Read All the King's Horses Online
Authors: Laura C Stevenson
All the King's Horses
About the Book
IT BEGAN THE DAY GRANDPA ESCAPED …
Something very odd has happened to Colin and Sarah’s much-loved grandfather. It’s as if a stranger is inhabiting his body … as if Grandpa has been spirited away and a changeling left in his place. Raised all their lives on his tales of great heroes and fantastical legendary creatures, Colin and Sarah feel sure that the Faer Folk are involved.
In an attempt to find him again, they follow Grandpa’s path, crossing the boundary between the everyday world and the enchantments of the Otherworld …
A wonderfully lyrical fantasy adventure brimming with characters from the Otherworld – from magnificent horses to mischievous night-elves and the legendary Sidhe.
Illustrated by David Wyatt
In memory of
John C. Cooley
Dorothy W. Copeland
and
Geraldine Henderson O’Connell
Dignitatem amissam redintegrat amor
It is no doubt very strange that faeries should desire to have a mortal king; but the fact is, that with all their knowledge and power, they cannot get rid of the feeling that some men are greater than they are, though they can neither fly nor play tricks … [But] it is only between life and death that the faeries have power over grown-up mortals, and can carry them off to their country. So they had to watch for an opportunity
.
–George MacDonald, ‘The Shadows’
IT BEGAN THE
day Grandpa escaped. I know that makes it sound as if Grandpa was in jail, but it’s the only word to use. He wasn’t in jail, of course; he lived with us, which meant it was dangerous when he got out, because of the neighbourhood we’d just moved to … if you could call it a neighbourhood. The place we were renting – a run-down house with a stained-glass window in the hall and a nifty pointed tower – faced the T where the street that crossed the train tracks met a dirt road that didn’t go anywhere. Once, that road had led from town to the ferry, and it was still called Ferry Road, but the way to town was blocked off by a pile of dirt and the new 125 Connector now. As for the ferry, it had gone out of business at least sixty years ago, Mom said – and she must have been
right,
because Colin and I couldn’t even find the old dock when we went down to look. The trains were still in business, naturally; they ran half a block from our front door. In the old ferry days, they’d stopped for loads at the two warehouses that stood between the house and the tracks; but later, they’d just whizzed by, and the warehouses, which had been pretty grand once, like our house, had gotten sadder and sadder; now they had paper and boards in the windows instead of glass. People lived in them – old men, mostly, with bottles in paper bags under their beat-up coats, and a few women, not as old, but with the same washed-out look. We weren’t allowed to call them bums, and we wouldn’t have anyway, because they always said hello as we walked back and forth to the school bus. But anybody could see they were too far gone to stop Grandpa from wandering out on to the tracks and playing with the rocks between the pilings. He always wanted to do that. So we could never let him go out by himself.
Grandpa wasn’t crazy – at least, he wasn’t crazy the way the warehouse people were. Obviously, a grown-up doesn’t sit down on railroad tracks if everything is OK upstairs; but with the warehouse people, you could say what was wrong (even if you weren’t supposed to be old
enough
to know words like DTs or Heroin Addict), and with Grandpa, you couldn’t. The doctor couldn’t, anyway; all he could say was that Grandpa was old, and that old people got forgetful. I explained, very politely, that Grandpa wasn’t just forgetful, he was losing whatever it was that made him Grandpa, but it didn’t do any good. The doctor gave me the look vets give you when they’ve just told you a horse is permanently lame, and he said ‘Sarah, I know it’s difficult to accept things like this, but even with the advanced medical knowledge of the 1950s, we can’t cure everybody,’ which is exactly what vets say. So Colin and I knew what we had to do. Grandpa had said you should always listen to vets carefully because they knew things you didn’t – but many a time, if you had a horse worth saving, it was up to you to find out what the problem was. Grandpa had cured a lot of horses that vets had said would never jump again, just by using his head. So we started using ours. Because, boy, was Grandpa ever worth saving.
