The journey for her was a numbing one: holding tightly to the thick coat of the Horse woman as the two beasts picked their way up tracks that were nearly invisible, passing like ghosts through a landscape that grew ever more still and frozen the higher they climbed. The horses were astonishingly sure-footed, and the stocky woman whispered to them and chided them whenever they baulked, promising them rest and good feed and the respect of the Horse Society if they did their duty. She went in front, Maniye clinging gamely on, and behind came Aritchaka, riding with the ease of long practice, her boat slung from her saddle like a shield.
When the night drew in, there was always somewhere close that the Horse woman already knew: a cave, a secluded hollow, a skeletal frame of wood that she pulled hides over to trap their body heat. She never spoke to Maniye – probably sensing the uncertain position the girl currently held – nor gave her name.
They drew ever further from any lands that Maniye knew, travelling more east than northwards until the hills had become forested foothills, and the sun rose over a horizon toothed with mountains. They were south of the Bear lands, she guessed, but still climbing to where winter yet lingered, scowling down at the tides of spring that had driven it from the lowlands. Considering how matters stood between the Tiger and the Wolf, the image seemed appropriate.
Surely by now they had left any Wolf pursuit behind, and yet Maniye kept her eyes on the gloom between the trees, expecting at any moment to spot a pale wolf with a dark patch across his shoulders. In doing so, she began to notice other things.
The people of the Wolf built with earth and with wood, and while the Cave Dwellers lived beneath stone ceilings, such roofs were found and not made. Aside from monuments and monoliths, Maniye had never thought that anything substantial could be raised out of such uncooperative stuff. She had not known how her mother’s people had made stone their slave.
There was not much to see at first, just traces of a people vanished from these lands. Sometimes there would be a pile of rocks that seemed oddly squared-off and regular. Once, butting onto the trail, she saw a big block, rounded a little by the weather but with its uppermost side still bearing grime-highlighted carving.
Then, one night, they stopped in what had been a tower before it became a ruin. The forest all about was scattered with dismembered fragments of stone but the lower level of the structure was still mostly intact – a jagged stump like a broken tooth. It was squat and square, with each corner buttressed out with fantastical carving. They had reached it after dusk, so Maniye had only the sense of it being a pale bulk between the trees, the stone seeming faintly luminous in the moonlight, despite the encroaching fingers of moss and lichen.
The Horse woman did her best to stretch some blankets over the uneven stones at the top, leaving them a cramped, dark space beneath, the ground under them lumpy and uneven from the detritus of the tower’s collapse. Maniye gathered in all the driest wood she could find – for the rain had not quite been their constant companion, though a frequent guest. Still, she worked hard at it, because only for the last two nights had she been trusted to return if she wandered.
Once a fire was lit, Maniye had a chance to view their surroundings more clearly. The nascent flames threw a leaping, ruddy light across the truncated walls all around them, and everywhere seemed carved into images that led the eye one to another. She felt that, wherever she looked, she was immediately plunged into the midst of an unfamiliar story told using alien conventions. This carving had been intricate once, whole panels of the walls given over to abstract representations of forests where the spaces between each tree were deeper trees, and where the forms of men and women and beasts were constantly hinted at. If she let her eyes be led, she could see battles there, and hunting and the gathering of crops. She could discern worship and bloody sacrifice, the raising of great halls, the veneration of heroes and gods. And then she would become too absorbed and refocus her eyes, and not know what was truly there, or what had just been drawn out of her head.
‘What is this place?’ she asked at last.
Aritchaka gave a satisfied grunt, plainly waiting for the question. ‘An outpost of . . .’ a moment’s pause, ‘our people. Your father’s warriors destroyed it, burning its beams so that the stones fell.’ Her face was fierce and angry in the firelight. ‘There are many such places as this, relics of the golden days, the Days of Plenty.’
She meant when the Tiger had ruled, before her father and the other chiefs of the Wolf had broken them – in the days of Stone River’s youth and the years before she was born.
