Belated realization struck her. It was not one of their beasts, nor quite one of them. It had a name, that curled husk, and its – her – name was Galethea.
The understanding turned the horror of the thing on its head, because Galethea was dead, but she had not died in a human shape. If Plague People could spawn ghosts, it would not be trapped in dead flesh. She had died Stepped. Her soul – the soul she had only now gained – would move on.
Maniye looked up at the circling host of the Plague warriors and watched.
At first there were only outliers, breaking away, clashing with their fellows, spiralling off in odd directions, but it was as though a disease spread through the mass of the Plague People, leaping from one to the other. She heard their voices calling out in a great murmur of confusion above.
She missed the first and the first several after that, but at last she was watching one of them when it happened. One moment there was a man, ephemeral wings ablur. He had dropped his killing rod and seemed to be fighting with his armour, or perhaps his skin, his bones. Then he Stepped. Where a human shape had been, now there was a wasp of human size, wings flashing erratically as it sought to free itself of the cloth and metal cocoon it had inherited. A moment later it was clear, and Maniye watched the creature arc over and over, struggling with its own shape, with unfamiliar limbs and senses. For a moment it was a man again, naked because the Plague Men had never trained to bring along their possessions. He was not flying any more and dropped ten feet before Stepping to the insect once again. He had been screaming, face gripped by an appalling horror at his own shape and form. The wasp crashed down nearby, flattening a tent, curling over and over as though trying to sting itself. Then Loud Thunder ran over and brought his axe down where the creature’s body was narrowest, slicing it into two twitching sections.
Above them, the same drama was being repeated over and over. The Plague Men Stepped, Stepped back, Stepped again as the hollow spaces within them were filled with souls at last. They had no control over their shapes, their limbs. They fought each other or swung wildly back and forth across the sky. They crashed to earth or fled for the horizon or soared towards the sun as though it was a candle.
The warriors below needed no instruction. Every bow was tracking a madly buzzing body and those who had none picked up stones or hurled spears. It was no battle. The insect shapes the Plague Men stepped to were terrifying things of mandibles and stingers and hooked feet, but they were unfamiliar cages. They had no chance to learn how to control them before the warriors below picked them off. Only those who broke and fled at once escaped.
Overhead, the great bulk of the Plague Ship was drifting away, pushed westwards by the wind. Its hull was crawling with insects. Some deserted it and others just dropped off and plummeted, to break open on the ground.
A hand landed hard on Maniye’s shoulder, its counterpart on Hesprec’s. Shyri pushed in between them, demanding, ‘What have you done?’
Maniye grinned. She felt utterly exhausted, as though her body had done in truth all the things her mind and souls had endured in the Godland. ‘We opened the way to their gods.’
‘You did what?’ Shyri asked. ‘But . . . that’s a bad thing. Surely that’s the worst thing?’
‘Their gods were waiting for them, sealed away. Back in their home, who knows? They had a chance for gods and souls, and chose their magic, their wings and fire and glamour, instead. But this is a land of gods. Perhaps we only found our gods when we came here. And now it is a land of their gods, whether they want them or not,’ Hesprec said. ‘And their gods bring them souls, just as ours do. Now they are not Plague People. Now they are just people. We can fight people. Every tribe has been fighting other people since time began.’
‘But what about the rest?’ Shyri demanded. ‘All those at the Plague camp? What about when they can actually Step. Doesn’t that make them worse?’
‘I do not feel the Terror in the air any more,’ Hesprec said. ‘Perhaps it’s just because we’re winning here, but . . . that difference is gone, the gap is bridged. We can fight them if we need to fight them. And if we do not . . .’
‘There will be few who won’t want to fight them, given all they’ve done,’ Maniye pointed out.
Hesprec shrugged. ‘I have collected a hundred visions of the future, but that future is the past. I cannot say what will happen now. Which is a relief, believe it or not.’ She sighed, and Maniye saw that, however tired she herself was, Hesprec was twice so.
‘Old woman,’ she asked the Riverlands girl, ‘what will you do now?’
