The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  biting at her lip.

  ‘Yes, you have.’ Alladei grinned suddenly. ‘To hear Stone

  River tell it, you are a trouble to the whole world. But perhaps

  only a little trouble for all that. Over the winter, our wise people

  were speaking of a great trouble. The Serpent girl tells me she

  has heard the same wherever she has gone, from the River to the

  Crown of the World. I do not think they were speaking of you,

  Many Tracks.’ He shook his head. ‘Change is coming upon us

  like the north wind from the mountains, like the sand wind from

  the south. So I will be kind to a strange girl who doesn’t know

  what skin she should wear, because who knows what will grow

  from that seed tomorrow? And because I think that being kind

  to Stone River is like planting a seed in dust.’

  ‘You Horse are very stupid.’ She tried to say it venomously,

  like Shyri would, but her voice shook and she heard herself

  sounding close to tears.

  ‘Not all of us – just me, perhaps.’ He was still smiling. ‘How

  will you outpace your father when you leave here?’

  ‘Somehow.’

  ‘You cannot run south, leaving this land as I suggested?’ ‘I would. I cannot.’ With the very thought, the souls twisted

  inside her. She felt unsteady on her feet, her human form

  momentarily alien to her. ‘I would not last. I need to . . . to cut,

  or . . . They are both too powerful within me now. I cannot cast

  either of them out, yet I cannot keep them within me . . .’ She

  looked at him, wide-eyed. I’ve said too much.These are secret things.

  There was only sympathy in his face. ‘Then there is one more favour I can do for you, to help you on your way.’

  Towards evening a messenger arrived, a young hunter of the Winter Runners, who had tracked cold news from post to post across the north until he had finally picked up the trail of his chief.

  Akrit Stone River listened without reaction as the breathless youth recounted it all, standing rigidly straight and obviously fearing an angry response. Stone River just stared, though – not at the messenger but into the distance of his own imagination, and then he dismissed the youth and turned to Kalameshli, the only other listener.

  ‘What do you think now,’ Akrit asked, ‘of the Horse plan to let the girl flee southwards, and thus be forgotten in the Crown of the World? You spoke for it, after we departed their fire.’

  The Wolf priest nodded wordlessly.

  ‘And you see now why it cannot be. But I think you should have seen so before.’ Abruptly Akrit’s rage – like his knife, never far from his grasp – was rekindled. ‘Even you – the girl pulls even you from me.’

  Takes Iron said nothing.

  ‘Or perhaps you’d say it is I who push you?’ Akrit demanded, working up his anger further. ‘But this is what it is to be a Wolf: to be strong, to drive my own path through the world, never to be led or herded or penned. You have always taught so. Each year of new hunters, this is the message you put into their hearts. This is the truth about the Wolf, that we are the strength of the world. I have only sought to be that strength! And this girl

  – my own daughter! – goes about the world unpicking my work, smearing my deeds, placing ill words in the mouths of those whose support I rely on. Even you!’

  ‘Akrit,’ Kalameshli said softly. ‘You are my chief, I am your priest. We are old friends, you and I.’

  ‘And yet she is here between us! You would protect her from me, if you could.’

  ‘There is no need—’

  ‘There is need! If there was ever doubt, then now we see the need. I am called, Takes Iron. I am summoned. On the shortest night, I am summoned so that all the tribes can meet to choose their high chief. And who summons me? Otayo of the Many Mouths, the son of Seven Skins. He who gave his voice to me after I killed his brother, and now he declares he must choose, and the other chiefs must choose, and no doubt there are half a dozen who they shall choose between, where once there would only be one. One, Takes Iron! And it is because this girl shames me that they do not already have my name in their mouths!’ He lifted his fists as though to strike the old priest – or the world at large. ‘What shall they say, then? Here is Stone River whose girlchild flouts him. Why should a man rule the destiny of the Wolf when he cannot even control his own get?’

  ‘We will take her again,’ Kalameshli murmured. ‘Bring her before the other tribes with a halter about her neck, if you will.’

