Gilgamesh

by Jo Bannister

  Ellen was standing behind the sofa, very still and quiet. Sally and all of us turned to look at her. Her face was pale, her eyes deep with the shock of the recurrent nightmare. But her voice when she spoke was quite calm and deliberate. “If I thought that riding Gilgamesh would get you hurt, I would shoot him myself today. If I’d known he would get David hurt, I’d have done it last week.”

  Sally knelt on the shabby velvet and caught Ellen’s hands over the high balding back of the sofa. “I understand how you feel that way just now. But it isn’t actually true, Ellen, and if you think about it, you’ll see that. Eventing is a risk sport. We all know people who’ve been put in hospital by their horses, who’ve been put in wheelchairs, who’ve been put under ground. We all know what we risk every time we put a foot in the stirrup. If the results weren’t worth the risk to us, we wouldn’t do it.

  “Well, a man with a gun is a different type of risk, but the big bay bastard may still get me before he has the chance to. I’m gambling I can outwit and outmanoeuvre both of them. I may be wrong; I may wake up tomorrow or the next day in a ward across from David’s, or maybe not at all. But that’s a prospect I’ve faced daily since I first started racing crazy horses across fixed timber. The odds may be shortening, but the gamble is still the same. I want to ride him, Ellen. And if David was in the same position, he’d be set on riding him too.”

  After Harry had gone, Ellen called a council of war in the drawing-room. I thought perhaps she’d been waiting for him to go, in which case I should go too, and I started to make my excuses. But she called me back.

  “If you’re going to be here helping us, you’re as involved as anyone. And for the record, I’ve nothing to say that I want kept from Harry. But we should work out what we’re going to do, and the best and safest ways of doing it. We know how Sally feels about this. I’d like to know what Karen thinks: anything we do is likely to affect her more than anyone. I’d like to know what you think, Clio. There are different ways we can go here, but I’m not making any plans that involve anyone more than she wants to be involved. If we go on with this, there are going to be risks—for everyone, not just Sally.”

  As she was saying this, she was drawing the curtains. It was just after two in the afternoon. I thought it a rather dramatic gesture, but actually she was right. Someone who could shoot a girl off a galloping horse with a .240 deer rifle would have no difficulty shooting the same girl in an armchair behind an uncurtained window and from further away.

  Actually, he was probably miles away right now, aware that the police would be combing the fields and woods around Foxford and content to wait, knowing that in time they must finish and go, leaving behind perhaps a sentinel or two but inevitably nothing like the ring of steel needed to keep out a skilful and determined assassin. You can protect people pretty effectively, but only by putting them in defensible places.

  Just a few men can guard a high-rise hotel room round the clock. The same accommodation in a detached bungalow would need five times the cover and still be more vulnerable to a surprise attack. To defend a house like Foxford, even without extending the dragnet to the estate, would take a small army. Harry hadn’t got an army. Jack Kennedy had an army, but they couldn’t keep a processional route through Dallas safe for him. If he’d been content to run his presidency from a high-rise hotel room, he’d probably be alive today.

  As long as his owner and his rider kept alive Gilgamesh’s challenge for the World Championships, we were all in danger. Foxford was under siege, surrounded by the infinite moments of threat that one man can present when you don’t know who he is.

  When she had straightened the drape of the curtains, the afternoon sunshine filtered, rather than excluded, by the worn fabric, Ellen came and sat down, the four of us forming a small conspiratorial knot round the coffee-table in the middle of the big room. Then she began speaking again, her voice quiet and serious and braced by the authority I had seen growing in her in the days since David was shot.

  “It seems to me that we have three options. We can accept defeat gracefully, rough Gilgamesh off, and turn him out in a field to let this madman know he’s no longer a contender, as David’s ride or anyone else’s. If we do that, and assuming that the horse is indeed the reason for all this, I don’t expect we’ll be troubled any more. We can get on with our lives and our work, and at least there’ll be one less horse in the stables.