Interpreting her expression, the priestess said, ‘You yourself will have heard only the lies of the Wolf about those days. When we are at the Shining Halls, you will instead hear many truths.’ After a thought, she added, ‘And you will tell us many truths.’
The Shining Halls had been mentioned before: their destination was the stronghold of the Tiger that the Wolf’s rampage had never approached.
‘Will you go to war against my father’s people?’ Maniye asked in a whisper.
‘Would you like that?’ Aritchaka turned the question back on her.
Maniye regarded her across the fire for a long moment, and then nodded.
27
Asmander was not really surprised by the company they found at the campfire. Since leaving the Riverlands, his journey had become less and less the steps of a man in the physical world, more the passage of a figure from myth. He had hunted a vanished tribe on the Plains, and stood amongst the ruins of the Old Stone Kingdom. He had bared his soul to the gods of the north. He had borne mute witness as the Wolf tore through the heart of the Crown of the World and stood, howling, on its corpse.
Leaving the Stone Place, after that, had been interesting.
And in truth, he would not have known that any of it was unusual, save for the reactions of the locals.
For a variety of complex reasons they had taken the east road, once they had extricated themselves from the Stones and the marsh and its suddenly agitated denizens. The causeway had become a chaos of jostling and sudden violence, but water was no hindrance to a son of the Tsotec. He and Venater had taken turns in searching out a pathway of firm land for the other and Shyri to follow, both of them just as at ease in the marsh as they were on dry land, but neither of them able to bear the chill for a long stretch. Asmander wondered, later, whether that careful journey might not have gone differently had he not already squared himself with the local gods and totems. The spirit of a marsh was a poor thing to be on the wrong side of, if one were crossing it.
On the marsh’s edge they had found a disintegrating little band of priests and traders and acolytes all come together to find their kinsmen and then depart. There they met the Coyote woman, Quiet When Loud, looking for her mate.
There were many there who were desperate, many who were grieving. Asmander was not truly sure who, if anyone, the Wolves had killed – save the one of their own that everyone knew about – but every missing face seemed to provide cause to fear the worst. Likely there were another half-dozen such temporary camps about the edges of the marsh, each full of people looking for absent others.
Quiet When Loud was not panicking, but her eyes certainly lit up when she spotted the three southerners. Because that was a notably better reaction than they got from most of the locals, Asmander gladly wound his way to her.
‘Where are you heading?’ she asked them, and seemed satisfied with the answer. ‘I will lead you east. My fool mate has set off already on some errand.’
‘And you’d rather not travel on your own,’ Venater finished for her, with a leer. ‘You’re so sure we’re safer?’
Quiet When Loud gave him a simple frown that quite silenced him – it was a remarkable trick that Asmander would have paid gold to learn. ‘But you’re right,’ she said, ‘normally I would range to all the edges of the Crown of the World, either with Two Heads Talking or without. But right now . . .’ Her look was troubled. ‘I’ve not known anything like what
happened back at the Stones. And everyone is talking of great change – all these priests gabbling about it. Not good change, either, to hear them. An escort would be welcome.’
Two Heads Talking had cut some signs, she revealed: the Coyote had a secret language of marks that they left for one another, the collective memory of a travelling people. Asmander did not say so, but he reckoned this was the closest to actual writing the north possessed.
They set off east, and made two days’ clear travel before catching up with Quiet When Loud’s mate. Approaching the fire, they found the Coyote sitting with the ancient Serpent priest, debating theology.
The wizened old man looked up at them, eyes glinting with mischief.
‘Who is this that rides in on the back of the Snake?’ he asked them with a crooked smile. ‘Come, share our fire.’
Quiet When Loud sat herself down next to her mate. Wordlessly she took his hand in hers and held it a while. No words passed between them, and apparently none were needed.
‘You’ve made good time, Messenger,’ Asmander remarked carefully.
