‘They said they had a prisoner,’ Maniye whispered. She was gathering Hesprec’s sluggish form to her, bringing his cold coils next to her skin. ‘A Tiger warrior, it must be.’
Still Broken Axe said nothing, but he did not need to. Another scream tore through the air, followed by a chorus of jeers from the same direction.
‘We have to go,’ Maniye told him. ‘Please, Broken Axe. We have to go. We can’t do anything. I have to save Hesprec.’
Then she flinched from the look he turned on her. Most of all, in that look, was disappointment. A revelation struck her then. The last time he had heard a woman of the Tiger scream, he had not acted to stop it then, only waited until later, and saved whatever he could. She had not known it before, but she saw how that delay had eaten into him, had made him the man he was: determined to follow his own path.
And yes, she must save Hesprec, or why else had they come? Yes, they could not save everyone. Perhaps a dozen Boar girls had already suffered the same, perhaps a dozen of their menfolk too. The world was cruel and callous, as were its people.
But they were here, and that pain and shame and agony was here, and there was nobody else. She saw, in that moment, how very hard it was to be Broken Axe.
‘I can run,’ she said. He thought she was abandoning him, but that was not her meaning. ‘I can run, fast as any. I will run for Loud Thunder’s home and the lands of the Cave Dwellers. I will run from here, but I shall call out before I go. I shall call out to show Stone River he has failed and that the Wolf hates him. You must do what you must do, when they chase me.’
He weighed and measured her with his gaze, and then put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I will bring the southmen to Loud Thunder, if I can,’ he told her. ‘Look for me there.’
‘You cannot hide this from the Winter Runners,’ she warned him. ‘Someone will see you. They will mark you for death from now.’
‘Nothing is forever,’ and then he Stepped, always his favourite way of avoiding questions, and he was gone.
Maniye braced herself. I can run, she told herself, and she took off the skin of dead Dirhath and Stepped, feeling Hesprec wind himself tighter around her.
Outside, the snow was swifter, starting to settle. Perfect. Perhaps the Wolf really was on her side.
She bolted through the village and, as she cleared the last hut, she howled out a cry of challenge and knew that her father would recognize just who it was that called him out.
36
She did not see what Broken Axe did next, after that fractured moment when she had called out the whole of the Winter Runner warband. What went through her father’s head then, she could not imagine. He had chased her, nearly caught her, lost her – and yet here she was again just outside his circle of firelight, howling her defiance.
And she ran, and did not see, but in her mind it played out: Broken Axe entering the hut where the warriors were amusing themselves with the Tiger woman. Perhaps they thought he had come for his turn. They would greet him. He would reply, jovial and easy, but with a tightness to his jaw they would not mark. Then he . . . would he kill the woman to put her out of her shame and misery? Maniye did not think he would. He was more than that. He would take his blade and bend towards her – and perhaps she would even recognize him, from the Shining Halls – and with one deft move he would sever the halter that held her confined to her human shape.
Then there would be a tiger at large in the village of the Spined Sons, angry and hurting. Perhaps she would hunt.
But others were also hunting: others were on the trail of Many Tracks. Even as her mind toyed with the thought of what the strength of Broken Axe might accomplish, her feet were speeding her further and further away from him.
And the snow fell thicker as she ran. Snow was of the Wolf, who claimed winter for his own, his breath sent to test the world. When last she had been fleeing the Wolf’s people, he had sent her this cloak of snow, but then her pursuer had been Broken Axe, who could not be thrown off the trail by a little adverse weather. Instead the snow had nearly killed her, a punishment for her disloyalty. Now . . .
Now the Wolf exhaled, and she fled into that shifting labyrinth of white, and felt that she had a god’s favour. Her heart was hammering high, but there was a jagged blade of excitement lodged there, rather than the fear she had been living with for so very long. Let Shatters Oak rage, let her father curse, let Takes Iron mumble his platitudes. She had challenged the Winter Runners.
