Turning, the black bull stepped toward the nearby creek, carrying his head high. He seemed disinterested in the sparse browse, even though he had finished the grain from his panniers.
A mockingbird flew past on the left. Spanish King drowned its cries with a challenge to the world.
"Hit ain't here," said Old Nathan, placing a hand on the bull's rib cage so that the distracted animal did not turn suddenly and crush him by accident.
"He'll come to me," rumbled Spanish King. "Er I'll go t' him. Hit makes no nevermind." He stepped deliberately into the creek and lowered his head to drink.
"There's blood in the water," said the cunning man, feeling his soul freeze within him.
"No, hit's the red sun," replied Spanish King, but his muzzle paused a hand's breadth from the surface. His tongue sucked back within his lips without touching the water.
"Runnin' with blood," said the cunning man, aware of his words as he would have been aware of words spoken by another whom he could not control. "Heart's-blood pourin' out like spring water."
"There's blood red clay in this stream," said the bull. "That's what you're seein'." But he backed out of the creek, two short steps and a hop that brought his shoulder even with Old Nathan as the man stood transfixed beside him.
Another bull bellowed from the foot of the valley, where the sun would just be touching the spring that fed the creek through a fissure in the limestone.
"Well," said Spanish King quietly, and then he bawled back, "There's none my like on this earth!"
The black bull began to stride along the stream, his broadly spreading horns winking with the ruddy light of dawn.
* * *
The waste that was Boardman's newground was three furlongs in length, valley head to valley foot. Old Nathan, tramping beside King, could see the other bull before they had covered a quarter of that distance. It was the piebald brute he had scryed in the plate of water, pacing toward them as they approached him.
"Big 'un," muttered Spanish King. "Well, we'll show 'im."
"Run, little one!" roared the strange bull. "I've crushed your like into the stone beneath this clay!"
The piebald bull was a match in size for King, but they were not twins. The stranger was higher at the shoulder than the black bull, and the difference was in the length of his legs as well as his pronounced hump. His horns thrust forward where King's spread widely, and they were as black and wicked as the creature's eyes.
"Well, reckon I kin take 'im," Spanish King murmured.
He paused a hundred feet short of the piebald stranger and lashed his tail vertical, then down again as sharply as a railroad semaphore. "You walk on my earth!" bellowed Spanish King, and he launched himself toward his rival at a trot that snatched him away from the supportive touch of Old Nathan.
The stranger's roar and the hammer of his hooves shook the sunstruck clay. The bulls met head to head, with no more finesse than icebergs grinding together in the swell of Ocean. Both of them recoiled onto their haunches, the thud of their foreheads overlaid by the sharper clack of the horns striking against one another.
The piebald bull, the aurochs, bellowed with the wild fury of which the Biblical prophets had spoken. He shook himself and got his hindquarters solidly beneath him again by pivoting to his left around his firmly planted forelegs. He snorted angrily, tossed his head, and lunged again at his rival.
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.