"Brother," he named the foal. "Wind Brother." And he sang the name into the horse's ears and blew a breath gently into the foal's nostrils as was the custom among the desert dwellers. And he made the horse a song:
Wind rider,
Sun strider,
The dreamer's dream,
Moon leaper,
Star keeper,
Are you what you seem?
It was not a great song, but Lateef whispered it over and over in an affectionate tone as he touched the horse, until it twitched its ears in reply. And the horse grew to love Lateef and would respond to his every command.
Often the caliph would stand by the stall, holding on to the door for support while Lateef cleaned the horse. Or he would sit in a chair nearby while the horse's wings were stretched and rubbed with oil. But whenever the caliph tried to come too close, both Lateef and the horse would tremble. Then the caliph would sigh, and a faint blush of color would stain his pale cheeks. "Ah, Dragonfly," Al-Mansur would say, "do not forget that you are my dream. And I must ride my dream or die."
One day, when Lateef and the horse had both trembled at the caliph's approach, and Al-Mansur had sighed and spoken, Lateef could control his tongue no longer. Bowing low, afraid to raise his head, he spoke. "O Caliph, if what you say is so, then you are no more free than I."
The caliph was silent for a moment, and when he spoke his voice was very soft. "No one is entirely free, child. Even I, Caliph Al-Mansur, have never been free to indulge my own dreams. To be good and wise, a ruler must make real the dreams of his people. But now, for once, I would have this dream, this wonder, for myself alone. For in some small way, the dreaming makes me feel I am free, though I know I am not."
Lateef shook his head, for he did not understand the caliph. How could a man who had everything no farther away than a handclap not be free? He raised his head to ask the caliph, but the man was gone. He did not come again to the stable, and his absence troubled Lateef.
When a year had passed and Wind Brother's sides had filled out, his mane and tail grown long and silky, the caliph sent word around to the stables that he would come the very next day to ride the winged horse. Now in all this time Wind Brother had never been mounted, nor had a saddle ever been placed upon his back. And never had he opened and shut his wings on his own: Lateef had been content to walk around the ring with the horse, his hand on Wind Brother's neck. He had feared that if he were to sit on the horse's back, his heels might accidentally do injury to the iridescent wings or that a saddle might crush a fragile rib.
Lateef bowed low to the messenger. "Tell my caliph," he said fearfully, "and with many respects, that the horse is not yet strong enough for a rider."
The messenger looked even more afraid than Lateef. "I dare not deliver such a message myself. You must go."
So Lateef entered the caliph's room for the second time. Al-Mansur lay on the silken pillows as if he were only dreaming of life.
"The horse, your . . . your Dragonfly," stuttered Lateef, "he is not yet ready to be ridden."
"Then make him so," said the caliph, barely raising himself up to speak. He sank back quickly, exhausted from the effort.
Lateef started to protest, but the guards hurried him out of the room. As he walked down the long hall, the caliph's oldest adviser followed him.
"He must ride tomorrow," said the old man, his thin beard weaving fantastic patterns in the air as he spoke. "It is his only wish. He is growing weak. Perhaps it will keep him alive. A man is alive as long as he can dream."
"But his dream is of my horse."
"The horse is not yours, but the caliph's. His grain has kept
the horse alive. You are but a slave," said the old man, shaking his finger at Lateef. "A slave cannot own a horse."
"A slave can still be brother to the wind," Lateef whispered, aghast at his tongue's boldness, "as long as the wind wills it so." But even as he spoke, he feared he had failed—failed the horse and failed the caliph—and in failing them both, failed himself.
Allah's Test
In the morning Lateef was up early. He rubbed the horse's sides with scented oils. He wove ribbons into its black mane. And all the while he crooned to the horse, "Oh, my brother, do not fail me as I fear I have failed you. Be humble. Take the caliph onto your back. For you are young and healthy, and he is old and sick. He is the dreamer and you are the dream."
The horse whickered softly and blew its warm breath on Lateef's neck.
Then Lateef took the horse out into the ring.
