by Joan Aiken
Who looked after them? Cal did, the boy who had been fished out of a snowdrift thirteen years before, a hungrily crying baby wrapped in a sheepskin jacket. Both his parents, poor young things, lay stiff and dead by him, and not a scrap of paper on them to show who they were. Nobody came forward to claim the baby, who, it turned out, was lamed from frostbite; McGall’s wife, a good-natured woman, said she’d keep the child. But her own boy, Dirk, never took to the foundling, nor did his father. After Mrs McGall died of lung trouble, young Cal had a hard time of it. Still, by then he had proved his usefulness, did more than half the work in stable and yard, and as he was never paid a penny, McGall found it handy to keep him on. He ate scraps, got bawled at, was cuffed about the head a dozen times a day, and took his comfort in loving the ponies, which, under his care, shone and throve like Derby winners.
Ride them? No, he was never allowed to do that.
“With your useless leg? Forget it,” said McGall. “I’ll not have my stock ruined by you fooling around on them. If I see you on the back of any of my string, I’ll give you such a leathering that you won’t be sitting down for a month.”
Cal had a humble nature. He accepted that he was not good enough to ride the ponies. Never mind! They all loved the boy who tended them. Each would turn to nuzzle him, blowing sweet warm air through his thatch of straw-yellow hair, as he limped down the stable lines.
On a gusty day in November a one-eyed traveller came riding a grey horse up Glenmarrich Pass.
McGall and Dirk had gone down with the Land-Rover to Glen Dune to buy winter supplies, for the first snows were close ahead; by now the inn was shut up for the season, and Cal was the only soul there, apart from the beasts.
The traveller dismounted halfway up the track and led his plodding grey the rest of the way; poor thing, you could see why, for it was dead lame and hobbled painfully, hanging its head as if in grief. A beautiful dark dapple-grey, it must have been a fine horse once but was now old, thin, sick, and tired; looked as if it had been ridden a long, long way, maybe from the other side of the world. And the rider, leading it gently up the rocky path, eyed it with sorrow and regret, as if he knew, only too well, what its fate would soon be and what had brought that fate about.
Reaching the inn door, the traveller knocked hard on the thick oak with the staff he carried: rap, rap! still holding his nag’s reins looped over his elbow.
Cal opened the door: a small, thin, frightened boy.
“Mr. McGall’s not here, sir! He went down the mountain to buy winter stores. And he told me to let nobody in. The fires are all out. And there’s no food cooked.”
“It’s not food I need,” said the traveller. “All I want is a drink. But my horse is lame and sick; he needs rest and care. And I must buy another, or hire one, for I am riding on an urgent errand to a distant place, a long way off on the other side of the mountain.”
Cal gazed at the man in doubt and fright. The stranger was tall, with a grey beard; he wore a blue riding cape and a broad-brimmed hat that was pulled down low; his face was rather stern.
“Sir,” Cal said, “I would like to help you but my master will beat me if I let anyone take a horse when he is not here.”
“I can pay well,” said the one-eyed man. “Just lead me to the stables.”
Somehow, without at all meaning to, Cal found that he was leading the traveller around the corner to the stable yard and the long, thick-roofed building where the ponies rested in warmth and comfort. The one-eyed man glanced swiftly along the row and picked out a grey mountain pony that was sturdy and trim, though nothing like so handsome as his own must once have been.
“This one will serve me,” said he. “I will pay your master ten gold pieces for it” – which he counted out, from a goatskin pouch. Cal’s eyes nearly started from his head; he had never seen gold money before. Each coin must be worth hundreds of pounds.
“Now fetch a bucket of warm mash for my poor beast,” said the traveller.
Eagerly Cal lit a brazier, heated water, put bran into the mash, and some wine too, certain that his master would not grudge it to a customer who paid so well. The sick horse was too tired to take more than a few mouthfuls, though its master fed it and gentled it himself. Then Cal rubbed it down and buckled a warm blanket around its belly.
