But he said, ‘Yes,’ trying to make himself sound enthusiastic. ‘I will have done my duty.’
Shyri snickered at that, and he glared at her. ‘The Laughing Men know nothing of duty, then?’
‘There are things you must do, and things you must not do. We know this.’ Her smile was blithely unconcerned with his feelings. ‘You river people find it so complicated, so hard to tell one thing from another. You use so many words.’
‘Loyalty,’ he snapped at her. ‘Duty. Family. These are just words to you?’
She exchanged a sidelong glance with Venater, as though the two of them were conspirators in Asmander’s torment. ‘All words are just words. They are not the things they are used for.’
Asmander opened his mouth to argue, then found her point too unexpectedly philosophical to make headway with. This was the sort of talk the Serpent priests debated in the temple.
Venater had at last grown bored. ‘Home soon, anyway,’ he suggested.
Asmander nodded.
‘Gratitude of the Kasra, I reckon. Or half a Kasra, anyway. Good way to make your mark, that. All those snapping fools at your Tecuman’s feet, each one giving all their strength to fighting the next man for the least scrap from his table. And in you come, Asmander the Champion, with your Wolfguard, ready to swear the iron savages into your Kasra’s service. Good way to make everyone realize you’re on top.’
‘Is it?’
‘Not as good as biting some throats out, true, but – oh, no, you’re all too civilized for that. As if it wasn’t always the best way.’
‘Enough, Venater.’
The old pirate merely chuckled. ‘Now what your man really needs is Dragons.’
‘He has them. Or do you think your people will be in rebellion against the whole of the Sun River Nation, when we return?’
‘Half,’ Venater corrected, almost absently. ‘And we might. Hadn’t thought of it, but we might. Even if not, though, your man has us, but he doesn’t have us. There’s not-fighting-against, and then there’s fighting for.’
He was angling for some concession, but Asmander was not in the mood. ‘If the Dragon have betrayed Tecuman, then I will send you out to kill them. To kill your own kin until they kill you.’
Venater went still. It was not really the kinslaying: the Dragon were notorious for simply not caring about all sorts of concepts that were the basis of human life everywhere else – even in the Crown of the World it appeared. It was a threat of a new order from Asmander, though. It was a promise to abuse the old pirate’s freedom more harshly than before.
‘I’d be careful what plans you make,’ was Venater’s quiet pronouncement.
‘Because one day the Dragon will rise up from the delta and ravage all the Tsotec?’
‘One day, maybe.’
Asmander’s smile was like a knife. ‘But first you must learn how to work together. You must stop killing each other over petty slights and women. You must become more than murderous children, Venater – become more like us. And you never will.’
And there was the spark, alight again in the old pirate as though it had never gone out. There was the fierce, fighting rage that Asmander remembered from when he had fought and bested this man. And this time Venater was not drunk and suddenly woken into a fight. This time he was fresh, and ready to bloody his hands.
‘No reaver of the Dragon would shed so much skin as to be like you.’
‘Reaver is a fancy word for a thief. Even her people are more honest.’
‘What?’ Shyri had been following the exchange keenly, plainly not sure how serious they were.
For a moment Asmander wondered if he could bait either into a real fight. And why? But he knew why. Venater trying to kill him was something that was simple and comprehensible. He would welcome the Dragon’s teeth in his throat, or his own claws in the old pirate’s gut.
‘I will forget your name,’ he spat.
Venater’s fists were clenched.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Shyri complained.
‘You will be a child forever. I will cast your name out of my mind.’ Asmander tried to make every word a javelin to hurl at the man. ‘There will be none who can give it back to you.’
‘But I know what his name is,’ the woman put in, baffled, ruining Asmander’s moment of triumph. ‘I even know what it was before you did whatever thing . . . you just made a new sound on the end of it. That’s just some stupid river thing. It isn’t real.’