Soon the caliph came, borne in a chair that was carried by four strong men. Behind them came the caliph's advisers. Then, in order of their importance, came the caliph's wives. Finally, led in by the armed guards, came the men and women and children of Akbir, for the word had gone out to the souks and mosques: "Come see Caliph Al-Mansur ride his dream."
Only then, when Lateef saw how many people waited and watched, did he truly become afraid. What would happen if the caliph failed in front of all these people? Would they blame the horse for not bearing the caliph's weight? Would they blame Lateef for not training the horse well? Or would they blame the caliph? Failure, after all, was for slaves, not for rulers.
The caliph was helped from his chair, but then he signaled his people away. Slowly he approached the horse. Putting his hand to the horse's nose, he let Wind Brother smell him. He moved his hand carefully along the horse's flanks, touching the wings in a curious, tentative gesture, as if he had never really seen them clearly before. He spoke softly, so that only the horse and Lateef could hear. "I am the dreamer, you are the dream. I think I am ready to ride."
Lateef waited.
The horse waited.
All the men and women and children of Akbir waited.
Suddenly, so swiftly it surprised them all, the caliph took a deep breath and leaped onto the horse's back. He sat very tall on Wind Brother, his hands twisted in the horse's mane, his legs carefully in front of the wings. Eyes closed, the caliph smiled. And his smile was a child's, sweetly content.
For a long, breath-held moment, nothing happened. Then the horse gave a mighty shudder and reared back on his hind legs. He spun around and dropped onto all fours, arching his back. The caliph, still smiling, flew into the air and landed heavily on the ground. He did not get up again.
The horse did not move, even when Lateef ran over to him and touched his nose, his neck, his side. But as Lateef swung himself astride, he felt the horse's flanks trembling.
"Be not afraid," Lateef whispered to the horse. "I am here. What they try to do to you, they must do to me first. In this I will not fail you."
The chief of the caliph's guards ran toward the boy and the horse, his great silver scimitar raised above his head. As the scimitar began to sing its death song on the trip down through the air, Lateef leaned forward, guarding the horse's neck with his own. But he did not feel any blow. All he felt was a rush of wind as the horse began to pump its mighty wings for the first time.
Lateef turned his head. Above them he could still see the image of the silver sword. Then at his knee he felt a hand. He looked down. A boy about his own age stood there, in white robes, with a white dulband on his head. In the turban's center was the caliph's red jewel.
"I am free and ready to ride," the boy said, a shadowy smile playing at the corners of his mouth.
"Then mount, my brother," whispered Lateef, putting his hand down and pulling the boy up behind him. "Ride your dream."
With a mighty motion, the horse's wings pumped once again, filling with air and sky. He lifted them beyond the sword, beyond the walls of the palace. They circled the minarets once, and Lateef looked down. He could see a crowd gathering around the fallen figures of a caliph, a horse, a ragged boy. Only here and there was a man or a woman or a child who dared to look up, who saw the dream-riders in the sky.
And then they were gone, the three: over a river that was a thin ribbon in the sand, over the changing patterns of the desert, to the place where t
here are neither slaves nor rulers and where all living beings truly dwell as brothers—the palace of the winds.
Aunt Millicent at the Races
by
Len Guttridge
Here's a gentle, warm-hearted, and very funny look at a family problem—and the ingenious, if not exactly ethical, solution the family finds for that problem . . .
Len Guttridge has published several lyrical and amusing stories about strange doings and supernatural occurrences in the Welsh countryside, most of them in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the mid-1960s. He lives in Alexandria, Virginia.
You've heard what they say about the Rhondda Valley. How the spread of industry cast a blight upon the verdant land and just as ineradicably scarred with fear and suspicion the souls of its people, etc. That more or less is the popular romantic notion. But it wasn't the coal mines and smelting furnaces which stamped the faces of Pontypandy at least, my birthplace, with permanent expressions of gall. Instead, I blame the economic crisis which struck following my father's exploitation of Aunt Millicent's overnight transformation into a horse.
