by David Drake
Spanish King's hooves shoveled deep into the clay with his effort, but nonetheless he was marginally slower than the piebald beast—and a battle of this sort had narrow margins. King twisted to face the aurochs, but he did not have his hind legs anchored when their horns clashed again. He went down, his left flank skidding on the ground.
The piebald bull trumpeted victory and surged forward, very nearly losing the battle in that moment.
When Spanish King went down, he and the aurochs pivoted around their locked horns. King's left horn was so long that it touched the piebald bull between his shoulder and the base of his neck. When the stranger advanced, it was by impaling himself on the cruel point.
Blatting in shock and pain, the aurochs stumbled backward. The black bull scrambled up and followed, snorting deep breaths through nostrils which were already flared to their widest extent. Six inches of the left horn were blood-smeared, and the blood dripping down the aurochs' right shoulder was richer and brighter than the orange clay on King's black flank.
"Mine!" snorted Spanish King, and he strode toward his rival with a deliberation that seemed gentle until the two of them again crashed head to head.
Both bulls had learned caution and a respect for the present rival as for no other in their experience. They locked horns, and all obvious motion stopped.
Old Nathan found the stump of a beech forty inches in diameter, a survivor of the valley's first clearing, and settled himself on it regardless of the layer of soot from brush burned nearby. He was not a participant in this battle, though he had made it possible. The aurochs would not have had sufficient material form in this world—and Spanish King would not have had form in the valley the aurochs trod in life—save for the rent between their existences which the cunning man had opened with his scrying glass.
Even without Old Nathan's intervention, animals would have known of the presence of the great piebald bull. Smaller ones, like Boardman's bitch and the rabbits who would come to crop flowers springing from the newground, would skulk and remain beneath notice—even as their kin had done during the aurochs' proper life. Perhaps even deer would browse in the waste which would become meadow and then forest again, as it had done in the past.
But no animal large enough to drag a plow through roots and half-burnt saplings could coexist with the aurochs' fury. Horses and oxen would panic at the challenge and the glowering phantom of the piebald bull, even if it were no more than a memory in the soil itself. . . .
The aurochs was no phantasm now. He and Spanish King both pawed forward without moving, as if they were trying to pull stoneboats too heavy for even their huge muscles. Clay heaped behind each of the bulls' forehooves as the thrust which could not drive the beasts forward began to force the ground back.
King's tail lashed in a circular motion, rising to the top slowly and then cutting through the remainder of the arc with a snap like that of the whip which had cut him the day before. The aurochs' brushier tail was almost still, but his ears popped repeatedly against the base of his horns as if to add even their weight to the force mustered against Spanish King.
The bulls' first contact had been like the lightning, a cataract of sudden power that would slay or fail but could not last. This second struggle mimicked the thunder in its rumbling omnipresence, shaking the world without changing it; but not even thunder rolls forever.
The rivals sprang apart as if by concert, each of them pivoting their hindquarters left and keeping their heads low to face a renewed attack by the other. When they had backed till twenty yards separated them, each began to sidle toward the creek. The blood which would otherwise have matted the fur of the aurochs' right shoulder had been washed away by sweat.
Old Nathan got up and followed his bull to the nearby stream. He kept a wary eye on the aurochs, splay-legged and already slurping water. Though the cunning man knew that he could neither affect nor be affected by the phantom, the piebald bull had a savage reality which penetrated to grosser planes of existence. Big Bone Valley would not become plowland so long as the aurochs' ghost walked it.
And that mattered not a whit to Old Nathan now.
The cunning man stepped down into the shallow creek and laid a hand on the shoulder of Spanish King. The black bull was shuddering as his muscles strove to throw off fatigue poisons accumulated in the nearly motionless struggle, and the air reeked with hormones saturating the sweat which foamed across his torso as far back as the last ribs. King's deep exhalations roiled the surface of the creek in counterpoint with his slobbering gulps of water.
"Ye've whipped 'im, boy," said Old Nathan earnestly, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. "Hain't another bull on this earth could've done what you did. Now, let's ussens go off and leave him t' his business. Hit ain't no affair of ours if some triflin' daddy's boy lays in a stand uv corn here er no."
