by David Drake
"Well?" Boardman said, flexing back his shoulders.
"There's a dippin' gourd there by the tub," said Old Nathan, nodding toward that corner. "Fetch it back to me full from the stream and I'll see what I kin do."
"There's water in the tub already," said Boardman, glancing from the container to his host.
"Fetch me living water from the stream, boy," the older man snapped, "or find yer own way out uv yer troubles."
"Yessir," said Boardman—Boardman's son—as he came bolt upright off the chair and scurried to the dipper. It was thonged to a peg on the wall. When the boy snatched hastily, the leather caught and jerked the gourd back out of his hand the first time.
The cunning man said nothing further until his visitor had disappeared through the back door of the cabin. The cat gave a long glower at the bitch, absorbed in licking her own paws, before leaping to the floor and out the swinging door himself.
"Hope the boy's got better sense'n to cut through Spanish King's pasture," Old Nathan muttered.
"Oh, he's not so bad for feeding," said the dog, giving a self-satisfied lick at her own plump side.
"You were there at the newground, weren't ye, when the plow team balked?" asked the old man. He twisted to look down at the bitch and meet her heavy-browed eyes directly.
"Where the bull is, you mean?" the dog queried in turn.
"Bull? There's a bull in thet valley?"
"Oh, you won't catch me coming in hornsweep uv that 'un," said the dog as she got up and ambled to the water tub again. "Mean hain't in it, and fast. . . ." Anything further the dog might have said was interrupted by the sloppy enthusiasm with which she drank.
"Well, thet might be," thought the cunning man aloud as he stood, feeling the ache in the small of his back and in every joint that he moved. Wet mornings. . . . "Thet might well be."
Old Nathan set his coffee cup, empty save for the grounds, on the table for later cleaning. He frowned for a moment at the mush and milk remaining in his bowl, then set it down on the floor. "Here," he said to the bitch. "It's for you."
"Well, don't mind if I do," the animal replied, padding over to the food as Old Nathan himself walked to the fireboard.
The soup plate there had the same pattern as the five cups. The cunning man took it down and carried it with him out the back door.
Boardman was trudging up the slope from the creek, a hundred yards from the cabin. His boots were slipping, and he held the dipper out at arm's length to keep from sloshing his coat and trousers further. Old Nathan's plowland was across the creek; on the cabin side he pastured his two cows and Spanish King, the three of them now watching their master over the rail fence as their jaws ratcheted sideways and back to grind their food.
"Not so bad a day, King," said Old Nathan to his bull while his eyes followed the approach of his stumbling, swearing visitor.
"No rain in it, at least," the bull replied. He watched both Boardman and the cunning man, his jaws working and his hump giving him the look of being ready to crash through the hickory rails. The fence wouldn't hold King in a real rage. Most likely the log walls of the cabin would stop him, but even that was a matter of likelihood rather than certainty.
"Any chance we might be goin' out, thin?" Spanish King added in a rumble.
"Maybe some, maybe," Old Nathan admitted.
"Good," said the bull.
He wheeled away from the fence, appearing to move lightly until his splayed forehooves struck the ground again and the soil shook with the impact. King stretched his legs out until his deep chest rubbed the meadow while his tail waved like a flagstaff above his raised haunches. His bellow drove the cows together in skittish concern and made Boardman glance up in terror that almost dumped the gourdful of water a few steps from delivering it.
"You hevn't a ring in thet bull's nose," said the visitor when he had recovered himself and handed the gourd—still half full—over to Old Nathan. "D'ye trust him so far?"
"I trust him t' go on with what he's about," said the cunning man, "though I twisted the bridge out'n his nose t' stop it. Some folk er ruled more by pain thin others are."
"Some bulls, you mean," said Boardman.
"Thet too," Old Nathan agreed as he emptied the gourd into the soup plate and handed the dipper back to his visitor. "Now, John Boardman, you carry this back to its peg, and then go set on the porch fer a time. I reckon yer horse is latherin' hisself fer nervousness with the noise." A quick nod indicated Spanish King. The bull had begun rubbing the sides of his horns, one and then the other, on the ground while he snorted.
