There is a new field in this universe, and standing in it, at last at ease, is an old soldier. His name is Hector.
He is a Cavalry Black, a big Irish-bred gelding the better part of seventeen hands, and for seventeen years he served with the Household Cavalry in London, on State and Ceremonial duty, which is a polite phrase for the hardest thing you can ask of a horse.
Understand what that means. A horse is a flight animal. Every instinct in it, refined across millions of years of being prey, says one word in the face of sudden noise and pressing crowds: run. Hector was trained, over years, to do the opposite. To stand. To carry a rider in a steel breastplate down the Mall through a wall of sound, past the bands and the cheering and the saluting guns of the King's Troop, and not move a muscle. To hold himself still on a state occasion while every nerve in his body screamed at him to bolt, and to do it again, and again, faultlessly, because the man on his back and the crowd at his shoulder were trusting half a tonne of flight animal to master its own nature on command.
He walked behind a gun carriage at a state funeral once, at the slow march, the drum beating the step, a nation watching through its tears, and he never put a hoof wrong.
He is retired now. The shoes are off. The clipped parade coat has been let go woolly and unmilitary, the first sign the people who tend old service horses look for that one is finally letting down. He shares a green field with a small unbothered donkey called Nelson, because a horse should never be alone, and the black charger who stood behind kings and the donkey who has never had a worry in his life are now inseparable. When his old groom visits, Hector lifts his head and nickers across the field before the man has said a word.
And here is the part that undoes everyone who knows what they are seeing. One afternoon they found Hector lying flat out on his side in the grass, dead still, and a heart stopped, the way every horseman's does at that sight, because a horse down and flat looks like the worst news there is. Then an ear flicked at a fly, and the breath went out of them in relief. He was simply, deeply asleep. A horse only sleeps like that when it feels entirely safe, because flat on the ground is the one place a prey animal cannot flee from, and most never dare it. For seventeen years Hector stood, awake to every danger, holding everyone else's nerve so they could rely on him. Now, in a quiet field, he has decided it is finally safe to lie down and close his eyes.
He gave his courage to the rest of us for seventeen years. He has earned the grass. He is taking it lying down, in the sun, with the donkey keeping watch.