The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  None of these things did Maniye understand.

  Then she was standing before the seat, the throne, wondering what must happen now. Aritchaka was some steps away from her, and the guards also. The room was full of people, but she wondered how far she might get with a sudden surprise Step and a dash . . .

  But there stood the throne, and it was empty still. Perhaps this was the test. Perhaps they were waiting to see if she would take what was hers by right.

  That was a strange and heady thought. Surely it could not be so simple? To just sit down on that stone seat that all the walls of the room were marching towards? But if she did not, was she giving the lie to her own story? Perhaps then she would be transforming herself from queen into sacrifice.

  By now she was very alive to the way that everyone in the room was watching her. It was not obvious, not an overt stare, but their attention was on her nonetheless. It was exactly the way that a tiger stalks its prey, she thought, subtle and subtle and again subtle, then suddenly the pounce. Sensing the minute shifts of stance and attitude all about the room as she drew closer to the throne, she became convinced that they were not waiting for her to seat herself there. To do so would be an unforgivable usurpation.

  In her mind, that left only one possible fate they could intend for her.

  She took a careful step back, trying to seem casual. Still that dreadful focused attention encompassed her, and it was the Tiger watching her through the eyes of his priesthood. It was there in the room with her: it was all the empty space that was not peopled.

  I will run, she told herself. I will be swift and sure, and I will run. And she turned, ready to Step down onto her Wolf feet for extra speed, and saw him. A cry escaped her lips and died there. It was impossible!

  There, in the doorway, standing between her and freedom; there, in the den of his enemies who should have cut him down in moments: there stood a lean Wolf-tribe man in well-worn leathers and furs, with ice-coloured eyes. Broken Axe. Broken Axe was here for her. Even the Tiger could not stand in the way of his hunting.

  She pointed, but she could not say anything. Right then, she did not honestly know if anyone else present could see him. She would have believed anything.

  He was smiling slightly, that expression that was becoming more familiar to her than her own would ever be. Of all of them, only he looked at her directly.

  ‘Many Tracks,’ she saw his lips form, and he took a few steps into the room. She saw the eyes of the Tiger people track him, then slide off him. They did not want to acknowledge him; somehow they could not deny him. Their warriors tightened their fists and scowled, yet nobody challenged him. And he advanced on her, step after step, like a terrible dream.

  Then he had stopped, and everything had changed. The room had shifted around her, again like a dream, so that all the attention that had been moving between her and Broken Axe was abruptly elsewhere, following the great sea of stone figures until it reached the throne.

  Maniye turned. It was now occupied.

  The woman who sat there was hard featured, and there were scars on her hands and one on her chin. Her eyes were like green stones, lustrous as emerald, and as cold. Compared to the bright display of the priestesses, she should have seemed drab, wrapped as she was in a dark pelt.When she moved, though, she smouldered, and light gleamed and glittered in red bands within the fur, like fire in the deep woods.

  It was plain to Maniye that the Tiger had spared no time in finding a new ruler, for this woman commanded their attention entirely. From the moment she took her seat, her hand lay on everyone in the room, stilling them. Even the proud Eyriemen kept their disparate eyes low.

  ‘Come forwards,’ she said, and that chill green gaze cut into Maniye. She took a stumbling step, knowing only that all chance of escape had been stripped from her. That cool gaze anatomized her calmly, tallying her faults and features, until the woman said, ‘I see only him.’

  There was movement at Maniye’s shoulder, and she flinched as she realized Broken Axe had come up behind her. She still could not understand how he could be here.

  The enthroned woman laughed at her reaction. ‘It seems you make friends everywhere you go, Broken Axe.’

  And Maniye felt like shouting at her, shouting at all of them, Don’t you know who he is? Don’t you realize that he’s the man who killed your . . .

  The man who killed my . . .

  She felt something, some certainty she had lived with forever, fall out of her world. Suddenly the woman before her was different, entirely different in every particular, even though she looked exactly the same.

  My mother . . .

  ‘Now she knows me,’ the Queen of the Tigers declared with satisfaction.

  29

  ‘What do they call you?’

  In the now-emptied room the question hung in the air between them. The Queen of the Tigers had sent them all away: the priests, the warriors, the Eyriemen, even the thralls. Every one of them she had banished from the chamber, save for Maniye – and one other.

  By the door, a quiet presence, was Broken Axe.

  ‘I am named Many Tracks,’ she declared, seeing the slight twitch of an eyebrow when she glanced towards Broken Axe. ‘But my name is Maniye.’ Because, if this was really her mother, then here was someone she must give her true name to.

  The Queen’s face was rigid, her posture stiff, as though she was fighting to control something. Her eyes skittered across Maniye, unable not to look at her, yet never still enough to properly take her in. ‘Always the Wolf way, the backwards way,’ she murmured. ‘To hide the birth name that means nothing, when it is the given name – the hunter’s name – that tells the truth about us. That is why it is the secret name. They are fools, to reveal it so.’ She stared at Maniye, seeming to steel herself. ‘I am Joalpey,’ she continued, and then, ‘but I am called Strength Under Moonlight.’ The words left her with a shudder, a concession born of customs alien to Maniye.

