‘Set not your foot upon the Serpent, lest it bite.’ For a moment the old man seemed about to summon up a great aura of presence and power from somewhere, but then he smiled, and it made him look older than ever, because Asmander saw he had no teeth, not one. The soft lisping that prowled at the corners of his speech was more than just age. And he was mocking himself, because it was better to mock oneself than have the rest of the world do it.
‘You are a long way from home, Messenger,’ the Champion said softly.
‘How observant you are.’
‘And set to go further, you say?’
‘It seems inevitable. And you will come with me, will you not? If I ask?’
‘This one?’ Shyri chuckled with a deep and earthy sound. ‘He wears duty like a belt.’
Asmander nodded. ‘I am tasked . . .’ and then he caught the meaning behind her words: how a belt held in a man’s desires; that he was trapped by his duty.
And there was Hesprec Essen Skese pinning him with a gaze full of pent-up years.
‘You went to the temple when you were young, I’m sure.Your father, he’s a man who remembers Serpent in his prayers, because it is the done thing. But you . . . what must it have been like to feel the mantle of Champion fall upon you, to know that other within your soul, that ancient shape scratching to be free? That it was you so chosen – not your father, not the votaries of Old Crocodile? It was the Serpent who showed you the path through the darkness in those days, am I right?’
Asmander nodded convulsively. ‘You are, Messenger.’
‘And, after that, I see a young man of the Bluegreen Reach who listened more to the words of the priests, who thought more about the way the world turned, now that he found himself part of it. I see there a soul that the Serpent spoke to.’
‘This does not assist you,’ Asmander objected stubbornly.
‘And now the Serpent calls to you in his hour of trial. Here is one of the Serpent’s poor servants in need of your strong arm.’ ‘You said yourself, this is just some errand of your own.’ ‘And you were not listening. I said this is no part of my mission here in the north, but there is no breath I take, no thought that comes into my head, that is not the Serpent’s business. If I owe a debt, it is the Serpent’s debt to repay. Now, will you travel with me to the east, Champion?’
‘He won’t,’ Shyri said derisively. ‘You argue like a sick man, priest, all begging and wind and no strength. These words sway no one.’
‘No doubt you’re right,’ Hesprec said. ‘But here is the difference between the Sun River Nation and the peoples of the Plains, Laughing Girl. Our words are not just solitary stones thrown into the night. With our words, we build. What sways the heart is the sum of all the words that went before.’
Asmander sighed. ‘You’re right, of course. Messenger, it would be an honour.’ He could hear it plain in those words that he thought it anything but, and yet the old man had played him, read him, moved him like a game piece. ‘For I have been shown the way more than once, and walked the Serpent’s back to escape the darkness. So now will I follow it one more time.’
28
The stronghold of the Tiger, that they called the Shining Halls, rose up a steep hillside, tier on tier, and all of it built from stone. Maniye had never seen so much worked stone in one place. There were towers three or four storeys high, and many of them intact. In places, a high wall ran intermittently. Even the lowest and plainest of the dwellings were of stone, and even they were carved, their faces boasting panels depicting human and animal figures intertwined, fighting one another, embracing one another. The upper corners of every building projected into the shapes of gargoyles, louring out over the broad thoroughfares that ran between.
Higher up the slope, the buildings became grander as well. Below were the homes of the lowly, the dens of the thralls, Aritchaka explained. Status and station was important to the Tiger: where one was born and what one could rise to. The higher dwellings were for warriors, for the priesthood, for the rulers.
Maniye had witnessed nothing in her life that might have prepared her for the great temple of the Tiger. It rose in leaps and bounds from a squat, square base, spiralling into towers that lifted claws to the skies above, the stonework coursing fluidly with the bodies of a thousand effigies. It should have been a chaos of mingling, contradictory shapes, but there had been a single mind behind it, so that the eye was led across this intricate fretted surface with a sure hand, images and scenes leaping into the mind.
