The House at World's End by Monica Dickens Page B

him forget his fast cart trot and slip straight into a rolling canter.
    ‘Looks as if he’d got five legs,’ Mr Mismo grumbled, but when Carrie got used to him, he was the most comfortable horse she had ever ridden, because he was hers.
    ‘Use your outside leg!’ Mr Mismo was standing in the field like a riding master, while Carrie made circles round him.
    ‘I’m training him to my voice.’ She pulled back to a jog. ‘When I say, “Canter!” he canters.’ John cantered.
    ‘I knew a girl did that,’ said Mr Mismo, who always knew someone who had done everything. ‘And when she was showing at the International, her worst enemy sat by the edge of the ring and said, “Canter” when it was supposed to be Trot. Laugh!’ He slapped his knees.
    ‘Look how he can jump.’ Carrie hopped John over the two fallen tree trunks by the hedge. Henry and Lucy the goat, who always schooled themselves while she was schooling John, leaped over the trees behind her.
    ‘Look here.’ When she came back to Mr Mismo, his face was serious. ‘I’m not sure you’ve not got a natural jumper there, old dear. He uses his back amazing. See this length from croup to hock?’ He ran a hand down the back end of John. ‘Yes … yes … I’ve seen some ugly customers like this that could jump like deer. It’s not the looks, see, nor yet the power. It’s the way they use it.’
    Carrie did not mind him calling John an ugly customer. She was not surprised that he might turn out to be a jumper. John could do anything.
    That night, she decided to do the third thing that she had waited for. She decided that John was fit enough torun with her and Penny-Come-Quick up into the sky where the bygone horses grazed on the Elysian star.
    She rode Penny, and John galloped beside them with his neck stretched out and his growing mane and tail flying in the night. It was like a flight. The beat of the hooves on the firmament was like the thrust of wings. Carrie clung to Penny’s white mane and the cool night air streamed into her smiling face. She would never get old enough to give up this dream!
    On the star, John was introduced to several interesting horses. They met a roan mare who had pulled a covered wagon in the California Gold Rush, and a big Cleveland Bay who had carried his master against the guns in the First World War, and a chariot horse and Queen Victoria’s Highland pony, and the black stallion Bucephalus.
    John was asked to tell his story, so Carrie made one up for him, with all the different homes and jobs she thought he might have had, and all the hard times through which he had worked so bravely, to come at last to Black Bernie and Bottle Dump.
    ‘I thought I was doomed. When they bundled me into that pig van, I knew where I was going.’ The other horses nodded. All animals know when they are near the end. ‘And then,’ he told them, ‘I was rescued from the very jaws of death itself.’
    Carrie twisted her fingers in Penny’s mane, looking modestly down, as John told them the story of the Great Rescue.
    ‘Very interesting,’ said Bucephalus, almost before he had finished, ‘but wait till you hear what happened to
me’
He had repeated the story dozens of times, but John was a new ear to listen, so he was able to tell once more the stirring tale of the Battle of Cheironeia.
    ‘My rider, Alexander’ (he never called him Master), ‘still only a boy of eighteen, was in command of all the cavalry. We thundered down from the hill. I can hear the drumbeat of the hooves now. I can see the flash of that sword blade in the morning sun, striking at Alexander. I reared up and trampled the enemy down, but another was upon us from the side. The cold steel of his spear was actually into my neck - see, here’s the scar.’ He turned his proud black head to one side. ‘But Alexander struck him down. We saved each other’s lives that day. Yes, my friends,’ like all conceited tellers of tales, he often repeated himself. ‘We saved