She almost missed the moment when one of the women misstepped, in human shape with her blade held wide, and her opponent a tiger under her guard. Then she was down, the snarling beast atop her, jaws agape. Maniye expected her to die. She sensed the bloodlust of the Tiger all around her.
And the drums reached their crescendo and the pipes shrieked, and then all was still, and the tiger was a woman once more, stepping back from her adversary. Instantly, thralls were rushing forwards to tend to their wounds, and the loser was forcing herself to stand, proud before her god. Maniye was left wondering whether it had not, after all that, been merely a dance to long-rehearsed steps.
She felt as though she was back at the frozen lake with Loud Thunder again, and waiting for the thaw. Her mother came to see her, and she tried and tried, coming ten years too late to all these traditions. Never did Joalpey speak to her; never did she call for her daughter. Always her eyes seemed frozen with doubt and bad memories.
Maniye knelt in the room that was the Tiger’s shrine, crouched before that apparition of smoke and imagination that was the closest her mother’s people got to representing their god. The Tiger without spoke there to the tiger within. She felt the connection as clear and self-evident: This is where I belong. And yet the Wolf was written in her face and in her compact frame, in the way she spoke, in her blood. And the same Wolf was embedded in Joalpey’s mind like an arrow.
She began to feel a terrible fear that she would never become either of the things within her. That, in the end, neither Tiger nor Wolf would have her. That she was lost.
She began to dream badly: confusing, tormenting nightmares of fleeing or chasing, though really it was herself that she both pursued and fled from. In her dreams there were no familiar places. Each seemed to take her further from anywhere she knew, from any sight she had seen. She was drifting away, inside her own head. She had been given a chance to belong: it had been within her very reach. Yet she was losing her hold on it, as though she had climbed and climbed only to fail within sight of the top. And that meant a long drop.
Maniye began to dread going to sleep. In the dreams themselves, though, it was waking that she dreaded. Another day where her mother turned away from her. Another day alone amidst all the people of the Shining Halls, because there was nobody she could speak with about this: not her teachers, not Aritchaka, not anyone.
Yet one morning she woke in the close stone cell where she slept alone – the other students would not have her in their dormitory because of her face and her twitching, whimpering nightmares. She awoke with the sense of a presence close by, quiet and still and buried . . . and he was there.
He sat beside her pallet with his back against the wall, awake but not quite looking at her. He seemed paler and older than ever, and the scales of his tattoos were so faded that they had almost rubbed away in parts. His skin seemed brittle, as though to reach out and touch him would break him into a thousand desiccated flakes. But then his eyes flicked towards her, and a delicate smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
‘Good morning, little Tiger,’ said Hesprec softly. ‘I came to see that you are well.’
She had her smile ready, and was hunting about for some mocking retort, some dismissive joke, when the tears came. Abruptly she was sitting up and weeping, holding him close, feeling the feather weight of his hand on her head, smoothing her hair.
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‘It is no great matter,’ Hesprec told her.
‘But how are you even here?’ Maniye demanded.
‘Does the Serpent not know all ways under the earth?’ Hesprec looked at their close stone confines almost approvingly. ‘Besides, I discovered some fellow countrymen whose aid I was able to enlist. Serpent provides, little Tiger.’
Maniye thought about the gods of Wolf and Tiger. Did they provide? They challenged, yes; they made their people strong by testing them and weeding out the weak. Which sounded admirable unless you spent your life terrified of weaknesses you could do nothing about.
Hesprec was watching her, reading each thought from the smallest change in her expression, or so his eyes suggested. ‘Nothing lost, nothing forgotten,’ he told her softly. ‘Serpent seeks for old knowledge in the deep earth and brings it to light. Serpent’s coils cradle learning now gone from the rest of the world, ready to proffer it to us when we are ready. Why do you think the world has to suffer ancient creatures such as I, mm? Only that we go amongst the people of the world with those gems of knowledge Serpent has dug in the deep earth of old time.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ she told him, but inwardly she experieced a stab of envy at the comfort his god gave him. Then she felt guilty for it, because she was trying to grow close to the Tiger, not be seduced by some other way. Still . . .