  ‘Thank you,’ the girl replied. She was waiting for some sense of connection to arise between them – mother to daughter. That was how it should be, she knew. That was how the stories had it, whenever estranged family found one another. They always knew. The connection of kin drew them inexorably together. She thought Joalpey was waiting for the same thing. There was a gap between them that was not mere distance though.

  ‘They say you are my child,’ the Queen of the Tigers declared awkwardly.

  ‘They told me you were dead!’ Maniye had not meant to say it. ‘I lived all my life knowing you were dead, that my father ordered you killed, and that he did it!’ jabbing a finger at Broken Axe. And then she rounded on him furiously: ‘And why didn’t you tell me? Any time, you could have said, “Your mother lives,” and made all the difference to my life. I’ve lived in fear of you all these days. And you hunted me. Even at Loud Thunder’s fire, when we were free of the Winter Runners, still you tried to take me back. Still you said nothing. Why?’

  Broken Axe drew a deep breath. ‘Why would I take you back to the Winter Runners? Because that was your home. Because it was safer than the teeth of winter. Why would I keep this secret? Because it is a secret. Because better Stone River believes Joalpey dead, and that he thinks any Queen of the Tiger he hears of is another woman. For my own sake, as much as hers.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Maniye complained bitterly.

  The Wolf hunter shrugged, suggesting that neither he nor the world were there simply for her to understand. ‘I am the Wolf that walks alone,’ he said simply. ‘I am not Stone River’s pack follower. I do what is right.’

  ‘By whose reckoning?’ she demanded.

  ‘My own. That is the true path of the Wolf, not the leader, not the follower.’ He spread his hands self-effacingly, as though embarrassed by how grave he sounded.

  There was the scuff of a footstep: Joalpey had stood up, taken a step closer. Her presence was as demanding as a fire, and yet where was the heat?

  One of Joalpey’s hands moved a lit
tle, rising towards her daughter then drawing away. There was a thing she was not saying, perhaps not even letting her own mind light upon, but it was there in the chamber with them. Maniye felt it, that unspoken thing. It was What Had Been Done. It was the history of Joalpey’s captivity amongst the Winter Runners, her humiliation and all of what she had endured. It was a history that had a sequel, though, and the sequel was Maniye.

  ‘I feel nothing.’ Joalpey’s voice was fractured with emotion. For you, she meant. Maniye felt herself begin to tremble very slightly. She met her mother’s eyes desperately and saw the same need there reflected back at her.

  ‘You are my daughter.’ It was spoken as though the words were alien to her. ‘Broken Axe has vouched for it. After he took me away and swore to Stone River I was dead, he watched you grow into what you are now. He gives his oath that you are my blood.’ The Queen brought her hands up before her, clenching them into fists over and over. ‘But I look at you and see only a Wolf.’

  ‘I can Step—’

  ‘I know what they say. But it means nothing until you have cut a soul away and become one thing or the other. And you have a Wolf face, Wolf eyes.’ Her own had gone very wide. ‘I cannot see myself in you.’

  ‘I fled the Winter Runners!’ Maniye insisted. ‘I fled them. I want to be nothing of theirs.’ But she was lying, of course. When she had passed Kalameshli’s trials, she had been proud to take her place in the tribe. It was only when Akrit had revealed his plans that she had run. She was false to the Wolf, so why not to the Tiger as well?

  ‘I kept Broken Axe here to remind me that not all born in the Jaws of the Wolf must be an enemy,’ the Queen said softly.

  ‘Mother.’ And the word seemed as leaden and strange to her as ‘daughter’ had been to Joalpey.

  ‘I will make you one of us,’ the Queen declared, not as a threat but more out of desperation. ‘You will train alongside our daughters. You will learn how to fight, and how to worship. You will eat of our meats and dance to our music. You will learn our histories. With these flames I will burn the Wolf out of you, I will sever all his claims to you. And then I will know you, at the end. You will be mine: my blood, my child.’

  As Maniye stood before her, she sensed that chasm between them, knowing only that Joalpey felt the need to bridge it even more than she herself did. Was that some way towards a mother’s love? Maniye did not know. She did not have the real thing to compare it with.

  She decided that it would do, that it was close enough. It was all the world would offer her, and she had seen enough of the world by now to know its meagre generosity.

  The daughters of the priestesses and the families close to the Queen learned to fight, but it was like dancing. Growing up amongst the Winter Runners, Maniye had been resistant to being taught anything at all, and what she had been forced to learn had come only from Kalameshli, with his rod and the hard back of his hand.

  She suspected that most children of the Tiger learned exactly like that, but for those close to the throne it was different. For them, there were ways of doing things. There were stories they were expected to know. There was battle.

  They fought with long knives and with short-hafted axes, but they learned their fights one move at a time, and strung their moves together like beads, each flowing to the next. Their teachers – sharp-voiced priestesses like Aritchaka – emphasized the grace of each movement, the poise and balance: where the feet trod, where their bodies were weak. A student who took the wrong stance could expect to receive a hard shove to show her just where she had failed.

