And then Joalpey was there, revealed in the opening temple doors with a dozen of her priesthood. At her arrival a little of the scorn went from the Eyriemen, though not all of it.
‘You give him to me, Yellow Claw?’ Joalpey asked. The Wolf had been forced to his knees.
‘He is yours,’ the Eyriewoman confirmed after a glance at her chief.
‘Great are the hunters of the Eyrie,’ Joalpey recited. ‘All will have their reward.’ The words were a shade less than sincere and, from her look, her alliance with Yellow Claw and the Eyrie was a difficult one. Two priestesses stepped forward and hauled the prisoner to his feet, manhandling him into the shadow of the temple at a nod from their queen.
Maniye held still, watching and waiting, but Joalpey’s eyes never turned to her. The Queen re-entered the temple without ever glancing her way, although Maniye’s gaze bored into her every second.
When she turned away, after Joalpey had gone from view, she was staring directly at the chest of Yellow Claw. The Eyrieman’s gaze flicked over her, predatory and keen. His woman stepped forward to speak his words, but he yanked her back by her collar.
‘So, this is the Wolf girl,’ he said. A handful of his people were at his back, but he was a big man, and there was an aura about him of a strength more than physical, Maniye thought. He hardly needed his followers to give weight to his threats.
Nonetheless, she could not let that accusation lie. ‘I am no Wolf.’
‘You are no Tiger.’
‘I am.’
‘Your face says you lie to me,’ Yellow Claw observed. He reached for her, as though to cock her head back, but she flinched away, feeling both her souls rise with a fighting anger within her. It was all she could do to hold a human shape right then.
‘I lie to no one,’ she spat at him. ‘I am Tiger. This is my home. More so than it is yours.’
He angered quickly, the emotion darkening his face instantly. ‘The Wolf girl is full of words,’ he observed. ‘They cram her mouth so much, they leak. Perhaps it would be a kindness if a hole was cut in her, so they could all fly free.’
She felt her feet slide into the ready stance she had been taught. Her heart was hammering, infecting her blood with fear, but she held his gaze. ‘You challenge me?’
Yellow Claw sneered at her boldness, but there was an exasperation to him because she would not simply bow her head and back down. She thought of the only Eyriewomen she had seen, all of them meek, and haltered too, denied even the chance to give voice to their souls. How are my mother’s people in league with these creatures?
A hand fell on the Eyrieman’s arm: one of his compatriots, short and broad-shouldered, with half his face plain black and the other half painted a pale grey. White paint slashed a band across his eyes. It was a simple mask, but the sight of it awoke a deep fear in Maniye – a fear of something she could not name. He wore a drab woollen cloak of no particular colour, and beneath it his chest was bare, ridged with old, carefully inscribed scars.
The sight of him seemed to jolt Yellow Claw as well, for all the newcomer said nothing. He had the authority of a priest, though: a man who it was unwise to cross. For a moment, the leader of the Eyriemen warred with himself, but then he hissed between his teeth and stalked away.
The grey-faced man stayed on, staring at her with wide, round eyes. She felt far more scared of him than she had been of his leader. Then he turned aside and nodded once, and she saw Hesprec standing there.
She did not have to ask the question, for it was writ large in her expression.
‘This is Grey Herald, who spoke for me,’ Hesprec explained. ‘His word brought me into this place. There is yet remembrance in the Eyrie of the oldest tales, when the Serpent and the Owl Society stood shoulder to shoulder.’ The words rang a distant echo within her, one of stories seldom retold. Tales of the soulless Plague People, and the loss of many things.
That night, she dreamt – a broken, twisted string of images informed not so much by Hesprec’s talk as by the things he did not say. She was chasing after her mother, running through a landscape made as though the Shining Halls had been sunk deep within the earth. She called out Joalpey’s name, and even her secret huntress name, but the woman still would not look back, rushing full-tilt through the broken, buried streets. Stepping to her tiger shape, Maniye ran and ran, but the distance between them only grew. A terrible convulsion in the earth’s bones was occurring all around them, stone cracking, ornate carvings shivering into shards. Looking up towards the cavern sky – lit by some greenish radiance that emanated from precisely nowhere – she saw Hesprec standing atop one of the buildings, and others like him: men and women, old and young, and all with the tattoos of the serpent making tracks across their faces. Grey Herald was there too, and others painted like he was, and more still. They held their hands up as though warding off some presence that sought to intrude through the rock above.