  “Or we can find a yard that’ll take him and train him, and put their own rider on him, and hopefully take him to the Championships. Again, if we do that, we’ll probably avoid any more trouble—except for the sleepless nights we’ll have worrying that we’ve wished our problem onto somebody else and whether Gilgamesh will get them before the gunman can.” It could have been a little joke to lighten the atmosphere, but it wasn’t. She was absolutely serious. She was afraid that the horse could kill someone.

  “Or we can keep him in training here. The advantages are that we know we can cope with the horse: Karen can do him and Sally can ride him without any particular likelihood that he’ll put them in the hospital. Also, we know what we’re up against as far as this other thing goes. We’ve seen enough to take it seriously; no one else has to get shot before we start watching our own and each other’s backs. And we already have the co-operation of our local police. Someone coming fresh to the problem in another part of the country might not get the same help, at least until someone else got hurt. You can’t expect them to surround a horse with the same sort of security they provide for visiting heads of state.”

  We smiled and waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, after a minute Sally said, “It sounds like you’ve already decided.”

  Ellen sighed. “Decided one thing anyway. I’m not going to send him away.”

  No one raised an argument Clearly she was right.

  When no one else spoke, Karen said, “If he’s staying here and if Sally’s going to ride him, I want to groom for her. I don’t expect that makes me a target, but anyway I’ll risk it But the big problem isn’t going to be Gilgamesh: it’s the other seven horses. It’s crazy for Sally to risk being shot at seven times a day riding out on horses that someone else could do quite safely. I could exercise them, enough to keep them fit anyway, but I can’t ride them round the likes of Bramham, and their owners wouldn’t thank me for trying.

  “Unless we can get another rider in, I think we have to ask their owners to send the four that aren’t ours to another yard where they can be done properly and ridden out by whoever’s going to compete with them. And where they won’t get caught in any cross-fire. I’m sorry, Ellen; I wanted to keep them together for David too. But I don’t think we’ve any right to. Not if we’re keeping Gilgamesh.”

  Ellen leaned forward and touched her hand. “You’re right. I’m glad you thought of it. I’ll call the four of them today, see if they can move their horses out tomorrow. They’ll understand. Maybe they’ll come back another season.” She straightened up and smiled, not like a woman who’d just lost most of her income. “Never mind, we still have our own four. And it does solve one problem: how to manage without David and Jane.”

  “All right,” said Sally slowly. “So I ride Gilgamesh—and Pasha, I can’t leave him just standing there, but he won’t need as much as the younger horses; I can do most of his work in the school—and Karen rides the other three. We can split the stable-work between us. We can do the five between two of us for as long as it takes.”

  My heart lifted. What, no more call for a supernumerary shit-shoveller?

  Someone said, “You’re not getting rid of me as easily as that,” and I was amazed to find it was me. “Maybe you can manage without me now, but I want to help. There must be something I can usefully do. Hell, I can sit on the roof with a pair of binoculars and a whistle if there’s nothing else going.”

  Ellen sat back and smiled, and there was something like pride in her face. “We’re going to beat this. We’re going to beat it and come through it, and I don’t give a t
inker’s damn whether the horse gets to the World Championships, but he’s damn well going to have his crack at the trials.”

  Chapter Four

  For a week we were amazingly careful, peeping round corners before turning them and opening feed-bins as if they might be booby-trapped, and absolutely nothing happened. For the first three days, we had a police minder. Then we had a part-time minder, and a little after that we had a crunch on the gravel every few hours as a cruising squad car included us on its itinerary, between the glue-sniffers of the Chamberlain Estate and kids stoning cars off the motorway flyover. Then it was Bramham.

  They travelled up to Yorkshire on the Wednesday. With half the horses away home, the only occupant of the big van was Gilgamesh. Since the other three were staying behind, Karen had to stay with them, so Ellen was both driver and groom. She invited me along for the trip, but I wanted to stay and give Karen what help and moral support I could. She was obviously disappointed to miss the big event but accepted it as unavoidable. She cheered up when she found that at least she wouldn’t be entirely on her own.

