‘They tell me you learn fast, devouring all they have to teach you,’ she observed.
‘I want to be of the Tiger,’ Maniye insisted. ‘I will do anything, if it means that.’
Joalpey regarded her doubtfully as the girl scooped up another slice of meat and tore into it. ‘In this short time, you have made great advances, they say. You cannot walk the steps of the Tiger’s dance, yet each footfall is not so very far away. You do not know all the cycles of our heroes and our deeds, yet you can tell a tale that is not so very far removed. And they say you Step well.’ Her voice had gone hard on that word, but Maniye could see that she was fighting down the bitter edge in it.
Maniye opened her mouth again, not sure what she should say next. She longed for Hesprec’s wisdom, to know what convoluted sequence of words would break down the barrier still between them. Surely there had to be some magic that could accomplish it.
‘The Tiger’s sacred meal,’ Joalpey gestured. ‘How do you like it?’
‘Very well,’ Maniye said, desperate to please, although it was true.
‘You understand, then?’
The girl frowned. ‘Understand?’
‘That you eat the flesh of the Wolf.’
That was no great revelation: amongst the Winter Runners she had eaten wolf-meat many times. It was common, when a hearth-woman wished to become with child, that she would have her hunter mate kill a wolf and butcher its body for the pot. In that way the beast’s soul would be cut loose, and might seek out a new life within her belly. Usually there was enough to spare, and it was good practice to woo the Wolf’s favour by gifting it to many. Still, the meat was tough and poor eating, not like the feast currently before her.
‘This tastes like no wolf,’ she remarked, around a mouthful, ‘This is tender as pig.’
Joalpey regarded her intently. ‘It is Wolf,’ and this time Maniye caught the special inflection, and a sudden shudder of fright went through her.
With great willpower she forced the mouthful down, aware of sitting suddenly on a knife-edge. Yes, the Swift Back scout had stopped screaming at last. She had not asked what would be done with him after that.
‘But, if he died . . .’ The words were drawn out of her as though she had eaten a keen-edged thread along with the meat, and now it was being hauled back out. Humans were animals, animals were human. There was no line between them save the ability to Step. Souls passed one to the other. To eat of a deer that had worn a man’s shape was no different than to eat of a mute deer that had not.
But Joalpey meant something different.
‘His ghost . . .’ Maniye got out, ‘is here?’
‘Yes,’ the Queen confirmed calmly, and selected another morsel herself.
Maniye sat very still. Because this was a Tiger thing; this was a tradition of her mother’s house. This was how they did things in the Shining Halls. But it was wrong, it was terribly wrong. Not eating the flesh of a man, for all beasts were men, but to eat his soul. To trap it within the yoked human flesh and to consume it
– to give a mad ghost sanctuary inside your own body – was to fill yourself too full of souls – and she had two already fighting within her.
‘This is how the Tiger is fed. He is a god. What do you think he eats? Other people do not understand this, but we know.’
And Maniye thought, The Shadow Eaters, the Wolves call us. It is not just a casual name.
Her hands shook. She thought that she could feel the dead Wolf’s ghost squirming inside her. And yet . . . and yet the Tiger had padded up behind her, darkening the gloom further with its smoky presence, waiting to be fed.
There were rituals that they had tried to teach her, words and forms and steps. Aware that Joalpey’s eyes were fixed upon her fiercely, Maniye stood, trying to master the hammering of her heart. She took a deep breath – and turned to face the god.
Her eyes saw only the dancing patterns of shadow that the fires threw against the wall, but her mind told her that these were the striped flanks of the Tiger, that the hot air was his breath. The knowledge, the utter certainty that he was immediately before her came like a blow, as though that sightless muzzle had suddenly nudged at her chest, rocking her back on her heels.
She could not remember all the moves, the gestures of invitation and propitiation, but she could guess and follow her instincts, just as Joalpey had said. The sequence was not long, and if she did not get every motion of it exactly right, she was never far away – hovering about it like a crow over a dying thing. With a mix of grace and awkward pauses she invited the Tiger to feed, to take the struggling soul of the Swift Back scout from between her lips.
