The Star of Kazan Read Online Free PDF Page B

down the Danube to Durnstein, where Richard the Lionheart had been imprisoned, and the year before that they had gone to the opera to see Hansel and Gretel .
    This year Annika plucked up courage and asked if they could go to the gala to see the Lipizzaners dance for the English king. She was tired of Loremarie’s taunts.
    ‘If it’s not too expensive?’ she asked.
    It was expensive, very expensive, and the professors were not entirely pleased with her choice because they thought that the emperor spent too much money on his beautiful white horses – money which could be better spent on making the university bigger, especially the parts of it in which they worked. Sigrid too did not really approve of the Lipizzaners.
    ‘They could build new hospitals all over the city with what those animals cost,’ she said.
    But the professors gave in – and bought tickets not only for the household but for Pauline and Stefan, whom Annika always wanted to invite.
    Treats which involved the professors always started off with rather a lot of education. Before they went to Durnstein, Professor Julius had told her about the depth of the river at that point, the speed of the current and the kind of sandstone from which the castle had been built, and Professor Gertrude had played on her harp the tune that Richard’s rescuers had played under his castle window.
    ‘We’ve learned a lot about the horses at school,’ Annika said now, thinking she might get away without too many lectures.
    She already knew that the horses were bred in Lipizza, near Trieste, from Arab and Berber strains brought from Spain and that the Archduke Charles had brought the first ones to Vienna 300 years before. She knew that the horses did not start off white but dark brown or black, in the same way as Dalmatian puppies are born without spots, and that each stallion had his own rider who stayed with him all through his life in the riding school.
    But Professor Julius was not satisfied. He took Annika up to his room and got out a map of Karst, the plateau on which Lipizza was situated.
    ‘The soil is sparse and there are rocks close to the surface, so that the horses learn to pick up their feet and this helps to form their high-stepping gait. All the area is limestone, which is very porous . . .’ And he was off, because he was after all a geologist, and very fond of limestone – and it was an hour before Annika could get away.
    Professor Emil took her and Pauline to the art museum. Both girls knew it well, with its marble floors and the pictures of half-dressed ladies with dimpled knees. Now, though, Emil led them to the seventeenth-century Spanish artists who had painted huge battle scenes with rearing horses and dying soldiers and blood dripping from swords.
    ‘You see the way those forelegs are poised over the enemy soldier,’ he said, pointing to a grey stallion with flaring nostrils and wild eyes, ‘that’s a courbade, and when he brings his hoofs down, he’ll crush the man to pulp. And over there, the Duke of Milan’s horse – the one that seems to be flying – he’s doing a capriole. See how he’s kicking out with his hind legs!’
    And he explained that the most famous of the movements that the Lipizzaners performed, the ‘airs above the ground’, were originally developed in battle, where they could help a rider to escape, or kill his foe.
    By the time they set off in two hansom cabs, with the professors and Annika in the first, and Sigrid, Ellie, Pauline and Stefan in the second, Annika was almost wishing she had chosen a different treat. As soon as she knew that Loremarie would be at the gala, Sigrid had decided that Annika needed a new dress and had gone out for a roll of sea-green silk. She was a superb needlewoman, the dress was a triumph; Annika’s hair was brushed out and taken back with a band of matching silk. All the same, she felt rather as though she was going to a lecture given by horses instead of people.
    But when they went up