“How will you know that he is alive, sir?”
The one-eyed man did not answer that question but said, “Here is another gold piece to pay for his board.”
“It is too much, sir,” objected Cal, trembling, for there was something about the stranger’s voice that echoed through and through his head, like the boom of a waterfall.
“Too much? For my faithful companion?”
Cal flinched at his tone; but the man smiled.
“I can see that you are an honest boy. What is your name?”
“Cal, sir.”
“Look after my horse kindly, Cal. Now I must be on my way, for time presses. But first bring me a drink of mead.”
Cal ran into the house and came back with the inn’s largest beaker brimful of homemade mead, which was powerful as the midsummer sun. The traveller, who had been murmuring words of parting to his horse, drank off the mead in one gulp, then kissed his steed on its soft grey nose.
“Farewell, old friend. We shall meet in another world, if not in this.”
He flung a leg over the fresh pony, shook up the reins, and galloped swiftly away into the thick of a dark cloud that hung in the head of the pass.
His own horse lifted up its drooping head and let out one piercing cry of sorrow that echoed far beyond the inn buildings.
McGall, driving back up the valley with a load of stores, heard the cry. “What the deuce was that?” he said. “I hope that lame layabout has not been up to mischief.”
“Stealing a ride when he shouldn’t?” suggested Dirk as the Land-Rover bounced into the stable yard.
Of course McGall was angry, very angry indeed, when he found that a useful weight-carrying grey pony was gone from his stable, in exchange for a sad, sick beast with hardly more flesh on its bones than a skeleton.
Cal made haste to give him the eleven gold coins, and he stared at them hard, bit them, tested them over a candle, and demanded a description of the stranger.
“A one-eyed fellow with a broad-brimmed hat and blue cape? Nobody from these parts. Didn’t give his name? Probably an escaped convict. What sort of payment is that? I’ve never seen such coins. How dare you let that thief make off with one of my best hacks?”
Cal was rewarded by a stunning blow on each side of the head and a shower of kicks.
“Now I have to go down into town again to show these coins to the bank, and it’s all your fault, you little no-good. And I’m not giving stable room and good fodder to that spavined wreck. It can go out in the bothy. And strip that blanket off it!”
The bothy was a miserable tumbledown shed, open on two sides to the weather. Cal dared not argue with his master – that would only have earned him another beating or a tooth knocked out – but he did his best to shelter the sick horse with bales of straw, and he strapped on it the tattered moth-eaten cover from his own bed. Forbidden to feed the beast, he took it his own meals, and he huddled beside it at night, to give it the warmth of his own body. But the grey would eat little and drink only a few mouthfuls of water. And after three days it died, from grieving for its master, Cal thought, rather than sickness.
“Good riddance,” said the innkeeper, who by that time had taken the gold pieces to the bank and been told that they were worth an amazing amount of money. He kicked the grey horse’s carcass. “That’s too skinny to use even for dogmeat. Bury it under the stable muck in the corner; it will do to fertilize the crops next summer.”
“But,” said Cal, “its owner told me, if it died, to bury it under a rowan tree.”
“Get out of my sight! Bury it under a rowan – what next? Go and muck out the stables, before I give you a taste of my boot.”
So the body of the g
rey horse was laid under a great pile of straw and stable sweepings. But before this, Cal took three hairs from its mane. One he tied around his wrist, the other two he folded in a paper and kept always in his pocket.
A year went by, and the one-eyed traveller never returned to inquire after his horse.
He must have known that it died, thought Cal.
“I knew he’d never come back,” said McGall. “Ten to one those coins were stolen. It’s lucky I changed them right away.”
When spring came, the heap of stable sweepings was carted out and spread over the steep mountain pastures. There, at the bottom of the pile, lay the bones of the dead horse, and they had turned black and glistening as coal. Cal managed to smuggle them away, and he buried them, at night, under a rowan tree.