They were both staring at her now. She glanced wide-eyed from one face to the other and for the first time seemed genuinely off balance.
‘It is? That’s a thing you can do?’ And, as they continued to stare at her, ‘You people are crazy.’ But she sounded impressed, too, as if she had finally found a secret of the river worth knowing. ‘So what happens if he’s stuck with his baby name forever?’
Venater went for her, but she was absolutely ready for that and Stepped away from him, reviling him with her high cackle. Venater had Stepped too, and now he was very still, a long black shape with scales that glittered in the firelight, its blue tongue lashing the air angrily.
Shyri had achieved what she had set out to, though. She had cut the tension between them, playing the pair of them. No doubt she thought she was doing the right thing.
And we all know what comes of doing the right thing.
She was grinning, and her self-satisfaction irked him like sand under his eyelids, like broken shards underfoot. Even as she opened her mouth for some witticism he pushed himself up from the fireside and sloped off to the dim periphery of its light, sitting there alone. He thought one of them might come after him, told himself he didn’t want them to . . . then was honest enough with himself to admit just why he had stopped short of the deeper darkness. Conduct unbecoming of a Champion.
Another sore point.
He took his maccan from his belt, letting his fingers touch lightly alongside the sharp stone teeth, finding any loose flakes, investigating the gaps left by those that were missing. He had a pouch of new blades – obsidian from home and flint that he had knapped here in the Crown of the World. He set about repairing and replacing, a constant duty with such a weapon but one that he hoped would settle his mind.
His father would be very proud of him, or at least that was the ideal. Tecuman would smile on him for returning home with such a savage and indomitable bodyguard. Yes, Asmander had done well.
He worked patiently and carefully, fingers delicate in placing the razor-edged flakes. Still his mind did not clear, but surged and roiled like rapids in flood. Then, after plenty of time had passed, there came the scuff of a footstep nearby. Not Shyri but Venater.
‘What?’ the pirate demanded bluntly.
‘Is it not you who have come to me?’ Asmander asked him, his hands still busy at work.
‘Let it go,’ Venater advised. ‘I would.’
‘Would you?’ No sense in denying what was eating at him.
‘Don’t you think you did it right?’
At last Asmander’s fingers stilled and he looked up, saying nothing.
‘You know what I think?’ Venater went on, squatting down on his haunches.
‘No doubt you will gift me with it.’
The pirate smirked. ‘You did it right. You surprised me. I didn’t think you had that in you. But you led her right to her daddy. You got what you were after, no matter how. That’s good. That’s the way things are done in proper places. My people know that. The Wolves know it, too, I reckon. It all worked out perfectly.’
‘And that’s what you think?’
‘Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t anyone? Life’s a killer. The only way you win is be a killer back, twice as hard. Biggest bastard at the end of the day wins the morning.’
Asmander looked into his face: lantern-jawed, traced with lines and scars, the eyes like flints, long greying hair bound back. There was more going on behind that face than the barbarian whose words he aped. Who else would believe
that, from somewhere in there, a keen intelligence was peering slyly out? Not the learning of letters nor the mysteries of the priests, but a man who knew people, if only because it was easier to kill them if you did.
‘So we rejoice,’ the Champion half asked.
‘I do.’ Venater grinned. ‘Does you good to be more like a real man, like me.’
Asmander stood up suddenly, the maccan clutched tightly in one hand, the other knotted into a fist. Venater just leered up at him, utterly unworried.
Asmander took a deep breath. ‘You’ve always known, haven’t you?’
‘Since you got back from selling the girl? I know you, Son of Asman. I’ve had to put up with you all the way from the Riverlands. When you’re pleased with yourself, I know it – which is rare enough ’cause you’re a gloomy streak of piss. When you’re eating yourself up inside, I know that too. And you are now. So just say it.’
‘I believe I am having second thoughts.’
