Travellers #2 Read Online Free Page B

aspossible. A few animals broke and ran, but the dogs followed my orders. Het led the others to round them up, while Jak and Jess sprang into the dark and bailed up the monster. Beneath the dogs’ snarls, the bray changed to a blubbering shriek.
    Fresh wood on to the fire. The torch ready, a brand of resinous wood frayed so it ignited as I thrust it into the embers. I held it above my head.
    Down in the Whykatto Cave, before each Journey began, we used to see the Animals’ Dance: the Stag Man, the Ram, the Goat, and we saw many others, the animals that had vanished, some without names, some with names like the Boar Man, the Horse, and the Bull Man. Through the smoke swirl, the leaping light from the torch, that was what I saw now. Struggling, kicking on the ground, a man as far up as the waist, with a slabbed bull’s chest, shoulders, and horned head above. The Bull Man. Beside him lay a huge curved trumpet made from a horn, a wooden mouthpiece at its narrow tip.
    The Animals’ Dance had been the signal for the beginning of the Journey, time for us to close the Cave, strike tents, and cross the Narrower Ford of the Whykatto River. And here was the Bull Man, one of the Gods of the Travellers, down on his back, the dogs worrying at his throat, slashing the heavy folds of skin like a cape.
    “Ah! Ah!” the Bull Man groaned, legs thrashing. “Ah! Ah!” he blubbered, a throaty unformed roar. “Ah! Ah!” the bellow diminished to a terrified wet cry.
    The dogs came off reluctant, rumbling in their throats, lips still drawn up and back, ravening for blood. The monster lay and shook and blubbered that wet sound. I took the cape low down, tugged upwards, and skinned it off, hide and head, like a mask. Under the bull’s head and horns, under the folded skin of its great shoulders and dewlapped neck lay the upper body of a man twisting on the ground,blubbering, mouth open, dribbling, crying, “Ah! Ah!” both terrified and laughing, all at once.
    What made me do it, I still don’t know. I fingered the green stone fish at my neck and laughed, too! My mind was full of memories of the Bull Man in the Animals’ Dance, full of last night’s terror at the bellow, full of our combined fear of the unknown. Yet I laughed. Jak and Jess joined, open-mouthed, white teeth flashing. Frolicking around me. Laughing, all of us. And the Bull Man, stripped of pelt and mask, bellowing, slobbering, laughing loudest of all.
    A tall, heavy man, he sat up, shaking his ponderous head that hung forward off his great neck. The bull’s mask, its head and horns, draped its empty cape beside him. When I took up the great horn and blew in its mouthpiece, a grunt came out, and the Bull Man laughed himself helpless, a shout of a laugh.
    As he opened his mouth wider, laughed louder, deeper, as I laughed with him, and the dogs leapt around us both, I saw somebody had torn out his tongue, so his voice came out in that unformed bellow, a booming slobber, even as he laughed. I saw that awful stump and fell silent until he looked at my eyes in the flames of the torch and was silent, too.
    We led him to the closed-in gully, sat him by the fire, and offered food, some dried fish. He tried a little, thanking me with the bawled rough notes from throat and chest, chewed a fragment, then stood and beckoned. With the torch I followed him, Jak and Jess, one each side. He led to the end of the grassy flat above the river, to a dark slot hidden there, the entry to a cave. He gestured to wait, disappeared, and returned carrying a large pot of fresh milk, neither goats’ nor sheep’s, a bundle of herbs, and a piece of cheese.
    Back at the fire, the animals gathered around, the goats jostling to watch, curious. The Bull Man put the dried fish in a cooking pot, added some of his milk, the herbs andcheese, and heated it. Some of the herbs I recognised, most were strange.
    I spooned the fish from the pot, delicious, much better than on its own. The Bull Man, enjoyed the