  Something like a laugh escaped from Stone River. ‘And can I even hold her, if I take her?’ He was speaking too loud – enough for all the rest of the warband to hear. ‘I have had her in my hands already, and where is she now? Vanished and fled to her many allies! If I tried to parade her before the tribes – if I dug a pit for her a hundred men deep, or built a cage of iron without a door – she would be gone in the moment I sought to bring her forth. She would be rescued from the earth by moles, or spirited away by songbirds. What is she, Takes Iron? Is she even my child?’ He was so caught in his ranting that he missed the old man’s flinch. ‘No capture this time. I’ll tear her throat out myself. She is no kin of mine. She is a thing of the invisible world, a changed child, a thing as soulless as the Plague People. When I go before the tribes I will throw her pelt at their feet – be it wolf or tiger or human.’

  Then the voice of Smiles Without Teeth boomed out, ‘She’s moving!’ and Akrit Stepped instantly, darting over, with his eyes shining in the last rays of the sunset.

  Two horses had broken out from the camp, heading west. One small figure, one greater one, they were already moving at a gallop.

  Akrit threw back his head and let out an air-rending howl, and then forced himself into his human shape, and into human thoughts. Undue haste now could mean defeat later, and Maniye might have more friends waiting for her – perhaps Tiger friends.

  ‘Weapons and armour, as much iron as you can carry, and leave the rest!’ he roared. ‘Let us be Iron Wolves, fast as you can, and then we shall run them down.’ No wolf could outrun a rider in the short term, but wolves ran on when laden horses tired, especially on the uneven ground of the Crown of the World.

  In what seemed a few heartbeats, the warband was on the move, picking up the track of the horses, knowing them through their scent even though they had ridden off into the concealing dusk. There was the spoor of Broken Axe. There was that of the treacherous Maniye, plain to every nose. Silent and grim the pack went after them, murder on their minds.

  Only after they had gone did Maniye herself come out from one of the Horse tents. She wore a quilted coat dyed in faded colours of red and mauve, a garish and much-darned garment. Her original coat was now fast receding on horseback, worn by a Horse girl only a little larger than herself.

  The deception would not work for long, but she was hoping for Akrit’s fury to take him a long way from the Horse camp before he realized it. The riders had a good head start and were making off across open country. When their pursuers came close they would Step, and four unladen horses would outstrip all the wolves in the world. They had undertaken this task without complaint when Alladai had asked it of them. Hesprec had purchased a great deal of loyalty from the Horse Society, it seemed.

  The rest of the camp was packing up now, ready to return to the trading post, where the Society would have the numbers to withstand the rage of the Winter Runners if need be. Alladai was dismissive about such a confrontation, and yet at the same time he was going among his people, enjoining them to be brave. Maniye worried for him.

  But her path and his must separate for now. She was departing for the sacred place, this Path of Fallen Stones. She was going to confront the madness in her souls, to conquer it or to be conquered.

  ‘Are you ready?’ The new Hesprec was at her side, teeth gleaming as she smiled.
The young energy that ran through her now was the most alien part of the Serpent’s transformation. Maniye was amazed at how much of the elder Hesprec’s character had simply been a factor of the years that burdened him, and that his rebirth had stripped away.

  The others were already gathered. Broken Axe and Loud Thunder were talking quietly – she saw the Bear grin, a boyish expression that only emerged when he was happy and with his old friend. To see it was almost a relief: if the big man was to risk himself, it would at least be for Axe, and not for Maniye herself.

  The three southerners stood apart, and Asmander’s eyes flicked between the two women as they approached.

  ‘Messenger,’ he said, and glanced at Maniye again, not quite guiltily. ‘I am here to serve you.’

  Hesprec nodded. ‘Champion, always I am glad of your company but do not confuse my path with your own.’

  Asmander lowered his eyes. ‘When I was told you were dead, I knew despair.’ There was a wealth of pain in his voice, a sudden open wound, but Hesprec held a hand up to forestall him.