She almost did not say it, hovering twice on the edge of voicing the words without letting them out, before finally giving way.
‘I thought I felt . . . Serpent, I thought he helped me, once, twice. He? She?’
‘Either. And most likely you did. Serpent’s coils run beneath all the earth, and now you have met me, you may see them from time to time. You have become something that Serpent may notice.’ He stretched. ‘Now, there is a priestess who has said she would speak to me of visions.’
Maniye stood up suddenly, feeling betrayed. ‘You’re here for your mission! You’re not here for me at all!’
Hesprec rolled his eyes, spreading exaggeratedly exasperated hands. ‘Dear me, life is so simple in the Crown of the World that you can do one thing at a time only. I came here for you, and I am very grateful that your meanderings took me to a place where I might also advance the Serpent’s business.’
‘Hmm.’ Feeling backed into a logical corner, Maniye folded her arms stubbornly. ‘If the coils of the Serpent are everywhere, why does he need you?’
‘Because I am but a loop of those coils.’
It was past time for her to be gone to her studies, she realized. ‘Will you . . . ?’ She could still not quite understand how he was here, alive and unfettered. ‘You will stay?’
‘For a time,’ he agreed mildly. ‘I must find some path back to my home eventually, but for now I am here, and in no apparent danger from your kin, thanks to, if I might say so, a remarkable combination of good fortune and deft speech on my part. And you, of course.’
She started. ‘Me?’
‘Yours is a name to conjure by. When I gave it, they brought me straight before that remarkable woman who rules here. Why was that, I wonder?’ His expression gave her no clue as to his private thoughts.
She wanted to answer him, but the whole business had laid a weight of secrecy on her ever since she had first left her mother’s presence. She had grown used to it being that one piece of knowledge that was never spoken of – even amongst those who knew the truth.
Later, Hesprec was there as she tried to match the careful steps of the other students. In those slow passes she saw again the fierce duel between the priestesses: the same movements at a difference pace. It should have made her nervous, but instead every part of the dance seemed to fall into place that much more naturally: her bones now knew what it was all for. That was the day she Stepped and took her bronze knife with her, making the hard metal a part of her body, and finding it in her hand again when she retook her human form. The old Serpent’s gaze upon her made her feel proud.
Just as nobody openly stared at her Wolf face, or speculated on her heritage, so Hesprec seemed to share in that peculiar invisibility. He could hardly be missed, that outlandish old man with his cloth-covered head and his corpse-pallor skin, and yet Tiger eyes slid off him in a willing conspiracy to pretend he was not there.
When Broken Axe made an appearance, which was rarely, he too was looked straight through, made to disappear by the collective consensus of the Tiger. Even the Eyriemen had a touch of it. At first Maniye saw this as an aloofness born of disdain. It was watching Hesprec that taught her otherwise. Somehow, as he passed amongst them, he taught her to look at her h
osts anew and see the weakness she had taken for proud strength. They did not wish to see him, or Maniye, or any of these strangers walking freely in their halls, because they were all evidence of how the Tiger had fallen from the heights of its strength. She studied the carvings then, seeing past Queens seated with great ceremony while the world scuffed a path on its knees to their throne. The Eyriemen would not have stalked so haughtily through these halls in those days.
She understood, then, that the whole of the Shining Halls could not look at these foreigners without feeling the pain of old wounds, humiliations and indignities. Just as her mother could not look on her.
With that particular revelation, she found herself a high place, roosting up on the temple wall amongst the carved monsters: the petrified jaws and claws of tigers trapped forever halfway out of the stone. Just as she had once retreated to the high eaves of Akrit’s hall, she perched there and stared down at the sprawl of buildings that was the Shining Halls. At night there seemed to be precious little about them that shone.