The Shining Halls were certainly far grander than the village of the Winter Runners, and yet, as their tired horses passed beneath a gateless arch and under the eyes of a dozen armed Tigers, Maniye noted that there were fewer people here than the sprawling size of the place would suggest. As they made their way between the buildings, ever on upwards, she saw that much of the stonework had seen better days too. Some had been damaged and not repaired. In a few places there were signs of fire blackening. She was left with the impression of a culture defined by what it had come to lack, that once had been plentiful. She kept these thoughts to herself.
‘You are taking me to your temple?’ She knew the answer. Aritchaka just nodded.
‘And what will you do with me there?’
‘Bring you before the Tiger,’ came the short answer. It had not escaped Maniye that some of the scenes that had
leapt at her eyes from the stonework were ones of sacrifice, and intricately so: whole gatherings of Tiger priests officiating at the dismembering of those they would feed to their god. The Shadow Eaters, she thought. The Wolves believed they consumed more than mere flesh.
To the temple they took her, that Aritchaka said was also the seat of their ruler, the heart of their world. She felt many eyes upon her as she stepped under the great stone weight of it. They did not look kindly on her. They saw a Wolf.
Within the temple, there was a room of screens and fires. She had expected an icon, a carven tiger in mid-leap perhaps. Instead there was just an altar, a block of stone that was scored and cut. Behind it, a wall was carved over and over with repetitive shapes, and she saw the outlines of running cats there, each interlocking with the rest so that there was no part of the stone not coursing with a limitless cascade of them. Either side of her, the walls were fretted with a thousand holes, so that what remained was almost a lacework of stone, and fires were lit behind, throwing their light through that maze of gaps.
‘What now?’ Maniye could only whisper.
‘Now the Tiger will come,’ Aritchaka told her, already retreating. ‘Now you will see what it is to be of the Fire Shadow People, the Tiger’s chosen.’
Maniye heard the fires being banked, their light leaping higher. Shadows leapt and danced about her, running up and down the wall so that the constant progress of the cats seemed to falter, to change direction, their illusory movement chasing back and forth across the face of the carvings as though some terrified quarry was rushing amongst them.
Around her, the piecemeal shadows cast by the twin flames seemed to thicken and coalesce, and yet she was still waiting for some effigy to rise up, something like the iron jaws of the Wolf that she remembered from her home.
Not my home, she told herself fiercely. I am of the Tiger now. The traitor Wolf within her walked the lonely reaches of her soul and bayed at her, but she stopped her ears to it. Only now, here with her mother’s people, could she admit to herself how alone she had felt since leaving the Winter Runners. Hesprec, Loud Thunder, these were not her people. She wanted to be with her own kind.
The shadows scurried and swayed about her. Although the fires were higher still, yet somehow the room was darker, until all those weaving spots and slashes of orange light seemed like embers on the very point of guttering out. As she watched, her eyes took in the circular dance of the shadows in her peripheral vision, and built shapes from it, so that the complex game of dark and light became abruptly the smouldering striped flanks of the Tiger – there in the room with her.
&nbs
p; She fell to her knees, not through reverence but fear. Yes, the Wolf had touched her during her life, but that was a distant, dispassionate totem, a patient stalker always watching to see what she would do, what she could endure. The Tiger was immediate, fierce, predatory in another way entirely. Not for the Tiger the long hunt, the patient grinding down of fleeing prey. To be a tiger was to leap, to ambush, to strike suddenly and sure.
And can you? In her head, the voice was vast and low and purring, mingled with the low thunder of the fires. What are you? But you do not know yourself.
I am of the Tiger! she protested. I am your own! But the wolf was still howling deep inside her, and she lacked the means to drive it out into the cold night, and to sever it from her.
We shall see what my people call you, but I suspect it shall be ‘prey’.
She wanted to beg, but that would be weak. She wanted to demand, but that would be presumptuous. She did not know what she wanted. She wanted to belong. Somewhere, she wanted to belong.
The red-lit shadows bunched and gathered, and in her mind the great beast sat up and regarded her indolently. Do you think possessing my blood will save you?
I have the blood of your queen! It was Akrit’s own argument, but now she clung to it because she had nothing else.
