‘I think your father understands as much,’ he agreed. His eyes had never left her, and she felt a crawling sense of unease born of that rigid scrutiny.
‘Then what?’ she hissed.
She saw Kalameshli’s shoulders rise and fall. ‘His thoughts are close about him now. The eyes of the Wolf—’
She made an exasperated noise, because Akrit himself had told her all that, and it gave her no clues as to what her father would actually do. In the wake of that, she heard someone nearby stirring, woken by her frustration. Kalameshli melted away into the dark silently, and in the morning she was not sure she believed any of it.
They travelled two more days, moving with all the speed the travois could manage, swapping bearers and scouts, and never giving Maniye the least chance to escape. When Smiles was not holding her leash, the job fell to Shatters Oak, the other veteran amongst them. She was a worse captor, if anything. Smiles Without Teeth was a man of little imagination, and able to plod along in silence for hours without growing bored or fretful. Amiyen Shatters Oak had a harsher streak to her. Even if Maniye had not killed her son, she had still been there, connected to that death by a trail of blood. Amiyen would yank on the lead viciously, hauling Maniye close, her teeth almost to the prisoner’s ear.
‘When we catch Broken Axe, we’re going to skin him,’ she would hiss. ‘Kalameshli says he has spat on the Wolf, so his ghost can’t be allowed to leave his body. We’re going to wear his human pelt and leave his flesh for the coyotes. He’ll never come back as wolf or man.’ From her first sally she had realized that simply threatening Maniye herself with pain or death would barely register, Akrit having already run her to exhaustion on that front. Instead, she noticed the flinch when she first brought up Maniye’s ally. ‘He will come,’ she had crowed. ‘He’ll come for you, do you think? I will be waiting. When he’s ours, I’ll wield the knife myself. I’ll beg Kalameshli for the chance. I am owed, girl. We’ll roast him alive on the fire and feed you his human flesh.’
She was endlessly inventive in the fates that they had in store for their former kinsman, each of them whispered viciously into Maniye’s ear. It was a pastime the woman never tired of.
At last they stopped, because they had caught up with the hunters Akrit had sent ahead. They had been crossing open land, following a young river’s descent out of the highlands and onwards west, but there were more trees ahead. Maniye had lost all track of where they were: without her wolf nose, she felt disconnected by so much travelling.
At the edge of the trees and in the crook of the river, a fire was already going and the hunters had not been idle. There was a mess of wood there, and they were building something too small and irregular for a dwelling. When the travois party arrived, Kalameshli took himself off to view it immediately, mostly to berate them and have them dismantle much of it.
They had been hunting, too, because there was a pit dug and within it a sow and a boar were pacing angrily, leaping up at their captors whenever a human face showed itself. At first Maniye feared she would be thrown in there too. Instead, the big tent-shelter they had originally kept her in was reassembled here, and she was leashed inside, kept blind to what was going on without.
Her ignorance lasted only until nightfall, for most of which time she had simply lain there, feeling the ache in her legs and feet, the taut tugging of the welts across her back, not even trying to uproot the stake. Kalameshli’s voice came to her, calling instructions peevishly, and the harsh shout of Akrit when something went wrong. If anything, the tension between the Wolves was spun tauter than ever. Maniye had been desperately looking for any sign that someone was getting close to standing up to her father – for surely any challenger would have no particular interest in her fate – yet Stone River’s reputation still held them in check.
Then, once the noise and mutter outside had died down into uneasy sleep, Akrit and Kalameshli backed into the tent. The priest glanced at her once, her father not at all.
‘Two pigs are no sacrifice,’ Akrit stated. He had brought a brand with him, and he jammed it into the ground for its light. ‘The scouts say the only people close to here are the Horse, who they fear to touch.’
‘Well, they are wise,’ Kalameshli murmured. ‘If we are to war against the Tiger, we would be fools to seek more enemies. The Horse are dangerous, not because they have many warriors, but because they have many friends—’
‘All this I know,’ Stone River cut him off sharply. ‘So, not even a hunter of the Deer or some Boar woman out looking for mushrooms. Then you know the answer to your question.’
