The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  ‘You’re having second thoughts?’ she demanded.

  He tucked his gloved hands under his armpits. ‘Let us go anyway, and hope they are dangerously hospitable and desperate for company.’

  ‘On these feet?’ she asked, meaning: In these shapes?

  ‘It would seem best,’ he agreed weakly. ‘I mean no slight, but who welcomes a wolf to their fire?’

  They approached carefully, treading as lightly as possible through the snow and squinting into the dark at the burgeoning reddish glow that was fast becoming the focus of their world. Maniye had thought of Stepping to her tiger form to scout the strangers’ camp, but if any of the fire-makers were resting in an animal shape, then they might pick up her scent. Worse, if she was spotted skulking about the edges of their camp, and if one of them had a bow or even a good spear-arm . . .

  Closer, and the tantalizing scent of cooking drifted to them: fish was not common fare in Akrit’s hall, but even a human nose could not mistake it.

  ‘Do the rules of hospitality hold, so far to the north?’ murmured Hesprec. He had withdrawn his arms entirely from the sleeves of his robe, huddling his way along with them wrapped inside it about his skinny body, and in constant danger of falling over.

  Only one way to find out, Maniye realized, but her own teeth were now chattering too much to say it.

  The fire had been set in a hollow cleared of snow, to hold in as much of its heat as possible, so they were obliged to creep very close before they could get sight of its master. When they did, lifting their heads over the dip’s edge, Maniye caught her breath in shock.

  The fire itself had been laid within a half-cairn of stones to shelter it and to direct its heat. The structure was constructed intricately, a veritable work of art in dry stone, each piece interlocking with its neighbours elegantly – and all the more remarkable because its builder was a giant.

  Even sitting at the fire, he would have been able to look Maniye directly in the eye. Standing, he would have loomed at least head and shoulders over Hesprec and, rather than being lanky like the Snake priest, he was massive, vastly broad across the shoulders, wide at the waist, lumpy with muscles like boulders. He wore a robe of overlapping, stitched-together hides and the garment itself probably weighed more than Maniye could lift, perhaps even with Hesprec’s help. Over that he had a cloak of coarse wool that would have made a tent for a man of more modest proportions. His black hair was long, plaited into two thick braids that rattled with bone rings alongside his cheeks. His beard was the size and shape of a spade-head.

  At his side sat a pair of muscular grey dogs, wolf-like but most certainly not wolves, and behind them, covered with a skin, was a sled. The dogs’ attention was entirely fixed on what their master was doing. He sat cross-legged with a fist-sized ball of earth before him, and with a gentle tap he cracked it open, revealing a curled fish inside that had cooked in the heat of his fire. The smell was unbearably delicious.

  Maniye spared a glance for Hesprec, who was plainly not going to last much longer without that fire. For herself, she felt that she would not last much longer without the fish.

  Her stomach made the decision and pushed her forwards, one hand snagging the old priest’s flapping sleeve to draw him after her.

  As they half stepped, half slipped down into the hollow, she expected the huge man to leap up, outraged at these intruders, but apparently the two of them were not so very alarming as all that. Instead, their hoped-for host leant back, one eyebrow raised quizzically, and one hand moving over to rest easily on the haft of an enormous axe she had not noticed before. It was as long as she was tall, with a head of copper held to its armthick shaft by three sockets, and yet it seemed barely adequate for the man’s huge hand.

  ‘What’s this now, hrm?’ That last was a sound from deep in the man’s throat, a growl that sent a shiver of fright through Maniye’s bones. His voice was very soft, just as his stance was very calm and still, but both made absolutely plain the ferocity they were gateways to.

  Maniye had no idea how to address one of the Cave Dwellers

  – for he could be nothing else. The sheer bulk of him had struck her silent, mouth opening but her words afraid to venture forth.

  ‘Kind lord,’ came Hesprec’s voice at her ear, ‘we are but travellers in this land, who saw your fire from afar, as if it were a star to guide us.’ His voice shook and shuddered from the cold, but he managed a stiff bow, and Maniye wondered if this was how people actually talked where he came from, or whether he was just making things up again.

