The young woman was on the verge of tears again. “Fetch the mirror,” Old Nathan said gruffly. That gave her an excuse to turn away and compose herself as he proceeded with the preparations.
The words that the cunning man murmured under his breath were no more the spell than soaking yeast in water made a cake; but, like the other, these words were necessary preliminaries.
By its nature, the bullhead’s wrinkling corpse brought the flies he needed. The pair that paused momentarily to copulate may have been brought to the act by nature alone or nature aided by art. The cause didn’t matter so long as the necessary event occurred.
Old Nathan swept his right hand forward, skimming above the bullhead to grasp the mating pair unharmed within the hollow of his fingers. He looked sidelong to see whether the girl had noticed the quickness and coordination of his movement: he was an old man, right enough, but that didn’t mean he was ready for the knacker’s yard. . . .
He realized what he was doing and compressed his lips over a sneer of self-loathing. Durned old fool!
The flies blurred within the cunning man’s fingers like a pair of gossamer hearts beating. He positioned his fist over the lamp chimney, then released his captives carefully within the glass. For a moment he continued to keep the top end of the chimney covered with his palm; then Ellie slid a corncob under the cunning man’s hand to close the opening.
The flies buzzed for some seconds within the thin glass before they resumed their courtship.
The woman’s eyes narrowed as she saw what Old Nathan was doing with the bullhead, but she did not comment. He arranged the other items to suit his need before he looked up.
“I’ll be sayin’ some words, now,” he said. “Hit wouldn’t do ye airy good t’ hear thim, and hit might serve ye ill ifen ye said thim after me, mebbe by chance.”
Ellie Ransden’s mouth tightened at the reminder of the forces being brought to bear on the man she loved. “I reckon you know best,” she said. “I’ll stand off till ye call me.”
She stepped toward the cabin’s only door, then paused and looked again at Old Nathan. “These words you’re a-speakin’—ye found thim writ in books?”
He shook his head. “They’re things I know,” he explained, “the way I know . . .”
His voice trailed off. He’d been about to say, “—yer red hen’s pleased as pleased with the worm she jest grubbed up from the leaves,” but that wasn’t something he rightly wanted to speak, even to this girl.
“Anyhow, I just know hit,” he finished lamely.
Ellie nodded and walked out onto the porch of her cabin. “I’ll water yer mule,” she called. “Reckon he could use thet.”
The beast wheezed its enthusiastic agreement.
Old Nathan sang and gestured his way through the next stage of the preliminaries. His voice cracked and he couldn’t hold a key, but that didn’t seem to matter.
The cunning man wasn’t sure what did matter. When he worked, it was as if he walked into a familiar room in the dead dark of night. Occasionally he would stumble, but not badly; and he would always feel his way to the goal that he could not see.
He laid the bullhead inside the crotch of Ransden’s trousers.
In between snatches of verse—not English, and not any language to which he could have put a name—Old Nathan whistled. He thought of boys whistling as they passed through a churchyard; chuckled bitterly; and resumed whistling, snatches from Mossy Groves that a fiddler would have had trouble recognizing.
* * *
“How would ye like, my Mossy Groves,
T’ spend one night with me?”
* * *
Most of the life had by now crackled out of the extra stick of lightwood Ellie had tossed on the fire. Beyond the cabin walls, the night was drawing in.
The pair of trousers shifted on the table, though the air was still.
A familiar task; but, like bear hunting, familiarity didn’t remove all the danger. This wasn’t for Ellie, for some slip of a girl who loved a fool of a man. This was because Bully Ransden had issued a challenge, and because Old Nathan knew the worst that could happen to a man was to let fear cow him into a living death—