The Fire Stallion

No wonder this place is messing with my head. Ever since that night with the fire ritual, I swear that I’m not always me any more. I shift back and forth, my shape becoming one and the same as hers. If I focus hard now, I can hear her voice. More than that, I can feel her thoughts and instincts. They’re mingled with mine. Brunhilda’s Viking blood is coursing through my veins. I’m a thousand years old and thirteen all at the same time.

Yesterday, as I walked across the fields towards the horses with Anders I saw this patch of brilliant red berries growing right there on the moss beside the track. Without thinking, I picked some and put them straight in my mouth. Anders was horrified.

“Are you crazy? They could be poisonous!”

I laughed. “They’re delicious,” I insisted, holding them out to him. “Try some!”

I would have been in big trouble if Katherine had caught me. Feeding potentially poisonous wild berries to her lead actor? She would have hit the roof. I’m not even a proper crew member on this movie, I’m only here because of Mum.

Anders hesitated for longer than I expected. “How do you know, Hilly? If they’re poisonous, they could kill us,” he said.

“I’ve got no intention of dying,” I replied, smiling. My hand was still outstretched, daring him to take them.

“Nobody intends to die,” Anders said, plucking the entire handful from my palm and then munching them down.

“Yummy,” he agreed.

I double-checked the berries on the internet when I was back at the cabin later that day. Lingonberries, it said. They turn scarlet when ripe for the picking. Perfectly safe. A staple of the ancient Icelandic diet. But then I had known that when I had picked them. It’s because of Brunhilda. I know everything that she knows. All about the natural world around me here. Like I can tell you which are the tastiest of the mosses and lichens growing on the volcanic rocks. I’m an expert too on gathering seaweed, picking through the salty strands washed up on the shoreline, divining which kinds are suited for eating raw and which would be better for stewing in the cooking pot. The other day, walking along the beach, I found a dead Greenland shark that had washed up in the storm and, without even acknowledging what I was doing, I found myself digging a hole in the pebbles at the top of the tideline, where I knew it would stay dry, and burying the body. I dug the hole shallow, but deep enough so that the heavy stones I piled up on top will press down and squeeze the shark, making the deadly toxins leach out as it rots. It will need about a month like that before I can go back and dig it up again and eat it. By then its noxious juices will have disappeared completely and the meat will be safe to consume.

I mean, come on! How did I know that? Since when is the process of fermenting a Greenland shark something a kid from New Zealand knows how to do?

My connection to Iceland becomes more powerful every day. There’s a magnetic pull that anchors me here. I can hear the land humming with energy, can feel its volcanic vibrations beneath my feet and in the air.

I don’t tell Mum any of this stuff. She’s fed up with what she calls all the “mystical mumbo jumbo” that’s been happening to me since we arrived. Mum’s very practical and hasn’t got much patience for hippy-drippy nonsense. As the head of the costume design team, she spends all day dealing with highly strung actors and actresses banging on about their spirituality, and it has made her intolerant.

That’s why Mum can’t stand Gudrun. I know a lot of the crew totally agree with Mum and think that the cultural consultant is either a schemer or simply nuts. Behind her back they call her “the Icelandic witch” because she swans about in these floaty dresses, burning bunches of sage and chanting Norse poetry.

Nobody can do anything about Gudrun, though, because Katherine, the film director, is the one who brought her along. Gudrun’s a professor of Icelandic saga, and knows everything about the real-life Brunhildaof the film.

“‘Cultural consultant’ is a fancy term for getting in the way and holding up the rest of us who have real jobs to do,” Mum complained after that first day of filming, when Gudrun made everyone run late by insisting that the whole crew formed a circle round her while she chanted and “blessed” the set.

Mum says that Gudrun is crazy, or just very good at acting crazy to keep her job. Either way, Mum really doesn’t like me hanging out with her. But she’s wrong about Gudrun. I know her rituals are annoying, but she’s not faking it. Gudrun is one hundred per cent serious. She truly believes in everything she’s doing.

I remember when we got off the plane at Keflavik airport and Gudrun sidled up to me. She put her pale arm round my shoulder, pulling me close to her so that no one else could listen when she whispered, “Hilly, do you hear the land crying out to you? Iceland knows that the Norse heir to the throne has returned to her. You are home. You are home.”

And it’s true – I am home. I belong here. Or perhaps that’s the sleep deprivation talking. It’s 2 a.m. and I still can’t sleep. I get out of bed and pull on jeans and Ugg boots, along with my thickest woollen pullover and a North Face puffer jacket. Then I head out of the cabin and down the woodland path that takes me between the crew’s cabins, all the way to the fields beyond.

It’s midsummer and yet it’s so cold my breath makes puffs of steam in the air as I walk. I have to shove my hands deep in my pockets to stop my fingers from going numb.

At the edge of the cabins there’s a stile I clamber over and I keep on going, the gravel of the path crunching lightly beneath my feet. The moss on either side of the path is a washed-out sage green. If you step on it, your foot leaves an imprint then slowly springs back up. Halfway to the fields the moss clears and now the soil turns black. There’s steam rising up from hot pools that are deep enough to climb into at the end of a hard day’s filming.

Beyond the black steaming rocks, more moss grows, and then rust-coloured heather and tussock grass form little islands in among the marshlands. This is where Mjölnir lives.