As she imagined that vast maw gaping for her, she wondered what else it might take from her. She felt her own Wolf nature backing as far into her as it could go, tail between its legs, yellow eyes glinting.
When she turned back, with the dark tide that was the Tiger receding in her mind, Joalpey was standing there – close enough to touch. She was still staring – forcing herself to stare at the girl. One hand was raised halfway, as if to rest on Maniye’s arm, but it had paused. For a moment – for a long, tense agony of a moment – she remained still, save that Maniye could hear her mother’s ragged breathing.
‘I want a daughter,’ the Queen got out. ‘I want an heir of my own blood. You are all the heirs of my blood, all that there will ever be . . .’ The outstretched hand twitched, contracting into a fist. ‘But . . . but . . . but I look on you and see it in your eyes, in your face. You have a wolf soul.’
‘I have a tiger soul.’ Maniye’s voice was just a whisper.
‘It is not enough,’ Joalpey forced out through clenched teeth.
‘Aritchaka has told you—’
‘Aritchaka,’ Joalpey hissed. ‘Aritchaka has spoken for you.You are strong, she says.You are clever.You are brave.You are all the things a child of the Tiger should be. But I see these things in you, too, and it is a Wolf’s strength, a Wolf’s cleverness. I cannot change my eyes. I cannot forget them: Stone River and that loathsome creature his priest. And you are them. They sit in your face, and I cannot see you past them.’ She took two steps away, convulsively. The hand that had been reaching out was now warding.
Maniye tried to voice something: a plea, a protest. What sound came out did not make a complete word.
‘And they will use you against me,’ her mother whispered. ‘The Tiger tells me so. The Tiger tells me that you must be prey, if you are not his. What am I to do? I want to make you mine, but I cannot. I cannot bear you to be here. I thought I could face it, after all this time, but it still cuts me – it hurts just as it did.’ She turned away, fists clenched by her sides, shaking.
Maniye felt the Tiger’s breath still on her neck, its insatiable hunger for souls. You must be prey, if you are not his.
She fled then, while Joalpey was still wrestling with herself. Any later would be too late.
32
Shyri had been terrorizing the local wildlife, Stepped into her Plains form, a Laughing Girl indeed. The deer and squirrels and groundhogs and coyotes she scared up had no idea what she was. A long-limbed, spotted demon with swift and terrible jaws, she killed more by fright than by trauma, Asmander reckoned. She killed more than they needed, too, but she was enjoying herself, and he had no intention of stopping her. It was a bitter realization but, of the three of them, she was the only effective hunter in this country. He disdained to sully his Champion’s shape for something as mundane as finding food, and neither Old Crocodile nor the Dragon could hunt in such cold. The year was supposedly getting warmer, but Asmander could only assume that in the Crown of the World that word carried some other meaning.
‘Come south to our country,’ Asmander had told the Laughing Girl. ‘Come hunt the channels of the estuary or the banks of the Tsotec’s head and then we’ll see.’ But she just laughed at him, and she was right to do so.
‘I will,’ she said, her grin widening from ear to ear as she made him gut and spit the sp
oils of her pre-dawn hunt. ‘And I’ll outdo you there, too. There is nowhere in the world my people cannot thrive.’
‘Then why do you rule just a hand’s breadth of the Plains, and no more? Where is the great Empire of the Hyena?’ Asmander demanded, nettled.
She put her face right in front of his, eyes to his eyes. ‘O leaping Champion, we are a patient people. We are not hasty. The Plains are covered with the dust of those who have mounted greatness and failed to keep a hold. We have seen the Aurochs and the people of the Horn, we have seen the Cats come and go. We will see these northern Wolves fall, and no doubt we will visit the ruins of your own great city one day. We watch you all claw up for the sun, and then burn, and we laugh. And when you have all fallen, then we will walk the carrion road of your failure, and we will rule.’