"Ain't finished, old man," said the bull as he paused in drinking and got his breath enough under control that he could rumble out the words. "You know thet." The creek curled around his fetlocks, and his black hide steamed with sweat.
"What call do we hev t' stay here, damn ye?" the cunning man demanded.
The piebald bull pranced out of the stream, his tail lifted so that the center of it curved higher than his rump though the brush of long black hairs still hung down. Mud his hooves had stirred upstream began to drift past Old Nathan's boots.
"Come away," the man cried.
"And give him best?" murmured Spanish King. "Don't reckon so." He poised himself. "Watch yerself, old man," he warned, and he launched himself from the creek to charge his rival.
"Blood and dust!" thundered the aurochs as he pounded with his head high toward the black bull.
"King, he's hook—" cried Old Nathan, but the warning would have been too late even if it could have been heard over the competing bellows of the bulls.
The aurochs ducked so low that he seemed almost to have stumbled, his lower jaw sweeping dust from the clay. Neither the feint nor the piebald bull's attempt to hook him low took Spanish King by surprise, but his reflexes played him false for all that.
King twisted to block the thrust of a long-horned bull like himself, and the aurochs' right horn stabbed over King's guard and deep into his throat.
The black bull grunted in shock, and his legs stiffened as if the blow had been to the cortex of his brain. The aurochs rumbled in triumph and backed a step to give his rival time to die. Beads of arterial blood stained the right horn like rubies in black onyx.
Spanish King strode forward as the piebald bull stepped away. Their horns met and locked again with the sound of lightning striking a tall tree, and the aurochs gave back a further pace with surprise that the struggle had not ended. Blood rolled down King's black chest, and the stream lifted from the fur around the wound every time his heart beat.
Old Nathan fell to his knees in the dirt beside the trampling bulls, his hands clasped as if for prayer . . . but it was too late to pray, even if he had not forsworn the god, the God, of his father long years before. The blood that trailed from King's deep chest splashed on the clay like molten metal.
The aurochs kicked out against his black rival. When he kicked again with the other foreleg, Old Nathan realized that the piebald bull was lifting his forequarters from the ground in order to avoid being thrown down by the turning force King was applying through their locked horns.
"No!" the aurochs said. "No, you can't—" he thundered, and his forehooves lashed out together. They waggled short of Spanish King, though they splashed in the bloodstream as the piebald bull twisted to the right despite himself.
The crack of the aurochs' spine was as sharp as a pistol shot, but it was far too loud for that.
The piebald bull did not sprawl limp with his tongue thrusting in a vain effort to drive out sounds that his lungs no longer knew to power. Instead he vanished, uncanny only in the moment of his end.
Spanish King stumbled to the ground when the aurochs disappeared. His forelegs folded under him, an
d the gouting neck wound rubbed the furrow his lower jaw gouged in the dirt.
Old Nathan thought the black bull had died in the moment of victory, but when he ran to the beast, cursing the Devil in whom he believed as he could not God, King wallowed up from the side on which he had fallen. The bull got his forelegs beneath him, but instead of trying to rise he let his haunches down as well so that he lay on the ground in a parody of relaxation.
The cunning man knelt beside the black bull and pressed his right hand to the wound, muttering the words by which he marshalled the forces within himself to staunch the blood. It wasn't any good. On the lids of his closed eyes he could see the form of Spanish King wasting away like a salt carving in water, and his palm burned as if he held it in a stream of liquid rock.
"No, let it go, old man," the bull said in a voice gentler than any his master had ever heard come from his throat.
"Damn ye!" Old Nathan snarled, his eyes pressed closed because the tears would wash down even harder if he opened the lids. "You hold hard er I'll crack yer neck fer ye!"
"A big 'un," said Spanish King slowly. "But we showed 'im, old man. We showed that 'un who rules here."
"There was never yer like, big feller," murmured Old Nathan with his face pressed against the steaming neck of the bull. "There'll never be yer like, not till the sun goes cold."
