"I"d hit them two hard licks," I said. "n.o.body puts a hand on my guitar but just me myself."
"Then take it with you, yonder to the fire. Go to the fire, John."
One hand pointed a finger at me, the other pointed to the fire. It blazed high up the chimney. Wood had come into it, without a hand to move it there. It shot up long, fierce, bright tongues of flame. The floor of h.e.l.l was what it looked like.
"Look on it," Becky Til Hoppard bade me again. "I can send you into it. I made my wish before," and her voice half-sang. "I make it now. I nair saw the day that the wish I made was not true."
That was a kind of spell. I had a sense that hands pushed me. I couldn"t see them, but I could feel them.
I made another step into the hot, hot air of the hearth. I was come right next to her, with her bright green eyes watching me.
"Yes," she sang. "Yes, yes."
"Yes," I said after her, and pushed the silver strings of my guitar at her face.
She screamed once, shrill and sharp as a bat, and her head fell over to the side, all the way over and hung there, and she went slack where she sat.
For I"d guessed right about her. Her neck was broken; her head wasn"t fast there, it just balanced there.
And she sank lower, and the flames of the fire came pouring out at us like red-hot water. I fairly scuttled away toward the door, the locked door, and the door sprang itself open.
I was caught behind the door as Hoppard and his son Herod came a-shammocking in, and after them his daughter Tullai. As they came, that fire jumped right out of its hearth into the room, onto the floor, all round where Becky Til Hoppard sunk in her chair.
"Becky!" one of them yelled, or all of them. And by then I was through the door. I grabbed up my pack as I headed out into the open. Behind me, something sounded like a blast of powder. I reached the head of the trail going down, and gave a lookback, and the cabin was spitting smoke from the door and the windows.
That was it. Becky Til Hoppard ruled the fire. When her rule came to an end, the fire ran wild. I scrambled down, down from that height.
I wondered if they all burnt up in that fire. I nair went back to see. And I don"t hear that anybody by the Hoppard name has been seen or heard tell of thereabouts.
OLD NATHAN.
David Drake
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 b.i.t.c.h-dog with "im." Then he sprang up the wall, using a c.h.i.n.k 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 pa.s.s 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?"
"d.a.m.n 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 s.h.a.ggy, 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 b.i.t.c.h 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, d.a.m.n 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 k.n.o.bby 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 b.i.t.c.h, lifting to nuzzle the hand that rumpled her fur. "I"d heard that."
"Don"t doubt ye heard worse d.a.m.ned 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 b.i.t.c.h, 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 b.i.t.c.h 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 b.i.t.c.h. "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.