The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  He heard a gasp from within, and then murmured words. He hoped that, in rescuing Broken Axe, he had gained an ambassador to Maniye, to speak for him.

  Then Axe was at the flap again, a hand stretched out, and Asmander passed over the flint edge of his knife, without needing to be asked.

  That was when the woman’s body was found. That was when the Wolves discovered the absence of Broken Axe.

  41

  She had not wanted to believe it at first. As soon as she thought of the secret, she had tried to rid her brain of it, as though it was yet another soul jostling for room there. But the idea refused to go and, looking into the shadowed eyes of Kalameshli Takes Iron, she saw the confirmation. She knew, and he saw the knowledge in her.

  She could destroy him, or at least she could try. If she convinced Akrit of what she had intuited, then he would turn on his own priest. What price angering the Wolf then? If he killed Takes Iron, the other tribes might even abandon him altogether. Killing priests was as bad as killing kin.

  Although she had spent all her years hating him, now that she had that weapon in her hand – the weapon he had handed her, hilt first – she did not know whether she wanted to harm him with it or not.

  He had backed out of the tent, stiff with the knowledge of what she could do to him, and she had turned away from the intruding moonlight and tried to think. This might be her last night before the Wolf took her in his fiery jaws. She wanted to have some of it to herself.

  But no, she heard his tread again, coming back to her, this time padding in the shape of his god. She curled in upon herself, screwing her eyes shut, as if she could simply unmake him and unravel all his history back to the beginning.

  ‘Many Tracks,’ a voice addressed her.

  Her heart jumped within her chest. It was not Kalameshli.

  She scrambled to sit up, and there he was, impossibly: Broken Axe himself. A surge of emotion leapt inside her that she could not anatomize.

  He ducked out for a moment, and came back with a sharp flint, sawing away at her collar with swift strokes. She wanted to question him but, if there was a tale to be told, this was not the time. She could not understand how he had got free and then walked through the camp of his enemies to come to her. She knew only that he had.

  Then she was loose, and she felt both the tiger and the wolf within her leap up, clamouring for her attention. For an instant her own shape slid through her hands, and she felt herself losing control of it, her twin souls about to battle each other there and then. Her Serpent dream had lent her a little control, though, as if its invisible coils were still hobbling them. She took them each by the scruff of the neck and held them apart in her mind.

  Then there was a yell from elsewhere in the camp, and Broken Axe bared his teeth, that grimace becoming a wolf’s snarl as he Stepped. She copied him, finding her wolf feet, and the two of them were out of the tent and into the open air.

  She scented him instantly: the southerner. He was crouching by the tent flap, but Broken Axe stood beside him, and so she understood that somehow the dark man was here as her ally, not her enemy. She would trust Axe’s judgement.

  There were more important matters right now, for the Wolves were coming.

  It was just a couple of them at the moment, but their cries had woken up all the camp. There were vital seconds in which confusion would run from Wolf to Wolf – surely the Tigers were attacking! Then they would look to their prisoners and all would be lost.

  There was one who came as a wolf, and the other as a man. Perhaps hoping she would just flee, Broken Axe threw himself at the first, snarling and snapping out of the shadows, the two of them rolling over and over. The second paused, a hatchet already to hand, eyes flicking from the two fighting animals to Maniye herself. He was a hunter called Thorn Foot, one of Akrit’s cronies since forever.

  He lunged at her, letting his companion trust to his own luck. He was coming in with an open hand though: grabbing rather than attacking, just as if she was still the girl he remembered. She got her teeth into his fingers and shook her head savagely, and he howled with pain. Bones ground between her jaws. Then the axe came up, a swift feint at her that sent her skittering back, his blood in her mouth – and Asmander cut him down.

  The southerner made his rise from the shadows flow into the downward-cleaving arc of his sword: a single fluid motion. The stone teeth of the weapon sheared into Thorn Foot just where his shoulder met his neck, and the man was snuffed out just as swiftly, live meat to dead meat in an eyeblink. The taste in Maniye’s throat was abruptly that of a corpse.

