‘Who are these, your guests?’ their leader asked.
The Hetman offered Asmander a small nod, letting him know that the Laughing Men expected visitors to speak for themselves.
‘I am the First Son of Asman,’ he announced. ‘I am a Champion of the River Lords.’ He watched their faces to see if that meant the same to them as it did to his own people, and was satisfied to see that it did: enough widened eyes and thoughtful glances there to know that they understood him. He looked to Venater, who was scowling and plainly not about to play along, leaving Asmander with the difficult job of introducing him. He would rather I humiliate him than he has to do it to himself. ‘This man is Venater, sworn to my family.’ It was the kindest way to say it, for all that he probably owed his companion no kindness. Better than, ‘a notorious but ultimately failed pirate’, certainly.
‘A little trade, a little talk, gifts.’ The Hetman displayed her open hands. ‘Friendship between the Laughing Men and the Horse Society. Friendship between the Laughing Men and the friends of the Horse.’
The woman who led these Laughing Men regarded them haughtily for a moment, as though contemplating driving them back into the river. Then she laughed, and the sound was just as they had made when Stepped into their animal shapes – wild and mad. ‘Come, then. The Malikah likes gifts, and her mates like trade. Friends? We shall see.’
Dwellings of the Sun River Nation tended to be at least half underground, digging into the cool earth to ward off the daily height of the sun. The village of the Laughing Men, however, was all in the earth, barely rising above the level of the ground. Although their goat and cattle pens stood out, Asmander saw little sign of an actual settlement until they were nearly upon it, and he realized that the thirty or so raised mounds of dry grass were actually roofs. They lived in pits, did the Laughing Men, a scattering of holes in the ground, secluded and sheltered, with no fear of flooding in this dry land. He thought it all looked barren and primitive, but then the Plains life was not about showing your wealth to the sky. When they had come to the biggest hut, and descended the steps carved into the packed earth, he found the area within was surprisingly spacious, three-levelled and with the largest room being the deepest. The day was ebbing, and at first Asmander was just stepping down into darkness, twitchy with a sudden sense of danger. Up above though, children were already letting down pots of flame, suspending them by ropes from the spars that supported the roof, making an elaborate constellation that cast a thousand patterns of light and shadow all about the curving walls. There were paintings there, intricate and complex: human and animal figures, abstract designs, mountains and rivers. A hundred legends had been sketched out and intermingled in bright colours around the confines of the Malikah’s home.
Most of the Horse party were being hosted elsewhere. Only the Hetman, her chief trader and her two southern guests had the honour of meeting the ruler of these Laughing Men. The trader became almost immediately ensconced with a pair of the locals, falling to discussing commodities for the coming year with an ease that told Asmander that all this threat and show was a ritual path both sides had trodden many times before. It was the first such sign: till then he had begun to wonder if these Plains people were sharpening their bronze knives for the throats of their guests.
The Malikah of the Laughing Men was a woman as old as Venater, and just as battle-scarred. She wore a cloak striped with many colours, and a leather headband set with the teeth of lions rested in her tawny hair. She had a fierce beauty about her, as did so many of these Plains people. Every sign of the hunt and the fight that had marked her skin only added to her sense of presence, and now she fixed Asmander with a frankly acquisitive stare.
‘Champion of the River Lords,’ she addressed him. ‘But you are no more than a boy.’
‘I am as you see me,’ he replied, sitting across the floor from her. ‘So young and yet a Champion.’
‘Asmander, First Son of Asman. Your father must be proud.’
He kept his smile steady, although for a second it was difficult. ‘The honour of our family rests in me, Malikah.’
‘And so he casts it away?’
For a moment he wondered what she had been told, but no . . . she was simply fishing, dangling a paw in the water to see what she might catch. ‘The cold north calls to me. I would see the snows of winter.’
Her eyes turned to his companion. ‘And you must be a young man too, even with your old face. Venater,’ making great play with the end of his name, that juvenile suffix, ‘your father, is he proud also?’
