And then she laughed delightedly and pushed him away, so that, off balance from squatting on his haunches, he tumbled backwards. For a moment he was a crocodile, twisting and whipping his bladed tail at her, and then he regained his feet and his human shape.
‘You made it up,’ he snarled at her. ‘This is all your fantasy.’
‘Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,’ she grinned fiercely. ‘But you recognized it for truth, didn’t you? I think you even liked it. A strong woman to put her foot on your neck, eh? Is that your type, O Champion?’
Venater sniggered: there was no other word for it. Asmander glowered at the pair of them. ‘Mock all you want, a Champion is chosen by the world. It is something you will never know.’
‘A Champion can’t even get his servant to gut a rabbit for him,’ Shyri pointed out, not in the least put out.
‘It’s beneath him.’ Asmander looked down at his own slick hands and smiled somewhat shamefacedly. ‘You’re right, I should really take him in hand.’
‘Try it,’ Venater growled.
They had been hiding out here in the woods near the Shining Halls for days now, in a shelter built of branches and leaves that had not been meant to last this long. Every so often, Hesprec appeared and assured them that all was well, but his business was not yet concluded. Questions about whether this Wolf girl of his needed rescuing or not were dodged nimbly, and then he would be gone. That the locals were aware of them seemed in-arguable – yet nobody troubled them, nor invited them within the walls of the settlement either. And that was a shame, for the Shining Halls looked as close to civilization as he had come in a long while. In the manner of their building and carving Asmander saw an echo of his own homeland, and wondered what ancient architects had tracked north – or south.
‘What’s the point of him, if he won’t cook and clean for you?’ Shyri demanded.
‘I’m not his mate,’ the old pirate spat.
‘Are you not?’
‘Enough.’ Asmander stood up abruptly. He didn’t know what had alerted him, but something was definitely wrong.
The other two abandoned their quarrel instantly. Shyri Stepped smoothly, surging forwards into her high-shouldered hyena shape. Venater took up his meret, the greenstone edge of which he had been awake half the night sharpening.
A moment later Asmander spotted them: Hesprec returning, and this time not alone, for a small Wolf girl dogged his footsteps. The sight filled him with gladness. It meant they could move again, and it meant he could now fulfil his own mission, one way or another.
Hesprec had paused, struggling for breath. The girl addressed him briefly, and then she was a tiger, and the old priest a serpent coiling in her jaws. Seeing that – such trust between them – Asmander understood why the priest had demanded his reluctant entourage wait for him. He pushed further thoughts of his duty to the back of his mind.
Then the striped cat had flowed up the hillside towards them, hardly seeming to need footholds. A second later Hesprec was with them in human form, looking so worn out that Asmander felt he could have held the old priest up to the sun and viewed his bones through the man’s skin.
‘This is her, then?’ he asked lightly. Stepped back to her human shape, the much-heralded girl seemed an insignificant piece of work.
‘And now we go,’ Hesprec confirmed with uncharacteristic directness. ‘Forgive me for ruining your breakfast.’
‘There are more rabbits,’ Shyri said happily, ‘always more rabbits. This is good hunting land.’
‘A shame,’ Hesprec remarked wryly, ‘for we will be hunted.’
They set off as swiftly as possible, a Stepped Shyri leading the way. Asmander had asked for the honour of bearing Hesprec, the priest’s whip-slender form tucked inside his tunic, next to his bare skin. The girl changed too, not to the tiger but into the compact form of a wolf, but he had been expecting that.
Asmander would have preferred to have the two Coyote traders with them, because the north remained a large, cold and complex place in which to navigate. However, Two Heads Talking and Quiet When Loud had abandoned their company as soon as they were close to the Shining Halls. The pair had shown little confidence in Tiger hospitality.
Even so, at first it was simply a matter of finding the best paths downhill through the trees, for it was more important to put distance between them and any pursuers than to be clever. As night drew on, then perhaps some application of cleverness might be in order, Asmander considered, and that was where they were more likely to run into trouble. Even a day out from their starting point they would still be well within the Tiger’s Shadow.
