The Winter Horses

by Philip Kerr

  Another time, she heard a strange whooping noise, and it was the next day before she was able to connect this strange sound with some zebras, the sight of which was unnerving to her, because she was certain that zebras existed only in Africa, like lions, and it occurred to her that if there were zebras at Askaniya-Nova, then there might just as easily be lions, too.

  Strangest of all was the noise of a llama—another animal she was sure existed on a different continent. This sounded exactly like someone laughing his head off, and she almost thought it might be a hyena, until she saw the llama, which was as white as the snow and, in the bright moonlight, resembled a creature from a fairy tale.

  All of these noises were made less alarming to Kalinka by the fact that Taras, the dog, and Temüjin and Börte seemed not in the least bit bothered by them. And the only time the three animals stopped and pricked up their ears was when they heard what Kalinka was quite certain was a wolf howling in the distance.

  Now, as anyone will tell you, a howling wolf is a wonderful sound, but only if you are inside a warm house with a lock on the door. It is not a sound you want to hear when you are standing in the middle of an open steppe in winter—especially, as on this occasion, when the wolf’s plaintive howl received a swift reply from another wolf.

  “Wolves,” whispered Kalinka. “Max didn’t say there would be wolves, Taras.” She made a fist inside her coat pocket. “This is a good start to our journey.”

  Taras stayed silent; he was too busy listening to bark at the girl. And besides, he hardly wanted to give their exact position away to the wolves, although he had a good idea that they had already picked up their scent—not that this was difficult. There wasn’t one of them—the girl included—who didn’t smell as strongly as a nest of mice.

  “Perhaps I should light a fire,” whispered Kalinka, fingering the box of matches in her coat pocket. “Wolves don’t like fire. Not that there’s wood or anything else to put a match to.” She thought for a moment. “Perhaps if I gave them the bread and the cheese? No, I thought not. A hungry wolf is hardly likely to make do with a cheese sandwich, is he?”

  Taras glanced at her impatiently; then they heard another yowling howl, and this time it seemed much, much closer. Taras looked at Kalinka uncertainly. He was sure the horses could defend themselves, but about the girl he was much less sure. Without a doubt, she was the weakest in their group, and her soft white flesh would look all too inviting to a leaping wolf. If only the old man had thought to give her a walking stick, then at least she might have used it to hit something.

  “I wish dear Max was here with his gun,” she whispered. “Better still, I wish I was back in his little blue cottage.”

  A minute passed, and none of the animals beside the girl moved or made a sound. All Kalinka could hear was the cold bora wind moaning over the snow-covered grass and her own nervous breathing. The silence was even more unnerving than the howl of the wolves, for she realized that it meant something ominous now.

  Slowly, Taras turned around to face the direction where they’d heard the wolf’s howl coming from; so did Temüjin, and Kalinka sensed that something was about to happen that only the three animals who were her companions actually understood.

  “Are they going to attack, do you think?” she asked the dog. “I’ve never even seen a wolf, and I don’t know what to do. Should I crouch down? Should I play dead?”

  Taras lowered his tense body, growled and pinned his small ears back so that he resembled a wolf himself. He was a big dog: at the shoulder, he was as high as a man’s waist, but the girl doubted he was equal to a contest with a pack of wolves. And even though Taras was a wolfhound, she had the idea that when borzois hunted wolves, they did it not on their own but in pairs. Besides, he had such a gentle-looking face, it was hard to imagine him fighting anything.

  Meanwhile, the stallion lifted his furry tail and his head, showed his big yellow teeth to the moon and let out a strange noise that was part snort and part growl—a blustering sound that was full of aggression and determination to stand his ground against whatever the night now threw at him.

  Bright eyes shifted in the dark like fireflies. Kalinka’s chest felt so tight, she could hardly breathe. There were at least two wolves circling them, patiently looking for the weakest one of the four travelers to attack. That is how it always is with wolves. Stealth and patience and, above all, a ruthless drive to kill; in that respect, at least, they reminded Kalinka of the Nazis. She swallowed her fear and tried not to let it show, for she had an idea that wolves can smell terror. She was right. Taras pushed out his chest and barked fiercely at the bright eyes, and for a moment, they disappeared.

