He had brought the whip up for another strike, but now he was frozen, staring at her. ‘Alive?’ he hissed, and then he did break free from his enclosed ignorance, leaping from stone to stone in his mind until he spat out ‘Broken Axe!’ seeing past the man’s recent betrayal to that far greater one.
‘He was never yours!’ she hissed at him. ‘He was always his own, and I will not be yours either.’ It was as if, somehow, her mind and her mouth had forgotten the whip and the pain, just for that moment.
But Akrit did not strike again. This much she could say for him: within the little domain of his thoughts, he was no fool. Already he was planning. ‘You will serve me,’ he said, whether to her or to the world, she could not say.
The switch was lowered. Akrit’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is a destiny. I tore out Water Gathers’ throat in the ring of stones, and the spirits stooped low about us, watching. You ran beneath their gaze, too, that day. You are marked by them, as am I. Marked for great things. Or for a great doom. So I must show the Wolf I am worthy, and to do so I must use what the world has given me.’ His gaze rested on her again. ‘It has given me you.’
‘Have you never thought,’ she got out, ‘that perhaps we just did those things, and the spirits don’t care?’
He struck her three times with the full force of his arm, though his hatred and anger, which would have made the blows a real terror, were concentrated elsewhere, considering his next move. Once she lay twitching and whimpering before him, though, he barely seemed to notice her, departing again, already calling for his priest.
Maniye was left to herself, after that, in a gloom that seemed lit up by the burning stripes Akrit had laid across her back. She could hear exchanges about the camp, sometimes a snap and snarl of disagreement, once what sounded like a full-scale skirmish between two of them. Akrit’s warband was fraying. They had come this far with him, and they had been bloodied by the Tiger, and now they must be looking to their leader and wondering. Some would be thinking of challenge. Who would be the first? Smiles Without Teeth was too loyal, Shatters Oak was a woman, but others would be asking themselves if their own time had come.
The wait seemed to go on forever, any sense of time’s passing taken from her, without the sky to mark it. The hurt from her whipping dulled, like embers dimming but never quite extinguished. She slept a little, but fitfully, then was awoken by her father’s voice barking loudly outside the tent. He was giving orders, rousing the warband to move. Shortly after, a pair of hunters came in and uprooted the metal stake between them, not looking at her. She could have named them both but they were working very hard at pretending that they could not see her, even as they hauled her out at the end of her leash.
The Wolves decamped so quickly that Maniye guessed the Tigers were still stalking somewhere nearby. She had a feeble hope then, for if they were to move at full pace, surely they must run as wolves, and free her to do the same. Then she would seize the first chance she had, and she would be gone from them, trusting to her feet once again.
A moment’s thought told her it could not happen. They had baggage with them, hides and tents and provisions, and loot from the Boar village. They had a pair of travois that they bundled their burdens on, to be hauled by the younger hunters. Of the rest, many did Step, running ahead or falling away to either side to keep an eye and a nose ready for any enemy, leaving a handful to stay with Maniye and the baggage, led by Smiles Without Teeth.
Smiles stooped low to speak in her ear, putting her in his shadow.
‘Stone River says he wants you to live, for now,’ he told her. ‘But he says, “If she runs, break her leg.”’ His dark eyes pinned her. ‘I asked him, “Why not do that now? No running then.” But he says there’s too much we need to carry already. But I will – give me the chance, girl, and I will.’
She fully intended to meet his ugly gaze, but the deep rumble of his voice pitched itself right to the fear in her mind, and she could not. He took her leash himself, his hand almost eclipsing the metal stake.
Her wounds were dressed roughly, leaving her feeling as though they had lit a fire on her back. Then they headed westwards, away from the Tiger, and there was no talking between them. Despite their loads, Akrit’s warband set a swift pace, further reinforcing Maniye’s suspicion that the Tiger were not keeping to their own places now. And I have caused that somehow. I am a weapon so fierce that my mother cannot let her enemies grasp me. I am the spark that sets the fire.