And Kalameshli’s eyes slid inexorably to Maniye, sitting up and staring at them. ‘This also is unwise,’ he observed.
‘I have asked you for wisdom but your well has run dry,’ Akrit told him flatly. ‘I can feel the Wolf’s breath on my neck, old man. He is waiting for me to prove myself to him. I need to show him that in me are all the qualities he values: that I am fierce and strong; I baulk at nothing.’
‘There are other qualities that the Wolf values. Loyalty to kin—’ Kalameshli started, trying to sound mild but the strain in his voice betrayed him.
‘Yes, loyalty!’ Akrit interrupted. ‘And she has shown none! So she deserves none. She fled the tribe. She stole meat from the Wolf’s own jaws. She has been the guest of the Shadow Eaters! The Wolf must be hungering for her.’
Kalameshli glanced at her, the fire catching his eyes. ‘Akrit, as I am your friend, this is not the way.’
‘She will be given to the Wolf.’
What Maniye felt was some terrible variant of relief. Her fears had come to pass. The nightmare that had chased her all the way from the village of the Winter Runners had caught up with her. Outside the tent they had been building an altar: jaws of wood in imitation of the iron teeth of home. They would burn her inside them, and the Wolf would consume her.
But Kalameshli continued shaking his head. ‘She is your kin,’ he insisted. ‘No god will protect a kinslayer. Is this what you will have the Wolf see?’
Akrit even smiled at that. ‘But I will not be a kinslayer. Because you are my priest, and you shall carry the flame.’
The older man’s face went dead in an instant, utterly without expression. ‘It cannot be done,’ he said quietly.
‘You’ll do it,’ Akrit told him. ‘As I am your chief, you will do it. Because the Winter Runners need me, Takes Iron. I will make us first of all the tribes, and I will make the Wolf the first of all the peoples. It starts here, with this. This is how I show the Wolf what I dare. This is how you show the Wolf your loyalty. Don’t think he isn’t watching you as well.’
Kalameshli would have argued further, but Akrit abruptly grabbed him by the robe, yanking him forwards in a clatter of little bones.
‘Do not challenge me,’ Stone River growled into the old man’s face, and then dropped him, the old priest falling to his knees. A moment later Akrit had stomped out of the tent, the parting of the hide flap giving Maniye a glimpse of the flames outside.
Kalameshli got to his feet and stood there for a long time, long after the brand had burned out, thinking in the darkness, and then he, too, left.
39
‘So what makes him High Chief, then? He has to kill the others?’
Before now, Venater had shown no interest whatsoever in the ways of the Crown of the World. He had happily fought against the place’s natives, but even the Stone Place had barely impressed him. Now, though, he seemed suddenly interested in the ways of the Wolf.
Asmander would rather not have spoken of it, but at the same time he knew that silence would only encourage the old pirate. Sensing weakness was meat and drink to the Dragon.
‘I don’t think so.’ His voice seemed remarkably conversational, to his own ears. ‘He has not killed the chief of these . . . Swift Ones? Swift Feet, Swift somethings. And there is some other tribe he says will join him. It is these Moon Faces who are not decided. He needs to impress them, I think.’
‘B
etter than your lot,’ was Venater’s verdict. ‘When you told me what that was about, I thought it was arse backwards both ways.’
Shyri smirked at that, eyes flicking between the two of them. Seeing Asmander being baited came second only to baiting him herself in her list of pastimes, or so he surmised.
‘All that ceremony. Fasting, invocation, sacrifice, just to make someone Kasra, but you’ve already decided who gets to do it: always the eldest brat of the last one.’ Venater was watching him keenly for any crack in the facade.
‘You’d rather everyone fought until only one of them stood?’ Asmander asked him with a superior look. ‘That is how life is amongst the Dragon?’
‘No ceremony, no certainty.’ Venater grinned. ‘When we get back, maybe that’s what I’ll do: cut a few throats and make myself chief. About time I settled down with a few wives.’
