The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Hesprec stopped to rest frequently, but he managed to bear her on his shoulders for most of the day. They ate some of the Horse Society’s food but made no fires and, although the sky through the trees was white as the old man’s skin, no more snow fell. When they were moving again, Maniye let her nose guide them still, pointing out the way for Hesprec. When she caught even the faintest trace of wolf – for all that it was not familiar Winter Runner wolf but just her mute brothers – she urged him away. When the breeze brought a hint of running water she guided him towards it. It was still her hope that somehow she could follow a stream leading to the Sand Pearl; that those hunting them might be gone from the Horse post; that there would still be a path south.

  Alladei and his people would be already gone though, that much she knew. She would need to seek downriver into Swift Back lands for any of the Horse at all. Most likely, by the time she arrived there, they would not be travelling. There would be no movement on the river until the summer. And staying by the river, or with the Horse, was just an invitation for the hunters to find her.

  And yet she had nothing and nowhere else. Only now with the luxury of hindsight, draped over Hesprec’s narrow shoulders, did she realize just how little she had thought matters through. In her mind a hundred scenarios played out, and she had constantly to fight a nagging voice saying that life in her father’s shadow would not have been so bad. To betray her mother’s people, to become the mate of terrifying Broken Axe, these things could be endured more easily than the killing cold and hunger of a winter spent alone.

  That night she found another hollow to sleep in, repairing her satchel as best she could to provide a bed for Hesprec. She did not dare try for a fire, but felt mournfully sure that she would not have been able to start one anyway. She had the understanding of how to do it, yet not the skill.

  The next day she travelled on her own four feet, and he still on his two: too weary now to carry her further and yet too proud to beg a ride just yet. They passed the time in silence, with Maniye shackled to Hesprec’s slow pace. That morning they finally found the stream that her nose had been telling her about. The land here was broken, worn snarls of rock pushing out of it like bones, the lie of it tilting up into slopes that were the edge of the uplands. She guessed that she had wandered even further north in her search for it, but here it was: falling in a fierce, unfrozen torrent from the higher ground and carving its stony channel, a line free of snow.

  She Stepped, needing a human mouth to speak and human eyes to read his face properly. ‘Downstream will take us . . .’

  He nodded. ‘I know, I know.’ For a long while they shared an uncertain stare. Downstream was a direction and a destination, two things they had bitterly felt the lack of since finding themselves in the forest. And yet every step would increase the chance that the Winter Runners would discover them.

  ‘Can you fight at all?’ she demanded.

  ‘Threats only.’ He tapped at his lips. ‘And when they see he has no teeth, who shall fear the serpent?’

  ‘I mean you, can you do . . .’ even as she asked it, she felt like a child, ‘magic at all?’

  He looked at her not with derision but with a great sadness. ‘How I would like to say yes. And yet, if I had such magics – if there were any such in the world – would I have been where you found me?’

  She could not refute the logic.

  Then they found where the stream led: not to a river but a lake. She should have thought of it: the Crown of the World was dotted with a thousand such. The still body of water had been here forever, since the world was made, and yet to her it seemed just one more unnecessary impediment designed to wear her down.

  She looked out across it, still with a skin of ice in its centre, even if the water was clear about the edges. The snow of its shores was trampled at many points, by deer and other animals coming to drink.

  ‘We must go about its edge, this way.’ She was recovering her orientation enough to know which was the southern shore. ‘We will find where the water leaves it, and follow that.’

  Hesprec nodded. He was looking drawn and his skin was almost bluish, even huddled in the heavy robes of the Horse people. When she set off again she held to her human shape, trying to match his pace and not forcing him to hurry.

  The stream they found was broad and swift-flowing, winding off through a gully into the forest. Perhaps there would be more such lakes, Maniye considered, but there must eventually be a river, and that river would lead them somewhere.

  Always assuming somewhere was where they wanted to be.

  And then the voice, not Hesprec’s, called out: ‘I have a name for you. They should call you Maniye Many Tracks.’

  She froze rigid on hearing it. At her side, Hesprec shifted slightly, his hand reaching for hers.