  ‘Go, now!’ Asmander urged. Broken Axe had seen his opponent off, sending the other wolf running with his tail between his legs. The whole warband was converging on them, though. They were in the heart of their enemy’s little domain.

  Maniye had a sudden vision of herself ending up with the altar at her back, the whole escape attempt nothing more than a means to bring her to sacrifice.

  ‘With me!’ The southerner was haring off through the camp. He was still a man, not even in his fighting shape.

  Broken Axe shared a look with her, wolf to wolf, and she saw that neither of them had a better idea.

  She saw a wolf leap at Asmander, enraged beyond all telling by the foreigner’s intrusion. He caught the animal with a smooth upward swing that barely seemed to interrupt his sprint, yet cast his attacker away trailing a spray of dark droplets. Others were massing into a pack, though, and there would be archers. Even the greatest warrior in the world could not fight all of Stone River’s hunters together.

  And yet she followed the southerner, Broken Axe coursing alongside her. There were jaws nipping at her heels and she saw an arrow darting almost lazily above her, close enough that she could have jumped and caught it. She could hear her father’s furious bellow.

  A man came at them with a spear, driving it for Broken Axe’s side. Axe twisted away, almost belly to the earth to avoid it, and Maniye leapt into the attacker’s face, snapping jaws one moment, then Stepping to her tiger shape to slap him down with her greater weight, raking him a little with her rear claws even as she kicked away.

  But there was nowhere to go, and Asmander was at bay now, his back to the river. Still, he was calling to her, calling to both of them: ‘With me! With me!’ An arrow clipped his arm and hung in the thick fabric of his coat.

  And by then there were enough of the Wolf close behind her that all she could do was head towards him. All her options in this whole doomed venture had narrowed to that.

  ‘Step,’ Asmander yelled, ‘and hang on!’ He had slipped his blade away and was reaching out with empty hands.

  Broken Axe reached him first, clasping wrist to wrist and being yanked closer, and then Maniye just threw herself forwards. For a terrified moment she did not think she could resume her human form – the souls within her twisting in rebellion – but then she slammed into Asmander, arms about his waist, hard enough to knock him into the water.

  She felt him Step. His body thickened suddenly, her grip slipping and scrabbling over ridged and rugged scales. She thought she would lose her purchase on him altogether, but then she had hold of a stubbly limb, her legs wrapped about the strong barrel of his torso. He was driving forwards into the water with great flexing contortions of his spine. She could barely snatch a breath of air, held underwater half the time. Arrows and even spears were lancing into the river like murderous kingfishers. She saw at least one strike solid against Asmander’s armoured back but simply glance away.

  And then they were out of the camp, even though there were wolves trying to pace them along the banks. With the current and his thrashing strength, Asmander was making them run hard to keep up with him. All the while the banks grew higher, the forest more snarled.

  From then on, simply getting herself a half-breath of air was all Maniye could concentrate on.

  The next she knew, she was lying half-conscious in the forest by the riverside, soaked through and chilled to the bone. Dawn
was still some way off, and someone was trying to prise her out of her clothes.

  She kicked and spat, Stepping into a very sodden tiger, her back arched and hissing. It was Broken Axe, she realized. He lifted his head, plainly listening for any suggestion they had attracted attention, then held up a tunic and a coat, dry clothes produced from somewhere. He himself was as bedraggled as she was.

  She regained her human form with a quick nod, and stripped away her river-ruined clothes, struggling into the new garments, which were far too big for her. Broken Axe had acquired dry leggings and a thin tunic, and was now tugging them on unselfconsciously. After she had the coat firmly wrapped about her, she realized that Asmander was still with them, wearing several layers less than he’d sported before.

  There was something important that had struck her about him during that mad river-ride, but it was gone from her head now.

  ‘We can’t risk a fire, of course,’ she guessed. ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘If you’re fit enough, we travel,’ Broken Axe told her. ‘The southerner has somewhere to go.’

