Thirst for Adventure

Chapter 3

Leo focus followed the workers voices, who were gradually moving closer to them. He heard the chattering of the frustrated parrots in the trees on the far side of the field. The rich warm smells of the harvest settled around him as his eyes slowly closed. He said to the artist, ‘It’s a pity you can’t paint smells and sounds and flavours’ but the man, who had resumed his painting, did not reply. Or did he say, ‘I do’? Leo, asleep from his ears down, could not be sure.

That evening Leo was caught in a violent thunderstorm that frightened him. He was soaked through. It did not last long, but at its c****x a tree on a slight rise on the other side of the river was struck by lightning and exploded with a booming crash. The world was reduced to nothing but noise. Leo knew he was probably not going to be frizzled by a stray bolt, but it was exciting to realise that it was a possibility. He enjoyed the storm while being terrified by it and wishing it would end. When the thunder and lightning finally moved away, across the plains, a heavy downpour of rain completed the drenching of the shivering boy, who by this stage was huddled under a fallen tree. He waited until the showers too had ended and nothing was left of the storm but an unspectacular drizzle; then he set out across the fields for some trees that he guessed concealed and sheltered some buildings.

It was a long and uncomfortable walk but his guess proved to be correct: the trees hid a farm, a large white house, a spread of outbuildings and yards. The house was too grand for Leo, who felt that he was probably a miserable sight in his bedraggled clothes. And there were wet strands of hair plastered across his forehead.

He picked out a large low building on the edge of the complex and slipped over towards it. The smells and scuffling noises emanating from it suggested to him that it was the stables. Leo entered the building quickly and quietly, but there were no people there. The horses, most of whom were eating from feed-bins, paid him no attention. Leo, however, was astounded by their number. He had never seen so many horses in one place in his life. He walked down the central aisle of the building, examining them more closely. They were fine-looking creatures, obviously well-tended, though Leo, a Farmerion’s son, thought rather contemptuously that they would not be good for more than an hour’s hard work at a time. He was accustomed to the sturdier, less glamorous mountain ponies.

But the building was dry and warm and the presence of the horses gave it a homely feeling. Leo found an empty stall and stripped off his clothing, then leant over into the adjacent pen and grabbed an old towel that was hanging there, which had obviously been used to rub down the animals. The occupant of the stall, a restless-looking, beautifully-contoured young stallion, tossed his head and glared at the boy.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Leo, grinning to himself, ‘I won’t be bending over in front of you.’ The stallion pranced a little, then went back to his food. Leo began to dry himself, wondering if he had ever experienced anything so good as the feeling of the rough, worn towel on his damp body. He felt the blood sing under his skin once more. He completed the job by drying his hair, not knowing or caring that he was making it stick up like the hay under his feet. He put the towel back on its nail and stood looking down at himself, felt his hand across the horses mane, so smooth it felt.

For a few moments Leo stood in the stall, bent over, exhausted by the intensity of the experience. Yet he was pleased and proud too, and aware that it was an experience that he would repeat — and perhaps he could enhance it too, He realised that something else had changed: the desire that would plague him for hours in the past had suddenly become a finite thing and had disappeared

He stood slowly and walked back down the centre aisle to the store-room that housed the huge

feed-bins for the horses. There he made himself a gruel of oats and barley, a meal that he was pleased to flavour with carrots and apples from trays that stood beside the bins. But his greatest delight came when he found a supply of sugar cubes. Starved of sugar since leaving home, he added handfuls of it to his gruel until it was a sweet and syrupy concoction.

Up until then Leo had been acting with complete disregard for the possibility that someone might come into the stables, but after finishing his meal he decided that it was time to take a little care. He eventually settled in a row of unoccupied stalls at the back of the building, choosing the second last one as his bed for the night. He knew from his experience at home that hay was not comfortable unless a good covering was available, so he used his own blanket as well as a couple of horse rugs from the tack-room. Sometime quite late into the night he heard voices and could see a reflection of a moving light dancing along the ceiling: another horse was being brought in and stabled, after a journey perhaps, but the activity was well away from Leo’ corner and the boy soon went back to sleep.

For the first time on his journey Leo found that he was never out of sight of buildings and, by inference, people. He was constantly passing cottages, guesthouses and farmhouses. Occasionally he went by a cluster of buildings that could be called a hamlet. He enjoyed the evidence of increasing life that was all around him; he gazed curiously at each new sight and approached each bend in the road with anticipation. There were new problems for him — mainly the difficulty of finding places to sleep — but there were compensations too, particularly the plentiful food supplies. Many of the fields he passed were given over to market gardens, and after dark these provided him with a varied diet.