David Drake - Old Nathan

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OLD NATHAN

David Drake

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely

coincidental.

thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original.

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, N.Y. 10471

ISBN: 0-671-72084-8

Cover art by Larry Elmore

A signed, numbered limited-edition print of the artwork is available from the

artist at Elmore Studios, P.O. Box 358, Leitchfield, KY 42754.

"The Bull" previously appeared in Whispers Magazine, Whole Number 23-34,

October 1987, edited by Stuart Schiff.

Schiff.

First printing, October 1991

Distributed by

SIMON & SCHUSTER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10020

Printed in the United States of America

DEDICATION

To my late friend

Manly Wade Hampton Wellman

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Among the people who made this book possible are my wife Jo; my parents, Earle

and Maxine Drake; Janet Morris; and Manly himself. My thanks to all of them.

THE BULL

The cat slunk in the door with angry grace and snarled to Old Nathan,

"Somebody's coming, and he's bringing a great blond bitch-dog with 'im." Then

he sprang up the wall, using a chink in the logs at the height of a man's head

to boost himself the last of the way to the roof trestle.

"She comes close t' me, I'll claw'er eyes out," muttered the hunching cat.

"See if I don't."

"Just keep your britches on," snapped Old Nathan as he rose from the table at

which he breakfasted on milk and mush.

Despite the chill of the morning, he wore only trousers tucked into his boot-

tops and held up by galluses. The hair of his head and bare chest was white

with a yellow tinge, but his raggedly cropped beard was so black that he could

pass for a man of thirty when he wore a slouch hat against the sun.

There was nothing greatly unusual about an old man's beard growing in dark;

but because he was Old Nathan the Cunning Man -- the man who claimed the Devil

was loose in the world but that he was the Devil's master -- that, too, was a

matter for fear and whispering.

Even as Nathan stepped to the door, he heard the clop of shod hooves carefully

negotiating his trail. The cat hadn't mentioned the visitor was mounted; but

the cat made nothing of the difference between someone on foot who hoped to

barter for knowledge, and a horseman in whose purse might jingle silver.

Spanish King smelled the visitors and snorted in the pasture behind Old

Nathan's cabin. A man or a dog was beneath the notice of the huge bull, save

on those days when the motion of even a sparrow was sufficient to draw his

fury. A horse, though, was of a size to be considered a potential challenger.

King wasn't afraid of challenge, or of anything walking the earth. The blat of

sound from his nostrils simply staked his claim to lordship over all who heard

him.

The horse, a well-groomed bay gelding, stutter-stepped sideways, almost

unseating his rider, and whickered, "No, I'm not goin' close to that. D'ye

hear how mean he is?"

"Damn ye, Virgil!" shouted the rider as he hauled on the reins. The gelding's

head came around, but his body continued to slide away from the cabin.

"Now jist calm down!" Nathan snapped as he stepped onto the porch. "That bull,

he's fenced, and he wouldn't trifle with you noways if he got a look. Set

quiet and I might could find a handful uv oats t' feed you."

"Hmph!" snorted the horse. "And what'd you know?" But he settled enough to let

his rider dismount and loop the reins around the hitching rail pegged to the

porch supports.

"I find speakin' with 'em helps the beasts behave, sometimes," said Old

Nathan, truthfully enough, to the man who watched him in some puzzlement and

more pure fear. He didn't know the fellow, not truly, but from his store-

bought clothes and the lines of his smooth-shaven face he had to be kin to

Newt Boardman. "Reckon you're a Boardman?" the cunning man prompted.

"There's a cat here, too," said the shaggy, blond-haired dog who had ambled

out of the woods to intersect with the more deliberate horse at the porch

rail. The dog sniffed the edge of the puncheon step to the porch and wagged

her tail.

"I'm John Boardman, that's a fact," said the visitor with a hardening of his

face muscles that made him look even younger. "But I'm here on my own account,

not my daddy's."

Old Nathan knelt and held out the clenched knuckles of his right hand for the

dog to sniff. "You leave the cat alone and we'll be fine, hear me?" he said to

the bitch firmly.

"Sure, they're not the fun uv squirrels t' chase nohow," the dog agreed.

The old man stared at the visitor. Boardman's ramrod stiffness gilded the fear

it tried to conceal.

"Scared to death, that one," said the dog and licked the offered knuckles.

"Come in and set, then, John Boardman," Old Nathan said with enough of a pause

that his visitor could see there had been one. "I got coffee."

The coffee boiled on the coals in an enameled iron pot. Old Nathan had roasted

the green beans in his frying pan the night before and had ground them at dawn

when he rose. He lifted the pot's wire handle with a billet of lightwood while

the dog padded in quickly to snuffle the interior of the cabin and the

Boardman boy followed more gingerly.

"I will claw yer eyes out!" shrieked the cat from the roofbeam, reaching down

with one hooked paw in a pantomime of intention.

"Bag it, now, damn ye!" snarled Old Nathan from the chimney alcove, twisting

to face the cat and add the weight of his glare to his tone, as savage as that

of the animal itself.

