Mercury's Flight - The Story of a Lipizzaner Stallion Read online

  The last thing I heard as we made our way toward the door was the distinct snort of Maestro telling Bonny to shut his muzzle.

  CHAPTER 5

  If Bonny hadn’t characterized the Winterreitschule as a paddock, I would never in a thousand years have thought it was a place built for horses. But it was no more a “paddock” than one of the wild mountainsides of Western Styria was a “pasture.”

  In fact, I thought, this could be a kind of human version of the grandeur of the snowy peaks of home. I blinked up at the flood of daylight that poured into the fantastical white hall, illuminating the elaborate frozen shapes that seemed to me like so many delicate drifts of ice and snow, suspended in time like the white horse head above my stall. The very sky was white and carved in floes and veins like a snow-covered waterfall, and a silence and peace reigned here, as they reigned in the wintery, snowbound hollows between the hills of Piber. It was a sunny dome, a cave of ice, with a slash of red in the very center of the far wall, like a cardinal on a winter tree.

  And suddenly this silent winter palace was filled with horses, none of whom seemed overawed by the grandeur of the place. Snorting, pawing, and taking great, energetic strides into the center of the arena, five stallions rushed by me as I stood, dazzled, by the door. They broke the spell, and I bounded forward to join them, eager, for once, to simply run around with a bunch of horses. It felt so good to loosen and stretch my tense muscles that I lost my head and bucked down the entire long side of the arena, then took a few bouncing leaps as if I were jumping over the mountain streams of home. I shook my head and tossed my forelock and pranced happily around the corners—until I felt an unceremonious kick on my flank. It was hard, and it hurt.

  “Out of my way, first year,” snorted a well-muscled, dapple gray stallion, apparently the giver of the kick. His neck snaked viciously forward, and he got right up in my muzzle. “We’re running this way. Stay with the herd.” His ears were pinned so tightly back to his skull that they appeared to be missing altogether. He had a very long, narrow face, and his stone gray forelock parted in a dark curtain over his eyes. I glanced behind him. The herd didn’t seem to be going in any particular direction. Everywhere I looked, I saw frolicking, bantering stallions, play fighting, smelling one another, getting annoyed and lashing out, jostling for position in front of the group. Nothing I hadn’t seen at Piber, after all.

  “The herd seems fine without me,” I ventured, and eased away from the threatening face now pressing even closer to my own. The stranger seemed to want to shove me backward into the corner, trapping me, and after allowing myself to be forced back a few steps, I decided this was not the best idea. I sidestepped, swinging my hindquarters away from the wall, and tried to get my head over the gray’s. I failed spectacularly: The stallion reared, batting at my neck with his forelegs, and I squealed in protest. At the sound, a groom materialized just ahead of us, waving my attacker off with a sharp word and emphatic gestures.

  “Tattletale,” the stallion snorted at me with an evil look as he turned, reluctantly, away. “Mama’s boy.” That cheered me up. He might have rattled me a little, but I knew for a fact that I was no mama’s boy.

  The rest of our frolic in the Winterreitschule passed in relative peace, though it passed too quickly. I felt I could have wandered around the long oval, studying the light, the people watching us from the balconies, the elaborate snowy world within its walls, for quite a bit longer. I also wanted more freedom. I wanted to walk through the streets of Vienna with Max, have more strudel, find some grass perhaps just now peeking through melted snow. I was restless, filled with a yearning for more … more of everything, I suppose. More room, more time, and more answers as to what I was supposed to be, and how I would become it. I was reluctant to leave the arena, but Max did not force me. He waited until I was ready, until I knew that no matter how much I’d rather stay, I’d still have to go, and it wasn’t worth fighting about. Then, as I finally stepped forward, toward him, he gave me his last bit of strudel, as if in consolation.

  * * *

  “So that was Slava?” I called over to Bonny as we ate our hay back in the Stallburg. “The one with the skinny face and negative attitude?”

  “That’s the one,” Bonny said, putting his ears back. “Did you kick him for me?”

  “No—he kicked me, though. I think I hate that guy.”

