The Duchess and the King

After two weeks at the ranch, the morning smells of musty horse and manure were beginning to become as familiar to Ryan as your average joe’s cup of coffee and toast.  Not concentrating on the smell helped some.  A little.  Shovel down, heave up.  These used to be his good jeans; now everything was just work clothes.  Move to the next stall, gently so as to not disturb the enormous animal blinking sleepily at him.  He’d gotten pretty efficient at mucking the stables every morning, but he didn’t think that was necessarily something to be proud of.  Well, one thing for certain—at least he wasn’t going to get out of shape this summer.

Last stall.  Ryan’s stomach grumbled—foul smells or not, there were eggs and bacon waiting for him back at the house.  He couldn’t rush this last one, though.  Bracing himself, Ryan stepped meekly into the last stall at the far end of the barn.

Maybe the stallion wasn’t all that much bigger than the others, but to Ryan he seemed a giant.  Maybe it was simply how high he held his head, or the rippling muscles visible as he shifted his shoulders and pawed the hay with a powerful front hoof.  To muck out his stall was like washing the feet of a great king, and Ryan the dutiful servant.  Ryan had yet to see a tourist at the ranch take him out riding; perhaps none were that confident.  Or foolish.

Your Majesty.

Within a few minutes, Ryan had fled the throne room and was sitting, hands thoroughly washed, at the massive table at the Callahan’s Ranch Resort Bed and Breakfast.  When he had started working at the ranch at the beginning of the summer, Aunt Meredith would wrinkle her nose in distaste at his mucky shoes and jeans, buts she had quickly learned that clean hands were a miracle enough before breakfast from a teenage boy.  Now she was downright schmaltzy about it.  What a dear, working so hard; you’d have thought he was born on the ranch.  So it was left to the families staying at the resort to be properly appalled, frowning with disapproval at Ryan’s sweaty clothes from their own seats half a mile down the table.

“So, my boy, what d’you say ‘bout learnin’ to ride today, eh?” Aunt Meredith chipped as she ladled a precarious mound of scrambled eggs onto Ryan’s plate.

“Mm-hmph?” Ryan mumbled, having already wolfed down a pancake before swooping onto the eggs.

“Ridin’, boy,” Aunt Meredith repeated, pursing her lips.  “You’ve been muckin’ out stalls since you got here, now it’s time you learned to ride.  That way you can help us with the customers out in the field.”  Aunt Meredith liked to call the pens and valley where the tourists rode the ranch resort horses “the field;” she thought it sounded professional and chic.

For a half-second, Ryan’s mind flashed an image of the great stallion in the barn and his heart beat rapidly.  No, don’t be silly; such a mighty lord would never stoop to a peasant like himself.  Even so… he couldn’t help but look up at his aunt, grey eyes bright with anticipation, but Aunt Meredith was charging on, blissfully unaware.  “We’ll start ya out on old Ginger, of course,” she said over her shoulder, switching her wide hips back and forth as she made her way down the table with the almost empty egg pan.

Ryan’s heart skipped back to normal tempo.  An old spinster maid like Ginger wasn’t due the respect of a great king, after all.  He stabbed his eggs and shoveled them into his mouth.

To be the equal of such nobility…

The morning was unusually overcast and sticky.  Storm in the air, maybe, though Uncle Ike had grumbled—despite the newspaper stating otherwise—that the storm wouldn’t come for another few days.  Considering that the ranch didn’t have a TV or wifi, Ryan would have to take his uncle’s word for it.

Leaning on the whitewashed fence while Aunt Meredith fetched Ginger, Ryan poked pointlessly at his phone.  No new texts.  He ran his hands through his sandy hair, tousled by the warm breeze.  What were his friends doing back home?  Bonfires every Friday night, driving out to their cabins at the lake, enjoying the last summer of real freedom before they went off to college and found new people to party with.  Too busy to send a text his way, at least, not that Ryan could really blame them.  He’d been the one stupid enough to get a DUI, and now here he was, resigned to sweating under the hot Texas sun instead of destroying brain cells from boredom in juvenile detention.

And he still had ten long weeks to go.

“Saddle ready, boy?”

Ryan looked up as Aunt Meredith brought Ginger over, leading her by the reins.  He reached down and grabbed the saddle sitting in the dust at his feet.  “Here you go,” he said, holding it out to Aunt Meredith.

She shook her head.  “Nu-uh, boy.  If you’re gonna ride a horse, you’re gonna have to learn to saddle her yourself.  It’s the first step to formin’ a real bond with the horse, which you gotta have considering this girl could fling you off and crush you if she wanted.”

If the old spinster didn’t throw her back out trying it, of course.

Under Aunt Meredith’s tart instructions, the saddle was soon arranged on Ginger’s back as reasonably as Ryan could manage it.  Aunt Meredith tugged here and there, small eyes inspecting every inch of the saddle.  Good enough, she seemed to say, and showed Ryan how to mount.

Uncertain, Ryan took a handful of Ginger’s mane, looking at the mare’s face as he did so.  Her old eyes were calculating, though uninterested.  She was too old to mind the inane goings-on of the common folk, which was probably why Aunt Meredith was starting Ryan out on her.  He could ride like a blob of Aunt Meredith’s scrambled eggs for all she cared.  Bracing himself, Ryan shifted his foot in the stirrup and swung over the horse’s broad back, landing gently in the saddle.  He released a breath.  He hadn’t realized he’d been holding it.

Suddenly, Ryan felt a keen awareness from every part of his body.  He could feel Ginger’s muscles shifting underneath the saddle—powerful for an old horse past her prime.  Her head shifted, back and forth, tugging the reins held too tightly in Ryan’s hands.  With a rider on her back, she tensed, grew alert.

She was no old maid after all.  She was a grand duchess.  

Ryan reached down and patted the thick mane, feeling the heat of the animal underneath.  Ginger twitched, looked back, snorted.  Duchess?  No.  God save the queen, sir.

By lunchtime, Ryan’s back and legs ached.  He’d only gone around the pen a few times, slowly, carefully, Aunt Meredith watching his every move, but he was exhausted.  He convinced Aunt Meredith to let him return Ginger to her stall by himself after promising to give the mare a thorough rub-down.  

Ginger’s stall was directly across from the stallion’s.  He stood, unnoticing but majestic, munching on some hay.  Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan gazed at the horse as he led Ginger in to her stall.  Mechanically: reins slipped of her nose, saddle placed neatly on its hook.  Firm, circular strokes with the coarse brush across her copper pelt.

Ryan paused before leaving the stall.  Queen on one side, king on the other.  Suddenly he’d entered a court and was presenting himself before the nobles.  The stallion, who had stopped munching his hay, was now staring at him.  

Ryan suddenly had a foolish urge to bow—put down quickly by the ache in his back.  And he’d only been riding for a few hours on a cautious old mare.  But someday…

Ten weeks.  He still had ten weeks left.

Ryan caught the gaze of the stallion, and thought the horse held his look: a promise there.  Ten weeks.  That was enough time to prove his worth to such a mighty lord.  Shoving his hands in his pockets, Ryan stepped out of the barn and into the patchy sunlight that occasionally broke through the overcast.

The humidity lingered thick and heavy. Although the storm was still far off, Ryan thought he could feel a thrilling electricity in the air as well.