‘Hesprec said something was coming,’ Maniye agreed, ‘something bad. He said that everyone he spoke to had some piece of it, some glimpse. And you, you’ve seen the same?’
The Bear Mother grunted. A child came in just then – ten or twelve, and taller than Maniye – with a wooden platter of meat and fish hot from the fire. For a while the big woman just ate, as though she had entirely forgotten her guest, but at last she grudgingly invited Maniye to join her, her calculating eyes showing that she had been turning over her thoughts.
‘Something, yes. Enough word, enough signs. Birds flying out of season or on new paths, news from the Seal that the fish are schooling differently, flowers in bloom not seen for a lifetime, too many bad dreams, too many frightened children. And so we know something comes, but we’re blind as to what. So we try to prepare.’
‘You had Loud Thunder as your warleader?’
The Mother laughed. ‘And what use did we have of him? Some half-hearted lessons in war to our hunters, and then he must go chasing across the Crown of the World after his lack-wit Wolf friend. And yet . . . so many changes in the world, and one of them sits right before me now. And so perhaps that was what we chose Loud Thunder for: to see that you became what you have become. You see? Prophecy is even easier if you offer it after the event.’ She worried some more meat off a goat leg and chewed thoughtfully. ‘I had thought a war between the Wolf and the Tiger might be the start of it, but now it seems this will not be.’
‘With Stone River dead, there is none left so very desperate to be High Chief over the Tiger’s corpse. Perhaps the Wolf begin to see that they need none,’ Maniye said. ‘And the Tiger keep to their places, for now.’
‘And this you have accomplished?’
The girl shrugged. ‘It is just a madness that passed from the world when my f– when Stone River left it.’
‘And the Coyote and the Horse bring word and trade,’ the Mother mused. ‘And who knows what tomorrow’s tomorrow may bring?’ She leant ponderously forwards, casting Maniye in her shadow. ‘And now what will you do, little one? For I hear you make the people of these lands nervous.’
‘The chiefs fear that, if I am not theirs, I will threaten their power. They make me their guest, they speak kind words to me, some even offer themselves or their hunters as mates. But when I tell them I am not ready to settle, I see the worry in their eyes. The Wolf tribes, yes, and the others, too. I am too new in the world, and they remember Stone River and see him in me. They think I am ambitious.’
‘And of course they have no reason to think so?’
‘I cannot control what young fools do,’ Maniye snapped bitterly.
The Bear Mother chuckled deep in her throat. ‘How disappointed they must be, those bold hunters, when you send them away.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Or do you?’
‘Most times, they will not go. They skulk like dogs at the edge of my firelight, or hunt and bring me meat and hides.’ One or two at first, and then a handful, and surely there were more on the way: misfits, mystics and bravos out for glory and adventure, and all of them had decided that their best trail was the one left by her new footprints. They came to the Champion and offered their weapons in her service. And so the chiefs of the Crown of the World were growing nervous, and Maniye could not keep from wondering what she might gain if she mustered these followers. What sort of power could she become, with a warband at her back?
And even before the equinox – where she had stood before those chiefs and priests and seen that she had gone in their eyes from being a bringer of peace to a harbinger of strife – she had seen her path. She wanted to give no man cause to strike out at her but, more, she wanted to give herself no way to yield to temptation and strike first. She was no daughter of Stone River but she had grown up in his shadow, and that shadow moved in her mind sometimes and whispered about what she might do.
‘When I first fled the Winter Runners, I had a plan. The Snake priest and I, we would fly south to his homeland. I know a man who brings a handsome offer to any Iron Wolves who might come to aid his chief, there by the river they love so much. I will go south for a time. I will go with Hesprec and the southerners and any who will follow me. I remember Broken Axe telling me that, when he was young, he and Loud Thunder did just that, fought battles and had adventures and saw strange lands. Now I shall do the same. And when I come back to the Crown of the World, it will be more ready for me, I hope.’
‘When you come back, it may need you.’ There was a great deal of foreboding in the Mother’s voice, but Maniye just shrugged.
‘I’ve had enough of being gifted with futures. None of those I was offered ever appealed to me. Broken Axe, he made his own – and so will I.’
The Tiger and the Wolf Page 59