Until whatever it was happened to him, Grandpa lived on a big horse farm in Pennsylvania, and even though he was so old and had only one good arm, he was the head trainer. Every year, Colin and I took the train down
there
to spend the summer, and when we had to go back to Massachusetts to school, we counted the days until summer came again. The people who owned the stable had two hunter ponies, and since their kids were grown up, they let us ride them. Grandpa gave us lessons every day, and after we got good enough, he let us work bigger horses. He only let us ride six hours a day, but during the other hours, we got to watch him train young jumpers or work with famous people who brought Olympic-level horses to him for advice, so even when we were on foot, we learned a lot. Then at night, we would sit out on his doorstep, smelling the roses that grew up trellises on his cottage, looking at the stars (unless it was raining, of course). Sometimes, we’d just lean against Grandpa and dream off, but most nights, he’d stretch his good hand out to the darkness and chant:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
,
For the world’s more full of weeping
than you can understand
.
We’d chant with him, feeling tingly all over, because that poem meant Grandpa was going to
tell
us faerie stories. You’d better understand right away that the faeries in Grandpa’s stories weren’t Disney fairies, with plastic wands and tiny wings; they came in all shapes and sizes, and they lived in hollow hills until they rode out at night to visit mortals. When Grandpa told us about them, his eyes shone, and his hand moved, and we could almost see what he was describing: the Sidhe
1
, who were so powerful they could spirit bards into the Otherworld, or bewitch the spears and swords of great heroes, or put whole armies to sleep by playing enchanted music – and elves and firbolgs and other little faeries who teased foolish people that didn’t believe in them. Sometimes, he got so deep into his stories he’d go on until dawn, and we’d doze off with our heads in his lap, dreaming we were with him in the Otherworld.
Then whatever it was started. It was the summer before I was in fourth grade (I’m finishing sixth, now). Grandpa started forgetting things, like when our riding lessons were supposed to be. He would promise to give us one, but when we had gotten the ponies tacked up, he’d be off doing something else, and he’d get angry if we reminded him. Sometimes he forgot
lessons
for the famous riders, and
they
got angry and told the Smithes, who owned the stables. But the Smithes said that Grandpa was still the best trainer in the U.S., and people in their seventies were allowed to forget things. The next summer, though, they weren’t saying that any more, because it wasn’t just lessons Grandpa was forgetting; it was really important stuff. One of his jobs was to supervise the horses in Barn One – those were the top showjumpers, and he wanted to be sure the stable boys treated them just so. But that summer, sometimes he told the boys to feed the horses twice in a row, and sometimes he insisted they’d been fed when they hadn’t, and if the boys argued, he’d holler at them. We tried to explain he was wrong, but that just made him holler at us, which he’d never done before.
Half-way through July, Mom turned up at the farm. I was glad to see her, because I knew Grandpa needed a doctor and nobody else could persuade him to see one. But as I said, the doctor was a bust, and instead of thinking about ways to cure Grandpa, the grown-ups made an ‘informed decision’ about what he should do – which meant that the Smithes decided he was going to retire, and Mom decided he was going to come live with us, and nothing he said (and
nothing
Colin and I said) was going to make any difference. The only thing that got us through the rest of the summer, while we were saying goodbye to the farm and the ponies and moving Grandpa to Massachusetts, was that we’d have lots of time to figure out what was wrong with Grandpa, and when we did, he’d be able to go back.
The trouble was, Grandpa got worse and worse, and no matter how much we read or how hard we thought, we couldn’t figure out why. He was upset and confused after he moved, and he began forgetting more and more things. Then, two nights before Christmas, when he was telling us the story of Finn Mac Cumhaill
2
and the misty faerie monster that burned Tara, he jumped to his feet, the way he always did in the part where Finn throws a faerie spear at the monster – but instead of acting it out, he stared around the room, frowned, and wandered away. After that, no matter which story he started on, he couldn’t finish it, even if we helped him along. We begged Mom to take him to another doctor, and she took him to a specialist in Boston, but the specialist just said it was ‘dementia’, which meant, Mom said in a funny tone of voice,
‘tough
luck’. That’s not what it meant; we looked it up, of course. The dictionary said it was ‘Irreversible deterioration of intellectual faculties with concomitant emotional disturbance resulting from organic brain disorder. Synonym: insanity’.