Despite the snow, her nose still guided her swiftly towards Loud Thunder’s home, though it would be another long and draining trek across rugged country. She would tire eventually, she knew, but right then she felt as though she could run forever, like the wolf in the stars.
They were close behind her, she knew. She could not put names to them, but glimpses and instinct told her at least three, perhaps five, were on her trail. Would Stone River be one of them? Surely his pride would have urged him out. Was Broken Axe clear of the village by now?
She could not know, and she might never know. Running was all she could contribute to his success.
About her narrow wolf chest the bonds that were Hesprec’s body tightened. He must be cold but she could do nothing about that. She had no pack for him to crawl into. Better the cold than the fire, if the worst came. If he perished even as she tried to rush him to safety, he would at least die in a fit form, and his spirit would pass on, and some hatchling serpent elsewhere in the world would inherit all that he was.
Abruptly there was a figure racing almost beside her, and she realized that she had been running for the long distance, whilst her hunters were flogging themselves in a quick sprint, desperate to catch her up. Not Stone River, this; not Shatters Oak or Smiles Without Teeth, just some young hunter she could not immediately name, but he was snapping at her flanks, trying to force her aside to where others of the pack might intercept her.
She put on more speed, spending her strength, but he matched her, a boy who had not had to run and run as she had the day before. The snow waxed and waned, curtains of white shifting and drawing aside before her, but it would not hide her from this persistent youth. Perhaps he saw in her a chance to win his name, or perhaps he already had a name that was less than complimentary, and needed deeds to offset it. He was determined, though. His eyes were set on nothing but her. His breath was on her haunches, his teeth at her side.
Maniye kept her eyes fixed ahead, pushing herself harder. They were ascending a rocky slope, slippery with the snow that had drifted there, and she was hoping the other wolf might slip or stumble. Luck held with him, though, and he was forcing her to veer now, stealing her speed from her.
And then there was no more ground beneath their feet.
Maniye had seen it barely in time to react. The boy had not, too busy recounting his own legend inside his head. They had found a stream that had been cutting into the rocks for generations, a stone-scattered drop of ten feet to the shallow silver line of the water below. Maniye was a tiger the moment she began falling, landing four-footed and then kicking off on wolf paws again. Her pursuer lost his luck, though, landing heavily, all the breath gone from him, and she had vanished from his sight before he could recover.
Then she was running again in earnest, that long lope of the wolves, forcing herself always uphill. When her path found rocks and jutting heights, she scaled them, Stepping to tiger and feeling that extra tightness as Hesprec adjusted his hold on her, inch by frozen inch. She heard howling, once, but it was far away. The snow had eaten her tracks and her scent. The world had swallowed her up.
But although she was discovering the ground ahead rock by rock, drop by drop, she knew that this great trackless forest was the same one in which she had played chase with Broken Axe; the same one that she had stumbled through half-frozen to reach Loud Thunder’s camp. She was closing with her destination, over so many miles, led by stray memories, by guesses, by hope.
And then, with a dawn grown ripe in the sky and the snow at last behin
d her, she was at a lakeshore. It was not frozen now although the snow had made a slush out of its fringes, shot through with the dagger-like fingers of reeds. A pair of herons took thunderously aloft as she skidded and scraped to avoid wetting her feet. And she knew it. She remembered this place clear as day, despite all that had changed. Here, Broken Axe had bearded her. Here he had given her a hunter’s name.
And somehow her long run had directed her right, despite the snow, despite the great, great heedless spaces of the world. She was close now; still a long way to run, but she was close.
She drank gratefully, though the water was icy cold. Her stomach snarled at her, and so she Stepped and took out some of the dried meat, the nuts and wizened fruit she had taken from the Tiger.
‘Hesprec,’ she said softly. ‘Eat. Snake or man, but eat.’
For a moment he did not move, remaining just a cold line tight against her chest, and then she thought it was too late. In that moment – even as her heart clenched – he loosened, dropped like a dead thing to the ground, and became a shivering, bluish-skinned man.
