The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  She had only just tracked the Serpent girl down when a deep horn was sounded by one of the Horse sentries. They had spotted a pack of wolves breaking from the treeline.

  She could not imagine what Alladei would say to Stone River when the wolf warband Stepped into human form within a spear’s cast of the camp. To her, the man’s options seemed brutally simple: hand Maniye over or bare his throat to the Wolf.

  But perhaps the Horse Society always enjoyed more options than anyone else. Alladei went out to speak to Akrit, and he invited the Wolf over to his fire to talk.

  Stone River came with Kalameshli and a hunter known as Sunset Spear. That Smiles Without Teeth had stayed back with the warband gave Maniye something to think about. Had Akrit told his strongest supporter to stay behind to keep the rest in line? How unruly were the warriors of the Winter Runners becoming?

  She had intended to hide herself away – perhaps even to flee unnoticed if the chance arose, but Alladei himself found her and guided her to the fire where her father was waiting. He was polite but he was firm. He had Broken Axe there as well, and Hesprec – though hers was not a face Akrit would recognize any more. Loud Thunder and the southerners were close by, within earshot but not within the circle at the fire – hence without a voice.

  The Horse people made a great show of hospitality: they had milk and meat and honey for all their guests, and Akrit was served first, his status explicitly acknowledged. In all things Alladei was the gracious and compliant host, until the formalities were observed and Akrit spoke.

  ‘You have something of mine,’ he said shortly. ‘The Horse are not thieves and I know they will return what they find if they know it is already promised to another.’

  Alladei nodded thoughtfully. ‘I will not insult you by pretending I do not know of what you speak,’ he replied slowly. Indeed, Akrit’s glower at Maniye was unmistakable.

  ‘Then let me take her, and let me go.’

  ‘Set out your claim to her.’

  Stone River stared at the Horse man narrowly. ‘She is of my

  tribe, and is fleeing my judgement. I am chief of the Winter Runners. I am High Chief of the Wolves.’ Though many expressions about the circle said Not yet, none gave voice to the objection, and Akrit smiled at that. ‘The Horse are welcome in the Crown of the World. I know they will do what is right.’

  ‘Well, it is not for a foreign visitor to your lands to argue the laws of the Wolf,’ conceded Alladei calmly. ‘As you see, I have her in my hands, and now you ask me to give her up to you. Gladly would I do so, but I find a wall between us, that I cannot fetch her through,’ And, seeing Akrit’s impatience at his speech, he continued, ‘You are my guest, Chief of the Winter Runners. She also is my guest. My duty to her is unyielding.’

  Stone River snarled and started to say something heated, but Alladei went on, more forcefully, ‘The duty of host to guest is known to all peoples, in all lands. I would be cursed if I forsook it.’

  The Wolf chief was colouring with anger, but Kalameshli leant in and murmured something that restrained him. At last he got out, ‘And how long is she to remain your guest?’

  ‘I suspect your coming here will prolong it,’ Alladei said, with every appearance of regret.

  ‘A guest that brings trouble to her host is no guest.’

  Alladei spread out his hands, appealing to the sky and then to the horizon. ‘That is not a distinction that any god will make when my soul is weighed. I have taken her as my guest. I must live with that. I told the Tiger the same.’

  Akrit went very still. ‘Did you so?’

  ‘They were equally unhappy with my words.’

  Maniye kept her own face devoid of expression, knowing that any words Alladei had given the Tiger had taken place before she had ever become his guest, but of course Akrit could not know that.

  ‘The Horse would be unwise to anger the High Chief of the Wolves.’

  ‘The High Chief of the Wolves would be unwise to cut himself off from the Horse, or to give the men of the Horse more reason to aid the Tiger. All know the Shadow Eaters – that is your term? – are now down from their high places. We of the Horse have traded with Wolf and with Tiger freely, as we trade with Boar and Deer, with Seal and Hawk, and even with the Bear sometimes. Many are the goods we bring from all the lands south of the Crown of the World and, of all the families of the Horse, my hand-father Ganris heads one of the greatest. So let us not rattle spears, my guest.’