‘I am all of my house.’ Venater met her gaze steadily.
‘But you have found a new father in the River Lords? How kind of them.’
‘I piss on the golden doorsteps of the River Lords,’ the burly pirate told her.
‘These things are known: he does,’ Asmander confirmed wryly.
Her eyes had narrowed, but she seemed content not to peel back Venater’s past any more than that. ‘Men come to us from the south, sometimes. Men who offer us bronze coin to fight. Do you offer us coin to fight, Champion of the Riverlands?’
‘No.’ An easy shrug, and he had guessed that there would be some from the Nation who had sought mercenaries here. After all, why else was he himself heading north, if not to try and tempt the fabled Iron Wolves to support his prince, his childhood friend?
As always, thinking on the man his family had sworn allegiance to, Asmander felt a point of pain as though the knife was at his own chest. His honour and his family duty were both stretched tight about the success of this mission. He only hoped that the two did not part company, or he would be like a man caught with each foot on a different boat.
Thinking on his father, he was grimly aware how honour and family seldom shared the same house these days.
Eshmir the Hetman spoke then. She was a foundling of the Horse, with the flat features and snub nose of a northerner but the ruddy skin of the Stone People, and she danced carefully through a conversation with the Malikah that elegantly checked and repaired all of the ties the Society had built here. While she spoke, the subdued, slope-shouldered men who were the Malikah’s mates – or slaves, or both – passed back and forth with gourds of a liquor that made Asmander’s eyes water. Venater, he saw, was putting the stuff away with gusto.
‘Champion of the River Lords.’ He snapped back to himself as the Malikah addressed him. ‘When you return to your lands in triumph, no doubt you will lead your own house.’
‘Many things are possible,’ Asmander allowed.
‘Before then, will you drink your fill of the women of the Crown of the World, and cause them to lament your leaving them?’ She had a cruel smile on her, as she toyed with a necklace of horn and gold.
‘Even this, even this is possible.’
‘They are cold, up in the Crown of the World. They have no fire such as we have here.’ It was plain what she was after and it was because he was a Champion, that rare and special thing. The Laughing Men had none, he had heard, but their enemies of the Lion did, and perhaps she foresaw his seed and her womb breeding a hero of the next generation. In truth, there was a power to her that was greatly attractive, as power always was, but he shook his head regretfully.
‘Alas, I am sworn to my father. My loins are not my own.’
She snorted at that, and Venater muttered a snide, ‘This much is known,’ which made Asmander want to hit him.
‘Do none of my beautiful daughters catch your eye, for just one night?’ the Malikah asked him, and that made him sad for a moment. The space that was between them was not contained merely within the interior of her hut; it was the years between his youth and her age. There was no sign of it on her face, but her words showed that she felt it.
‘You honour me.’ The most polite of all refusals, contained in the tone and not the words, and she did not press him further.
4
To navigate the sides of the pit, Maniye Stepped to her tiger shape again, descending with the beast’s
agility but human forethought. All the while the Snake’s cold eyes were fixed on her, and not a muscle of him moved. Only when she had descended to his level did she realize that she had given him a weapon against her: she had revealed her mother’s shape to him, that she had hidden so assiduously from everyone she knew.
For a moment she froze, close enough to the huddled man that she could have dug her claws in him. Had he enchanted her somehow, that she had made such an error? Where had her habitual caution gone?
Then she understood: he is dead. She was already thinking of the Snake as a dead man, the Wolf’s due. Why hide secrets from a corpse?
She stared at him challengingly. Only his eyes moved to meet hers, that and a slight shivering. His breath plumed in the night’s chill.
He could not reach her with his hands, and he could not Step. He might have tried to kick her, but it would profit him nothing, and he was such a feeble, used-up-looking creature that she would hardly feel the blow: a Snake without fangs.