"Well, but what's yer answer?" Boardman pressed.
"Ye'll git my answer when I come out and give it to you, boy," said the cunning man, peevish at being questioned. Some folk 'ud grouse if they wuz hanged with a golden rope. "Now, go mind yer affairs whilst I mind mine."
* * *
Nathan's cat reappeared from the brushplot to the west of the cabin, grinning and licking his lips. The old man walked over to the pasture fence, spinning the water gently to the rim of the shallow bowl to keep it from spilling, and the cat leaped to a post. "He thinks he's tough," said the cat, ears back as he watched King's antics.
"Now, don't come on all high 'n mighty and git yerself hurt," the cunning man said. "Never did know a tomcat with the sense t' know when to stop provoking things as could swaller'em down in a gulp."
He paused at the fence and closed his eyes with his right hand open in front of him. For a moment he merely stood there, visualizing a pocketknife. It was a moderate-sized one with two blades, light-colored scales of jigged bone, and bolsters of German silver. Old Nathan had bought it from a peddler and the knife, unlike the clock purchased at the same time, had proven to be as fine a tool as a man could wish.
As the cunning man pictured the knife in his mind, his empty hand curled and he reached forward. He saw his fingers closing over the warm bone and cooler metal mountings . . . and when after a moment he felt the knife in his hand also, he withdrew it and opened his eyes. There the knife was, just as it should be.
Old Nathan let out the breath he had been holding unconsciously and set down the soup plate so that he could open the smaller blade. There was a spot of rust on it, which he polished off on his trousers. No help for that: good steel rusted, there were no two ways about it.
"King!" the old man called. "Come over here!"
The bull twisted his forequarters with the speed and grace of a cat taking a mockingbird from the air. "Says who?" he snorted.
"Mind this, damn ye, or we'll go nowhere!" the man retorted in exasperation. As bad as the Boardman boy. Nobody'd let Old Nathan get along with his business without an argument.
Grumbling threats that were directed as much against the world as they were the cunning man specifically, King strode deliberately to the fence and his master. Flies glittered against his hide, many of them clumped in chitinous rosettes instead of scattering evenly over the whole expanse. There was a matting of sweat on the bull's withers from anticipation rather than present exercise, and his tail lashed to emphasize the swagger of his hindquarters.
"Three hairs from your poll," said Old Nathan, reaching deliberately between the horns of the big animal whose muzzle bathed him in a hot sweet breath of clover. He kept a wire edge on the knife's shorter blade, and it severed three of the coarse hairs of King's with no more drag than a razor would have made on so many whiskers.
"And a drop of blood from me," the cunning man continued, stepping back and grimacing at the three long hairs before he chose his location—the back of his left index finger, not the calloused pad—and pricked himself with the point of the blade.
While the blood welled slowly, Old Nathan wiped the steel clean on his trousers and closed the knife. Closing his eyes again, he mimed putting the knife away on an invisible shelf. He saw it there, saw his fingers releasing it—and they did release it, so that when he withdrew his hand and opened his eyes, the well-kept tool was nowhere to be seen.
The
re was enough blood now on the back of the finger which pressed the bull hairs against his thumb. Sighing, Old Nathan settled himself on his haunches in front of the bowl he had placed on the ground. One of his splayed knees touched the lowest rail of the fence, giving him a little help in balancing when his mind had to be elsewhere.
Spanish King made a gurgling sound in his throat as he watched over the fence, and his breath ruffled the surface of the water. That would be beneficial to the process, if it made any difference at all. Old Nathan was never sure how the things he did came about. Some things—techniques—felt right at a given time but the results did not always seem to require the same words and movements.
The cunning man dipped the tips of his left index finger and thumb in the shallow basin and whisked the bull hairs through the water. The blood on the back of his finger trailed off in a curve like a sickle blade, dispersing into a mist too thin to have color.
Old Nathan closed his eyes, visualizing the soup plate in which now drifted the blood and the hairs he had released. The water in his mind clouded abruptly—first red as blood, then red as fire, and finally as white as the sun frozen in a desert sky.
