The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  ‘How kind,’ Hesprec replied faintly.

  They arrived among the Cave Dwellers in a flurry of dogs. As Mat and Yoff drew close, there were a dozen of them already on their feet and barking uproariously. Thunder’s dogs were no better, the pair straining at the sled’s traces until he let them run free. Maniye feared the animals would tear each other apart, but it was simply that she had never lived with dogs before. The yapping chaos was resolved as simple greetings, Mat and Yoff renewing their acquaintance with their relatives. The Bear tribe themselves had a rather more reserved greeting for their wayward son. One by one, the big men stood up, faces closed and sullen, staring as Loud Thunder drew near. Then, with shocking suddenness, they were all bears, standing tall on their hind legs. Maniye remembered then how he and Lone Mountain had fought when they met, and she stopped walking and started backing away. Hesprec was right beside her.

  Loud Thunder Stepped as well, but did not slow his pace, and then all of the Cave Dwellers were bellowing at him, some dropping down on all fours, some standing as tall as they could. They seemed to be working themselves up for a fight, and Maniye could not imagine how Thunder imagined he might win against so many. He just ambled on, though, and they roared and shook their jaws at him, and yet none of them quite stood directly in his way. Then one got too close, and Thunder cuffed the smaller bear across the muzzle, sending it loping off sideways. The defiance of the others petered out slowly, until Loud Thunder reached the middle of them and sat down, blithely unconcerned, scratching at his belly. One by one, the Cave Dwellers gave up their show of protest, returning to their hulking human shapes and grudgingly giving the newcomer room. Maniye had the impression that the natural Cave Dweller demeanour was dour to the point of sulking, a people slow to demonstrate their emotions and slow to act. Looking at them now, the gathering together of such a weight of muscle and dense bone, she was glad of it.

  ‘This girl has my protection,’ Loud Thunder declared, directing a broad hand at her. ‘The old Snake, too. My hearth is their hearth. They are my guests.’

  That went down as poorly as she had anticipated but, now that he had arrived and established his place amongst them, his word obviously carried sufficient weight. When she moved to sit by the fire, they regarded her with dull curiosity, but made room.

  ‘Now you wait,’ Thunder advised the pair of them. ‘Now we all wait. Mother will send for me, and she and I will have our talk, at last. She will tell me how the world is going to be, and what it wants with me.’

  ‘Serpent guide you,’ Hesprec said softly.

  ‘Old man, this is the Mother of Bears. She could break your Serpent in one hand. Only thank your god that he drew out your years long enough to see the Stone Place and its business.’

  The Snake priest lowered himself down beside Maniye and closed his eyes. She wondered if he was preparing himself for his own promised meeting, whenever that might happen, and tried to imagine how formidable this woman must be. Certainly all the Bear tribe were keeping a respectful distance from that single tent.

  ‘Will you tell her your stories of Serpent?’ she asked Hesprec.

  The old priest shrugged his bony shoulders. ‘Who can say?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Stories of Serpent?’

  ‘Tell me what you’ve come here to find. Tell me what you think she knows. Make me understand.’ Because the unseen was pressing on her eyes, and she felt it was trying to tell her something beyond her comprehension.

  But Hesprec just hunched his shoulders and began coughing again, long enough to leave him weak and gasping.

  Thereafter he was plainly too deeply lost within his own priestliness to have any more time for her, so she got up from the fire and padded over to where she felt the edge of the Cave Dweller camp must be. The sky was darkening now, and a little stubborn snow was feathering down to become one with the chill waters of the marsh. Little fires had sprung up everywhere around the island, save for the darkness between the stones themselves. A grand bonfire was set there, she had seen, but plainly it was for other purposes than keeping anyone warm.

  She narrowed her eyes, examining the other supplicants arrived here for the equinox. There were broad, heavy-set Boar people, all layered hides and necklaces of teeth and tusks. She saw the long limbs of the Deer tribe, a familiar sight to her. Antlers graced the brows of their priests, and at the neighbouring fire a handful of them were stepping through the movements of a dance to the low patter of a drum.