She fell back into her human form, Stepping to leave herself with her back up against the pit’s earthen wall. The stone, wood and bone pricked at her hand, and she shoved the trinkets into the waistband of her shift.
The old man still said nothing. Close to, she was struck even more by the two sides of him: strange and pale and foreign, and yet so dirty and ragged and thin that even Coyote would call him starved.
She had a hundred questions, but what came out was, ‘Are you really a southerner?’
His withered lips moved, and then he spat, not at her but at the ground, clearing his mouth of old blood. ‘Compared to you,’ he got out.
‘I thought southerners were burnt black by the sun.’ She had heard it from the Horse Society, who travelled further than anyone else she knew.
A smile’s ghost brushed the corners of his mouth. Those eyes – as pale and moon-coloured as the rest of him – wrinkled a little. ‘Mosht of ’em are,’ he got out, fighting the words. ‘I’m sh . . . sh . . .’ A spasm of annoyance rippled his features, and he made the sibilant by drawing breath sharply inward across the roof of his mouth. ‘Ss-pecial.’
Something small and mean turned within her, seeing him momentarily pleased at overcoming his limitations even by that small degree. ‘They’re going to sacrifice you to Wolf.’
He nodded once, the smile gone.
‘Do you know how they’ll do it?’ she pressed. ‘The stone face of Wolf has iron teeth – more iron than you’ve ever seen. They’ll tie you between his jaws and light a fire in his throat, and the teeth will get hotter and hotter until you roast in his mouth.’ It felt horrible to say the words, but at the same time it was a weird release, a catharsis she could not quite pin down.
Another bleak nod, and he even managed a shrug.
She had more hurting words already crowding her mouth. She wanted to make him see the utter despair of his position and, even as she opened her mouth, she understood the petty hand that gripped her. Here was a creature lowlier than she, without even the meagre freedoms of a thrall. Here finally was someone she could hurt without fear of reprisal.
She stopped the words, killed them in her throat and disowned them, and instead the two of them just stared at each other for a long while.
‘What issh your name, child?’ came his soft, mumbling voice.
‘Maniye.’ She said it without thinking. A moment later – a moment too late – she was wide-eyed with wondering whether he could work some magic on her, simply by knowing her name. Filthy and wretched as he was, surely he still had a curse or two to spare for a foolish girl who did not keep her name close.
‘I am Hessprec-Esh . . .’ He made a determined effort, ‘Hesprec Essen Skese.’
It was a great deal of name for this dried-up stick of a man. ‘Are you really a priest?’
Again that guarded nod.
‘When they kill you, will you curse Kalameshli Takes Iron – our priest? Will you curse my f—the chief?’
His eyes were fixed on her, and she realized that she had not seen him blink once since she came down to join him.
‘Your father, Tiger girl?’
Abruptly she was frightened of him again – even dying in the Wolf’s jaws he might betray her, after all. She wondered briefly if she had the courage to kill him here and now, whether as wolf or as tiger, but knew that she did not.
‘Why did you come here?’ she demanded.
And he laughed. It was a sound as weak and pitiful as he was, but his narrow shoulders shook with it. ‘Ssh-eeking the wishdom of the north, to sh-ss-peak with your prieshts.’
‘Then you’re a fool.’
‘I cannot deny it.’ He sighed. ‘How many yearsh have I ssheen, and yet I am a fool.’ He spat again. ‘When will it be?’
‘The day after tomorrow is the Testing,’ she told him, and the thought sent dread coasting past her like the north wind. ‘The day after, there will be a feast, and you will die. Aren’t you going to ask me to free you?’ The words came out without her ever forming them in her mind. Once spoken, she clamped her hands to her mouth, but too late now to call them back.
He regarded her coolly, then shifted his body sinuously, tucking his knees even higher, holding as much warmth as he could to himself. ‘Why would you do that?’ Not bitter but a question posed with genuine interest, and it sank its hooks into her. She found herself thinking of reasons immediately, each one more appealing than the last.
