OLD NATHAN(12)

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, and 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."