But who truly believes that? The lazy, amused voice, always with a laugh hidden within it, and that laugh always cruel. They know you for some mixed-blood foundling, and when your blood waters my altar, will it be any more red for all your heritage? Who will care? Who will know?
‘I will know!’ she told it aloud, knowing that Aritchaka and the priestesses would be listening from where the fires were laid. ‘I know who I am. Who else matters?’
Again that soft, dangerous laugh. I so love human pride. I love the savour of it. I will certainly enjoy yours.
There were chambers beneath the temple that never saw the sun, and that was where they put her. The torches that burned there only stirred the shadows; they brought the Tiger down from its altar, let its smoky body pace instead the tangled network of buried spaces that she now had the run of. She was not a prisoner, not quite, for these were not cells. Still, when she encountered the steps leading up, there were always men of the Tiger tribe there, waiting to turn her around. Other times she could not find any steps at all.
Aritchaka came down sometimes. With her, she had thralls who bore food and drink: corn cakes and wizened little apples and stone jugs of dust-tasting water. When Maniye demanded to know what fate was intended for her, the priestess just cocked her head.
‘We deliberate,’ she said. ‘We know what you claim to be, but a little Tiger blood – even a tiger’s shape – does not make you her child. Are you some trick of the Wolf’s? Are you just some child of two tribes who seeks to steal what is precious to us? Are you what you say? We have lit the low-smoking fires, and the smoke has provided no answer for us, not yet. And so you must wait.’
‘How long?’ Maniye asked.
Aritchaka gazed at her without expression. ‘You may wish it had been longer, if the Tiger disowns you.’
Then she departed, leaving Maniye to the near-darkness.
She walked her buried domain on human feet. She prowled it as a tiger. It brought her no release. When she brushed against the unseen flanks of the greater cat that filled the space around her, she sensed its sudden snarl, the bared teeth and wide eyes, warning her off. Warning her not to pretend to something she had not earned.
Time slipped away from her. She could not say whether she slept when night fell, or whether she had been swept away from the rhythms of the sun, set adrift in this hidden world. After she had slept five times, with no clearer answer from Aritchaka, she began to despair. With the shadow-bulk of the Tiger looming at her back, she seized a torch and ground it into the stone at her feet, putting it out, swallowing up the shadows in a greater dark.
She crouched there in that blackness, her eyes slowly adjusting to the faint glow of more distant lamps. For a brief moment, though, the Tiger was pushed away from her, a creature of shadow that could not tolerate the utter depths of night.
In that black silence she put her hands to the stone of the floor, desperate for some reassurance that this was not the end, that she was not wholly alone and abandoned. Something moved there, she sensed. It might just have been her own pulse, but she felt the slightest of shiftings beneath her hands, as though something vast and far deeper shifted its coils as her prayer reached it.
She knew that she was fooling herself, and yet the idea was fixed in her mind now. Even as her eyes banished just enough of the darkness for the Tiger to slip back in, she felt stronger, more hopeful, less lonely. Even here in the Crown of the World ran the scaled lengths of Hesprec’s god.
When Aritchaka came for her, not long after, she was ready.
The priestess’s gaze was keen and searching, but she said nothing, merely beckoning Maniye to follow. There was a quartet of warriors there, in case she demurred. She recognized Red Jaw and Club Head amongst them, but they would not meet her eyes. Maniye could not read Aritchaka, but the manner of the men was curious, something of reverence, something of fear, yet they were plainly there to ensure she played her part.
They took her into a deep chamber where water welled up from a crack in the rock that had been smoothed and carved until it resembled a human face. Two thralls were present, men both, and they stripped and washed her, despite her protests. They kept their faces averted as much as they could, and would not speak a word to her, and the guards watched on throughout. At no point was there any hint of desire in any of them, or not any form of desire that might be consummated. They were treating her with the careful, dispassionate respect they might accord to one of their sacred carvings.
