“Stick them into me,” said the horse, “every spike of them in every bone end that I have.”
That he did; he stuck the spikes into the horse.
“There is a loch here,” said the horse, “four miles long and four miles wide, and when I go out into it the loch will take fire and blaze. If you see the Loch of Fire going out before the sun rises, expect me, and if not, go your way.”
Out went the black horse into the lake, and the lake became flame. Long was he stretched about the lake, beating his palms and roaring. Day came, and the loch did not go out.
But at the hour when the sun was rising out of the water the lake went out.
And the black horse rose in the middle of the water with one single spike in him, and the ring upon its end.
He came on shore, and down he fell beside the loch.
Then down went the rider. He got the ring, and he dragged the horse down to the side of a hill. He fell to sheltering him with his arms about him, and as the sun was rising he got better and better, till about midday, when he rose on his feet.
“Mount,” said the horse, “and let us begone.”
He mounted on the black horse, and away they went.
He reached the mountains, and he leaped the horse at the fire mountain and was on the top. From the mountain of fire he leaped to the mountain of ice, and from the mountain of ice to the mountain of snow. He put the mountains past him, and by morning he was in realm under the waves.
“You are come,” said the prince.
“I am,” said he.
“That’s true,” said Prince Underwaves. “A king’s son are you, but a son of success am I. We shall have no more mistakes and delays, but a wedding this time.”
“Go easy,” said the Princess of the Greeks. “Your wedding is not so near as you think yet. Till you make a castle, I won’t marry you. Not to your father’s castle nor to your mother’s will I go to dwell; but make me a castle for which your father’s castle will not make washing water.”
“You, rider of the black horse, make that,” said Prince Underwaves, “before the morrow’s sun rises.”
The lad went out to the horse and leaned his elbow on his neck and sighed, thinking that this castle never could be made for ever.
“There never came a turn in my road yet that is easier for me to pass than this,” said the black horse.
Glance that the lad gave from him he saw all that there were, and ever so many wrights and stone masons at work, and the castle was ready before the sun rose.
He shouted at the Prince Underwaves, and he saw the castle. He tried to pluck out his eye, thinking that it was a false sight.
“Son of King Underwaves,” said the rider of the black horse, “don’t think that you have a false sight; this is a true sight.”
“That’s true,” said the prince. “You are a son of success, but I am a son of success too. There will be no more mistakes and delays, but a wedding now.”
“No,” said she. “The time is come. Should we not go to look at the castle? There’s time enough to get married before the night comes.”
They went to the castle and the castle was without a “but”____
“I see one,” said the prince. “One want at least to be made good. A well to be made inside, so that water may not be far to fetch when there is a feast or a wedding in the castle.”
“That won’t be long undone,” said the rider of the black horse.
The well was made, and it was seven fathoms deep and two or three fathoms wide, and they looked at the well on the way to the wedding.
“It is very well made,” said she, “but for one little fault yonder.”
“Where is it?” said Prince Underwaves.
“There,” said she.
He bent him down to look. She came out, and she put her two hands at his back, and cast him in.
“Be thou there,” said she. “If I go to be married, thou art not the man; but the man who did each exploit that has been done, and, if he chooses, him will I have.”
Away she went with the rider of the little black horse to the wedding.
And at the end of three years after that so it was that he first remembered the black horse or where he left him.
He got up and went out, and he was very sorry for his neglect of the black horse. He found him just where he left him.
“Good luck to you, gentleman,” said the horse. “You seem as if you had got something that you like better than me.”
“I have not got that, and I won’t; but it came over me to forget you,” said he.
“I don’t mind,” said the horse, “it will make no difference. Raise your sword and smite off my head.”
“Fortune will now allow that I should do that,” said he.
“Do it instantly, or I will do it to you,” said the horse.
So the lad drew his sword and smote off the horse’s head; then he lifted his two palms and uttered a doleful cry.
