to put it bluntly. Here I was forced into community—a community I mostly loved, to be sure, but still … there were moments when I very much wished to be by myself.

  Horses do not like change. We are sentimental and steadfast, stubborn and of limited imagination. We prefer safety, routine, and a comfortable amount of freedom. To a certain degree, we can be made to fight cavalry charges as long as we have our familiar brush and a bucket of oats—on the other hand, we can become neurotics. It comes down to trust. I trusted Max and Oberbereiter Polak, and I loved a handful of the horses in my stable, so there was little chance I would turn sour. More, I usually found our near-daily forty-five-minute training sessions invigorating. I had bad days, to be sure, but Max was so scrupulously careful to end our sessions on a good note—in essence, to restore my pride even when I had bungled badly—that my low moods never lasted long.

  Other horses did not fare as well. I’ve spoken of the psychological transformations that were such necessary ingredients to our training: making common cause with our riders, making peace with our elegant confinement. Over the course of my early years at Die Spanische, I witnessed a handful of transformations gone awry, or made incompletely … or not at all. Some stallions simply couldn’t be brought on board, so to speak, and they expressed their unsuitableness for life at the school in ways ranging from the emphatic (throwing riders, fighting with other horses) to the quiet (going off their feed, becoming dull and listless). These horses were not allowed to remain miserable—they were sold, shipped back to Piber, or gelded and given other work. I saw these things happen, or heard about them, and did not think deeply about any of it, except to be glad that I continued in my own way to prove my worth and so was not dismissed. No, the careful culling of our ranks did not disturb me … until it happened, though under different circumstances, to Galant. To Ned.

  It was a confusing time at Die Spanische … in the world, I suspect. We had been told that the German Army, the Wehrmacht, was taking over the school, as they had taken over Austria. The Germans brought a great uneasiness with them—a sense of uncertainty and fear that penetrated deep within the stone walls of our palace. Suddenly there were military men watching our exercises, roaming our halls, making inspections and (in our mind) a quite unnecessary bustle. From what I could gather, it seemed that now that Austria belonged to the Germans, so did everything in Austria … including a stable full of Lipizzaner stallions in the heart of Vienna. And the Germans were trying to decide what to do with us.

  After a nervous day of army men striding about the barns and poking around our hay and halters, I was feeling quite upset, mostly because Max had been almost totally absent during their visit. I was pacing my stall, nickering for him, when Maestro admonished me to calm down.

  “The Holy Roman Empire. The Hapsburgs. The First Republic. And now the German Reich. We have survived them all, and we will outlast this, too, Mercury. We are above the political machinations of the world,” he said solemnly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t really care about the Germans per se, except when they were making a nuisance of themselves. It was Max I missed.

  He was back the next day, even more subdued than usual, and he greeted me almost absently, though he spent a long time in my stall, brushing me over and over again, even when there wasn’t a stray hair left to shed. He didn’t put my tack on, or lead me out to the Sommerreitschule, or say much of anything. He just leaned against my shoulder, braiding and unbraiding my mane, checking nonexistent cracks in my hooves, then, finally, just petting me, silently.

  We had more days like that—silent, thoughtful days—as spring turned to summer, and Max’s somber mood affected mine. Even worse, he had a few very uncharacteristic quarrels with the other élèves. In fairness, it was a stressful time for everyone (even without the Germans), so perhaps the spats were simply a release of tension. All three élèves—my Max, Ned’s Georg, and Adrina’s Stefan—were due for evaluations in the autumn, evaluations that could lead to their promotions to Assistant Riders. I remembered all too well what it was like to face the sort of inspection that could decide the course of your future. I was still a little amazed that I’d passed mine. Still, their voices were startling … so unusually cold and hot, rising and falling that morning, the first really hot day of the year.…

  “… don’t see why you’re making such a fuss about it. It’s just a gesture!” Stefan sounded half-joking, half-angry as he led Adrina back to his stall after the weekend performance. Adrina and Ned had both been featured in the Young Stallions segment, and Max had helped demonstrate Maestro’s magnificent levade in-hand. He hadn’t wanted to ride at all, and had even told a fib that I seemed under the weather, but what with staff shortages and his own growing competence, he was always needed now. He was silent as he started untacking Maestro, his back to Stefan, who stood staring at him through the bars. Stefan apparently wasn’t through.

