The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  He had thought often of speaking it aloud and returning it to its owner. He had imagined that moment as a scene from legend, when the hero utters the names of the great spirits and unleashes them. He had pictured something invisible but unmistakable returning to the pirate’s long-jawed face, to his stony eyes.

  And then they would fight, as they had fought before, only this time Venater – Venat – would not be hungover or caught unawares.

  The thought made Asmander shiver. Always the same astonishment: How did I ever beat him?

  And now, without his name, that fire was lessened within him. Not Venat, but merely Venat’s son, as Asmander was Asman’s. If he died as Venater he would go to the Dragon as a boy – no deeds, no glory, no bloody-handed history – and only Asmander could give him back the name he had surrendered. How the hate must be stoppered up within him.

  Venater was like a beast penned, and Asmander found himself staring at the lock of its cage, over and over, and knowing he held the only key.

  ‘I’ve never really moved at all,’ he said, voicing the trailing end of his own thoughts, but the two Coyote seemed to understand him. I’m like the river. I seem to be driven ever onwards, and yet here I am always.

  Loud Thunder travelled with his sled, Matt and Yoff pulling it swiftly over ground that was still deep with packed snow. He travelled on his human feet, and Maniye loped alongside him, outpacing him and coming back for him, with Hesprec sleeping or plotting inside her pack.

  The bear would have moved faster, she reckoned, and, when they camped on the first night, she asked Loud Thunder if he stayed human because of the dogs.

  He shook his great head. ‘They know me. They smell my soul on me. Shape of the body doesn’t matter.’ His face took on one of those slightly embarrassed expressions of his, a big man making a small admission. ‘The bear, it gets distracted: smells, hunger . . . and it doesn’t care about time. It’s been on lean pickings all winter, or it’s slept. It needs more to eat than a man. If I Stepped, I’d be foraging all the time. I’d forget.’

  She stared into his face, understanding that, living alone, he must hear the call of his bear soul asking him to give up his hands and his language and walk off into the wilds forever. It was the fate of the old and the grieving. Before now she had not thought of it as the fate of the lonely.

  She guessed that there were not so many Cave Dwellers compared to the people of the Wolf or the Deer or the Boar, and perhaps that was one reason why. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have such a powerful totem as the Bear, and to be able to take on a body of casually superhuman strength and endurance. The temptation never to return to human form must grow strong in these harsh places.

  Even in human shape, Loud Thunder’s Bear nature made him strong. For all she could outrun him, he would still be trudging indefatigably at the end of the day, when even the dogs seemed tired. Each night they would travel an hour past dusk before he finally picked out some sheltered spot in which to build a fire.

  After a winter spent within an arm’s length of a hearth, Hesprec had not taken well to the cold. When he was seated with them at the fire, he coughed intermittently: a thin, fluid sound. The ruddy light of the flames touched on his sallow skin, his hollow cheeks.

  Most nights, Loud Thunder fell asleep as soon as the camp was laid, trusting to the fire to keep away inquisitive beasts. Maniye and Hesprec were both more concerned about inquisitive people – and of course Broken Axe would be trailing them, invisible and silent and yet always present in her mind. The equinox, at the Stone Place, would mark the end of his promise, the return of his hunt. She could only hope that he would not try to seize her in front of all the priests of the Crown of the World. It might seem an act to invite bad fortune, but Broken Axe was a man who would dare anything.

  They shared the watches, the two of them. Her keen wolf nose alternated with whatever alien senses a coiled serpent could muster; that was all they had against the hostile world. When it was her turn to sleep, she tucked herself against Loud Thunder’s slumbering bulk for warmth. When it was Hesprec’s, he slid his sinuous form into her pack and curled up there.

  Most nights, when she was left the only one awake, she tried to think of what best to do. Living in Loud Thunder’s shadow, she had not needed a plan, and each day had drawn in the next without any concern save to survive the winter. Now she was forced to confront the fact, once again, that she had no plan, no thought for the future save to move on into it and never retrace her steps. She was aware that everything she did only bought her a little more sunlight. That night must close on her was inevitable: whether it was captivity or death at the hands of her own people, or the inexorable rift between her souls.

  But, while I can run, I’ll run.

  Elsewhere, following his own path, Water Gathers and a band of his hunters travelled on wolf feet towards the Stone Place.

  He had already lost valuable time, because he had bid his retinue lie in wait for Akrit Stone River. It was plain that the shedding of one man’s blood now might spare the lives of many others later, if the Wolf should find itself tearing at its own.

  But Stone River was a canny hunter, a man who had grown old and cunning during times of war and peace. He had found another route, even here in the heart of Many Mouths territory, so that Water Gathers had waited in vain.

  The southerners and their guides had passed by though, and he had been on the point of ordering an attack on them, remembering the death of Sure As Flint and the humiliation that it had brought with it.

  Recollection of that yellow-eyed monster which the black man had turned into had stayed his hand.Who knew what losses such a creature might inflict; who knew what the black man’s friends could do? He had been burned before by not knowing. Now he found that something else held him back. He would not acknowledge it as fear, so perhaps it was wisdom.