  Ellen phoned me on the Friday, after the dressage phase (largely satisfactory, occasionally impressive, but with momentary lapses of temper, and the horse wasn’t bad either), and on the Saturday, Karen and I made an absurdly early start, raced through our chores, then piled into Harry’s car to race up the M1 and beyond, in order to reach Bramham in time for Sally’s cross-country. Rather to my surprise, Harry announced he was coming too. It may have been me he wanted to keep an eye on, but I think it was the car.

  To my joy and surprise, there was practically no mud. There was no problem driving into the car-park and no prospect of difficulty getting out. The turf was green, not brown. The gypsy encampment of caravans no longer resembled a cluster of mosques with ranks of shoes waiting patiently around the doors. Both my yellow wellies and Harry’s finding-things-in-sewers boots were redundant. Clumping round all afternoon behind me, Harry managed somehow to give the impression that this was my fault.

  Before the car was stopped, Karen was out and trotting through the ranks of vehicles, pointing rather vaguely ahead of her. “I’ll go and help out at the vet box.” She turned round, running backwards for a pace or two, pointing another way. “If you want to watch some of the fences, your best bet’s over thataway. Never mind the big personality fences with the crowds round them: find somewhere you can see three or four fences at once, then you can see how the course is riding.”

  That was the last we saw of her until tea-time.

  We studied the programme, found Sally’s number, and peered after a few galloping backs to see how long it was to her turn. Then we followed Karen’s advice and traced the line of the course round until we found ourselves on the inside of a curve with a small eminence from which we could watch the horses through a wide arc and over four different obstacle. We sat down on Harry’s raincoat and passed his binoculars between us.

  Even those of us who love my husband dearly—three at the last count: me, his mum, and his brother, Charlie—would not pretend that he’s easy to entertain. It’s not that he has no capacity for enjoyment—I don’t know about the other two, but I can testify unreservedly that he has—more that he has a built-in resistance to anything that comes designed and packaged for his amusement. He is either the crowning triumph of the work ethic or one of its casualties, depending on how you look at it.

  His idea of relaxation is creosoting the fence. His idea of good television is watching workers blast a highway through the Amazonian rain forest. His idea of a real treat is crawling round our garage floor under his first love, the Riley—he only stopped driving it to work when an independent road test established that he’d have to give best to a bank robber making his getaway in a Reliant Robin—getting oily and smelly and occasionally crushing his thumb. But will he take it to rallies and enjoy showing it off and looking at other people’s? He will not. “It’s a car, not a poodle,” he grunts, and disappears back under the sump.

  So it was with considerable surprise, even some suspicion, that I realised he had stopped complaining about the crowds, and the walk from the car-park, and his boots, and the fact that horses kept galloping past and spoiling his view of the park, and actually seemed to be taking some interest in the competition and the competitors. He kept referring to the programme. A couple of times he clumped down the hill to stand beside particular fences and watch how different riders tackled them. I even caught him making notes in the margin, but I couldn’t read them.

  He said, “I’d no idea how substantial these things are.”

  We were looking at a pile of timber, not so much logs as tree-trunks, like giant spillikins tipped across the track. They could have been left as they had fallen off the dumper-truck, with just a little red flag added at one end and a white one at the other. There was no obvious route through. Some horses did it in two jumps at one side, others in three down the middle. One jumped into the middle and wouldn’t jump out again. One, jumping the corner, misjudged the take-off and ended up spread-eagled across it with its front feet on the ground and its back ones hung up briefly on the fence. The rider, who had made a close inspection of his horse’s ears while this was happening, was now upright again, looking round in some embarrassment at the interested crowd gathering. After a moment, with a wriggle and a heave, the horse sorted itself out and the combination continued, apparently none the worse for wear.