  ‘Does he?’ Maniye fixed Asmander with a hard stare. ‘What do I think about you, Son of Asman?’ His title came to her even as she spoke. She hoped that using it made her seem even a little more intimidating.

  ‘Think what you want.’ He shrugged. ‘But come with me.’

  ‘You’re going to trade me to the Tiger now?’

  ‘I was not sent to make bargains with the Tiger. My father sent me only to the Wolf,’ he replied candidly. ‘I had been promised what I needed, in return for you. Long before I even met you was that promise made – back at the Stone Place when your father went mad.’

  ‘He’s always been mad,’ she told him darkly. ‘So what now?’

  ‘Now I do not have what I needed. Nor will I obtain it.’

  She shivered, and Broken Axe hugged her to him. She twitched away from him at first, because the stripes on her back hurt, and because she didn’t know what she thought about him. He was warmer than she, though, and sharing that with her.

  ‘We will need to move soon, wherever we go,’ Axe murmured.

  She nodded jerkily. ‘So why?’ she demanded.

  For a long while he remained silent, his dark face unreadable, then just tilted his head towards Broken Axe. ‘For him.’

  Maniye did not know what to make of that, and she suspected that Axe didn’t either, but it was said now, and apparently there was to be no more explanation. ‘So what was it your father wanted anyway? Furs? Timber?’ She was trying to remember what the Horse had been carrying south on their great barges.

  ‘Warriors: the Iron Wolves,’ Asmander explained with a fragile smile. ‘Where I come from, they are a myth to frighten children. Perhaps I shall go home and say they are no more than a myth indeed.’

  ‘And where would you lead us now?’ Maniye was reaching inside herself for strength, finding it bleeding back into her limbs slowly.

  ‘This river will take us to a Horse Society camp,’ Asmander told her. ‘My companions should already be there.’

  ‘The girl with the laugh and that big man who hates everyone?’

  ‘Just the same.’ His grin was startlingly white. ‘And there will be another. One who very much wishes to meet you again.’

  She didn’t like the sound of that at all, but at the same time she had no sense of malice from him. His perverse humour was back, which meant that he was done with straight answers.

  Soon after, they were setting off along the river. Maniye wondered how far the Wolves were ranging; how her father’s new rage had manifested itself. She wondered about whether the Tiger had turned back for the Shining Halls, or whether the Fire Shadow People were also trailing her, clashing with their Wolf enemies. The world was cast in fog, and the only way she could discover what was out there was to go to it.

  Maniye thought she could not be so far from that very outpost she and Hesprec had fled to at the beginnings of winter. When she asked, Broken Axe confirmed that would likely make any Horse they found to be of the same clan or family or band of the Horse Society. This gave her a little heart, as she recalled their small kindnesses before: the clothes and the warning.

  They followed the river at Asmander’s behest. When she trusted herself to Step, Maniye’s wolf nose told her once more where she was, and how to reach places. She felt that she had been travelling in darkness, both night and day. Now finally there was a little sliver of light. She tried to look within herself to find the root of this new hope. Her passage through her father’s hands had broken some hold on her that he had still possessed all this time, even when she was sitting at her mother’s feet in the Shining Halls. She had seen him for the man he truly was. Even whipping her with his switch, he had been a thing diminished: not the ogre of childhood nor the all-powerful god-chief. Even as he had expounded his plan for the Tiger, which could never have worked, she had seen further and understood greater mysteries. He was nothing more than a man.

  And after that had come the revelation gleaned from Kalameshli. Hurrying along the path of the river, Broken Axe and Asmander at her side, she felt a control of her own destiny that had been lacking for a very long time.

  And then the Horse were ahead, and this was not the trading post, though she knew by now that it was the same river. Instead, they had arrived at a point where the river was shallow and wide. There the Horse Society were camped in force and busily engaged – with two dozen of the Boar and Deer – sieving and trawling the sands of the shallows with nets, for their own mysterious purposes.