  Broken Axe stood on the far side of the stream, so still against the snow that she had not noticed him. He must have been watching them approach around the lake’s edge all this while.

  She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to demand how he could always be there ahead of her. She would have believed, in that moment, that Axe was more of a sorcerer than Hesprec could ever be. Her voice stayed locked in her throat though, save for a tiny whine of fear.

  She could Step now onto a wolf’s paws, and dart away. She would be abandoning Hesprec, but then Broken Axe wanted her and not the old man. Or at least her more than the old man.

  ‘I am here to take you home,’ Broken Axe informed her, taking two casual steps forwards. Maniye was as aware of the lessening distance between them as she was of her own rapid breathing.

  ‘You are here to kill me.’ She was amazed she could even say the words.

  ‘Not I.’ And another step, his feet seeming to move without the knowledge of his face, which was trying, along with his voice, for earnest honesty. ‘I will not say that your father worries about you. We’d both smell the lie in those words. But, still, you will be better in his shadow than dead in the jaws of winter.’ And she could sense the tension coiling in him as he inched nearer, and still she could not move. He was two steps from the stream bank on his side; she was three steps from it on hers.

  ‘What about him?’ Maniye asked, and Hesprec’s hand finally closed on her wrist.

  ‘I don’t care about him, Many Tracks.’ She saw Broken Axe shift the set of his feet.

  ‘Go,’ whispered the Snake priest, and his bony fingers drove into her skin, the sudden shock of it breaking the spell and freeing her. But only to flee, once again, craven as a coyote.

  Not knowing what he would do, she Stepped in that instant, dropping into the wolf shape that seemed almost more natural than the form she was born into. When she Stepped, it was always into the feet of each form, and so she had a desperate vision of Hesprec just collapsing into the coils of his serpent, and being left behind. His grip never left her, though. Somehow he cast himself up the arm that was touching her, so that when he whipped into the slim cord of his smallest shape, it was already coiled about her. There was a horrible moment when she felt him throw himself about her shoulders and neck, heartbeats from dragging her back to her human form, but then he had himself settled somehow, twisted about the knotted straps of her satchel, and she was dashing away, then twisting back to see.

  In his native shape, still, Broken Axe took his final two steps and jumped, kicking off from the bank to cast himself across the stream. He Stepped in mid-air, the strength of his human legs lending the pale wolf more distance than it could ever have leapt across itself. In an instant he was almost alongside her, and once again she turned and ran.

  13

  The Horse people at the trading post on the Tsotec were surprised to see them. Asmander had the impression that, give it another two or three days, they’d none of them still be there. There was one final raft of logs rocking at the crude quay, and they were busy loading it with everything that could be carried, leaving just the hollow stockade behind.

  The local Hetman, another tough and compa
ct little Horse woman, obviously thought little of Eshmir and her journey. Asmander learned a great deal by watching the two of them talk, as the new arrivals enjoyed the fire’s warmth in the post’s only hut. It was not about what was said – all of which was very comradely – but about the way they sat and the distance between them, the attitude of their arms and shoulders. Rival clans, Asmander knew, without any doubt at all. The Horse Society’s strength was its unity, that was what everyone knew about them: a network of trade and talk and travel from the northern ice to the southern banks of the Tsotec. It was fascinating to see the cracks.

  At last, some northern natives were located and brought forward. They looked a sorry lot. On the one hand, a man and woman in furs and wool, each with a pack that looked half as big as they were, and neither of them looking young enough to be tramping through the wilderness in winter. The third was a small man with half his face tattooed or painted black, so that one eye stared out of that mask like a mad, trapped thing, while the other was creased with sardonic humour. He wore dark clothes: a woollen robe that looked almost priestly, with a heavy quilted cloak over it. All three had those flat northern faces: skin the colour of wet sand, high cheekbones, and eyes that seemed constantly suspicious of everything.

  ‘The man and his trade-wife are Coyote,’ Eshmir explained. The other’s Crow, from the Eyrie. They’re better than nothing.’

