There were men and women of the Stone Kingdom in Atahlan, in some numbers. They came to work, and they stayed because they were paid well and valued. They were craftsmen and quarrymen, whose understanding of the moods and movements of stone was unparalleled. Moreover, they were the arm of the Kasra: foreigners without ties to any of the great clans, they made perfect enforcers of the laws. Recruiting the Stone men to be the shield and the sword of the Sun River Nation’s ruler was an old tradition. In return, the Snake priests had made their way even into the Stone halls, conquering ancient enmities with cunning words.
All of which was relevant to Asmander’s purpose for one reason: this outside force, these spears hired from beyond the Nation’s borders, would be a key factor in what happened next. And for all he hoped desperately that the near future would be one of peace succeeding peace, he did not believe it.
Hence his mission to the north, and he was not alone. Even as his prince, his beloved Tecuman, sent out trusted men such as Asmander, so there would be others . . .
When there was enough wood for a good fire, the whole travelling party clustered about it, and the chief entertainment then was telling stories. Everyone took their turn. The Horse told stories about far places, everywhere but their own home. So it was that one would tell a tale of the Crown of the World, how some hero tricked the sun into returning, and yet offended it so that it would always go away again. Another would tell some familiar Riverlands myth, or perhaps there would be a complex, badly remembered history of the Oldest Kingdom and the coming of the Pale Shadow People, a myth Asmander had heard recounted far better by the Snake priests.
When his own turn came, he felt embarrassed. He was no great storyteller: his voice would always go dry, and he forgot key parts of the tale, so that the whole made no sense. When he had demurred enough, and everyone else – Venater and Shyri too – had made it plain he had no choice, he had lamely fallen back on one of the old children’s stories, about the Crocodile and the Serpent. He muddled through it, how Serpent had come to the river and sought passage on Old Crocodile’s back, and been refused three times. Who, after all, would carry a venomous reptile willingly? Here, Asmander found himself mimicking his long-ago tutors, bringing their expressions and gestures to life, sparking smiles from his audience. Simpler tales for simpler times, he thought. At the last, of course, Old Crocodile is tricked into carrying Serpent across anyway, and when he gets to the far side he’s very surprised that the snake has not bitten him. More, Serpent has guided him to a new place where the herds come to drink. And so Old Crocodile learned to trust Serpent’s guidance, just as Serpent had trusted his strength. Asmander thought he had done quite a good job of the telling, for all it was just a fable for the very young. When he had been that young, the world had seemed fit for such simplistic tales.
What will they tell about us, after we are gone?
After that, Venater wanted to give a blood-and-butchery retelling of some act of pointless villainy, but Asmander elbowed him sharply, and instead another of the Horse told a midnight story of the Old Kingdom – the great dominion of the Stone People – and how it had been eaten away from the inside by the Rat Cult, by poison and disease, and of the ruins still standing today where none would dare go again.
‘I’ve seen them,’ Shyri declared at the end of that, when everyone was pleasantly frightened by the idea of terrible things done far away. ‘I’ve been there.’
That seemed to be in bad taste as far as the Horse were concerned, but she had a smug look on her face that said the Laughing Men did not care about the taboos of others. ‘They are close to here. We will pass through their Shadow before we reach the north. If you were brave, any of you, you could follow me up there and see where the Rat gnawed the bones of kings.’ She was grinning fiercely at their discomfort, plainly very satisfied with herself.
Asmander knew where he stood with the Horse Society. He knew exactly how his relationship with Venater pivoted: duty and resentment, love and hate. In the days of their journeying together, he had come to no understanding of Shyri at all. She remained a cipher.
And so he announced: ‘I will go with you.’
She had not been fishing for this, and his offer caught her off guard.
‘We shall not have time,’ the Hetman started. ‘We will see ice on the river soon . . .’
‘We will go at night, Laughing Girl,’ Asmander suggested, seeing her eyes go gratifyingly wide. ‘Or are you not laughing any more?’