  Maniye’s abiding memories of her father were of his short temper, but here he mastered his rage, husbanding it until he could use it. ‘So what says the Horse?’ he demanded.

  ‘Amongst my people we have found ourselves in this position more than once,’ Alladei said patiently. ‘It is my duty, as Hetman here, to see if the grievance between my guests may be settled by trade or by promises. I would have to know the faults laid at the feet of Many Tracks.’

  Hearing her hunter’s name mentioned, Akrit’s lip curled, but he did not try to strip her of it. ‘I do not choose to recite her wrongs again,’ he replied, affecting boredom, ‘save to say that, wherever she travels, she raises enemies against the Wolf. How is it that she now turns the Horse against me?’ And now a little genuine frustration was leaking into his words. ‘For that alone, I would hunt her down.’ Then Kalameshli touched his arm, cautioning him, and he subsided. ‘There is nothing to be offered by you that can cool my need to have her. The Wolf demands her.’

  ‘And if I was to take her away from the Wolf, and from all the lands of the Wolf?’ Alladei asked softly.

  Stone River frowned. ‘Away where?’

  ‘Out of the Crown of the World, to other lands where neither Tiger nor Wolf hold sway. To Where the Fords Meet, joy of the world, or to the Riverlands that lie further still. She can work no ill to you if she is so far beyond your horizon.’

  Maniye expected her father to throw those words back in Alladei’s face almost immediately, but though his face twisted darkly, he said nothing for a few precious seconds. Even for such a short time, that idea was something he considered.

  Have I truly become so much of an annoyance to him that he would simply be glad to see me gone? she thought, with sudden hope. Or say an embarrassment rather than an annoyance. He cannot use me against the Tiger, but so long as I am alive and free in the Crown of the World, I am something that another tribe could use to shame him.Yet if I am gone . . .

  But Akrit was shaking his head. ‘It cannot be. How could I believe she was gone,’ unless I saw her corpse, was the unspoken addition that perhaps only Maniye heard. Alladei was opening his mouth, perhaps feeling that he could press his case further, but then Akrit added, ‘And, even if she were gone, what about the other betrayer?’

  ‘Of whom do you speak?’ Alladei was baffled.

  ‘Of me,’ Broken Axe put in. ‘He speaks of me.’

  ‘I do,’ Akrit agreed. ‘I do not know how the men of the Horse regard oaths, but this man swore many times to do my service, and yet he betrayed me and lied to my face. In the lands of the Wolf, that gives me the right to his pelt. How stands that behaviour with the Horse?’

  ‘It . . . is not recommended,’ Alladei said, glancing at Broken Axe. He was instantly on more unsure footing now that a real crime had been named. ‘How do you answer?’

  ‘These claims are true,’ Broken Axe acknowledged, ‘and my reasons for doing so are nothing that would satisfy the Wolf. But if it is I whom Stone River has run so far to catch, then let him hunt me. Let the girl go south.That is fitting. I have made all this come about, through my choices. Let him hunt me alone.’

  He said it with such careless calm that Maniye was almost angry with him. Seeing Alladei about to answer – perhaps even to condemn – she burst out, ‘I’m not going south.’ Everyone was staring at her now, but she squared her shoulders and went on. ‘Stone River has not caught me for two seasons, he will hunt me for two more, and two more after that. And I will run beside Broken Axe, and I will kill the Winter Runners
if they are at my heels – just as I will kill the Tiger.’ They were brave words, as wildly overstated as if a coyote had threatened a bear, but she said them with absolute conviction. ‘So I will run and be free, or I shall die hunting for my freedom.’

  Akrit stared at her and she waited for the raging, the hard words and invocation of the Wolf. Instead she saw a strange sadness there, quite alien to his usual expression. For just that moment – never before, surely never again – he was looking into other futures, where he and she had not grown so far apart. He was seeing the daughter he might have had, and might have valued.

  She held her breath, but already his face was turning sour. ‘It seems you cannot bring harmony to your guests,’ he growled at Alladei.