In that dawn’s harsh, uncompromising light, he looked more corpse than living, so thin that she could barely think where any muscle could fit between skin and bone. That skin, always so pale, was crazed with lines, blotched with broken veins. His eye-sockets were bruise-dark and his lips were cracked, drawn back to expose the ravaged gums beneath. She took her coat off and draped it across the knobs of his shoulders. He clutched it to himself, shivering uncontrollably, fumbling at the sheepskin lining with fingers like claws.
‘Eat,’ she told him, and then, ‘I’ll chew it up for you.’
He looked at her at last. She could just make out a smile on that face, and it was like the ruins of Tiger power she had seen on the way to the Shining Halls: an echo of a strength that once had been.
‘Dear one,’ he said. Just then the great bowl of the lake seemed very quiet, the morning holding its breath as Hesprec’s own plumed white in the air. ‘You are too good, but no need. No need.’
‘Then . . .’ She offered a strip of meat to him uncertainly but he made no move to take it.
‘No need,’ again, from those old lips.
‘You have to eat.’
He just watched her, though. His eyes were the lake’s pale colours, which were no colours at all, even the pink of their edges gone bloodless.
‘Hesprec.’ She tried to find some authority to invest her voice with. Am I not a Wolf chief’s daughter? Does my mother not rule the Shining Halls? ‘You have to eat . . . and then we’ll move on. We’ll go to Loud Thunder. He’ll shelter us.’
He was shivering – or more like shuddering, the mess of angular sticks that made up his body jumping and spasming beneath the Horse-made coat. His eyes were steady, though, as if they had already severed ties with the rest of him.
‘You need to go,’ he said softly.
‘We – we need to go. When you’ve eaten, we need to go. We’re going to Loud Thunder. I’m saving you.’
‘You must stop that, or it’ll become a habit.’ His ghost-smile again. ‘But here I am, and I am saved. I am free. But I cannot go further with you.’ He was so dreadfully calm despite the state of him.
‘But your friends, the southerners . . .’
‘They will have to understand.’
‘No.’ She could feel a child’s wailing welling up inside her and fought it down stubbornly. ‘You have to come, see . . . because, because you have to.’
‘Maniye.’ The uttering of her name was like a spell to silence her, to still her. ‘The coils of the Serpent are endless, their loops everywhere. You see before you just one such loop. It has passed into the sunlight from the earth, and curved about its long, long course, and now the time has come for it to return.’
She stared at him, struggling to shake off the quiet he had placed on her until at last she came out with, ‘But you still have to come with me. Step, and I’ll carry you, and if, and if . . .’ Her own voice was like a serpent fighting to escape from her control. ‘If . . . then your soul will pass, and . . .’
‘Did I not tell you, when we first met, that my people are different?’ he said gently. ‘We must do everything in a way that is ours alone. Even this. Especially this. The Serpent waits for me below, and I must return to the earth.’
‘No, but—’
‘Maniye.’ Again that quietening spell. ‘I am further from home than I should ever be, but some things do not care for distance. This is how it is for my people. Below us, the Serpent coils upwards through the earth towards me, and I must go to greet him. I have been his servant for more years than you can imagine. I look forward to meeting with him again. This is not the end, Maniye.’
‘I know, but . . .’ She had nothing she could say, and yet she was still speaking. ‘But I rescued you! I got you out. I stole you from my father! And it’s not supposed . . . it wasn’t supposed to be—’
His hand on hers surprised her: colder than the water itself. ‘I am rescued,’ he said simply. ‘You cannot know how great it is, the thing you have done in bringing me away from that place. Greater than all the pains and tortures that this body has been spared is what you have gifted to my soul.’
And at last her words had run dry. She collapsed to her knees beside him, holding him close, feeling his bird-bone fragility.
Then he was running like sand from her arms, dwindling and diminishing, casting off his humanity until he was that whip-slender snake she had carried for so long. It lifted its head, slit eyes bright, and she knew the cold must be biting into every scale of it.
