The Tiger and the Wolf

by kindle@netgalley. com

  Maniye kept her eyes fixed ahead, pushing herself harder. They were ascending a rocky slope, slippery with the snow that had drifted there, and she was hoping the other wolf might slip or stumble. Luck held with him, though, and he was forcing her to veer now, stealing her speed from her.

  And then there was no more ground beneath their feet.

  Maniye had seen it barely in time to react. The boy had not, too busy recounting his own legend inside his head. They had found a stream that had been cutting into the rocks for generations, a stone-scattered drop of ten feet to the shallow silver line of the water below. Maniye was a tiger the moment she began falling, landing four-footed and then kicking off on wolf paws again. Her pursuer lost his luck, though, landing heavily, all the breath gone from him, and she had vanished from his sight before he could recover.

  Then she was running again in earnest, that long lope of the wolves, forcing herself always uphill. When her path found rocks and jutting heights, she scaled them, Stepping to tiger and feeling that extra tightness as Hesprec adjusted his hold on her, inch by frozen inch. She heard howling, once, but it was far away. The snow had eaten her tracks and her scent. The world had swallowed her up.

  But although she was discovering the ground ahead rock by rock, drop by drop, she knew that this great trackless forest was the same one in which she had played chase with Broken Axe; the same one that she had stumbled through half-frozen to reach Loud Thunder’s camp. She was closing with her destination, over so many miles, led by stray memories, by guesses, by hope.

  And then, with a dawn grown ripe in the sky and the snow at last behind her, she was at a lakeshore. It was not frozen now although the snow had made a slush out of its fringes, shot through with the dagger-like fingers of reeds. A pair of herons took thunderously aloft as she skidded and scraped to avoid wetting her feet. And she knew it. She remembered this place clear as day, despite all that had changed. Here, Broken Axe had bearded her. Here he had given her a hunter’s name.

  And somehow her long run had directed her right, despite the snow, despite the great, great heedless spaces of the world. She was close now; still a long way to run, but she was close.

  She drank gratefully, though the water was icy cold. Her stomach snarled at her, and so she Stepped and took out some of the dried meat, the nuts and wizened fruit she had taken from the Tiger.

  ‘Hesprec,’ she said softly. ‘Eat. Snake or man, but eat.’

  For a moment he did not move, remaining just a cold line tight against her chest, and then she thought it was too late. In that moment – even as her heart clenched – he loosened, dropped like a dead thing to the ground, and became a shivering, bluish-skinned man.

  In that dawn’s harsh, uncompromising light, he looked more corpse than man, so thin that she could barely think where any muscle could fit between skin and bone. That skin, always so pale, was crazed with lines, blotched with broken veins. His eyesockets were bruise-dark and his lips were cracked, drawn back to expose the ravaged gums beneath. She took her coat off and draped it across the knobs of his shoulders. He clutched it to him gratefully, shivering uncontrollably, fumbling at the sheepskin-lined hide with fingers like claws.

  ‘Eat,’ she told him, and then, ‘I’ll chew it up for you.’

  He looked at her at last. She could just make out a smile on that face, and it was like the ruins of Tiger power she had seen on the way to the Shining Halls: an echo of a strength that once had been.

  ‘Dear one,’ he said. Just then the great bowl of the lake seemed very quiet, the morning holding its breath as Hesprec’s own plumed white in the air. ‘You are too good, but no need. No need.’

  ‘Then . . .’ She offered a strip of meat to him uncertainly but he made no move to take it.

  ‘No need,’ again, from those old lips.

  ‘You have to eat.’

  He just watched her, though. His eyes were the lake’s pale colours, which were no colours at all, even the pink of their edges gone bloodless.

  ‘Hesprec.’ She tried to find some authority to invest her voice with. Am I not a Wolf chief’s daughter? Does my mother not rule the Shining Halls? ‘You have to eat . . . and then we’ll move on. We’ll go to Loud Thunder. He’ll shelter us.’

  He was shivering – or more like shuddering, the mess of angular sticks that made up his body jumping and spasming beneath the Horse-made coat. His eyes were steady, though, as if they had already severed ties with the rest of him.

