Time may change me but I can’t change time....ch ch ch ch changes……..
The Horse of course wasn’t dead. Merely changing, shape shifting as any magician would when the going gets tough and their warrior companion seems to have run out of ideas or even a hint of a plan.
An amorphous jelly. A mist before Slinger’s eyes. Not that he hadn’t seen it before, this transformation of form and substance, but it still left him shaken.
“Jesus Horse, you had me worried for a moment. I thought you were going to die on me there”
The bones, skin, flesh, ligaments, muscles and blood vessels reorganising themselves into a new horse. Grey with a white star on her forehead. Scrawny and altogether different from the proud and beautiful cream and brown charger she had been when they rode like vengeful Furies through the Italian lines only half an hour earlier.
The Horse was shaken by her change of form. Drained and momentarily exhausted. She was never sure why it happened or whether somehow she was responsible for it. Something deep in her soul that brought the change about. It always seemed to occur at exactly the right moment. The feeling of life flowing out of her. The wild trembling. The frothing at the mouth. Horrendous pain in every part of her body. A roaring and tearing as if meat hooks were ripping the flesh off her bones.
An incandescent sensation in her brain and then…….silence……darkness…..a moment of complete tranquillity.
Opening her eyes she beheld her new form.
“Interesting” she murmured.
“Yeah” Slinger replied “ I kind of like the colour. You could do with a good meal. A couple of bagfuls of oats, a few bales of quality hay and some of those ribs might start to disappear”
“Awful quiet” said the Horse
It was.
Only a skylark high above singing its song.
No guns.
No bombs.
Sweet silence.
“Hey, let’s get the hell out of here Horse before someone decides to lob a few shrapnel shells in our direction”
Slinger, with the Horse before him, walked down the avenue of bombed trees and set off along a small track leading out of what had once been a wood and now resembled a strange and lopsided cathedral. The trees leaning against each other at crazy angles, victims of shells wide of their mark. Somehow two lines of trees had fallen towards each other at the same moment of violent explosion and formed a roof as of a long nave with their dead top branches tangled together to create a mass of candelabras, gargoyles and arches.
As they passed under the last of the trees in this vaulted place of desolation it seemed to Slinger that, for an instant, the scene all around him flickered and blurred.
Long shot of opening through hedges with track wandering away between fields and small copses of sycamore and poplar trees.
Pan up to blue sky with a few fluffy clouds blown across its wide expanse.
He shook his head “Too tired. Need to sleep.” It all came back into focus.
“Hey Horse. How come all these trees are still standing? I thought they would’ve been turned to matchsticks by now. Though they look kind of.....a lot older than when we arrived ......some of them are almost totally rotten and...”
“Mmmmm…Any idea what sort of plane that might be?”
Indicating with her brown and white muzzle a patch of sky far to their left.
Slinger, shading his eyes with his right hand, peered towards the black object that was moving with speed across the canopy of the sky towards them.
“Doesn’t look like a Fokker or a Sopwith or….it’s moving too fast for any….shit Horse it’s not a bi or a tri it’s a..”
“Stuka or Messerschmitt wouldn’t you say. …..No…. it’s not a Messerschmitt…I reckon it’s a Stuka.”
The Stuka (for indeed it was) it’s engine roaring and siren screaming was now only a short distance away from them.“Stuka! Stuka! But that’s the wrong goddam war Horse…what’s it doing here ?”
“Never mind which war. Get down before it spots us”
The Horse had, as gracefully as speed would allow, folded her legs under her and fallen into the hedge. Slinger threw himself flat on his face by her side. He heard the plane pass overhead. The roar of its engines so close he could feel the heat and taste the diesel in his mouth. Waiting for the thud of machine gun bullets along the track and into his body. Then the wail of the siren changed pitch as it flew over them, its shadow flickering across the fields in the light of the early morning sun, moving at speed towards whatever mayhem it was intent on.
Together they lay quite still until there was only a faint engine hum heading out into the distance.
Slowly they rose from the hedge and the dusty track. Slinger brushed himself and the dead german from Hamburgs coat down. He looked at his friend, gazing into her deep blue eyes.
“Explanations?” he enquired.
The Horse shrugged her skinny shoulders and shook her head, her brown and straggly mane swishing back and forth.
“No idea. Maybe the Illyrium inlay on your Colt could be responsible? Maybe we’re just lost in time?……You were right though. Definitely the wrong war. Swastikas and black crosses on the underside of the wings”
“You looked up at it!?”
“Of course. If I’m going to get shot to pieces I’d like to know where it’s coming from.”
“Jesus Horse. Are you never afraid?”
She studied him for a moment. Reflections of his lined and stubbled face gazed back at him from her eyes.
“Of course I was afraid, but I still had to look. Hadn’t we better be moving on before another Stuka spots us or a German patrol stumbles across us?”
“No problem. Just look at the state of us. Not even a card carrying Nazi Gestapo Officer would give us a second glance”
Slinger was right. The wild ride through the fields and the days in the trenches before had covered him in mud and filth and, with the horse's recent transformation, they appeared as authentic a displaced person with quadruped that it was possible to find.
“We’ll pass for a peasant and his starving nag”
He pulled his hat down round his ears, adjusted the dead German from Hamburg’s coat round his shoulders, patted her nose affectionately, squinted up at the sky and announced
“Assuming the geography and landscapes haven’t changed in the past thirty years I reckon Chartres is….”
He paused for a moment, shielding his eyes against the brightening sun that stretched a long finger between the hedges of hazel, privet and willow growing luxuriantly along the sides of the fields heavy with maize and wheat.
“That way”.
He pointed down the path towards the steadily rising sun.
“Late summer” said the Horse “It was June as I recall back in the trench, so not only have we jumped a few decades but we seem to have lost half a season on the way as well. But I reckon you’re right. If we follow the direction of this track, head west and then south we should make it to Chartres in a few days. Let’s move on out.”
And so it was, with the late summer sun rising in front of them, that the Horse and Slinger, casting long shadows behind them, travelled on towards the cathedral.
Medium close up of the back of Slinger & the Horse walking between a canopy of hedges & trees.
Zoom slowly out to extreme long shot to reveal landscape of fields, hills & sky with bright sun and scattered clouds in front of & beyond them.
Fade slowly to white.