But who truly believes that?The lazy, amused voice, always with a laugh hidden within it, and that laugh always cruel. They know you for some mixed-blood foundling, and when your blood waters my altar, will it be any more red for all your heritage? Who will care? Who will know?
‘I will know!’ she told it aloud, knowing that Aritchaka and the priestesses would be listening from where the fires were laid. ‘I know who I am. Who else matters?’
Again that soft, dangerous laugh. I so love human pride. I love the savour of it. I will certainly enjoy yours.
There were chambers beneath the temple that never saw the sun, and that was where they put her. The torches that burned there only stirred the shadows; they brought the Tiger down from its altar, let its smoky body pace instead the tangled network of buried spaces that she now had the run of. She was not a prisoner, not quite, for these were not cells. Still, when she encountered the steps leading up, there were always men of the Tiger tribe there, waiting to turn her around. Other times she could not find any steps at all.
Aritchaka came down sometimes. With her, she had thralls who bore food and drink: corn cakes and wizened little apples and stone jugs of dust-tasting water.When Maniye demanded to know what fate was intended for her, the priestess just cocked her head.
‘We deliberate,’ she said. ‘We know what you claim to be, but a little Tiger blood – even a tiger’s shape – does not make you her child. Are you some trick of the Wolf’s? Are you just some child of two tribes who seeks to steal what is precious to us? Are you what you say? We have lit the low-smoking fires, and the smoke has provided no answer for us, not yet. And so you must wait.’
‘How long?’ Maniye asked.
Aritchaka gazed at her without expression. ‘You may wish it had been longer, if the Tiger disowns you.’
Then she departed, leaving Maniye to the near-darkness.
She walked her buried domain on human feet. She prowled it as a tiger. It brought her no release. When she brushed against the unseen flanks of the greater cat that filled the space around her, she sensed its sudden snarl, the bared teeth and wide eyes, warning her off. Warning her not to pretend to something she had not earned.
Time slipped away from her. She could not say whether she slept when night fell, or whether she had been swept away from the rhythms of the sun, set adrift in this hidden world. After she had slept five times, with no clearer answer from Aritchaka, she began to despair. With the shadow-bulk of the Tiger looming at her back, she seized a torch and ground it into the stone at her feet, putting it out, swallowing up the shadows in a greater dark. She crouched there in that blackness, her eyes slowly adjusting to the faint glow of more distant lamps. For a brief moment, though, the Tiger was pushed away from her, a creature of shadow that could not tolerate the utter depths of night.
In that black silence she put her hands to the stone of the floor, desperate for some reassurance that this was not the end, that she was not wholly alone and abandoned. Something moved there, she sensed. It might just have been her own pulse, but she felt the slightest of shiftings beneath her hands, as though something vast and far deeper shifted its coils as her prayer reached it.
She knew that she was fooling herself, and yet the idea was fixed in her mind now. Even as her eyes banished just enough of the darkness for the Tiger to slip back in, she felt stronger, more hopeful, less lonely. Even here in the Crown of the World ran the scaled lengths of Hesprec’s god.
When Aritchaka came for her, not long after, she was ready.
The priestess’s gaze was keen and searching, but she said nothing, merely beckoning Maniye to follow. There was a quartet of warriors there, in case she demurred. She recognized Red Jaw and Club Head amongst them, but they would not meet her eyes. Maniye could not read Aritchaka, but the manner of the men was curious, something of reverence, something of fear, yet they were plainly there to ensure she played her part.
They took her into a deep chamber where water welled up from a crack in the rock that had been smoothed and carved until it resembled a human face. Two thralls were present, men both, and they stripped and washed her, despite her protests. They kept their faces averted as much as they could, and would not speak a word to her, and the guards watched on throughout. At no point was there any hint of desire in any of them, or not any form of desire that might be consummated. They were treating her with the careful, dispassionate respect they might accord to one of their sacred carvings.
At the end, they gave her a shift of fine calfskin that was dyed near-black and set with rows of stones: beads of amber and green moss agate and three colours of tiger’s eye, dense and heavy enough that she felt she had donned a cuirass of bronze. Aritchaka then reappeared, and set a circlet about her head – weighty enough to be gold – and anointed her with scented oils.