  “We all do, Mercury. We all hate that guy.” Bonny sighed heavily.

  “Hey!” Ned broke in. “Is that your new name? Is that what they’re calling you now?”

  “Um, I don’t know. Is it, Bonny?” Mercury. It wasn’t quite as bad as Mercurio, somehow. It sounded almost the same of course, but there was perhaps enough of a difference … Mercury. I tried it out in my head. It wasn’t … awful.

  “That’s what I heard Max the Gypsy call you, when you all were in the Winterreitschule. He said he wanted to give the little snail wings, whatever that means.”

  “Young Max was referring to Merkur, or Mercury—or Hermes, for that matter—god of the ancients, in an empire even before the Hapsburgs.” I had assumed Maestro was asleep, but I was soon to learn that one of his many skills was feigning unconsciousness. Perhaps it wasn’t entirely deliberate; he seemed to exist very comfortably in a twilight state, musing his own inscrutable thoughts, not bothering with the rest of us unless something piqued his attention, as it had now.

  “Mind explaining that, sir?” Bonny said in the habitually respectful and affectionate manner with which all the stallions treated my neighbor.

  “A god. A human god. Not the creator of horses—no, that was Poseidon for the Greeks, Neptune after the Romans got hold of him. Always seemed strange to have horses born from water, especially the ocean. It’s not our best medium. But, ah, Mercury has a hat with wings. God of messengers, dreams, thieves, and, well, a few more things I’m sure. You’ll see Greeks and Romans scattered throughout the city … Theseus in the Volksgarten, Athena outside the Parliament building. They, too, are part of our history. All of Europe is. We are citizens of the world.”

  And with that, Maestro really fell asleep.

  * * *

  If the following weeks did not bring enlightenment as to our purpose in Vienna, they did at least bring a measure of resignation to our new lifestyle. Gradually I got used to the schedule of meals, meticulous grooming, and daily frolics in the Winterreitschule, became acquainted with the stallions of our hall and the second years who ran with us under the white dome of the snowy palace. I had several more run-ins with Slava—his kind of bullying was impossible to avoid altogether—but as I merely resisted him, instead of challenging him, he eventually lost interest in me.

  “See?” Ned told me one morning, “You’re already Uncle Mercury here, like you were Uncle Schnecki at Piber. Everyone trusts you and knows to leave you alone when you want it.”

  I had to admit he had a point. I had always thought of myself as a loner, bound only to Ned and to Jan, aloof from the herd. But there was no luxury of escape here, except mental. I was forced to live cheek by jowl with a slew of strangers, and to my surprise, they both accepted me and let me be, allowing me to carve out a space of liberty, at least in my own head. And, so far, no one had remarked on either my looks or my mother.

  “Who would want to mess with Mercury?” Bonny asked incredulously. “I mean, he’ll never be perfect, like me, or boss of the first years, but he’s, well, smart. Total brain.”

  “Thanks, Bonny,” I said modestly, licking my block of salt. Yes, it took the sting out of our confinement, being respected by the others. Pluto Adrina had not had such luck—he and Slava seemed enmeshed in daily guerrilla warfare in the Winterreitschule, and he did not get along well with his neighbors down the corridor. I had always thought he was a bold horse, though filly-obsessed. The others apparently thought he was a bit of a blowhard. Ned—Ned was Ned, though now Galant. Brave, spirited, cheerful, and a great social creature. I suspected I owed half of my unexpected cachet to his good offices, thou
gh of course he denied it.

  My élève, Max, was a regular presence, and soon an eagerly expected one. He couldn’t have been more different from Jan—dark where Jan was fair, long-legged and thin where Jan was stocky, and sober where Jan was smiling. But I liked people, and Max was my person. More—he suited me. He had great dark eyes set in a melancholy face, and his movements and voice were always quiet and calm. He appeared to have taken Jan’s parting words quite to heart and was never impatient or rude to me. He gave simple instructions over and over again, waiting patiently until I understood. And he seemed to like me. I’ve always responded well to people who like me.

  By my third week at Die Spanische, I felt I understood what, so far, was expected of me. And so then, of course it all changed.