That autumn, snow fell early, with bitter, scouring winds, so that from September onward no more travellers took the steep track up to the Forest Lodge. McGall grew surlier than ever, thinking of the beasts to feed and no money coming in; he cursed Cal for the slightest and kept him hard at work leading the ponies around the yard to exercise them.
“Lead them, don’t ride them!” shouted McGall. “Don’t let me see you on the backs of any of those ponies, you useless idiot! Why the deuce didn’t you die in the blizzard with your wretched parents?”
Secretly Cal did not see why his lame leg should prevent his being able to sit on a horse. Night after night he dreamed of riding the mounts that he tended with such care: the black, piebald, roan, bay, grey, chestnut; when they turned to greet him as he brought their feed he would hug them and murmur, “Ah, you’d carry me, wouldn’t you, if I was allowed?” In his dreams a splendid horse, fiery, swift, obedient to his lightest touch, would carry him over the mountain wherever he wanted to go.
When winter set in, only six ponies were left in the stable; the rest had been taken down to the lowland pasture. But now a series of accidents reduced these remaining: the black threw McGall when he was out searching for a lost sheep and galloped into a gully and broke its neck; the chestnut escaped from Dirk as he was tightening its shoe in the smithy and ran out on to the mountain and was seen no more; the roan and grey fell sick and lay with heaving sides and closed eyes, refusing to eat, until they died. Cal grieved for them sadly.
And, day after day, snow fell, until a ten-foot drift lay piled against the yard gate. The inmates of Forest Lodge had little to do; Cal’s care of the two remaining ponies took only an hour or two each day. Dirk sulked indoors by the fire; McGall, angry and silent, drank more and more mead. Quarrelsome with drink, he continually abused Cal.
“Find something useful to do! Shovel the snow out of the front yard; suppose a traveller came by; how could he find the door? Get outside, and don’t let me see your face till suppertime.”
Cal knew that no traveller would come, but he was glad to get outside, and took broom and shovel to the front yard. Here the wind, raking over the mountain, had turned the snow hard as marble. It was too hard to shift with a broom; Cal had to dig it away in blocks. These he piled up on the slope outside the yard, until he had an enormous rugged mound. At last a way was cut to the front door – supposing that any foolhardy wayfarer should brave the hills in such weather.
Knowing that if he went back indoors McGall would only find some other pointless task, Cal used the blade of his shovel to carve the pile of frozen snow into the rough shape of a horse. Who should know better than he how a horse was shaped? He gave it a broad chest, a small proud head pulled back alertly on the strong neck, and a well-muscled rump. The legs were a problem, for snow legs might not be strong enough to support the massive body he had made, so he left the horse rising out of a block of snow and carved the suggestion of four legs on each side of the block. And he made a snow saddle, but no bridle or stirrups.
“There now!” He patted his creation affectionately. “When we are all asleep, you can gallop off into the dark and find that one-eyed traveller, and tell him that I cared for his grey as well as I could, but I think its heart broke when his master left it.”
The front door opened and Dirk put his head out.
“Come in, no-good,” he yelled, “and peel the spuds for supper!”
Then he saw the snow horse and burst into a rude laugh.
“Mustn’t ride the stock, so he makes himself a snow horsie. Bye, bye, baby boy, ride nice snow horsie, then!” He walked round the statue and laughed even louder. “Why, it has eight legs! Who in the world ever heard of a horse with eight legs? Dad! Dad, come out here and see what Useless has been doing!”
He stared angrily at Cal’s carved horse.
“Is that how you’ve been wasting your time? Get inside, fool, and make the meal!”
Then smoke began to drift around the corner, and a loud sound of crackling.
“Lord above, Dad, you’ve gone and set fire to the stable!” cried Dirk.
Aghast, they all raced round to the stable block, which was burning fiercely.
