Read Online The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr - Free Book Online

Dnepropetrovsk?”
    Taras whined with sympathy and laid his long wolfhound’s muzzle across the girl’s stomach.
    “You feel sorry for her, too, eh?” The old man grinned. “I knew someone had been stealing bread and cheese when I was out of the house. And I was right. It must have been her. No question about it.”
    Taras sighed.
    “It’s all right, all right. Don’t concern yourself, old dog—I’m not about to throw her out for stealing a bit of bread and cheese. It’s obvious she was starving. I meant what I said, you know. She can stay here as long as she wants. Well, not in here. It’s not so safe with that captain around when he feels like it. But I reckon she’d be safe enough at the old waterworks. What do you reckon?”
    Taras jerked his long tail and moved closer to the girl as, outside the little blue cottage, the wind moaned like a wandering spirit.

T HE NEXT MORNING , M AX awoke at his usual early time; it was a bitterly cold morning but at least it had stopped snowing. Instead of waking Kalinka, he went to the little stable at the back of the cottage to see if the two Przewalski’s horses were still there and found—to his considerable surprise—that they were.
    “There’s nothing that makes another day feel quite as new as something you’ve never seen before,” he said.
    The stallion, Temüjin, looked up from the hay he was eating and gave the old man a look of near contempt, as if to say, “Your trouble is that you have no faith; she said we’d be here and we’re here.” In spite of this, Max still adopted a degree of caution when inspecting Börte’s wound, for Przewalski’s stallions are jealous of anyone looking at their mares, even humans.
    “Now don’t kick me,” he told the stallion, “for my shinsand my backside are too old to learn a lesson I thought I already knew by heart.”
    Max was pleased to see that the wound showed no sign of infection, but all the same he cleaned and disinfected it again, just to be on the safe side. Then he fed the horses some more oats mixed with rice and went back to the cottage to wake Kalinka with some breakfast. He brought her a little inlaid wooden tray with hot porridge, sweet Russian tea and some black bread and a piece of honeycomb.
    “I must be dreaming,” she said sleepily.
    “No, it’s not a dream,” he said. “You’re here, all right. And I’m glad of the company. Which is not something I’ve said in a long time.”
    Kalinka glanced at the black window with her one open eye. “It feels like it’s still the middle of the night.”
    “Aye, it’s still dark, right enough,” admitted the old man. “But I want to move you and the horses to the waterworks before it gets light, in case that German captain appears on his morning ride. He doesn’t often come this way. But he might. Just out of pique. On account of how I didn’t go and have dinner in the mess with his men the other night.”
    “A free meal? Why didn’t you?”
    Max shrugged. “I had my reasons. And it’s just as well I stayed here; otherwise I might have missed meeting you and the horses.”
    “Who would have been out on a night like that?” said Kalinka.
    “Suppose I’d been like those villagers and turned you away?”
    Kalinka ate a spoonful of thick porridge, pulled a face and shook her head. “No. That wasn’t a possibility.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because of the horses. Maybe I didn’t explain things properly. It was them that brought me to your door. It was the horses that were rescuing me, just as much as I was rescuing them. I suppose they knew I couldn’t have survived another night in the woods. Not in that blizzard. They knew you weren’t going to turn me away; otherwise they wouldn’t have brought me here. In the same way, they knew that you could dig that bullet out of Börte’s shoulder. At least that’s the conclusion I’ve come to. I know these horses, and I think they just know things that you wouldn’t expect horses to