The white flare did not clear but rather coalesced like curds forming in cultured milk. The color shrank and gained density, becoming a great piebald bull that romped in a valley cleared so recently that smoke still curled from heaped brush. Tree stumps stood like grave markers for the forest which had covered the ground for millennia.
The bull's hide was white with a freckling, especially on the face and forequarters, of black and russet spots. Its horns curved sharply forward from above the beast's eyes, long and sharp and as black as the Devil's heart. The bull raised its short, powerful neck and bellowed to the sky while its hooves spaded clods from the loam.
The vision shattered. Spanish King was bellowing in fury, rattling the shakes with which the cabin was roofed. Old Nathan shivered back to present awareness, flinging out his arms to save him from toppling backward.
For an instant, the real soup plate trembling on the ground seemed as full of blood as the one which the cunning man had imagined.
King stamped through a narrow circle, feinting toward invisible foes. His own horns flared more broadly from his head than did those of the piebald giant in the vision, but Old Nathan would not have sworn that King's weapons were really longer from base to point.
The bull calmed, though with the restive calm of a high-mettled horse prepared to race. He paced back to the fence, raising his hooves high at each step, and demanded, "Where is he? Where is that one?"
Old Nathan stood, aiding himself with one hand on the nearest fencepost. Before answering, he stooped to pick up the soup plate and sluice the hairs and water from it. There was no trace of blood, only one drop spread through a pint. The cat had vanished again also, whether through whim, King's antics, or what he had seen Old Nathan conjure in the water.
"What in damnation!" shouted John Boardman as he burst through the back doorway of the cabin. His dog loped ahead of him and yapped, "A fight, is there a fight?"
"I don't know we want any truck with this, big feller," said the cunning man to his bull. Memory of the beast glimpsed on the newground was blurring already, but though the details faded, they left a core of brutal power that could not be forgotten.
"What in damn-nation are ye about?" the visitor repeated as he paused just outside the cabin. "I never in all my born days heard a bellerin' like thet!"
"Why, old man, I'll knock this poor farm t' flinders ifen you cross me!" roared Spanish King, and suited action to his words with a sweep of his head. Old Nathan jerked his hand away just in time. A horn struck the stout cedar fencepost and skewed it so badly from its socket in the soil that the top rails fell to the ground.
"God'n blazes!" cried the Boardman boy as he hopped back within the sturdy cabin.
"King, damn ye!" Old Nathan shouted as he slapped the bull hard on his flaring nostrils. "Did I say we'd not go? D'ye think I care ifen yer neck's broke fer yer foolishness?"
"Hmph!" snorted the bull as he calmed again. "See thet you're straight with me, old man." He walked away from the bedraggled fence, throwing his head back once over his powerful shoulder to repeat, "See thet you are."
No lack of damn fools in the world, thought the cunning man as he trudged back to the house and his visitor. Human damn fools and otherwise.
"Oh, there'll be a fight!" yelped the bitch in cheerful anticipation of carnage. She jumped up against Old Nathan from behind, the mud on her paws icy against the bare skin above his waistband. He swatted her away awkwardly, because the dog was to his left and he did not want to break the plate he carried in that hand. The bitch ran back to her master and smudged his fawn-colored waistcoat as he too tried to thrust her off.
"Here, damn ye, here," said Old Nathan to the dog in a coaxing voice as he knelt, embarrassed to have lost his temper with the animal. She sprang back to him, calming somewhat as he kneaded the fur over her shoulders and prevented her from jumping further.
Boardman walked forward again. "Well?" he said, fluffing back the tails of his coat with his hands behind him. The gold chain of his watch stood out in the sunlight, as did the muddy pawprints on his vest. "Well, what am I t' do?"
"Now hush," Old Nathan said firmly to the bitch. He rose to his full height, topping his visitor's average frame by a full hand's breadth.
"I kin make it so's ye kin plow yer newground," the cunning man went on. "If thet's what ye want. And the cost of it to you is a hundred minted dollars."
"What?" the younger man blurted, stepping back as if his bitch had leaped up in his face. "Why, I paid Bully Ransden only ten to clear it, and he thought himself paid well."