  Kalinka had discovered the special fear of wolves. Everyone has it. It’s a fear that goes right back to the time when man lived in caves and painted horses on the walls by firelight and very sensibly avoided the forests and open steppe at night.

  Taras stared hard into the darkness; every fiber of his being was on guard against imminent attack. Temüjin clopped the hard snow with one hoof, ready to smash a wolf’s skull if that was what was required, while Börte patrolled in a circle around Kalinka.

  “I can’t see anything,” she whispered. “Have they gone?”

  The next second, three, or perhaps four, wolves arrived at a sprint from opposite directions with the same object in mind: to catch the girl by the throat and then hang on long enough to bring her down and kill her, at which point they estimated that the dog and the horses would have no choice but to abandon her body.

  With jaws bared viciously, the first wolf—a big male—launched himself like a streak of snarling gray lightning at the girl, only to be met by a perfectly judged double kick from Temüjin as both the stallion’s rear hooves lashed out in unison and connected very solidly with the wolf’s body; the hapless animal flew through the air with an injured yelp and landed somewhere in the darkness, whereupon Temüjin gave immediate chase with the intention of trampling the wolf to death. But although badly stunned, the wolf still had sufficient presence of mind to pick himself up and run away as quickly as he could.

  The second wolf—a female—fared even worse than her mate, for it was not Kalinka’s throat that ended up being gripped in a pair of powerful jaws but the wolf’s own, as hundreds of years’ breeding in the big white wolfhound suddenly came to the fore. With a loud snap, Taras caught the animal expertly as she sprang at the girl and, holding the wolf tightly, shook her hard, several times, as if she were no bigger than a rat. He might have held on to her, too, but for the fact that Börte bit the wolf on one back leg and then the other, which was so painful and made the wolf writhe so much that she twisted herself free and limped quickly away before the horse or the dog could bite her again.

  Temüjin snapped his jaws shut on an ear and then a tail, and in the darkness, something gray and furry let out an agonized yelp; he lashed out behind him with his rear hooves and felt a dull thud as they connected with the wolf he had just bitten.

  Breathlessly, Taras and the two Przewalski’s turned one way and then the other, instinctively searching for more wolves; the dog barked loudly, as if challenging any others to come forward and pit themselves against dog and wild horse, but there was none. Sensing victory, Temüjin rose up on his hind legs and cycled his front hooves in the air; at the same time, he let out a loud neigh that was nothing short of triumphant.

  When the second wolf had attacked, Kalinka had ducked down abruptly and then slipped on the snow; for the few seconds it had lasted, she had watched the fight lying down, as she thought it best to stay out of the way.

  She was still lying there now, and Taras wasn’t sure if the girl had been injured or not. Almost immediately after the danger was past, he came over to check that she was all right. Kalinka took his long, almost curved muzzle in her hands and hugged the dog’s head close to her body.

  “Thank you,” she said as the dog licked her face fondly. “You were so brave, Taras.”

  She stood up and hugged the
bodies of both horses.

  “You too, Temüjin. You saved my life. And you, Börte. Thank you so much. I told you that I couldn’t do this without you.” She let out a breath that was part relief and part fear, and shivered. “But for the three of you—well, I’ve a good idea how Little Red Riding Hood must have felt. I just wish I had a treat to give to you all.”

  She glanced up at the moon. “Come on,” she said. “There’s no time to waste. Southeast is this way.”

  THAT NIGHT, MAX PRAYED for it to snow to cover the tracks of Kalinka and the Przewalski’s horses, which led away from the old waterworks like a trail of bread crumbs, but no snow came—not so much as a flake. Max started to brush over the tracks, but this simply made their trail bigger and more obvious. He racked his brains for an idea as to how he might cover them effectively but none came. Finally, he decided that if he were asked about the tracks by Grenzmann, he would have to tell the German SS captain that the tracks had probably been made by deer or llamas; there were still a few around that the Germans had not killed and eaten.

