‘You are my daughter.’ It was spoken as though the words were alien to her. ‘Broken Axe has vouched for it. After he took me away and swore to Stone River I was dead, he watched you grow into what you are now. He gives his oath that you are my blood.’ The Queen brought her hands up before her, clenching them into fists over and over. ‘But I look at you and see only a Wolf.’
‘I can Step—’
‘I know what they say. But it means nothing until you have cut a soul away and become one thing or the other. And you have a Wolf face, Wolf eyes.’ Her own had gone very wide. ‘I cannot see myself in you.’
‘I fled the Winter Runners!’ Maniye insisted. ‘I want to be nothing of theirs.’ But she was lying, of course. When she had passed Kalameshli’s trials, she had been proud to take her place in the tribe. It was only when Akrit had revealed his plans that she had run. She was false to the Wolf, so why not to the Tiger as well?
‘I kept Broken Axe here to remind me that not all born in the Jaws of the Wolf must be an enemy,’ the Queen said softly.
‘Mother.’ And the word seemed as leaden and strange to her as ‘daughter’ had been to Joalpey.
‘I will make you one of us,’ the Queen declared, not as a threat but more out of desperation. ‘You will train alongside our daughters. You will learn how to fight, and how to worship. You will eat of our meats and dance to our music. You will learn our histories. With these flames I will burn the Wolf out of you, I will sever all his claims to you. And then I will know you, at the end. You will be mine: my blood, my child.’
As Maniye stood before her, she sensed that chasm between them, knowing only that Joalpey felt the need to bridge it even more than she herself did. Was that some way towards a mother’s love? Maniye did not know. She did not have the real thing to compare it with.
She decided that it would do, that it was close enough. It was all the world would offer her, and she had seen enough of the world by now to know its meagre generosity.
The daughters of the priestesses and the families close to the Queen learned to fight, but it was like dancing. Growing up amongst the Winter Runners, Maniye had been resistant to being taught anything at all, and what she had been forced to learn had come only from Kalameshli, with his rod and the hard back of his hand.
She suspected that most children of the Tiger learned exactly like that, but for those close to the throne it was different. For them, there were ways of doing things. There were stories they were expected to know. There was battle.
They fought with long knives and with short-hafted axes, but they learned their fights one move at a time, and strung their moves together like beads, each flowing to the next. Their teachers – sharp-voiced priestesses like Aritchaka – emphasized the grace of each movement, the poise and balance: where the feet trod, where their bodies were weak. A student who took the wrong stance could expect to receive a hard shove to show her just where she had failed.
It was all alien to Maniye. More, the teachers regarded her with emotions ranging from bafflement to open dislike. The other students stared and whispered, repelled by her differences: wrong face, wrong skin, wrong hair, wrong eyes. And small, too: smaller than girls three or four years her junior. Everything around her seemed set on making her admit defeat.
The girl who had hidden and skulked apart amongst the Winter Runners, the girl whose world had been an exercise in avoiding the notice of the powerful, she would have failed here. But she was not that girl any longer. Looking back, she could see that the actual privations she had thought she was escaping were small things. She had lived a life where she was fed and sheltered; not a thrall, nor fending for herself.
But when she had rescued Hesprec and fled, she had unwittingly broken out from a different prison: a prison of no choices. She had defied her father, and in doing so had become someone for the first time.
Maniye had spent a harsh winter becoming that person. Her flight from Broken Axe had taught her to think fast. Her months with Loud Thunder had taught her to shift for herself. She threw herself into her new surroundings with a will, watching every movement, listening to every word.
In the first ten days, everything she did was wrong. After that – well, she was learning for the first time what all the others had been practising for years. She did not know the precise, exquisite steps; she did not know the proper and exact wording for the tales. She recognized where the gaps were, though; she knew the limits of her ignorance. When she came to them, she did not turn back but just ran faster, leaping each gap as it appeared. She found in herself a swiftness and a sureness that meant she could keep to her feet: not able to beat the others, but not so easy to beat.
