"David Drake - Old Nathan (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

The waste that was Boardman's newground was three furlongs in length, valley head to valley foot. Old
Nathan, tramping beside King, could see the other bull before they had covered a quarter of that
distance. It was the piebald brute he had scryed in the plate of water, pacing toward them as they
approached him.

"Big 'un," muttered Spanish King. "Well, we'll show 'im."

"Run, little one!" roared the strange bull. "I've crushed your like into the stone beneath this clay!"

The piebald bull was a match in size for King, but they were not twins. The stranger was higher at the
shoulder than the black bull, and the difference was in the length of his legs as well as his pronounced
hump. His horns thrust forward where King's spread widely, and they were as black and wicked as the
creature's eyes.

"Well, reckon I kin take 'im," Spanish King murmured.

He paused a hundred feet short of the piebald stranger and lashed his tail vertical, then down again as
sharply as a railroad semaphore. "You walk on my earth!" bellowed Spanish King, and he launched
himself toward his rival at a trot that snatched him away from the supportive touch of Old Nathan.

The stranger's roar and the hammer of his hooves shook the sunstruck clay. The bulls met head to head,
with no more finesse than icebergs grinding together in the swell of Ocean. Both of them recoiled onto
their haunches, the thud of their foreheads overlaid by the sharper clack of the horns striking against one
another.

The piebald bull, the aurochs, bellowed with the wild fury of which the Biblical prophets had spoken. He
shook himself and got his hindquarters solidly beneath him again by pivoting to his left around his firmly
planted forelegs. He snorted angrily, tossed his head, and lunged again at his rival.

Spanish King's hooves shoveled deep into the clay with his effort, but nonetheless he was marginally
slower than the piebald beastтАФand a battle of this sort had narrow margins. King twisted to face the
aurochs, but he did not have his hind legs anchored when their horns clashed again. He went down, his
left flank skidding on the ground.
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The piebald bull trumpeted victory and surged forward, very nearly losing the battle in that moment.

When Spanish King went down, he and the aurochs pivoted around their locked horns. King's left horn
was so long that it touched the piebald bull between his shoulder and the base of his neck. When the
stranger advanced, it was by impaling himself on the cruel point.

Blatting in shock and pain, the aurochs stumbled backward. The black bull scrambled up and followed,
snorting deep breaths through nostrils which were already flared to their widest extent. Six inches of the
left horn were blood-smeared, and the blood dripping down the aurochs' right shoulder was richer and
brighter than the orange clay on King's black flank.