He parked the car by the roadside, choosing a space under a broad oak to ward off the increasing heat of the sun and pointed across the way to a broad stretch of meadowland dotted with stately chestnut trees. “They should be still out there waiting for someone to come and round them up for the afternoon’s hay carting.” He glanced up at the branches of the tree, assessing the wind direction. “Come on. Get out and come and prepare to meet the best horses in the east of England.”
Warily, but making no protest, Joe took off his trench coat, fanned his face with his hat and took a handkerchief from his pocket. He wiped the sweat from his face and neck and followed Hunnyton to the fence. He jumped over it and walked two paces behind his guide into the field.
“Here they come! They’ve caught our scent.” Hunnyton gave a high-pitched whistle.
A quarter of a mile away in the distance something in the landscape was breaking loose and on the move. Hunnyton continued his swift march towards the centre of the field. Coats shining like conkers in the sunshine, ten horses were whinnying a greeting and thundering towards them. Joe counted eight fully grown, one-ton, seventeen-hand Suffolks and two smaller, but not much smaller, colts. Probably two years old and as yet unbroken, Joe estimated. They came on in a line, ever accelerating, pounding the ground. Half a minute away. Joe swallowed, unsure whether the shaking in his body was due to the tremors in the earth or his own increased heartbeat. Joe had stood up to both cavalry charges and machine gun bursts and knew that it was a waste of time to tell a soldier that the mechanised assault of a stream of bullets was more lethal than the charge of a mounted division. Every Tommy knew in his head that in terms of numbers it was. But the onward rush of heavy horses, eyes rolling, nostrils flaring, right in amongst you, way above your head height, brought with it a terror that froze your guts and your limbs as no impersonal attack from a distance ever could.
Joe found himself, ridiculously, reaching down to his side for a weapon—any weapon. It was Hunnyton’s sliding glance backwards, assessing the effect the charge was having on the city gent, that roused Joe. He stepped forward defiantly and took up his place at Hunnyton’s shoulder. Waiting.
With one mind the horses hauled themselves to a halt only feet from the men, carving up the turf with their braking back hooves, front ones pawing the air in a dramatic flourish. A row of rampant, Sienna-red medieval horses. Riderless and uncontrolled. Joe was aware of wild manes tossing from side to side, the smell of sun-scorched hide, the whiff and dampness of horse-foam in the wind and above all the insane cacophony of neighing and whinnying, the whole tumult erupting well over his head. He managed somehow not to flinch or cry out. He stayed very still, hands behind his back, eyes lowered, unthreatened and unthreatening.
The older horses, neighing with delight, ignored Joe and pranced up to greet Hunnyton with slathering tongues and nibbling lips while he talked to them in a language Joe could barely make out. The affection between man and horse was unmistakable. Joe could have sworn the animals knew their place in the welcoming line. It was hardly an orderly greeting queue but somehow the figure of Hunnyton, insignificant alongside the tonnage of muscled horse-flesh, managed to stay upright and unmangled and able to call each beast by its name.
The trained horses were clearly no menace to a stranger who entered the field in the company of their adored horseman but the unbroken pair, inquisitive, unaware of their strength, were where the danger lay. Jostled to one side by the older horses, they sought another outlet for their excitement. Not recognising Joe’s scent, they moved in skittishly towards him, muzzles extended, noisily sniffing, inexperienced feet clumsily trampling the ground and any human foot left unthinkingly in their way. They were unaware of their killing strength, emboldened by the presence of the older members of the herd and excited by the unknown. A potential disaster.
Hunnyton broke off from thumping a big chap called Scot in the ribs and looked round sharply. Belatedly? Aware of the danger at any rate.
Joe kept his stillness but turned his head towards the bolder of the pair of colts and began to murmur a few pleasant words. He backed away, creating the space he knew a horse liked to keep about itself. “Let him come to you, laddie!” The remembered words always rang in his ear when he met a strange horse. In response, the youngster showed an increasing interest, following him with confidence, butting him lustily with his nose when Joe turned again. The nose followed up with a more intimate inspection, twitching as it moved with slobbering, sensitive lips around Joe’s neck and face. A foam-flecked tongue emerged and began to lick his neck. At this point, Joe gently brought forward a hand and caressed its ears. As this gesture was well received, he leaned forward and breathed, as he’d been taught, into the huge nostrils, continuing to speak the words he’d learned so many years before. Gaelic? Latin? Chinese? It could have been anything. Horses knew no language. They were responding to his tone. It wasn’t difficult to speak with delight and love for these beautiful creatures. They seemed to understand that he admired them. The second colt edged the first away, eager for its share of attention. Joe fumbled in his pocket and found a Chelsea bun. He broke it in two and gave them half each, sending the pair into ecstasies and provoking a concerted attack on his pockets.
Hunnyton, he sensed, was intrigued and mystified by this behaviour. Should he tell him that his father’s head groom had been a member of the Scottish Society of Horsemen? More than just a member—a Grand Master in that secretive Masonic world. A possessor of the Word. One of the last in the land, Auld Angus had calculated; with the arrival of the new-fangled tractor, the days of the horse—and their horsemen—were numbered and his skills and knowledge would be extinct within a generation. His standing in his own community would disappear, was already disappearing. Thousands of years of acquired knowledge was laughed at and rejected by the young lads who preferred to turn a handle and steer with a wheel rather than feed, brush and harness up the great Clydesdales Joe’s father kept. Virtually turning his face to the wall, Auld Angus, with the first appearance of a motorised vehicle on his land, had taken the decision to pass on his knowledge to the one youngster who’d shown a willingness to listen and believe. He’d broken all the rules of the Society by confiding it to the son of a farmer. Farmers and landowners were excluded from the knowledge but with his life and his world coming to an end he’d reckoned he had little choice.
Joe had paid careful attention, committing the words and signs to memory, writing down nothing, swearing a fearsome oath never to reveal the secrets of the craft until his own last moments. To his astonishment, the Word whispered to him over a sack of corn in a barn at midnight—a hasty approximation of the initiation into the Society of Horsemen—had been two words, two words in Latin. Though he’d made no comment at the time and made no reference to it ever after, Joe’s classical education had led him to suspect, with an awe that was almost religious, that the whole ceremony and structure had been devised in a very ancient past. Romano-British, most probably. The traces they’d left behind in the landscape showed that the Roman army had had a stronger and more peaceable presence in these northern lands than was generally supposed. They’d farmed and kept stock. They’d married local girls. A good number of the soldiers were also horsemen by trade, some from far eastern lands, Persia and beyond. It had pleased Joe to think that when he’d whispered the Roman words into the ears of horses he’d ridden in India and Afghanistan that he was using a link in an unbroken chain reaching back from Britain, through Mithras, god of the soldiery, and Epona, goddess of horses, to some ancient, horse-taming homeland.