Thinking further on that, she had it in her mind to warn Loud Thunder that he should go back to the quiet of the highlands, to his lakes and his cave. Akrit Stone River had killed bears before.
She thought she had said it, then, but from his puzzled frown she realized that her words had not come out properly. A moment later she was swaying, as the tiredness of several days descended on her. She waved off his huge hands as they reached out to support her. She was fine; she was well. She was just weary, so very weary. All that time she had spent locked tight about herself, binding herself with iron bands to keep out the fear and be ready for the least chance. She had been strung taut for so long, and now she could relax, just for a while.
And within her the Tiger leapt and seized hold of her. Abruptly her mind was in its jaws. She felt its fangs bite, its claws raking and ripping at her, as it tried to get at the Wolf. The Wolf had the other half of her, worrying and dragging at her entrails so that she clutched at her stomach, the pain now so intense that she was sure she had been torn open then and there.
She dropped, very distantly feeling herself fall into Loud Thunder’s hands, whilst her two souls ran madly about her mind and body, stalking, ambushing each other, skirmishing furiously and then breaking apart. Her limbs were twitching and shuddering and there were distant voices crying out in alarm, advice being offered. She felt something forced between her teeth and she gnawed and savaged at it, feeling wood splinter against her gums.
When she came back to herself, every part of her hurt. She was within a tent and, for a dreadful moment, she thought she had not escaped her father after all, and that the fire that glimmered in from outside had been lit in the mouth of the Wolf’s effigy. The tent was smaller and neater, though, and the memories came back to her piecemeal: this must be in the Horse fishing camp.
All was quiet outside. No doubt there would be a few Horse sentries watching through the dark hours, but the rest – all the people that her presence had somehow drawn together – would be sleeping.
She felt gingerly within herself for her souls. She had a sense of Tiger and Wolf glowering at each other from opposite ends of her mind. They had run themselves ragged within her: every muscle hurt from where she had thrashed and strained, and there was a fierce knot of pain within her skull. For now, though, those beasts within were exhausted, and she was free to step out under the stars.
The Horse had no walls here. There was nothing between her and the world beyond.
Her father would be hunting her, somewhere out there. He would find this camp soon. Probably her mother’s people would as well. She was the loose end that everyone wanted to tie off or cut away. Left to herself, she might go mad, run ragged across the hills by her two natures. To simply walk away from anyone who could help her was something close to suicide. But she did not really believe that any of them could help her. None of them possessed that kind of wisdom.
She took a deep breath, knowing it was time for her to leave. The anxiety that had descended when she spoke with Loud Thunder remained with her. She did not want these people to come to harm, and harm seemed to be all she had to gift the world with. She had spent a winter with Loud Thunder, lived on his hospitality and become his friend, and yet she dragged him before the claws of the Tiger. She owed Broken Axe far too much, not least for all the years she had hated and misjudged him, and he had been caught by Stone River because of her. Even the southerners had risked far more than they should: rough Venater and snide Shyri had fought for her. She even felt she owed Asmander, who had changed his mind in the end.
She owed it to all of them to leave.
She reached for the shapes that twisted inside her, but she could not say what might happen if she favoured one or other of them right now: better let them sleep. Instead she padded off on bare human feet, weaving her way through the tents, and away from the river. She could only hope the sentries would not cry out an alarm at seeing someone leaving the camp.
There was a shape in the darkness, eyes glinting in the firelight as it watched her. For a heart-stopping moment she thought it was a wolf; that her father was already here and about to take her. Then she saw it was just a dog – one of Loud Thunder’s dogs, in fact, Yoff or Matt. The animal’s gaze was on her, but it made no sound, nothing to wake its master. If it could think like a man, no doubt it would be glad to see her go.
A few more steps, and the last of the tents rose before her. The air was full of quiet breathing, a few snores, the crackling of guttering fires . . . and her name.
‘Maniye.’