  I remembered saddles and bridles from Piber, though it had been a while since I’d worn them, so I didn’t object when Max suited me up one morning, especially when I saw Ned’s élève, Georg, doing the same. The bit was a light snaffle, and Max didn’t cinch the girth too tight, so I felt comfortable and interested in the change of routine.

  “And so it begins,” Maestro commented, eyes half closed. “You have wondered what your purpose is, young stallion, and today is the first step on the road to discovery and understanding.”

  It was thrilling. I could hardly stand still as Max finished his adjustments and plucked a stray piece of straw from my tail. I caught Ned’s eye and we exchanged excited glances. And so it begins!

  And twenty-five minutes later, it ended.

  Ned was frankly disgusted. “All we got to do was walk around in a circle for twenty minutes? Seriously? I got a good canter up and Georg just stared at me with this sort of sad look on his face until I walked again, and then he gave me a ridiculous amount of sugar. OK, I get it. Walk in a circle. Get sugar. But what’s the point?”

  I was wondering the same thing. It had taken me longer to figure out what Max wanted than it had taken Ned, of course, but it seemed as though a minute after I stopped walking back over to Max and had gone around in a few circles like he wanted, he put a halt to the proceedings, showered me with praise, and called it a day. It was, truly, a little embarrassing.

  “Every great artistic endeavor has a beginning, and this is ours.” I had had a feeling we were coming home to a lecture from Maestro, and I was right. “You must learn to walk. To trot, especially. You must learn to understand the riders.”

  “I know how to walk,” Ned grumbled.

  “Do you, Neapolitano Galanta? Do you know how to correctly place your hoofs, to bend the body, to align your hindquarters with your shoulders, and to free your back?”

  “Erm—”

  “Did you buck?”

  “Once or twice, maybe.”

  “Did you gallop?”

  “Well … only a little.”

  “Did you wander aimlessly toward your élève, or the other horses?”

  “That was Mercury, not me.”

  “The beginning of wisdom is to first accept how little you know. And you two, I’m afraid, know nothing. Do not feel ashamed. It is how we all begin.”

  Fine, I thought. But if this was the beginning, what would be our end? First I must walk in a circle. Or should I say, learn a new way of walking in a circle. No, that wasn’t right either. Learn a new way of thinking about walking in a circle?

  “My brain hurts,” I commented aloud. I directed the complaint toward Ned, but it was Maestro who answered.

  “And that is exactly the muscle you should be exercising, young stallion,” he said in a satisfied tone.

  CHAPTER 6

  Apparently Ned and I did know how to walk, and yet we needed to learn how to walk under a new set of circumstances.

  It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight, to follow the stages of our training and see how one accomplishment—athletic or intellectual—led to another challenge, never too little to bore us or too big to defeat us. But I am talking in riddles. Let me see if I can explain better than Maestro—the master of mysterious pronouncement—ever did.

  I am a horse, a Lipizzaner, a stallion. I have gaits (very nice ones): walk, trot, canter, gallop. I naturally made use of these gaits in the early part of my life, those halcyon days in the fields and mountains and paddocks of Piber. What I was to learn in my first year at Die Spanische was to walk, trot, and canter naturally—but with a rider, under longe lines, or in hand, and with all the equipment that entails. At first, you can’t help changing: a bridle and bit exert pressure, a saddle with a man in it is quite heavy, longe lines create tension, however light-handed. Your body adjusts to all these things, and so do your gaits and movements. The trick is to adjust in a way that is most like what your gaits and movements would be if you had no rider, no equipment, no burdens at all!

  It took me some time to learn this. There are all sorts of reactions you can have to the feelings of being ridden, from hunching your back to dragging your feet to getting under the bit (a particular problem of mine) to developing stiffness on one side of your body (in my case, the right). But you do not compensate for these issues by learning something new, some trick or strategy … you must address them by becoming, if anything, more natural, more horselike. It takes grace to accept this much interference and to act as if you weren’t being interfered with at all. But luckily you have a rider who is mostly helping you, though at first it’s hard to tell because you’re getting used to so many new sensations. Then after a while you do get the feeling that the person in the saddle or holding the lines is there to support you, not to confuse you, and once that happens the mental magic—so key to our training—has been performed: You’ve made common cause with this human, and suddenly his project is your project, and the project is you.