  ‘You need to go,’ he said softly.

  ‘We – we need to go. When you’ve eaten, we need to go. We’re going to Loud Thunder. I’m saving you.’

  ‘You must stop that, or it’ll become a habit.’ His ghost-smile again. ‘But here I am, and I am saved. I am free. But I cannot go further with you.’ He was so dreadfully calm despite the state of him.

  ‘But your friends, the southerners . . .’

  ‘They will have to understand.’

  ‘No.’ She could feel a child’s wailing welling up inside her and fought it down stubbornly. ‘You have to come, see . . . because, because you have to.’

  ‘Maniye.’ The uttering of her name was like a spell to silence her, to still her. ‘The coils of the Serpent are endless, their loops everywhere.You see before you just one such loop. It has passed into the sunlight from the earth, and curved about its long, long course, and now the time has come for it to return.’

  She stared at him, struggling to shake off the quiet he had placed on her until at last she came out with, ‘But you still have to come with me. Step, and I’ll carry you, and if, and if . . .’ Her own voice was like a serpent fighting to escape from her control. ‘If . . . then your soul will pass, and . . .’

  ‘Did I not tell you, when we first met, that my people are different?’ he said gently. ‘We must do everything in a way that is ours alone. Even this. Especially this. The Serpent waits for me below, and I must return to the earth.’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Maniye.’ Again that quietening spell. ‘I am further from home than I should ever be, but some things do not care for distance. This is how it is for my people. Below us, the Serpent coils upwards through the earth towards me, and I must go to greet him. I have been his servant for more years than you can imagine. I look forward to meeting with him again. This is not the end, Maniye.’

  ‘I know, but . . .’ She had nothing she could say, and yet she was still speaking. ‘But I rescued you! I got you out. I stole you from my father! And it’s not supposed . . . it wasn’t supposed to be –’

  His hand on hers surprised her: colder than the water itself. ‘I am rescued,’ he said simply. ‘You cannot know how great it is, the thing you have done in bringing me away from that place. Greater than all the pains and tortures that this body has been spared is what you have gifted to my soul.’

  And at last her words had run dry. She collapsed to her knees beside him, holding him close, feeling his bird-bone fragility.

  Then he was running like sand from her arms, dwindling and diminishing, casting off his humanity until he was that whip-slender snake she had carried for so long. It lifted its head, slit eyes bright, and she knew the cold must be biting into every scale of it.

  ‘Goodbye, Hesprec,’ she said, and the little reptile had found a crack between two stones and vanished into it. She wanted to believe that she felt the earth tremble with the smooth motion of unseen coils, as the god came for his servant, but there was nothing. The ground was frozen hard.

  She ate then, chewing bitterly at the cold, tough meat, switching between human, wolf and tiger teeth to best gnaw it into pieces she could swallow. As the sun clawed its way free of its bloody birth and the new day began in earnest, the dawn found her sitting staring across the lake, but seeing nothing at all.

  Broken Axe found her there, too, padding up with his fur bristling in the chill. For a long while he watched and waited, and no doubt he was piecing it all together. His nose would tell him Hesprec had been there,
but was not there now, nor had left any track to follow. When he Stepped, his human face showed that he understood it all.

  ‘Many Tracks,’ he told her quietly, ‘you cannot stay here.’

  She just looked up at him bleakly.

  ‘The southerners are close behind me,’ he told her, ‘but closer than that, the woods are full of hunters. I outran a warband of the Tiger to find you, and your father is not far off.’

  ‘What then?’ She looked at him through raw red eyes.

  ‘There is only Loud Thunder. I have nothing else. We must run, now.’

  She was sick of running. It solved nothing. She had run fit to make the gods proud that night, and still it had not saved Hesprec.

  But when Broken Axe put out a hand, she let him lift her to her feet. When he Stepped, she followed.