What should he hear behind him but “All hail, my brother-in-law.”
He looked behind him, and there was the finest man he ever set eyes upon.
“What set you weeping for the black horse?” said he.
“This,” said the lad, “that there never was born of man or beast a creature in this world that I was fonder of.”
“Would you take me for him?” said the stranger.
“If I could think you the horse, I would; but if not, I would rather the horse,” said the rider.
“I am the black horse,” said the lad, “and if I were not, how should you have all these things that you went to seek in my father’s house. Since I went under spells, many a man have I ran at before you met me. They had but one word amongst them: they could not keep me, nor manage me, and they never kept me a couple of days. But when I fell in with you, you kept me till the time ran out that was to come from the spells. And now you shall go home with me, and we will make a wedding in my father’s house.”
ALEXANDER AND BUCEPHALUS
Seguing from fantasy to reality, I want to tell you about one of the greatest horses in history—if not the greatest. And certainly one of the most influential—if not the most influential. His name was Bucephalus, and he was the warhorse of Alexander the Great. His name in Greek, Boukephalos, means “Ox-head”—bous (meaning “ox”) and kephale (meaning “head”). This had nothing to do with the horse being stubborn, though he may well have been; it refers to the bull’s-head symbol which was either branded on his shoulder by Alexander or occurred there naturally. Sources I consulted say it was “imprinted,” which could mean either. Still other sources maintain that the horse’s head resembled that of a bull. It is not likely we will ever know for sure.
My career and the life of Alexander the Great are linked in the sense that I played him in a movie nearly a half a century ago. Obviously, that is very different from setting out to conquer the world. From this vantage point in my life, I can tell you that it’s enough for a man to conquer himself, let alone everybody else. I didn’t have that kind of stamina or vision in my youth. And even if I did have the vision, it’s much different from the stamina those world-beaters had to have. But back to the boy-king.
Alexander was born in Pella, in the ancient kingdom of Macedon, in July of 356 BCE. A brilliant tactician, a great strategist, this young Macedonian king had conquered most of the known world by the time he was thirty. Think about that: he was a Millennial who ruled the world, though it was a much different millennium. He died two years later, of malaria, in what is now modern-day Iraq. I was several years older than that when I played him.
Here’s the part about the stamina. Among his many achievements, Alexander was a renowned horseman. When he got this fractious black colt Bucephalus, nobody could train him. The so-called boy-king discovered what previous owners knew, that Bucephalus was afraid of his own shadow. That presented a challenge which Alexander embraced: he simply turned the horse in to the sun to train him so that the shadow did not exist. It is from that actio
n, that act of turning him strategically in order to mount, that we get the phrase, “Having a leg up.” Alexander also stopped wearing one of his favorite pieces of attire, a cloak, while he was training the horse, since that, too, alarmed Bucephalus.
Lest you think the shadow story is apocryphal, I’ve ridden horses that have tried to jump shadows on the ground because they weren’t familiar with them. I make this point repeatedly throughout the book: horses can be bold and brave and they can also be skittish and craven. Some can endure cannon fire, others will flinch at a cracking branch. Part of what any rider has to do—and do well, if they want to continue to ride—is to understand this and be sensitive to the horse’s own quirks and neuroses.
Bucephalus served Alexander well in combat after combat. By the time the charger perished, in 326 BCE—immediately after the Battle of the Hydaspes, which opened India to the Greeks—the legends of Alexander and Bucephalus were inseparable. So much so that every great commander thereafter, from Julius Caesar to Robert E. Lee, and every great cowboy, from Roy Rogers to the Lone Ranger, had to possess one great mount who was nearly as famed and beloved as the rider.