At the end, they gave her a shift of fine calfskin that was dyed near-black and set with rows of stones: beads of amber and green moss agate and three colours of tiger’s eye, dense and heavy enough that she felt she had donned a cuirass of bronze. Aritchaka then reappeared, and set a circlet about her head – weighty enough to be gold – and anointed her with scented oils.
Maniye remembered what her father’s plan had been: for her to come to the Tiger and announce her heritage; for them to kneel to her and accept her as their queen, somehow usurping their devotion and government simply by virtue of her bloodline. That was how the world worked for the Tigers, so Akrit Stone River had believed: no challenges, no consent of the tribe, just some sort of invisible fitness to rule conveyed by blood from mother to daughter.
In the way they treated her, she did not sense that they had accepted her as their ruler. A ruler, after all, was required to engage with her people. Maniye was being treated like a thing: a valuable thing but a thing nonetheless. And things were there to be used. They could trick her up in gold and shining stones as much as they liked, but even the most exquisite of things was still property.
She thought then of the Deer people. She had heard that they chose kings from amongst their number in spring, who lived well and wanted for nothing, beloved of all. Until the next spring, when they would take their happy, smiling king to the Stone Place and . . .
She could not tell if she was being welcomed as the scion of their lost royal line, or as a sacrifice for the Tiger’s claws. She was wise enough in the way of the world to know these fates need not be mutually exclusive.
After all, she thought, someone else has been ruling the Tiger since my mother was taken from them. How happy would they be, to find they have just been keeping a place at the fire for someone else? No, better to be rid of the newcomer, to denounce her and do away with her.
She was being led upwards through the maze of nested stone, climbing towards the sun. Maniye made the resolution then that she would run – girl feet, tiger or wolf – if the chance presented itself. She would run, and head for Loud Thunder’s house, wherever that was from here, or for the Horse Society, or even just walk all the way to the southern lands and speak them Hesprec’s name, and hope . . .
But the Shining Hall of the Tiger had few windows, and it was busy with thralls and priestesses and people of the Tiger staring at her with a weird, unhealthy anticipation. They had a haughty grandeur to them, as if they did not see the broken carvings, all the small repairs that they no longer had the masons to perform. Here, wearing her Wolf’s face, she was surrounded by the scars of the war the Wolf had brought against them, the wounds that an entire generation had not healed. Even now the lair of the Tiger echoed hollow to the tread of too few feet. Even now the work of a hundred hands was left undone.
She was still looking out for some opportunity to bolt when they led her suddenly into a far larger room, where the carvings seemed to have grown outwards from the walls, forming pillars and buttresses that leant in to support the great and intricate expanse of the ceiling. There were many already gathered there, yet the place felt empty still, resounding with the echo of the greater multitudes which had once graced it. There was a seat at one end, on a semicircular dais which rose seamlessly out of the floor and wall. The carvings surrounding it demanded the eye follow them: from all corners, a constant stream and progression towards that raised seat: thousands of human figures worked in miniature, bearing corn, wood, stone, weapons, tools, or else leading
strings of thralls by the neck. They all of them faced that same empty seat, as though they were bringing the whole world to that point. It came to Maniye that the people of the Tiger set all they had in stone, immortalized and recorded and imprisoned there, save for the thing they valued most. Their soul, their heart, their god, they did not dare limit by trapping it in some rigid form: they knew the Tiger was smoke and flame and fear.
Many of the Tiger gathered there were priestesses like Aritchaka. They wore striped fur cloaks and ornamental cuirasses of stones and precious metals, and all of them were armed. The others of their people, also mostly women and all immaculate in furs and fine cloth, gave way to them deferentially.
