Slowly, Moe came through the doorway. Above, on a platform inside the
barrier, stood a gray-haired man who stuck identifying, streamered darts
into bovine shoulders. His hand swept down, carrying Stonecypher's
chosen colors, black.
Moe's walk upset the man's timing. His arm moved too soon. Moe's front
hooves left the ground. Horns hooked. The gray-haired man screamed and
dropped the dart. With a spike of horn through his arm, between bone and
biceps, he gyrated across the barrier. He screamed a second time before
cloven hooves slashed across his body.
The crowd inhaled, then cheered the unprecedented entrance. Killer
Fergus's team stood rigid, not comprehending. Then men dashed through
shielded openings in the barrier, yelling and waving pink and yellow
capes to draw the bull from his victim.
Moe ignored the distraction, trotted nonchalantly to the center of the
ring, and turned his bulging head to examine the spectators jabbering at
his strange appearance. The short horns, the round skull, the
white-banded eyes, the mane that seemed slightly purple under the cloudy
sky, and the exaggerated slope from neck to rump that made the hind legs
too short--together they amounted to a ton of muscle almost like a bull.
"Where'd you trap it, Oswell?" someone near the ringmaster's box yelled.
Forgetting the mess Illard had made with the previous bull, the crowd
commented. "It's the last of the bison!"
"He's poiple! Lookit! Poiple!"
"The bull of the woods!"
"Howya like 'im, Fergus?"
Killer Fergus posed behind the barrier and studied his specialty, an odd
bull. Two stickers, Neel and Tomas, flourished capes to test the bull's
charge, with Neel chanting, "Come on, bull! Come on, bull! Come on!
Bull, bull, bull!"
Moe did not charge. He moved, in a speculative walk, toward the chanting
Neel who tantalized with the cape and retreated with shuffling steps.
The charge, when it came, occurred almost too fast for sight. Neel
wriggled on the horns, struck the sand, and the horns lifted him again.
He smashed against the barrier. Tomas threw his cape over the bull's
face. The left horn pinned the cape to Tomas's naked chest over the
heart.
Moe retired to the center of the ring and bellowed at the crowd, which,
delirious from seeing human blood, applauded. Blood covered Moe's horns,
dripped through the long hair on his neck, and trickled down between his
eyes.
Quavering helpers removed the bodies. The first lancer, livid and
trembling, rode a blindfolded horse into the ring. "He'll fix this
horse!" the crowd slavered. "We'll see guts this time!"
Moe charged. The lancer backed his mount against the barrier and gripped
his weapon, a stout pike. Sand sprayed like water as Moe swerved. On the
left side of the horse, away from the menacing pike, Moe reared. The
lancer left the saddle. A tangle of naked limbs thrashed across the
wooden fence and thudded against the wall of the stands.
Twenty-five thousand people held their breaths. The blindfolded horse
waited with dilated nostrils and every muscle vibrating in terror. Moe
produced a long red tongue and licked the horse's jaw.
Fergus dispersed the tableau. Red-haired, lean, and scarred with many
past gorings, the popular killer stalked across the sand dragging his
cape and roaring incomprehensible challenges. In the stands, the cheer
leaders of the Fergus Fanclub lead a welcoming yell. "Yeaaaa, Fergus!
Fergus! Fergus! Rah, rah, rah!"
Moe wandered through the helpers trying to distract him from the horse
and looked at the killer. Fergus stamped his foot, shook the cape, and
called, "Bull! Come on! Charge!" Moe completely circled the killer, who
retired in disgust when another lancer rode into the ring. "Stick him
good!" Fergus directed.
The pike pointed at the great muscles of Moe's back, as the bull
charged. Moe's head twisted in a blur of violence. Teeth clamped on the
shaft behind the point. Too surprised to let go, the lancer followed his
weapon from the saddle. He released his hold when Moe walked on him.
Like some fantastic dog stealing a fresh bone, the bull trotted around
the ring, tail high and pike in mouth. The crowd laughed. Wild-eyed men
carried out the trampled lancer.