And when it came to Step, she found she was as swift and fierce as any of them, and as used to the tiger’s shape. She could climb better than they, and run faster. Whilst they had learned and practised, she had been living. None of the Tiger’s other daughters had been forced to test their skills against the sharp edges of the Crown of the World. However they might try to look down on her, they always found her eyes staring right back at them.
But always, when she reached deep into her soul so as to Step, there was the Wolf, that solitary figure. She pictured it out in the snow, banished from the fire, a little further away each time. And yet still there. She wanted it to go away, to pad off into the darkness and leave her forever. She wanted to step wholly into the Shadow of the Tiger. But still it lingered, howling mournfully at the edge of her attention.
Sometimes she woke from Wolf dreams, pack dreams, raging at the obstinacy of her own soul.
Sometimes her mother came to watch, and that was when she got it most wrong. Because suddenly there was a new thought in her mind: I must impress her. Those were painful times.
Her blood link to the Queen did not seem to be general knowledge, and Maniye herself said nothing of it. Her teachers must have been told something of why this Wolf-looking girl had been forced on them, but they remained close-mouthed. No doubt she was a constant source of speculation amongst her unwilling peers.
One day – and she had lost count, but felt it must be close on a month since she first came to the Shining Place – they were spared being put through their paces. Instead, they were brought before the Tiger.
Maniye was never sure whether this was some sacred date that nobody had mentioned to her, or whether the Queen had ordered it, or whether this was all because of a challenge between two of the priesthood. They were taken down to the temple chamber, though, and made to kneel and watch the scattered smoke and firelight dancing on that wall with its ever-coursing carvings. To Maniye, the presence of the Tiger was palpable, hanging in the air, moving restlessly from wall to wall. Glancing at her peers, seeing expressions ranging from fear to boredom, she wondered if they felt as she did. Could you really become jaded with that brooding, bloody-minded spirit? Or was her own mind just colouring the smoky air? Perhaps she cast the Tiger as menacing because she knew she would never truly belong.
She fought down that thought mercilessly. And felt a tiny spark of approval? So she told herself.
There was music then: fierce and rapid drumming on instruments of hide and metal, and shrill pipes, all issuing from hidden spaces about the temple. Two priestesses had stepped out into that Tiger-haunted space between the fretted screens. They wore much gold about them, though little else, and their skins were streaked and striped with eye-leading patterns of black. They carried knives like curved razors, and they began to dance. With her breath caught in her throat, Maniye watched them as they stepped around one another. Each move was between positions of perfect balance, each step moved the hands and the knife as they circled. It was the perfect expression of the clumsy lumbering that Maniye and the other girls had been lurching through. They were exquisite in every motion, eyes fixed on each other, moving through exacting passes with unthinking elegance.
Then the first blood was drawn and Maniye realized that it was actually a fight. Whether there had been some dis
agreement between them or whether this was an offering to the Tiger, she had no idea, but in a handful of seconds both women bore two thin lines of blood across their bodies, and the tempo of the contest was accelerating, without their movements being any less perfect.
And then they Stepped, and fought as tigers, and it was simply a continuation of the dance. Each flowed from shape to shape as advantage required, two feet to four and back, and never faltered. The keen lines of claws joined the thin scratches of their blades. Watching them – two masters of an art that she had only recently discovered – Maniye could only think, How could these people ever have been beaten? The Wolves had nothing compared to this, only the hard experience of a hunter, gained piecemeal.
But the Wolves had a different way, of course, for they did not fight alone. And she had seen herself how few in number the Tigers were.
She almost missed the moment when one of the women mis-stepped, in human shape with her blade held wide, and her opponent a tiger under her guard. Then she was down, the snarling beast atop her, jaws agape. Maniye expected her to die. She sensed the bloodlust of the Tiger all around her.