  ‘How much?’ Asmander asked her.

  ‘Enough. They will guide us to the Many Mouths. Failed traders who got here too late, after all the pickings had gone. They’re luckier to get us than we are to get them.’

  ‘You fill me full of confidence,’ he remarked.

  At his shoulder, Venater snorted. ‘They’re no fighters.’

  ‘I hope we shall need no fighters. With winter coming on, there will be few others abroad, I’m assured.’

  ‘Assuming these natives don’t lead us into an ambush,’ Asmander put in, almost cheerily.

  Eshmir gave him a pained look. ‘We leave come the morning,’ she informed him.

  Everyone else was leaving under the same dawn. The local Horse traders cast off their final raft after a stilted exchange of well-wishings with Eshmir. The new arrivals were left in sole control of the stockade.

  Eshmir and her people wanted to leave at once, but the three guides had apparently been conspiring, and they insisted that everyone sit and talk over the journey, which meant heading back into the hut.

  The Coyote man, who had perhaps the least trustworthy face Asmander had ever seen, was their main speaker, and his given name was Two Heads, which turned out to be short for Two Heads Talking, in that peculiar northern fashion for names.

  Even though he had already sworn his agreement over guiding them, Two Heads was suspicious. First he wanted to know why Eshmir wanted to go to the Many Mouths, who he claimed would not be pleased to see her.

  ‘Everyone is glad of the Horse Society,’ she replied implacably.

  ‘Wolves from all over the Crown of the World have come to the Many Mouths,’ Two Heads went on. ‘You have chosen an unlucky season. You should come next year.’

  ‘We’re here now,’ Venater grunted, ignoring a look from Eshmir that said she wanted to do the talking. ‘Piss on next year.’

  ‘Seven Skins, the High Chief . . . he passes,’ the Coyote explained, spreading his hands helplessly. ‘Not a good time for strangers to come near the Jaws of the Wolf, or anywhere in the Wolf’s Shadow. Me and mine, we go where we will, but Horse . . . ? And these?’ An incredulous nod towards the southerners.

  ‘Put up or piss off,’ was Venater’s sharp response.

  ‘Nonetheless, we must travel.’ Eshmir tried unsuccessfully to talk over him. She glanced at Asmander. ‘We all have our duty.’

  ‘Of course we will take you.’ This was the Crow man with his half-darkened face. Currently he was eyeing them with the unpainted half, the other eye glowering past them at the sloping roof. ‘You must have gifts for the road, though. You Horse, you always carry gifts.’

  ‘You’ve had your price,’ Eshmir told him flatly. The currency had not been coin, which apparently was something alien to the cold north, but in future favours from the Horse.

  ‘We? Yes, yes.’ The Crow bobbed his head. ‘There will be others.’

  ‘The Hetman said nobody travels in winter,’ Eshmir stated, nothing in her face acknowledging how foolish that made her own mission sound.

  ‘Winter?’ The Crow chuckled deep in his throat. ‘This is not winter. If we are not with the Many Mouths when true winter comes, then you will all die.’

  ‘And you?’ Asmander asked, not as a challenge but from genuine curiosity.

  ‘I, Black Man? I shall fly away.’

  There were only two steeds left for them, so Eshmir and one of her people would get to ride, and the rest must walk. Their supplies – a reluctant gift from the outgoing Horse Hetman – were distributed over every set of shoulders that would consent to bear them, which meant everyone except Venater.

  ‘How do you get to go without?’ Shyri asked him, then she cast a look at Asmander, with a flash of white teeth. ‘You have a disobedient slave.’

  Venater lunged for her, utterly without warning, and yet she slipped beyond his clawing grasp. ‘Are you not his slave?’ she asked delightedly, her voice bouncing back from the inside of the stockade.

  ‘I’m no man’s slave,’ the pirate spat.

  ‘Then what are you, old man?’

  Asmander watched with interest as the pirate tried twice to answer her, murder glinting in his eyes.

  ‘He is mine,’ the Champion announced at last, when Venater had suffered long enough. ‘That is all.’

