Free All the King's Horses by Laura C Stevenson Page B

didn’t get along, I guess, and he ran away when he was fourteen. He got a job as an exercise boy for a man who trained showjumpers; after a while, he got so good that people paid him to ride their horses in important shows. He won so often that he got to try out for the Olympic team, even though he was too poor to own that kind of horse himself—’
    ‘– You can
do
that?’
    ‘Sure you can. If you’re as good as Grandpa was, people with Olympic horses
want
you to compete on them. So they pay for all the expensive stuff, and you just ride.’
    ‘Boy,’ she murmured.
    ‘Well, it’s not as easy as it sounds,’ I said. ‘You don’t just get to ride the Olympic horses. When Grandpa was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, he had to ride ten horses a day, sometimes more – and feed, groom, and muck out stalls as well. He says he never got enough sleep.’
    ‘Yeah, but he made it to the Olympics, so it was worth it.’
    ‘Actually, he
didn’t
make it. In the try-outs, he was riding this really wonderful mare named Second Chance, and he and a big-name rider both had perfect rounds, so there was a jump-off for time. The other rider went clear in really good time, so the only way Grandpa could beat him was to do a perfect round extra fast. Second Chance could feel that Grandpa was nervous – that’s what he says, anyway – and she got all excited. As they went around the course, Grandpa was having a harder and harder time holding her, and he was scared about the time, so when they came to the last triple bar, he let her go a little too fast, and she took off wrong, and …’
    Tiffany hid her face in her hands. ‘They fell,’ she whispered. ‘Disqualified.’
    ‘More than that! It was a terrible fall. Second Chance got the last rail caught between her front feet, and she flipped over on top of Grandpa, landing sort of sideways so they banged into the side of the jump. Grandpa’s right arm got crushed, but he didn’t even notice, because he was so torn up about Second Chance.’
    ‘Oh no! What happened to her?’
    ‘She broke her back – and it was really awful. She kept struggling to get up, in spite of everything Grandpa and the vets could do. Finally, she collapsed, and when Grandpa stroked her, she looked at him as if she were trying to say she was sorry they couldn’t finish the course. He says he broke down and cried in front of everyone. And then …’
    Tiffany looked out the window. ‘Don’t tell me what they did. I know.’
    The bus pulled into school, and we got off, sort of quietly. As we started up the stairs to our classroom, Tiffany asked, ‘What about your grandfather’s arm?’
    ‘It was so badly smashed that they had to take it off at the elbow,’ I said. ‘They made him an artificial arm – actually, it’s a hook – and after a couple of months, he could do just about anything. But he couldn’t ride any more.’
    ‘Criminy,’ she breathed. ‘And he’d been good enough for the Olympics!’
    ‘Well, he could ride; he just couldn’t do showjumping. At first, he says he thought it was the end of him. But one day, his hook glinted in the sun, and he suddenly thought of Nuadu of the Silver Arm.’
    Tiffany frowned. ‘Of whom?’
    ‘Nuadu. He was king of the Tuatha de Danaan, the Irish gods. He lost an arm in a battle with the firbolg, and so had to give up his kingship because a king of the gods had to be perfect. But after seven years, the great healer and smith of all the gods made him a silver arm, and he became king again. When Grandpa remembered that story, he realized he
could
go on, just differently. If he couldn’t go to the Olympics, he could train horses that did. So he—’
    The bell rang, and we hurried to our seats. But when Tiffany went up to the front for her math group, she slipped me a note and kind of waited. I opened it quick:
There is a secret place on the playground. We could talk about horses there
. I nodded, and she scooted up to the front.
    Tiffany’s