  The Cave Dweller grunted.

  ‘Even I,’ Hesprec went on gamely, desperately, ‘who first saw the sun in a land far distant, have heard of the welcome generosity of these, your cold lands. Wherever life is harsh, there life is precious, that is what they say. Even for two strangers such as we . . .’

  The huge man raised a hand abruptly, and Maniye found herself flinching back from him, even though he stood halfway across the fire from them.

  ‘Share the fire, why don’t you?’ he suggested quietly, with a touch of exasperated humour. ‘Leave all those words out in the dark, though.’

  Now it was Hesprec who was lurching forwards and dragging Maniye after him, almost falling into the fire in his eagerness to get warm. Once he was sitting, shivering uncontrollably, she reached over and pulled his robe open a bit, against his protests, so that the fire’s heat could get to him through all those layers.

  Their host poked at the fire with a stick and excavated another clay lump. The look he gave his guests was distinctly put-upon. ‘You’ll be hungry, of course – all sorts of cold and hungry.’ He looked mournfully at the ball before him. For him, they were very small fish.

  ‘I will survive,’ Hesprec said, ‘but my friend has been doing much of the walking.’ He pressed on with sudden abandon. ‘I am Hesprec Essen Skese, a priest much respected in civ– in my own land, and the girl here is Maniye.’ The exchange of names was an essential element of the bond between host and guest, as everyone knew.

  The big man stared at him for a moment, his sullen expression almost a child’s, then he shrugged. ‘Loud Thunder,’ he rumbled, striking a fist at his chest. A hunter name was better than nothing, Maniye knew, although not quite so potent as a birth name.

  There were six more fish still in the fire, and they were able to watch the precise tilting of greed and conscience in Loud Thunder’s face as he cracked the earthen balls all open and considered how to divide the spoils. In the end, Hesprec got half of one, Maniye the other half, and the smallest one of the remainder. Two went to the dogs, the huge man filleting the fish neatly with a thin blade of flint and then letting the animals snap and squabble over the meat. Nobody complained. The taste was surprisingly rich, flavoured with the herbs the fish had been wrapped around before being encased in clay.

  Loud Thunder watched them as he ate, his knuckle-sized teeth making surprisingly delicate work of it. His expression was a little puzzled, a little resentful, but mostly that of a man withholding judgement.

  Then, just as Hesprec had finished picking flesh from bone, one of the dogs lifted its head from the last scraps of its food, ears pricked high.

  ‘Who is it that travels with you?’ Loud Thunder growled suspiciously.

  For a moment Maniye could not understand what he meant. A second later, she knew, without any doubt, who it must be.

  In a thought she became a tiger, turning away from the fire as she Stepped, her keen eyes paring away the darkness, hunting out what the dogs had sensed.

  There was a man out there, standing still as a tree amongst trees, and it was Broken Axe. There was no mistaking him. His image was branded on her mind.

  The shock of seeing him jolted her back into human form, and she turned to see the Cave Dweller staring at her with almost comical surprise.

  ‘Please,’ she got out. ‘Please, we are being hunted. There is a man out there, a killer. He is sent by my father to murder me. Please.’

  Lou
d Thunder’s expression told her that this went beyond any contract between host and guest, and his great head shook slightly. Then Broken Axe, human still, stepped carefully into the firelight with his hands empty.

  The Cave Dweller’s hand was resting on his axe again, but with no obvious intention of using it. Maniye felt her innards freeze up, the fear clenching her there hard enough to hurt.

  ‘Please,’ she forced out, ‘he killed my mother. Please. He killed my mother.’

  Now she had the absolute attention of all three men as the Wolf hunter approached.

  ‘Well,’ Loud Thunder murmured, taking a deep breath. For one mad moment she thought he would take up his axe and defend her, stranger though she was. She had a dream-vision of that heavy copper blade cleaving through the Wolf without slowing, just a single blow that would end forever her nightmares and her running.

  Then the Cave Dweller nodded. ‘Axe,’ he hailed the newcomer, with evident familiarity.