Is he doing this to me? Am I doing this to myself? Abruptly she had used up her stock of daring. Being in this forbidden place, with this terrible, tragic old man, was more than she could bear. She Stepped back to the tiger and raked her way up the side of the pit, hoping that nobody would examine it too closely on the morrow and see where her claws had been. At the lip she paused, hunched low and looking for the watchmen, but by now they were both asleep. They did not fear that the old man would escape, and nobody had even thought about some wilful girl deciding to go down into the pit.
She Stepped again into her wolf, her smallest shape, and padded swiftly back towards the foot of the chief’s mound.
She thought of him often during the next day, as she stayed out of the way of everyone. Hesprec Essen Skese: that awkward foreign name had lodged indelibly in her mind. She decided she would creep out to speak with him again that night. After all, it was not as though she would have many more chances.
By that evening, though, the Testing had grown to encompass her entire horizon. She could think of nothing else. All day, Kalameshli had been giving her his cold looks, as if to say, Just you wait . . . And Broken Axe had been seated just a few places from her, a guest at the chief’s fire as he always was. He went wherever he willed but, whenever he came home to the Winter Runners, there was no more popular man than Broken Axe. It was a popularity born of fear, she knew. Oh, they hardly feared him like she did, but there was fear there nonetheless. Here was a Wolf who needed no pack: a taboo-breaker, a lone-walker. A gift of food and shelter might buy him for a little while, but here was a man who might be capable of anything, severed as he was from the ties of hearth and family.
And his eyes had strayed to her more than once, as he ate. He had eyes like nobody else, did Broken Axe: pale blue like spring ice set in the gaunt brown leather of his face.
She did not dare sneak away from her lair to seek out the doomed Snake that night. She had the unshakeable thought that she would find Broken Axe out there, waiting for her.
What does he want with me? There were few possibilities, none of them pleasant.
And the next morning they were preparing the ground for the Testing, and all the mad energy that had infused her peers over the last month was abruptly gone. She stepped out into the chill morning, and saw them standing about as though someone had died. They were afraid. This was the day their lives had been leading to, and they all of them feared now.
Theirs was a different character of fear to her own. They feared bruises and welts, and the humiliation of making mistakes befor
e the whole tribe. None of them was going to be singled out by Kalameshli Takes Iron, after all. None of them ran the risk of ending the day without family and tribe, cast out from the Wolf and destined to burn in his jaws. She remembered now the perverse glee that had gripped her as she described the old man’s fate to him. Somehow she had overlooked that it might also be hers.
Up on the temple mound, before the forge where Kalameshli laboured, lay the training ground. Usually it was a place of young hunters and warriors running, wrestling, casting spears and Stepping. Now the whole tribe thronged around its edges, down to the meanest Boar or Deer thrall, and a course had been laid out with painstaking care for the boys and girls who would end this day as men and women of the Wolf.
Each year it was different, this course, but the intent was the same. The youngsters would be harried from one end to the other, and to make a swift progress past all the obstacles they must Step from child to wolf and wolf to child, until at last their final transformation would be into an adult. There were stretches of open ground where a wolf might break away from its tormentors, and there were obstacles that a swift youth might vault over. There were logs to balance along and narrow holes to dive through.
The crowd was already in high spirits. For the young triallists this might be a day that would stand by them for the rest of their lives, for good or ill, but for everyone else it was sheer entertainment. All the adult Wolves – the old especially – were hoping for a good crop of embarrassments to laugh at and retell later. The lucky few that Kalameshli had chosen were already standing by with rocks and rotten yams and sticks, quite ready to make the triallists’ lives an utter misery for the handful of minutes in which they were being Tested.
Maniye had been trying to retreat into the crowd without thinking about it, pulling her usual trick of being overlooked. Without warning, her father was at her elbow, one hand gripping her shoulder painfully.
‘Go,’ he told her flatly, giving her a shove towards where the others were already gathering at the head of the course.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 5