Mind you, Alexander was not infallible when it came to horses, and he appears to have been a bit of a know-it-all … until he wasn’t. Initially, Alexander decried the invention of the saddle because he thought it was too sissified for his men. They all rode bareback, and powerfully so. When, some eight, nine years after he had begun his conquests—and toward the end of his incursion in the Mediterranean area—he came up to the Hindu Kush mountains in Central Asia, just short of invading India. There, he met and fought the tribesmen, who had saddles, and he had his first defeat as a general because the saddle gave the archers a more stable platform. A rider’s purchase on the horse was increased enormously by the invention of the saddle. Alexander quickly and decisively changed his mind.
I do wonder what would have happened had the events been reversed and Alexander had predeceased Bucephalus. I suspect they would have been interred together. Or perhaps both would have ridden in one final battle, as the legendary “wonder horse” Babiéca did. He was the steed of Spain’s great thirteenth-century national hero El Cid, “the Lord.” Not only was Babiéca valiant in combat, but when El Cid died in battle the horse soldiered on, carrying his dead rider onward to the terror of the enemy, arrows reportedly striking the knight’s bosom as he remained in his saddle.
Both of these examples are indicative of the horse-human relationship at its core, this idea of mutually beneficial codependence where each one uplifts the other to the next level—not just of mutual confidence but of leadership. This is a point that cannot be overstated.
Think of the great leaders—not just Alexander and El Cid but in modern times. The aforementioned Robert E. Lee, George S. Patton, George Washington, and Winston Churchill, all of them exceptional horsemen. These leaders (and I cannot emphasize that word enough) were able to encourage a horse to overcome their natural bent, which is to graze, to breed, and to die. Each of them was able to do the same thing with humans, to get panicking humans to override their own survival instincts and fight for the good of the whole.
What we see today are a lot of leaders who incite survival instincts rather than cooperation, with the result that people are becoming more aggressive and flighty rather than building or relying on the strength of the herd. We’re losing that capacity of the individual to lead. We’re losing that because people are not trained to ride anymore. We have people who have not served an apprenticeship commanding in the field, who have only sat at a desk all their lives, and as a result we’re devolving. We’re actually becoming more frightened and more aggressive, and inciting more fear and aggression in others, rather than overriding our basic survival instincts—which is the entire purpose of a “civilization,” just as a herd: to provide mutual protection and empathy, to become elevated to a higher level of awareness and wisdom and what I would call evolution.
It’s a disheartening state of affairs, especially to those of us who ride, who have seen how elevating these unions can be.
I had my Bucephalus. His name was Great Day and I’ll tell you about him shortly. For now, though—a taste of Alexander and his great steed.
The War Horse of Alexander
by ANDREW LANG, FROM THE ANIMAL STORY BOOK (1896)
Lang notes in his introduction to this tale that “part of the story of Bucephalus is taken from Plutarch,” the famed Greek historian—as celebrated a narrative pedigree as one could hope for!
There are not so many stories about horses as there are about dogs and cats, yet almost every great general has had his favourite horse, who has gone with him through many campaigns and borne him safe in many battle-fields. At a town in Sicily called Agrigentum, they set such store by their horses, that pyramids were raised over their burial-place, and the Emperor Augustus built a splendid monument over the grave of an old favourite.
The most famous horse, perhaps, who ever lived, was one belonging to Alexander the Great, and was called Bucephalus. When the king was a boy, Bucephalus was brought before Philip, King of Macedon, Alexander’s father, by Philonicus the Thessalian, and offered for sale for the large sum of thirteen talents. Beautiful though he was, Philip wisely declined to buy him before knowing what manner of horse he was, and ordered him to be led into a neighbouring field, and a groom to mount him. But it was in vain that the best and most experienced riders approached the horse; he reared up on his hind legs, and would suffer none to come near him. So Philonicus the Thessalian was told to take his horse back whence he came, for the king would have none of him.