  ‘For just so long,’ Venater got out. ‘And then I will be my own again, and I will have my name back, and then I will kill you, boy. I will!’

  The others – especially the three northerners – stared, because what was going on was something they simply did not do, not here where names were cheap and they did not understand. Chiefly they could not understand the sudden warmth of Asmander’s smile.

  ‘You will try,’ he agreed. ‘And who knows, perhaps this time you will succeed.’

  Venater’s stony eyes flicked away from him to their audience, then to Shyri. ‘So what? You’ll make me your pack dog?’

  ‘Never,’ Asmander assured him, his smile still there but hard. ‘I’ve loaded you with so much weight already that another grain of corn might break you.’

  He never knew the precise limits of Venater’s temper – surely there was a point where the man would just snap, fly into the mad rage he had once been famed for, and so give up any chance of reclaiming his name and his soul from Asmander’s keeping. For a second, those eyes seemed desperate, hunted, lost. The look in them was such that Asmander regretted his words, because he had never been one to find joy in torture.

  Then, incredibly, the man’s teeth were bared in a hard crescent. ‘Oh, boy, I’m stronger than you know.’ And the hurt was gone, and they were grinning at each other. Look at what we’ve learned about each other. ‘But I’ll still not carry for you.’

  The expressions of the others, when Asmander looked around at them, were utterly bewildered, profoundly disturbed. All except Shyri: she had been mightily entertained, he saw. The Laughing Men did not care about understanding others: that was her secret. He envied her the contentment it must bring.

  Once on the road, he placed himself at the front – beside Two Heads Talking and his trade-wife, whatever that was. They regarded him warily, as though he might suddenly do . . . anything, he supposed. He was the alien in their midst, a man of different skin and shape and customs.

  ‘But tell me,’ he addressed them, ‘if the Wolves are so dangerous to outsiders, why go there yourself? Surely the Horse’s favour cannot be worth endangering your skins? Or are coyotes enough like to wolves for you to avoid their wrath?’

  Two Heads regarded him morosely. ‘We need to be somewhere for winter. We came to the Hor
se too late, and now home’s too far. At least your Horse woman will get us in amongst the Many Mouths. Winter has more teeth than all the Wolves in the world.’

  ‘Never say a Coyote is a Wolf,’ his wife spoke up. ‘But in their eyes we’re not worth shedding blood for.’ She grinned ferally. ‘Not when they’ve got you.’

  The attack came three days later, when they were all worn down from journeying and numb from the cold. There had been snow the day before, though light enough that Two Heads Talking had advised simply pressing on. On the morning that they fought, the sky was utterly clear – a pale blue that Asmander had never seen before.

  Their guides were earning their keep. Whilst Two Heads led the way, his trade-wife – her northern name was Quiet When Loud – was forever straying off and coming back with game or even fish. The Crow cooked and tended the fire, and while they were camped he sometimes sang, strange wordless songs that made the hairs stand up on the back of Asmander’s neck. He went by the name of Ragged Sky, but by now Asmander had worked out that they each of them had another name, a real name, that they did not share with mere strangers. They were an untrusting people here in the Crown of the World, keeping their names in darkness.

  That day, Asmander had noticed a number of large birds dark against that strange sky, but had thought nothing of it. In truth, he needed most of his concentration focused on the ground. This Crown of the World was the most jagged country he had ever seen, as though great spirits had broken it apart with hammers in ancient times, and then some of it had grown over with grass and thick stands of slope-boughed trees. Water wormed through it everywhere, and much of the time their path was along the cut of some streambed. Right now they were ascending, in steps and lurches, along the channel that a river had carved into a steep hillside, the water’s work making the unscalable into the merely laborious. The flow of water itself had atrophied to little more than a brook, the result of the oncoming freeze creeping down on them from the north.

  With the rocky ground rising away from them on both sides, this was the obvious point for an ambush. Even before the trouble started, Asmander found himself feeling tense. Ahead of him, the stomping form of Venater already had his meret to hand, weighing its comforting heft with every step.