  ‘Then my guests must leave in their own time. If Many Tracks will run, then I may not stand in her way,’ the Horse Hetman stated. ‘As I am your host, I swear that, before tomorrow dawn, she will be gone. As you are my guest, swear that until then you shall camp beyond an arrow’s flight from my fire, and make no move against her.’

  Akrit said nothing, but his eyes roved the camp, plainly weighing up the prospects of forcing the issue. His warband were surely fiercer fighters than any the Horse could muster. They had iron to strengthen them. They comprised a number close to that of the Horse. Surely it was only the guest bond itself that was now holding Akrit back and, if he returned to his warriors, would that deter him?

  But Maniye saw that, of the men and women of the Deer and the Boar who had been assisting the Horse, most of them had a weapon to hand. They had clubs and spears, and some had bows; they had axes and knives, and of course they had horns and tusks. With their numbers added to the Horse, the odds against the Wolves were much poorer, worse than two to one. Maniye felt as if the ground beneath her had shifted in some strange, foreboding way. The Deer and the Boar had once been subjects of the Tiger, and they were subjects of the Wolf tribes now: farmers and gatherers and fishers bowing the knee before the greatest hunters of the Crown of the World. But they were many, even so, and here they had come to work for the Horse, learning foreign ways like resistance.

  Nothing was revealed on Akrit’s face, to show that he had made the same observation, but he nodded and said, ‘You have my word on it, as your guest.’ And with that, Maniye had another sunset gifted to her, another night in which to plan.

  When the Wolves had left the Horse camp, she went straight to Hesprec, because she had one last chance to free herself from her shackles and her rebellious souls. And if she could not do that, then she would not even be able to run.

  43

  Hesprec heard her out, as Maniye presented her plan. She had so little to work with, just odd scraps of things the Serpent priest had said, and a few things he – she – had done. Most of all she remembered how the old Snake had come along with Asmander to free her from the Eyriemen. Was that the moment the idea had been planted in her mind?

  ‘You made him take another shape when you took me from the Eyriemen.’

  ‘Asmander? Yes, I did.’

  ‘You gave him another soul.’

  ‘We invited one in together, he and I.’

  And Maniye gripped the other girl’s hands and said, ‘Then do it for me.’

  Hesprec regarded her warily. ‘The gods of the River, their totem, their souls . . . there is a flexibility that I think you northerners do not possess.’

  ‘I could not choose when the choice was before me. Now . . . they are running wild in me. Asmander said that the Champion was a chief of souls, a ruler.’

  ‘I suspect he did not say such words,’ Hesprec noted with a small smile. ‘But yes, you understand it right. The Champion’s soul is of a different order.’

  ‘Then that is the way I can stay who I am. I cannot retain my mind with two souls. I cannot drive one of them out. Even if both could be cut away from me, they would take me with them, and leave . . .’

  ‘Do not speak of that. It is too late for such things . . . perhaps it was too late before we ever spoke in the pit, back in your village.’

  And Maniye considered Kalameshli and all his tests and his cruelty. He was trying to drive the Tiger out of me. He was trying to force me to make the choice. ‘Then . . .’ But she had no words to go after that ‘then’. They had all been spoken.

  But there was a contemplative expression on Hesprec’s young face. ‘Take this dilemma to one of your Wolf priests, they would say it cannot be done: there are no Wolf Champions. Take this to a priestess of the Tiger, she would say the same.’

  And hope had leapt into Maniye’s mouth: ‘But the Serpent is ancient and wise, and his people know better.’

  Hesprec’s eyes held no assurances, but something had hooked the Snake girl’s interest. And so emerged the words: ‘I cannot promise you that it can be done, but together we might try. If the Serpent will offer up his secrets; if you will follow where I guide you; if you are strong enough; if, indeed, this thing is possible at all. But it cannot be done quickly, and it cannot be done here.’

  ‘Where, then?’ Maniye demanded. Already she was feeling tremors through her, as her souls stretched and shouldered against their confinement and against each other. Another attack from them was on its way, she knew.