How long she stayed there, as the moon bellied up into the sky, she could not later have said. She only came out of the depths of herself at a scuffing sound nearby. Instantly she was a Tiger, keen-eyed in the dark, and she saw Broken Axe standing further along the wall from her, feet neatly balancing along the same ledge that she had taken as a roost.
‘What do you want?’ she asked sourly.
His eyes fixed her against the stone. Even now that she knew some inner part of him, she could not say just who or what he really was. He was the Wolf that walked alone. He did what he did for his own reasons.
‘I wanted to see how you were,’ he told her.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ she demanded. ‘I thought you didn’t need to hunt me any more.’
He shrugged, and then lowered himself until he was sitting close by, looking down. ‘You are a strange creature, Many Tracks. You are something that should not have come into the world.’ He said it matter-of-factly, without any sign that he intended to hurt her. ‘To bring a thing into existence is to be responsible for it. Whose hands are behind the fashioning of you, then? Stone River, for sure. Kalameshli Takes Iron also, for his was the thought behind it. And your mother, too, for all she had little choice. And me.’ Meeting her fierce glare, he shrugged again. ‘Or do you not think so? That I saved your mother, there is the mark of my wood-knife in carving you. That I never told you, there is another. That you grew up believing I had murdered her, a mark there. I did not bring your shape from the wood, but I have helped finish you.’
‘You’re responsible for me?’
‘In some small way.’
‘You don’t need to be,’ she told him harshly. ‘I – what? – absolve you.You are nothing to me. I am happy to be nothing to you.’ It wasn’t true, of course, and she felt they both knew it. He still frightened her, but she could not cut him away from her history. In that, he was right.
He stretched, prior to changing the subject. ‘I have travelled from the Swift Backs,’ he said, naming the closest tribe of the Wolf.
‘You lie to them like you lied to the Winter Runners?’
‘I lie to nobody. I am the Wolf alone, and I serve the Wolf in my own way. If they believe that I must be a slave to their path, it is not my place to enlighten them,’ he said softly. ‘Of all my responsibilities, the chiefest to me is that I tread a path that bears neither guilt nor shame. Those are the things that the Wolf cannot endure.’
‘Did you . . . ?’ Asking a question of him was putting herself in his debt, drawing back into his shadow that she claimed to be free of, and yet . . . ‘What have you heard, of my f– of Stone River?’
‘That he is strong with the Many Mouths now, and that the eldest son of Seven Skins has given many gifts to Stone River. That the Moon Eaters and the Swift Backs have exchanged many messengers, and it seems that they are halfway into Stone River’s camp, each for fear that, if the other joined but not they, then standing alone they would fall prey to the rest. You know how Stone River got his name, Many Tracks?’
‘I . . . the landslide.’ She knew the story, of course: the most told tale amongst the Winter Runners, or at least of those recounted within earshot of her father. During the war with the Tiger, Akrit had come to a battle in a canyon. He had lured the Tiger to where he had seen a great slope of loose scree and, when they had chased him, he had brought it down on them, killing many of their best. He had been barely older then than she herself was now.
‘The words of the Swift Backs were only the first stones of the landslide,’ Broken Axe told her. ‘You know what I mean.’
For a long time she stared at him, and then she finally found the question that had been stalking her mind since she first saw him in Joalpey’s throne room.
‘How did it happen? When did you become . . . not a Winter Runner? Was it in the war?’
‘I was just a boy during the war.’
‘You didn’t fight?’
‘I fought. Boys fight, but they don’t ask questions. They believe what they’re told. I fought well, scouted well. That’s what they used us for, mostly. Of all the youth of the Winter Runners, only I could walk alone into the trees and take back the night from the enemy. I was noticed because I killed Tiger warriors. When I left an axehead in the skull of one of their war chiefs, I was not much older than you. If you could have met me in those days, you’d not have found a more devoted member of Stone River’s warband.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Afterwards, after the Tiger’s power broke – when your mother had been captured, and they were forced to give tribute to Seven Skins and your father, there was a hunt. Stone River entrusted it to his best warriors – and I was one. Tell me, girl, how many tigers you have seen in your life?’