  “It makes us look bad—sloppy. Can you imagine how stupid you looked, just standing there with your hands to your side while everyone else graciously acknowledged the audience’s applause? How ungrateful? How—”

  “I don’t care how stupid or ungrateful I looked, Stefan!” Max whirled around to face the boy in the corridor. “The only emperor I’m saluting in the Winterreitschule is Charles VI!”

  “Who’s that?” I nickered to Maestro.

  He sighed heavily. “Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Archduke of Austria. He had the Winterreitschule built. It’s his portrait that hangs in the hall, that the riders salute.”

  “Ah. That red bit. Always wondered what that was.”

  Maestro looked too offended to respond, so he closed his eyes.

  “Times change, Max! What’s the big deal? Wait—stop. I’ll tell you what the big deal is, actually. OK? It’s that we were performing for some of the top officers of the Wehrmacht—men who very well might decide the future of Die Spanische—and you went out of your way to insult them!”

  “Time is not supposed to change here!” Max practically shouted, jerking Maestro out of his snooze.

  “What?” Stefan snorted. “What childishness—”

  Max’s voice crackled with emotion. “Every day we practice an art whose principles were set by Xenophon1 more than two thousand years ago! Die Spanische itself was founded in the sixteenth century, for God’s sake … look at the uniforms we wear, the traditions that are passed down from rider to rider.…” Max was growing hoarse.

  “I don’t need a history lesson, thank you very much,” Stefan snapped. “I am much more concerned about the future. And if I were you, I’d be concerned, too. After all, the evaluations are coming up in autumn, and if the Wehrmacht is in charge of the school, I’m sure they will be looking very carefully into all of the riders’ qualifications.”

  There must have been an undertone to this that I didn’t understand, because the color left Max’s face. I do believe he would have opened the stall door and hit Stefan if Georg hadn’t intervened.

  “Oh, enough, you two,” he said cheerfully. “I admit I think the salute’s a bit silly. I think we should just take off our hats like we used to. Max has a point—we’re horsemen, after all, not soldiers. Why should we be raising our arms in the air and shouting ‘Heil Hitler’? But they want us to, so there you have it. Best to do what they say.”

  * * *

  Things were sour between Max and Stefan after that exchange, though Georg tried to keep the peace. He wasn’t always effective. Even a horse could see that Stefan had a decided opinion, Max had another equally decided but opposite opinion, and Georg really had no opinion at all, except that the arguments were a bore.

  “Young Max is right, of course,” Maestro told me as we walked to the Sommerreitschule for our morning lesson. “The fads of government have nothing to do with us. ‘We are the makers of manners,’ as the English poet said. At least, we should be. The world would be a much b
etter place if people held its reins with a lighter hand.”

  I liked that—and liked that Maestro thought Max was in the right. Ned and I had reached no conclusions except that Stefan was becoming increasingly obnoxious. He’d always been a bit of a braggart, but friendly and dutiful. He took splendid care of Pluto Adrina and treated us all with affection. He used to be tolerant of Max’s more quiet spirits, much as Ned had always tolerated mine. But no—that’s not quite right. Ned had defended me, and I doubt Stefan would go that far for Max. At any rate, his mood changed with Max’s, with the school’s, with Vienna’s. In the long, topsy-turvy days of summer, lines were being drawn.

  And yet the figures we cut that summer and fall! I cannot think of that time without doing a mental pirouette, for the movement dominated my thoughts, despite all of our other work, from lead changes to improving my serpentines and renvers. But the pirouette, for a time, completely baffled me, so it looms large in memory. If my first and second years were all about going forward and straight, my third year was defined by learning to bend. At first, it seemed odd to me—after all, we’d taken all this time to address my crookedness, and now they appeared to want me to be crooked. Shoulders-in, or tail-to-the-wall, hindquarters swiveling, forelegs free, going forward but not looking forward, and trotting … oh, the trotting. It seemed all I did was trot. I am not passionate about speed, like Ned was back at Piber, but even I could have used a good canter up and down the length of the arena after a day of trot, trot, bend, twirl, trot, bend. But I don’t complain of it. My body grew stronger and stronger, Max grew ever more secure and sensitive to my motion, and on days when I was really stuck, Polak would hop on my back and seem to perform the passade and renvers for me. He was positively uncanny, that man.