  Harry said thoughtfully, “You don’t realise just how powerful the horses are. Or how fast they can travel, or how few things stop them.” Deep in his policeman’s brain the mills were turning again, but I didn’t know what they were grinding or to what end.

  But they didn’t grind uninterrupted for too long, because while we were standing beside the fence we found ourselves caught up in a small drama. A little black horse came sprinting down the track, turned into the fence, and got it wrong. After seeing a number of people jump it, some of them better than others but all of them managing, it was quite a shock to see somebody come a real purler.

  It all happened so quickly it was hard to see exactly what had gone wrong. I think they jumped too soon, so that the horse was already coming down when it should still have been going up. Its front feet came down inside the back rail, and the impetus of its motion turned it over, literally somersaulting over the rail, its back legs stretched out and raking the sky like a child turning cartwheels. It landed on its back with a terrible crump that I could feel through the ground as well as hear and see, and the crowd round the fence sucked in a sharp breath and fell silent. I didn’t know quite where the rider was at this point, but there seemed no great likelihood of either rising again.

  Then with a heave and a rueful expression, the black horse got its legs under it and staggered to its feet, and a bundle of coloured silks slowly unfolded on the ground where the animal had lain. The crowd breathed again.

  Someone laid a hand to the horse. It moved awkwardly for a moment, bruised by the fall, but recovered quickly, shaking off the shock and stiffness. I pushed a way through the watching cluster to where the rider was still sitting on the turf with the fence judge squatting beside her. “Can I help? I’m a doctor.”

  She didn’t look up. “I’m all right,” she said in a small voice. She was about Karen’s age, frail in variegated silk. “Claire—is Claire all right?” She raised her head then and turned this way and that, looking about her with the slightly distracted air of someone who’s forgotten what she’s looking for and hopes she’ll remember before she finds it.

  “Claire?”

  The fence judge smile. “The horse. It’s always the horse. Claire’s fine. Now what about you? Is it safe enough to move her, doctor?”

  Nothing was bending the wrong way or giving her particular pain. “Oh, I think so. But have her checked out at the medical tent; she’s a bit concussed.”

  That focused her attention faster than anything else I could have done. Her head jerked round at me, her eyes flaring. “Medica
l tent be damned! I’m all right. If Claire is too, we’re going on.”

  She wasn’t fit to. I touched her cheek, and the skin was cool as well as pale. There was dizziness in her eyes. It was a classic conscious concussion. “I can’t advise it. You are concussed, and that means you’re operating below par. If you go on, there’s a strong possibility that you’ll make a bad mistake before you finish, and then you or Claire might not be so lucky. Call it a day while you’re both OK.”

  She looked at me with desperation and something akin to hatred. “Who the hell are you?”

  I spread my hands defensively. “Nobody. A spectator. But I am a doctor, and I know concussion when I see it. You’ve had my advice; whether you take it is up to you.”

  “No,” said the fence judge, straightening up into a young man about six feet tall, “actually it’s up to me. I’m sorry, but I’ve no doubt the doctor is right and that leaves me with no alternative. I’m pulling you up.”

  “You can’t!” She stumbled to her feet and stood swaying, devastation etched on her face. “You have no right!”

  “As you very well know,” he said calmly, “I have not only the right but the duty. If you continue with sixpence short on a shilling, you could kill yourself, your horse, a spectator—even a fence judge. I’m sorry.”

  “Damn you,” she cried. “Have you any idea what it takes to get here—in money, time, effort, and blood? I may never make it again. What’s a bit of concussion—to me, to any of us? I’m all right; I can ride on. You owe me that much.”

  “What I owe you,” said the young man, firmly but not without sympathy, “is my job done to the best of my judgement, in your interests and everyone else’s. Shouting at me isn’t going to change my view that you’re not fit to continue. Please pull off course and make your way back. I’ll arrange a lift for you and someone to take your horse if you’d prefer.”