  ‘No more of that,’ she said. ‘Enough has been said. If Many Tracks will challenge you, then that is her business. What about your fellows though, Champion? Are they so happy to walk in your tracks?’

  ‘No,’ Venater snapped immediately, arms folded.

  ‘Quiet, you,’ Asmander told him. ‘You are my shadow until I set you free.’

  ‘And you, laughing sister?’ Hesprec asked.

  Shyri smirked. ‘No sister of yours, old man, whatever face you now wear. But I am not yet bored of this river-boy and his stupidity. I will stay.’

  Alladai came next. Hesprec clasped her little hands in front of her and he matched her.

  ‘May your road be smooth underfoot,’ he intoned, and then, ‘though that is a poor blessing for the Crown of the World.’

  ‘May the earth carry your burdens,’ Hesprec matched him, ‘and the Serpent’s back lead you home.’ She tugged her scarf tighter over her hair.

  ‘Many Tracks,’ Alladai called out. ‘We’ll meet again. Stay well.’

  She carried his parting smile with her a long way, once they had set off.

  44

  Moving north again, a day’s travel took them to the sacred place of the Boar. At first they were following the river into the woods but then they broke off into tangled, cluttered country, hunting for the tracks they had been told of. Broken Axe sniffed out the scent of boars and led them to a narrow trail half overhung with the knotted branches of trees.

  They should have moved faster, for even Loud Thunder could make a good pace when Stepped. Maniye had hoped to take the trail on wolf feet, to range alongside Broken Axe with her nose open for danger. When the time came, though, she could not do so. She took a deep breath to Step, and instantly those two souls were welling up like pus inside her, poisoned and corrupted, pressing and swelling against her. She fought them down though they racked her body, forcing themselves up in a mouthful of bile and trying to make her vomit one or the other out. She was a prisoner of her human shape.

  So they were limited to a human’s speed – and less even than that, for Maniye felt feverish, shivering. The fits came and went, each one tearing at the tenuous hold she was keeping on the world.

  And the going grew harder and harder, the upward slope of the land weighing on her like stones. She was awash with sweat, her heart skipping and dancing to rhythms that seemed to ape those of the Tigers’ dance. There was a pressure within her head born of too many eyes trying to peer out from the same two sockets.

  She did not stop, though. Even though she knew that she was slowing them all, she would not call out for aid, and she would not give in to herself. Whenever the ground tilted up beneath her, she went on all fours, climbing with human hands and feet where she would have leapt like a tiger not so long before. When the land was flatter, she stumbled and lurched along, with the wolf inside her snarling and clawing for the freedom of the far horizons.

  But then the way was more steep than not, and the forest was rising upwards ahead of them, following the slope of a hill.

  ‘Hold!’ called the high voice of Hesprec. ‘Not another step until I’ve studied our way.’

  ‘Our way is up,’ Venater pointed out.

  Maniye squinted upwards, and there, within her sight, rose a hill crowned with stones – and not just the three the Boar had mentioned. There was a clutch of enormous boulders, as though some giant spirit had plucked them from the mountains and set them down here where they had no business to be. She thought she saw more, too: odd suggestions of regular lines that might have indicated the work of man, but overtaken by enough time to bury them. And there were ridges running around the hillside that almost seemed like . . .

  ‘There’s a path,’ she croaked. ‘It goes round, round and round and up.’

  Venater made a disgusted noise. ‘That’s not a path, not for people who want to get anywhere fast. We’ll go straight up.’

  ‘We will not,’ Hesprec said quietly but firmly. ‘We will approach this place as its creators intended. Perhaps they were wiser than we. Certainly they were wiser than you.’ She raised an eyebrow at Venater, who loomed over her, big and mean enough to tear her in two. The old pirate just looked surly, though, and took a step back.