Asmander glanced at him sharply, fighting down a flare of real anger, and found himself meeting the pirate’s amused stare. More bait, always more bait, until he found himself lunging at it.
‘I would think those women would rather cut their own throats than settle down with you,’ he managed, knowing it for a weak rejoinder.
‘You don’t understand what women want,’ Venater replied, still coolly jabbing away with a patience that said he could do this all day.
‘Who would not want to lie with the son of Venat,’ Shyri added slyly. ‘The muscles of his arms are like hard melons. His teeth are so yellowed you’d think them nuggets of gold,’ and then, just as Venater was about to expand on her words with more of his attributes, she added, ‘Alas for his name, though: it has entered its second childhood. Have I got it right?’
The old pirate found himself abruptly on the other end of the joke, snarling at her, which bred only laughter.
Asmander did not join in.
‘Well, what now, longmouth?’ she pressed him. ‘You trust this Stone River to give you your due, now he’s got his cub back?’
‘We move like his shadow. When he travels to visit these Moon Faces – no, Moon Eaters – I will follow his tracks. I will remind him of his promise.’
‘And if he just sends his hunters out to kill you?’
‘Then I will kill his hunters, until he remembers his promise,’ Asmander said dully.
‘And if he sends his Iron Wolves, his great warriors that even the Sun River Nation has heard of?’ she pressed.
‘Then I will see whether they were worth me travelling so far. And perhaps I will die.’ Killing one was hard enough.
‘Is that really it?’ Shyri asked.
He could not tell what she meant. ‘Dying?’
‘Why your chief sent you here, your . . . Tecuman?’
‘My Tecuman, yes. For his cause, yes. But it was my father who sent me.’ And enough said about that. Asmander must be a dutiful son and do what he was told. Even when he was told to cross the whole world in search of a mad myth. Who would have thought the Iron Wolves were actually real?
Not for the first time he wondered what had happened back home since he set off upriver. Perhaps Tecuman had defeated his sister. Perhaps he was dead. No word would have come to him here, in these cold lands.
‘Well,’ said Venater, eyeing him. ‘You’ve done it, anyway. Think of the look on the old man’s face when you bring him what he asked for. Like something out of that story.’
Bizarrely, Asmander knew exactly the story he meant, or what sort of tale anyway. There were many variants, but there was a young man given an impossible task by someone supposed to be their ally – stepfather, uncle – yet finds some way to complete it. The hero’s return was always a triumphant scene of virtues rewarded, and evil unmasked. Somehow Asmander did not feel that his own exploits would fit into that pattern.
But he said, ‘Yes,’ trying to make himself sound enthusiastic. ‘I will have done my duty.’
Shyri snickered at that, and he glared at her. ‘The Laughing Men know nothing of duty, then?’
‘There are things you must do, and things you must not do. We know this.’ Her smile was blithely unconcerned with his feelings. ‘You river people find it so complicated, so hard to tell one thing from another. You use so many words.’
‘Loyalty,’ he snapped at her. ‘Duty. Family. These are just words to you?’
She exchanged a sidelong glance with Venater, as though the two of them were conspirators in Asmander’s torment. ‘All words are just words. They are not the things they are used for.’
Asmander opened his mouth to argue, then found her point too unexpectedly philosophical to make headway with. This was the sort of talk the Serpent priests debated in the temple.
Venater had at last grown bored. ‘Home soon, anyway,’ he suggested.
Asmander nodded.
‘Gratitude of the Kasra, I reckon. Or half a Kasra, anyway. Good way to make your mark, that. All those snapping fools at your Tecuman’s feet, each one giving all their strength to fighting the next man for the least scrap from his table. And in you come, Asmander the Champion, with your Wolfguard, ready to swear the iron savages into your Kasra’s service. Good way to make everyone realize you’re on top.’
‘Is it?’
‘Not as good as biting some throats out, true, but – oh, no, you’re all too civilized for that. As if it wasn’t always the best way.’
‘Enough, Venater.’
