“I shall shoot him myself.” Grenzmann patted the horse on the neck and then smiled sadly at Max. “It’s the kinder thing to do. That an animal as fine and noble as this should end up on some Russian peasant’s plate is an unbearable thought to me.”
Max said nothing.
“But that’s not for a while yet.” The captain nodded. “Don’t forget about tomorrow night, will you, Max?”
“No, sir. I won’t forget. And thank you.”
Grenzmann galloped away, and for quite a while after he’d gone—until he realized it was the sound of his own heart beating—it seemed that Max could still hear the horse’s hooves on the snow.
THE OLD MAN WATCHED Captain Grenzmann gallop away until he was just a dot on the snowy horizon before turning back to the stable. Still more than a little puzzled—for he had seen no tracks in the snow leading away from the stable to persuade him that Temüjin and Börte had ever left there—Max looked up at the loft and called out Kalinka’s name.
“Kalinka,” he said. “You can come down now. He’s gone.”
For a moment, Max thought there must be an earthquake—these are not uncommon in that part of the world—because the straw-covered floor of the stable seemed to shift before his eyes; the next second, Kalinka stood up, followed by the two horses.
“That was close,” she said. “There was one moment when his stupid, great horse almost stepped on me.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Max, for it was now apparent to him that all three of them had been hiding under a layer of straw.
She grinned. “We really fooled him, didn’t we? That German. And his German horse.”
“How did you do it?” he asked the girl.
“Believe me,” she said, picking straw off her clothes, “I’ve hidden in a lot of hayricks since I left Dnepropetrovsk. More than I care to remember.”
“I’m sure you have. But what I mean is, how on earth did you persuade these two horses to lie down and let you cover them with a layer of straw?”
“Actually, it was their idea,” said Kalinka. “They lay down and started to pull the straw across themselves, like they were going to bed. I just helped finish the job. You know, I’d say they’ve done this sort of thing before: hiding. I mean, they seem pretty good at it. As good as me, I reckon. Maybe better.”
“For years, I’ve been telling people that these horses are as clever as foxes.”
“I reckon they are, you know. Not that I know many foxes.”
“I used to say that there was a very good reason why they had a fur brush for a tail instead of just hair.” Max rubbed his silver beard thoughtfully. “I guess I should have listened to myself, eh?”
He laughed, clapped his hands and stamped around the floor with delight. This prompted Temüjin to utter a whinny and hoof the straw, which seemed to amount to almost the same thing.
“I always knew they could find the right spot to stand in that helped them blend in with a bush or a tree,” added Max. “There are plenty of stories in the books about how they were able to evade Mongolian hunters who were just a few steps away from them. But I didn’t realize how far they could take something like that. I never heard of a horse doing what I witnessed in here.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” said Kalinka. “Isn’t that what people say?”
“For everything except a miracle, perhaps.” He shook his head. “Come on. I won’t be happy until I’ve got the three of you hidden away again.”
Max led them outside; the sun was properly up by now, and they could see a clear trail left by Grenzmann’s horse as far as the horizon, which prompted Max to find something new to worry about.
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.
“What is it?”
He pointed at the Hanoverian horse’s hoofprints.
“If we walk on this snow, there will be an obvious trail from here to the waterworks. For any German soldiers looking for more horses to shoot, it would be like drawing them a map.”
“We could walk single file,” suggested Kalinka. “Like Saint Wenceslas’s page.”
Max shook his head. “It would still make them curious.
And that curiosity might lead them to the old waterworks. No, I think it’s probably best we keep its existence as secret as possible.”
“So what are we going to do?”
He glanced up at the sky again. “There’s only one thing we can do, I think, and that’s to wait for it to snow again before we go to the waterworks.”