  A handful of Wolves passed nearby, and she forced herself not to shrink back. They were Moon Eaters, from their paint and clothes, and talking quietly amongst themselves. One of them barked out a brief laugh as they passed, but none spared her even a glance. Crossing from the other direction came a trio of Eyriemen, and there was a tense moment when one or other needed to give way, and neither group would. Then some unspoken accord was reached, and both bands took an exaggerated step aside, and in the space now between them was the secret of this place, the same spirit that hung about the stones, strong and wise and unforgiving.

  There were other camps, too, and in the growing dusk it was hard to make out who kept which hearth. One drew her eye, though, as if there was a presence at her elbow pointing it out. The figures there seemed to be warriors, armoured in bronze polished to a gleaming shine that threw back their firelight. Somehow she knew they were priests as well. She saw gold glinting at their wrists and, wherever the fire picked out their skins, it found them striped with painted shadows.

  People of the Tiger. And a spark was lit in her then that would not go out.

  ‘How long will you wait?’ she asked Loud Thunder.

  He shrugged morosely. ‘Always, with Mother, it is others who do the hurrying.’

  ‘Days?’

  ‘Most likely.’

  She looked across the island, sounding out her own daring. This was the Stone Place. This was the still centre in the roiling turmoil that was the Crown of the World.

  The voice of the invisible sounded strong within her. It told her to go explore, to step out from the Bear’s Shadow.The island seemed alive with it, with a host of sightless entities that wanted her to move amongst them so that they could see her better. She could almost feel their spectral fingers trailing across her skin.

  At first she meant to wait until morning. The sun was falling to earth in a welter of spilled red, and soon there would be darkness, with the treacherous marsh on all sides.

  And she could not sleep anyway. She lay there, with Hesprec’s bony body curled up on one side of her, and the vast snoring mountains of the Bears all around, and her mind was like a leaf bobbing in the waters, constantly dancing and dancing. It came to her then that she had no plan for the future. Hesprec’s south was a fool’s dream to hold on to, and one that the old man himself would surely never attain, let alone some vagrant Wolf girl he might choose to bring along with him. It came to her then – or at least she finally admitted it to herself

  – that Hesprec would die soon. He was hard and stubborn enough to fend off the winter, but the Crown of the World made all its guests work hard for the privilege of their keep.

  She had come to a place where priests of every tribe were peering into the mists of the marsh to know the future, while she just looked ahead and saw a void. She was a creature of the moment, fleeting and transient.

  She Stepped to her wolf’s shape and rose silently, slipping between the bulky shapes of her hosts, and out into the night.

  At first she intended heading straight for the Tigers’ fire. Perhaps – she had not totally decided – she would even walk straight up to them, show them what shape she could assume, show them that I am of you. She imagined it all, daydreamed it in detail even as she left the Bears’ hearth. She assured herself what it would feel like to step from under the Wolf’s Shadow and into the embrace of a different god. Even while she wore the Wolf’s own shape, she thought it. Perhaps that was why her feet led her astray.

  Despite the fires, i
t was very dark in the Stone Place. Above her, the stars were shrouded, mocking those below who might seek to fish the future from their pond. Her wolf nose was battered by a multitude of scents: the bodies, fires and food of a dozen tribes. Abruptly she found that she could not tell which of the leaping lights of the island were nearby, and which were all the way across it.

  Trying to shake off her uncertainty, she pushed forwards with a sudden flurry of speed. Ever since leaving the Winter Runners, she had raced through the world as though distance itself was a cure for all ills, and now it betrayed her. Abruptly the land was clear on either side, just the packed earth of this artificial hill . . . and then there were the stones.

