"Mary Stewart - Ludo and the Star Horse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart Mary)

LUDO AND THE STAR
HORSE

Mary Stewart
 CHAPTER I
Home
This is the story of something that happened a long time ago, to a boy called Ludo, and you can
believe it or not as you please. It was told to me by Ludo's own grandson, and personally I believe every
word of it. But you, Amelie, must judge for yourself.

Ludo Spiegl was eleven years old, and he lived near a little mountain village in Bavaria called
Oberfeld. Herr Spiegl, Ludo's father, was very poor. He owned three goats and a cow, and that was all,
if you don't count his wife and son. Even the old horse he kept for work, and the cottage he lived in, poor
as it was, did not belong to him, but to the King, who owned the whole valley and all the land for many
miles around.

Herr Spiegl made his living chiefly by carpentry. He even cut the trees himself, and dragged them
down from the mountain with the help of Renti, the old horse, then sawed them up and stacked them and
left them to weather. He was a good carpenter, and there wasn't a house in Oberfeld without some of his
furniture in it. Even Doctor Kainz, from as far away as Niederfeld, had asked Ludo's father to make him
a table, and Herr Spiegl had once carved a seat for the church, which (said the priest) was good enough
for one of the King's castles. But the work was slow and hard, and of course it took a long time, so Herr
Spiegl had to take any other work that came his way. In summer he and LudoтАФ whose real name was
Ludwig, the same as the King's -тАФleft the cottage in the valley and moved up into the mountains with the
goats and the cattle from all the valley farms. There the sun shone brilliantly all the time, and there was
plenty of good grass and water. This was the Alm, the summer farm. Twice a day all the cows came in
from the pastures to be milked, and from this milk Ludo's father and the other men made cheeses, which
were stored and later on taken down the mountain and sold. The cheese making was hard work, in sheds
full of steaming vats, and so was the milking. Ludo was too young to help. He spent every day out on the
mountainside watching the cows and goats and seeing that they did not stray. He loved the summer.

But when summer ended life was hard and fierce. Every year, about the middle of September, when
dew lay heavy on the grasses, and the butterflies wavered sleepily over the blue scabious and silver
thistles, the cattle would trudge, with sweet bells tolling, down the steep mountain paths back to their
winter homes in the valley. This was a time of festival in the village; there would be music and dancing and
the blessing of the cattle, and for a short time life would be full of gaiety and color; but then the feasting
would be over, the cattle would file into their places in the lower rooms of the cottages, and the Spiegls'
cow and the goats and Renti would be shut up for the long winter months. Ludo's father would check the
store of firewood stacked under the eaves, and would sort out the good seasoned wood for his
carpentry, and the household would settle down to the routine of winter.

Then the snow would come.

You have never seen such snow. You would go to bed one night as the flakes began to drift, and the
sky was dark, had been dark all day. When you awoke in the morning the sun was out, and what a sun!
A blaze in a sky so blue that it hurt the eyes, reflected everywhere from snow dazzling white with clear
blue shadows. You could tell where the houses were because the snow was house shaped. You could
see the pine trees because the snow stood glittering in Christmas-tree columns. But that was all. Roads,
streams, fields had gone. It was winter, and the snow locked the valleys.
 In some ways this was an even better time than summer, because people would get out their