" `She saved me, you know,' I said brightly. `She left them and saved me. But the Dead Horse got her. That was too much, you see. She was only a girl, couldn't fight that. You do see, don't you?' This is what I am told I said at any rate, by Mr. Andrews, the Episcopal minister of the little Church of the Redeemer. But that was later. I remember none of it.
"When I woke, in the spare bed of the rectory the next day, I found Andrews sitting silently by my bed. He was looking at my bare breast on which lay the little Celtic cross. He was fully dressed, tired and unshaven, and he reeked of smoke, like a dead fireplace, still full of coals and wood ash.
"Before I could speak, he asked me a question. `Did she, the young lady, I mean, give you that?'
"'Yes,' I said. `It may have saved me. Where is she?'
" `Downstairs, in my late wife's room. I intend to give her a Christian burial, which I never would have dreamt possible. But she has been saved to us.'
" `What about the rest of that crowd?' I said. `Can nothing be done?'
"He looked calmly at me. `They are all dead. We have been planning this for three years. That Hell spawn have ruled this part of the country since the Revolution. Governors, senators, generals, all Waldrons, and everyone else afraid to say a word.' He paused. `Even the young children were not saved. Old and young are in that place behind the house. We took nothing from the house but your clothes. The hill folk, who live to the West, came down on them just before dawn, as we came up. Now there is a great burning, the house, the groves, everything. The State Police are coming, but several bridges are out for some reason, and they will be quite a time.' He fell silent, but his eyes gleamed. The prophets of Israel were not all dead.
"Well, I said a last good-bye to Betty and went back to Washington. The police never knew I was there at all, and I was apparently as shocked as anyone to hear that a large gang of bootleggers and Chicago gangsters had wiped out one of America's first families and got away clean without being captured. It was a six day sensation and then everyone forgot it. I still have the little cross, you know, and that's all."
We sat silent, all brooding over this extraordinary tale. Like all of the brigadier's tales, it seemed too fantastic for human credibility, and yet—and yet!
The younger member who had spoken earlier could not resist one question, despite Ffellowes' prestory ban on such things.
"Well, sir," he now said. "Why, this means that one of the oldest royal families in the world, far more ancient than King Arthur's, say, is only recently extinct. That's absolutely amazing!"
Ffellowes looked up from his concentration on the rug and seemed to fix his gaze on the young man. To my amazement he did not become irritated. In fact, he was quite calm and controlled.
"Possibly, possibly," he said, "but of course they all appear to have been Irish or at least Celts of some sort or other. I have always considered their reliability open to considerable doubt."
Further Reading
Novels
(There must be hundreds of novels about horses that have some trace of fantasy or a fantastic element to them, many of them children's and young adult novels—far too many to attempt any sort of comprehensive listing here. So we will limit ourselves to saying that among those fantasy novels that deal with horses or horselike creatures, some of the more central are:)
The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle
Unicorn Mountain, Michael Bishop
Winds of Fate, Mercedes Lackey
Black Unicorn, Tanith Lee
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, Madeline L'Engle
Stalking the Unicorn, Mike Resnick
The Heavenly Horse from the Outermost West, Mary Stanton
A Wind in Cairo, Judith Tarr
Brothers of the Wind, Jane Yolen
(And we can't end this listing without mentioning what may well be the only two science fiction horse novels ever written:)
The Island Stallion Races, Walter Farley
Overlay, Barry N. Malzberg
Anthologies
Horse Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Rosalind M. Greenberg
Herds of Thunder, Manes of Gold, edited by Bruce Coville
Unicorns!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
Unicorns II, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
The Unicorn Treasury, edited by Bruce Coville
Bestiary!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois
Other Short Fiction
"The Rocking Horse," Cezarija Abartis, Twilight Zone Magazine, Sept./Oct. 1984
"Snow Horse," Joan Aiken, A Whisper in the Night
"Rocinante," Steven R. Boyett, Elsewhere III
"Bellerophon," Kevin Christensen, Destines, Spring 1980
"The Horse with One Leg," George Alec Effinger, Idle Pleasures
"Driving the Chevy Biscayne to Oblivion," Kandis Elliot, Asimov's Science Fiction, March 1993
"The Wild One," Max Evans, The New Frontier
"Spud and Cochise," Oliver La Farge, A Decade of F&SF
"Royal Licorice," R.A. Lafferty, Orbit 14
"The Magic White Horse with His Heart in His Mouth," Phyllis MacLennan, Best from F&SF 21
"Kehailan," Judith Tarr, Arabesques
"Al-Ghazalah," Judith Tarr, Arabesques 2
Horses! Page 25