  The three of them were spotted at a distance: a black man with two wolves trotting at his heels. She saw that the Horse people included a fair number armed with little curved bows and spear-hafted axes that would surely give even a bear pause. They recognized Asmander, though, and the arrows were returned to their quivers. Soon after, as Maniye’s party neared the camp, the other two southerners turned up and with them a figure whose bulk put even Venater into shadow.

  Maniye broke into a run, Stepping to her human form so close to him that she almost collided. ‘Loud Thunder!’ She was aware that many of the Horse had stopped playing with their nets to watch, but she decided that she didn’t care what others thought. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘The Sons of the Bear travel where they like,’ he replied, somewhat defensively. He had his axe in hand and wore foul-smelling armour of grease-hardened fleeces: a Cave Dweller ready for war.

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Venater was saying to Asmander. ‘You actually came back with her. I was heading south today, maybe tomorrow. I was going to tell old Asman that his favourite son had died attempting something stupid, just to see his face. You ruin everything, you do.’

  Asmander shrugged. ‘The Crown of the World has no shortage of stupid ways to die. You’ll get your chance.’

  And the woman, Shyri, cackled and smirked. ‘Ignore him. He was fretting all this time for fear you’d take his name with you to the Wolf’s belly.’

  Maniye ignored the southerners and their banter. Instead she drew Loud Thunder aside, because him, at least, she was glad to see.

  ‘Maniye Many Tracks,’ he addressed her. ‘Running again?’

  ‘Always.’ She felt her whole life since the Testing had been one long flight.

  ‘Not from Broken Axe these days?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  His look caught her utterly by surprise with its childlike happiness. ‘Good, that’s good. Broken Axe, he’s a good friend. You, you’re a friend, too. It’s not right for friends to fight.’

  She nodded at that. ‘You came when he called – when the Tiger was attacking?’

  He shrugged, looking almost embarrassed. ‘I am all sorts of stupid sometimes, the things that I do.’ He went wandering off towards the fire, where some of the Horse were cooking. ‘For many days since the Stone Place I have been teaching war to the men of the Bear. Very slow, very dull. Much more interesting to follow Broken Axe.’
/>   That made her laugh as she followed him. ‘Surely the Bear don’t need teaching how to fight?’

  He grimaced. ‘We brawl, we are rough with each other, we hunt. But fighting? That is hard work. Hard work does not come easy to my people.’

  ‘And your Mother chose you for this?’

  ‘Because I once fought. After the Tiger was beaten . . . so many warbands in the Crown of the World then, working for meat, for mates, for glory. I was young.’ He sounded very apologetic. ‘We went many places – me, Broken Axe, Peace Speaker, Storm Born, Restan Bastard.’ Across Thunder’s broad face, a gentle tide of memories washed like a lake’s shallow ripples. ‘We went all over, even to the Plains when the Lion were still trying to rule. But always we returned . . . or most of us. Peace Speaker, he was killed, and Restan too. And Storm Born went south. He was mad, though. He had destinies like a dog has worms, that one . . . But I fought, so they make me a teacher of war.’ His expression showed exactly what he thought about that.

  ‘And now you’ve run away from your Mother again,’ she divined, and the Cave Dweller cast his eyes sideways, as though the rest of the Bear might spring out from the Horse tents to accuse him.

  ‘I have not forgotten what I was told,’ he mumbled. ‘I have come here because I am concerned for my old friend Broken Axe, that is all.’ His display of nonchalance was unconvincing. ‘And also for my new friend, Many Tracks.’

  She stared at him, unable to tell how serious he was being.

  She found inside herself a sudden desire not to be important. She remembered Hesprec joking with her about prophecies and destinies, and how she had wanted there to be some mystic star above her head – one that would give her a purpose in the world. Now she was wiser. She had witnessed Asmander fighting the purpose his father had laid across his shoulders like a yoke; she had seen how Broken Axe lived, who knew no destiny but the dictates of his own heart. She had known how it felt to have others risk their lives for her. Perhaps she had yearned for the eggshell crown that was a destiny, the year before, but now it was summer and she was grown, and childish things were left behind her. That the world had a purpose for her, she had no doubt, but the chief use most of it seemed to have for her was as a corpse.