And yet, as dusk fell, he was aware that all sign of civilization had been left behind save for the odd tumbled ruin. There was no great sprawl of farms and herdsmen here, as there would have been in the south. Asmander sensed that they would be re-entering the domain of the Wolf before too long.
Which brings its own special problems, he knew.
Shyri sniffed out a sheltered hollow, and they all bundled themselves together to sleep, going without a fire but building a shelter around them that would hold their body warmth near to them. Even so, they were all awake and shivering well before dawn.
‘Early start it is, then,’ Asmander declared, and he nodded at the Wolf girl, Maniye, who had not said a word to anyone yet.
‘What’s she good for, then?’ Venater was more direct. ‘She’s what all this is about? Why?’
‘Because it is my whim, and my will,’ Hesprec told him sharply. Venater – no proper follower of Serpent – glowered at him but stopped short of any direct challenge.
‘We are walking between fires, I am afraid,’ the old priest said gently to Maniye, ‘and yet we must walk.’
‘Who is likely to be chasing us, and why?’ Asmander asked him, posing a question necessary enough not to seem invasive, although he was burning with curiosity.
‘All I know is that she came to me in the Tiger city,’ Hesprec told him, ‘and she needed to leave. That was enough.’
‘You foresaw it,’ Asmander decided.
The old man shook his head tiredly. ‘If only the Serpent could speak so clearly to me. It seemed to me that life in the Crown of the World is seldom kind, and that the life of one half-Wolf girl has not been kind, and that such unkindnesses might not be shrugged away simply by exchanging one roof for another. And so I came to the Shining Halls, and waited. And I wish that I had not been needed there, and could have returned to you alone. But sometimes the Serpent moves in your innards, and you must learn to trust that movement, and follow it.’
‘What was it, though?’ Asmander asked plaintively. Somewhere in the question lurked the southerner’s civilized horror of these northern people and their ways.
‘My mother.’ Maniye’s voice sounded flat and dead. ‘I found my mother.’
Looks were exchanged between the rest of them, and then: ‘The Tiger did for her?’ from Venater.
‘Idiot, her mother must be Tiger,’ Shyri hissed.
‘Doesn’t mean they can’t—’
‘Quiet,’ Asmander hissed at them both. Maniye stared at them: it was as though, after a day’s travel together, she was seeing them for the first time. ‘You are as I thought men of the far south would be,’ she remarked in a small voice, staring at him.
‘As I said, the followers of the Serpent are special,’ and Hesprec then named them all, though Asmander could see that the girl had problems with most of what she heard, traditions being so different in these lands.
‘What was it about your mother?’ Asmander rested on his haunches beside her, so as not to loom. He wanted to know whether there was some rescue they would need to enact, or if the older woman was dead.
Maniye took a deep breath. ‘She did not want me,’ was what he barely heard, the words scarcely venturing beyond her teeth. ‘She would not look on me.’
Faced with that, he could only stand up and back off.
They achieved another day’s hard journeying.
At first they followed the Plains girl Shyri’s best guess, and Maniye trailed behind on her wolf feet, mostly so she would not have to speak to anyone. Past midday, though, she came out of herself enough to object to the path.
‘Where are you even going?’ she demanded.
Shyri regarded her narrowly. ‘Away.’
‘Where would you head for?’ Hesprec asked her gently. They had stopped to eat in the shadow of a great fallen stele, a carven obelisk that might even have marked some key Tiger tribe border.
‘The further west we travel, the more the Shadow of the Wolf falls on us,’ she warned them simply.
‘These things are known: a stranger is always short of friends,’ Hesprec said.
‘Yet we may find some,’ she insisted. ‘If we find the river and follow it, there are the Horse traders.’
The old priest frowned. ‘But your people . . .’
‘We would brave the Wolf’s jaws to do it, yes.’ She closed her eyes, breathing in the land around her. ‘Winter Runners or Swift Backs – if there were Wolf scouts at the doors of the Shining Halls, then they will be everywhere south as well. We could run into them at any time, but more and more so, the further south we tread.’