And then she knew how she could catch up with her mother, and she had Stepped into her wolf shape, swift paws carrying her eagerly in the pursuit, but when she was at Joalpey’s heels the woman looked back with a stricken, terrified expression, and Maniye saw that the shadows on all sides of her were other wolves, and that she had been what her mother had been running from all along.
Then she woke, because there was screaming, and it was coming from somewhere outside her head.
31
The bronze knife clattering to the ground at her feet was the loudest sound in the world.
Maniye had slept poorly these last two nights. It was not the dreams, though. It was the sound of the Wolf scout that the Eyriemen had brought in. The priesthood were torturing him.
The people of the Tiger knew that gods were not of the world: above it and beyond it, things of pure spirit. That was why they would not commit the image of their deity to stone or metal or wood. Smoke, shadows, these were fit intermediaries through which to glimpse the spirit world.
She had learned all this, of course. She remembered carefully committing to memory that, for a soul to be prepared for the Tiger, it must be brought to a height of spiritual awareness, drawn from the body until it was almost visible in the air. In her lessons, the logic of this had seemed unassailable.
And there were different methods of arriving at such awareness. The year-kings of the Deer Tribe had their every want sated until it was time for them to kneel at the altar; the Wolves hunted their Running Deer to exhaustion. Drugs, deprivation, death at the point of physical exultation; the gods could be reached in many ways.
For the Tiger, when it came to offer up its enemies, there was only one way. Fear and pain were the hammers they used to forge a fine sacrifice. And so the Swift Back writhed and wailed deep inside the temple, his voice carried out to all, echoing his despair along the halls and the corridors. And in the temple’s heart, in the room of smoke and pierced stone, the Tiger licked its insubstantial lips and waited.
When he cried out, there was a distant echo deep within Maniye, the return call of her receding wolf soul. She hated it, yet it kept her awake. No matter how much she told herself that these were her ways now, still that lonely voice would not be silenced.
And now this: the dancers and their knife.
She had been up early, red-eyed, trailing towards her lessons, when four of the other girls had blocked her path.
‘You,’ said one who stood in front like their leader. Maniye had looked her in the eye and groped for her name. Imshalma, or something like that. Tiger names were still strange to her.
Maniye did not answer, merely waiting. She could sense the ill-feeling amongst them, and yet they were nervous, too, about something illicit.
‘I understand you now,’ said Imshalma or whatever her name was. ‘I have watched you, all the days since you came. I have asked myself, “What is this Wolf they have brought among us?” There must be a reason, I knew, but I could not see it. But now I understand you.’
Maniye had no sense that her relationship to the Queen
had become known to these girls, but plainly something had changed.
‘I have seen our teachers watching you. I have seen the Queen watching you. I know you, Wolf girl. You are a test.’
Maniye’s eyes narrowed. ‘I am not a Wolf.’
‘You are a test for us, to see if we possess the mind to be warriors. Our teachers have watched just to see if we would act against this enemy they have brought into our midst. They have been disappointed, because we accepted you so meekly. The Tiger is not meek. The Tiger takes his prey without hesitation, without mercy. So, I will take you. I will pass the test.’
That was when the daggers came out, one to stay in Imshalma’s hand and one cast at Maniye’s feet.
Maniye weighed the girl’s words, hunting for truth and finding not a trace of it. But there was another possibility. There might be a test, after all.
‘They are testing me,’ she told the other girl. ‘I am Tiger but they doubt me. And I have been meek. As you say, the Tiger is not meek.’ She picked up the dagger, noting an eddy of movement through the other girls. Imshalma’s eyes were a little wider than before, and Maniye wondered if she had been expecting the ‘test’ to be passed simply by making the challenge, perhaps thinking the Wolf girl would flee when confronted with a blade.