  The Tiger and the Wolf, he said, but it seemed to her that the further they ran, the more the world around them fell silent. Each rasp of her own breath echoed in her ears, along with the drumming of her feet and the constant drumming of her heart. The grand silence that had been spread out over the lake where Hesprec had gone to earth was following her, more surely than any hunter. It coursed past her and stilled all the sounds of the world.

  She was falling behind, so that Broken Axe had to stop and wait, then stop and wait again. All that fierce fire that had given strength to her legs when she had escaped the Winter Runners seemed to have run out of her, and left only a void. Her mind thronged with all the words she had not said to Hesprec before the end. Everything around her, within and without, was defined now by absences.

  And those absences, the holes in her world, they were growing and growing. She felt the ground brittle and hollow beneath her pounding feet, and that seemed entirely fitting: the Serpent that had burrowed there was gone now, and the space it had taken up was surely collapsing in upon itself. Even as she ran, she felt she was standing at the brink of something vast and cavernous.

  There was a forest down there, a night-dark forest, as though it had grown within a great chasm in the earth. She was leaning over it, arrested at the very moment of falling. Things moved in the spaces between the trees: a hunt . . . it was a hunt. There was a tiger like smouldering embers. There was a wolf like a pale ghost. Each intended murder. Each was hunting the other, and each fled in turn. But they were closer and closer, hunters gaining with ravenous jaws agape, prey flagging and failing in its flight. And there was a light, a glaring brightness growing in the forest. It swelled and swelled, searing the eyes of her mind, not the eyes in her head, until it had eclipsed all the world, and she could see nothing, know nothing, be nothing, because she had to choose now, she had to choose, she had to know what she wanted to be . . .

  When she came back to herself, the cold of the ground had leached into her bones. Broken Axe was calling out her name, his hands on her. His ice-water eyes were the first things she saw as she opened her own.

  She made a questioning sound, little more than a croak. Moving her limbs, she found herself shaky and weak, barely able to sit upright.

  Broken Axe’s expression was closed, but his body thrummed with tension. ‘Can you run?’ he asked her. ‘I’ve heard the Wolf calling.’

  ‘What . . . ?’ She wanted to ask him if she had been struck; she wanted there to have been an attack, some cause outside herself. She could not deny the knowledge, though. Her souls had fought: they were grown too great for her small body. They had fought inside her, and now they had withdrawn to lick their wounds, leaving her the strength of neither to help her.

  ‘You fell,’ Broken Axe explained shortly. ‘You started shaking. There was foam on your lips, and your eyes were white.’ He was keeping himself as calm as possible, so as not to pass his alarm on to her. ‘Many Tracks, can you still run?’

  ‘Yes.’ But she could barely stand. Terror shot through her: not at the thought of being caught but at being unable to trust or master her own body. Every muscle within her was trembling, and the more the fear mounted, the more the strength ebbed from her limbs.

  Without a word, Broken Axe had swept her up and in a moment she was clinging to his back, arms clasped before his throat and her legs about his waist. He spared no more effort on words, but began trudging on between the trees. She could read his mind though: a burdened man on human feet could never outpace wolves or tigers. There was no escape that way.

  She wanted to tell him to leave her – his life was surely forfeit if he was caught, just as hers was. But strength to make such sacrifices was gone from her along with the rest. She just huddled into him, feeling his muscles shift beneath her.

  They found the deer soon after: not the tribe but their mute brothers. Spring had come to the Crown of the World enough for the first bucks to be out gorging, and the hollow they found was one of their feeding grounds. At the intrusion, the halfdozen beasts fled, white tails flashing in the sun, and Broken Axe set her down.

  ‘We need a new plan,’ he told her. ‘This place is thick with deer-scent. If I leave you here, can you hide yourself? Can you Step?’

  She reached tentatively for the souls within her, then flinched away. Her expression was all the answer he needed.

  ‘I will find help.’

  ‘Loud Thunder?’ She knew herself how far it was still to his cabin.

  For a moment, Broken Axe didn’t answer, and she realized that it was because he had no better answer. Even he was beyond the edge of his inventiveness.

  ‘I will wait.’ She was stronger now than she had been. If the Tiger or her father caught up with her, then she would find out whether she could run or not. ‘Broken Axe . . .’

