The Fire Stallion

“Have you ridden at a tölt?” I asked.

Gudrun smiled. “Of course. As a girl I grew up riding every day. Everyone rides in Iceland. There are only three hundred thousand people, and there are a hundred thousand horses. The Icelandic has the purest blood of any horse in the world. Their breeding hasn’t changed for a thousand years. They are the horses of the Vikings.”

“So do you live in Reykjavik?” I asked.

Gudrun shook her head. “I grew up there, but New York’s my home now. When Katherine asked me to work on this project, I knew I had to come back, though. Brunhilda is very important to me.”

I had taken a look at the Brunhilda script when Mum was reading it on the plane. “So it’s about the princess from Sleeping Beauty, right?”

Gudrun’s face darkened. “Sleeping Beauty is a nonsense story! Brunhilda is not some fairy-tale princess. She was a real girl. This is precisely why I am here – so that this movie won’t become some ridiculous recounting of her history, a helpless fawn waiting for a prince’s kiss to awaken her. The true Brunhilda was the fiercest, the noblest of warriors, willing to fight to the ends of the earth for what she believed in. I have worked all my life to serve her truth.”

Gudrun looked at me hard, her green eyes searching mine. “But why are you here, Hilly?”

I gulped down my sushi roll and thought about telling her everything about me and Piper and the worst time of my life, but in the end all I said was the truth.

“I didn’t want to be home.”

The flight to Iceland took us into Keflavik airport, an hour from the capital Reykjavik. We were picked up by three minivans and got on board with our bags before driving off in convoy. The landscape out of the window was like looking at Mars – plateaus of bare, rugged black rock patchworked with lichen, moss and snowdrifts with strange curls of smoke coming out of the ground.

“Steam not smoke,” Mum corrected me when I pointed it out to her. “There are a hundred and thirty volcanoes here. Thirty of them are still active and even in summer there’s snow. They call it the land of fire and ice.”

We turned off the motorway not far from Keflavik because Lizzie thought it would be fun to stop for lunch at Blue Lagoon, a vast natural hot water lake.

“It’s just so touristy,” Gudrun said as we got out of the vans. “There’s hot water everywhere in Iceland but this place is a little too crowded for me.”

It smelled like the hot pools back home in Rotorua with a rotten tang of sulphur in the air. The hot water lake was huge and the water was an ice-cloudy blue.

Mum and I changed into our swimming costumes along with the crew and got in, sitting up to our armpits. Gudrun was off having an intense conversation with Katherine and didn’t join us.

“Slip this on,” Lizzie said, giving me a wristband.

“What’s it for?” I asked.

“Anything you want!” She winked at me.

It was the coolest thing ever. All I had to do was wave my digital wristband at the kiosks and I was given whatever I wanted. Soft drinks, chips and hotdogs – well, Icelandic hotdogs, which were kind of like American ones but with this weird creamy mustard sauce. I asked for tomato sauce instead but even that was a little strange and tasted like sweet cheese.

We soaked in the pools until my skin wrinkled. It felt chalky and dried-out when we got back out and dressed in the cold air. Then we piled back into the vans, all toasty from the hot water.

Most tourists go to Reykjavik and stay there but we drove straight through. It wasn’t a big city so it didn’t take long and pretty soon it was like we were driving across a moonscape, all spooky and barren with scattered patches of snow despite the summer. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the snow vanished and we were driving through tussocky plains, bare and desolate. It looked prehistoric here, almost as though humans had never existed.

We passed a roadside diner that looked closed except for the flashing lights that insisted it was open. By now it must have been late, but it was still eerily light. I looked at the time on the clock on the dashboard of the van: 11 p.m.

“There’s the hotel.” Mum nudged me and pointed off the main road to the right. In the far-off distance, I could see a long, low wooden lodge that looked like something the Vikings would have lived in except it was much bigger. It stood alone, in front of a massive forest of grey-green fir trees.

“So, that’s our base for the next two months,” Mum said.

The sign outside the hotel said ISBJÖRN. It translated as “ice bear” – polar bear, I guess it meant, since there was a giant stuffed polar bear standing on its hind legs in the foyer. Isbjörn had twelve rooms inside the lodge and another twenty-three cabins. The whole place had been rented out so that we were the only ones here. Katherine and the actors were going to be in the main lodge. The rest of us were allocated cabins around the grounds. Lizzie was methodically doing the rounds of the vans with a clipboard as everyone clamoured around her to find out where they were sleeping.

“Jillian, I’ve put you in the woods – total Hansel and Gretel job, little footpath into nowhere, but, trust me, it’s very pretty …” Lizzie handed Mum our key on a wooden tag and a map of the hotel grounds.