‘If you can keep up, longmouth.’ But she was quieter now, far less delighted with her own wit.
‘I have not known many of the Stone Men,’ Asmander commented, reaching out for another handhold. ‘I know they live shoulder to shoulder in their high places, or so I’m told. Perhaps I don’t believe in this ruined kingdom.’
He was speaking to cover his own nervousness. The very path they followed gave the lie to his words. It was steep, but the steps of worked stone were still evident, rounded by time. Hardy trees and bushes had forced a foothold with their roots, making for easier purchase. The moon was close to full, too, but while that pale light showed them their way, Asmander did not like the way it seemed to make the rock stairs glow faintly.
Shyri, ahead of him, just grunted, concentrating on her own ascent.
‘There are many places along the Tsotec where men once lived until disaster or bloodshed destroyed them. Now those places are lived in again, by others. Nobody would abandon such a place forever. If it was good to live there, it will be good to live there still.’
‘No doubt you’re very wise,’ she cast back at him. ‘But there are places on the Plains, the old forts of the Horn-Bearers which are sealed still. We do not go there.’
‘And why?’
‘For the same reason the Stone Men don’t come here now. Because of what they let in, all those years back. Places where bad ideas have arisen; places where the people have consented to their own degradation and death; where the bones of the dead have been gnawed in such ways . . .’ She paused ahead of him, and he glanced up and saw she had reached the top.
Clambering up beside her, he remained silent. There were indeed ruins. None of his rationalizations could wish them away.
An archway cut into the stone stood twice the height of a man, and through it, just a short distance off, he could see a broad and moonsplashed space, littered with tumbled stones.
Shyri was watching him with a mocking smile. ‘So brave, Champion?’
‘You have stood inside there?’
‘In daylight.’
‘How courageous of you.’ In truth he found he did not want to venture in. A dreadful silence had its hand on the place. He had reasons, though, for coming up here with Shyri. That deserted arena within would serve his purposes. The mission first, he reminded himself.
She twice hesitated to walk into that dark passage, before she finally Stepped and skittered through on four legs. That seemed a good idea to Asmander. When he followed her, it was without hesitation, clawed feet clicking on the stone. The Champion was always a ready antidote to fear.
They resumed their human forms inside, staring about them at the dead city of the Old Stone Kingdom. Here was a canyon, sheer sides reaching far above them, with a trickle of a stream still snaking its way down its centre. The walls had been worked from top to bottom, cut into rooms one on top of another, not an inch wasted, so that the stone around them seemed to have a hundred vacant eyes on both sides.
‘They go straight into the rock,’ Shyri told him. ‘I don’t know how far. They go down, too. There are shafts like great wide wells that just go down . . .’
What bare wall there was had been carved. They saw what had been human figures there, large and small, but everything vandalized. The faces, especially, had been smashed away, and most of the hands too: all the imagery that might have told them of who those lost people were and what they had been about.
‘Did you go in?’ Asmander pressed. The look she gave him provided enoug
h answer: no, she had not.
His curiosity was more than satisfied. It was time to talk.
‘I will have words with you now.’
She did not mistake his tone, and perhaps she had been waiting for this. ‘So,’ was all she replied, but there was abruptly more distance between them than before. Asmander still stood between her and the way they had entered, and the Champion was faster than she was, whatever form she might assume.
‘I do not understand why you are here,’ he told her flatly.
‘Some southern boy’s foolish dare,’ she said, hands on hips.
‘You know what I mean. Why is one of the Laughing Men inviting herself to the Crown of the World?’
‘I like to travel.’
‘Plains people do not travel.’
That struck real anger. ‘You know nothing, longmouth. I have travelled many places. Never to the north. Not yet.’ She had started loud, but lowered her voice before she finished. The window-riddled stone around them had made something unpleasant of the echoes.
‘Why did the Malikah send you?’ he pressed.
