The Fire Stallion. Stacy Gregg
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Название: The Fire Stallion

Автор: Stacy Gregg

Издательство: HarperCollins

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isbn: 9780008261436

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СКАЧАТЬ director – he was English but he’d worked in New Zealand a lot with Katherine. And Chris, the lighting guy, and Lizzie – they were old friends of Mum’s from film school.

      So there were ten of us already seated and waiting by the time Katherine arrived. Katherine wasn’t one of those superstar directors who looked all Hollywood – she was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans. It was the woman beside her who was dressed as though she was famous. She had a really dramatic look about her with this flame-red Rapunzel hair. She wore this brilliant, floor-length purple patterned dress which looked incredible against her pale skin. Her eyes, a startling emerald green, seemed magnified behind her gigantic spectacles rimmed with red glitter frames.

      “Everybody, I want to introduce you to Doctor Gudrun Gudmansdottir, professor of Norse mythology and Icelandic saga at Harvard University,” Katherine had said. “I’m thrilled to have someone of her stature on board to ensure the integrity of this movie and help us to bring the real Princess Brunhilda to life.”

      Gudrun raised her hands in this spectral way, as if she were about to perform a séance or something, and then she reached out and picked up a champagne glass off the table and raised it to the light. “I have cast the runes and they tell me that the Norse gods will smile upon this production,” she said theatrically. “Now join me in paying thanks to mighty Odin by raising your glasses and drinking deep in his honour!”

      I could hear Mum mutter under her breath beside me as she reluctantly raised her glass. I caught her rolling her eyes at Jimmy as if to say, “Who is this nutter?”

      “To mighty Odin!” Gudrun’s toast was so loud the whole restaurant suddenly stopped talking. Draining her glass in one go, she put it back down, and then, rather than taking the empty seat beside Katherine, she walked the length of the table and made a beeline for me.

      “I’ll sit here. Bring me a chair …” She waved a hand airily at the waiter. Then she positioned herself in between me and Mum and locked me into the tractor beam of her powerful green eyes. She put her hand out to shake mine. I’d been expecting her skin to feel cold it was so white, but it was almost like touching fire.

      “I’m Gudrun,” she said.

      “Hilly,” I replied. “Hilly Harrison.”

      “Of course you are,” Gudrun said, as if she knew this already. “You’ve travelled a long way, Hilly. Are you prepared for Iceland?”

      “Oh, no!” I thought she had the wrong idea. “I mean, yes, I’m coming, but I’m not working as part of the crew or anything. I’m here with Mum.”

      Gudrun narrowed her eyes at me. “Do not underestimate yourself, Hilly. You have a role of your own to play. And a very important one it will be too.”

      She leaned close to me and whispered conspiratorially: “I threw the runes this morning and the gods told me everything. The future holds great adventure for us, Hilly. Ready yourself …”

      “Excuse me—”

      It was the waiter.

      “What would you like to order, madam?”

      Gudrun didn’t open her menu, she just smiled up at him. “Do you have any puffin?”

      The waiter looked horrified. “No, madam!”

      Gudrun sighed with genuine disappointment. She turned to me. “It’s so difficult to find puffin on the menu outside of Iceland. They’re delicious roasted. The Icelanders catch them in butterfly nets.”

      Instead, Gudrun ordered the Atlantic salmon. I had the teriyaki chicken. As we ate, she asked me all about my life in Wellington and seemed genuinely excited when I told her that I rode.

      “It must have been hard to leave your horse at home, to be away for so long?” Gudrun said.

      I said nothing. I didn’t want to talk about Piper.

      “You’ll find the Icelandic horses very different to the ones back home,” Gudrun continued. “They’re bred to be highly spirited and hot under saddle and they have five gaits.”

      I didn’t understand. “Five gaits?”

      “Most horses have just four gaits – they can walk, trot, canter and gallop,” Gudrun replied. “An Icelandic horse has no gallop – instead they pace, and they have a fifth gait, the tölt, which is super fast – it’s like a trot except it’s so smooth you do not need to rise out of the saddle. When you ride a tölting horse, it feels like you’re flying. You can sit on their backs quite comfortably like this for great distances.”

      “Have you ridden at a tölt?” I asked.

      Gudrun smiled. “Of course. As a girl I grew up riding every day. Everyone rides in Iceland. There are only three hundred thousand people, and there are a hundred thousand horses. The Icelandic has the purest blood of any horse in the world. Their breeding hasn’t changed for a thousand years. They are the horses of the Vikings.”

      “So do you live in Reykjavik?” I asked.

      Gudrun shook her head. “I grew up there, but New York’s my home now. When Katherine asked me to work on this project, I knew I had to come back, though. Brunhilda is very important to me.”

      I had taken a look at the Brunhilda script when Mum was reading it on the plane. “So it’s about the princess from Sleeping Beauty, right?”

      Gudrun’s face darkened. “Sleeping Beauty is a nonsense story! Brunhilda is not some fairy-tale princess. She was a real girl. This is precisely why I am here – so that this movie won’t become some ridiculous recounting of her history, a helpless fawn waiting for a prince’s kiss to awaken her. The true Brunhilda was the fiercest, the noblest of warriors, willing to fight to the ends of the earth for what she believed in. I have worked all my life to serve her truth.”

      Gudrun looked at me hard, her green eyes searching mine. “But why are you here, Hilly?”

      I gulped down my sushi roll and thought about telling her everything about me and Piper and the worst time of my life, but in the end all I said was the truth.

      “I didn’t want to be home.”

missing-image

      The flight to Iceland took us into Keflavik airport, an hour from the capital Reykjavik. We were picked up by three minivans and got on board with our bags before driving off in convoy. The landscape out of the window was like looking at Mars – plateaus of bare, rugged black rock patchworked with lichen, moss and snowdrifts with strange curls of smoke coming out of the ground.

      “Steam not smoke,” Mum corrected me when I pointed it out to her. “There are a hundred and thirty volcanoes here. Thirty of them are still active and even in summer there’s snow. They call it the land of fire and ice.”

      We turned off the motorway not far from Keflavik because Lizzie thought it would be fun to stop for lunch at Blue Lagoon, a vast natural hot water lake.

      “It’s just so touristy,” Gudrun said as we got out of the vans. “There’s hot water everywhere in Iceland but this place is a little too crowded for me.”

      It СКАЧАТЬ