Sea Change Read Online Free

with fear, whiter than he’s ever seen her before.
    He falls forward from the stallion and seems to be overrun, run over, slipping down the animal’s front under its head and his cheek becomes smeared with a great wipe of wetness from hair or skin, and then the relief to be falling, to be separate from the horse at least, although he sees it in terrible closeness, even the swinging motion of its throat, brushing him off, and the hardness of the animal getting even harder and more solid as he falls beneath it. Soft marshy ground here and the stallion’s front leg punches into the mud like a steel piston right by his face and Guy gets splattered by drops of soft wet mud and is then alone again.
    The field has a kind of stunned silence to it as Guy lifts himself on to one elbow and sees the oak tree and Judy and Freya still standing a little way from it. Judy, wanting to run to her husband, holding herself back to be with Freya. Both of them look so relieved, so happy in this little instant, it’s a sight which fills him with love, their care, their absolute loyalty. The others are safe. He must have been brave, leaping at the horse like that, and perhaps it balked as a result, at the last minute; the danger’s over now. He looks at Judy, and surprisingly they smile at each other. It’s a strange moment, but it’s really there, a warm smile between them, no sense of panic or recrimination or anything other than sheer relief.
    He lifts himself up, a little groggily, and limps towards them. It’s actually a surprisingly little distance to be together again, and he hugs them, he’s winded and defeated but he was their best chance, and then he looks for the stallion, knowing he’s now acting instinctively, without caution. He’s declared himself - he’s declared that their life came before his. It’s given him a wonderful sense of rightness, to be thinking this way.
    ‘It’s OK now,’ he says, and then he says, ‘where is that thing?’ and he sees it trotting in a wider circle, collecting itself, the bastard, getting its breath back.
    ‘The horse is so strong,’ he says, absurdly, to the others, and he looks at the animal as it shakes itself down again, as if shaking off the memory of the man who’d briefly hung on its neck.
    The first attack, yes, that was terrible, but the second one, I won that, he thinks. It’s been scared off. Learn your lesson, and as he looks at the horse now he wonders how long it had taken to better this animal. It hadn’t been agile. When it came at them, it didn’t even try to deviate from the run. There was no disguise to the direction. It was determined, but it was really just a blatant show of bullying aggression and force.
    There was an element of sport too, to have faced this thing. The stallion’s runs had been brief and had clearly taken their toll. It had seemed petrified, even as it ran at them. Disorientated. He sees it across the field, breathing too quickly, its snorts and whinnies almost overlapping themselves. He imagines its great lumbering heart jerking rapidly and beyond its limit, and he wants it to die.
    ‘I think it’s over now,’ Judy says, calmly, bringing his attention back to being with them. She’s holding him tenderly and he notices she has the book of poems back in her hand, she’s picked it up, in itself that smallest of gestures must mean the danger has now passed. The stallion has proven its point, it can go back through the gate to be with its family, if there is one, it can receive their gratitude and adoration if that’s all it needs. He sighs with relief, and crouches down to take a breath, and to make himself equal with Freya, to be on her side, her support and friend. Freya comes to him, so upset, so terribly small, her love for horses shattered, and he holds her, feels her warmth like it’s the most precious substance the world can offer, which it clearly is. She whispers to him in a dry voice that she wants to go home now, can they go