Hesprec’s gaze was narrow, perhaps wondering what business had delayed the Champion at the Stones. ‘And your path here has been solely to reunite these two children of Coyote? An act of benevolence that the cold gods of this land will, no doubt, entirely ignore.’
Asmander found a place across the fire from the old man, then glanced up at the others. ‘You should bed down. No doubt we two will be talking a while.’
Venater grunted, cast a suspicious look at Hesprec, and then threw a blanket down on the ground. It was not his blanket – or had not been until recently. Asmander assumed he had made off with it during the confusion at the Stone Place. After a moment’s consideration, Shyri laid herself beside him, tucking in close for warmth, as they had learned to do.
‘How long is it since you saw the banks of the Tsotec, Messenger?’ Asmander asked.
‘The best part of two years.’ Hesprec’s wondering tone made it sound a great age. ‘I guested with the Horse at Where the Fords Meet before I came north. But news finds me still. I know the clan of the Bluegreen Reach yet.’
‘Do you know Asman, my father?’
‘Not the man, though others of his line.’
Asmander smiled bleakly. ‘If you do not know him, you do not truly know my clan, for he is a man alone – a singular creature.’
‘And you, being his son, love and honour him,’ Hesprec concluded.
‘I am dutiful.’ Not quite a confirmation, not quite a denial.
‘And your father is no doubt a dutiful servant of the Kasra, as any clan head should be.’
‘The Kasra is dead,’ replied Asmander flatly.
The old man sat silently, watching him across the flames, digesting the news. What he knew of what occurred at Atahlan
– of the division between Tecuma and Tecuman, the old Kasra’s children – was hidden behind his veiled stare. Perhaps he already guessed at the need that had dispatched Asmander to this forsaken country, but the Champion only hoped he would not ask. To speak with a priest of the Serpent was like trying to navigate the shifting channels of the estuary itself. To lie to one, however, would be far worse. The priesthood of the Serpent was powerful and respected across all of the Sun River Nation. Their word carried a weight that could crush a man to death.
‘Tell me of your own purpose here, Messenger,’ Asmander fished.
‘I came for word from the wise men and women of the north. And, thanks to the gathering at the Stone Place, I have it.’
‘And what word did you find?’ Asmander asked.
Hesprec sighed: just a simple sound but it sent a shiver down Asmander’s spine that all the fires in the world could not have dispelled. That sound spoke of ages, great stone volumes of history that had come and gone, filled with the lives of men who thought that their ‘now’ was the only now that mattered.
‘Do you know what it is like to try and see what the future holds?’ the old man asked him. ‘It is like looking into choppy waters at night, and trying to read the march of the stars reflected there, save that you can see only one wave’s worth of them, just so small a span of the sky. How, then, can any man know with any certainty what is to come? You look, and you think, “Can it be? No, surely I am mistaken. That fragment I glimpsed, that looked all fire and broken things, that could have meant anything.”’ He was smiling but it was a skull’s smile, especially on that near fleshless, parchment-skinned head. ‘But if a wise man were to travel to many lands, and speak to the wise men of those lands – and avoid being sacrificed to the Wolf, which is always a danger, apparently – then a man might hear many views of the future, view many different handfuls of stars seen in the waters. And, from those tales and divinations and half-understood glimpses, a truly wise man might stitch together the whole cloth.’
Asmander was sitting very still, feeling inside him a deep cold that had nothing to do with the north. ‘And what might such a wise man see?’ he whispered. In truth, he wanted the Serpent priest to do what his kind normally did, snatching the revelations back at the last moment. He did not expect Hesprec to just speak on.
‘When all those little fragments of tomorrow show fire and ruin, Champion, what then?’
‘Tecuma and Tecuman . . . will it come to war, then? In truth, is that what it means?’