Amongst them, she saw a delegation quite different in dress. She knew them as Eyriemen from the moment she set eyes on them, a band of haughty, hard-eyed men, their clothes embroidered with bone and feathers. Their leader wore a wooden harness about his shoulders, twin spars arching over him like the horns of the moon, the quills that decorated them turning them into perpetually spread wings. The Eyriemen’s faces were tattooed on one side or the other, but they were careful to look at Maniye only through the painted eye. There was only one woman in their number, Maniye saw, and she looked at nobody. She wore a cloak of feathers over her plain shift, and there was a leather collar tight about her neck.
None of these things did Maniye understand.
Then she was standing before the seat, the throne, wondering what must happen now. Aritchaka was some steps away from her, and the guards also. The room was full of people, but she wondered how far she might get with a sudden surprise Step and a dash . . .
But there stood the throne, and it was empty still. Perhaps this was the test. Perhaps they were waiting to see if she would take what was hers by right.
That was a strange and heady thought. Surely it could not be so simple? To just sit down on that stone seat that all the walls of the room were marching towards? But if she did not, was she giving the lie to her own story? Perhaps then she would be transforming herself from queen into sacrifice.
By now she was very alive to the way that everyone in the room was watching her. It was not obvious, not an overt stare, but their attention was on her nonetheless. It was exactly the way that a tiger stalks its prey, she thought, subtle and subtle and again subtle, then suddenly the pounce. Sensing the minute shifts of stance and attitude all about the room as she drew closer to the throne, she became convinced that they were not waiting for her to seat herself there. To do so would be an unforgivable usurpation.
In her mind, that left only one possible fate they could intend for her.
She took a careful step back, trying to seem casual. Still that dreadful focused attention encompassed her, and it was the Tiger watching her through the eyes of his priesthood. It was there in the room with her: it was all the empty space that was not peopled.
I will run, she told herself. I will be swift and sure, and I will run. And she turned, ready to Step down onto her Wolf feet for extra speed, and saw him. A cry escaped her lips and died there. It was impossible!
There, in the doorway, standing between her and freedom; there, in the den of his enemies who should have cut him down in moments: there stood a lean Wolf-tribe man in well-worn leathers and furs, with ice-coloured eyes. Broken Axe. Broken Axe was here for her. Even the Tiger could not stand in the way of his hunting.
She pointed, but she could not say anything. Right then, she did not honestly know if anyone else present could see him. She would have believed anything.
He was smiling slightly, that expression that was becoming more familiar to her than her own would ever be. Of all of them, only he looked at her directly.
‘Many Tracks,’ she saw his lips form, and he took a few steps into the room. She saw the eyes of the Tiger people track him, then slide off him. They did not want to acknowledge him; somehow they could not deny him. Their warriors tightened their fists and scowled, yet nobody challenged him. And he advanced on her, step after step, like a terrible dream.
Then he had stopped, and everything had changed. The room had shifted around her, again like a dream, so that all the attention that had been moving between her and Broken Axe was abruptly elsewhere, following the great sea of stone figures until it reached the throne.
Maniye turned. It was now occupied.
The woman who sat there was hard featured, and there were scars on her hands and one on her chin. Her eyes were like green stones, lustrous as emerald, and as cold. Compared to the bright display of the priestesses, she should have seemed drab, wrapped as she was in a dark pelt. When she moved, though, she smouldered, and light gleamed and glittered in red bands within the fur, like fire in the deep woods.
It was plain to Maniye that the Tiger had spared no time in finding a new ruler, for this woman commanded their attention entirely. From the moment she took her seat, her hand lay on everyone in the room, stilling them. Even the proud Eyrie-men kept their disparate eyes low.
‘Come forwards,’ she said, and that chill green gaze cut into Maniye. She took a stumbling step, knowing only that all chance of escape had been stripped from her. That cool gaze anatomized her calmly, tallying her faults and features, until the woman said, ‘I see only him.’
There was movement at Maniye’s shoulder, and she flinched as she realized Broken Axe had come up behind her. She still could not understand how he could be here.
The enthroned woman laughed at her reaction. ‘It seems you make friends everywhere you go, Broken Axe.’