  If there wasn’t much that Max could do about concealing a suspicious-looking trail in the snow, there was something he could do about Kalinka’s “cave paintings,” and the old man reluctantly decided to clean the paintings off the walls of the water tank—just in case the captain turned up and put two and two together about what and perhaps who had been staying there. So as soon as he had given up trying to cover the trail of Kalinka and the horses, Max trudged back to his cottage to fetch a bucket, a broom, a brush and some soap flakes, and, returning immediately to the water tank, began to try to scrub the walls clean of evidence.

  It wasn’t long before he made an uncomfortable discovery: the paintings could not be removed from the stone wall of the water tank. Try as he might—and he tried all night long—the best of them remained indelibly all around the circular wall, as if they’d been there for thousands of years. Soap and water and huge amounts of scrubbing, which left Max lathered in sweat, had absolutely no effect on Kalinka’s perfect little black palm prints and her excellent paintings of the Przewalski’s horses. At first, Max was puzzled that something so new could prove to be so indestructible; if it hadn’t been inconvenient to his plans, he might even have said it was a miracle that Kalinka’s paintings should prove to be as durable as the French ones, and it was several hours before the old man worked out exactly what must have happened. Unwittingly, the girl had created a perfect fresco painting: her homemade colors, mixed with water, had been applied to a damp stone surface; these pigments had been absorbed by the stone and then quickly dried by the wood fire that was still burning on the floor, so that the paintings were now as permanently fixed in the very fabric of the wall as if they had been painted on the ceiling of the great cathedral in Kiev. “That’s torn it, Taras,” said Max, quite forgetting for a moment that he had told his faithful dog to go with Kalinka and the horses. “If this situation wasn’t so dangerous, it might be funny.”

  So he had to content himself with burning her old coat and the books with the cave pictures of the horses, and sweeping away some horse dung.

  “With any luck, that captain will take my word about this place and not come here at all,” the old man told his absent dog. “I mean, it’s just an old waterworks, after all is said and done—not a weapons arsenal or a Red Army barracks. It makes no sense to be suspicious of absolutely everything, like he is.”

  But in his bones, Max knew that Grenzmann wasn’t the type to accept anyone’s word for anything—least of all someone who was not German. And he knew that as soon as the captain saw the paintings, his life at Askaniya-Nova would become very awkward indeed—and quite possibly worse than that, since he knew the SS didn’t take kindly to being made fools of. He suspected that the same thing that had happened in the botanical gardens at Dnepropetrovsk would now happen to him.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he told himself, for by now he had remembered that Taras had gone with Kalinka. “What matters is that they make their escape and start a new life somewhere else.”

  When he was satisfied he had done all he could—he left the fire burning, to make sure that Kalinka’s old coat was properly consumed by the flames—Max went back into the brick passageway, past the pumping station, and opened the secret door that led outside onto the steppe.

  An unpleasant but hardly unexpected discovery awaited him: it was Grenzmann on his tall Hanoverian horse, with four of his SS men seated on two motorcycles and in their sidecars.

  “Max,” said Grenzmann. “This is a surprise. And, then again, perhaps not such a surprise.” Smiling thinly, he jumped down from the horse and walked toward the old man. “Here we all are, looking for the entrance to the baron’s old waterworks, and all of a sudden there you are, showing us exactly where to find it. How about that?”

  “After you mentioned it last night, sir,” explained Max, his heart pounding, “I decided to come and have a look at the place myself. To see if there was anything I could scavenge. And in case, at a later date, you wanted me to show you around.”

  Grenzmann grinned and wagged his finger at the old man. “You know, you’re such a bad liar, Max,” he said. “I don’t know why I put up with it. Really, I don’t. I give you my friendship—we invite you to supper—and this is how you repay our trust: with lies and evasions. It’s really quite intolerable. If your German wasn’t so perfect, I might be tempted to shoot you right here and now.”