  It was all alien to Maniye. More, the teachers regarded her with emotions ranging from bafflement to open dislike. The other students stared and whispered, repelled by her differences: wrong face, wrong skin, wrong hair, wrong eyes. And small, too: smaller than girls three or four years her junior. Everything around her seemed set on making her admit defeat.

  The girl who had hidden and skulked apart amongst the Winter Runners, the girl whose world had been an exercise in avoiding the notice of the powerful, she would have failed here. But she was not that girl any longer. Looking back, she could see that the actual privations she had thought she was escaping were small things. She had lived a life where she was fed and sheltered; not a thrall, nor fending for herself.

  But when she had rescued Hesprec and fled, she had unwittingly broken out from a different prison: a prison of no choices. She had defied her father, and in doing so had become someone for the first time.

  Maniye had spent a harsh winter becoming that person. Her flight from Broken Axe had taught her to think fast. Her months with Loud Thunder had taught her to shift for herself. She threw herself into her new surroundings with a will, watching every movement, listening to every word.

  In the first ten days, everything she did was wrong. After that

  – well, she was learning for the first time what all the others had been practising for years. She did not know the precise, exquisite steps; she did not know the proper and exact wording for the tales. She recognized where the gaps were, though; she knew the limits of her ignorance. When she came to them, she did not turn back but just ran faster, leaping each gap as it appeared. She found in herself a swiftness and a sureness that meant she could keep to her feet: not able to beat the others, but not so easy to beat.

  And when it came to Step, she found she was as swift and fierce as any of them, and as used to the tiger’s shape. She could climb better than they, and run faster. Whilst they had learned and practised, she had been living. None of the Tiger’s other daughters had been forced to test their skills against the sharp edges of the Crown of the World. However they might try to look down on her, they always found her eyes staring right back at them.

  But always, when she reached deep into her soul so as to Step, there was the Wolf, that solitary figure. She pictured it out in the snow, banished from the fire, a little further away each time. And yet still there. She wanted it to go away, to pad off into the darkness and leave her forever. She wanted to step wholly into the Shadow of the Tiger. But still it lingered, howling mournfully at the edge of her attention.

  Sometimes she woke from Wolf dreams, pack dreams, raging at the obstinacy of her own soul.

  Sometimes her mother came to watch, and that was when she got it most wrong. Because suddenly there was a new thought in her mind: I must impress her.Those were painful times.

  Her blood link to the Queen did not seem to be general knowledge, and Maniye herself said nothing of it. Her teachers must have been told something of why this Wolf-looking girl had been forced on them, but they remained close-mouthed. No doubt she was a constant source of speculation amongst her unwilling peers.

  One day – and she had lost count, but felt it must be close on a month since she first came to the Shining Place – they were spared being put through their paces. Instead, they were brought before the Tiger.

  Maniye was never sure whether this was some sacred date that nobody had mentioned to her, or whether the Queen had ordered it, or whether this was all because of a challenge between two of the priesthood. They were taken down to the temple chamber, though, and made to kneel and watch the scattered smoke and firelight dancing on that wall with its ever-coursing carvings. To Maniye, the presence of the Tiger was palpable, hanging in the air, moving restlessly from wall to wall. Glancing at her peers, seeing expressions ranging from fear to boredom, she wondered if they felt as she did. Could you really become jaded with that brooding, bloody-minded spirit? Or was her own mind just colouring the smoky air? Perhaps she cast the Tiger as menacing because she knew she would never truly belong.

  She fought down that thought mercilessly. And felt a tiny spark of approval? So she told herself.

  There was music then: fierce and rapid drumming on instruments of hide and metal, and shrill pipes, all issuing from hidden spaces about the temple. Two priestesses had stepped out into that Tiger-haunted space between the fretted screens. They wore much gold about them, though litt
le else, and their skins were streaked and striped with eye-leading patterns of black. They carried knives like curved razors, and they began to dance. With her breath caught in her throat, Maniye watched them as they stepped around one another. Each move was between positions of perfect balance, each step moved the hands and the knife as they circled. It was the perfect expression of the clumsy lumbering that Maniye and the other girls had been lurching through, but as like to the latter as the flight of birds was like to human jumping.They were exquisite in every motion, eyes fixed on each other, moving through exacting passes with unthinking elegance.

  Then the first blood was drawn and Maniye realized that it was actually a fight. Whether there had been some disagreement between them or whether this was an offering to the Tiger, she had no idea, but in a handful of seconds both women bore two thin lines of blood across their bodies, and the tempo of the contest was accelerating, without their movements being any less perfect.

  And then they Stepped, and fought as tigers, and it was simply a continuation of the dance. Each flowed from shape to shape as advantage required, two feet to four and back, and never faltered. The keen lines of claws joined the thin scratches of their blades. Watching them – two masters of an art that she had only recently discovered – Maniye could only think, How could these people ever have been beaten?The Wolves had nothing compared to this, only the hard experience of a hunter, gained piecemeal.

  But the Wolves had a different way, of course, for they did not fight alone. And she had seen herself how few in number the Tigers were.