And the drums reached their crescendo and the pipes shrieked, and then all was still, and the tiger was a woman once more, stepping back from her adversary. Instantly, thralls were rushing forwards to tend to their wounds, and the loser was forcing herself to stand, proud before her god. Maniye was left wondering whether it had not, after all that, been merely a dance to long-rehearsed steps.
She felt as though she was back at the frozen lake with Loud Thunder again, and waiting for the thaw. Her mother came to see her, and she tried and tried, coming ten years too late to all these traditions. Never did Joalpey speak to her; never did she call for her daughter. Always her eyes seemed frozen with doubt and bad memories.
Maniye knelt in the room that was the Tiger’s shrine, crouched before that apparition of smoke and imagination that was the closest her mother’s people got to representing their god. The Tiger without spoke there to the tiger within. She felt the connection as clear and self-evident: This is where I belong. And yet the Wolf was written in her face and in her compact frame, in the way she spoke, in her blood. And the same Wolf was embedded in Joalpey’s mind like an arrow.
She began to feel a terrible fear that she would never become either of the things within her. That, in the end, neither Tiger nor Wolf would have her. That she was lost.
She began to dream badly: confusing, tormenting nightmares of fleeing or chasing, though really it was herself that she both pursued and fled from. In her dreams there were no familiar places. Each seemed to take her further from anywhere she knew, from any sight she had seen. She was drifting away, inside her own head. She had been given a chance to belong: it had been within her very reach. Yet she was losing her hold on it, as though she had climbed and climbed only to fail within sight of the top. And that meant a long drop.
Maniye began to dread going to sleep. In the dreams themselves, though, it was waking that she dreaded. Another day where her mother turned away from her. Another day alone amidst all the people of the Shining Halls, because there was nobody she could speak with about this: not her teachers, not Aritchaka, not anyone.
Yet one morning she woke in the close stone cell where she slept alone – the other students would not have her in their dormitory because of her face and her twitching, whimpering nightmares. She awoke with the sense of a presence close by, quiet and still and buried . . . and he was there.
He sat beside her pallet with his back against the wall, awake but not quite looking at her. He seemed paler and older than ever, and the scales of his tattoos were so faded that they had almost rubbed away in parts. His skin seemed brittle, as though to reach out and touch him would break him into a thousand desiccated flakes. But then his eyes flicked towards her, and a delicate smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
‘Good morning, little Tiger,’ said Hesprec softly. ‘I came to see that you are well.’
She had her smile ready, and was hunting about for some mocking retort, some dismissive joke, when the tears came. Abruptly she was sitting up and weeping, holding him close, feeling the feather weight of his hand on her head, smoothing her hair.
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‘It is no great matter,’ Hesprec told her.
‘But how are you even here?’ Maniye demanded.
‘Does the Serpent not know all ways under the earth?’ Hesprec looked at their close stone confines almost approvingly. ‘Besides, I discovered some fellow countrymen whose aid I was able to enlist. Serpent provides, little Tiger.’
Maniye thought about the gods of Wolf and Tiger. Did they provide? They challenged, yes; they made their people strong by testing them and weeding out the weak. Which sounded admirable unless you spent your life terrified of weaknesses you could do nothing about.
Hesprec was watching her, reading each thought from the smallest change in her expression, or so his eyes suggested. ‘Nothing lost, nothing forgotten,’ he told her softly. ‘Serpent seeks for old knowledge in the deep earth and brings it to light. Serpent’s coils cradle learning now gone from the rest of the world, ready to proffer it to us when we are ready. Why do you think the world has to suffer ancient creatures such as I, mm? Only that we go amongst the people of the world with those gems of knowledge Serpent has dug in the deep earth of old time.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ she told him, but inwardly she experienced a stab of envy at the comfort his god gave him. Then she felt guilty for it, because she was trying to grow close to the Tiger, not be seduced by some other way. Still . . .
She almost did not say it, hovering twice on the edge of voicing the words without letting them out, before finally giving way.
