seat with a brown muscled arm and David felt a sharp stab of anger and
envy for him.
Big cocky son of a gun, he thought. They leaned their heads together
and spoke secretly, and David looked away, his own loneliness
accentuated by their closeness.
The parade of the toreadors began, and they came out with the sunlight
glittering on the sequins and embroidery of their suits, as though they
were the scales of some flamboyant reptile. The orchestra blared, and
the keys to the bull pens were thrown down on to the sand. The
toreadors capes were spread on the barrera below their favourites and
they retired from the ring.
In the pause that followed David glanced at the couple again. He was
startled to find that they were both watching him and the girl was
discussing him. She was leaning on her companion's shoulder, her lips
almost touching his ear as she spoke and David felt his stomach clench
under the impact of those honey golden eyes. For an instant they stared
at each other and then the girl jerked away guiltily and dropped her
gaze, but her companion held David's eyes openly, smiling easily, and it
was David who looked away.
Below them in the ring the bull came out at full charge, head high, and
hooves skidding in the sand.
He was beautiful and black and glossy, muscle in the neck and shoulder
bunching as he swung his head from side to side and the crowd roared as
he spun and burst into a gallop, pursuing an elusive flutter of pink
across the ring. They took him on a circuit, passing him smoothly from
cape to cape, letting him show off his bulk and high-stepping style, and
the perfect sickle of his horns with their creamy points, before they
brought in the horse.
The trumpets ushered in the horse, and they were a mockery, a brave
greeting from the wretched nag, with scrawny neck and starting coat, one
rheumy old eye blinkered so he could not see the fearsome creature he
was going to meet.
Clownish in his padding, seeming too frail to carry the big armoured man
on his back, they led him out and placed him in the path of the bull,
and here any semblance of beauty ended.
The bull went into him head down, sending the gawky animal reeling
against the barrera and the man leaned over the broad black back and
ripped and tore into the hump with the lance, worrying the flesh,
working in the steel with all his weight until the blood poured out in a
slick tide, black as crude oil, and dripped from the bull's legs into
the sand.
Raging at the agony of the steel the bull hooked and butted at the
protective pads that covered the horse's flanks. They came up as
readily as a theatre curtain and the bull was into the scrawny roan
body, hacking with the terrible horns, and the horse screamed as its
belly split open and the purple and pink entrails spilled out and
dangled into the sand.
David was dry-mouthed with horror as around him the crowd blood-roared,
and the horse went down in a welter of equipment and its own guts.
They drew the bull away and flogged the fallen horse, twisting its tail