But that was merely a sop to her own vanity. Even helpless, she was trying to spin a tale that gave her some sense of control. She had been swept before the rush of events like broken wood in the river during the spring thaw.
Akrit dropped back occasionally. He would encourage Smiles to keep up the pace, but his eyes were ever on Maniye. When they camped that night, the stake was hammered in again, but she lay out in the open, surrounded by wolves on all sides, without any true camp being pitched.
Several of the warriors had been sent ahead. My father has a plan.
Some time during that same night she woke into a darkness relieved only by the fire’s last embers and a sliver of cloudy moon. A man stood over her, and she recoiled, assuming it must be her father. Then, for a mad moment, she thought it was Broken Axe, for it lacked Stone River’s broad bulk. This was an older man, though, shorter and leaner, and one she should have known sooner: Kalameshli Takes Iron.
She was not going to speak at first, although he must know she was awake. He just watched and watched, though, and at last she got out, ‘You must be very happy, Takes Iron. You were right all along. I am no true daughter of the Wolf.’
‘Nor of the Tiger yet.’ His voice startled her, for she had not expected an answer. ‘You were wolf enough, when you were caught.’
‘Your chief is a fool,’ she said softly, wondering if any other was awake to hear. ‘He needs me to be a Wolf, so as to be his own, yet he thinks the Tiger would follow me if I was not a Tiger?’
‘He has cherished some dreams a long time.’ Takes Iron did not say ‘too long’ and yet it was there between his words. Maniye frowned, because she had never heard him even come close to criticizing her father.
‘The Tiger will not have me anyway, no matter how much Tiger I am,’ she added bitterly.
‘I think your father understands as much,’ he agreed. His eyes had never left her, and she felt a crawling sense of unease born of that rigid scrutiny.
‘Then what?’ she hissed.
She saw Kalameshli’s shoulders rise and fall. ‘His thoughts are close about him now. The eyes of the Wolf—’
She made an exasperated noise, because Akrit himself had told her all that, and it gave her no clues as to what her father would actually do. In the wake of that, she heard someone nearby stirring, woken by her frustration. Kalameshli melted away into the dark silently, and in the morning she was not sure she believed any of it.
They travelled two more days, moving with all the speed the travois could manage, swapping bearers and scouts, and never giving Maniye the least chance to escape. When Smiles was not holding her leash, the job fell to Shatters Oak, the other veteran amongst them. She was a worse captor, if anything. Smiles Without Teeth was a man of little imagination, and able to plod along in silence for hours without growing bored or fretful. Amiyen Shatters Oak had a harsher streak to her. Even if Maniye had not killed her son, she had still been there, connected to that death by a trail of blood. Amiyen would yank on the lead viciously, hauling Maniye close, her teeth almost to the prisoner’s ear.
‘When we catch Broken Axe, we’re going to skin him,’ she would hiss. ‘Kalameshli says he has spat on the Wolf, so his ghost can’t be allowed to leave his body. We’re going to wear his human pelt and leave his flesh for the coyotes. He’ll never come back as wolf or man.’ From her first sally she had realized that simply threatening Maniye herself with pain or death would barely register, Akrit having already run her to exhaustion on that front. Instead, she noticed the flinch w
hen she first brought up Maniye’s ally. ‘He will come,’ she had crowed. ‘He’ll come for you, do you think? I will be waiting. When he’s ours, I’ll wield the knife myself. I’ll beg Kalameshli for the chance. I am owed, girl. We’ll roast him alive on the fire and feed you his human flesh.’
She was endlessly inventive in the fates that they had in store for their former kinsman, each of them whispered viciously into Maniye’s ear. It was a pastime the woman never tired of.
At last they stopped, because they had caught up with the hunters Akrit had sent ahead. They had been crossing open land, following a young river’s descent out of the highlands and onwards west, but there were more trees ahead. Maniye had lost all track of where they were: without her wolf nose, she felt disconnected by so much travelling.
At the edge of the trees and in the crook of the river, a fire was already going and the hunters had not been idle. There was a mess of wood there, and they were building something too small and irregular for a dwelling. When the travois party arrived, Kalameshli took himself off to view it immediately, mostly to berate them and have them dismantle much of it.