‘I was not sent.’
‘If you are here to prevent me carrying out my mission, I will kill you.’ He was ready to right now, right here. This place reeked of death. One more victim would make no difference. At the same time, he knew that the thought was shot through with dishonour. To turn the Champion loose upon this woman for such a reason would be mean-hearted and vicious. He felt his intentions tilt in the balance, waiting to see what excuse she would give him.
She was still angry, hands balling into fists, over and over. ‘I don’t even care what your mission is.’
‘You know.’
‘If you want to fight, longmouth, then let’s just fight.’ She had a bronze knife in her hand swift enough that he had not even seen her draw it. In the echo of her words, he sensed that something else stirred. For a moment he was imagining little feet rattling troves of old bones; many feet flooding through the buried halls where the ancient Stone Men had gone off to die.
Looking into her eyes, he realized that she had imagined exactly the same thing, and so perhaps neither of them had imagined it at all.
‘What I know is what everyone knows,’ she said, quieter now. ‘I know the Kasra is dead. I know there is no new Kasra, or two of them, and you cannot have two Kasra of the Riverlands. Everyone from the south tells a different story. What do you say, longmouth?’ When he would not answer, she prompted, ‘You spoke of your prince to the Malikah. I heard you say . . . what was his name?’
‘Tecuman.’ It seemed a betrayal, to give voice to that name in this place, but at the same time it brought a little strength along with it. ‘Tecuman, my prince.’
‘And he’s going to be Kasra, is he?’
‘I’ve heard it said.’ My father has staked a great deal on it.
‘But there’s the girl, that’s what they say. If he’s Tecuman, then she’s, what, Tecume?’
‘Tecuma.’ He had been listening to Shyri’s voice, letting his ears search for the hidden intentions he had felt sure must be there if she was here with an ulterior motive. He had heard nothing.
‘Two children, one name, right. We may not be River Lords, but even we know that’s not right,’ Shyri told him. ‘One has to find a new name. The other one’s the Kasra.’
He realized he had taken his eyes off her – what should have been a fatal mistake. She had stepped closer, but the knife had been put away.
‘So this matters a lot to you,’ she observed. ‘Enough to try and kill me.’ The anger had gone along with the knife. In its place came something like sympathy, unlooked for in a Plains woman of the Laughing Men. ‘You know this Tecuma?’
‘From my earliest days.’
‘And?’
‘She is beautiful,’ Asmander replied honestly, seeing a shadow of displeasure pass over Shyri’s face. ‘She is noble, wise and brave. She would make a good Kasra.’
‘And your Tecuman?’
‘The same – all of it the same.’
She regarded him, perhaps doubtfully, but he could not read her expression: the moon did not touch it. In the gap of her silence, the greater silence of the place around them crept in, until Asmander’s ears began hearing sounds that might not even have been there. The scurrying and the scrabbling, as though the faint echoes issued from chasmed wells and long-lost chambers, winding their way to the surface by the ranks of empty sockets that lined the canyon.
‘Come.’ Abruptly he was turning, passing a panel of defaced inscription to the nearest squared-off hole that might have once been door or window. Beyond was only the darkness, and a faint, cool breeze that bore something disagreeable upon it. ‘Come here.’
He heard the scuff of her feet as she approached him warily. He had one foot up on the edge of the hole as though about to descend into the unseen abyss beyond.
‘The Stone People never returned to this place?’ His voice echoed into the black depths below.
‘Do you see them here?’ She was at his shoulder, but tense and suspicious.
‘Those I saw in Atahlan, they were no fools. Sober, serious – strong and not easily scared.’
‘I told you, nobody will go where the Rat has raised its standard. Once a people have fallen to that despair, their home is lost forever. But you must tell the Rat stories, even on the River.’