And she had him. He was staring into those wide eyes, struck to the core with the certainty of it all, the manifest destiny of the Laughing Men and the women who led them. He could see, vividly in his mind’s eye, their dominion of bones, extending from the cold north to the deserts beyond the Tsotec.
And then she laughed delightedly and pushed him away, so that, off balance from squatting on his haunches, he tumbled backwards. For a moment he was a crocodile, twisting and whipping his bladed tail at her, and then he regained his feet and his human shape.
‘You made it up,’ he snarled at her. ‘This is all your fantasy.’ ‘Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,’ she grinned fiercely. ‘But you recognized it for truth, didn’t you? I think you even liked it. A strong woman to put her foot on your neck, eh? Is that your type, O Champion?’
Venater sniggered: there was no other word for it. Asmander glowered at the pair of them. ‘Mock all you want, a Champion is chosen by the world. It is something you will never know.’
‘A Champion can’t even get his servant to gut a rabbit for him,’ Shyri pointed out, not in the least put out.
‘It’s beneath him.’ Asmander looked down at his own slick hands and smiled somewhat shamefacedly. ‘You’re right, I should really take him in hand.’
‘Try it,’ Venater growled.
They had been hiding out here in the woods near the Shining Halls for days now, in a shelter built of branches and leaves that had not been meant to last this long. Every so often, Hesprec appeared and assured them that all was well, but his business was not yet concluded. Questions about whether this Wolf girl of his needed rescuing or not were dodged nimbly, and then he would be gone. That the locals were aware of them seemed inarguable – yet nobody troubled them, nor invited them within the walls of the settlement either. And that was a shame, for the Shining Halls looked as close to civilization as he had come in a long while. In the manner of their building and carving Asmander saw an echo of his own homeland, and wondered what ancient architects had tracked north – or south.
‘What’s the point of him, if he won’t cook and clean for you?’ Shyri demanded.
‘I’m not his mate,’ the old pirate spat.
‘Are you not?’
‘Enough.’ Asmander stood up abruptly. He didn’t know what had alerted him, but something was definitely wrong.
The other two abandoned their quarrel instantly. Shyri Stepped smoothly, surging forwards into her high-shouldered hyena shape. Venater took up his meret, the greenstone edge of which he had been awake half the night sharpening.
A moment later Asmander spotted them: Hesprec returning, and this time not alone, for a small Wolf girl dogged his footsteps. The sight filled him with gladness. It meant they could move again, and it meant he could now fulfil his own mission, one way or another.
Hesprec had paused, struggling for breath. The girl addressed him briefly, and then she was a tiger, and the old priest a serpent coiling in her jaws. Seeing that – such trust between them – Asmander understood why the priest had demanded his reluctant entourage wait for him. He pushed further thoughts of his duty to the back of his mind.
Then the striped cat had flowed up the hillside towards them, hardly seeming to need footholds. A second later Hesprec was with them in human form, looking so worn out that Asmander felt he could have held the old priest up to the sun and viewed his bones through the man’s skin.
‘This is her, then?’ he asked lightly. Stepped back to her human shape, the much-heralded girl seemed an insignificant piece of work.
‘And now we go,’ Hesprec confirmed with uncharacteristic directness. ‘Forgive me for ruining your breakfast.’
‘There are more rabbits,’ Shyri said happily, ‘always more rabbits. This is good hunting land.’
‘A shame,’ Hesprec remarked wryly, ‘for we will be hunted.’
They set off as swiftly as possible, a Stepped Shyri leading the way. Asmander had asked for the honour of bearing Hesprec, the priest’s whip-slender form tucked inside his tunic, next to his bare skin. The girl changed too, not to the tiger but into the compact form of a wolf, but he had been expecting that.
Asmander would have preferred to have the two Coyote traders with them, because the north remained a large, cold and complex place in which to navigate. However, Two Heads Talking and Quiet When Loud had abandoned their company as soon as they were close to the Shining Halls. The pair had shown little confidence in Tiger hospitality.