‘Oh, how terribly civilized of you.’ The pirate mocked his tone perfectly. ‘Did you even work out why yet? I take it you don’t think it’s really about the girl. Tell me you’ve not decided you love her or something.’
Asmander shot him a sharp look. ‘She’s not my type. It’s not her. She’s nothing to me.’ Actually speaking the words made him feel better than anything else that evening. ‘I owe her nothing.’
‘It’s the old Snake, then? Because he liked her, you have to?’
Again Asmander shook his head. ‘Maybe you don’t know me so well after all.’
Venater just frowned at that, like a hunter who has lost the trail. Because he is, in the end, just enough of what he seems to be: a bloody-handed old man of the Dragon who would not understand. And Asmander smiled at the pirate, because it was good that there were constants in the world, even if some of them were evil ones.
It was not Hesprec. It was certainly not Maniye. Oh, he sympathized with her, but that was life: duty and loyalty and family and society, all cages within cages. Believing in freedom was just a knife the girl had made and given to the world to cut her with.
Except . . .
In his mind was a man he had barely met, who had uttered only a handful of words. But those words! The Wolf had no true Champions, but there was a man who should have been one. When he had spoken, the soul within Asmander had resonated with what he had to say. He had no shackles on him to drag him down, to make him less than he should be.
As I have lessened myself.
In the end, it was because Asmander felt bitterly ashamed of disappointing Broken Axe, a man who should mean less to him than a stone underfoot.
Venater sighed. ‘Knew it was too good to be true,’ he muttered, and then, ‘Oi, Laughing Girl!’
Shyri ventured over, looking from one to the other. ‘You two lovers finished your spat, have you?’
‘We have,’ confirmed Asmander.
‘He’s got something to tell you,’ Venater leered.
There was a tiny fraction of a moment when her expression was unguarded, but then the usual snide smile was back in place. ‘Oh?’
‘He’s going to get that girl back.’
Shyri laughed, head thrown back. Then, realizing nobody was joining in with her, she stopped. ‘No, he’s not. That would be a stupid thing to do.’
‘No argument here about that,’ agreed Venater.
‘Or here.’ Asmander sighed. ‘But it is true, even so.’
She tried another laugh, but the resulting sound was an uncertain one. ‘There’re more than a few of those Wolves there, Iron or not. Is the great Champion going to fight them all?’
‘Who can say? Perhaps they will line up for me sideways on, like in the carvings.’
Venater snickered at that, but Shyri just frowned.
‘Well, then, when do we go? What is your plan?’
‘I have no plan. We do not go. I go. With my lack of plan.’ And then, ‘You’d go, too, would you?’
‘Someone has to watch and laugh,’ she replied defensively.
He stood. The time for it was now, he realized, or he might change his mind. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me.’ She tried to back off, but he caught her wrist before she could do so, and held on for a moment before she tugged it free. ‘You’re stupid. You want to die so much, let me open your throat.’
‘So kind an offer, but I owe that honour to Stone River’s Wolves.’
‘Then tell us where we can meet you.’
He almost laughed at that, but she was desperately serious about it, just as he had been. ‘So now you think it’s a good plan, and it will work?’
‘No, but tell us anyway.’
‘I have nowhere to suggest for you.’ Asmander spread his hands. ‘This is not my land. What can I say?’
And a new voice broke in, a girl’s voice, ‘Let me say it for you then.’
They all three whirled round to confront her, and for a moment Asmander thought it must be Maniye herself, somehow free and come to accuse him. He found himself looking into a different face, though: a strange face and yet one that he knew.
40
The Tiger came to her in dreams, but only to express its disappointment. As she slept, her mind was wandering out in the dark, with only the fire-glimmer of her mother’s god to light her way.
You should have tried harder to cast out the Wolf within you, came the low rumble of the Tiger’s voice. If you had only pleased your mother more, she would have taken you in. You could have been the golden child of the Shining Halls, if only you had been better.