‘And what would a river war mean to the Crown of the World?’ Hesprec asked him. ‘And, anyway, wars . . . there are always wars, especially here. Is it the war the Wolf now want to bring against the Tiger, then? Is it both these wars and more besides? What question must we ask of these signs, to put them in perspective?’
‘What has gone before, that was prefigured by such omens?’ Asmander asked promptly, earning an approving nod.
‘The Fall of the Stone Kingdoms to the Rats,’ came a voice from an unexpected direction. Shyri, who had been lying still and breathing easily as if asleep, now sat up without warning. ‘What have you heard?’ Asmander demanded.
‘You think I could sleep with all this yattering?’ she asked lazily. ‘This one,’ with a nod at the snoring mound that was Venater, ‘could sleep through the world breaking, but not me. Besides, what are you saying? That the end of the world is a secret just for you?’
Asmander threw Hesprec an exasperated look, but the old man was smiling.
‘Daughter of the Laughing Men, welcome to our counsels. The fall of the Stone Kingdoms, is it? You’ve been there? You’ve seen their ruins?’
Asmander nodded along with Shyri, remembering.
‘Then think on this: if I read these futures right, the doom they speak of is at least as grand and final as that. And wars on the River, or the spitting and yowling of wolves and tigers, all these disputes mean only that the people of all our lands will be at each other’s throats when the axe falls on them, instead of standing together. The great enemies of history always thrive on chaos and rivalry: the Rat cult, the Pale Shadow, even the Plague People back in the very beginning – they could never have gained a victory if we were not forever turning against each other.’ His tone had become bitter, bitter and old, a man whose withered hands are no longer strong enough to put things right.
‘So if this axe must fall, who wields it?’ Shyri asked. Even she seemed impressed, shorn briefly of the irreverence that was practically the air she breathed.
‘Oh, I don’t know. You think visions ever told anyone anything useful,’ Hesprec hissed exasperatedly. ‘You think there was a face of some warlord or sorcerer, and a map to where he lived, so that I could just go and poison his well or strangle him while he was still a child?’ He laughed quietly. ‘I cannot point the finger, Laughing Girl. I cannot say this leader of the Wolf will become the doom of the world. I cannot say that the rift between the royal twins in the Riverlands will be the spark to set the grass ablaze. I cannot say that it will not be the Horse, or a great union of the Plains peoples, or . . .’ He waved a hand. ‘I am like the god’s offering: I see the knife an
d not the priest.’
‘And your journey now,’ Asmander said softly. ‘The road east, that is because of these visions? You go to prevent this doom?’
‘Wouldn’t it be grand if that were the case? You’d be honoured to come, of course. You, the Champion, would have your part to play. Perhaps the fate of the world would rest in single combat between you and the enemy of all the peoples?’
Asmander felt a curious sensation inside him, a lifting, reaching feeling. Ye s, it seemed to say. ‘And can it be so?’
Hesprec laughed again. ‘Oh, no, no. I have no idea what can be done – or if anything can be done. I have heard the wisdom of these lands. My place is back home, not haring off into the cold wilds like a fool. And yet here I am.’
‘So why?’
‘Because there is a girl . . . a young girl,’ Hesprec said simply. ‘She is fleeing the Wolf, and it is possible she has found safety, or perhaps she has found only danger wearing a different mask. And I want to know. I find I do not wish to return to the south without that knowledge, even though it is not part of the wisdom I came here to gather.’
‘A girl,’ said Asmander flatly. ‘A girl of talents, of significance? Has she magical powers? Or she is so beautiful that men would give their all for her? Or a great warrior, perhaps? Or beloved of the gods?’
‘None of that. Just a girl,’ the old priest replied softly. ‘But she saved my life – for her own selfish reasons, but nonetheless – and I find I do not wish to abandon her now. I am old. These fond foolishnesses are permitted me.’
Shyri made a derisive noise, and Asmander found himself perilously close to agreeing with her. ‘This does not sound a fit task for a Messenger of the Serpent,’ he said as strongly as he dared.
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 33