When Mjölnir arrived, the crew all had trouble pronouncing his name – for the record you say it “Meel-nir”. Anyway, no one could get it right so we called him Hammer, because that’s what Mjölnir is: he’s the hammer of the gods – the weapon that once belonged to the mighty Thor.

At the edge of the marshlands I stand with my hands cupped at my mouth and call his name.

“Hammer! Hammer!”

Nothing.

He could be sleeping, I guess. He doesn’t have the same sort of insomnia as I have. He was born here and he thinks it’s perfectly normal to sleep in daylight.

“Hammer!” I try again and this time, in response to my call, a clarion cry thunders through the air, echoing across the fields.

And then I see him. He flits between the trees of the woods like a black shadow. His mane is flying wild, like brilliant scarlet silk ribbons in the wind, and his tail flashes behind him as if it’s on fire.

Gudrun says she threw the runes and asked the gods to bring her the perfect horse. She believes that all of this was fated to happen – me and her and Hammer too.

Looking back, she was preparing Hammer to be with me right from the start, just as she was readying me for the rituals of Jonsmessa, preparing me to make the Cross-Over when the time came. I only wish I had known that back then, but I guess if Gudrun had told me the truth about Jonsmessa I would have thought she was crazy, too.

You’re going to think I’m mad myself, unless I backtrack and start at the beginning … unless I tell you how I ended up in this remote land of volcanoes and ice at the furthest end of the world.

It’s no coincidence that I’m here. Gudrun is right about that. She read in the runes that I would come and I have. I am here in Iceland to do what needs to be done for the saga. To make things right at last, not for me but for her. I will fight this battle to redeem Brunhilda and bring glory to the one true queen. Her saga has been told before, but this time there’s a twist. This time we’re in it together.

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Looking back, I can see that Gudrun had been preparing me before we’d even got to Iceland. It began the moment I met her, that first night in London.

This was the first time that Mum had taken me on one of her film jobs and I was nervous about tagging along to dinner that night. Katherine Kara, the director of Brunhilda, had decided to throw a get-together for the crew at a Japanese restaurant in Soho before we departed for Reykjavik.

Mum and I had only just arrived that morning on the long-haul flight from New Zealand. I was so jetlagged my brain was swimming and I could barely talk. “We can go back to the hotel and get room service instead if you’re tired?” Mum said, looking worried.

“I’ll be fine,” I promised. I knew that Mum felt unprofessional having her daughter along. It had never been the plan to bring me and it would never have happened if things hadn’t turned out like they did with Piper.

It had been the start of the eventing season. I’d been doing loads of fitness work on Piper, riding her on the beach each day, doing timed gallops along stretches of hard sand and then cooling her legs by walking her home in the salt water. We’d finished the season at the top of the one-metre class rankings at the end of last year and were about to step up to the big league. Taking on the Open class fences at a metre ten was like going pro, but we were ready for it. Nothing was going to stop us. Until it did.

It’s an odd thing because I don’t usually check on Piper at night, but that evening something made me go to her paddock. As soon as I saw her lying down like that, I knew. She was in this weird position, her neck craned uncomfortably, and she was sniffing at her belly, as though she was about to have a foal, except she couldn’t be – she wasn’t pregnant. I climbed over the gate and ran across to her, and when I reached her I could hear her making these groans, and then she nickered to me with this pitiful cry as if she was saying, “Oh, thank goodness you’re here – I’m in such pain!”

I pulled at her neck rug and got her to stand up, but almost straight away she dropped back to her knees and was lying down again. Then she kicked out at her stomach, really hard, so that she actually struck it with her right hind leg and then she collapsed back to the ground with an agonised groan.

“Piper!” I dropped to the ground, undoing her rug, seeing how soaked in sweat she was beneath it. I needed help.

“I’ll be back,” I promised her.

I remember running to the house, stumbling in the dark, feeling like I was going to throw up, and then I couldn’t find Mum or Dad anywhere and I was yelling for them and finally Mum came into the kitchen and found me sobbing.

“Hilly? What’s going on?”

“It’s Piper!” I couldn’t breathe to get the words out. “She’s got colic.”

Mum looked at me, her face ashen. “You go back to her,” she said. “I’ll call the vet.”

Piper was still on the ground when I got to her again. It took me, Mum and Dad to get her up on her feet. Then, for the next hour and a half while we waited for the vet to come, I had to keep her up. A horse with colic doesn’t realise what’s wrong. All they know is that their gut hurts, and so they can injure themselves really badly by trying to kick their own stomachs and you have to keep them walking to stop them from harming themselves. And so I walked her, in circles, around and around the yard, waiting for the vet to arrive. When it was almost midnight Mum had offered to take a turn, but I said no. Piper was my horse and she trusted me, I had to stay with her. Besides, I was so sick with fear I needed to keep doing something.

I had been so relieved when I’d seen the headlights of the vet’s truck snaking their way down the bush road that led to our farm. It turned straight towards the stables and when she got out of the truck she immediately began grabbing vials and needles out of her supply kit, gathering everything she needed before she ran to join us.

“Sorry it’s taken me so long,” she said. “I was delivering a foal on the other side of the gorge and there are no other vets on call tonight.”