And when she fled from it, into the darkness – on human feet, for the leash restricted her even in her dreams – there was the Wolf, a greyness shifting through the midnight forests of her imagination.
You could have been High Chief’s daughter, it growled. If you had truly wished, you could have been one of my children and run with my pack. Instead I will feast on your soul.
And still she fled, but the two of them were always with her, snarling at each other and at her.
She knew it was a dream; that was the worst part. She fled and she fled, knowing it for one of those inescapable dreams that would pursue her to the very shores of waking. And, at the same time, the Tiger and the Wolf were truly within her and still at war. She knew that some men and women had dreams that told them the future or let their souls speak to the gods. When Maniye dreamt, she spoke only with her own fighting souls as they grew more and more savage within her. In the dream, her feet bled and her skin was lashed with briars, yet still they made her run.
Then there was something ahead that was not just gloomy ghost-forest or the shades of remembered hills. She saw open water and an island crowned with stones: the Stone Place, and yet not quite. At first she stumbled to a halt at the water’s edge, finding no causeway there, and the Tiger and the Wolf came to her and loomed above her, their eyes like stars in a clouded sky, baring their teeth like the curve of the moon.
But something glimmered within the water that was not a mere reflection, and she saw scales sliding past scales there, reflecting rainbow colours even in the darkness. As the animals inside her howled and spat, she stepped out over those measureless depths and, wherever her feet touched, those looped coils rose from the depths, ridged and somehow dry, and bore her weight. Each step was taken with a faith that she could not imagine copying in her waking life, but the Serpent was there for her each time she entrusted her weight to the waves.
And she found herself on the island, which was so small that two men lying head to foot could have spanned it, with a handful of tumbled old stones, as if it was what the Stone Place had once been in the unimaginable mists of time, before it had grown into what it was now. The Tiger and the Wolf were swimming after her now, for the Serpent would not consent to bear them.
You should have cast out the cat from you! came the vicious cry of the Wolf. And now you will burn!
And from the Tiger: What mother could want a creature such as you! What
are you if you will not make up your mind?
Something rose in her with that barb, as though she had acquired a third soul from somewhere, possessing the strength to face down the other two. ‘I am Maniye! I am Many Tracks! And I will walk my own path, and I will be nobody’s slave!’
And she woke to the sound of her own voice crying out, and found herself staring into the eyes of Kalameshli Takes Iron. The old priest was kneeling beside her, far too close for comfort, and she shrugged and elbowed herself away from him until she was right at the tent’s sloping edge, at the limit of her leash. He stayed where he was, illuminated by a strip of moonlight shining through the open flap.
‘You were calling out to the Wolf,’ he observed.
Maniye bared her teeth at him. ‘There were three gods in my dream, old man. It was not the Wolf that helped me when I was in need.’
‘The Wolf does not help,’ he replied, surprisingly mildly. ‘The Wolf wants us to be strong. We cannot be strong if we live our lives on crutches. The Wolf chases away the summer stars and brings the winter: you know this. The Wolf sends the ice and the snow, and makes the game scarce. And the other tribes grow weak, as they shiver by their fires, and only we remain strong.’
She could not say where the next revelation came from, but the words were on her lips already. ‘There are two ways of seeming strong: to build yourself up or to throw all others down. But only one of these is truly a way of being strong.’ The thought felt like sacrilege, but it tasted like truth on her tongue. She imagined Kalameshli’s face darkening, because he would not value that kind of truth. She thought he would reach for a switch and beat her just as her father had, and so she burst out, ‘What does it matter? You’ll burn me anyway, tomorrow or the next night.’
‘It may not be so,’ Kalameshli said quietly.
But she knew him of old. If he held out any hope to her, it could only be so that she would grasp it by the sharp edge and cut herself. ‘You will do as Stone River bids you,’ she said. ‘And you will do it joyfully. You have always hated me for what I am. This chance now must be a thing made from your dreams.’
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 47