A third, and extremely reluctant, lancer reined his horse through the
gate. A pike in the mouth of a ton of beef utterly unnerved the man. He
stood in the saddle and jumped over the barrier where a rain of rotten
eggs from the booing fans spattered him thoroughly.
* * * * *
An uninjured bull pawed alone in the sand when the trumpet recording
announced the end of the lancers' period. The crowd noises softened to a
buzz of speculation, questions, and comment, as the realization that
weird events had been witnessed slowly penetrated that collective mind.
The bull had not touched a horse, no pike had jabbed the bull, and five
men had been killed or injured.
"Great Government!" a clear voice swore, "That ain't no bull, it's a
monster!" This opinion came from a sticker in Illard's team. Fergus
attempted to persuade the man to help, since both of Fergus's stickers
were dead. Part of the crowd agreed with the sticker's thought, for
people began moving furtively to the exits with cautious glances at the
animal in the ring. They, of course, could not know that the bull had
been trained, with rubber-tipped pikes and dummies, in every phase of
the bullfight; that he knew the first, and only, law of staying alive in
the ring, "Charge the man and not the cloth."
The clouds that had obscured the sky all day formed darker masses tinted
with pink to the east, and the black dot of a turkey buzzard wheeled
soaring in the gloom. Carrying, in either hand, a barbed stick sparkling
with plastic streamers, Fergus walked into the ring. His assistants
cautiously flanked him with capes.
[Illustration]
Moe dropped the pike and charged in the approved manner of a bull.
Fergus raised the sticks high and brought them down on the humped back,
although the back was not there. The sticks dropped in the sand.
As the killer leaped aside in the completion of a reflex action, a horn
penetrated the seat of his trunks. The Fergus Fanclub screamed while
their hero dangled in ignominy from the horn. Moe ignored the flapping,
frantic capes. The killer gingerly gripped a horn in either hand and
tried to lift himself off. Gently, Moe lowered his head and deposited
the man beside an opening. Fergus scrabbled to safety like a rat to a
hole.
Four helpers with capes occupied the ring. When they saw death
approaching on cloven hooves, two of them cleared the fence. The third
received a horn beside his backbone and tumbled into the fourth. A dual
scream, terrible enough to insure future nightmares, echoed above the
screeching of the crowd. Moe tossed the bodies again and again across
the bloody sand.
Silence slithered over the Highland Bullring and over a scene
reminiscent of the ring's bloody parent, the Roman Arena. Men sprawled
gored, crushed, and dead across the sand. A section of the blood-specked
barrier leaned splintered and cracked, almost touching the concrete
wall. Unharmed, Fergus stood on one side of the battleground, Illard on
the other.
Fergus reached over the wooden fence for red flag and sword. Turning his
back on the heaving Moe, who stood but ten feet behind, the killer faced
the quaking flesh that was Ringmaster Oswell, high up in the official
box. The killer's voice shook, but the bitter satire came through the
sound of departing boats and aircraft. Fergus said, "I dedicate this
bull to Ringmaster Oswell who has provided for us this great Dependence
Day Bullfight in honor of the Great Government on which we all depend."
He turned and faced the bull.
Moe, for once, rushed the red flag, the only thing that made bullfights
possible. His great shoulders presented a fair target for the sword.
Fergus, perhaps the only bull-fighter ever to be gored in the brain,
died silently. The sword raked a shallow gash long Moe's loin.
In the sixth tier of the stands, saliva drooled from the slack mouth of
the little man seated beside Stonecypher. "Now's your chance, Illard!"
the man squalled. "Be a hero! The last of the bullfighters! Kill him,
Illard!"
Illard walked on shaking legs over bodies he did not see. He was short,
for a killer, and growing bald. He picked up the sword Fergus had
dropped, looked into the gory face of the bull, and toppled in the
sticky sand. The sword quivered point-first beside his body.