The cat subsided, muttering. Boardman's bitch slurped water from the tub in

the corner of the single room and curled herself beside the rocking chair.

Five china cups with a blue pattern about the rim rested upside down on the

mantlepiece. Boardman got a hold of himself enough to fetch two of the cups

down so that the older man did not have to straighten to get them. They were

neither chipped nor cracked, and the visitor said approvingly, "Fine as we

have at home," as he watched Old Nathan pour.

"Fine as your daddy has," Old Nathan corrected. He gestured Boardman toward

the straight chair, near the table which still held the remains of breakfast.

He himself took the rocker and reached down absently to stroke the dog's fur

with his long knobby fingers.

Boardman seated himself on the front of the chair like a child preparing for

an interrogation with a whipping at the end of it. "I thought you didn't like

dogs," he ventured with a doubtful glance at his bitch, lifting to nuzzle the

hand that rumpled her fur. "I'd heard that."

"Don't doubt ye heard worse damned nonsense 'n that about me," Old Nathan

replied, his green eyes slitting and the coffee cup frozen an inch short of

his lips. "I don't choose t' eat red meat nor keep it in the house. That 'un"

-- he lifted his black beard to the cat, now licking his belly fur on the beam

with all his foreclaws extended -- "fetches his own, as a dog would not . . .

so I don't keep a dog."

All that was the truth, and it concealed the greater truth that Old Nathan

would no more have hunted down the animals he talked with than he would have

waylaid human travellers and butchered them for his larder. There were fish in

good plenty, with milk, grains, and his garden. Enough for him, enough for any

man, though others could go their own way and the cat -- the cat would go the

way of his kind, in grinning slaughter as natural as the fall of rain from

heaven.

"Hit may be," the old man continued as he sipped his coffee, hot and bitter

and textured with floating grounds, "thet ye've come fer yer curiosity and no

business uv mine. In sich case, boy, you'll take yerself off now before the

toe t' my boot helps ye."

"I have business with ye," Boardman said, setting his cup on the table so

sharply that the fluid sloshed over the rim. "You may hev heard I'm fixin' to

be married?"

"I may and I may not," said Old Nathan, rocking slowly. He wasn't as much a

part of the casual gossip of the community as most of those settled

hereabouts, but when folk came to consult him he heard things from their

hearts which a spouse of forty years would never learn. He recalled being told

that Sally Ann Hewitt, the storekeeper's daughter from Advance, was being

courted by rich Newt Boardman's boy among others. "Say on, say on."

"Sally Ann wouldn't have a piece from my daddy's cleared land," said the boy,

confirming the name of the girl -- and also confirming the intelligence and

strength of character Old Nathan had heard ascribed to Hewitt's daughter. "So

I set out to clear newground, the forty acres in Big Bone Valley, and I did

that."

"Hired that done," said Old Nathan, rocking and sipping and scratching the

dog.

"Hired Bully Ransden and his yoke uv oxen to help me," retorted Boardman, "fer

ten good silver dollars -- and where's the sin uv thet?"

"Honest pay fer honest work," agreed Old Nathan, turning his hand to knuckle

the dog's fur. Ridges of callus bulged at the base of each finger and in the

web of his palm. "No sin at all."

"So I fixed to plant a crop afore raisin' the cabin, and in the Fall we'd be

wed," the boy continued. "Only my horses, they wouldn't plow. Stood in the

traces and shivered, thin they'd bolt."

Boardman tried a sip of his coffee and grimaced unconsciously.

"There's milk," his host offered with a nod toward the pitcher on the table

beside the bowl of mush. "If ye need sweetnin', I might could find a comb uv

honey."

"This here's fine," the boy lied and swallowed a mouthful of the coffee. He

blinked. "Well," he continued, "I hired Bully Ransden t' break the ground,

seein's he'd cleared it off. But his oxen, they didn't plow but half a furrow

without they wouldn't move neither, lash'em though he did. So he told me he

wouldn't draw the plow himself, and best I get another plot uv ground, for

what his team wouldn't do there was no other on this earth thet could."

"Did he say thet, now?" said the cunning man softly. "Well, go on, boy. Hev

you done thet? Bought another track uv land?"

"Sally Ann told me," said Boardman miserably to his coffee cup, "thet if I

wasn't man enough to plow thet forty acres, I wasn't man enough t' marry her.

And so I thought I'd come see you, old man, that mayhap there was a curse on

the track as you could lift."

Old Nathan said nothing for so long that his visitor finally raised his eyes

to see if the cunning man were even listening. Old Nathan wore neither a smile

nor a frown, but there was nothing in his sharp green eyes to suggest that he

was less than fully alert.

"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.

There 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 iffen 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 iffen 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.

"Ye know, Ellie," Bully Ransden continued, still astraddle the center of the

path, "his own balls, they wuz shot off by the Redcoats at New Or-leens."

"Did your mother tell you that, Cullen Ransden?" Old Nathan said softly. His

skin formed layers, hot and prickly on the outside while the inner surface

froze against his flesh as hard as the ice on which Satan shivered in Hell.

"And did she tell ye besides how thet came t' be her business?"

