Название: The Fire Stallion
Автор: Stacy Gregg
Издательство: HarperCollins
isbn: 9780008261436
isbn:
I did as she asked and dug, chipping away at the hard crust beneath the grassy surface. It was tough at first but, once I’d broken through, it crumbled away more easily and soon I’d made a decent hole, with a mound of earth beside it.
“That will do,” Gudrun said. She was still fossicking in her bag.
“Gudrun?” I finally summoned up the nerve. “What are we doing?”
“We’re preparing,” she replied, pulling out a cow’s horn from her bag and laying it down next to the hole.
“Soon it will be the Jonsmessa – the apex of midsummer,” Gudrun said. “In ancient Iceland this was considered a most magical time. And so, to honour the ancients, we prepare for the ritual. We will bury this horn now and then, when the time is right, we will return.”
Gudrun produced a bundle of purple herbs and some yellow flowers, shoving half of them into the cow’s horn before turning to me. “May I have your necklace please?”
There was a silver chain around my neck that Mum had given me for my birthday. I hesitated. “My necklace? Why?”
Gudrun sighed. “The ritual requires something that has touched your flesh.”
I frowned. “Will I get it back again?”
“Yes, of course,” Gudrun said, as if she’d made this obvious already. “We will return for it.”
I took the necklace off and I was about to hand it to her but she shrank back. “No,” she instructed. “Not to me. You must put it in the horn.”
So I slipped the necklace inside, on top of the purple herbs, and then Gudrun took some more yellow flowers and pushed them into the horn too. Then she laid the horn carefully on its side in the hole I’d dug before patting the soil flat back over it.
She beckoned for me to stand up again. She stood beside me, her eyes closed and her hands raised above her head, and chanted a verse in a language I didn’t recognise. When she opened her eyes again she was smiling at me.
“All done,” she said brightly. “You can go home now, Hilly. Your mother will be wondering where you are.”
It was true. Mum was already waiting for me when I got back. When she asked where I had been, I knew it would wind her up if I mentioned Gudrun. Mum clearly found her annoying already. So I just said I’d gone for a look around while she finished her call.
In our cabin that night, I slept really well because I was so jetlagged. I didn’t notice that the night sky was as bright as day. When I woke up, the clock said it was morning, although time seemed meaningless by then. For a moment, I couldn’t work out how I’d even ended up here, and when I thought back to the whole episode in the Colosseum with Gudrun, it felt so surreal I could have sworn I’d imagined it. But then I put my hand to my neck and realised, with a shiver, that my silver chain was gone.
We were having breakfast in the hotel restaurant the next morning when Gudrun swept in, red curls flying out behind her in a fiery blaze.
“I’ve just read the new script.” She flung the thick wodge of paper down in front of me and it hit the table with a dull thud.
“Is it any good?” I asked.
“Aargh.” Gudrun pulled a face. “If you like fairy tales, it’s excellent. But I’m not interested in fairy tales. It’s the truth that I want to see. The real Brunhilda, a ferocious warrior who takes the throne after her father and leads her tribe to be Queen of Iceland.”
I must have looked doubtful because Gudrun picked up on my hesitation.
“Isn’t this what you want too, Hilly?”
“Yes, I guess,” I said, “if that’s the truth, but what I want doesn’t necessarily count around here.”
Gudrun’s eyes narrowed. “But what do you think?”
I sat there for a moment, gathering my thoughts so that I would say this right. “Why is it that in all the movies I see the Vikings are men? I’ve never seen a girl Viking. Maybe the girls really did just cook and clean and the boys were the only ones who got to do all the cool stuff like swordfights and horse riding.”
“You see history as it’s told by men,” Gudrun said. “And these men know nothing because they weren’t there.”
“I guess so,” I replied, “but you weren’t there either. The only person who really knows what happened to her is Brunhilda.”
I thought Gudrun would be cross with me for saying this. But she looked delighted and threw her arms around me.
“Exactly! Oh, I knew I was right to choose you!” She gave me a kiss on the forehead.
I wasn’t sure exactly what she was going on about, but I smiled anyway.
“Two weeks from tonight, Jonsmessa will be here at last,” she went on. “Then, Hilly, we’ll find out everything we need to know.”
There was even more bounce than usual to her step as she headed back out the door, dashing past Mum, who was heading to our table from the breakfast buffet with a plate of bacon and eggs for us both.
“What’s up with Gudrun?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” My heart was racing.
“She came in and left again without eating anything.” Mum shook her head. “That woman is very peculiar.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “she most certainly is.”
In the weeks of pre-production that followed, Gudrun didn’t mention Jonsmessa again to me. She was still pretty friendly, but her focus seemed to be on Katherine and the script and getting it right. They would frequently sit at a table in the dining room locked in heated discussions. Sometimes I would see Gudrun by herself at the same table late into the evenings as she cast her runes and chanted. One morning at breakfast, before we ate she’d insisted the room needed “cleansing” and we had to wait to eat until she could perform her ritual: waving a burning bunch of sage. Considering the frequent strangeness of her behaviour, being dragged along to bury a cow’s horn didn’t seem so out of the ordinary when I thought about it now. In fact, it had pretty much become a distant memory. Also, I had something else to distract me from the cultural consultant’s enchantments. I had somehow landed myself a job.
It had happened the same morning that Gudrun had cleansed the room at breakfast. Mum was sorting out the room in the hotel that she’d been allocated for costume storage. Mum’s assistant had gone back to London for more items and was due to return that afternoon, and they were on the phone to each other talking about how many racks they needed when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a woman with sandy blonde hair tied back in a messy plait. She was wearing СКАЧАТЬ