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

  And then one day, it clicked. I had been thinking about the passade—essentially a small semicircle away from the wall, which I had been learning at the walk—and how I must try to limit the movement of my hind legs. Then it came to me. What if I kept my hind legs practically still altogether? Then I could turn a circle in place. Maybe Max would like that.

  And he did. Very much indeed. Even Polak gave a bit of a whoop, which from him was quite something. I was stuffed with sugar and fussed over to an extraordinary degree. Apparently I had performed the pirouette very nicely, and even Maestro signaled his approval from across the hall, where he was displaying his piaffe. Now that, I thought, was what I wanted to master next. I loved watching Maestro, and while I did not harbor Ned’s burning ambition for the Airs Above the Ground, I admit that I started to think that maybe, just maybe, there might be exercises I was good at, that I was … even great at? Though I loved jumping things (streams, logs, my own shadow) in the natural world of the Piber fields, I suspected that I lacked the fire or dash to re-create the more dramatic movements, like the capriole, within the formal world of the school. I didn’t have the confidence. Still, though I needed to chew it over with my hay, it might just be possible to loosen the borders of how I thought of myself, allow room for … pride?

  “Will you look at that?” Polak said as he stroked my neck.

  “What do you mean, sir?” asked Max from the saddle. They were really breaking all the rules today—whooping, talking, fluttering over me in a most maternal manner.

  “Mercury actually looks pleased with himself! I swear he’s practically preening!”

  Max laughed and peered down at me. “He likes figuring things out. Yes, he does seem happy.”

  “Hopefully his mood is catching.” Polak winked at Max as I nibbled on the tip of my rider’s boot contentedly.

  CHAPTER 8

  Maestro came back to the barn in a very curious mood. I had just finished my hot walk with Fritz, the head groom (it was Saturday, a performance day, and I had demonstrated my pirouette in public for the first time), when the old stallion was clipped to the cross-ties for a sponging off after the School Quadrille, which is always the program’s finale. His thick neck was arched as if he were still on parade, and if he were a cat, he would have had feathers peeping out from his mouth.

  “Good ride, Maestro?” I asked. “You seem pleased with yourself, sir.”

  “No, not with myself, young stallion. I am pleased with someone else entirely. Granted, I am satisfied with the role I played in his performance, but it is mostly on the lad’s behalf that I am, shall we say, cautiously optimistic.”

  Like many of Maestro’s speeches, I had a hard time puzzling this one out.

  “What lad?” It could have been horse or human. To Maestro, everyone except Polak and the senior riders were children.

  “Oh, you’ll see him later,” Bonny called from around the bend of the narrow corridor, where he was being put back in his own stall after also performing in the quadrille. “Though he may look a little different!” Maestro wheezed a laugh, and his startled groom hastily withdrew the sponge, probably worried the cold water had brought on some sort of fit.

  “Fine, keep me in the dark,” I grumbled.

  I wasn’t left in suspense for very long.

  * * *

  If it weren’t for his familiar smell of coffee and home (alas, not strudel, which he hadn’t bought in months), I might not have recognized Max in his splendid new array. Gone was the élève’s modest cap, replaced by one of Polak’s winged headdresses! Gone was the dull gray coat; now Max was resplendent in a dark brown tailcoat with gold buttons and buckskin breeches. He seemed to have grown by a foot, and his eyes sparkled with a new expression of joyful pride that lifted my heart quite to the autumn sky. Max was no longer an élève. He was now an Assistant Rider of Die Spanische.

  “There’s still a pocket for sugar, Mercury,” he said, and reached into his tailcoat to pull out a lump for me. The sugar was nice, but the happy look on Max’s face, a look I hadn’t seen in so long, was even better. I nickered my congratulations to him as best I could and tried to accustom myself to the way he looked in his new coat. Mine, to my chagrin, had still hardly changed. I was nearly seven years old and the most I’d achieved was a kind of dark, mottled gray, and a lightening of the ends of my mane and tail. Surely within the next year, I would become white; then Max and I would both look as we should.