  They rose above her, to the left and to the right, great dark sentinels that she sensed more than saw. In a convulsive moment she felt as if something had gripped hold of her – intangible and irresistible, stripping her skin from her, nose to tail. A moment later she was in her tiger shape, its keener eyes harvesting distant firelight so as to make out the tall, still monoliths rising before her. For a brief moment she felt that the wolf was gone, totally gone, and scrabbled with unexpected panic within her, searching out all its old haunts one by one. Then she had it again, cowering at the very back of her mind, while the tiger in her was so bold . . .

  She had almost run straight inside the circle of stones. She had almost crossed into the eye of the Stone Place, where the spirits watched all the time. Only priests went there and, though she had pretended to herself that she felt like a priest, now she knew she was nothing but a fugitive girl. If she had taken another handful of steps . . .

  Who could know? But she would be marked forever. To stand before the greater spirits even a priest must purify himself and sacrifice and beg.

  Her eyes caught the approach of more lights: a line of torches emerging from one of the camps, and she froze, torn between the desires to flee and to spy.

  Their own fires picked them out for her, and her tiger’s heart jumped – for it was her people, her own people, the ones she had never known.

  A woman led them, who wore mail of bronze squares and an ornate helm with a feathered crest. The skin of her cheeks was raised in thin lines that the torchlight turned into dancing shadow-stripes. Behind her followed two men, their faces solemn. They had some of the look of the people Maniye had grown up with, but with something else as well. Their eyes were angled, their faces longer. There was a mystery written into them. To Maniye, they were beautiful.

  She followed their progress, crouching close to the base of the closest stone. They were tracing a curving path, and she knew they were making for some special point, some invisible path known only to the Tiger, by which the circle could be entered.

  Turning to keep them in view, she realized her error. She traced the line of the stones with her eyes. The circle was simple, just a ring of irregular, jutting fingers with a single squat altar in its very centre. As the torches neared, many of the stones leapt into relief, casting their shifting shadows across the ground, across the circle that they enclosed.

  The circle that she was inside. She had bounded straight into it, and only been brought to a halt by the stones on the far side.

  She knew then that it was the coming of the Tiger to these stones that had Stepped her into this shape. If she had just been some hapless Wolf girl, then surely she would have been punished: struck blind, driven mad, killed on the spot. The spirits could do such things.

  With this new knowledge, though, she could not stay. Half-belong as she might, she could not trespass within the circle during a Tiger ritual. There was reckless, and there was outright foolhardy.

  She held her breath as she backed out between the stones, between the same two pillars that she’d thought had been keeping her from going in. Casting a glance behind her, she saw the three Tigers now enter the circle, their priestess at the fore.

  Moving further away, she could see more. Her eyes caught a deeper darkness between the fires, and after a moment she identified it: spies, other spies. Of course, any who chose to look up the hill towards the stones might see something of what passed between the Tiger and their god, but these – whoever these were

  – they had drawn closer.

  Still clad in her tiger shape, she circled them, closing carefully, wondering who it was that took such an interest in her people.

  Yet who else but her other people? She stopped dead-still because she had recognized a face she knew. Yes, yes, there was Kalameshli Takes Iron, and the sight of him sent a jolt of fear and hatred through her, a short lifetime’s worth of taunts and goads flurrying through her head, like snow. A moment later he was almost forgotten though.

  Akrit Stone River was here too. He knelt on the ground, a man with patience to spare, and stared at the stones and the three votaries within. The two Shadow Eater men were singing now: one low and one high, an eerie counterpoint that seemed to rise up into the clouded sky and resonate through the earth. Their torchlight barely touched Akrit’s eyes, lurking there as the faintest of angry embers.

  She began to back away. Their attention was fixed on the ritual. The spirits had blessed her this much: that she had spotted them first.

  It was the fur of her flanks that told her of the other: not her nose, nor eyes nor ears. When she twitched away from him, he was close enough to reach out and take her by the scruff of the neck.

  Broken Axe regarded her expressionlessly – no, not quite: there was a slight twitch to his lips, a token amusement at having found her yet again.

