Blaze and the Dark Rider (2 page)

Issie opened her programme again. “The Dance of the Seven Veils is next,” she told the others. “It says here that the riders perform the dance on Anglo-Arab mares…”

Snake charmer music started up and six spotlights shone on the arena as the dancing horses entered down the centre of the ring, following each other nose to tail and then pivoting on their hind legs and facing the audience. The riders were women this time, all dressed like belly dancers in Arabian Nights costumes made out of flowing chiffon. The girls wore harem pants instead of jodhpurs and veils covered their faces. Each of them wore a different colour and their throats and wrists sparkled with jewels that matched the colours of their outfits—emeralds, rubies, sapphires, aquamarines, gold and silver.

While the riders all looked different, their six horses matched so exactly you could have sworn they were clones of each other. They were all the same height, around fourteen-two, with deep liver chestnut coats, white socks and flaxen manes and tails. Their legs were as finely turned as ballet dancers, and their delicate Arab blood showed through in their arched necks and dished noses.

“Ohmygod!” Issie gasped. She stared at the horses, too shocked to speak. Then she turned to Stella. “Is it just me or do you see it too?”

Stella nodded, “Totally!”

“Issie,” Kate said, “those horses…they all look just like Blaze!”

It was almost midnight by the time the audience had finally filed out of the pavilion after the show.

“Where is she?” Stella whined. She was standing by the doorway of the main tent with Kate and Mrs Brown. They were waiting for Issie, who, supposedly, had just popped off to the toilet, but was taking ages.

“Sorry I took so long!” Issie yelled out to them. She came running now, not from the direction of the toilets after all, but from the other side of the arena. A dark-haired woman in fawn jodhpurs and a pink cashmere jersey, her hair tied back in a smart chignon, was striding across the sawdust behind her.

“Mum, Kate, Stella, this is Francoise D’arth.” Isadora introduced the woman with the dark hair.

“Bonjour”
Francoise said in a syrupy French accent. She smiled coolly as she shook hands with each of them. “I hope you did enjoy the show?”

“Francoise was one of the riders with the Arabian mares,” Issie explained to the others. “She trained at the Cadre Noir de Saumur in France.”

“Oui”
Francoise smiled. “But that was a long time ago, Isadora. I have been now with El Caballo Danza Magnifico for many, many years. I train all the horses at their riding school back in Spain, and when the school goes on tour I come along too and I ride in the shows.”

She smiled at Mrs Brown. “Your daughter, Isadora…such a pretty name. She tells me that her horse, Blaze, is very much like my own dancing horses? Is this so?”

“I expect it is,” Mrs Brown nodded, “but I’m hardly the one to ask. I can hardly tell one end of a horse from the other. It’s the girls that you should be talking to.”

“Blaze is exactly the same as them!” Stella blurted out uncontrollably. “She is the same size and the same colour and she’s totally beautiful just like them. Honestly! You should see her!”

“Perhaps I will,” mused Francoise. “Why not? We
are in town for several weeks putting on the show It is not far from the city here to Chevalier Point, is it? I will be able to come one day to see you, no?”

“No—I mean yes!” Issie laughed. “Yes please, Francoise. I would love it if you came to the pony club to meet Blaze.”

“Then it is a date.” Francoise smiled. “
À bientôt!
I must go now and help my girls to groom the mares and put them to bed. It can be very tiring when you are doing two shows a day! See you soon.”

Francoise waved goodbye and headed back towards the stables.

“Come on, girls, we need to get you home. Look at the time!” Mrs Brown said, holding out her watch. It was five minutes past twelve.

“Hey, Issie! It’s after midnight. That means it’s your birthday!” Stella laughed.

“So it is!” Mrs Brown smiled. “OK, let’s go home, birthday girl.”

Issie paused and stood there for a moment, watching the dark-haired Frenchwoman as she disappeared through the vast stable doors on the other side of the arena. Then she turned and ran to catch up to her
mother and her friends. She couldn’t believe she was actually thirteen. It felt different somehow. Something told her this was going to be a very big year.