Maniye remembered what her father’s plan had been: for her to come to the Tiger and announce her heritage; for them to kneel to her and accept her as their queen, somehow usurping their devotion and government simply by virtue of her bloodline. That was how the world worked for the Tigers, so Akrit Stone River had believed: no challenges, no consent of the tribe, just some sort of invisible fitness to rule conveyed by blood from mother to daughter.
In the way they treated her, she did not sense that they had accepted her as their ruler. A ruler, after all, was required to engage with her people. Maniye was being treated like a thing: a valuable thing but a thing nonetheless. And things were there to be used. They could trick her up in gold and shining stones as much as they liked, but even the most exquisite of things was still property.
She thought then of the Deer people. She had heard that they chose kings from amongst their number in spring, who lived well and wanted for nothing, beloved of all. Until the next spring, when they would take their happy, smiling king to the Stone Place and . . .
She could not tell if she was being welcomed as the scion of their lost royal line, or as a sacrifice for the Tiger’s claws. She was wise enough in the way of the world to know these fates need not be mutually exclusive.
After all , she thought, someone else has been ruling the Tiger since my mother was taken from them. How happy would they be, to find they have just been keeping a place at the fire for someone else? No, better to be rid of the newcomer, to denounce her and do away with her.
She was being led upwards through the maze of nested stone, climbing towards the sun. Maniye made the resolution then that she would run – girl feet, tiger or wolf – if the chance presented itself. She would run, and head for Loud Thunder’s house, wherever or how far that was from here, or for the Horse Society, or even just walk all the way to the southern lands and speak them Hesprec’s name, and hope . .
.
But the Shining Hall of the Tiger had few windows, and it was busy with thralls and priestesses and people of the Tiger staring at her with a weird, unhealthy anticipation. They had a haughty grandeur to them, as if they did not see the broken carvings, all the small repairs that they no longer had the masons to perform. Here, wearing her Wolf’s face, she was surrounded by the scars of the war the Wolf had brought against them, the wounds that an entire generation had not healed. Even now the lair of the Tiger echoed hollow to the tread of too few feet. Even now the work of a hundred hands was left undone.
She was still looking out for some opportunity to bolt when they led her suddenly into a far larger room, where the carvings seemed to have grown outwards from the walls, forming pillars and buttresses that crept inwards to support the great and intricate expanse of the ceiling. There were many already gathered there, yet the place felt empty still, resounding with the echo of the greater multitudes which had once graced it. There was a seat at one end, on a semicircular dais which rose seamlessly out of the floor and wall. The carvings surrounding it demanded the eye follow them: from all corners, a constant stream and progression towards that raised seat: thousands of human figures worked in miniature, bearing corn, wood, stone, weapons, tools, or else leading strings of thralls by the neck. They all of them faced that same empty seat, as though they were bringing the whole world to that point. It came to Maniye that the people of the Tiger set all they had in stone, immortalized and recorded and imprisoned there, save for the thing they valued most. Their soul, their heart, their god, they did not dare limit by trapping it in some rigid form: they knew the Tiger was smoke and flame and fear.
Many of the Tiger gathered there were priestesses like Aritchaka. They wore striped fur cloaks and ornamental cuirasses of stones and precious metals, and all of them were armed. The others of their people, also mostly women and all immaculate in furs and fine cloth, gave way to them deferentially.
Amongst them, she saw a delegation quite different in dress. She knew them as Eyriemen from the moment she set eyes on them, a band of haughty, hard-eyed men, their clothes embroidered with bone and feathers. Their leader wore a wooden harness about his shoulders, twin spars arching over him like the horns of the moon, the quills that decorated them turning them into perpetually spread wings. The Eyriemen’s faces were tattooed on one side or the other, but they were careful to look at Maniye only through the painted eye. There was only one woman in their number, Maniye saw, and she looked at nobody. She wore a cloak of feathers over her plain shift, and there was a leather collar tight about her neck.
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 34