They were under the spell of darkness and expectation.

He knew that few among them realized that his music had been composed to create just that feeling—that anything might happen. It faded away again to the faintest of sounds and, finally, stopped as abruptly as it had begun.

The captain smiled in the darkness. The audience was still silent, but he knew that they were growing apprehensive. They must be straining their eyes and ears for the faintest sound or movement from the ring.

Once again the music came, this time with a dreamlike slowness, as if carried on a summer wind, and barely audible. It echoed through the hall, percussive but muted with a thin, haunting piping sound. Then the rhythm became brisk, followed by a long flute passage, a new movement, as gentle as rain, the soft sounds stealing through the hall, mysterious, remote and ever-haunting.

Suddenly the spotlight came on to bathe the mare standing quietly, peacefully, in the center of the ring. Her head was lowered, as if she were grazing in pasture rather than standing in the tanbark of a circus ring. She would remain that way until her next musical cue—a shrill piping note, constantly repeated.

The captain’s eyes never left her silver-gray body. A moment went by while the mare remained ghostly still, as if under the deep spell of the music. The sounds carried far, the notes seeming to stretch out infinitely. It was weird, uncanny music, to him who had created it as well as to the audience. He listened to the receding echoes and could almost hear the cries of distant birds. It was ominous music and yet with it came a sort of joy, an excitement, an intoxicating sense of danger.

He heard the first of the piping notes faintly in the background. It was the signal for his mare to begin. He watched her lift her small head and gaze into the darkness outside the ring. She seemed startled. Her tension mounted as the notes were repeated and became louder.

She turned her head as if she didn’t know where the sounds were coming from, or why. She began trotting around the ring, slowly at first, but as the notes quickened so did her flying feet. The notes became a horrible whistling. She slowed abruptly, as if realizing there was no running away from the crackling noise. The notes became slow with her strides, even sly, with long pauses in between.

She continued trotting around the ring but now her strides kept time with the notes. She paused with each syncopated step, dancing as she moved in measured, cadenced strides, the embodiment of supreme grace and beauty.

The captain missed nothing as he watched her floating about the ring with no movement of ears or nostrils. Like a ghost, he thought, her namesake—but a ghost only in her lightness of foot. She was very much alive, his mare. Everything in her was attuned to the music. She raised her legs high in time to the rhythm.

The pauses between the shrill notes became longer. Obediently, she slowed her strides without lessening their lofty height, giving the impression of barely touching the ground as she moved forward.

He watched her perform the passage, and wondered how anyone in the audience could not be captivated by her dancing fire, even if ignorant of the noble art of dressage in its highest form. There was no evidence of her great strength being tried in the disciplined, controlled trot. Instead, it was as if she performed that slow, measured pace for her own delight.

Did the Swedes appreciate what she was doing riderless? he wondered. Without benefit of physical commands of hands and legs to prompt and guide her into the movements of haute école? Almost every circus could boast of having a horse and rider skilled in dressage.