The first rally of the new pony-club season had finally arrived and Stella was fizzing with excitement. “It’s so great to be back!” she grinned as she tied Coco up next to Blaze underneath the big plane tree at the far end of the Chevalier Point grounds.

“Coco is totally psyched to be here, aren’t you, girl?” Stella giggled and gave her chocolate mare a slappy pat on the neck.

Coco, who never got excited about anything ever, looked at Stella with a sleepy expression and immediately shut her eyes and began to doze away in the shade, her tail lazily flicking away the odd fly that happened to buzz by.

“Yeah, Stella, she’s thrilled,” Issie laughed.

Even if Coco wasn’t excited by the prospect of the
new pony-club season, the girls certainly were. This summer the club schedule was jam-packed and the most important event on the competition calendar was the Interclub Gold Shield.

The Interclub was a huge event involving all the clubs in the Chevalier district, from Chevalier Point in the north to Garnet Ridge in the south. Teams trained for the competition throughout the season and then the six district clubs competed in the grand event to see who would take away the trophy.

“St Johns, Mornington, Marsh Fields, Westhaven and Garnet Ridge!” Stella rattled the names of their rivals off by heart.

“Have you seen the Gold Shield? I’ve seen it. Whoever wins gets all their names engraved on it!” Stella was raving to Issie. “It’s not actually a big gold shield at all—well, it is big, but it’s made of wood and then it has all these little gold shields all over it and each shield has the names of that year’s winners engraved on it. It’s like, centuries old. OK, maybe not centuries, but really, really old. Even Avery has his name on it! He was in the team way back in, like, the seventies or something—”

“It was 1985 actually, Stella, thanks for making me feel even older than I usually do,” Tom Avery said stiffly.

“Oh no,” Stella groaned. She hadn’t noticed their riding instructor standing right behind her.

“Hi, Tom!” Issie grinned. Most of the riders at Chevalier Point were scared of Avery. He had a brisk, authoritative manner. But Issie knew that a lot of his strict attitude was just an act he put on for show.

Avery loved horses with a real passion. He worked part-time for the ILPH—the International League for the Protection of Horses. It was Tom who had brought Blaze to Issie so that she could be her guardian. She still remembered that day when he turned up at the River Paddock with the sickly, half-starved chestnut mare that he had rescued. Even though Issie was still hurting after losing Mystic she knew immediately that it was her job to nurse this mare back to health. And she had done just that. Blaze was now a beautiful, incredible horse.

Today, as usual, Avery carried a tan leather riding crop, which he now struck vigorously against his right boot with a loud thwack to get the girls’ attention. “Right. Got yourselves sorted for the first event this
morning, I hope? We’ll be fielding a team of six riders at the Interclub, which I will be choosing today…”

Avery paused for a moment as he noticed Coco dozing next to him. He shook his head, tut-tutted and made an adjustment on the throat lash on the mare’s bridle, tightening it by three holes. “Two fingers,” he told Stella, placing his own two fingers in the gap between the throat lash and the horse’s windpipe to illustrate his point. “Leave no more than a two finger gap on the throat lash…” he trailed off again.

“Anyway, yes, as I was saying—at the last two Interclubs we have been pipped at the post each time by our archrivals at Marsh Fields. But not this time. This time I mean to choose a team that will win us back that shield and do us proud.”

He looked Stella in the eyes. “Selection day is serious. I am not in the mood for hijinks today. Are you in the mood for hijinks, Stella?”

For once the bubbly, freckly redhead seemed to have nothing to say for herself. “Ummm, no?” Stella offered eventually.

“Excellent, excellent!” Avery smiled at her. “Off we go then. Mount up and round up the rest of your mob.
Your groups are all listed up on the walls of the clubhouse so head over there to see who you’re teamed up with. Right? Excellent.” Avery gave the side of his boot one more thwack with the whip for emphasis and then spun about and set off.

