They’d motored there from Vienna and then stopped and climbed off the motorcycle by the white fence for the military pasture. The estate buildings were just a short distance away; barns and stables with horses poking their heads out over half-doors, all looking their way over the chewed and hard-worn sills, looking and tossing their heads with manes and halters snapping. There was a fenced-off arena at one corner of the pasture, and they walked there in the late sunlight, their shadows long before them on the orange dirt road. In roadside grasses soldierbirds trilled and flew up. Men in stable jackets and riding boots were exercising horses in that arena, blacks and chestnuts on lunge lines, and the horses stepped precisely and rhythmically. Dust rose in small orange puffs and settled, and horses blew and high-stepped and obeyed minute motions on the line, the turn of a hand, the lowering and raising of the line. “Would you ride one for me?” she said to him impulsively. “Please, Albert.