‘Tigers?’
‘Of wolves, there are many, but you will find few tigers in these parts or anywhere west of here. We were ordered to trap and kill every one of them we could find. We were told to strip the Tiger of its souls.’ He gave her a bleak look. ‘I cannot even say what might happen then, whether the Tiger souls must travel many miles to find a new body to be born into. And what if there were not enough? What happens to those souls then? And I thought about it all too long, what we were doing. And I knew that if I just did what I was told, and it was wrong, then being told to do it would not save me. If the Tiger himself should stand between my soul and a new life, and demand to know why I slaughtered so many of his kind, what could I say? That it was Akrit Stone River who gave the order? What would that matter to a god-spirit? More, what could I say to myself, when I asked that question of my reflection in the waters? So I became Broken Axe, the Wolf that walks alone. I thought Stone River would be angry.’
‘Why wasn’t he?’ Because to Maniye, it seemed her father had always been on the point of anger.
‘When I came back from the hunt, he saw how I had changed. He saw how the change made the others in the village feel about me. They saw the change in me, and they knew me for a strong hunter and a warrior, so they feared it. And Stone River used that. He let me go my ways so long as I went his ways, too. He made me his huntsman, his messenger to other tribes, his fist to lift in threat against those who uttered words he did not wish spoken. And each time I weighed his orders, but mostly I did what he asked. Because it did not offend me, and because, for all a man wanders, having a home is still a good thing.’
She was going to ask it then, but he was already going on. ‘And there was your mother, of course. Your father . . . you know what was done, what his plans were, for her, and for you. And after you came, he gave me that order: to take her into the forest, far enough that her ghost could not find its way back to the village of the Winter Runners. And to kill her, while she was in her human shape. He wanted her spirit to wander a long while before it could be reborn, if it ever was.’
‘And that was wrong.’
A shrug, once more. ‘It seemed so to me. And Stone River never did understand me
. He never saw that I was not his creature. He gave me the name of Broken Axe, but he never realized I was not his weapon.’
Her next question took much longer to emerge. She did not want to think about it at all, but it could not be kept down.
‘And what my father did to her, was that not wrong?’
She forced herself to look at him, and caught the raw, hurt expression on his face. But he had no answer for her.
A few days later, a commotion summoned her from her solitary practice after the other students had gone. Since watching the duel between the priestesses she had been taking every spare moment to work through as much of the fighting dance as she could remember, over and over until every muscle ached.
The noise, to her surprise, was the Eyriemen. They hadn’t seemed the boisterous types when she had seen them stalking about the Shining Halls previously, but now they had something to celebrate. Or else, she considered, they were making sure that their hosts appreciated them.
She followed the sounds of their rhythmic whooping and clapping until she found them outside the front gates of the temple. There were half a dozen of them, and they had a prisoner between them. She felt an odd twist inside her when she recognized the man as a Wolf.
It was not anyone she knew, no Winter Runner at all. From his dress and markings she guessed he must be a Swift Back: a short, stocky man dressed in furs and quilted leather. The Eyriemen had a rope collar about his neck, and his hands were bound behind him. They were pushing him about between them, sending him reeling from one to another, with kicks and blows whenever he stumbled or fell.
She watched, and told herself that she was glad, because he was a Wolf and an enemy. That was what any child of the Tiger would feel in her bones.
‘A gift!’ The speaker was the woman the Eyriemen had with them, although, behind her, their leader held his hands up. ‘The Wolf are growing bold again! They come sniffing up to your very walls. Be glad you have the keen eyes of the Eyrie to keep you safe! A gift for your queen, here!’
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 36