  “The uniform suits him, no?” Maestro accepted a sugar lump from Max, beaming fondly at the new Assistant Rider as if he were his own foal. If it weren’t Maestro speaking, I would have suspected him of fishing for a compliment.

  “Yes—but tell me how it happened! Sir.”

  “I was Young Max’s performance partner, of course. Presenting a school stallion in the quadrille is the final test of the élève—and one he passed with flying colors. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the horse he rode … well, that is to say, that his mount … ahem—”

  I finished for him, so Maestro didn’t tie himself into knots.

  “That his horse was the most respected senior stallion in Die Spanische, a true teacher of men and horses. The Maestro,” I said respectfully.

  “Well, not that I would ever mention it myself, of course.” The old stallion snorted.

  I felt someone watching us and turned to see Stefan, Adrina’s saddle piled in his arms. His face was red and sweaty, but it was the look in his eyes that made me draw back. His scent was acrid with stress, and his eyes were narrow and cold. He turned on his heel and stalked off in the direction of the tack room before Max noticed him. And he was still wearing a gray coat and cap.

  * * *

  The day that Max received his winged hat was the last truly happy day at Die Spanische for a very long time—I am glad that I didn’t know it then, or I’m not sure I could have faced what lay ahead. War came. And it did what Maestro told me that all wars do—it wrecked. As I said at the very beginning of this tale, it did not change our world forever, but for several hard years, it consumed our lives and took from me all of the things I loved most.

  The first thing it took was Ned. He had been chosen to participate in a tour of the horses and riders of the school to other towns—I do not know where exactly. He simply did not return. Bonny, who had also gone on the trip, told me that a high-ranking German officer had liked Ned’s looks and “requisitioned” him for the cavalry. It was swift, and it was incomprehensible. I couldn’t even say good-bye. One morning I came back from my lesson and there was a stranger in his stall—a young stallion just up from Piber, noisy and quarrelsome and self-announcing. My brother, my protector, my bulwark was gone.

  But worse was to come. Everything happened so rapidly now; for a horse like me, who needs time to adjust to new realities, it was a series of body blows. I had hardly registered the Anschluss1 the year before, except when it affected Max’s spirits (and brought the Germans to the stables with their everlasting inspections), but now the events of the world were no longer knocking at the door of the Stallburg: They were knocking it down.

  “When’s your train, Georg? I’m to report at the end of the week. On to Poland, don’t you think?” Stefan’s voice was exuberant, with a hard, triumphant edge.

  “I’m going home to see my mother first,” Georg replied. “My brothers are already enlisted—I’m the last. I can’t believe my baby brother went up before me. They think I’m wasting my time, messing around horses. I’d rather mess around horses than mess around tanks.”

  “Maybe we’ll serve together, eh? I’m applying for officers’ school. But now that I’m in the Party, I’ve got my eye on the Waffen-SS. What about you?”

  Georg stared at him. “You’re in the Nazi Party, Stefan?” he said blankly.

  Stefan laughed. He seemed in better humor than he’d been since losing out in his promotion.

  “Maybe you didn’t notice, but Austria is in the Nazi Party. Sure I joined—why not? It’s the fastest way to promo
tion, and the Party’s police force is the elite. If we have to serve, why not serve with the best?”

  It took Georg a few minutes to answer, and his answer took the form of a question.

  “And what about Max?”

  “Well, Max wasn’t called up, you know that. He has to go and register at the ICPC.2 I was so surprised he hadn’t already registered! His father hardly kept it a secret that Max’s mother was a Gypsy. Everyone in the Austrian cavalry knew about the affair.”

  “His parents are dead,” Georg said.

  “Yes, what does that have to do with it? He’s still half-Gypsy. He needs to register for his own safety. The SS must keep track of the Gypsies as well as the Jews.… it’s wartime, after all!”

  Georg opened his mouth to reply, then closed it again. He went back to brushing the stranger in Ned’s stall.

  * * *

  The Colonel’s voice rang down the corridor, high and frantic with indignation.

