It begins (as many stories do) with an arrival. A woman in a cloak carrying a large suitcase steps off of a train. It’s a platform in a quiet town hardly worth stopping at. Except, those in the know remember it as a town that trades and breeds horses. Many of the town’s horses have been winners, and so the station master assumes that the hooded woman is just another customer come to study horse flesh.

 

It’s night. The shop windows are dark, and a faint drizzle shows fine mist under the yellow gas-lamps. At the end of the road is a painted sign for the inn, THE MONKEY AND DRUM, and an open door spills light onto the pavement.

The woman has passed through many such doors. She knows how to enter without being noticed, how to order a drink at the bar and be barely registered, how to settle in a corner table hardly uttering a word as the room continues around her. Two other women are sat at the bar, one older and the other younger, and they carry on talking.

‘Do you think he’ll change?’ the younger one asks the other.

‘Not him,’ the older one replies. ‘He can be gentle with those horses. But when it comes to training for a race, does he feel anything? He makes winners, oh yes, but I can’t bear to watch the way he treats them.’

‘No care,’ the younger replies. ‘More the rod than the carrot. Like he is trying somehow to prove his mastery of them.’

‘Hardly admirable to tear up a poor creature with a whip or spurs,’ says the older. ‘There’s a story there of course. His family were mountain people, farmers, breeders of horses and sheep from far up the valley, but they lost their livelihood when the ironworks came. The waste from the works was so bad that they say the river died. Neither fish nor frog could live in it, and when there is no clean water, there is not much of a life for a farmer.

‘All the farms in those parts began to fail, and theirs was no different. His mother disappeared. One of the neighbors saw her in town, heading towards the railway station. It must have been bad at home for her to leave her children. His father died in a ditch, drunk and in debt.’

‘I suppose he had a sad beginning, but he can be charming. I come away feeling used – no love there – like there is no kind part of him. Nothing with any feeling for others.’

‘Keep it down. Here he comes.’ The hooded woman follows their gaze to a smiling figure in the door.

‘Tilda,’ he addresses the younger woman. ‘When will you come to my bed?’

‘Not tonight or any other night,’ says the girl. ‘If you treat your women like you treat your horses, I’ll have none of that.’

He laughs. ‘My horses are the best in the county,’ he replies. ‘That’s because they know who their master is.’

At that, there is a sudden twang in the room, as if a fist came down on the keyboard of a piano, or a piece of silk has fallen from the senses of the people in the bar, as the woman sitting quietly in the corner pushes back her hood. The young man, Roan, turns pulled by magnetism. ‘How can I help you, lady?’

‘I’m looking for a horse,’ she replies in a low voice.

‘The stables are not far, but it’s a bit late to be horse trading.’

‘Too busy flirting to be trading, I see?’

‘Never too late for trading. Come this way.’

As they exit the pub, the women go on talking as if never interrupted. ‘Foolish to fall for his charms!’ says the older to the younger who nods.

 

Roan doesn’t think about it too much, but he has never given himself totally to a woman, certainly not to a horse. He is always thinking on the next one – the next winner he can sell for a large profit. He enjoys breaking horses. They come into the stables full of defiance, but they all break eventually, and then there is that defeated air about them. Absolute submission.

He is leading the woman in the cloak to the stable door, but however much he looks at her, he can’t quite see her. Is she young? Beautiful? Does he know her? He can’t really tell, but there is something commanding about her that makes him wonder. There’s something familiar too.

Inside the stable is his domain, but once within, he senses something strange hanging about her person like a metallic tang over the usual earthy smells of animals, straw, and shit. He lights the lanterns, and the horses are docile enough, just a nuzzle or snort as she walks up and down the boxes, occasionally leaning in to rub a horse’s flank with long fingers.

‘And you come from where?’ he asks.

‘Everywhere and all places in-between,’ she says hoarsely. ‘Your horses are fit, beauties in fact.’

‘My horses are winners,’ he replies.

‘But you drive them too hard with the spurs when you should be coaxing them and teaching them that you are to be trusted, but then again perhaps you aren’t to be trusted.’

‘Well, it depends on what you mean,’ he says wondering again.

‘Your mother would tell you that trust is everything.’ He flinches at her mention of his mother.

‘Did you know my mother?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Well then, you’ll know that she’s gone. Now is there any particular horse that takes your interest?’

She reaches into her bag which she has placed on the ground and pulls out a bridle.

‘Do you want to put that on a horse?’ he asks. ‘We have bridles you know.’ She walks towards him and though her face is like a smudged fingerprint to the eye, he can make out her eyes, her lips very clearly now. The tension winds itself like a breath held as she moves closer and closer.