Now the boy Alexander stood by, and his heart went out to the beautiful creature. And he cried out, “What a good horse do we lose for lack of skill to mount him!” Philip the king heard these words, and his soul was vexed to see the horse depart, but yet he knew not what else to do. Then he turned to Alexander and said: “Do you think that you, young and untried, can ride this horse better than those who have grown old in the stables?” To which Alexander made answer, “This horse I know I could ride better than they.” “And if you fail,” asked Philip, “what price will you pay for your good conceit of yourself?” And Alexander laughed out and said gaily, “I will pay the price of the horse.” And thus it was settled.
So Alexander drew near to the horse, and took him by the bridle, turning his face to the sun so that he might not be frightened at the movements of his own shadow, for the prince had noticed that it scared him greatly. Then Alexander stroked his head and led him forwards, feeling his temper all the while, and when the horse began to get uneasy, the prince suddenly leapt on his back, and gradually curbed him with the bridle. Suddenly, as Bucephalus gave up trying to throw his rider, and only pawed the ground impatient to be off, Alexander shook the reins, and bidding him go, they flew like lightning round the course. This was Alexander’s first conquest, and as he jumped down from the horse, his father exclaimed, “Go, my son, and seek for a kingdom that is worthy, for Macedon is too small for such as thee.”
Henceforth Bucephalus made it clear that he served Alexander and no one else. He would submit quietly to having the gay trappings of a king’s steed fastened on his head, and the royal saddle put on, but if any groom tried to mount him, back would go his ears and up would go his heels, and none dared come near him. For ten years after Alexander succeeded his father on the throne of Macedon (B.C. 336), Bucephalus bore him through all his battles, and was, says Pliny, “of a passing good and memorable service in the wars,” and even when wounded, as he once was at the taking of Thebes, would not suffer his master to mount another horse. Together these two swam rivers, crossed mountains, penetrated into the dominions of the Great King, and farther still into the heart of Asia, beyond the Caspian and the river Oxus, where never a European army had gone before. Then turning sharp south, he crossed the range of the Hindoo Koosh, and entering the country of the Five Rivers, he prepared to attack Porus, king of India. But age and the wanderings of ten
years had worn Bucephalus out. One last victory near the Hydaspes or Jelum, and the old horse sank down and died, full of years and honours (B.C. 326). Bitter were the lamentations of the king for the friend of his childhood, but his grief did not show itself only in weeping. The most splendid funeral Alexander could devise was given to Bucephalus, and a gorgeous tomb erected over his body. And more than that, Alexander resolved that the memory of his old horse should be kept green in these burning Indian deserts, thousands of miles from the Thessalian plains where he was born, so round his tomb the king built a city, and it was called:
“BUCEPHALIA.”
Of War Horses, or Destriers
ESSAYS OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE (1877)
This abridged essay provides a fascinating account of equestrian skills from around the world and from different times. It was written by a sixteenth-century philosopher-statesman, one of the greatest of his era.
I have read that the Romans had a sort of horses by them called “funales” or “dextrarios,” which were either led horses, or horses laid on at several stages to be taken fresh upon occasion, and thence it is that we call our horses of service “destriers”; and our romances commonly use the phrase of “adestrer” for “accompagner,” to accompany. They also called those that were trained in such sort, that running full speed, side by side, without bridle or saddle, the Roman gentlemen, armed at all pieces, would shift and throw themselves from one to the other, “desultorios equos.” The Numidian men-at-arms had always a led horse in one hand, besides that they rode upon, to change in the heat of battle: “To whom it was a custom, leading along two horses, often in the hottest fight, to leap armed from a tired horse to a fresh one; so active were the men, and the horses so docile.”
In the narrative which Philip de Commines has given of this battle, in which he himself was present, he tells us of wonderful performances by the horse on which the king was mounted. The name of the horse was Savoy, and it was the most beautiful horse he had ever seen. During the battle the king was personally attacked, when he had nobody near him but a valet de chambre, a little fellow, and not well armed. “The king,” says Commines, “had the best horse under him in the world, and therefore he stood his ground bravely, till a number of his men, not a great way from him, arrived at the critical minute.”
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