  “How in the name of Guérinière3 am I supposed to form a cavalry detachment at the same time that I am attempting to preserve the art of classical equitation, take care of dozens of under-exercised horses, and do so with half of my staff conscripted by the army? Is this reasonable, I ask you? I may be more capable than most men, but this … preposterous situation is nearly beyond me! Now they tell me I must give up my newest Assistant Rider because he is, of all things, half-Gypsy! What, do they think he’s going to steal the horses from under my nose? Preposterous.”

  The man making this ruckus, directed at Fritz, our old, long-suffering head groom, was by now a familiar presence. Ned and Bonny and I had lumped him together with the Germans, since he showed up at roughly the same time they did and seemed to share their passion for inspecting and poking about. But eventually it became clear that this man, Colonel Alois Podhajsky of the Austrian cavalry, was more specifically in command of Die Spanische. Indeed, from listening to him, one might think it was his personal kingdom, and that the barbarians were at the door.

  “I’ve got Nazi propaganda being printed in my staff rooms, renovations to the riding hall that will never be finished, and I owe back pay to nearly all my staff. At least they don’t throw their arms up in that ridiculous salute anymore. The indignity! And I feel like hell. I am heading for a nervous collapse.”

  I believed him. In fact, many of us weren’t feeling well. Illness came and went in the Stallburg—naturally with so many horses living closely together it was inevitable—but I had so far avoided getting sick. I was kept so well exercised, fed, and aired that it hardly seemed possible. I was a stallion in my prime—what business had I or Ned or Bonny or Adrina with ill health? But sickness and war go together … it’s as if war were bent on stripping away all of my resources … first Ned, then health, then Max. It doesn’t bear thinking about. I reeled from loss to loss, and I became very ill indeed.

  The fever wracked my body for many months through that dark, cold winter. It was a constant, aching weakening of my limbs, and my breath came short and hard. All of the élèves and riders were gone, except for Max, and even Polak and the Colonel were nowhere to be found. The Stallburg was a silent, spiritless place, though Max and Fritz did their best to alleviate our discomfort and to cheer us up. They had their work cut out for them. Even Maestro grew ill, and in a stallion his age, that was worrying indeed.

  And yet, I still had Max. That made all the difference in those long, feverish days. He had put away his fine brown uniform and adopted the simple garments of a groom, and worked with grim determination under the guidance of Fritz, as if he had never been promoted … had never been a rider at all. When the Germans were about, Fritz called Max “Hans,” and treated him quite as an underling. I wonder where they thought the half-Gypsy Assistant Rider had gone? Luckily, the Wehrmacht officers seemed to have other things on their minds.

  * * *

  I suppose there was one more happy length of days, though away from Die Spanische proper, and the memory is so bittersweet that it’s hard to dwell on. After our sick, feverish, gloomy winter and spring, the Colonel came back—with a vengeance. He was indomitable, that man. He was so fed up with everything: the Germans, his ill health, our ill health, the deteriorating conditions in Vienna, his inability to get a decent cup of coffee, the lackluster uniforms, the poor quality of feed … the list went on and on and on, and we heard some part of his unending battle against the world every time he strode by us. He was like a noisy car—you hear it humming down the road (grumble grumble army fools grumble), a distant drone, then it gets louder and louder as it approaches (grumble only person left in Europe who cares about the fate of man’s greatest art … that hay looks moldy, grumble), then roars by (I WILL FIGHT TO MY LAST BREATH IF THEY CUT THE BUDGET THAT DRASTICALLY, GRUMBLE).

  The Colonel was determined to get us out of the Stallburg and into fresh air and a bit of freedom after our long, dull confinement. He was quite clear in his opinion of our looks—particularly mine—as he fed us tidbits and rumpled our forelocks.

  “That horse started out looking like a weedy, unbalanced camel, and now he looks like a weedy, scrawny, orphan camel. Balanced, though. God, Max, do something to cheer him up!”

  “He’s always been a bit sensitive, sir,” Max said. “The loss of his friend Galant hit him very hard.”