  ‘Thunder,’ replied Broken Axe and, at a small nod from the big man, took a place at the fire.

  15

  ‘Amiyen Shatters Oak is returned,’ Kalameshli announced.

  Akrit was out on the training ground, pushing himself hard, working up a sheen of sweat despite the cold. First he had been wrestling with a few of the younger hunters, showing them just how little youthful vitality was worth against experience. Then he had called out Smiles Without Teeth, the biggest man there, whom none of the youngsters had yet dared challenge. Akrit knew Smiles well, though: big and strong but without imagination.

  And loyal, in the bargain. Too loyal, perhaps, to show up his chief before the tribe. There had been a time when Akrit had known he could beat Smiles easily, matching his skill and speed to the man’s strength. Now he beat the man, throwing him twice and then forcing him into a grunting armlock, and yet there was a nagging doubt in his mind that would not be silenced. How much of this is he giving you? How much could you truly take by force?

  The fear – and the anger that always followed on its heels – made him twist Smiles’s arm more savagely than he had intended, and he cast his henchman sprawling on the hard ground. For a moment he wanted that other kind of fighting, the serious kind. He wanted to get his teeth bloody. He stared about him at the hunters there – who had killed in their time, both as beast and as man. He found that he was desperate to be challenged, desperate to be brought to bay now, while he was still young enough and strong enough to tear the hide of any upstart who tried it. What were they all waiting for? Didn’t they want to be chief?

  And yet he knew what they were waiting for, any one of them with a drop of ambitious blood in them. They were trailing him like a good hunter should, letting him tire and tire as the years rolled by beneath his feet. Why attack the buck when he is full of pride and life when you can run him to his knees and then open his throat?

  Now, with Smiles Without Teeth struggling back to his feet, here was Kalameshli with news.

  Akrit did not ask the obvious question, not here, not before everyone. Is the girl with her? He could see it, anyway, from Kalameshli’s expression. Amiyen had come home without her quarry.

  He directed a glower about at the younger men, and they dropped their eyes gratifyingly, none of them wanting to confront his wrath. With that brief, petty satisfaction, he dragged his cloak about him and stormed off to his hall. Kalameshli would bring Amiyen to him, he knew.

  ‘Out, all of you!’ he bellowed as he entered, scattering thralls and wives. ‘Underfoot and listening, every one of you!’ He slapped a young Deer tribe slave as she tried to scurry past him, sending her tumbling to the floor. ‘Out!’

  For just one moment, old habit prompted him to go and root the girl out of her den up above, as he had been forced to do on other occasions when he wanted quiet counsel with Kalameshli. But, no, of course there would be no need now.

  Nobody had mentioned her since she fled. Or nobody had dared do so to his face or within earshot, which was not the same thing. He had no doubt that his errant daughter had become the talk of the Winter Runners behind his back – and probably the news had got as far as the Moon Eaters and the Swift Backs by now, for that matter. In his own sight, though, it was as though Maniye, his sole daughter, had never been.

  He kicked a couple of bearskins together and sat down, hunching himself towards the embers of the fire. Now he was not wrestling, the cold seemed to make a sudden leap at him. And it was cold: the winter was coming on fast. It was the cold and not the years that made him shiver beneath his cloak.

  Kalameshli and Amiyen entered, the priest settling the doorhanging carefully to keep the heat in. Akrit fixed the woman with a baleful look.

  ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  Amiyen did not lower her eyes. The angry stare of her chief did not cow her, but was instead swallowed up amid her own sour and festering anger. ‘She’s gone,’ the huntress spat.

  ‘Where?’ Akrit hissed.

  ‘She went to the Horse, and when they gave her up, she fled. A storm ate her tracks. I went downriver halfway to the next Horse camp, but there was no sign.’

  ‘You failed.’ Akrit was trying to disentangle the knots of her expression. ‘How hard did you search, Shatters Oak?’

  ‘Oh, believe me, if she could be found, I would have found her,’ Amiyen spat viciously. ‘She killed my son, my Iramey. Come the spring I will go hunt her again.’