‘I thought I felt . . . Serpent, I thought he helped me, once, twice. He? She?’
‘Either. And most likely you did. Serpent’s coils run beneath all the earth and, now you have met me, you may see them from time to time. You have become something that Serpent may notice.’ He stretched. ‘Now, there is a priestess who has said she would speak to me of visions.’
Maniye stood up suddenly, feeling betrayed. ‘You’re here for your mission! You’re not here for me at all!’
Hesprec rolled his eyes, spreading exaggeratedly exasperated hands. ‘Dear me, life is so simple in the Crown of the World that you can do one thing at a time only. I came here for you, and I am very grateful that your meanderings took me to a place where I might also advance the Serpent’s business.’
‘Hmm.’ Feeling backed into a logical corner, Maniye folded her arms stubbornly. ‘If the coils of the Serpent are everywhere, why does he need you?’
‘Because I am a loop of those coils.’
It was past time for her to be gone to her studies, she realized. ‘Will you . . . ?’ She could still not quite understand how he was here, alive and unfettered. ‘You will stay?’
‘For a time,’ he agreed mildly. ‘I must find some path back to my home eventually, but for now I am here, and in no apparent danger from your kin, thanks to, if I might say so, a remarkable combination of good fortune and deft speech on my part. And you, of course.’
She started. ‘Me?’
‘Yours is a name to conjure by. When I gave it, they brought me straight before that remarkable woman who rules here. Why was that, I wonder?’ His expression gave her no clue as to his private thoughts.
She wanted to answer him, but the whole business had laid a weight of secrecy on her ever since she had first left her mother’s presence. She had grown used to it being that one piece of knowledge that was never spoken of – even amongst those who knew the truth.
Later, Hesprec was there as she tried to match the careful steps of the other students. In those slow passes she saw again the fierce duel between the priestesses: the same movements at a difference pace. It should have made her nervous, but instead every part of the dance seemed to fall into place that much more naturally: her bones now knew what it was all for. Th
at was the day she Stepped and took her bronze knife with her, making the hard metal a part of her body, and finding it in her hand again when she retook her human form. The old Serpent’s gaze upon her made her feel proud.
Just as nobody openly stared at her Wolf face, or speculated on her heritage, so Hesprec seemed to share in that peculiar invisibility. He could hardly be missed, that outlandish old man with his cloth-covered head and his corpse-pallor skin, and yet Tiger eyes slid off him in a willing conspiracy to pretend he was not there.
When Broken Axe made an appearance, which was rarely, he too was looked straight through, made to disappear by the collective consensus of the Tiger. Even the Eyriemen had a touch of it. At first Maniye saw this as an aloofness born of disdain. It was watching Hesprec that taught her otherwise. Somehow, as he passed amongst them, he taught her to look at her hosts anew and see the weakness she had taken for proud strength. They did not wish to see him, or Maniye, or any of these strangers walking freely in their halls, because they were all evidence of how the Tiger had fallen from the heights of its strength. She studied the carvings then, seeing past Queens seated with great ceremony while the world scuffed a path on its knees to their throne. The Eyriemen would not have stalked so haughtily through these halls in those days.
She understood, then, that the whole of the Shining Halls could not look at these foreigners without feeling the pain of old wounds, humiliations and indignities. Just as her mother could not look on her.
With that particular revelation, she found herself a high place, roosting up on the temple wall amongst the carved monsters: the petrified jaws and claws of tigers trapped forever halfway out of the stone. Just as she had once retreated to the high eaves of Akrit’s hall, she perched there and stared down at the sprawl of buildings that was the Shining Halls. At night there seemed to be precious little about them that shone.
How long she stayed there, as the moon bellied up into the sky, she could not later have said. She only came out of the depths of herself at a scuffing sound nearby. Instantly she was a Tiger, keen-eyed in the dark, and she saw Broken Axe standing further along the wall from her, feet neatly balancing along the same ledge that she had taken as a roost.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 35