The great black head lowered to the ground. " . . . showed 'im," whispered Spanish King as he died.
* * *
John Boardman rode his bay gelding slowly through the newground, coming from the west end as the piebald bull had done earlier that morning. His bitch gamboled about the man and horse, rushing from stump to charred brush pile, yapping enthusiastically at the small birds he put up. When the blond dog noticed Old Nathan, she trotted over to him a hundred yards in advance of her master. Her head was thrown back and her tail held high, giving the impression that she was already in flight after a rebuff.
"G'day t' ye," said the bitch, well back from the arc Old Nathan could sweep with the knife he wielded. She could smell his mood, and she had no way of telling that it was not directed at her or the world of which she was one of the nearer parts.
"I've knowed better," said the cunning man. He wiped the knife's longer blade on the bull's hide to clean the steel, then cocked up the sole of his left boot and stropped the edge on it, two strokes to a side with a metronome's precision. He paused and added with the same lack of anything but a desire to be precise, "And worse, I reckon. Maybe worse."
"Chased off t'other bull, did he?" the bitch remarked, stretching her muzzle out to snuffle Spanish King. Her right forepaw began a cautious step forward as she continued, "Wouldn't hev believed it, but he's gone sure 'nuff. Mean 'un, thet. Too mean t' live nor die, seemed t' me."
"Whoa, Virgil!" John Boardman called to his gelding, who had stopped twenty feet from the carcase anyway. The odors of blood and death threw the horse into a shivering panic not far short of driving him off in a mad stampede back up the way he had come. The gelding calmed somewhat when his rider dismounted, knotted the reins on an upturned tree root, and stepped between him and the scene of slaughter.
"Well, I reckon ye did it," said Boardman as he approached Old Nathan as cautiously as his dog had done a moment before. The landowner could not scent fiery rage in the cunning man's sweat, but he could watch and wonder at the knife and the sinewed, capable hands flaying a strip of hide from the bull's back.
"I rode all the way from the west boundary cut t' here," the younger man continued—standing out of knife range. "And Virgil shied nary onct but when a pigeon flapped up in 'is face. Couldn't hev rid 'im here this time yestiddy."
"Said I'd do it," Old Nathan muttered, then wrinkled his face in embarrassment. This boy couldn't know it, but success had never been more doubtful than in the moment it came . . . and the cunning man had no heart now for bluster, when his hands were red to the elbows with the blood of Spanish King.
Old Nathan did not stand up or even uncross his legs, but he paused in what he was doing to give Boardman his attention and a full answer. "What wuz here," he said, "hit's gone and won't be back. Ye kin plow here er pasture, whatever you please."
The cunning man resumed his work. He had already removed a hand's breadth of hide from Spanish King's nose to his croup. The horns were included by a strip of the poll.
"There's a thing I wonder, though," said Boardman, squatting down on his haunches with care not to let the tails of his frock coat brush the bloody soil. "The spring, ye see, it's closed up. The rock's cracked down all around it, and hain't no water come out at all."
He pointed toward the creek, as if Old Nathan would not already have noticed. The slime of finely divided clay particles gleamed between stones where it was still damp. Higher up on the rocks, the mud was cracking and lifting its edges toward the naked sun.
The cunning man ignored him, making the final cuts at the base of the dead bull's tail.
"Well," continued Boardman, disconcerted both by the older man's activity and his lack of response to the implied question, "I reckon thet's no affair of yourn. I'll hire Bully Ransden en his team t' grub out the landslip and get the spring t' flowing agin."
Old Nathan stood up slowly, lifting with his left hand the strop he had just cut and still holding in his right the knife which the coating of blood joined to his flesh. "He kin grub t' Hell, I reckon," the cunning man said, "and he'll not strike water there. What lived through the flow uv that spring, it's gone now and the water besides."
Boardman overbalanced as he tried to stand up and had to brace his right fingertips on the ground. His face had a queasy expression as he straightened, and he neither looked at that hand nor allowed the splayed fingers to touch one another for some moments.