  The path spiralled up the hill, in and out of trees at first, and then they had left the forest behind, climbing out of it onto rocky slopes, with each lessening turn bringing them closer to the huge stones above. Squinting upwards past the glare of the duskbound sun, Maniye’s mind jumped back and forth: natural or made; made or natural? She could not decide which. The greater boulders were too vast to have been moved there, too unworked to have been intended. And yet, as they drew near, her earlier conviction returned to her. Someone had built here once, laid stone on stone just as she had seen in the Shining Halls. She remembered the intricately carved stonework of the Tigers, and how so much of it had fallen to ruin. Whoever had made this hill their temple had done so in an age that made all the works of the Tiger seem mere follies of yesterday. The earth

  – the grass and moss and mounded soil – had almost completely swallowed all signs of it. Only the occasional protruding block remained there as mute witness; a certain regularity that led Maniye’s gaze along the secret, hidden lines of the place.

  She remembered how the Stone Place had first seemed to her, with the spirits louring low in the sky, their twisting scrutiny anchored to that island in the swamps. As they approached the summit, she knew this was a kindred place. Not so grand, surely, but perhaps older. Those spirits that dwelled here, sleeping within the earth or spread across the wide sky above, they were powers that had been drifting away from human affairs for centuries. Yet there was strength here: she felt it in the hairs at the back of her neck; in the clutch of her bowels. Or else she was simply desperate to believe so, because if there was nothing here, then all Hesprec’s lore and wisdom would accomplish nothing.

  The three stones themselves seemed almost nothing. One stood, barely more than a man’s height; two were fallen, and one of those cracked in two. Together they formed two sides of a triangle inside a little round space that was half walled off by the mounded boulders. This small stretch of mystery was what their long spiralling progress had led towards.

  Feeling the strength of those quiescent spirits, though, Maniye knew that Hesprec had been right. To approach as the Boar did; to approach as the ancient architects had intended, that was how to win one’s way to the sacred site without gathering the ire of those whose power suffused the place. If they had just scaled the hillside as Venater had suggested, then they would have reached the top amid an invisible tempest of offence. Any ritual conducted against that anger could only have gone badly wrong.

  And now they were at the top, and Maniye collapsed onto her knees at the summit’s edge, looking around her at where those old, old stones cut through the turf like loose teeth. They had been carved once, but time had smoothed over whatever message huma
n hands had incised in them.

  Hesprec, though, was looking downwards with a speculative air.

  ‘One might wonder just whose hands raised this place, and when,’ the Serpent girl murmured, echoing Maniye’s own thoughts. Her copper eyes were narrowed in thought, and Maniye could see the world as she did, just for a moment. The spiralling path that encircled the hill was like the coils of a serpent, so that they now stood at its head, here where the stones were. And was that just a coincidence or was this some distant, cold splinter of the Serpent’s history that even Hesprec did not know of?

  ‘So you’re going to go straight on with this business, are you?’ Venater demanded.

  The Serpent girl shook her head. ‘Preparation is ever the friend of the ritualist.’

  ‘What’s that even supposed to mean?’ the pirate demanded.

  ‘It means priest business,’ Asmander decided. ‘And we have travelled far and, while the Messenger works, we will sleep, save for those who watch.’

  ‘And when the Wolves sniff out the truth and come for us?’ Shyri asked.

  Asmander put a hand to his ear. ‘What’s that I hear? Laughing Girl wants to take first watch? Then, of course, she must.’

  ‘Dung-eater.’

  ‘Not laughing now?’ Asmander challenged her.

  She shrugged. ‘At least you’re not moping and groaning about your honour any more. Selling that girl to her father was the one clever thing you ever did, and after it you were no fun at all. I prefer you when you’re stupid and happy.’

  Venater smirked. ‘You didn’t know him back home. He’s all smiles half the time, and about to cut his own throat the rest. You try being his slave, see how much fun it is.’ And then, seeing Asmander’s gaze on him, ‘What?’

  ‘A slave?’

  ‘Slave with no collar’s still a slave,’ the pirate replied with a rebellious look.

  ‘Enough,’ Broken Axe intervened. ‘Laughing Girl, you keep watch with Loud Thunder until the moon’s high. I’ll see out the rest of the night with one of these Rivermen.’