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

"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?"