The old pirate merely chuckled. ‘Now what your man really needs is Dragons.’
‘He has them. Or do you think your people will be in rebellion against the whole of the Sun River Nation, when we return?’
‘Half,’ Venater corrected, almost absently. ‘And we might. Hadn’t thought of it, but we might. Even if not, though, your man has us, but he doesn’t have us. There’s not-fighting-against, and then there’s fighting for.’
He was angling for some concession, but Asmander was not in the mood. ‘If the Dragon have betrayed Tecuman, then I will send you out to kill them. To kill your own kin until they kill you.’
Venater went still. It was not really the kinslaying: the Dragon were notorious for simply not caring about all sorts of concepts that were the basis of human life everywhere else – even in the Crown of the World it appeared. It was a threat of a new order from Asmander, though. It was a promise to abuse the old pirate’s freedom more harshly than before.
‘I’d be careful what plans you make,’ was Venater’s quiet pronouncement.
‘Because one day the Dragon will rise up from the delta and ravage all the Tsotec?’
‘One day, maybe.’
Asmander’s smile was like a knife. ‘But first you must learn how to work together. You must stop killing each other over petty slights and women. You must become more than murderous children, Venater – become more like us. And you never will.’
And there was the spark, alight again in the old pirate as though it had never gone out. There was the fierce, fighting rage that Asmander remembered from when he had fought and bested this man. And this time Venater was not drunk and suddenly woken into a fight. This time he was fresh, and ready to bloody his hands.
‘No reaver of the Dragon would shed so much skin as to be like you.’
‘Reaver is a fancy word for a thief. Even her people are more honest.’
‘What?’ Shyri had been following the exchange keenly, plainly not sure how serious they were.
For a moment Asmander wondered if he could bait her into a fight, and at the same time he knew he was trying to do just that with Venater. And why? But he knew why. Venater trying to kill him was something that was simple and comprehensible. He would welcome the Dragon’s teeth in his throat, or his own claws in the old pirate’s gut.
‘I will forget your name,’ he spat.
Venater’s fists were clenched.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Shyri complained.
‘You will be a child forever. I will cast your name out of my mind.’ Asmander tried to make every word a javelin to hurl at the man.
‘There will be none who can give it back to you.’
‘But I know what his name is,’ the woman put in, baffled, ruining Asmander’s moment of triumph. ‘I even know what it was before you did whatever thing . . . you just made a new sound on the end of it. That’s just some stupid river thing. It isn’t real.’
They were both staring at her now. She glanced wide-eyed from one face to the other and for the first time seemed genuinely off balance.
‘It is? That’s a thing you can do?’ And, as they continued to stare at her, ‘You people are crazy.’ But she sounded impressed, too, as if she had finally found a secret of the river worth knowing. ‘So what happens if he’s stuck with his baby name forever?’
And Venater went for her, but she was absolutely ready for that and Stepped away from him, reviling him with her high cackle. Venater had Stepped too, and now he was very still, a long black shape with scales that glittered in the firelight, its blue tongue lashing the air angrily.
Would he really have fought me? Asmander fretted. Shyri had achieved what she had set out to, though. She had cut the tension between them, playing the pair of them. No doubt she had thought she was doing the right thing.
And we all know what comes of doing the right thing.
She was grinning, and her self-satisfaction irked him like sand under his eyelids, like broken shards underfoot. Even as she opened her mouth for some witticism or other he pushed himself up from the fireside and sloped off to the dim periphery of its light, sitting there alone. He thought one of them might come after him, told himself he didn’t want them to . . . then was honest enough with himself to admit just why he had stopped short of the deeper darkness. Conduct unbecoming of a Champion.
Another sore point.
He took his maccan from his belt, letting his fingers touch lightly alongside the sharp stone teeth, finding any loose flakes, investigating the gaps left by those that were missing. He had a pouch of new blades – obsidian from home and flint that he had knapped here in the Crown of the World. He set about repairing and replacing, a constant duty with such a weapon but one that he hoped would settle his mind.
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 47
