To Andy and Natasha Madgewick Connell, Dave Huxter, Matthew Ledgerwood and David and Tamsin Moore
And to Christine Czajkowski, the Wilderness Dweller
Contents
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Acknowledgements
1
The sound of the chase confirmed he’d been right: they were heading his way. No doubt the quarry was flagging by now, but still keeping ahead of the pack. Akrit was not as young or swift as he once had been, but strength came in many forms, and raw speed did not decide success in a hunt like this.
A big, broad-shouldered man was Akrit Stone River: weather-beaten skin like old tanned leather and his hair starting to grey. He had led the Winter Runner tribe of the Wolf for twenty years, and each one of those years had made his people stronger, extended their reach, brought more hearths into the Wolf’s Shadow. If he showed weakness though, some challenger would step from the pack to face him. On days like this, he knew they were all waiting for it.
Akrit was sure that he could beat any of them if ever that day came. But he was not as sure as he had been five years ago.
If I had a son . . . and that was a weakness of his body, even if it was not one that slowed him in either the chase or the fight. If he had a son, then he would be unassailable. But just a daughter . . . Am I less of a man? A daughter’s better than nothing, isn’t it?
He scowled, thinking of that. A daughter, maybe. His daughter? He recognized little enough of himself in her. The fear that had grown in him, as the girl had grown, was that she was too much her dead mother’s child.
There is still time. Aside from the girl’s mother he had taken three wives, but none of them had borne him anything but excuses. This year, perhaps, he would find a fourth. There must be a woman born within the Jaws of the Wolf who is strong enough to take my seed.
As he crouched there, listening to the music of the chase, he thought of his daughter’s dead mother, the one woman who had been that strong.
I should have kept her. I shouldn’t have had her killed like that. But, once she had given him what he wanted, she had become too dangerous. A daughter had seemed ideal: from her a girl would serve his purposes better than a boy, and he had been young then, with plenty of time to sire a few sons to be true heirs. Who could have known that he would get no other issue in all those years since? Just that sullen, close-featured girl.
He could hear a shift in the baying as the chase neared – telling him exactly who had taken the lead, and who had exhausted their strength and fallen back. The quarry was giving them fair sport, that was plain: a good omen. The Wolf appreciated a good run.
Ten years before, Akrit Stone River would himself have been in the pack, keeping a moderate, confident pace, taking his turn to snap at the heels of the stag and then fall back. Nobody would have berated him that he was not at the fore when the quarry was brought to bear.
Now, though . . . now he was ten years older.
He heard the eager throats of his warriors as the quarry started to weary, imagined them coursing, a river of grey bodies between the trees with the stag’s heels flashing before them. There was Smiles Without Teeth, Akrit’s war leader and a man who would be his most dangerous challenger if he were not so loyal and devoid of ambition. There, too, was Bleeding Arrow’s high call, jaws closing on air – no, a hoof delivered to the snout as he got too close. Then Amiyen Shatters Oak was next at the fore, the fiercest of his huntswomen. She was near as old as Akrit but still as strong as ever, and if she had been a man she would have challenged him long ago. Impossible to take to wife, though, and that was a shame. Surely she would have made a good mother of many sons.
Too fierce to share a tent with, Akrit decided. No pairing could survive the conflicting ambitions of two strong hunters. So it was that Amiyen bore sons for another man, who tended her hearth while she went hunting.
He braced himself, hearing the chase draw near. All this struggle for a few more moments of life, and still I knew which way you would come. The land spoke to him, its rises and falls, its skeins of little lakes and streams, its hard ground and its soft, the very pattern of the trees showing him where the quarry would turn, where he would leap, where the pack would turn him aside.
And the Wolf is with me for another year. He ran forward and Stepped onto all fours, his burly human frame flowing into the wolf that was his soul, his second skin. Bones, flesh, clothes and all, turning into the grey hide of the beast. Now he was building up speed, claws catching at the turf, bolting from the undergrowth almost under the hooves of the fleeing stag.
The quarry reared, panicked and turned aside, just as Akrit knew it would. Smiles Without Teeth took the chance to lunge for its haunches, tearing a gash with his claws but failing to catch hold, and the deer was off again, staggering slightly, and Akrit had shouldered his way to the front of the pack, fresh and strong and laughing at them.
They had no words between them, but he heard their thoughts in the snarls and panting as the pack fell in behind him. Smiles Without Teeth was chuckling, Bleeding Arrow was angry at being out-thought – but then out-thinking Bleeding Arrow was no great feat. Amiyen Shatters Oak was pushing herself harder. She wanted to show that if any woman had been allowed to challenge for leadership, then it would have been her.
The joy of the chase, and feeling the pattern of the pack shift to accommodate him, whether they liked it or not, was taking hold of him. Even Bleeding Arrow was moving to his will, falling out towards the flank to head off the quarry’s inevitable questing there, bringing the stag back in line – and now they were forcing the beast into the denser forest, where their own lithe forms would slip more easily between the trees.
