“Isn’t this what you want too, Hilly?”
“Yes, I guess,” I said, “if that’s the truth, but what I want doesn’t necessarily count around here.”
Gudrun’s eyes narrowed. “But what do you think?”
I sat there for a moment, gathering my thoughts so that I would say this right. “Why is it that in all the movies I see the Vikings are men? I’ve never seen a girl Viking. Maybe the girls really did just cook and clean and the boys were the only ones who got to do all the cool stuff like swordfights and horse riding.”
“You see history as it’s told by men,” Gudrun said. “And these men know nothing because they weren’t there.”
“I guess so,” I replied, “but you weren’t there either. The only person who really knows what happened to her is Brunhilda.”
I thought Gudrun would be cross with me for saying this. But she looked delighted and threw her arms around me.
“Exactly! Oh, I knew I was right to choose you!” She gave me a kiss on the forehead.
I wasn’t sure exactly what she was going on about, but I smiled anyway.
“Two weeks from tonight, Jonsmessa will be here at last,” she went on. “Then, Hilly, we’ll find out everything we need to know.”
There was even more bounce than usual to her step as she headed back out the door, dashing past Mum, who was heading to our table from the breakfast buffet with a plate of bacon and eggs for us both.
“What’s up with Gudrun?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” My heart was racing.
“She came in and left again without eating anything.” Mum shook her head. “That woman is very peculiar.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “she most certainly is.”
In the weeks of pre-production that followed, Gudrun didn’t mention Jonsmessa again to me. She was still pretty friendly, but her focus seemed to be on Katherine and the script and getting it right. They would frequently sit at a table in the dining room locked in heated discussions. Sometimes I would see Gudrun by herself at the same table late into the evenings as she cast her runes and chanted. One morning at breakfast, before we ate she’d insisted the room needed “cleansing” and we had to wait to eat until she could perform her ritual: waving a burning bunch of sage. Considering the frequent strangeness of her behaviour, being dragged along to bury a cow’s horn didn’t seem so out of the ordinary when I thought about it now. In fact, it had pretty much become a distant memory. Also, I had something else to distract me from the cultural consultant’s enchantments. I had somehow landed myself a job.
It had happened the same morning that Gudrun had cleansed the room at breakfast. Mum was sorting out the room in the hotel that she’d been allocated for costume storage. Mum’s assistant had gone back to London for more items and was due to return that afternoon, and they were on the phone to each other talking about how many racks they needed when there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a woman with sandy blonde hair tied back in a messy plait. She was wearing jodhpurs and riding boots.
“I’m Niamh,” she said. “I’m from the equine department. I’m afraid we have a problem.”
“What kind of a problem?” Mum asked.
Niamh pulled a face. “It’s easier if I show you … Let’s go to the stables.”
The stables turned out to be a low block of buildings, just a short walk from the hotel, down by the river. I was shocked at the enormity of the scale of them. There were so many rows of loose boxes! And there was an indoor training ménage with a round pen and a sawdust schooling arena too.
“It’s so lucky they had these facilities here for your horses,” I said as Niamh slid back the barn doors.
“Oh no,” she laughed. “None of this existed before. They custom-built it for us so that it was ready when we got here. The weather was so cold and wet when we arrived. It was the middle of winter – minus fifteen degrees and pitch black outside most days. We were getting up in the dark and working all day in the dark – our lives had almost no daylight for months really. The weather back home in Ireland isn’t great but at least there’s sun! So naturally under those conditions we were really looking forward to summer. We didn’t think about the major problem it would cause.”
“What problem?” Mum asked.
“I’ll show you,” Niamh said.
We walked up the central corridor of the stable block and Niamh went up to the loose box that was labelled in gold with the name OLAFUR.
“This is Olafur, but we call him Ollie.” Niamh opened the top half of the Dutch door. There was a horse inside, standing in the middle of the loose box. He had the look of a prize fighter, stocky and burly, yet he was no more than fifteen hands high. His eyes, which were half-closed as if he had been dozing, were almost completely covered by an enormous bushy forelock. It looked like he had a massive fringe, this giant explosion of sunburnt brown hair that sprang out from between his ears and then crested his powerful neck. His tail was bushy and enormous too, and had the same bedraggled sunburnt colour against his coat, which was quite sleek and almost black.
“What breed is he?” I asked.
“He’s an Icelandic,” Niamh said. “They all are. Connor, that’s my brother, he and I wanted to bring our own stunt horses with us from Ireland, but the rules are strict and it’s impossible to bring any horses in.”
“Why?”
“It’s been the law for centuries now.” Niamh shook her head in wonder. “They’re really serious about keeping the bloodlines of their horses pure. And if you take an Icelandic horse out of the country, even for a single day to compete or for work, that’s the end of it. They’re not allowed to return again. Ever.”
“Really?”
“Banished for life,” Niamh confirmed.
“So, because of this law, you couldn’t bring any of your own trained horses here, then?” Mum said.
“Nope.” Niamh sighed. “Which put us on the back foot. We’ve had to train all of these new horses since we arrived in winter. And the whole time we were sending photos back to the production team of the horses we’d bought for schooling and Katherine was so excited. She loved the way they appeared so rugged with their coats all long and sun-bleached and shaggy.” Niamh seemed like she was about to burst into tears. “And then, just before filming started, summer arrived, and now look!” She waved a dismissive hand at Ollie, standing sleek and black before her. “It’s a nightmare! They’re all like this!”
“So they’ve moulted to their summer coats and lost their shaggy winter fur?” Mum grasped the situation. “And what do you want me to do?”
“I want,” Niamh said, “I want you to make it winter again.”
Mum didn’t bat an eye at the craziness of Niamh’s request. She stared hard at Ollie for a moment and then she dialled her phone. “Nicky? It’s me. Where are you? The airport? You’ve finally arrived? Good. OK, I’m going to give you the number of a contact in Reykjavik. I need you to go pick up some goat hair.”
A few hours later, Nicky was at the hotel with a minivan filled with six commercial bales of coarse-strand goat hair.
This was how Mum made the horse suits. Handfuls of the goat hair were dyed just the right shade of brown and then the ends were bleached to look like they’d been out in the sun. The hair was hand-stitched onto sheer black mesh which had been sewn with a zip that went from jaw to tail beneath the belly of the horse, in much the same way that a human