Hesprec chuckled. ‘Oh, you think this is it, the world to rights again? Live as long as I have, Many Tracks, and you’d know there’s always another problem.’
Just then a cold nose pushed its way into Maniye’s palm and she looked down, thinking it was one of Thunder’s dogs, perhaps. But the animal there was far smaller than any beast Loud Thunder would take in, just a starveling little coyote, head cocked on one side.
Maniye felt the clutch of that old guilt come back to her. ‘I thought . . . She was there with us, right there. I thought she would come back to us.’
‘She will be reborn in time,’ Hesprec said. ‘And I’m not sure it was Sathewe alone who was with us. I have a feeling one of the gods crept on his belly to where he was not supposed to be, to see we did the right thing.’ She glared across the circle of priests in mock-censure and Two Heads Talking met her gaze evenly.
Later, there was time for mourning.
Some wanted to press on eastwards immediately – to catch the fugitive Plague warriors and shed their blood, to purge their camps and burn their white walls. The desire for more vengeance came shackled to a weight of loss, though. There was no hearth without empty places at the fire, no tribe that had not given of itself to win the victory.
And they were tired, all of them: those who fought, those who prayed, those who had fled their homes, those who had marched so many miles from the lands they knew. Hearts cooled, and by nightfall a great wake had been arrived at by piecemeal consensus, each people to its own customs.
Maniye went to the Wolves first, whose smith-priests had great fires banked up. Those who had died on four feet were celebrated, their souls fleeing north already to be reborn as cubs in the wild. Those who died in human shape were laid out where the priests could perform the proper rites over them, to free them for another life and be sure their ghosts would not sour within the decaying flesh. Grim work, but it was their grim work, their ways, their world. Maniye watched, and then she looked across the camp to other fires, heavy with smoke, where the patterns of light and shadow could be read as a great ember-striped form present to honour those of the Tiger who had died in his cause.
And is the Godsland crowded now, with all the Plague gods? Maniye wondered. Or is it just larger, somehow? She remembered her first view of it, her understanding of the great landscape of divinity, the gods and their kin-neighbours, radiating outwards in increments of likeness. Surely the gods of Spider and Locust and Scarab had some distant part of that land – as far removed in distance as their forms were from Wolf and Tiger and Crocodile, and yet all the same land. She would have to ask Hesprec.
Loud Thunder carried the torch to put his Mother to the flame. Not the woman who had borne him, but his Mother nonetheless, the Mother of all the Bear, the greatest of them. Her vision had brought the Crown of the World together, for all that Thunder had been her tool. Her indomitable will had brought them all this way. But more than that, she had been the Bear’s very soul in the world. She had made them great. Now the tribe would splinter into pieces, because to the Bear, the natural unit was one bear. It would be long years, generations perhaps, before anyone might cast a shadow as long as Mother had.
One cause for relief, though. No war meant no Warbringer. Thunder could shrug off the hated responsibility and return to his cabin. He could find new dogs to keep him company and serve the needs of none but himself, as he had always wanted.
&
nbsp; It was cold, that cabin, even in summer. It was lonely, even with the dogs. All this while, ever since Mother called for him, he had pined for its solitude. Now he feared the hollow echo of it.
He had not seen Kailovela. Even the Coyote had not tracked her down, nor any word of her. She had gone to fight the Plague Ship and not returned. In his mind he made a decision: that she had played her part and then spread wing and gone her own way. She had ever loathed being tethered – far more than Thunder himself, for he had lived a life of his own decisions. She had been little more than a slave.
And so he pictured her, in his mind, sailing high over distant lands, and perhaps she found some place she could call home, or perhaps she just kept on flying, far above it all. In his mind, she never needed to land, to eat, to sleep. He saw her like that, and he ignored the cruel looks Yellow Claw gave him, so full of barely hidden knowledge. He ignored the child Quiet When Loud held and fed, an adopted sibling for the babe the Coyote woman carried.
She is free, he decided, and made himself believe it.
