“Well, Mills’s horse, here we go again. Round and round, hey, old fellow? No, no, can’t balk, lad. We’re in this together. Got to pull your weight. It’s all teamwork here. Can’t let them other fellows’ horses catch us shirking. That’s it, that’s the way.
“It’s hard times, Mills’s horse, I’ll give you that, but we’ve seen better, what? Oh, but wasn’t it lovely getting here though, doing them countries, eating the fruits and choice cuts, the good cheeses and grand breads and everything shipshape in the posh weather! But all good things come to an end, they say, and it’s hard to keep the splendid up. So perhaps we’re for it now.
“What I think, my view of it, is they’ll keep us only as long as you pull your weight. These salt farmers don’t seem very good Christians to me, Mills’s horse, old fella, old boy. Awful bloody blokes they be. And their women — whoo. Can’t get near ’em. Smell as bad as the wreckers. Saucy strumpets though, I think. Ah, the wenches, Mills’s horse, oh the crumpet, ah the birds!
“But they’ve no manners, hereabouts, nor a bit of breeding. I showed them my handshakes, displayed my salutes. Water off a duck’s back, Mills’s courser. — No no, dray it, dray it, old shaft horse, pull it, old pony. That pit boss has eyes like a peacock’s tail. That’s it, that’s it. — Not like with Nancy, not like with Joan. They appreciated a bit of culture now and again. It wasn’t all dicky in the furry. There was respect, foreplay, handshakes and salutes.
“I’ll tell you a thing about females, old cob. Hey! Hey! Keep moving, old goer. Raft it, old jade. Trant it, punch, trant it! Caddy and fetch it, old four-foot and nag-pad, keep on, old cinchfarm, or they’ll turn you to tack. (Good Lord, Mills’s horse, you’re carrying me more than ever you did when I was only your rider.) What was I on about then? Oh — the women.
“All that gynecic crowd. Oh, the splendor and Orient glory — the fine, fair furniture of flesh. Prone, how like the Persian’s couch — the flufféd pillows of their breasts, the long, soft bolster of their thighs, their pink hips curving like the tiding sea. And their hair — oh, their hair, Mills’s horse — sable, gold, bay and wine like all the point-blank brights of heraldry, more potent than the ensigns, guidons, jacks and pennons of inspirate loyalty! Seated, how like the fabric’d thrones of kings and potentates, ease coiled in their laps like springs! The odalisque miracle of those candied cabinets, the smoked, spiked licorice of the cunts and the chewy charming sweetmeat of the ass. — Keep going, keep going, old sleigh-pull! — Their fumed groins like a perfect delta in geography, the salty hollows of their underarms and the perfect upholstery of their frictioned genitals. Oh, oh. (Hold up, hold up old grasschew!) How fashioned to function, how molded to use. Perfect and practiced as a ball. They say He made them from a rib. ’Tis proof of alchemy then and there’s juice in stones and soup in straw.
“Have I told you of their faces? I’ve eyes, nose, mouth and lips, the same consanguineous skin stretched cross the same kinned, reciprocate bones and appendage, the same androgynous flaps and trenches, planes and ovals, and yet I am without beauty, am not beautiful. What differentiates us then? It’s not hue or texture. It isn’t the cant of the bones or the slow, lifelong settle of the skin and skull. It isn’t the smile — men smile — or the postures of shyness over their akimbo bearing. There is, I think, some meter in the faces of women, the iambs, anapests and dactyls of arrangement that female their expressions and lend them the look of children even when they’re old, that takes, I mean, the fierceness out and moderates the anger and toys the grief. Yes, it must be that, something like that, beauty that seditions their emotions and turns even fright to ornament and pain to grace. Keep moving, keep moving.”
And on like that. Sometimes telling him not only the story of his life but the story of their lives together since they left what neither of them knew was England. Or making up stories, singing him songs, telling him jokes. He recited special horse prayers and even tried to imitate the harshly consonanted jabber of the horse talker behind him or the horse talker in front. There came a time when he could think of nothing more to say. Then he remembered his mother’s recipes and relayed them to the horse. He counted — Guillalume had taught him to count to 127—for the beast. And sometimes even described what the horse was doing.
“You’re taking a shit. You’re peeing on top of the other horse’s shit.”
Or he’d groan, imitate belches, farts, pretend to moan, laugh, whinny.
And then he went blank and fell silent. Mills’s horse refused to move. The furious pit boss raged at Mills. Mills called for the merchant to translate his reply.
“Says lose tongue,” Mills had the merchant explain.
The pit boss, unimpressed, had the merchant warn Mills that he’d better say something to get the horse moving again. Mills, insulted, attempted to justify himself to the merchant.
“Ask him how he’d like to have nothing but a fucking horse to talk to all day? Tell him that this particular fucking horse wasn’t too fucking bright to begin with or we wouldn’t fucking be here in the fucking first place, would we? Tell him how I give the nag my best stuff, and all he fucking does by way of polite conversation is shit and piss on the fucking salt!”
That night he spoke to Guillalume about it in the long wooden barracks they shared with the other horse talkers.
“What do you talk about?”
“Talk about?”
“With Guillalume’s horse. To get him to move. To keep his spirits up while he goes round and round in circles pulling the two-ton goddamn tree trunk.”
“His spirits?”
“What do you tell him?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing at all. He knows what he has to do and he does it. I think he likes it rather.”
That night he had a dream and next morning, not knowing — as he had not known about horses or picnics or what a crusade was or the language he had been hearing for two months now without understanding a word — that he had just invented psychiatry, he began to tell Mills’s horse about it, speaking easily, effortlessly. “You weren’t there, Mills’s horse,” he said, “you never saw this — this was my dream and what happened, too — but once, when I was a small boy, there was a rider hurt. And he must have been an important man — from the castle — because the others, the knights, their squires, were very concerned, frightened. Because by ordinary they were a bung and lively lot, always laughing and passing off jokes when a fellow had fallen, even when he’d been hurt more than this one was, this fellow who’d only had the wind knocked out and was a bit silly, not even bad limping, mind, but light-headed and reeling about like someone mixed up.” Mills looked across at the animal, which seemed to like, be actually interested in, what he was saying, so easily did he move in his harness, almost too easily. Mills had to increase his pace to keep up with him. “Well then,” he said breathlessly, “like I was saying, they were very alarmed like and called in the men from the stable to pull off his armor for him and other men to support him back to the castle. And I was there and this great knight saw me and says, ‘You, boy, fetch Sir Guy’s lance and come along,’ and we all went up to the castle together. And you know, Mills’s horse, that was the first time and the last time too that I’d ever been there, though I could see it sometimes from the stables in winter when the leaves were down.