‘The Serpent priests do.’ She had been waiting for him to do it, ready to hurl herself away from him, and still he was quicker. In an instant he had her, one hand at the back of her neck, the other gripping her right arm where she had drawn it back. The point of her dagger gleamed close to his eye. She was stronger than he had thought. They fought a silent battle over the precise distance between her blade and his face.
‘These last three years, I have been hearing of the Rat Cult,’ he told her. They were now teetering on the brink and she stopped trying to stab him only because it might have toppled them both. ‘In out-of-the-way places, isolated villages, in old tombs, they say, the followers of the Rat are gathering within the Nation. The priests hunt them. I have seen Rat worshippers die an unclean death by the rope because their flesh is not fit for Old Crocodile, and their spirits must be penned within their human bodies. This is because my Nation stands at the edge of the fall, even as this place fell, as your Horn-Bearers fell. Wherever there is fear and doubt, the Rat creeps in and gnaws. This is what waits for us, if we descend into division and war between ourselves.’ He was speaking too loud, and partly it was to drown the distorted echoes of his earlier words.
He forced himself to stay calm, to lessen his grip a little. She did not try to break free. Perhaps that was because she had another knife, for a tiny flint blade emerged between the fingers of her left hand to graze a bead of blood from his waist.
‘That is why I cannot allow you to harm my mission. That is what is at stake,’ he told her. ‘Tell me, what do the Laughing Men swear by, Shyri?’
‘Tell me what you wish me to swear, Asmander.’
He almost felt that he did not need to ask her. That exchange of their names seemed to have sealed something between them.
‘Swear that you are not sent to work against me.’
‘By my mother’s life. But beyond that I will swear nothing. I do what I will. I go where I will.’
‘And where will you go?’
‘For now? With you.’
For a moment he stared into her dark eyes and tried to find truth there, or anything he recognized. At last he said, ‘You remind me of Tecuma.’
‘Your enemy?’ she demanded.
‘Even so.’ He paused, and perhaps should not have done so, for at that moment something else sounded from the cold depths beside them. A shifting stone, or something similarly innocuous, save what could be down there to shift it? Instantly they both sprang away from the edge, as frightened as children.
She put a body’s length between them – fighting distance, save that her knives had disappeared again. ‘What
now, Champion?’ she asked, and it was a direct challenge to that part of him she had witnessed killing the aurochs on the Plains.
Tecuman, forgive me if I am failing you in this.The two tines of the fork had him pinned: his duty to his prince and his personal honour. ‘Now I trust you.’ With those words he was walking towards the narrow archway by which they had entered, forcing her to trot at his heels.
‘Just like that?’
‘Even so.’
If they left with more haste than they had entered, well, the night was cold and growing colder. It was surely not the echoes of that dead place that drove them.
As they emerged from the shadow of the arch into a healthier kind of night, Shyri made a sound of amusement.
‘You said she was beautiful,’ she noted. ‘And some other flattery too, but mostly that.’
‘What of it?’ He turned and found she was eyeing him with the same predatory gaze as the Malikah.
‘Nothing of it.’ Then, as they were descending the worn steps, ‘But you know what everyone will think, now you’ve come back with me rather than without my corpse. You’ll never persuade them that we haven’t lain together.’
There was an unmistakable invitation in her voice, and for a moment he stopped, not so much from temptation as because he was wondering if he had misread her by that much. Was that all there was to it? He could not believe so.
He said nothing and continued descending. The look in the eyes of Venater and the Horse woman on watch said exactly what Shyri had predicted.
At last they were far enough north, and the year far enough advanced, that there was ice floating on the river. The evening after, Asmander asked Eshmir if they were close to their destination, and she shrugged. ‘We come off the water soon, first chance we get. There should be a trading post of my people somewhere near. When we see it, we’ll leave them the boats for the summer. Overland, from then. The water’s too dangerous.’
‘I can’t believe it can all just freeze solid.’ The first sight of jagged plates of ice tumbling in the flow of the river had greatly impressed him.
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 14