‘It’s all started again,’ Maniye observed to Hesprec. They were at their own fire, at the camp’s edge and looking over it. She had expected the Serpent girl to be going from hearth to hearth, visiting all the world just as she had done before, and so much easier now the world had all come to one place. Except the world did not live with itself happily, as Maniye knew.
Instead, Hesprec had her own fire, and out of the darkness would come this woman or that man, mostly the Wise rather than the Strong. Few stayed long, but Hesprec would turn her calculating smile to any guest who presented themselves, playing host until they made their excuses. Early on there had been Estuary priests and Stone Men, paying formal respects from lands where the Serpent was known and honoured – if not loved, perhaps. Everyone knew Hesprec Essen Skese was the mind that had broken the back of the Plague Men, and Maniye Many Tracks was her hand. Respect aplenty, therefore, but not camaraderie. People looked on the pair of them as though they were story-figures, good to talk about, slightly awkward to share a fire with.
Right now, they were hosting Two Heads Talking and Quiet When Loud, who at least did not stand on ceremony. Two Heads had come with a jar of mead and a string of fish still warm from the fire, and they lounged about like the vagabonds they were, eating and trading news just as though the world was still the same.
There had been a fight already between the Tiger and the Many Mouths Wolves, which was the meat of the Coyote’s news. The very night after the day when they had beaten the Plague Men, and vengeful memories were already finding generations-old grudges fresher in the mind.
There was a cackle from beyond the firelight, and then Shyri’s spotted coat seemed to form out of the shadows, eyes flashing back the flames. When she Stepped, she was still laughing.
‘Look at your faces,’ she said. ‘So solemn! This shows the world is going back to how it was.’
Hesprec’s own smile was wan. ‘Some of us might look for a world with more talk and fewer knives.’
‘Can’t cut your meat with talk,’ Shyri pointed out, and helped herself to the fish.
‘Why yes, of course you are welcome to our fire, as our guest,’ Hesprec said pointedly.
‘Hyena takes,’ Shyri got out, around a mouthful.
‘But you are welcome, nonetheless. You saved us in many ways the stories won’t bother to recall, but I do. And I have a long memory.’
‘Hyena tells his own stories, too,’ Shyri said. ‘And you can bet I’ll be in those.’
‘Is that what you’ll do, when this is over?’ Maniye pressed her. ‘Back to your people?’
Shyri wouldn’t meet her eyes. ‘Probably. Or wherever I will.’ Movement made her glance up and she rolled her eyes. ‘Here they are, then, the Big Men the stories will talk about.’
Maniye saw Thunder’s bulk first, but then, coming into sight around him like boats about a river bend, there were Asman and Venat too. She looked for Tecumet, but probably the Kasra of the Sun River Nation was not free to simply gad about between fires.
Hesprec’s nod summoned them in, the circle expanding until everyone had a place. Thunder had more mead, sharp with the strange spices the Stone Men used. By unspoken agreement they let the jug pass about a couple of times before anyone spoke.
‘Some of the Owl and the Bat are back with news,’ Asman said at last. ‘The Plague Men have abandoned their closest forts. They are trying to head east, those that can. There are a lot of their beasts loose across the Plains between here and the coast, and most of those beasts are men, some of the time.’
‘They will die if they cannot come to terms with what they are,’ Hesprec said.
‘You make that sound like a bad thing,’ Venat pointed out. ‘Let them all die, and bury their ghosts in the sea.’
Hesprec shrugged, and the Dragon rolled his eyes. ‘Here we go, the mystic secrets of Serpent. Give me any reason why we shouldn’t want every Plague throat cut.’
‘Galethea,’ Maniye put in, when Hesprec was reluctant to speak. ‘She was just such a creature, and without her we could not have found our way to victory.’
‘And her people have souls, like real people, now,’ Hesprec added. ‘And that is more work for someone, because the Sun River Nation must have embassies south, for the first time, and that will be a fraying rope to walk, I’m sure.’