He was only just out of earshot when Stella whacked her leg with her crop just as Avery had done, imitating his gruff voice and barking at Issie, “Are you in the mood for hijinks, Isadora?”

Issie fell about laughing.

“What’s so funny?” Kate asked as she trotted Toby over, pulling up to a halt next to Blaze and Coco.

“Avery,” said Issie. “He’s not in the mood for ‘hijinks’. He’s determined to win the Interclub Shield back again.”

“Well, I can’t say I blame him,” Kate said. “Marsh Fields have really rubbed it in ever since they won it for the second time in a row.”

“So Avery is choosing six of us out of the whole pony club?” Issie asked. She felt a sudden tingle of excitement as she realised how much this mattered to her.

“Eight, actually,” Kate told her. “Six riders plus two team reserves.”

“Dan and Ben are both bound to get in,” Stella groaned, “so that’s two places gone already!”

Dan and Ben were the girls’ closest friends at the club—and they were both really good riders. Dan had blond curly hair, startling blue eyes and rode a leggy, flea-bitten grey called Kismit. Ben was dark-haired, always teasing the girls, and had a sullen bay Welsh pony called Max.

Stella turned to her little chocolate mare. “You’d better wake up, Coco! We’re going to have to do our best to make the team.”

Coco reluctantly raised her head to see what all the fuss was about, and looked up at the girls now with her big brown eyes, then shut them again and dozed some more.

Kate and Issie were laughing, but Stella frowned as she reached for her hard hat and began to tighten her girth. “Sometimes, Coco, I think you aren’t taking this seriously enough.”

“How many events do we have to do for the selection?” Issie leaned over Kate’s shoulder to look at the schedule that she had written down.

“Five,” said Kate. “Rider on the flat, rider over
hurdles and a showjumping course against the clock, and then there’s the team events—the flag-race relay and the bending relay.

“I hope Toby and I do well in the jumping,” Kate sighed. “We’ll never get picked for the team when it comes to the games. Toby is useless at bending. He’s far too big and his stride is too long to wind through the poles.”

Kate was only thirteen and in the same year at Chevalier Point High School as Issie and Stella. But she was tall for her age with lean, long legs, and her parents, who didn’t want to buy a pony only to have Kate outgrow it, had thought it sensible to progress her straight on to a horse. Kate’s horse Toby was a rangy bay Thoroughbred, standing a massive sixteen-two hands, which came in useful for Kate in the showjumping ring. But he was not so good at games like bending and flag racing where the poles were set up at the right distance for the short strides of little ponies, not the huge, ground-swallowing strides of an ex-racehorse.

The bending poles had already been set up for the games. The poles were about two metres high, stuck upright in the ground and evenly spaced with about
three horse lengths between each pole. To win the race, riders needed to serpentine their way as fast as they could down through the poles, turning tightly around the last pole at the end, and slaloming back through again as fast as they could to cross the finish line.

For flag races, the same poles were used, but this time a flag was secured with a rubber band near the top of each pole. The riders had to race their horses to each pole in turn, pluck off the flag, then race back and drop the flag precisely into a small wooden box on top of an oil drum. If they missed the box, they had to dismount, pick up the flag, put it in the box and mount up again before they could continue the race.

“At least Toby is a star when it comes to jumping against the clock. You’re bound to win selection points in the jumping,” Issie consoled Kate. “Come on. Let’s finish tacking up and go.”

Issie ran her stirrups down the leathers, gave Blaze’s girth a final check and popped her foot in the stirrup iron, bouncing herself up lightly on to Blaze’s back.

“Here we go again, eh, girl?” Issie said, leaning in low by Blaze’s neck to whisper in her ear. The mare
danced and fidgeted anxiously beneath her as they waited for Kate and Stella to get ready Then the three girls set off at a trot towards the bending poles and their first event of the day.