The younger man could have been blasted by a thunderbolt without the hair

prickling up more sharply on his head and arms. He struck with the suddenness

of reflex and the skill of long years' practice with the blacksnake whip in

his hand.

It was a measure of what lay at Ransden's core that the target his instinct

chose was the ton of muscle that was Spanish King rather than the sparse old

man who looked unable to stand the very wind of a blow.

The whip, long enough to drive a team of four span, curled out and around Old

Nathan as if it were really the snake its braided leather mimicked. Ransden

could flick a fly from an oxen's ear without touching the beast itself, but

this time he aimed to cut. The crackling end of the whip touched Spanish King

at the base of the tail, where the hair gave way to the bare skin of the

bull's anus.

Rather than bolting like a startled cow or an

ox broken to the whip and yoke, Spanish King reacted as a predator might have.

The bull spun, questing for the presumed horsefly with a clop of his square

incisors. Old Nathan ducked and lurched sideways to avoid the bull's sweeping

horns. The four-inch hickory hitching post that Spanish King swatted in the

other direction with his haunches broke off even with the ground and clubbed

Ellie on its way to thudding against the cabin's log forewall.

King danced back, hooves splaying, as his eyes searched for the horsefly which

had escaped him at the first attempt. "When I find her!" the bull bellowed,

referring to the horsefly. "When I find her!" His tail lashed. Blood welling

from the whip-cut began to dribble along the appendage in dark red streaks.

As the old man and the woman sprawled, Bully Ransden dropped his whip. He

lunged for the porch but had to back hastily away as Spanish King stepped

between, tossing his head over either of his shoulders in turn.

The cunning man took a pinch of dust between his right thumb and forefinger as

he lay on his opposite hand and hip. "Ransden!" he called.

* * *

The younger man glanced instinctively toward his name. Old Nathan blew the

dust at his face, though at four yards distance none could actually have

reached the Bully. He sprang back anyway and fell, clutching his eyes and

shouting, "I'm blind, damn ye!"

The cunning man scrambled to his feet, sweeping up the hat he had dropped in

dodging. His bull was pacing smartly down the road, striding at a rate half

again that of his normal walk. He kept switching his tail and looking behind

him, searching for the horsefly he was still convinced had stabbed him.

Old Nathan followed the bull at a rate just enough short of a trot to save his

dignity. Ransden was up on his feet, thrusting his arms out before him as he

stumbled in the direction of his cabin.

"Ellie?" he called, his voice rising in fear on the second syllable. He would

regain his sight within minutes, perhaps less, but all he could know for the

moment was that his eyes felt as if they had been plucked out and their

sockets filled with sand.

Ransden's black-haired woman was gripping the doorjamb with one hand to help

pull herself upright, while the other hand clamped against her side where the

hickory post had struck. Under other circumstances, Old Nathan might have

helped her -- but under other circumstances, King wouldn't have bolted, and

the cunning man had no wish to be present when Bully Ransden found he could

see again.

For that matter, there were men not so touchy as the Bully who would sooner

see their woman die than watch another man lay hands on her. The couple would

do well enough without the cunning man's ministrations, and Old Nathan himself

would do far better by getting out of the way.

The road curved, skirting the base of the hill which Ransden had been plowing,

so by the time Old Nathan caught up with his bull they were out of sight of

the cabin. A creek, nameless and at present shallow, notched the road and

Spanish King stood there fetlock-deep in the water, drinking. He ignored the

cunning man's approach.

There was no ford proper, since the stream could be stepped across at any

point save when it was in spate -- and then it became uncrossable for its full

length. The steep banks were a barrier to most beasts and all vehicles, so

here, where the road crossed, they had been trampled down by use with little

intention toward the road's long-term improvement.

Rather than squelch through the mud into which the main path had been churned,

Old Nathan gripped the stem of one of the mimosas which grew as thick as a

man's arm. He lowered himself cautiously down the bank to the smooth-washed

stones of the streambed. Only then did King look up at him and grunt, "Well?"

from lips that still slobbered the water he had been drinking.

There was neither anger nor skittishness in the bull's tone. He had forgotten

the whip-cut or filed it at the almost instinctual level which warned that

horseflies bit like coals from the floor of Hell.

Bully Ransden would likely be less forgetful about the incident, but not even

hindsight offered the cunning man a view of a more desirable resolution.

Ransden could be a bad enemy, if he chose; but so could Old Nathan, the

Devil's Master. Perhaps the boy would let bygones be bygones.

"Come on, thin, big feller," said the cunning man, embracing the bull's humped

shoulders before readjusting the slung panniers holding a day's food for both

of them. "Savin' ye'd rather go back home thin go on with all this?"

"Humph!" Spanish King snorted. He gathered himself and sprang lightfootedly

out of the stream, his forehooves planted solidly on the bank top and his hind

legs crossing them neatly in the same motion, like the feet of a horse at a

gallop. "I'll fight that one. Sure as the sun rises."

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摘要：

OLDNATHANDavidDrakeThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright(c)1991byDavidDrakeAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginal.BaenPublishing...

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David Drake - Old Nathan

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