Not a voice she knew: a woman’s voice – no, a girl’s. Maniye crouched, reaching for a knife she didn’t have. A small figure was standing close up, seemingly sprung from nowhere.
‘There you are, Maniye.’
Her eyes slowly gathered in the firelight, picking out details from the shadows before her. This was a girl a little younger than she, but very different. A girl of Asmander’s people, she assumed: dark of skin and with a pale headscarf pulled over her hair. She wore a shift, and an over-large winter coat above it, though the summer night was mild. Her face seemed a little familiar, as if Maniye had once known the girl’s mother.
‘I don’t know you.’ Maniye was still motionless. Inside her, she could feel the first stirrings of her souls reacting to the surprise.
‘But I know you, a little at least,’ the girl said, taking one small step forwards.
She must be one of the children that the Horse trade for, Maniye realized, recalling something of this sort she had been told. ‘You were at the trading post? Or you’ve heard them talk of me from Thunder and the southerners?’ Is it just because she’s of Asmander’s people that I think I recognize her?
The girl nodded. She seemed to be very amused about something, but then Asmander behaved like that too, so maybe it was a Riverlands habit. ‘I wanted to talk with you.’
‘Why?’ And then, because she did not want to get drawn into a rambling conversation with a stranger, ‘I can’t.’
‘Please, do not leave until we have spoken. It’s very important.’
Maniye bared her teeth. ‘What’s it to you?’ she hissed. ‘I need to go. It’s safer for everyone.’ Even that was more than she should have said, but that maddening sense about the dark girl was drawing out the words. It was not that she was like Asmander: in fact, the more Maniye studied her, the less like Asmander she became, and yet the more familiar.
The girl took another step, as careful as if she was approaching a wounded animal. The firelight touched further on the brown of her skin, striking rainbow colours there. Maniye started in surprise: there were patterns tattooed onto her skin, gleaming where the light revealed them – endless loops of scales that wound about her forehead, cheeks and neck.
The sight brought a lump of loss to Maniye’s throat, for of course someone already had died for her. ‘I have to go,’ she whispered.
‘Maniye, there’s no need.’
‘Don’t use my name! I don’t know you. I owe you nothing!’ Maniye was fighting to keep her voice down, sure that there must be people stirring into wakefulness in all the tents around them.
‘But I owe you, Maniye. I owe you more than a life can repay,’ the girl told her solemnly. ‘Won’t you sit with me just a little, and talk? And if you still want to go, you can be gone long before dawn. But I hope you will stay, for me.’
Maniye opened her mouth, and what came out was: ‘You look like . . .’ Her legs were suddenly unsteady. ‘You came to find him, didn’t you? You came looking for Hesprec Essen Skese.’ Abruptly her heart was pounding in her chest, and just drawing in a breath had become a struggle. The far horizons she had set her aim at contracted to the here and now. She lurched into a gap between the two last tents of the camp and sat down there, almost collapsing. ‘You’re . . . you look like him: granddaughter, or granddaughter’s daughter, or . . . ?’
‘We are close. Not as close as we should be, I sometimes think.’ Still the girl seemed amused,
and Maniye had a horrible feeling that nobody had told this child about the old man’s death.
‘I’m sorry,’ she got out.
‘Of all things, you have no reason to be sorry.’ The girl sat down beside her, hugging her knees for warmth.
‘He was taken by my father’s people. I tried to rescue him but . . . it was too late.’
‘It was not,’ the girl told her with absolute assurance.
‘He . . . they had hurt him. He was weak, and we ran so far, so fast, but it wasn’t enough.’ Inside her, the Wolf was howling mournfully at a remembered moon, while the Tiger lay smouldering in shadow, its head down on its paws. The simple thought of all she had gone through had cowed them both. She was not weeping, she refused to, but inside, her souls mourned on her behalf. ‘I thought I could do it.’
The girl’s thin arms encircled her cautiously. ‘Ah, forgive me. I am too cruel,’ she whispered. ‘I am too fond of jokes that amuse only myself. Maniye, none could have done more than you did. A death in the mouth of the Wolf is a death for all time. Preventing that is all that the world asked of you, and you did it. You have no weapons against time and old age.’
