The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr Read Free Book Online

but then it will be all right.” She caught Max’s eye. “Go on. She’s as ready as she’ll ever be.”
    “You live long enough, you see everything,” said Max, and pushed his forceps into the hole in the horse’s shoulder.
    Temüjin snorted and turned away as if he couldn’t bear to look and drank some of the water in the trough. In truth, he was rather squeamish for a wild horse and didn’t care for the sight of blood at all.
    Börte lifted one hoof and began to pace at the floor; if Max hadn’t known better, he might have said that Börte was counting through her pain—almost as if she was trying to distract herself from what was happening with the forceps.
    Finally, Max lifted the forceps nearer the light to reveal a piece of metal smeared with the mare’s blood. He showed it to Kalinka, who simply nodded.
    He disinfected the wound again and inspected it. “That’s all done.”
    “Aren’t you going to put anything on that?” asked Kalinka. “Stitch it, maybe? That’s what my mama would have done.”
    “These horses heal better the natural way. Now that the bullet is out, she’ll mend soon enough, I reckon. As long as we keep the wound clean, it should be all right. It’s not likely she’ll be rolling in any dirt for a while. With God’s help, she’ll be fine, I think.”
    “God,” said Kalinka, and made a snorting noise thathad the stallion turning around to look at her curiously. “If he lived on earth, I think people would smash his windows. I know I would.”
    “I bet that’s not something your grandfather said,” said Max, washing his hands in the freezing pail of water.
    Kalinka shivered under her blanket and did not reply.
    “There’s no point in trying to understand God,” said Max. “If we did, he wouldn’t be God, I think.”
    Max fetched the two horses some rice and some oats in a couple of pails from a big bag in the loft and watched them eat for a moment, simply taking pleasure that there was a pair of the horses that had escaped Captain Grenzmann and his men. With a pair, you could breed again.
    “Any more of them alive, do you think?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” she answered. “The Germans killed almost all of them, I think. They’re good at that.”
    “True,” said Max. “Look, you’d better come into the cottage and get warm.”
    “What about the horses?”
    “They’ll be all right in here,” he said. “I don’t think anyone will come out here on a night like this. All the same, we’ll move them somewhere safer in the morning. I’ll leave them the light so they can finish their oats in comfort, although I suspect their vision is pretty good in the dark.”
    The sound of horses feeding greedily filled the stable.
    “They are hungry, aren’t they?” said Kalinka.
    He smiled. “You look as though you could use some feeding yourself, Kalinka.”
    “I’m all right,” she said.
    But then she fainted, and it was clear to Max she wasn’t all right at all. He scooped her up in his strong arms and carried her into the little blue cottage.

K ALINKA HAD FAINTED BECAUSE she was starving; the four squares of dark chocolate given to her by the old man had reminded her of just how hungry she was. It had been three days since she’d last eaten something. But in front of his roaring log fire, swaddled in blankets, and with the old man’s wolfhound lying on her feet, she quickly regained consciousness and drank a glass of hot sweet Russian tea from the samovar Max always kept lit when he was at home, and ate a piece of black bread and butter.
    “Feeling better?” he asked her.
    “Yes, thank you.”
    “Please don’t mention it. I haven’t much in the way of company these days, so you’ll have to excuse my housekeeping. Sometimes, there’s a German SS officer who stops by to water his horse in my stable and to give himsome oats and rice—that’s why there’s a bag of feed in there—but he wouldn’t ever dream of coming in here. Which is just as