‘And there was another one,’ Maniye put in, then wished she hadn’t when they all stared at her. ‘There were two Plague People – a man and a woman – when I was caught. They were . . . curious about me, about my soul. They wanted to watch me Step. I think they wanted to find out how it was done. They found something. I saw one of them dead, when we escaped – she was halfway to Stepping, part insect, part human.’ She shuddered at the memory. ‘But the other, the man, he did it. He was like those out there, terrified and out of control, but he knew me. He followed me. He must have thought I could help. And he died fighting the Rat. And he was one of them, but he found his own way to their gods. Without him we’d never have known it could even be done.’
‘Just one and he’s dead,’ Venat grunted. ‘Doesn’t mean we can’t kill the rest.’
‘It means they’re more than just enemies,’ Hesprec said slowly. ‘And the Serpent has always tried to turn enemies into friends.’
She looked round the fire, and Maniye saw that there would be a lot of convincing before even these, her friends, would concede the point. And how do I feel about this? She found that she trusted Hesprec and the Serpent, in the end.
Then conversation moved on, more news, bragging of exploits, remembrance of the fallen, and at last Asman asked Shyri the same question as Maniye.
‘There will be a place for you at Atahlan, if you wish,’ he added, ‘with honours and riches.’
Shyri looked at him uncertainly. ‘You’d have some Laughing Girl creeping about your palaces, would you?’
Asman shrugged. ‘I can even leave some trinkets out for you to make off with, if you felt Hyena demanded it.’
For a moment Shyri was very angry indeed, and then not at all, the emotion passing from her without leaving tracks. ‘Oh, Longmouth, I would not be your pet. Not even for your Dragon friend, though I love to watch him needle you.’ She stumbled over her next words twice, as though fighting parts of her that thought differently. ‘I have already been invited to go to the Crown of the World by my friend Many Tracks, though. I would be a poor guest to deny my host.’
Maniye held her face still so no sign of the lie might be seen on it. She had not even decided to go back north herself. Only on hearing Shyri’s words did she realize she would have to, at least for a little while. So much of her had been left behind there.
Asman nodded, a little sadly. ‘Of course, of course,’ he said.
Thunder cleared his throat, a heavy rumble like his namesake. ‘We must go east first, though. We must see the end of it, whatever the end is.’
* * *
Maniye had expected a mo
nth of fighting over every camp and village in the Plains, all the way to the sea. Her mind was full of the implacable Plague People, their deadly weapons, their utter heedlessness of anything that was not of them. And some part of her whispered what a lot of others were saying out loud. Surely gifting a people with gods would make them stronger, not destroy them.
Perhaps, left to come to terms with their new selves, the Plague People would have become stronger. Maniye hoped that Galethea’s Pale Shadow People were better placed to greet their god and take joy in the souls they had long sought. To them, souls had been a lack they had felt in their hollow centre. The Plague People had known no gods or souls at all in their far land, having driven all such irrelevances out of their world countless generations ago when they had purged their home of Maniye’s ancestors.
Everywhere the war host of the true people went, they found an enemy in horrible disarray. Often, the Plague camps were just abandoned, white walls already seeming tattered and threadbare in their absence, and perhaps a handful of Plainsfolk children left behind, bewildered and hungry. Sometimes the war host saw them leave, a sudden panicky evacuation the moment the warriors came into sight. Those early sights were comical and grotesque in equal measure, the Plague People fighting their own souls, crippling themselves as they struggled to stay in human form.
The countryside was crawling with their beasts by then, some just animals let loose in the general exodus, others maybe those Plague People who had lost control entirely. Great wasps blundered through the air, spiders and beetles skittered in meaningless patterns through the grasslands. The war host hunted them down where they could, but Maniye feared that would be a job for generations to come. Perhaps a job never complete – some of the monsters would no doubt breed and establish themselves, and be a terror to the future.
‘Or a tribe,’ Hesprec murmured, when she voiced those thoughts. At Maniye’s startled look, the Serpent girl raised her eyebrows. ‘The gods are here, their gods, but not just for them. What if some child sought them out, those gods, and begged a soul? What if some exiled pack of Wolves came south and, instead of begging the Plains Dog for patronage, sought out Spider or Locust? We have opened a bottle and lost the stopper, you and I. The world is saved, but it will never quite be the same.’
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 42