Maniye stared at her, bewildered by the words, the tone. The girl’s light voice was speaking as though Hesprec’s ghost was in her.
‘I don’t understand,’ she whispered, staring into the other girl’s eyes, seeing there such a weight of experience and wisdom and dry old humour that she could hardly stand to look.
42
The dark girl sat beside her, at the edge of the camp. The fires were behind, the measureless night extending before them. There were wolves in that night, and the sullen shadows of tigers, but for once Maniye had no thought for either. Knowledge was echoing inside her, making her head ring like a bell. She had come to the brink of Revelation, that deep understanding of the world that changes all things. It was not something that she was equipped to deal with. A great many things she had once thought were immutable had become fluid and uncertain through just a handful of words.
‘I told you, when we first met, that my people were special,’ the strange girl told her, grinning with bright teeth. ‘You were asking then – you thought southerners were dark, burned black by the sun. And, as you see, we are.’
‘Hesprec wasn’t.’ Because Maniye could not bring herself to say, ‘You weren’t,’ as if such things were everyday matters.
The girl shrugged, smiling. ‘And, if I have the chance to grow old once more, then, when I am old and my skin grows loose and brittle on me again, I shall seem pale to you once more.’
‘And . . . and then?’ Just a whisper, from Maniye. This felt like either madness or the sort of lore that gods guarded jealously.
But the girl continued, quite unconcerned with supernatural retribution. ‘And then I shall find myself somewhere alone, and at the end of my body’s strength, and I shall seek peace and go find the Serpent beneath the earth. And I shall touch his coils, and partake of our mystery, and I shall be born anew and be young once more, just as I am now.’
‘As a boy – a man, I mean?’
Again that carefree shrug. ‘Who can say how matters may fall out? I did not know, this time, if I would succeed. I thought that it might be a final death, despite all your bravery. The Crown of the World is a long way from those places where the Serpent is strong. But my faith is rewarded: he is beneath the earth even here.’
And Maniye could restrain the question no longer. ‘How many times?’
‘How often have I shed my old skin?’ The girl’s eyes glinted as she looked at her.
‘Yes, are you . . . ? You told me, during the winter, of the Oldest Kingdom that your people lost at the start of the world. Were you . . . ?’
‘Was I there?’ The girl laughed gently, and it was that sound which made her Hesprec. A young throat, but an old laugh. ‘No, no, I’m not so old that I laid any pair of eyes on those wonders . . .’ And then she grew reflective. ‘But I spoke once with an old, old priest who did, or so he said.’
Maniye felt an almost crippling sense of time, for here was an ancient being in the body of a thirteen-year-old girl, speaking in awed tones about one who had been truly old.
And at last Hesprec sighed, and admitted, ‘Eight times, now, and that is plenty of years enough.’
‘Were you a man or woman? First of all, I mean.’
‘You know, I’m not sure I can remember.’ Hesprec shook her head. ‘A little of the memory sloughs off with the skin, each time. We shed our childhoods soon enough.’ She looked up, finding the moon in the sky just as that pale crescent cut its way out from the clouds. ‘And will you leave now?’
‘Leave?’ For a moment Maniye could not think of what she meant.
‘You were planning to go. Because you did not want to hurt people, I think.’
‘I . . .’
‘The Tiger has been here, but two days ago.’
Maniye stared at her.
‘They came asking after you,’ Hesprec continued. ‘None was there then whom they might have marked. But their queen was with them.’
An uncertain, shocked sound escaped Maniye as though she had been stabbed. ‘The queen . . . ?’
‘She did not announce it, but these eyes of mine knew her,’ the girl confirmed. ‘And no doubt there will be wolves howling beyond the camp soon enough.’
‘Then I must leave.’