The Shadow of the Wolf clung to her, and it made them fear. Just as Wolf children grew up on tales of the Shadow Eaters, so recent history had given these girls plenty of reasons to fear the Wolf.
She shifted her back foot, dropping her weight lower. Her left hand came up before her face, fingers crooked, whilst her right held the curved blade extended at waist level. The mantle of her lessons settled on her, and for once she felt each part of her in its proper place. If Aritchaka had come by just then, she would have found no fault at all.
But the priesthood were not present to arbitrate. The other three girls had backed off to give Imshalma space, and it was just the two of them in the whole world. Maniye’s opponent had adopted a counter-stance, blade held high and jutting forwards, offhand low, halfway to reaching for Maniye’s weapon. The girl had been learning these stances and moves for years: her technique would always be better. If this was a dance, or the slow measured steps of a lesson, then Maniye would always be stumbling to keep up.
Some part of her mind had frozen – What comes next? – just as she sometimes found in practice. The animal inside her knew that she could not afford to be the one reacting, though. Even as Imshalma moved forwards, so Maniye’s feet were already dancing. She passed backwards three quick steps, because over a short distance it was always possible to go backwards faster than the opponent could advance. That was Lesson One. Lesson Two was when she braced against her back foot, pushing herself towards her opponent as Imshalma was trying to close the gap. In the moment after, she had reversed her motion, but before she was within reach of that bronze claw, she Stepped.
She managed the pounce badly, the dagger nipping her across the foreleg, and her impact coming at an angle, so that she made Imshalma stagger without knocking her down. Then she had leapt off, ending up on the far side of her opponent, knowing that, without that dagger pinned, she could not stay within its reach.
They both Stepped in the same instant, Imshalma to Tiger, Maniye to girl, her blade sweeping so that it cut her opponent across the muzzle, sending the animal reeling away, pawing at the shallow wound.
She felt her heart racing within her. For a moment she was fighting against her own body, trying to settle back into her ready stance. If Imshalma had been able to break through her own pain to mount an attack, things could have gone badly. Instead she was retreating again, now on human feet and dabbing at a line of blood that traced the bridge of her nose and ran along one cheekbone. For a moment Maniye thought that her opponent lacked the will to go on, but then some metal came into the other girl’s eyes and she was striding forwards, passing with the dagger, changing stances fluidly, all her years of practice flooding back into her.
Maniye Stepped, Stepped back, retreating before the darting bronze that kept coming for her. Abruptly her tiger eyes could not see a way past the blade. She tried a feint to give herself room, got her footing wrong and took a raking scratch across her forearm. She was aware that she had been backing up for too long – that she might hit a wall at any moment.
Something made Imshalma pause: it was Maniye’s expression, all bared teeth and frustration and Wolf features. In that moment, Maniye struck back, slapping for Imshalma’s knife hand, letting her own blade find the lines that she had been taught: belly, throat, armpit, flank. Imshalma fell back rapidly, and they both Stepped at once, pushing forwards into a grappling embrace of tigers, a lightning exchange of claws that marked both of them. Then Imshalma had twisted aside, shrugging out of the clasp and Stepping back to drag her blade past Maniye’s eyes. It left a slight wound, a scalp wound, but the shock of it threw Maniye back to her human form, out of position and off balance. Imshalma had a hand bunched in the collar of her tunic, holding her down, with her dagger drawn back to thrust.
Maniye Stepped, without conscious decision, and got her teeth into the other girl’s wrist. Had Imshalma held to her purpose she could still have stabbed and ended it, but instead she jerked away with a yell. Instead of holding – as every instinct was howling at her to do – Maniye broke away and made a snarling, defiant retreat, blood in her jaws. Her wolf jaws.
She Stepped to human instantly, standing in her best approximation of a ready stance, and Imshalma was still facing her, still nominally fighting, but the other girl’s eyes were wide, the expression of someone whose fears have been made flesh: seeing the Wolf brought to life right there in the temple.