‘Then what?’ Venater demanded, sounding as though running into a few enemies on the road would be just the thing for him.
‘North,’ she said.
‘What is north?’ Asmander asked her.
‘Cold, is what’s north,’ put in Venater. ‘More cold even than this.’
She looked at him blankly, because this was a warm spring promising a fierce summer. ‘Do you think Loud Thunder would help us, Hesprec?’
The old Serpent looked troubled. ‘The Cave Dweller we wintered with, yes. The man he now is, after his Mother has taken him to task – that is a different man.’
‘But?’
‘But these are quite the most hostile lands I have ever travelled,’ he admitted, and then added, ‘Yes, even including the Plains, Laughing Child: your people have no monopoly on unpleasantness. So we will see if the Bear will take in the Tiger’s quarry . . . and the Wolf’s.’
‘And then, Messenger?’ Asmander demanded.
The old man plainly knew what he meant, though he looked so weary at the thought that Maniye could feel the weight of his age dragging at her, too. ‘Then it will be time to look to the south’s needs, Champion. And whatever I can do, I will do.’
They set out again, and this time Maniye, as wolf, led them. Shyri relinquished the vanguard with nothing more than a shrug of her shoulders. Her scent, when she Stepped, was harsh and strange in Maniye’s nose.
Their path took them into broken ground, where the cover of the trees was patchy and unreliable. That was her error, she realized in retrospect. She was trying to find the shortest path, and thought this must also be the best.
When the attack came, it was unheralded: not a scent, not a sound until it was too late. She was running their little band across a rugged stretch of land creased deeply by the path of a stream that was still swelled by late meltwater from the northern reaches of the highlands. The crossing was difficult, the waters high and fast and hungry, too much so to swim in any shape. Shyri and Venater were already across, and Asmander was just about to make the jump, with Hesprec slung inside his tunic. Then there was a rush of wind – she assumed it was just that at first, but it grew louder and louder far too swiftly. Abruptly the sun was blotted from the sky by a vast shadow.
The great bird struck, coursing at head height over the uneven land, angling its wings as it took her, its talons, hot and strong as metal from the forge, seizing her about the body. She had time for one shriek – more of surprise than pain or fear – and she was airborne.
There were other birds, lesser creatures circling overhead, but the vast-winged eagle made them seem sparrows. It hoisted her into the air with ease, and the blustering beat of its feathers sent Asmander toppling from the stream’s edge. She caught a wheeling glimpse of him kicking away from the rock, one arm out for the others to catch him, and then she was already too far from them, jolting and jostling in the air as the eagle shifted its grip on her. The points of its hooked claws snagged in her clothing and pierced through all her furs and hide, to prick at her skin.
In mid-air she had tried striking out at the eagle, thinking that she might be able to hurt him, and so bring him down. At the first blow, though, he simply let go with one claw, leaving her dangling wildly from the other over what was now a fatal drop. The message was clear.
She was not carried so very far, and she could feel the eagle beginning to labour, for all the great span of his wings. Could he have plucked up someone larger – Asmander or Shyri, perhaps? Venater? Surely not. But Maniye had always been small.
Abruptly the hard grip of those talons loosened and she yelled out in terror, before landing on hard rocks. The drop had just been a second’s worth, and she found she had taken her tiger shape, four legs cushioning the landing as best they could. For a moment she was snarling, swiping at those around her, full of fighting spirit. Then the eagle landed on her back, driving her savagely to the unyielding ground. She twisted and clawed at him, but his grip was horrifyingly strong. A second later he had effortlessly shifted a claw to her neck, choking her, and she was again in her fragile human form beneath him.
He keened and shrieked, deafeningly loud, and people nearby were hurrying forwards. Even as she gasped and gagged, a noose was about her neck, pulling tight, and then his wings boomed in the air, lifting him up and then dropping him down a handful of paces away. She reached for the noose instantly, but hands were laid on her, hauling her to her feet. There was an Eyrieman on either side of her, twisting her arms back painfully: lean, hard men with half-painted faces.