  ‘We will be petitioning the invisible world,’ the Serpent girl announced, with an echo of the elder Hesprec’s grandeur of speech. ‘That Stone Place of yours is too far, but there will be others: places where the sky reaches down to touch the earth, or where the depths of the earth are laid open to the sun. Places where the priests have gone, generation on generation. Some ancient stone or a hill or a cave – some place visited year on year, yet where nobody would ever live. Some place so old and strong that people have forgotten why it was first picked out, knowing only that it has always been there.’ She smiled fondly as she spoke, and in her eyes Maniye thought she could see the reflection of ancient shrines beside a southern river, of deep ravines where the coils of the Serpent moved within the rock.

  So Maniye thought hard on all she had been told, and then she sought out Broken Axe and explained what Hesprec was looking for. Who knew the Crown of the World better than he?

  ‘A place like the Stone Place,’ he echoed. ‘Some place near here. A sacred place; a spirit place.’

  ‘And not the place of any one god,’ she added. ‘A place of great spirits. There must be somewhere.’

  ‘And you will flee there, and hope Stone River does not follow you.’

  She saw his intention in his face. ‘And you will be with me, to guide me.’ And you will not try to lead my father away, and shed your blood for me.

  A moment’s battle of wills, with her meeting his stony gaze and refusing to look away, and he nodded tiredly.

  He surprised her then, because he knew of no place of ritual anywhere nearby; this was not his land and he had only a passing familiarity with its ways. Instead, he moved amongst the people who had been working for the Horse. They were men and women who had long hunted and foraged the riverside here, and all the lands around. They were nervous around Broken Axe, as well they might be near any Wolf. Maniye realized that she herself had not even considered asking them: Deer and Boar, what could they know?

  But that was Stone River inside her, like yet another soul. Seeing them through Broken Axe’s eyes, she discovered just how much of her father was embedded within her. Hearing him speak to them, simply as one human being to another – something she could not imagine any of the Winter Runners doing

  – she was disappointed with herself. I will never be myself until I rid my mind of him.

  In the end, they were directed to a broad-framed old Boar man whose long hair was mottled light and dark grey, and whose cheeks were tattooed with tall upward-pointing darts.

  ‘There is a place,’ the old Boar had conceded, once he understood what Maniye wanted. ‘There is always such a place. Only a fool would seek these places out, save on certain days, and then only by certain ways. But of course there is a place. A hig
h hill, with two fallen stones and one still standing. The Eyriemen bring their dead there sometimes, and lay them out on high platforms for the crows to pick apart. My people bring offerings when the year turns towards winter. Our priests approach with their faces masked by the skins of the Boar – when I was young, I witnessed this – but we shun the place at all other times. The Path of Fallen Stones, we call it. It has been there longer than my people – perhaps longer than any people. It is a place for spirits to dwell, not men.’

  He had told them where they would find these stones, which hills to head into, which winding path would lead them there. His expression said plainly that he thought them mad.

  ‘None who go there escape being changed,’ he warned, but to Maniye this sounded more like a promise than a threat.

  ‘You have been kind to me, even when you had no reason.’ Maniye had not wanted this conversation with Alladei. She was clawing for control of her own destiny, though: even the kindness of strangers could not go unquestioned.

  The Horse Hetman looked slightly embarrassed, hands out as though to defend himself. ‘I have risked, it is true,’ he admitted. ‘When I tell my hand-father what choices I have made, he will either embrace me or turn his back on me. But if we bow our backs even once to the Wolf – or to anyone – then they will always hold the lash in their hands whenever they come to us. The strength to run far, the freedom of all horizons, that is the creed of the Horse. Where other people try to tame us, to bar our way or make us their slaves, then they will find that the Horse too can fight.’ He said the words proudly, and just for a moment she saw there the man he was waiting to become, the man his father perhaps saw in him. ‘But the Horse understands profit, also. Your friend the Serpent, she has promised. I have sent men south already, with certain words and secrets she has given me. Great are the rewards for my family, whatever should befall this solitary son. I do not regret standing up for you.’

  ‘You’re a fool, then.’

  He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I am wise beyond my years.’ ‘I have brought too much trouble to you,’ Maniye muttered,