She found her balance, though, levelling her blade at Maniye once more, although there was a terror still lurking in her eyes. She would not back down.
Then there was only Aritchaka’s voice calling out, ‘Enough!’
The priestess stood at the far end of the passage, the same direction the four girls had come from. Maniye felt sure she had been watching there for quite long enough.
‘Your dedication to your studies is admirable,’ Aritchaka said, in a sharp-edged voice. ‘However, I feel you both require more practice so as to master the proper forms. Have those injuries washed and tended to.’
Please don’t tell her. Please don’t tell my mother, but the words could not be spoken and Aritchaka’s expression was stern.
Following a day of practice in which she did not look at or speak to any of the other girls – and they had returned the same cold courtesy – Aritchaka came to her as she was bedding down.
‘Do not sleep. Tonight I will come for you,’ the priestess instructed. She was staring, weighing what she saw, but her face could not be read.
‘What is it?’ Maniye wanted Hesprec there, because she dearly needed anyone who might be on her side. Although he was tolerated within the Shining Halls, his presence in the temple itself was very much on sufferance. He could not stay there long. She was alone.
‘The Queen has sent for you,’ Aritchaka told her. ‘Tonight we feast with the Tiger. It is for the priesthood and the great families – but she will have you there.’ She was unhappy about it. Maniye felt her own innards clench. What did this mean? Was Joalpey going to acknowledge her at last? Would the priesthood stand for it, if she did? Or was she herself to be offered to the Tiger? Would it be her screams next, now the extended torment of the Swift Back scout had finally been silenced.
After that, there was nothing for it but to watch the moon climb the sky and put the stars to shame, to name the constellations as they made their procession above, and wonder if any of them might be invoked to come to her aid. Within her, her twin souls roiled in a festering sore of fight and flight, keyed up to a danger that she could not assess or confront. The foot-dragging stretch between dusk and midnight was a long and lonely road for her.
And then at last she heard the soft scuff of Aritchaka’s return. The priestess carried with her a robe of s
oft hide and a cloak of tiger fur, which lay heavy enough on Maniye’s shoulders that she felt the Tiger himself was pressing down on her. Meekly, mutely, she followed in the woman’s footsteps into the heart of the temple, into that same room of smoke and shadow where the insubstantial spectre of the Tiger dwelt.
She had expected there might be other students – those in favour or disfavour – or perhaps the priesthood all mantled in tiger-skin, but Aritchaka backed out again as soon as she had delivered Maniye there, and then it was just the two of them: the girl with the Wolf tribe face and the Queen of the Tiger people.
Joalpey, whose secret name was Strength Under Moonlight, forced her head around to gaze directly at her daughter. The muscles of her jaw clenched, but this time she did not look away. Her eyes just lanced and lanced deeper, as though Maniye was a boil.
She knows . Just one lapse into wolf shape, after resisting it for so long . . . but of course word had come to her mother. Is this to be a reckoning then? Maniye felt the Tiger cease his pacing and settle down in the darkness behind her, head resting on his paws, and watching. Something was to happen here: her twin souls knew it. She could almost hear the great cat’s rumbling purr of anticipation, feeling it like a tremor in the ground.
Then there were servants: thralls, men with heavy collars bearing platters of meat. They looked at neither woman, merely trod about the chamber in fixed paths, eyes on their feet as if terrified of stepping astray.
‘Sit with me,’ Joalpey instructed. ‘Maniye . . . Many Tracks . . . daughter, sit with me.’
She folded herself down alongside the altar and, after a moment, Maniye followed her example.
‘Aritchaka and the priesthood hold the Tiger’s feast, but the Queen takes her meat apart from her subjects,’ Joalpey explained. She was watching Maniye as if the girl was venomous, or apt to become violently mad. ‘But you shall eat with me. Please . . .’
Maniye took a sliver of meat: it was so tender that it seemed to melt on her tongue, delicately spiced and rich with juices. She was suddenly aware of how hungry she was, having fasted since noon. Joalpey found a smile and forced it onto her face, picking at the flesh herself.
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 37