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Awake, and purified, he dreamed of the bulls. But then came the voice.
    “Father, you must come.” The voice was high and piping, almost squeaky with nervousness. Or perhaps fear. The Keeper of the Bulls tried to think clearly through his shock, his anger that the boy would be foolish and disrespectful enough even to come to this place, which he had no right to see. At least the child had waited until the chant was complete. He understood that much of the ritual, although he could not take his place among the workers in the cave until he had grown to manhood and killed his beast. He was a good boy, the Keeper of the Bulls thought proudly, always scratching shapes and drawings in the mud with a stick, born to the work. “The women …” the boy squeaked on. “It’s Mother.”
    “Go,” shouted the Keeper of the Bulls, his anger suddenly overcoming his concern that the birth was going badly. “I cannot come now. I am purified. I must do my work. I will come after.”
    He heard a scurrying down in the rocks, and suddenly saw the boy’s back as he ran downhill toward the fire close to the river where the women gathered. Childbirth so often went ill. This was his second wife, who had given him two sons since his first wife died in childbirth. Now perhaps he might be able to take another. He turned and marched solemnly to the cave, ducking under the low roof of the entrance, and then standing motionless while his eyes became accustomed to the darkness. There were too many poles supporting the scaffolding to risk blundering ahead until his eyes adjusted to the light of the small lamps with their wicks of juniper. He heard the scuffling above him of other painters, crouched on the scaffolding as they worked, and the first sight that came to him clearly was the Keeper of the Horses, the other priest whose work he most admired after his own. The Keeper of the Horses had a young daughter, who would soon be old enough to wed. A girl, young and fresh, and awed by his status as the Keeper of the Bulls. He smiled to himself as his sight improved and the head of the greatest of the bulls began to emerge in the dim light of the lamps.
    This was his work, the commemoration of the bulls. And he studied as if for the first time his greatest achievement—the way he had caught movement and a sense of distance by varying the shape of the horns. The farther horn was always a simple curve. The nearer horn began the same way, but then toward the tip he changed the line of the curve, almost reversing it, so that the head appeared suddenly to be moving, to be portrayed not simply in profile like the deer and horses always were but as great beasts that might almost be charging out into the cave itself. He sighed in satisfaction, and nodded gravely as he looked down to the last work he had done, on the chest of the bull when it sank to the forelegs.
    Yes, it had worked. Just as the different shape of the horns had seemed to turn the bull’s head toward him, so the separation of the forelegs maintained the effect. The rear foreleg thrust out forward, at a down-sloping angle to show that the bull was moving. Then before he began sketching the front foreleg he had drawn thickly the deep sagging muscle of the lower chest. Then the foreleg itself, marked off from the chest and belly by pure white space, to make the leg stand out and seem almost to move. It was perfect. Every trick that he had learned here, in the months and years in the semidarkness of the cave, they were all coming to fruition with this bull. It moved, and its movement was not simply forward but at an angle.
    “This is the greatest of your work,” said the Keeper of the Horses. He was standing easily on the scaffolding, each foot braced on a different pole, as he worked in the curve where the cave wall sank to become the wall. He was close to the head of the great bull, sketching lightly in the place between the two horns. “I shall pay tribute to your work with my own.”
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