  I doubt I’ve explained that any better than Maestro. There is something about life and training at Die Spanische that lends itself to enigmatic speeches, no matter how straightforward the actual exercises are. Oberbereiter Polak used to refer to the alchemical process of riding, saying that horse and rider combined together to make a new creature, a new substance. The Colonel, when he came, called it the “secret speech” shared between man and horse. Whatever poetry you want to make of it (and the entire place lends itself to poetry), here are some scenes from our first years, which should serve better than words to describe what it was all about.

  * * *

  When I first met Oberbereiter Polak again, I thought he was the god referred to in my new nickname, the one with wings on his hat. But once I looked past his impressive headgear, I saw the face that had seemed so familiar during the final Musterung1 at Piber, when it was decided that I was fit for training at the school.

  “Well now,” he murmured as he petted my cheek and looked me calmly in the eye, “here is a horse who knows who he is.”

  It was a strange time to make this remark, as I was just learning to ride under the saddle with Max, and while I’d gained a certain amount of confidence in following my élève’s aides, I was still teased (gently) with being a slowpoke. The general consensus was that Ned and even Pluto Adrina were much farther along than I was. I was surprised now when Max agreed with the Chief Rider.

  “Yes, we may call him ‘Mercury,’ but he is still Schnecki,” he said. “He has not advanced as far as the others, it’s true, but it is remarkable how little he forgets. His faults are never disobedience—they are in trying to understand correctly.”

  “I cannot think of a higher compliment,” Polak replied, giving me a final pat. “And as I was the one to give him the nickname Schnecki during one of my visits to the stud, I’m not displeased that it still suits him. Come. Show me what you both have learned.”

  This conversation took place in the Stallburg, as there was very little talking in the Winterreitschule, and all of that done by the instructors, none by the élèves. Well, Max talked (quietly) to me, but never to Polak or to the other senior riders who formed our community of trainers.

  Today we were continuing our work on my stiff right s
ide. Max often squeezed the reins while still asking, through his legs and seat, for me to move forward, and this made me adjust my contact on the bit until he seemed satisfied. Apparently, though I’d never realized it, I was a little crooked in my movements, and this needed to be adjusted every day.

  “You are overdoing it, Max,” Polak admonished in a just-audible murmur from the center of the ring. Immediately, the squeezing lessened, and I readjusted my head.

  “Ahem. Underdoing it, I’m afraid. Go large2 and try again.”

  Max guided me back to the long wall of the school and this time we went around the entire outside track, meeting and passing Bonny, who was doing voltes3 in the corner.

  “Good to see the Maestro hasn’t forgotten his tricks.” Bonny winked at me as I trotted by. Startled, I turned my head to the center of the ring, searching out my neighbor among the white bodies moving more or less harmoniously in various formations around the school. I could tell Max was chagrined by my sudden distraction—my nose had swung up and I was trotting quicker than he liked—but I had literally never seen Maestro out of his stall, except occasionally in fine weather, when we were walked together in the courtyard, or Sommerreitschule. I knew he still trained (or rather, trained young riders himself) and still performed the quadrille, but I’d never seen it, nor seen him do anything other than walk (which he did beautifully) or lecture (which he did at length) or sleep (which he did almost as well as he walked). I felt aflame with curiosity.

  And then I spotted him. He was tied between the twin white pillars where a form of advanced training was conducted that I did not fully understand. But then, my ideas about the pillars had mostly been formed by a dramatic and upsetting incident in which a stallion, apparently not ready to be initiated to these mysteries, tried to pull himself out from the ties and to take his three trainers down with him. I had avoided thinking about them ever since. But now, as I slowed my trot to take a good look at my elderly neighbor, I saw the pillars in an entirely new light. I saw them as the frames for something so beautiful that I stopped in my tracks, nearly unsettling Max. But I had to stop: The Maestro was dancing!