Part 47 (1/2)

”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 lords.h.i.+p 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.”