A good spread of antlers on that head, Akrit noted approvingly. If the quarry fulfilled his part then this would be a good year, with that fine tribute to place between the jaws of the Wolf. No need for a priest to read omens as fine as that.
One of the many lessons a warrior must learn was held in the great span of those antlers: Do not let your strength become your weakness. How proud was the stag of that broad spread of points, how he must have strutted before his women, and yet in the chase they were a weight that slowed him down, an encumbrance constantly in danger of being caught by briars or branches.
Akrit gauged his moment, then spurred himself forwards, snapping at the flanks of the stag, driving him sideways to where Smiles Without Teeth was waiting to rip his fangs across the beast’s path. The quarry turned more quickly than Akrit would have expected, but the pack was closing in on him from all sides, offering a set of jaws wherever the stag turned: the only path left was deeper into the forest, to where the trees grew close.
There was a glade there that Akrit knew well, its b
racken and moss long fed on old blood. The pack was already spreading, those hunters who had been hanging at the back regaining their strength were now drifting out to the side, and with a swift burst of speed began to move ahead.
The stag burst into the glade, ready to gain some ground over the open space, but the pack was already there before him, and he wheeled, rearing high, those mighty antlers clashing with the trees overhead: brought to bay at last.
The encircling wolves snapped and bared their teeth at one another, excitement running high between them, but they were waiting for Akrit’s move. He had them for another year at least.
The stag lowered his antlers, threatening them with those jagged tines, wheeling round and round, trying to hold all quarters against the grey tide. Akrit waited for his opening, bunching himself to spring. There was still a very real chance of getting this wrong if he was too impatient—
And there went Dirhathli, a boy out on his first hunt, unable to restrain himself, trying to earn a name. The antlers flashed, and the boy yelped and fell back, twisting to lick at his side, and then Stepping entirely from thin wolf to thin boy, holding his wound and crying out in pain. No hunter’s name for you, Akrit thought sourly. Or, if you’re unlucky, you’ll earn such a name as to make you regret this hunt all your life.
Another two of the pack made abortive lunges at the quarry, more to drive it back to the centre of the glade than to harm it. They were still waiting for Akrit.
Then the quarry Stepped, and a moment later there was just a long-limbed man crouching in the centre of the clearing, one leg bloodied where Smiles Without Teeth had gashed him, his face twisted in fear.
A shudder went through the circling wolves, one of disgust and horror.
‘Please,’ said the quarry, hands held out in supplication, and Akrit felt a stab of anger, and fear too, for this was surely a bad omen unless he could turn matters around somehow.
He growled deep in his throat and Stepped too, a man amongst wolves, aware of the pack’s eyes on him.
‘Running Deer, this is no proper tribute. You know how this is done.’
‘Please . . .’ The man’s chest was heaving with the exertion of the chase. ‘I can’t . . .’
‘You know what this price buys your people,’ Akrit told him sharply. ‘You know what your cowardice will cost them. I give you one chance to face death as you should, Running Deer.’
‘No!’ the trembling man cried out. ‘My name—’
‘You are Running Deer from the moment you were chosen as tribute,’ Akrit shouted at him, incensed that this wretched creature should flout the traditions of the hunt. ‘Your family I will see torn apart. I shall feast on them myself. Your village shall give its children and women as thralls. I offer you this one last chance to avoid that. You know the rules of tribute.’
But the man – such a proud stag, and yet such a wretched human being – only begged and pleaded, and at last Akrit tired of him.
He gave the signal, and the pack descended. For himself, he would not sully his fangs, and none would blame him for not lowering himself. There would be no trophy of antlers for the Wolf, and no doubt Kalameshli Takes Iron would have dire warnings for the year to come. All of the hunters would have to be cleansed of the dead man’s ghost. The entire tribute hunt had become a travesty.
Akrit had an ambivalent relationship with omens. He was quick to make use of them, but well aware that they were a knife with two edges. So far, in his rule of the Winter Runners tribe, he had been able to ride out whatever the fates had in store for him, turning each year’s predictions to his advantage. The priest, Kalameshli Takes Iron, was his friend of old and their partnership a long-standing and close one, but a year’s forecast of bad omens might change that.
Akrit walked away from the kill, because there was no glory to be found there. He was already trying to think how this day might be seen as anything other than a disaster.
***
The people of the Wolf, and those of the Boar and Deer, considered themselves denizens of the middle world. Their dominion was over the wet, cold lands. To the north lay frozen uplands shouldering their way ever northwards until they were eaten by the mountains’ glacial tongues. South, the land dried slowly into the vast, temperate plains whose peoples had all the warmth they might desire but of water, other than the river, almost none. If there was yet a south beyond that, known of only from travellers’ tales and myth, it failed to skew their sense of centre. They dwelled in the very heart, the perfect place, the Crown of the World, studded with lakes like gems, and filigreed with silver streams. Theirs was a land of thick woodland that went on forever, of rich but stubborn earth that the winter months froze, but the spring always thawed. A land of vast forests where dwelled the beasts that were their ancestors, their kin, their prey and, after death, their rebirth.