  But she had no words to follow his name, and he understood. A moment later there was that pale wolf with the dark shoulders again, before he was off into the forest. She found shelter for herself amidst the roots of a tree, and husbanded her strength.

  37

  She heard wolves calling as she crouched there – not close, but not as far away as she would have wished. The Tiger she did not hear, nor expected to. Slowly her two souls slunk back to her, their power seeping grudgingly back into her limbs. She did not try to Step, in case playing favourites with them might trigger another rebellion. Denied their animal senses, she felt blind. There could be enemies all around and she could not scent them.

  But then Broken Axe was back, far sooner than he should have been – and not alone. She leapt up, knowing instantly that he could not have found Loud Thunder in such a short span. Her body was flooded with the need to fight or flee.

  He had found other allies, though. He had come with the southerners.

  ‘They were on my trail,’ he told her. ‘The girl here, she tracks like a wolf.’

  The southern woman made a scoffing sound at that.

  ‘Can you run?’ Axe asked. It seemed to be the question that her life revolved around.

  She did not know the answer, but she replied, ‘I can.’

  ‘Make for Loud Thunder’s home,’ he told her. ‘I will run ahead to alert him. Perhaps the Bear will give us guest rights.’

  And Asmander enquired, ‘Where is the Messenger?’ It was a yawning moment before she realized who he meant. Saying the words opened up the wounds again. ‘He is dead.’ The Champion stared at her.

  ‘I took him from the Winter Runners,’ she said in a whisper. ‘But he was hurt, and then the cold . . . I’m sorry.’ She was not quite sure of the relationship between Hesprec and this man. They had not been old friends from before, but the black youth had shown the old priest immediate and unquestioning respect. She was very aware of how little she knew any of these southerners.

  The news had struck Asmander like a hammer. ‘A Messenger of the Serpent, dead?’ he got out. Maniye wanted to remind him that Hesprec had been old. She had wanted to say how he had seemed at peace. The words would not come, though, and she doubted that they would have helped.

  ‘We must .. .’ Broken Axe started, but Asmander wandered off a few steps, unsteady on his legs. Ma
niye looked at the other two. The southern girl was grimacing, a spectator to someone else’s awkwardness, but when she met Maniye’s gaze she just shrugged. The other man, the big one with the long hair, seemed blithely unconcerned.

  Broken Axe approached Asmander. ‘What will you do?’ he asked. ‘Where does this leave you?’ His clenched fists alone showed how aware he was of the valuable time lost.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the Champion said, and then, ‘It leaves me with my duty.’ He did not sound glad about that. ‘Why can the girl not run with you?’

  Broken Axe frowned. ‘It is her souls.’

  For a second, Asmander just stared at him blankly before understanding dawned. ‘One must be cut away. The Messenger could have done that.’

  ‘I could do it,’ Broken Axe said tersely. ‘But first she needs to choose.’

  ‘Why not Wolf?’

  ‘What do you know about it?’ Axe asked sharply.

  ‘She grew up a Wolf, did she not? And you are a Wolf – there is no Tiger here. She respects you.’

  The hunter scowled. ‘Normally this is easy. Normally there is one soul that speaks of home, and one that speaks of the other. But Many Tracks . . . the jaws of the Wolf, the claws of the Tiger, each is as unkind as the last.’ He took a deep breath, glancing over at Maniye. ‘Southerner, where do you stand now?’

  A flurry of conflicting thoughts passed across Asmander’s dark face, but they were written in the fashion of his River Nation, and Maniye could read none of them. ‘Don’t ask me this,’ he replied hollowly.

  ‘I ask you to do what you believe is right,’ Broken Axe said simply. ‘I would value your help, if you will offer it.’

  Asmander’s expression was eaten up by something that Maniye could not quite discern.

  His big friend made a derisive noise. ‘Wolf, this is no business of ours. Keep your girl and your tigers, and your piss-cold north.’

  Broken Axe nodded once. ‘I understand,’ he said, but then Asmander held a hand up.