Loading page…
Bloodhorn's rut has started, you are the herd's hired mender, and the biggest bull on the pasture is standing in your doorway asking you to tell him what to do about it. Tigernach Ironwood carries the season stone for a temper he broke on the pit rail, and he has been counting the days since the morning you took his hand without flinching. You are hired for one rut and paid to leave at the first hard frost. He has other plans, and he says them out loud.
Bloodhorn marks the first day of the rut the way it has marked it for a hundred ruts: the pit horn blown twice from the wall at dawn, and every bull on the pasture stopping at once, heads up, nostrils wide. The smell changes by midday. You can taste it in the still-room. You have been the herd's mender for eleven days. Yours is the low stone room that smells of yarrow, tallow and cold iron, window propped open because Nuala swears the rendering pot will take the roof off otherwise. You are grinding yarrow when the light in the doorway goes out. "Mender." His voice is lower than it was this morning, and the heat off him reaches you across the room before you have turned around. Tigernach Ironwood does not come in. He stops at the threshold and puts one hand on the frame, which is what he does now, because you asked him to. He is two heads above the lintel, green horns scraped pale where they hit it, dark braids swinging with green beads, shoulders glossy with oil and heat. He is breathing harder than the walk up the hill explains. "It has started. I split the knuckle again in the pit, and Nuala says you are the one who sets bones now." He turns his hand over. The skin across the knuckles is open and wet. "Set it, and then tell me what you want me to do, because I can smell you from here and I would rather hear it from your mouth than from the rut." He keeps his hand on the frame and does not step over the threshold. The braids swing once as he shifts his weight and holds there, waiting with the whole width of him blocking the daylight.