The eagle stretched its neck back and spread its wings, a gesture of triumph beyond mistaking, and became a man: Yellow Claw. Of course, it was Yellow Claw.
‘What do you want?’ she shouted at him. Surely it was enough that her mother’s people and her father’s would be hunting her, and that neither meant her well? What did this creature want with her? ‘Did she send you? Did the priesthood send you?’
‘Nobody sends Yellow Claw,’ the Eyrieman leader scoffed. ‘Yellow Claw is his own master. Yellow Claw is a Champion, Many Tracks Wolf girl. Your people do not even know what that means.’
He spoke the word as Hesprec had, when referring to Asmander. There was something about the big Eyrieman, and there had been a similar sense about the black southerner, although the general strangeness of the latter’s appearance had taken more of her attention. They both cast greater shadows than other men. As though a greater spirit stands behind them?
Yellow Claw’s wings had taken them north to a high place, a stony shelf jutting high and sheer out of the trees, with the mountain slopes above. Here the Eyrie had carved out a roost for themselves within Tiger lands. There were at least a dozen warriors in her sight, and a handful of women. The former were eyeing her with brash stares; the latter had eyes downcast, some cooking, some mending or making things. With a jolt, Maniye saw that each woman’s long hair was looped about her own neck like a halter: nothing they could not have undone with a little effort, but a mark of slavery nonetheless.
‘As for what I want?’ Yellow Claw muscled closer to her, so that she could smell the raw-flesh stink of him, feel the heat rising from his body. ‘I want you, girl, and so I have you. So it is with all that the Eyrie’s gaze lights on.’ He was glaring at her from his war-eye. ‘I have the little mongrel girl that Stone River is hunting, and that the Queen of the Tigers demands back. But I do not think I will give you to her, not yet. Not until I know what is so important about such a meagre-looking morsel. And then I will decide whether you should return to our faithful allies, or whether I fly you to the Eyrie as my prize, or whether I cast you from the heights to see if the Hawk will save you. I do not think that he would.’
He cocked his head at some of the women. ‘Make sure that collar stay
s on her, or you’ll feel my talons, every one of you. She’s a valuable cur, this one – for now, she is. Fleeting Light, fly to the Shining Halls, see what they say about their missing mongrel. But don’t take too long. You know how easily I grow bored. I might give this one the Hawk’s test.’ He thrust his tattooed face into hers, close enough that she could have bitten him, had she dared. ‘Do you fly well, Wolf girl, Tiger girl? Do you leave many tracks in air? I didn’t think so. Whatever god you speak to, ask him to make you useful to me.’
33
Maniye sat miserably, with a braided collar tight about her neck. A day had passed since her capture, and Yellow Claw was still awaiting the return of the man he had sent off to the Shining Halls. In the meantime she had been held here under the watch of the women, eating thin stew once a day. Right now she was watching two of the warriors play some sort of game. The Eyrie-men had plainly camped here for some time. They had a row of wood-framed hides to shelter in, lined up against the rising rock furthest from the edge, and there were jagged stakes bristling at the one place where their bluff could be approached on foot from below.
Then there was their testing ground – or whatever name they had for it. They had hauled up a dozen tree trunks and then wedged or roped them to the rock so that they projected out over the sheer drop, jutting at various angles. The task must have involved a considerable effort, but then Yellow Claw would have had a band of fractious warriors on his hands, and an urgent need to find them something to do. She watched the Eyriemen play a game where they fought and wrestled at the ends of those precarious posts, darting and dancing to tag each other without having to resort to their wings.
A shadow fell across her: one of the women, come to check on her – or check that she was not escaping the rope. Not that I would have anywhere to go. Yellow Claw was right. I can’t make tracks on air.
There came another little wooden bowl of stew, containing the last scraps of whatever the hunters had caught. The Eyrie-men had a strict hierarchy of eating: Yellow Claw would be first, or whoever he had left in charge. Then, if he was present, would be the sinister Grey Herald, although Maniye had seen little of him, and he had shown no sign of knowing her. After that, the other warriors ate, jostling to be first with much joking and cursing.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 38