  Max shook his head and then snatched off his cap. “It’s not like that at all, sir. I told you the plant was useless, and it is.”

  “Don’t split hairs with me, Max. It’s obvious that you are hiding something in there. The question is, what? Or perhaps who? But I think we’re going to find out.”

  “I can assure you, sir, that there’s no one here except you and me and these men.”

  “Perhaps that’s true now,” admitted the captain. “But these tracks, leading away from here to the horizon, suggest that it wasn’t true a while ago—until last night, perhaps, when I first mentioned this place to you and you were so hopelessly evasive.”

  “Tracks, sir?”

  The captain came and grabbed Max by the collar of his coat and led him to the trail, where he pushed the old man onto the snow. “These tracks,” he said. “The ones that lead to the southeast of here.”

  Grenzmann frowned.

  “Now look what you made me do. You made me lose my temper. I very much dislike losing my temper, Max. What is it someone said? ‘When you lose your temper, you lose the argument’? Not that this is much of an argument. I mean, we both know I’m right and that you’re lying.”

  “Ah, you mean those tracks.”

  “Yes, I do mean those tracks.”

  “I hardly noticed them, sir. They look like deer tracks. I think there are still a few on the reserve that your men have not yet killed.”

  Grenzmann laughed. “Really, it’s amusing. I have to hand it to you, Max. You are a most persistently stubborn fellow. You insult me with your lies. I think we both know that these tracks in the snow are not the tracks of a deer—which has two toes that make an upside-down heart shape—but the tracks of a small horse, which has no toes. Do you really think it’s possible that an Olympic equestrian like me—someone who’s been around horses all his life—would not recognize the hoofprint of a horse? To be more exact—two small horses, not to mention the tracks of a dog—your dog—and a human being. And this is the intriguing part: whose tracks are these? A partisan, perhaps? A Red Army soldier? Who?” He shrugged. “Well, perhaps we’ll find out more when we go inside the waterworks, if that’s what this is. I’m no longer sure about anything you’ve told me.” He looked at one of his men. “Bring him along,” he said coldly.

  With Max now their prisoner, the Germans went through the hidden door and along the passageway. While two of the captain’s men inspected the mechanics of the pumping station, the captain and two others walked out the other side and into one of the stone water ta
nks, where the captain sniffed the air suspiciously.

  “It smells very much like horse in here, Max.” Picking up the broom, Grenzmann turned it around and put his nose near the head. “No question about it,” he added. “Horse.” He smiled. “A horse that knows how to open a door and sweep up its own dung, perhaps.”

  “Sir,” said a voice from inside the other water tank. “Come and take a look at this.”

  Everyone went through the jagged doorway of the second tank, where an SS sergeant had lit a lantern and was lifting it above his head to illuminate Kalinka’s paintings.

  Grenzmann took the lantern from his sergeant and was silent for a moment as he looked around the stone wall.

  “Remarkable,” he said eventually. “Quite remarkable. And really very artistic. Exactly like being in one of those French caves at Lascaux. You haven’t heard of those, Max? Yes, they’re a recent discovery in Vichy France. I read about that in a newspaper. Apparently, they’re at least seventeen thousand years old. Although I’ll hazard a guess that these on your walls are not nearly so old. I’ll also guess that these are not the work of some primitive Stone Age man but of someone rather more contemporary.” He bent down beside one of Kalinka’s black palm prints and placed his own hand over it. “And altogether smaller. Most likely a child. Or a young woman. How about it, Max? Has someone been living in here, in secret?”

  “Only very recently,” admitted Max. “And quite without my knowledge. As a matter of fact, it was only yesterday I discovered—quite by chance—that someone was living in here.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said Grenzmann. He rubbed at one of the black palm prints with a gloved hand. “I must say, these handprints don’t look like they were done only yesterday. They seem quite indelible.”

  “I can assure you, I’m telling you the truth, sir. And, really, it was so cold, I could hardly throw this person out onto the steppe.”