"I ain't sellin' ye forty acres, John Boardman," the cunning man replied with his jaw and black beard thrust out. "What I hev to offer is Sally Ann Hewitt, and whether er no she's a hundred dollars value is a question ye'll answer yerself."
"You think I cain't pay thet," the younger man said in flat anger, meeting Old Nathan's eyes.
"I think yer daddy kin," said the cunning man. "But it makes no matter to me, yea 'r nay."
"Then ye'll hev yer silver money," said his visitor. "Though I reckon you're humbug, and we'll hev that money back outen yer hide if ye fail us."
" 'Us,' " Old Nathan repeated with a sneer. "Oh, aye, you'd do wonders, boy. But I'll not fail."
In the pasture behind him, Spanish King bawled a challenge to the world.
* * *
When Old Nathan saw him, Bully Ransden was plowing on a hilltop a furlong from the road. Unlike horses, bulls have no certain gait between ambling and a panic rush, so the younger man easily had time to outspan his plow oxen and trot down the hill. He met Old Nathan and King in front of the cabin Ransden shared with a black-haired woman. The homeplace, where Ransden's mother still lived, was a quarter mile away on the far side of the acreage.
"So-o-o . . ." said Bully Ransden, arms akimbo and his legs spread to put one boot just within each of the road's single pair of wagon ruts. "Where d'ye think you wuz goin', old man?"
"You know me, Cullen Ransden," Old Nathan replied. He laid an arm over the neck of Spanish King and murmured, "Whoa, now, old friend, we'll have us t' drink and a bit uv rest here."
He was a fine figure to look at, was Bully Ransden. He stood as tall as Old Nathan and supported with his broad shoulders a bulk of muscle that the older man could never have matched at the height of his physical powers long decades before.
Ransden's long hair was bright blond, the sole legacy he had received from the father who had beaten the boy and the boy's mother indiscriminately . . . until the night the eleven-year-old Cullen proved that fury and an axe handle made him a better man than his father. The elder Ransden had bolted into the night, streaming blood and supplications, never to be seen since in the county.
Cullen Ransden had now spent a decade reinforcing the lesson he had taught himself that night: that his will and his strength would
gain him aught in the world that he wanted. All the county knew him as Bully, but no one as yet had shown that wisdom of his to be false.
"Oh, I know the humbug what skins fools worse'n a Yankee peddler," Ransden said in mock agreement.
He took a step forward and Old Nathan stepped also, halving the distance between them to little more than the reach of a fist. It was a dangerous choice, putting his back to the horns of Spanish King. If he did not step forward, however, it would look as though he were trying to shelter in the bull's strength—a challenge that Ransden would likely meet with a blow of his ox-driving whip to King's nose.
Besides, Old Nathan was as little willing to crouch away from trouble as the bull was, or Bully Ransden.
"Well, where's the water, then?" King grumbled as he sidled to the hitching post before Ransden's door and began rubbing his black hide on it.
"I'd thank'ee fer a bucket uv water, as the day's a hot'un," said the cunning man. His shirt of homespun wool, gray where it was dry, was black with sweat in the middle of the back and beneath his armpits. As he stood, he lifted his hat and fanned himself with it, smelling nervousness and anger in his own perspiration.
"Cull, what—" called a clear voice.
As both men turned to look over the back of Spanish King, a woman appeared at the open door of the cabin. She wore a gingham dress over a shift, and the body beneath was so youthfully taut that it had shape despite the loose garments. Her hair was black and might have fallen to her ankles had it not been caught up with pins and combs. Amazingly, it was clean and shone like strands of burnished metal when the sunlight past the edge of the porch touched it.
"Well," she continued, "what do we hev?"
"We got the liar as says he'll plow Boardman's newground when I couldn't," said Bully Ransden. He glanced back at the cunning man with the eye of a butcher for a hog squealing in the chute. "It's what he does, milk old women and boys with no more balls 'n old women."
"Ransden, leave this be afore—" Old Nathan began, his mind white with the fear of the thing Bully was about to say and what would come when he replied.