In Maniye’s great-great-grandfather’s day, the Winter Runner tribe of the Wolf people had been driven from their haunts further north, where they had been forced to snarl over scraps with their brothers the Moon Eaters, and where the Bear came down in the worst of winters and took what it liked, leaving everyone hungry.
The Winter Runners had found a land already sewn tight between Deer and Boar and Tiger, and they had fought their battles, and spread the Shadow of the Wolf wherever they won, and licked their wounds where they had lost. But the time of the Wolf had since been in the ascendant, and more and more they had won, and now that Shadow lay thick across the entire land, and had not lifted in a generation.
Her great-grandfather – Akrit’s grandfather – had raised this mound that now stood at a crossroads of others, and what had been uncut forest back then was now speckled with herders’ crofts and the huddled villages of the Runners’ thralls.
Here was the ancient longhouse of that long-ago great-grandfather – for though the roof was re-turfed each year, and the walls re-daubed, and even the timbers sometimes replaced, still all knew it to be the same house that the old man had raised. As the village was the Shadow of the Winter Runners, so this hall was the Shadow of her father and his forebears. Outside it seemed almost a part of the mound, built right up against the edge so that the slant of its roof might have been a continuation of the steeply sloping bank of earth. Inside, the cavernous space was dark and warm with fire’s trapped heat, grand enough for pillars to prop up a floor overhead that created a close, slant-walled space where food was stored and meat was hung and the rats could not reach.
Maniye claimed just this much of it: a little alcove at one end that she had appropriated and made her own, a cell fit for the child of a chief. In all the dominion of the Wolf, this small space was the Shadow cast by Maniye, Akrit Stone River’s daughter. She had beads here, and hangings and furs, all she could manage to haul up to soften the confines of her world. Her favourite part of her lair was an absence, though. In the wattle and daub of the end wall there was a smoke-hole that she had widened to be her lookout on the outer world, a narrow slot in the wall. It gave her a view out towards the forest’s dark edge, but surely not an escape. She was small for her age, but her bony shoulders could never have fitted through that space, twist as she might.
And if there were those who said that the wolf shape she might Step into would be such a scrawny thing that it could have wriggled through – well, the drop, down the longhouse’s wall and then the almost sheer side of the mound, would surely have broken her bones. Neither wolf nor girl could have made the climb. There could be no possible basis for anyone thinking otherwise.
And yet here came Kalameshli Takes Iron, with his bony face full of suspicion. The scrape and rattle of his robe of bones had tracked his path through the wives’ quarters below – the one other man allowed there. She had seen his shadow blot the firelight, angular and angry even in silhouette, and she shrank back into her tiny bottled kingdom, holding her breath and trying to wish him away.
Her wishes had never had power, and how could they have had power over him who was the Wolf’s priest and
favourite, and who knew the secrets of the forge?
There was a ladder placed at a slant, leading up to her, and she saw his form shift and slide, Stepping onto four fleet feet to scrabble up, then back on two as soon as he had ascended. There was not quite enough space, even at the highest point beneath the ridge-pole, for him to stand upright.
Still she breathed shallowly and pretended to be elsewhere. There was some magic, she believed, that could cast an echo of her spirit to another place, to send hunters chasing after their tails instead of chasing her. The other girls spoke of such things, part of their arsenal when they sought to deceive parents and meet lovers. If such a thing was possible, Maniye did not know the making of it. Magic was not something Akrit Stone River’s daughter was fit for.
He was hidden from her by the hanging meat and switches of herbs, but she felt him Step again, abruptly, no longer a man in a robe of bones, but a lean, grey wolf, scarred and cunning. She heard him sniff, finding her out by her traitor scent, despite all the clamour of chicory and feverfew. He padded forwards, eyes glinting in the dim light, and when he Stepped back to the shape of an old man, he was standing before her as she huddled beneath her makeshift window.
‘Your peers are all at their practice.’ He pronounced each word precisely, as though he was worried about spitting a few more loose teeth out if he spoke too hastily. ‘They fight, they run, they jump, they Step. But not you.’
Kalameshli was still strong enough to wrench her arm or slap her, and he had free rein to do so. She backed away as he stalked to the window. The sun caught the thousands of tiny bones sewn into the hide of his robe, playing over the intricate patterns. Standing there, he made the place his, took the sun from her. ‘Not you, no: here you are. Why is this, I wonder?’
‘Perhaps it’s because they hate me,’ she told him flatly.
‘And holding yourself aloof from them will win their love, then? Will it so?’
‘Then perhaps I don’t need their love.’ Bold words, she knew, for a girl who was working her shoulder blades into the wall to get further from him.
‘Wrong!’ he snapped, and she flinched away from his tone. ‘If the pack despises you, you will die. Or do you fancy yourself a lone wolf. Perhaps you would walk in the footsteps of Broken Axe, hmm? You’d like that, would you?’
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 1
