The Fire Stallion

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.”

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 smelled like the hot pools back home in Rotorua with a rotten tang of sulphur in the air. The hot water lake was huge and the water was an ice-cloudy blue.

Mum and I changed into our swimming costumes along with the crew and got in, sitting up to our armpits. Gudrun was off having an intense conversation with Katherine and didn’t join us.

“Slip this on,” Lizzie said, giving me a wristband.

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“Anything you want!” She winked at me.

It was the coolest thing ever. All I had to do was wave my digital wristband at the kiosks and I was given whatever I wanted. Soft drinks, chips and hotdogs – well, Icelandic hotdogs, which were kind of like American ones but with this weird creamy mustard sauce. I asked for tomato sauce instead but even that was a little strange and tasted like sweet cheese.

We soaked in the pools until my skin wrinkled. It felt chalky and dried-out when we got back out and dressed in the cold air. Then we piled back into the vans, all toasty from the hot water.

Most tourists go to Reykjavik and stay there but we drove straight through. It wasn’t a big city so it didn’t take long and pretty soon it was like we were driving across a moonscape, all spooky and barren with scattered patches of snow despite the summer. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the snow vanished and we were driving through tussocky plains, bare and desolate. It looked prehistoric here, almost as though humans had never existed.

We passed a roadside diner that looked closed except for the flashing lights that insisted it was open. By now it must have been late, but it was still eerily light. I looked at the time on the clock on the dashboard of the van: 11 p.m.

“There’s the hotel.” Mum nudged me and pointed off the main road to the right. In the far-off distance, I could see a long, low wooden lodge that looked like something the Vikings would have lived in except it was much bigger. It stood alone, in front of a massive forest of grey-green fir trees.

“So, that’s our base for the next two months,” Mum said.

The sign outside the hotel said ISBJÖRN. It translated as “ice bear” – polar bear, I guess it meant, since there was a giant stuffed polar bear standing on its hind legs in the foyer. Isbjörn had twelve rooms inside the lodge and another twenty-three cabins. The whole place had been rented out so that we were the only ones here. Katherine and the actors were going to be in the main lodge. The rest of us were allocated cabins around the grounds. Lizzie was methodically doing the rounds of the vans with a clipboard as everyone clamoured around her to find out where they were sleeping.

“Jillian, I’ve put you in the woods – total Hansel and Gretel job, little footpath into nowhere, but, trust me, it’s very pretty …” Lizzie handed Mum our key on a wooden tag and a map of the hotel grounds.

“Which way?” Mum asked.

“Go through the hotel foyer,” Lizzie called back without looking round. “Out the other side you’ll see the path into the forest. Follow the middle track. On the map I gave you your cabin is marked with a red cross.”

“You navigate, Hilly,” Mum said, passing it to me.

I took the map and started reading. “We go this way,” I said, pointing at the walk-through pavilion that divided the two main wings of the hotel.

The path was there. It split three ways and each artery was signposted for cabins three, four and five.

“That’s us, cabin five.” I led the way.

Mum was already on her phone, talking to Nicky, her assistant, who was arriving tomorrow with the costumes. Some of the cast were on Nicky’s flight but the main actors and actresses weren’t due to arrive for two more weeks. Mum had already done fittings for all of them, but there were still details to go through and more clothes to source. She wanted to have everything on hand to do final fittings before shooting began. I could hear Nicky’s voice on the other end of the phone, all shrill and panicky. She was saying there were problems getting the suits of armour through UK customs. The customs officer thought the shoulder pads with the spikes should be classified as weapons. Mum was so calm as she advised her what to do – it made me realise how good she was at her job. The other night at dinner, when Katherine had introduced everyone to Gudrun, she had referred to Mum as the “Oscar-award-winning costume designer Jillian Harrison”. Mum didn’t care about her Oscar – she was currently using it to prop open the cat flap at home – but it made me feel proud.

“No bars. I need to backtrack,” she said suddenly, holding her phone up above her head, searching for a signal. “I have to clear this up now. You keep on going, Hilly. I’ll catch you up at the cabin.”

It was like something out of a movie in that forest. The trees around me were so damp they dripped water. Bright green moss grew on the trunks on the dark side where no light could reach it. I walked slowly at first, thinking Mum might catch me up, but then I got cold and my fingers were numb so I sped up again, and then I saw the little red toadstool on the ground. Not natural but manmade with a sign beside it, an arrow made out of wood with the number five on it that pointed in the direction of our cabin.

When I look back on what happened next, I still can’t figure out how she did it. I remember we were all waiting by the minivans when Lizzie gave us our keys and allocated our rooms. Mum and I had set off down the path to our cabin straight away after that. I hadn’t seen anybody else come this way. So how was it that Gudrun was already on the doorstep of the cabin, sitting on a rocking chair and waiting for me?

She jumped straight up, an air of impatience about her, as if she’d been there for hours.

“Throw your bags inside quickly, Hilly,” she said. “We need to hurry.”

“But …” I was confused. “Mum’s still back there. She’s on the phone.”

But Gudrun ignored me. As I put the key in the lock, she turned the handle for me, then helped me to put my bags in the room. I only just had time to look around and see the shadowy shapes of deer antlers hanging on the walls before she had bustled me back out again and we were walking on the path that took us deeper into the forest.

Gudrun walked so fast I was panting with the effort as I skipped to catch up with her.

We walked like this, saying nothing for a little way. Just when I was about to summon up the courage to ask her where we were going, the woods cleared in front of us and we were obviously in the place she wanted me to see.

Years ago when I was little we’d taken a family holiday to Rome and visited the Colosseum. I remember standing at the side and staring down into the depths of it and imagining all those fights to the death on the sand between the gladiators with their swords and tridents, and the wild tigers and lions being let loose to eat the Christians.

This place we were in now was like a miniature version of that, a circular structure of stone steps sinking down into the earth to create an enclosed arena. Not big enough for the colosseum, but still pretty big. I couldn’t figure out whether it was natural or man-made – the stone steps were covered in grass. Gudrun began to vault down them towards the arena. She was carrying a tote bag across her back and it bounced as she leapt, making a clattering noise like it had bells inside.

I clambered after her, tentatively taking the first step in an ungainly fashion, before figuring out that the best way to get down was to do what Gudrun was doing and leap and land then leap again. Finally I reached the bottom too – not sand like the real Colosseum but dry tussock grass. Gudrun strode out until she was standing right in the middle of the arena and began pulling items out of her bag, including a garden trowel.

“Here!” she called to me. “Come and help me to dig.”

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 jodhpurs and riding boots.

“I’m Niamh,” she said. “I’m from the equine department. I’m afraid we have a problem.”

“What 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.”