"I see," he said in a voice that made it clear he understood nothing of what he had just been told. "Well, I reckon the Bully'll grub till he fetches water somehow."
The cunning man began to coil the bloody strap he held, starting from the back but letting the tail stick out to one side because it was too stiff to roll. The fresh hide made a fat bundle as well as a heavy one.
The younger man waited for Old Nathan to add something further, until it became evident that he had said all he cared to say. "Well," began Boardman. He paused to clear his throat, starting to shield the cough with his right hand. Then he thrust the member with its charnel slime back down at his side, a safe distance from his pants leg.
"Rub it in clean earth," said Old Nathan unexpectedly. His hands were occupied, but he twisted his neck so that his beard gestured up the slope where the ground was loose and dry. "Better'n water t' clean thet, evens if there wuz water."
"Well," said Boardman. "Well, thank . . ." He trudged a few steps away, scuffing his boots to find suitable soil and clear it of ash and soot. "Oh," he added as if by afterthought as he turned. "Reckon we might pay you yer price . . . though I don't know we ought to"—his gaze glinted away from Old Nathan's hard green eyes like lamp oil dripping from ice—"seeins as we don't want it put about that we wuz sacrificin' bulls 'r any sich heathen thing."
He did not realize that Old Nathan still held the open jackknife until the cunning man carefully set the roll of hide back on the ground. The horns, connected by a strip of skin but removed from their bony cores, flopped loose.
"Don't you dare t' threaten me!" the younger man bleated. He scuttled backward two steps with his hands out in prohibition toward Old Nathan, then tumbled over a stump in mewling panic.
"What's that?" his dog barked, leaping to her feet and baring her teeth. "Don't touch him now, don't touch him!"
Old Nathan raised the knife beside his ear and flicked the blade closed with his thumb. The blood on it and his forearm were already black. He made a motion that young Boardman's eyes could not follow, and the weapon vanished somewhere.
"Boy," the cunning man whispered, "we hev a bargain you and me, and ye'll keep yer part of it as I did mine."
He paused. Though Old Nathan
's face was shaded by the brim of his hat, it seemed to Boardman, looking up from his sprawl, that the old man's eyes spit green sparks like pinches of copper salts thrown in a lamp flame.
"But . . ." continued the cunning man in the same whisper which carried as if his lips were an inch from the hearer's ear, "if I ever hear you've told anyone thet I killed a friend fer you, who hain't enough man t' hev rubbed the scale from 'is hoofs. . . . Ifen I ever hear thet, John Boardman, I'll cut a strop offen you as I done with him, and ye'll scream while I do it."
Old Nathan snapped his fingers above his head . . . but the sound was loud as a thunderclap, and Boardman thought he saw looming behind the cunning man the shape of a great black bull.
The Gold
"Might save a few fer the rest of us," squawked the mockingbird as Old Nathan dropped another blackberry into his poplar-bark basket.
Old Nathan looked up from what he was doing and snagged his hand in the thorns. "Go 'way, bird," the cunning man grumbled as he detached himself from the brambles. "Ye don't look ill-fed—and if ye did starve, the world 'd be a better place without your screechin'."
He eased a half step farther. The blackberry vines grew out from the margin of the woods into his oats. They'd need to be cut back before Old Nathan cradled the grain—but first he'd have berries.
"Tsk!" said the bird. "Now thet's a lie if ever I heard one! Why"—he half-spread his black-and-white barred wings to examine the interlocking edges of the flight feathers—"ifen I wish to, there's no prettier tune in all the world 'n mine."
Old Nathan grunted and collected three more of the ripe black fruit. The fingertips of his right hand were stained purple.
The strap supporting the basket over Old Nathan's left shoulder was cloth, gray linsey-woosey worn soft as soft from the days it was a shirt. Though the fabric didn't bite flesh the way a bail of split white oak would have done, there was nigh a gallon of blackberries in the bucket already. That, plus the weight of the long rifle in the cunning man's left hand, had about convinced him that it was time to traipse back to the cabin.