  Akrit could not afford to show the shock he felt, holding his face carefully impassive. Killed . . . ?True the girl was a wild one, but he could not imagine her besting even Amiyen’s younger, not as woman nor wolf . . .

  But as tiger . . . Akrit remembered well how fiercely a tiger could fight when cornered. He recalled those battles, in the days when the whole of the Crown of the World had risen under the Wolf, and when men like Akrit had forged futures for themselves . . .

  Simpler times, better times . . . But living in the past was for older men than he.

  ‘Tell me,’ he ordered, and Amiyen recounted it all, how she had almost caught the girl at the Horse camp, but lost her in the snow. How she had then searched for days before the snows returned, and she and Rubrey were driven before the advancing cold all the way back to the stronghold of the Winter Runners. And since that first storm there had been no sign at all of Maniye or the Snake priest.

  And her son . . . She spoke very little of her younger son, save to report his death. She kept the grief all inside.

  Looking her in the eye then, Akrit knew that if the Winter Runners would consent to being led by a woman, then she would have called him out right there. Her mood was ugly and rebellious, and it was the blood of his blood that had spilled her own.

  ‘What about Broken Axe?’ Akrit demanded.

  ‘There was no other,’ Amiyen declared. ‘Just the winter and me.’

  Once she had gone, Akrit sat in silence for a long while, with Kalameshli seated across the fire from him, like his reflection in a dark pool.

  The people of other totems pretended horror at the Wolf, especially those milksops of the Deer and the Boar who lived within the Wolf’s Shadow. They claimed that a chief of the Wolf ruled only until a stronger beast tore his throat out. They told themselves that the Wolf were cruel – stronger than them, but only at the expense of some moral refinement. They did not understand, and that was one reason that those peoples had always come second: the playthings of whatever predator was stalking at the edges of their villages, be it Bear or Tiger or Wolf.

  In truth, mere fighting skill won no chieftainships.What made a chief was the confidence of his tribe. A challenger without the backing of the pack would not even be allowed into the circle. A chief facing the loss of his tribe’s support would back down without baring his teeth, knowing that the battle was lost. Only if the tribe was divided, only if the race was close, would it come down to bloodied fangs.

  Akrit could feel that confidence in him slipping away. He was still chief; the Winter Runners would still follow him, but for how
long? How long with one as respected as Amiyen gnawing away at his support like an old bone? He thought about her older son, Rubrey – a popular youth but unproven still. A bare handful might stand with him if his mother put him up to the challenge. A bare handful this winter but what about the next, when he had one year’s more strength, and Akrit a year’s less?

  Therefore take a warband against the Tiger, capture some thralls, shed some blood, show the world that Akrit Stone River remained a power to be reckoned with. He had faith that his hunters would be up to the task, and there was always some skirmish, some theft or intrusion from the edge of the highlands that needed avenging. And, yet, just such a small venture was the meat and drink of young challengers: somewhere they could prove themselves. The shedding of blood was ideal for binding a new pack together about some emergent leader. Was Rubrey, son of Amiyen, that man?

  When he himself was a young man, Akrit had known large dreams. The Wolves and their allies had thrown off the Tiger yoke, and he had caught the enemy ruler – taken that proud woman from the midst of the fray. He had already challenged for the leadership of the Winter Runners – he was the hero of a dozen battles and the tribe loved him. In covert conference with the new priest, Kalameshli, he had aimed his arrow higher. The Wolf tribes were choosing a High Chief, already planning their own hegemony over the Crown of the World. Akrit and Kalameshli had been looking to the future, assessing the chance that power over the Tiger might bring the Winter Runners into dominance over everyone born to the Jaws of the Wolf.

  And it had seemed such an easy thing: get a child on the Tiger Queen. A child of two souls who would wear the wolf’s skin but still provide enough leverage to make the Tigers bow. And a girl-child too, as it turned out. What more could he have asked for? She was destined to be just one of his numerous brood.

  He had since wondered if lying with the Tiger woman had not poisoned him, somehow, soured his seed within him. Each night he lay with one or other of his Wolf wives, yet not one of them bore his child, for all the charms and old wisdoms they resorted to.