Read The Star of Kazan for Free Online

the stairs and came out in the riding school itself, everything changed.
    It was like being in a ballroom: the crystal chandeliers blazing with light, the white walls, the red velvet on the banquettes, the huge portrait of Charles VI on his charger. The band played soft music, and below her, the russet sand was raked into swirls like the sea.
    Loremarie was at the other end of the row, wriggling and showing off, but Annika had forgotten her.
    The band broke into the national anthem, everyone rose to their feet; the emperor in a blue-and-silver uniform came in, with his guest – the portly English king – and Ellie sighed with pleasure. She dearly loved the emperor, who was so old, so alone and so pig-headedly dutiful. Then everyone sat down again, the band started to play the Radetzky March , the great double doors opened – and two dozen snow-white horses came into the ring.
    They came like conquerors, in perfect formation and in perfect time to the music, lifting their legs high, bringing them down exactly on the beat, and as they came level with the place where the emperor sat, they stopped as one and the riders swept off their cockaded hats in homage.
    Then they began. They started with the simpler movements: the passage, which is a kind of floating trot, the piaffe, where the horse trots on the spot, the flying changes, the turn on the forelegs . . . The tall riders in their white buckskin breeches sat silent, guiding the horses with movements so small they could not be noticed – or even just with their thoughts. The understanding between the stallions and the men who rode them had been built up during the long years of training. There was no need any longer for commands.
    Now the younger horses left the ring, the band played a Boccherini minuet and three of the most highly trained stallions did a pas de trois: weaving the earlier steps into an intricate and faultless dance.
    ‘They’re so beautiful,’ whispered Annika. Light poured from their white skins, their manes and tails tossed like silk, they held their heads like princes.
    The three stallions disappeared through the huge double doors. The horses which came in now were riderless; their riding masters walked behind them, holding them only on the long rein. These were the most experienced horses, who could do the steps on their own – the one in the lead was the emperor’s favourite, Maestoso Fantasia, the horse Annika had seen on the poster.
    If Annika had chosen to come to the horses to get even with Loremarie, she had long forgotten it. Beside her Pauline, who was always doubtful about horses – the way they tossed their heads and stamped their feet – was hanging eagerly over the balustrade.
    And after the interval, the climax of all those years of training, the famous ‘airs above the ground’, with the riders riding without stirrups as they took their mounts through the levade, known to Vienna’s children because of the many statues where the horses sit back on their haunches and lift their legs into the air . . . and the courbette, where the horses don’t just rear up but jump forward on their hind legs and one can see their muscles bunched and rippling with the effort . . . And the most difficult of all, the dazzling ‘leap of the goat’, the capriole, where the horse really seems to be flying, and Annika, along with most of the spectators, let out her breath in an ‘Oh’ of wonder.
    The show ended with the famous quadrille, ‘The ballet of the white stallions’, in which all the horses took part.
    Unlike the other children in the audience, Loremarie had found it impossible to sit still. She fidgeted and fussed and dropped her purse and picked it up again . . . Now she stood up and pointed at one horse in the centre of the row of stallions weaving faultlessly between the pillars.
    ‘That horse is the wrong colour,’ she said loudly. ‘He’s brown; he isn’t white. He shouldn’t be there!’
    She was hushed not by her doting