  The Colonel’s face turned bright red and a vein pulsed at his temple. “Don’t remind me,” he barked. “Requisitioning a Lipizzaner for the cavalry. Preposterous.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Colonel lowered his voice conspiratorially. “How’s it going, hiding in plain sight, lad? Can’t last forever, I’m afraid, but we’ll keep you as long as we can. Then to Switzerland, eh? Your father was a fine man, a fine officer. I was proud to serve with him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And your mother’s family?”

  “The last message from my aunt said they were being deported to some kind of detention facility, sir. Called Lety,” Max said in a hollow voice.

  It occurred to me then that one of war’s primary functions seemed to be to take things. Ned, from being a star of the campagne, a handsome, gallant stallion with a future set by the dictates of his breed and its calling, had simply been taken. Gone. Max’s family inexplicably was subject to the same force. It was like a mighty destructive wind was blowing through our world, and the Colonel, dear man, was standing in the middle of it, shouting his head off.

  But he managed to find us fresh air. One beautiful morning in July, Max led me outside of the confines of the Hofburg for the first time in four years. As we walked through the tall wooden doors, I remembered our first stroll through the streets of Vienna, my sense of eager expectation, how brilliantly new and vivid the world had seemed. Now there was no Ned to follow, but at least I had Maestro, riding in style in a truck. There was a great uproar around the trucks—passersby had stopped and were loudly questioning the grooms: Where were they taking the horses? Was Die Spanische relocating to Berlin? How dare the Germans lay claim to Vienna’s great treasure! The crowd was quite agitated, and it took all the Colonel’s soothing words to calm them down, which finally led to an invitation to follow the convoy to the Lainz Zoo4, our destination, which many did. I liked having the people walk with us—they reminded me of our honor guard of children on that first journey, years ago. I took my first steps onto the cobblestones and smelled coffee in the air. And felt Max’s gentle hand on my neck. That was, yes, a good day.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Lainz Zoo seemed like paradise after the grim winter. I regained strength in the bountiful parkland and in the large, airy wooden stalls that had been built just for us. To smell and taste grass again! A horse in his natural state will spend most of his time grazing—it’s a sort of meditative nibbling that is the essence of peace. I hadn’t grazed in four years, and I never thought I’d get enough of the sweet, tender blades of summer. It was a time of richness stolen from the very mouth of war.

  We resumed our training under the warm
July sun, but mostly each day felt like a vacation. And when Polak came back from wherever the Germans had been temporarily keeping him, it made our family nearly complete. Bonny and Adrina were positively exuberant, cavorting over the park like colts, and even Maestro looked young again as he ventured a prance around the tennis courts. I could not wander in this delicious freedom, over gentle hills and past thickets of dark woods, without thinking of Ned and our rambles in the mountains of Piber. I wondered where he was and what he was doing. I knew he was in the cavalry, and that meant fighting, but I could not picture it. I could only hope that if Maestro were right, and the Airs Above the Ground were military in origin, that Ned would finally master his longed-for capriole, and that it would sail him out of harm’s way.

  We managed most of our traditional exercises, enlivened (and distracted) by the open air and the occasional excitement of a wild boar running past the stables. Maestro admonished us to pay attention, to build back our strength, but the sunny fields were so different from the hushed solemnity of the Winterreitschule that I’m afraid we were a bit hard to manage at first. But horses infinitely prefer routine to novelty, so I was back to seriously working on my passage within a few days. Even better, one afternoon Maestro and I attempted part of a pas de deux, under Max and Polak, and though I bumped the old stallion a bit and was out of step for about half the time, it was great fun trying to match strides with the Maestro. We had to break up the exercise when Slava got away from his rider and tore across the tennis court to sink his teeth into Adrina’s saddle blanket. The open air hadn’t improved his temper, unfortunately.

  “We hate that guy,” I snorted to Maestro. He was too polite to agree, but he rolled his eyes in a marked manner.

  * * *

  My last rides with Max were unlike any that had come before, and once I had conquered their strangeness, they were perhaps my favorite of all.