And Maniye felt like shouting at her, shouting at all of them, Don’t you know who he is? Don’t you realize that he’s the man who killed your . . .
The man who killed my . . .
She felt something, some certainty she had lived with forever, fall out of her world. Suddenly the woman before her was different, entirely different in every particular, even though she looked exactly the same.
My mother . . .
‘Now she knows me,’ the Queen of the Tigers declared with satisfaction.
29
‘What do they call you?’
In the now-emptied room the question hung in the air between them. The Queen of the Tigers had sent them all away: the priests, the warriors, the Eyriemen, even the thralls, save for Maniye – and one other.
By the door, a quiet presence, was Broken Axe.
‘I am named Many Tracks,’ she declared, seeing the slight twitch of an eyebrow when she glanced towards Broken Axe. ‘But my name is Maniye.’ Because, if this was really her mother, then here was someone she must give her true name to.
The Queen’s face was rigid, her posture stiff, as though she was fighting to control something. Her eyes skittered across Maniye, unable not to look at her, yet never still enough to properly take her in. ‘Always the Wolf way, the backwards way,’ she murmured. ‘To hide the birth name that means nothing, when it is the given name – the hunter’s name – that tells the truth about us. That is why it is the secret name. They are fools, to reveal it so.’ She stared at Maniye, seeming to steel herself. ‘I am Joalpey,’ she continued, and then, ‘but I am called Strength Under Moonlight.’ The words left her with a shudder, a concession born of customs alien to Maniye.
‘Thank you,’ the girl replied. She was waiting for some sense of connection to arise between them – mother to daughter. That was how it should be, she knew. That was how the stories had it, whenever estranged family found one another. They always knew. The connection of kin drew them inexorably together. She thought Joalpey was waiting for the same thing. There was a gap between them that was not mere distance though.
‘They say you are my child,’ the Queen of the Tigers declared awkwardly.
‘They told me you were dead!’ Maniye had not meant to say it. ‘I lived all my life knowing you were dead, that my father ordered you killed, and that he did it!’ jabbing a finger at Broken Axe. And then she rounded on him furiously: ‘And why didn’t you tell me? Any time, you could have said, �
�Your mother lives,” and made all the difference to my life. I’ve lived in fear of you all these days. And you hunted me. Even at Loud Thunder’s fire, when we were free of the Winter Runners, still you tried to take me back. Still you said nothing. Why?’
Broken Axe drew a deep breath. ‘Why would I take you back to the Winter Runners? Because that was your home. Because it was safer than the teeth of winter. Why would I keep this secret? Because it is a secret. Because better Stone River believes Joalpey dead, and that he thinks any Queen of the Tiger he hears of is another woman. For my own sake, as much as hers.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Maniye complained bitterly.
The Wolf hunter shrugged, suggesting that neither he nor the world were there simply for her to understand. ‘I am the Wolf that walks alone,’ he said simply. ‘I am not Stone River’s pack follower. I do what is right.’
‘By whose reckoning?’ she demanded.
‘My own. That is the true path of the Wolf, not the leader, not the follower.’ He spread his hands self-effacingly, as though embarrassed by how grave he sounded.
There was the scuff of a footstep: Joalpey had stood up, taken a step closer. Her presence was as demanding as a fire, and yet where was the heat?
One of Joalpey’s hands moved a little, rising towards her daughter then drawing away. There was a thing she was not saying, perhaps not even letting her own mind light upon, but it was there in the chamber with them. Maniye felt it, that unspoken thing. It was What Had Been Done. It was the history of Joalpey’s captivity amongst the Winter Runners, her humiliation and all of what she had endured. It was a history that had a sequel, though, and the sequel was Maniye.
‘I feel nothing.’ Joalpey’s voice was fractured with emotion. For you, she meant. Maniye felt herself begin to tremble very slightly. She met her mother’s eyes desperately and saw the same need there reflected back at her.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 34