  Every tribe of the Wolf, indeed every tribe of the Crown of the World, would have eyes present at the Stone Place. Water Gathers would speak to them all there, one by one, in the name of his departed and respected father. He would court the Swift Backs and the Moon Eaters, and he would tell stories of Stone River’s weakness. What was a man without sons, after all? Be he never so great a warrior or a hunter, how could he call himself a man when his seed was weak?

  Akrit Stone River was leading his pack through the dense forest, following a curving path towards the Stone Place. He had seen the look in Water Gathers’ eyes, and he had weighed the odds. Seven Skins’ son could bring more warriors than he himself had, certainly, but could he bring the strength of will? The chance of turning that suspected ambush back on itself was tempting, just to rid the world of his strongest rival.

  But, in the end, he set his path away from the easy trails leading from the Many Mouths village. He told himself he did not like the odds. He told himself that if Water Gathers escaped, then there would be open war between their tribes and that would profit nobody except the Tiger.

  He did not want to kill the son of his old friend, for Seven Skins had at times been something like a father to him. Even though he was no blood-kin of Water Gathers, still the act felt too much like kinslaying.

  Akrit’s people travelled armed and armoured – the weight of iron and bronze did not slow down the wolf in them once they had shed their human shapes. They took the nights without fires, huddled together for warmth. They brought down what game they came across, and stayed as briefly as they could to gorge on it before setting forth again. Young deer, they took: bucks too reckless to know fear, too slow to escape. And some of the deer they took were men: errant herders and foragers caught unawares between the trees. All were as one to the Wolf. They travelled by night and by day, breaking to sleep at irregular intervals, two or three days apart, making up in speed what they lost by their tortuous route. Always one or two were ranging further from the pack, pushing themselves ahead or stringing outwards to the sides, keeping a sharp eye out for the Many Mouths.

  It was not Water Ga
thers’ people who eventually found them. Towards the end of their journey, after many days travelling, a familiar figure was abruptly pacing Akrit, loping easily alongside him as though he had never left.

  Akrit fetched to a halt, his people forming an uncertain scattering behind him. For a moment he looked into the pale eyes of the wolf before him and fully expected a challenge. What has changed since I was last home?

  But then the newcomer Stepped, hands open to signify peace, and Akrit followed suit.

  ‘Broken Axe,’ he named the man. ‘How goes your hunt?’

  23

  Where three rivers and the run-off from a score of hillsides met, the land was boggy all throughout the year, and the first melt of spring transformed it into a great swamp so vast and hungry it could have swallowed the world. No tribes lived here, though the swamp was rich and fecund enough that many came to gather and fish. And sometimes they died there, when the shifting ground ebbed suddenly from beneath their feet. It was said that the quicksands did not even let animal souls escape. True or not, enough had died there in their human shapes, smothering in the mud, that the swamp was crowded with ghosts. Priests travelled there to draw secrets from that buried mother-lode of the dead. On some nights even the least sensitive could see the lost souls drifting over the treacherous ground, glowing with pale fire.

  In the heart of the swamp there was a great island: no natural thing, it had been raised by the hands of men in an earlier age, earth set upon earth until they had conquered even the hunger of the swamp. Those ancients had raised a causeway towards it, a narrow processional path that was the only fixed and safe road through the quagmire. They had fetched the stones, the monoliths of bluish rock hewn from the mountains of the north. They had hauled them over the miles of rugged, broken ground, and they had floated them across the marsh, and then had set them upright on the island.

  Knowledge of whose hands had wrought all of this was lost. Every tribe claimed the marvel for their own forebears. Looking down the causeway’s length to that island, Maniye felt an abrupt certainty that it had been not one tribe but many. Somehow there had been a time, forgotten over the generations, when the peoples of the Crown of the World had come together united. And when they had stood together in one place, not even the earth nor the seasons nor the great spirits had been able to curtail their ambitions. They had remade the world.

  That thought came to her almost with the force of a physical thing, stopping her in her tracks so that Hesprec and Loud Thunder walked on a little and then turned, each wearing his own frown. For a moment she felt that she had come upon an absolute certainty, although she could not have mustered a single argument to defend it. She felt that some invisible ghost of the marsh had whispered a secret truth to her.

  She also had no intention of exposing herself to the mockery of either of the men, and so she skipped along to catch them up, and would not respond to their questions.

  There were others travelling to the Stone Place, but not so many. This was not a gathering for all the tribes, just priests and their retinues. She could see tents set on the island already, in separate little huddles. There would be plenty of old rivalries there around the ring of the stones. Everyone would be very careful not to draw down the ire of the spirits, not to foul the coming year for themselves and their people. But, at the same time, everyone would keep one hand close to a knife hilt while the priests indulged in their contests of magic, riddles and lore.

  There would be sacrifices, so she had heard. Back at the village, the Winter Runners told that the great spirit of the swamp itself must always be paid its due: living bodies sunk into its depths with halters about their necks.

  If the other two had shown the faintest reluctance, then she would have allowed herself second thoughts. Loud Thunder just kept shambling along as though he had not noticed where they were, though. His dogs trotted at his heels, with the empty sled dragging behind them.