What water they had, in tubs or barrels, was frozen hard; there was no possible way to put out the blaze. Cal did manage to rescue the bay horse, but the piebald, which was old, had breathed too much smoke, and staggered and fell back into the fire; and the bay, terrified of the flames, snapped the halter with which it had been tethered in the cowshed and ran away over the mountain and was lost.
The whole stable block was soon reduced to a black shell; if the wind had not blown the flames in the other direction, the inn would have burned too.
McGall, in rage and despair, turned on Cal.
“This is your fault, you little rat!”
“Why, master,” said Cal, dumbfounded, “I wasn’t even there!”
“You bring nothing but bad luck! First my wife died, now I haven’t a horse left, and my stable’s ashes. Get out! I never want to see your face again!”
“But – master – how can I go? It’s nearly dark – it’s starting to snow again...”
“Why should I care? You can’t stay here. You made yourself a snow horse,” said McGall, “you can ride away on that – ride it over a cliff, and that’ll be good riddance.”
He stamped off indoors. Dirk, pausing only to shout mockingly, “Ride the snow horsie, baby boy!” followed him, slamming and bolting the door behind him.
Cal turned away. What could he do? The wind was rising; long ribbons of snow came flying on its wings. The stable was burned; he could not shelter there. His heart was heavy at the thought of all the horses he had cared for, gone now. With slow steps he moved across the yard to the massive snow horse and laid an arm over its freezing shoulder.
“You are the only one I have left now,” he told it. And he took off his wrist the long hair from the mane of the traveller’s grey and tied the hair around the snow horse’s neck. Then, piling himself blocks of snow for a mounting block, since this was no pony but a full-sized horse, he clambered up on to its back.
Dusk had fallen; the inn could no longer be seen. Indeed, he could hardly make out the white form under him. He could feel its utter cold, though, striking up all through his own body – and, with the cold, a feeling of tremendous power, like that of the wind itself. Then – after a moment – he could feel the snow horse begin to move and tingle with aliveness, with a cold wild thrilling life of its own. He could feel its eight legs begin to stamp and stretch and strike the ground.
Then they began to gallop.
When McGall rose next morning, sober and bloodshot-eyed and rather ashamed of himself, the very first thing he did was to open the front door.
More snow had fallen during the night; the path Cal had dug to the gate yesterday was filled in again, nine inches deep.
A line of footprints led through this new snow to the inn door – led right up to the door, as if somebody had walked to the doorstep and stood there without moving for a long time, thinking or listening.
“That’s mighty strange,” said McGall, scratching his head. “Someone must have come to the door – but he never knocked, or we’d ha
ve heard him. He never came in. Where the devil did he go?”
For there was only one line of footprints. None led off again.
“He was a big fellow too,” said McGall. “That print is half as long again as my foot. Where did the fellow go? Where did he come from? I don’t like it.”
But how the visitor had come, how he had gone, remained a mystery. As for Cal, he was gone too, and the snow horse with him. Where it had stood there was only a rough bare patch, already covered by new snow.
Bindweed
It was when I was cleaning the dining-room windows that I first saw Aunt Lily, or thought I did. After she was dead, I mean. You know how, when you stand outside a window and rub off the white smears of window-clean fluid, by the time the glass is really shining and clear it acts as a mirror. You can see the sky behind you, quite dazzling; trees and buildings and the ground go dark, like a photographic transparency. It was our garden that I could see reflected, with the big walnut tree and the stretch of lawn, and a bit of the valley beyond, and a cloudy white sky; then, across this scene, carrying a white parasol, strolled our Aunt Lily, who had been dead for a year.
I was so startled that I dropped the container of Busy-BMart window cleaner and made a big pink splash all over the nasturtiums.
“Alan! Now look what you’ve done!” scolded Mum, passing by. It was a Saturday morning. I was earning five pounds to go bowling in the afternoon with Sandy Swithinbank. Cleaning all the downstairs windows, inside and out, double-glazing included, is a hard-earned five pounds, I can tell you. Specially with Aunt Lily thrown in.