Interior alterations may already have begun, so to speak, but the first surface indications that Aunt Milly was not her usual self appeared halfway through my tenth birthday party, forever wrecking my father's long reign as life and soul of such occasions. He had just supervised the usual gamut of infant-games and our carpet was littered with small panting bodies, mine included. His sergeant-major bellow jerked us then into giggling attention and he began his standard trio of funny stories.
We had heard them before, without comprehension. As usual, we sat through the first in grave and baffled silence. As usual, Father convulsed with mirth before he could complete the punch line of the second. The third, not as usual, was rewarded by a spirited neigh from the prim pink lips of my mother's cousin Millicent.
She neighed for several seconds and ended with a triumphant arpeggio squeak. It was the squeak, I recall, which flipped us. We spun like cartwheels all over the room, we clawed each other's clothes, we turned crimson and we choked. Had Father told fifty stories, all new and uproarious, he could never have achieved such spectacular effects and by the hand of the Lord, he knew it.
His brow grew blacker than summer thunder clouds over Gerrig Llan and his words spat down like hail. "I'll trouble you, Millicent, to keep your blasted animal impersonations to yourself."
Aunt Milly gulped. Her hands fluttered like blind birds. She hated to be the center of attention. But she could no more retreat from the spotlight now than explain why she occupied it.
From certain of his sulphuric soliloquies, I knew that Father had long felt the time overdue when his wife's cousin should have found herself a husband, preferably one of means. I don't think Millicent was unattractive. But since she swathed herself from chin to ankles in the tweedy puritan garb considered proper uniform for a twenty-five-year-old Welsh assistant librarian, it was hard to tell whether she was emphatically curved or indeed if she had any curves at all.
Anyway, the morning after Father's deposition as life and soul of family parties, Aunt Milly at breakfast was seen to be desperately grappling for her fork with a hoof protruding from one thick sleeve. Mother blinked and prepared to swoon. Father glared. My aunt gave a helpless shrug. "I'm terribly sorry." Her apology tiptoed into the sudden tension. "This . . . this came on in the night." A penitent neigh escaped her. "I rather hoped you wouldn't notice."
She neighed again, abandoned her labors with the cutlery, and fled to her room.
Father adjusted his features into a familiar cast. Upstairs over his bed hung a large Victorian print showing the last stand of the South Wales Borders against the Zulus at Rorke's Drift, its dominant figure the beleaguered lieutenant atop the redoubt, a dashing ideal of pluck and fortitude. Precisely this bearing my father always strove for when confronted by domestic emergency.
"Son." He addressed me with the gruffness of a commander dispatching a scout to bring up the cavalry. "Go and fetch Doctor O'Toole. On the double!"
The doctor was for Mother. When I returned with him, Father was buckling his old Sam Browne army belt, another symbolic gesture, and gazing resolutely upstairs where from Aunt Milly's room echoed a rhythmic sound. An anxious drumming. As of hoofbeats.
Doctor O'Toole sighed and turned to Mother but she threw one swoon after another, which quickly infuriated O'Toole and drew forth in a loud Belfast accents his oft-proclaimed intention of quitting this lunatic land for a sane and profitable practice in Harley Street.
Then Milly's room door banged wide and downstairs galloped a great bay mare. With a shriek Mother fainted again and Dr. O'Toole, about to apply brandy, quickly diverted it to his own gaping mouth.
The mare staggered nervously. Her flanks barged into our century-old grandfather clock and she butted an equally antique Welsh oak dresser. Chinaware flew. A silver cup Father had won in a regimental prize fight tournament toppled to the carpet. His ornate pipe-rack (hand-carved in Italy) followed, scattering English briars, Dutch porcelains and rich brown meerschaums. Uncertain hoofs kicked them right and left.
Throughout, Father stood unbowed in the center of the room, Gibraltar against a storm, although the military wingtips of his delta mustache quivered. Twice he muttered, "Steady, lads, steady," and I could almost hear bugles. Behind him the bruised grandfather clock burst into a frantic chiming though it was nowhere near the hour, and then it slid to silence like a half-wound gramophone. And Aunt Milly came to rest and braced on trembling legs, and peered self-consciously over Father's squared shoulder.