They had been hunting, too, because there was a pit dug and within it a sow and a boar were pacing angrily, leaping up at their captors whenever a human face showed itself. At first Maniye feared she would be thrown in there too. Instead, the big tent-shelter they had originally kept her in was reassembled here, and she was leashed inside, kept blind to what was going on without.
Her ignorance lasted only until nightfall, for most of which time she had simply lain there, feeling the ache in her legs and feet, the taut tugging of the welts across her back, not even trying to uproot the stake. Kalameshli’s voice came to her, calling instructions peevishly, and the harsh shout of Akrit when something went wrong. If anything, the tension between the Wolves was spun tauter than ever. Maniye had been desperately looking for any sign that someone was getting close to standing up to her father – for surely any challenger would have no particular interest in her fate – yet Stone River’s reputation still held them in check.
Then, once the noise and mutter outside had died down into uneasy sleep, Akrit and Kalameshli backed into the tent. The priest glanced at her once, her father not at all.
‘Two pigs are no sacrifice,’ Akrit stated. He had brought a brand with him, and he jammed it into the ground for its light. ‘The scouts say the only people close to here are the Horse, who they fear to touch.’
‘Well, they are wise,’ Kalameshli murmured. ‘If we are to war against the Tiger, we would be fools to seek more enemies. The Horse are dangerous, not because they have many warriors, but because they have many friends—’
‘All this I know,’ Stone River cut him off sharply. ‘So, not even a hunter of the Deer or some Boar woman out looking for mushrooms. Then you know the answer to your question.’
And Kalameshli’s eyes slid inexorably to Maniye, sitting up and staring at them. ‘This also is unwise,’ he observed.
‘I have asked you for wisdom but your well has run dry,’ Akrit told him flatly. ‘I can feel the Wolf’s breath on my neck, old man. He is waiting for me to prove myself to him. I need to show him that in me are all the qualities he values: that I am fierce and strong; I baulk at nothing.’
‘There are other qualities that the Wolf values. Loyalty to kin—’ Kalameshli started, trying to sound mild but the strain in his voice betrayed him.
‘Yes, loyalty!’ Akrit interrupted. ‘And she has shown none! So she deserves none. She fled the tribe. She stole meat from the Wolf’s own jaws. She has been the guest of the Shadow Eaters! The Wolf must be hungering for her.’
Kalameshli glanced at her, the fire catching his eyes. ‘Akrit, as I am your friend, this is not the way.’
‘She will be given to the Wolf.’
What Maniye felt was some terrible variant of relief. Her fears had come to pass. The nightmare that had chased her all the way from the village of the Winter Runners had caught up with her. Outside the tent they had been building an altar: jaws of wood in imitation of the iron teeth of home. They would burn her inside them, and the Wolf would consume her.
But Kalameshli continued shaking his head. ‘She is your kin,’ he insisted. ‘No god will protect a kinslayer. Is this what you will have the Wolf see?’
Akrit even smiled at that. ‘But I will not be a kinslayer. Because you are my priest, and you shall carry the flame.’
The older man’s face went dead in an instant, utterly without expression. ‘It cannot be done,’ he said quietly.
‘You’ll do it,’ Akrit told him. ‘As I am your chief, you will do it. Because the Winter Runners need me, Takes Iron. I will make us first of all the tribes, and I will make the Wolf the first of all the peoples. It starts here, with this. This is how I show the Wolf what I dare. This is how you show the Wolf your loyalty. Don’t think he isn’t watching you as well.’
Kalameshli would have argued further, but Akrit abruptly grabbed him by the robe, yanking him forwards in a clatter of little bones.
‘Do not challenge me,’ Stone River growled into the old man’s face, and then dropped him, the old priest falling to his knees. A moment later Akrit had stomped out of the tent, the parting of the hide flap giving Maniye a glimpse of the flames outside.
Kalameshli got to his feet and stood there for a long time, long after the brand had burned out, thinking in the darkness, and then he, too, left.