“Which way?” Mum asked.

“Go through the hotel foyer,” Lizzie called back without looking round. “Out the other side you’ll see the path into the forest. Follow the middle track. On the map I gave you your cabin is marked with a red cross.”

“You navigate, Hilly,” Mum said, passing it to me.

I took the map and started reading. “We go this way,” I said, pointing at the walk-through pavilion that divided the two main wings of the hotel.

The path was there. It split three ways and each artery was signposted for cabins three, four and five.

“That’s us, cabin five.” I led the way.

Mum was already on her phone, talking to Nicky, her assistant, who was arriving tomorrow with the costumes. Some of the cast were on Nicky’s flight but the main actors and actresses weren’t due to arrive for two more weeks. Mum had already done fittings for all of them, but there were still details to go through and more clothes to source. She wanted to have everything on hand to do final fittings before shooting began. I could hear Nicky’s voice on the other end of the phone, all shrill and panicky. She was saying there were problems getting the suits of armour through UK customs. The customs officer thought the shoulder pads with the spikes should be classified as weapons. Mum was so calm as she advised her what to do – it made me realise how good she was at her job. The other night at dinner, when Katherine had introduced everyone to Gudrun, she had referred to Mum as the “Oscar-award-winning costume designer Jillian Harrison”. Mum didn’t care about her Oscar – she was currently using it to prop open the cat flap at home – but it made me feel proud.

“No bars. I need to backtrack,” she said suddenly, holding her phone up above her head, searching for a signal. “I have to clear this up now. You keep on going, Hilly. I’ll catch you up at the cabin.”

It was like something out of a movie in that forest. The trees around me were so damp they dripped water. Bright green moss grew on the trunks on the dark side where no light could reach it. I walked slowly at first, thinking Mum might catch me up, but then I got cold and my fingers were numb so I sped up again, and then I saw the little red toadstool on the ground. Not natural but manmade with a sign beside it, an arrow made out of wood with the number five on it that pointed in the direction of our cabin.

When I look back on what happened next, I still can’t figure out how she did it. I remember we were all waiting by the minivans when Lizzie gave us our keys and allocated our rooms. Mum and I had set off down the path to our cabin straight away after that. I hadn’t seen anybody else come this way. So how was it that Gudrun was already on the doorstep of the cabin, sitting on a rocking chair and waiting for me?

She jumped straight up, an air of impatience about her, as if she’d been there for hours.

“Throw your bags inside quickly, Hilly,” she said. “We need to hurry.”

“But …” I was confused. “Mum’s still back there. She’s on the phone.”

But Gudrun ignored me. As I put the key in the lock, she turned the handle for me, then helped me to put my bags in the room. I only just had time to look around and see the shadowy shapes of deer antlers hanging on the walls before she had bustled me back out again and we were walking on the path that took us deeper into the forest.

Gudrun walked so fast I was panting with the effort as I skipped to catch up with her.

We walked like this, saying nothing for a little way. Just when I was about to summon up the courage to ask her where we were going, the woods cleared in front of us and we were obviously in the place she wanted me to see.

Years ago when I was little we’d taken a family holiday to Rome and visited the Colosseum. I remember standing at the side and staring down into the depths of it and imagining all those fights to the death on the sand between the gladiators with their swords and tridents, and the wild tigers and lions being let loose to eat the Christians.

This place we were in now was like a miniature version of that, a circular structure of stone steps sinking down into the earth to create an enclosed arena. Not big enough for the colosseum, but still pretty big. I couldn’t figure out whether it was natural or man-made – the stone steps were covered in grass. Gudrun began to vault down them towards the arena. She was carrying a tote bag across her back and it bounced as she leapt, making a clattering noise like it had bells inside.

I clambered after her, tentatively taking the first step in an ungainly fashion, before figuring out that the best way to get down was to do what Gudrun was doing and leap and land then leap again. Finally I reached the bottom too – not sand like the real Colosseum but dry tussock grass. Gudrun strode out until she was standing right in the middle of the arena and began pulling items out of her bag, including a garden trowel.

“Here!” she called to me. “Come and help me to dig.”

I did as she asked and dug, chipping away at the hard crust beneath the grassy surface. It was tough at first but, once I’d broken through, it crumbled away more easily and soon I’d made a decent hole, with a mound of earth beside it.

“That will do,” Gudrun said. She was still fossicking in her bag.

“Gudrun?” I finally summoned up the nerve. “What are we doing?”

“We’re preparing,” she replied, pulling out a cow’s horn from her bag and laying it down next to the hole.