  She had frozen in shock, and she saw his eyes flick towards the gathering of Wolves and to the Tiger ritual beyond. A shout from him would bring Akrit and Kalameshli both down on her back. She was caught, helpless and immobile, torn between leaping and fleeing.

  Then that seed of a smile grew a little, and he shrugged and turned away, strolling over towards the other Wolves, not a hint of hurry in his steps.

  She fled then, but he never called the alarm, and her father never knew she had been there.

  24

  The Tiger ritual had been disconcerting: a familiar message yet written in an alien tongue. The woman who stood in for their priest, and her two eunuch servants, they had gone through strange steps, made unfamiliar offerings, and yet Akrit felt he understood. Watching from out in the dark, he had seen an urgency in those motions, an invocation of martial preparedness. The Tiger tribe, too, were readying for conflict.

  ‘There is a time coming,’ Kalameshli confirmed, later. ‘The spirits speak of it. My dreams – the dreams of many priests here

  – are disturbed by it. So the Tiger hear the same voices. They do not know your plans.’

  Akrit had never concerned himself that the Tiger might be readying themselves to defend against him. He was struck by the sudden thought that his own plan – the plan he had been nursing all these years – might not be his plan at all. What if it had merely been gods and spirits working through him? He knew many who might be proud of playing such a role, but not he. Akrit Stone River was, above all, his own master. The Wolf wished no cringing thralls amongst those born in his Shadow.

  The morning after, and keyed up by Kalameshli’s words, he went to speak with the priests of the Moon Eaters, who were here in force. He needed to present himself to them, to win their blessing. He needed to have them thinking of him as the next High Chief.

  And yet, when he reached them, it seemed he was a man come second to the feast. The hard, derisive eyes of Water Gathers stared out at him from the midst of the priests.

  ‘Stone River,’ began the son of Seven Skins, ‘who would have thought to find you here? What purpose can you have, so far from home?’

  Catches The Moon, the young priest of the Many Mouths, was lurking in his shadow, and there were plenty of sidelong glances shared between the Moon Eaters.

  ‘I have told these wise men of the passing of my father,’ Water Gathers explained expansively. ‘All agree he departed from his tribe as a strong man, a warrior, should.�
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  ‘He did,’ Stone River agreed. ‘He was a man we shall not see again for a generation. Would that more were like him.’

  The twitch at the corner of Water Gathers’ mouth was slight, and utterly unamused. ‘I have told them also of my father’s last words to me: how he bid me follow in his tracks, how he marked me for greatness. I am my father’s son, his heart, his all. I was his joy, when he still lived amongst us; to see me in my strength was what gave him the strength to leave his people in my care.’

  ‘So much he told you.’ Akrit could sense Kalameshli right behind him, the old man urging him silently to hold his temper. ‘And yet I guested with your brother, a fine man and a wise one, and it seems your father had said not a word of this to him.’

  ‘My brother Otayo is no hunter,’ Water Gathers replied contemptuously. ‘He brought my father neither joy nor solace by tending hearth while his mate sought prey.’

  They are already with him more than with me, Akrit thought, letting his peripheral vision inform him of the Moon Eaters’ disposition, even as he kept his eyes fixed squarely on his opponent. He knew what he wanted to say, and also he knew that those words could never be taken back. They would fan the hatred of Water Gathers into a high burning fire that might consume either or both of them.

  And he realized that he was going to say them anyway. He was losing face moment to moment. No man would follow a High Chief who turned his back.

  ‘I, too, spoke with your father before his passing,’ Akrit said softly, making them lean in to hear more clearly. ‘It is true he said much of you. You were uppermost in his thoughts. But he was also my friend, my teacher, like unto my own father. We began the rising against the Tiger that drove them into the high places, and we finished it, he and I. Who else can boast the same that lives now?’ Not Water Gathers, certainly. ‘He spoke fondly of Otayo but, like you, he lamented your brother’s choice to keep a home rather than to lead the hunt. For, if your brother had taken up the bow and the spear, your father would not have to lament your becoming chief of the Many Mouths.’