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 kind of a problem?” Mum asked.

      Niamh pulled a face. “It’s easier if I show you … Let’s go to the stables.”

      The stables turned out to be a low block of buildings, just a short walk from the hotel, down by the river. I was shocked at the enormity of the scale of them. There were so many rows of loose boxes! And there was an indoor training ménage with a round pen and a sawdust schooling arena too.

      “It’s so lucky they had these facilities here for your horses,” I said as Niamh slid back the barn doors.

      “Oh no,” she laughed. “None of this existed before. They custom-built it for us so that it was ready when we got here. The weather was so cold and wet when we arrived. It was the middle of winter – minus fifteen degrees and pitch black outside most days. We were getting up in the dark and working all day in the dark – our lives had almost no daylight for months really. The weather back home in Ireland isn’t great but at least there’s sun! So naturally under those conditions we were really looking forward to summer. We didn’t think about the major problem it would cause.”

      “What problem?” Mum asked.

      “I’ll show you,” Niamh said.

      We walked up the central corridor of the stable block and Niamh went up to the loose box that was labelled in gold with the name OLAFUR.

      “This is Olafur, but we call him Ollie.” Niamh opened the top half of the Dutch door. There was a horse inside, standing in the middle of the loose box. He had the look of a prize fighter, stocky and burly, yet he was no more than fifteen hands high. His eyes, which were half-closed as if he had been dozing, were almost completely covered by an enormous bushy forelock. It looked like he had a massive fringe, this giant explosion of sunburnt brown hair that sprang out from between his ears and then crested his powerful neck. His tail was bushy and enormous too, and had the same bedraggled sunburnt colour against his coat, which was quite sleek and almost black.

      “What breed is he?” I asked.

      “He’s an Icelandic,” Niamh said. “They all are. Connor, that’s my brother, he and I wanted to bring our own stunt horses with us from Ireland, but the rules are strict and it’s impossible to bring any horses in.”

      “Why?”

      “It’s been the law for centuries now.” Niamh shook her head in wonder. “They’re really serious about keeping the bloodlines of their horses pure. And if you take an Icelandic horse out of the country, even for a single day to compete or for work, that’s the end of it. They’re not allowed to return again. Ever.”

      “Really?”

      “Banished for life,” Niamh confirmed.

      “So, because of this law, you couldn’t bring any of your own trained horses here, then?” Mum said.

      “Nope.” Niamh sighed. “Which put us on the back foot. We’ve had to train all of these new horses since we arrived in winter. And the whole time we were sending photos back to the production team of the horses we’d bought for schooling and Katherine was so excited. She loved the way they appeared so rugged with their coats all long and sun-bleached and shaggy.” Niamh seemed like she was about to burst into tears. “And then, just before filming started, summer arrived, and now look!” She waved a dismissive hand at Ollie, standing sleek and black before her. “It’s a nightmare! They’re all like this!”

      “So they’ve moulted to their summer coats and lost their shaggy winter fur?” Mum grasped the situation. “And what do you want me to do?”

      “I want,” Niamh said, “I want you to make it winter again.”

      Mum didn’t bat an eye at the craziness of Niamh’s request. She stared hard at Ollie for a moment and then she dialled her phone. “Nicky? It’s me. Where are you? The airport? You’ve finally arrived? Good. OK, I’m going to give you the number of a contact in Reykjavik. I need you to go pick up some goat hair.”

      A few hours later, Nicky was at the hotel with a minivan filled with six commercial bales of coarse-strand goat hair.

      This was how Mum made the horse suits. Handfuls of the goat hair were dyed just the right shade of brown and then the ends were bleached to look like they’d been out in the sun. The hair was hand-stitched onto sheer black mesh which had been sewn with a zip that went from jaw to tail beneath the belly of the horse, in much the same way that a human might wear a onesie. A Velcro attachment hooked up onto the bridle to hold the suit in place at one end and tail clips fixed it at the other so that once it was done up there was no way to tell it was there and the goat hair looked exactly like the horse’s own natural long, shaggy winter coat.

      Fashioning the horse-onesie was tricky work. The costumes had to be fitted perfectly to each individual horse. And that was where I came in. It was a two-man job to take precise measurements, involving one person making notes and the other lying down on the ground with a tape measure to chart the dimensions of their belly and combine this with their length all the way from their head to beneath the dock of their tail.

      Mum and Nicky’s domain was the sewing room, where they had their team cutting and stitching the suits, and I stayed at the stables helping Niamh.

      We did forty horses together. I would spend hours lying on my back beneath the bellies of the stallions with Niamh bent down beside me writing down the measurements that I gave her. By the time we were done I knew everything about her. She was eighteen, so only five years older than me, and had left school as soon as she could to go to work for her brother Connor who ran Equus Films.

      “Horses are in the blood,” Niamh had said. “Mum and Dad breed point-to-point racers. Connor and I were both in the Irish National team for Pony Club Mounted Games. We’re both daredevils – the stunts we do now started out as things we did at home, like teaching our ponies to bow and rear, or swinging onto their backs off ropes and galloping them bareback.”

      Mark, the third member of the team, was Irish too, a friend of Connor’s from Pony Club days.

      “He and Connor started the company together before I joined, so that makes them the bosses,” Niamh explained. “Connor does most of the ridden work. He’s been training the two lead stallions, Troy and Ollie. Ollie is going to be the horse that the prince rides. He needs to be able to do all the usual stunts – you know, drop to one knee and rear on cue, and he also has to jump through fire to do the rescue at the end of the film. Troy has to do stunts too, but he’s also got to act because there are lots of scenes with him and Brunhilda together, so we need a horse that has presence, you know? Like a movie star.”

      Considering he was supposed to be a movie star, Troy was not at all what I’d been expecting. He was handsome enough – a deep russet chestnut with a flaxen mane – and he was beautiful, almost feminine for a stallion. I guess he was the right horse for a princess, but he wasn’t quite what I’d pictured when Gudrun had talked about Jotun, Brunhilda’s famous stallion. If Brunhilda really was this ferocious warrior, then Troy seemed a bit tame for her. Not that I said this to Niamh, of course, who was totally in love with Troy.

      “Don’t you think Jam is going to look amazing on him?” she said as she groomed his thick, shaggy blond mane.

      “Jam?”

      Niamh looked at me as if I were from another planet. “Jamisen O’Brien. She’s playing Brunhilda. You СКАЧАТЬ