39
‘So what makes him High Chief, then? He has to kill the others?’
Before now, Venater had shown no interest whatsoever in the Crown of the World. He had happily fought against the place’s natives, but even the Stone Place had barely impressed him. Now, though, he seemed suddenly interested in the ways of the Wolf.
Asmander would rather not have spoken of it, but at the same time he knew that silence would only encourage the old pirate. Sensing weakness was meat and drink to the Dragon.
‘I don’t think so.’ His voice seemed remarkably conversational, to his own ears. ‘He has not killed the chief of these . . . Swift Ones? Swift Feet, Swift somethings. And there is some other tribe he says will join him. It is these Moon Faces who are not decided. He needs to impress them, I think.’
‘Better than your lot,’ was Venater’s verdict. ‘When you told me what that was about, I thought it was arse backwards both ways.’
Shyri smirked at that, eyes flicking between the two of them. Seeing Asmander being baited came second only to baiting him herself in her list of pastimes, or so he surmised.
‘All that ceremony. Fasting, invocation, sacrifice, just to make someone Kasra, but you’ve already decided who gets to do it: always the eldest brat of the last one.’ Venater was watching him keenly for any crack in the facade.
‘You’d rather everyone fought until only one of them stood?’ Asmander asked him with a superior look. ‘That is how life is amongst the Dragon?’
‘No ceremony, no certainty.’ Venater grinned. ‘When we get back, maybe that’s what I’ll do: cut a few throats and make myself chief. About time I settled down with a few wives.’
Asmander glanced at him sharply, fighting down a flare of real anger, and found himself meeting the pirate’s amused stare. More bait, always more bait, until he found himself lunging at it.
‘I would think those women would rather cut their own throats than settle down with you,’ he managed, knowing it for a weak rejoinder.
‘You don’t understand what women want,’ Venater replied, still coolly jabbing away with a patience that said he could do this all day.
‘Who would not want to lie with the son of Venat,’ Shyri added slyly. ‘The muscles of his arms are like hard melons. His teeth are so yellowed you’d think them nuggets of gold,’ and then, just as Venater was about to expand on her words with more of his attributes, she added, ‘Alas for his name, though: it has entered its second childhood. Have I got it right?’
The old pirate found himself abruptly on th
e other end of the joke, snarling at her, which bred only laughter.
Asmander did not join in.
‘Well, what now, longmouth?’ she pressed him. ‘You trust this Stone River to give you your due, now he’s got his cub back?’
‘We move like his shadow. When he travels to visit these Moon Faces – no, Moon Eaters – I will follow his tracks. I will remind him of his promise.’
‘And if he just sends his hunters out to kill you?’
‘Then I will kill his hunters until he remembers his promise,’ Asmander said dully.
‘And if he sends his Iron Wolves, his great warriors that even the Sun River Nation has heard of?’ she pressed.
‘Then I will see whether they were worth me travelling so far. And perhaps I will die.’ Killing one was hard enough.
‘Is that really it?’ Shyri asked.
He could not tell what she meant. ‘Dying?’
‘Why your chief sent you here, your . . . Tecuman?’
‘My Tecuman, yes. But it was my father who sent me.’ And enough said about that. Asmander must be a dutiful son and do what he was told. Even when he was told to cross the whole world in search of a mad myth. Who would have thought the Iron Wolves were actually real?
Not for the first time he wondered what had happened back home since he set off upriver. Perhaps Tecuman had defeated his sister. Perhaps he was dead. No word would have come to him here, in these cold lands.
‘Well,’ said Venater, eyeing him. ‘You’ve done it, anyway. Think of the look on the old man’s face when you bring him what he asked for. Like something out of that story.’
Bizarrely, Asmander knew exactly the story he meant, or what sort of tale anyway. There were many variants, but there was a young man given an impossible task by someone supposed to be their ally – stepfather, uncle – yet finds some way to complete it. The hero’s return was always a triumphant scene of virtues rewarded, and evil unmasked. Somehow Asmander did not feel that his own exploits would fit into that pattern.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 46