Thus Millicent's equine debut. Naturally, it summoned Father's strongest qualities, particularly his instinct for exploiting the unexpected, the at first glance perplexing, to his own greedy ends. That afternoon his mind was already exploring
ways and means as, watched peaceably by Aunt Milly grazing in our cabbage patch, he made over the toolshed out back into a cozy stable.
After we had pushed and prodded her into it, she turned to survey us with modest complacency, as when she used to relate some minor personal triumph attained at the Pontypandy Reading Circle. Father grinned. "Milly, my gal," he said. "You was never in better shape."
Father of course accepted what had happened. Despite his brief career in the army (exaggerated by him in retrospect), he believed whole-heartedly in magic. Name me the Welshman who doesn't. But instead of showing the proper awe for it, he took it like everything else in his military stride. And I'm sure he had felt that sooner or later, something strange was bound to happen to Milly . . .
Shy and demure though she was, Milly had positively wallowed in wizardry. Night upon night she would read to me from books old and full of wonder whose words bewitched the very pages so, I swear, they turned untouched. And I would shiver with dread, that was no west wind keening across the valley but spirit hounds baying at the moon, and once pajamaed for sleep I would keep my eyes from the bedroom window to avoid a fatal glimpse of death candles flickering in procession around the foot of Cerrig Llan or the Little People up to no good among the ash groves. . . .
Well, Pontypandy soon hummed with gossip. Inevitably it reached the vigilant ears of Pastor Goronwy Jones, familiar to his flock as Goronwy the Sin-killer. That Sunday, with hotter than usual eloquence, he kindled a special hellfire for those who would dabble in dark powers, and although he did not mention us by name, all knew that the target for his fiery shafts was the Pritchard brood, of which I was the only one in chapel. Obedient to the hint of its spellbinder, the congregation turned its multiple gaze on me, and as if pinned by a circle of flamethrowers I squirmed, sizzled, and finally melted in shame.
Rumors spread beyond the Welsh border and attracted a sniffing pack of newspapermen. A disarmament conference in Paris, an earthquake in Peru, and the defrocking of a Sussex bishop for scandalous conduct were elbowed off the front pages by speculation upon Aunty Milly, the Pontypandy Wonder. Pontypandy, we would say today, hogged the headlines. But not for lon
g. Alien students of psychic phenomena who camped on the slopes of Cerrig Llan caught pneumonia and went home. A professional ghost-hunter materialized at our front door but was himself so rudely interrogated by Father that he vanished more quickly than any apparition. An attractive lady evangelist from California delivered a sermon on Signs and Portents to Goronwy the Sin-killer's fold, then sailed off to America, her choral retinue augmented by some dozen endlessly singing young miners whose conversion had been instantaneous the moment they emerged from the bituminous depths to behold her.
All the visitors in fact departed before Father had a fair chance to profit from the publicity, for nobody really believed the whirl of stories about Milly. Nobody, I mean, who wasn't Welsh.
But Father was far from dashed. One morning after the fuss had died down, he marched off to the library in his best no-surrender manner while I trotted alongside him. The library staff numbered three, not counting Milly, whose absence they sorely lamented. "How is she?" they asked Father.
"Off her oats this morning," he replied curtly and demanded to see their stock of horse books. It was slim. We left with "Turf and Paddock," "Illustrated Horsebreaking" and "The Complete Horsewoman," all more than thirty years out-of-print. The last title didn't seem wholly appropriate but for some reason Father savored it with great glee.
He also wrote to London and bought a subscription to Horse and Track. And that is how we met Arlington Mellish, wealthy horse breeder, patron of the races, frequent contributor to Horse and Track. It was something in a Mellish article, we learned later, that led Father to ponder seriously Aunt Milly's track potential.
"I've written to Mr. Mellish," Father announced one evening, "with a view to introducing our Milly to the Sport of Kings."
Important decisions, Father believed, deserved the grandiose phrase.
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