  And Hesprec . . . a change had come over the old Serpent ever since they had reached the edge of the marsh. She wondered what he saw now with his priestly eyes. For him, did the waters hold the empty faces of the drowned dead? Did the air glow palely with the power of this place? His spine was straighter than it had been, his head held high. A look had come to his face that she did not like: hard and cruel and old, in a way he had not looked old before. Old like stories. Old like the Stone Place itself.

  Then he caught her looking at him, and something in her expression made him smile and shrug, just the same old vagrant she had fled across the Crown of the World with. But that other look returned once he thought she was not looking.

  ‘What will you do?’ The sound of her own voice seemed an intrusion, and she felt the still waters soak it up and resent it. She needed to break out of her own thoughts though. She had never counted herself as someone sensitive to the invisible world before, but their approach to the Stone Place was weighing on her in a strange way.

  ‘I must speak to my Mother,’ Thunder muttered sullenly. ‘But perhaps there is somewhere I can take you, before then?’

  There was pitiful hope there, as he seized on any excuse to put off his own duty, but she could think of no answer. She had hoped that she might just tag along with him. Apparently that was not an option.

  ‘There are people Hesprec must see,’ she announced proudly, trying to show off at least a little reflected glory. Then she caught the Serpent’s expression and flinched from it. ‘What?’

  ‘Little one,’ he told her carefully, ‘I seek the secret wisdom of the priests, if they will part with it. To my ears alone they may speak.’

  A shock of betrayal went through her. ‘Then what am I supposed to do?’

  ‘I would ask that you wait for me.’ He had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘I am sorry, but you are no priest. These matters are deep and terrible. Happier for you that you do not know them.’

  ‘So it’s better for me to know that something “deep and terrible” is going on, but not what it is?’ Maniye demanded.

  Loud Thunder chuckled. ‘I think she is more than ready for your secrets, old man.’

  Hesprec hissed in exasperation. ‘If I go as a priest from the River, and alone, then perhaps they might speak to me – if they do not kill me. If there is any respect left in all of this cold land. If I go with a fugitive Wolf girl, then they will see me as part of their feuds and rivalries and little wars, and they will judge me, and close their minds against me, and I shall learn nothing. And they will have one more reason to do harm to me. I have travelled—’

  ‘For a thousand years over a hundred mountains and twenty deserts and under the earth, and all the rest of the nonsense,’ agreed Thunder. ‘Girl, when I go to my Mother, I will find you a hearth amongst her people. They will feed you and shelter you, while I do what I must do there.’

  Maniye took a few quick steps until she was ahead of him and could look up into his face. ‘Why?’

  He smiled a little – which was as much as he ever really smiled. ‘Why are you not dead in the snow, Many Tracks?’

  The words, and his using Broken Axe’s name for her, made her skitter backwards, until her heels were at the causeway’s very edge. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why are you not back with your kin, as their prisoner? Why did I not cast you into winter’s teeth after you outstayed your welcome?’ Still he was smiling, but for a moment she could not read him, or square his words with that expression. Then he made an expansive gesture, taking in himself, and her, and invisible connections to the rest of the world. ‘Look at you: how you will not give up, you will not go away. Everything in the world you take between your teeth and shake it, to see what use to you it will be.You are a fierce little hunter, Maniye Many Tracks.You remind me of why I went south when I was young.’

  She saw Wolf tents on the island, several groupings of them. The sight had her creeping in Loud Thunder’s shadow, almost under his feet. Of course there would be Wolves here: the Moon Eaters lived close, and she saw banners
that she thought were Swift Backs, too. And the Winter Runners, of course. Her home was south of here, but not so very far. Most likely Kalameshli himself would be present.

  Would he try to seize her, even here, under the stern gaze of the invisible world? If he could catch her alone, she guessed he might, but not as long as she stayed in company. Likewise Broken Axe, who must surely either be here or be close behind her. They would have to wait until the gathering was over.

  She thought this, and then she examined her own thinking. Kalameshli Takes Iron was a cruel man, the tormentor of her childhood, the man who drove her before him with a switch. He would not be here alone: a handful of hunters, at least, would have come as his pack. Would he not just take what he wanted, as the Winter Runners so often did?

  And yet she did not quite believe it. It was the aura of the Stone Place; the air was thick with it. She could feel the tenuous balance of this place, and she knew nobody would wish to disturb it, to have it lash back across them like a bowstring. I am more of a priest than you know, old man, she thought, remembering Hesprec’s dismissive words.

  There were other little camps too. One was just a single ungainly tent composed of overlapping hides stitched over a round frame that stood almost twice Maniye’s height. There were a couple of hearths set out in the open nearby, and some mounds of fur that Maniye assumed were just piles of hides. Then one of them moved, and she realized that she was looking at the Cave Dwellers.

  There were no more than half a dozen there, and all of those she saw were men. There were none quite as big as Loud Thunder nor as tall as Lone Mountain, but every one of them was huge, nonetheless.

  ‘Old man,’ Loud Thunder said, as they drew near, ‘you had best come meet my Mother. If you are looking for wisdom, then she is more wise than any other in the Crown of the World. If I ask it, she will speak with you – and probably not kill you.’