‘Goodbye, Hesprec,’ she said, and the little reptile had found a crack between two stones and vanished into it. She wanted to believe that she felt the earth tremble with the smooth motion of unseen coils, as the god came for his servant, but there was nothing. The ground was frozen hard.
She ate then, chewing bitterly at the cold, tough meat, switching between human, wolf and tiger teeth to best gnaw it into pieces she could swallow. As the sun clawed its way free of its bloody birth and the new day began in earnest, the dawn found her sitting staring across the lake, but seeing nothing at all.
Broken Axe found her there, too, padding up with his fur bristling in the chill. For a long while he watched and waited, and no doubt he was piecing it all together. His nose would tell him Hesprec had been there, but was not there now, nor had left any track to follow. When he Stepped, his human face showed that he understood it all.
‘Many Tracks,’ he told her quietly, ‘you cannot stay here.’
She just looked up at him bleakly.
‘The southerners are close behind me,’ he told her, ‘but closer than that, the woods are full of hunters. I outran a warband of the Tiger to find you, and your father is not far off.’
‘What then?’ She looked at him through raw red eyes.
‘There is only Loud Thunder. I have nothing else. We must run, now.’
She was sick of running. It solved nothing. She had run fit to make the gods proud that night, and still it had not saved Hesprec.
But when Broken Axe put out a hand, she let him lift her to her feet. When he Stepped, she followed.
The Tiger and the Wolf, he said, but it seemed to her that the further they ran, the more the world around them fell silent. Each rasp of her own breath echoed in her ears, along with the drumming of her feet and the constant drumming of her heart. The grand silence that had been spread out over the lake where Hesprec had gone to earth was following her, more surely than any hunter. It coursed past her and stilled all the sounds of the world.
She was falling behind, so that Broken Axe had to stop and wait, then stop and wait again. All that fierce fire that had given strength to her legs when she had escaped the Winter Runners seemed to have run out of her, and left only a void. Her mind thronged with all the words she had not said to Hesprec before the end. Everything around her, within and without, was defined now by absences.
And those absences,
the holes in her world, they were growing and growing. She felt the ground brittle and hollow beneath her pounding feet, and that seemed entirely fitting: the Serpent that had burrowed there was gone now, and the space it had taken up was surely collapsing in upon itself. Even as she ran, she felt she was standing at the brink of something vast and cavernous.
There was a forest down there, a night-dark forest, as though it had grown within a great chasm in the earth. She was leaning over it, arrested at the very moment of falling. Things moved in the spaces between the trees: a hunt . . . it was a hunt. There was a tiger like smouldering embers. There was a wolf like a pale ghost. Each intended murder. Each was hunting the other, and each fled in turn. But they were closer and closer, hunters gaining with ravenous jaws agape, prey flagging and failing in its flight. And there was a light, a glaring brightness growing in the forest. It swelled and swelled, searing the eyes of her mind, not the eyes in her head, until it had eclipsed all the world, and she could see nothing, know nothing, be nothing, because she had to choose now, she had to choose, she had to know what she wanted to be . . .
When she came back to herself, the cold of the ground had leached into her bones. Broken Axe was calling out her name, his hands on her. His ice-water eyes were the first things she saw as she opened her own.
She made a questioning sound, little more than a croak. Moving her limbs, she found herself shaky and weak, barely able to sit upright.
Broken Axe’s expression was closed, but his body thrummed with tension. ‘Can you run?’ he asked her. ‘I’ve heard the Wolf calling.’
‘What . . . ?’ She wanted to ask him if she had been struck; she wanted there to have been an attack, some cause outside herself. She could not deny the knowledge, though. Her souls had fought: they were grown too great for her small body. They had fought inside her, and now they had withdrawn to lick their wounds, leaving her the strength of neither to help her.
‘You fell,’ Broken Axe explained shortly. ‘You started shaking. There was foam on your lips, and your eyes were white.’ He was keeping himself as calm as possible, so as not to pass his alarm on to her. ‘Many Tracks, can you still run?’
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 43