Even so, at first it was simply a matter of finding the best paths downhill through the trees, for it was more important to put distance between them and any pursuers than to be clever. As night drew on, then perhaps some application of cleverness might be in order, Asmander considered, and that was where they were more likely to run into trouble. Even a day out from their starting point they would still be well within the Tiger’s Shadow.
And yet, as dusk fell, he was aware that all sign of civilization had been left behind save for the odd tumbled ruin. There was no great sprawl of farms and herdsmen here, as there would have been in the south. Asmander sensed that they would be re-entering the domain of the Wolf before too long.
Which brings its own special problems, he knew.
Shyri sniffed out a sheltered hollow, and they all bundled themselves together to sleep, going without a fire but building a shelter around them that would hold their body warmth near to them. Even so, they were all awake and shivering well before dawn.
‘Early start it is, then,’ Asmander declared, and he nodded at the Wolf girl, Maniye, who had not said a word to anyone yet.
‘What’s she good for, then?’ Venater was more direct. ‘She’s what all this is about? Why?’
‘Because it is my whim, and my will,’ Hesprec told him sharply. Venater – no proper follower of Serpent – glowered at him but stopped short of any direct challenge.
‘We are walking between fires, I am afraid,’ the old priest said gently to Maniye, ‘and yet we must walk.’
‘Who is likely to be chasing us, and why?’ Asmander asked him, posing a question necessary enough not to seem invasive, although he was burning with curiosity.
‘All I know is that she came to me in the Tiger city,’ Hesprec told him, ‘and she needed to leave. That was enough.’
‘You foresaw it,’ Asmander decided.
The old man shook his head tiredly. ‘If only the Serpent could speak so clearly to me. It seemed to me that life in the Crown of the World is seldom kind, and that the life of one halfWolf girl has not been kind, and that such unkindnesses might not be shrugged away simply by exchanging one roof for another. And so I came to the Shining Halls, and waited. And I wish that I had not been needed there, and could have returned to you alone. But sometimes the Serpent moves in your innards, and you must learn to trust that movement, and follow it.’
‘What was it, though?’ Asmander asked plaintively. Somewhere in the question lurked the southerner’s civilized horror of these northern people and their ways.
‘My mother.’ Maniye’s voice sounded flat and dead. ‘I found my mother.’
Looks were exchanged between the rest of them, and then: ‘The Tiger did for her?’ from
Venater.
‘Idiot, her mother must beTiger,’ Shyri hissed.
‘Doesn’t mean they can’t—’
‘Quiet,’ Asmander hissed at them both. Maniye stared at them: it was as though, after a day’s travel together, she was seeing them for the first time. ‘You are as I thought men of the far south would be,’ she remarked in a small voice, staring at him.
‘As I said, the followers of the Serpent are special,’ and Hesprec then named them all, though Asmander could see that the girl had problems with most of what she heard, traditions being so different in these lands.
‘What was it about your mother?’ Asmander rested on his haunches beside her, so as not to loom. He wanted to know whether there was some rescue they would need to enact, or if the older woman was dead.
Maniye took a deep breath. ‘She did not want me,’ was what he barely heard, the words scarcely venturing beyond her teeth. ‘She would not look on me.’
Faced with that, he could only stand up and back off.
They achieved another day’s hard journeying. At first they followed the Plains girl Shyri’s best guess, and Maniye trailed behind on her wolf feet, mostly so she would not have to speak to anyone. Past midday, though, she came out of herself enough to object to the path.
‘Where are you even going?’ she demanded.
Shyri regarded her narrowly. ‘Away.’
‘Where would you head for?’ Hesprec asked her gently. They
had stopped to eat in the shadow of a great fallen stele, a carven obelisk that might even have marked some key Tiger tribe border.
‘The further west we travel, the more the Shadow of the Wolf
falls on us,’ she warned them simply.
‘These things are known: a stranger is always short of friends,’
Hesprec said.
‘Yet we may find some,’ she insisted. ‘If we find the river and
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 38