‘It’s you I’m interested in, not your horses,’ she says. And she puts the bridle over his head.

 

He is growing, bent over double. legs sprouting, growing freer and freer in his legginess. He feels somehow that he is covered, a weight of hair is sprouting at the base of his spine, his neck lengthening and hair curling too over his shoulders. His fingers and toes are retreating to a hard shell – he hears the sharp clack of them against the hard stone floor. How he sees differently – his eyes seem to be swiveling – and his legs move automatically – he is running out of the lamplight of the stable and into the night. Exhilarating, the way his body moves so simple and elegant like locomotion. Is that her speaking? You can choose not to change, but he continues to run on his long legs. He keeps running.

 

When he wakes in the morning, he finds himself in a forest on the edge of town where it is raining softly, and he lets the droplets run over his face wetting his eyelashes. A drop slides down to his lips, and he tastes the deliciousness of chill water. Everything tastes better, seems more vivid. He doesn’t want to go back to the stable, so he begins to climb the mountain and comes upon an old stone hut. The trees are clearing here, and sheep country is beginning. At the hut lives an elderly shepherd, Rhydian the Grey, who has given Roan shelter before in that strange time after his mother disappeared and father died, and their farm fell into ruin.

The shepherd greets him at once, and they lean against the old stone wall talking of old times.

‘You have done well for yourself, my lad, with your stable. From nothing. Not a father or a mother to help you. You did it yourself.’

‘I have,’ says Roan. ‘But now I don’t know what is happening to me. I need to understand horses, women, maybe even witches.’

‘Tell me your problem. There is nothing so strange that I haven’t seen.’

‘You’ll think I’m mad, but it began with an argument in the Monkey and Drum with Tilda. She accused me of mistreating my horses...of mistreating her too maybe, which I did.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t be the first man to do that, wrong though it is. Do you never feel lonely?’

‘I do. I should have been apologizing but instead just as I was crowing to Tilda, along came a stranger. Is she human? She took me aside, said she wanted a horse and seemed in a hurry. I went along with her, and she put a strange bridle over my head. Once that was done, I was suddenly set free. I seemed to be in the body of a horse myself, and I ran and ran until I couldn’t run anymore. Now I find myself here.’

‘Dear God, I know exactly what you speak of. She has returned then. The lady with the witch’s bridle.’

‘Is that what you call it?’

‘She comes to remind us of our creaturely nature. By entering the soul of an animal, it reminds us that we are humans, not gods.’

‘How strange it was.’

‘Strange and beautiful. Believe it or not she has been coming here for a very long time, and I was her familiar when I was a young man.’

‘You? When you were young? Then perhaps she is not human. She could be old or young. I could not tell.’

‘I doubt that she is human. But it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me. To be a creature was bliss. I loved her. I wish I could see her again one last time. I say that as an old man who has lived a long life. My advice to you is to learn from it – learn something about joy – while it lasts.’

 

She will come to Roan many times, always at night, always her form like a ghost floating across his vision. He hopes for her approval and spends days and days learning to love his horses. Dismissing the stable boy, he brushes their backs, their manes and tails himself. He speaks to them. He shovels their shit. He rides them gently, lets out the rein, allows them to run along the bank of the river, lets the turn and will of their heads guide him. When she comes, she seems to know, and though he cannot make out her face, he feels she is smiling.

Then there are those times when he eases into the bridle, and he himself is set free. He joys in the lengthening of his limbs, the call of freedom and the wild run through the night. He wakes by the waters of the lake, silver under the cloudy sky, or in a hollow in the wood, or beside the rolling churn of a waterfall.

He is so happy that he wonders if she might let him be a horse forever. When she comes to the stable again, he is ready to ask her. He calls her into the lamplight. ‘Here I am,’ he says. She puts down her bag on the stable floor. ‘Set me free forever,’ he implores, but she shakes her head.

‘One day I will come back for you, but now is not the time. When I come, it will be your time to pass out of this life. Then you must look for me in my true form which I will show you now.’ A shiver passes through her, like trembling on the surface of the lake. Another quake, and she is growing, her hair winding around her body, until it is a brindled hide. She is lengthening, bending to a horse shape, until it is indeed a horse that stands before him, a horse that rears so he falls back, and she bursts past him to disappear into the night.

He sees then that she is not a woman, but a horse, and she has always been a horse, as if there had been a fog around her shape to obscure the truth of things. And he wishes now that he was a horse again, and he sees that he will not be one for his lifetime, indeed perhaps not for a very long time.

He runs out into the dark, blunders through the forest, climbs up the mountain to Rhydian the Grey’s hut, but it stands empty.

An open door. A bowl of soup steaming on the table. A fire recently stoked. But no shepherd.