‘Leave in the daylight. Leave with me.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I owe you a debt. I know that some of the others have fought for you, for their own reasons, but I owe you my life twice over, and what I can do for you, it shall be done.’ Hearing so young a creature make so solemn an oath should have seemed absurd, but there was a current of certainty in Hesprec’s voice that most people could have lived a hundred years and not achieved.
‘You can’t help me. My father and my mother hunt in vain, because I will destroy myself. My body has three shapes and they are at war. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to save myself.’ And all her resolve had crumbled with the words, leaving her voice shaking. ‘I have too many souls, and they’re tearing me apart.’
Hesprec put a youthful arm about her shoulders and hugged her close. ‘The Serpent hides many secrets, and the Crown of the World contains more than one seam of wisdom. There are . . .’ And then the girl trailed into silence, cued by a change in the way Maniye held herself. ‘Or perhaps you have thought of something,’ Hesprec finished quietly.
Maniye looked at her, feeling as though she had donned the halved face of an Eyrieman: wolf eye, tiger eye; tiger eye, wolf eye: her souls jostling behind her visage. But, yes, her own words had sparked a thought, an unlooked-for avenue of enquiry.
‘I will stay,’ she said softly. ‘For now, I will stay.’ There was a conversation she needed to have and she was not looking forward to it.
In the morning she watched as Loud Thunder made a fuss of his dogs, teasing them and scratching under their jaws and throwing them scraps of fish. She could never quite get used to dogs: the language of their bodies was so like wolves, and yet so different. Time after time she thought they were attacking Thunder for real, and then it became clear they were only playing after all.
After that – for she was still working up courage – she watched the Horse and their fellows wading about in the broad, shallow basin of the river. She realized by now that more than one set of eyes was fixed on her, watching to see what she would do. There was an awareness in Broken Axe’s look that suggested he knew she had been on the point of fleeing overnight, and of course there was Hesprec. She had thought that the Serpent priest’s eyes should have been a fixed point, some part of him that he would carry forward, shed his skin as he might. Instead, the dark girl looked back at her from wide eyes of bright copper, and there was nothing of Hesprec in that gaze at all.
A shadow fell across her, as she stared across the water. She glanced up, then further up, for this was a tall man of the Horse, long-boned
and even-featured.
‘Blessings of the morning on your road, child of the Wolf,’ he intoned formally, bringing his hands together before him. He was keeping a precise distance between them, and she reckoned it was calculated as the reach of her arm if she had a knife to wield in it. That this long-boned, broad-shouldered man should be so wary of her was almost funny.
She opened her mouth, trying to think of something equally elegant to say in reply, but what came out was, ‘I know you.’ She was abruptly back at the Horse outpost on the Sand Pearl, where she and Hesprec had gone to seek passage south. There had been a fat man leading the Horse back there, but when the Winter Runners came hunting, it had been this tall, fine-featured youth who had come bearing food and clothes and warning.
He nodded solemnly. ‘I have been a servant of your host, during another season. I am—’
‘Alladei, Hand-son of Ganris,’ she recited. A moment later she felt herself colouring, for to remember the man after so long seemed oddly embarrassing. He was striking, though, and she remembered thinking so the first time she had set eyes on him.
His eyes widened, but then he nodded. ‘You do me much honour. You are the one they call Many Tracks. Welcome to our camp. My camp, as my hand-father has trusted me with this expedition.’
She nodded cautiously, still aware of the respectful distance between them. ‘What is it the Horse has travelled so far for?’
‘Travel is life and breath to the Horse,’ he declared. ‘But here is where we gather magic stones.’
She blinked. ‘Magic . . . ?’
He reached into a pouch and came out with a thumbnail-sized orb of translucent gold. ‘They love these so much on the River that they will shower us with wealth for them. They love stones of all kinds: turquoise, serpent-stones, tiger’s eye. But for magic, they must have the river-gold, these sun stones. Look, this is a cursed one.’ He held it out to her. ‘There is a little demon caught within it. With this their priests can do great magics.’
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 50