When he turned, he half thought he would behold the Wolf himself. What came down from the hilltop was grander and more terrible even than that.
It walked like a bear, on flat feet, with curved talons that gouged the earth where they touched, and it possessed a bear’s heavy-shouldered bulk – not quite the size of the Cave Dweller Akrit had just dispatched, but not so far from it. The monster’s head was not the squat muzzle of a bear, though, but a long, grinning gape that had a great deal of wolf in it, were it not for the size. Those were jaws that could reach out into the night sky and pluck down the moon. Its eyes held the gold fire of the sun. Its pelt was black as a panther’s, with a shimmer-sheen of silver to the dense hairs, and its tail lashed the air like a cat’s. There was something of a tiger’s grace to it, too, despite its size.
And, more than that, there was an aura that surrounded the creature, of something more than natural. As it advanced down the hill, Akrit backed away until he was almost amongst his followers, for there was a terrible cold radiance that seemed to limn the creature, perceived only by the mind.
The creature had halted at Broken Axe’s body, staring down at it, and Akrit was half convinced this prodigy must have been sent by the Wolf himself to bring home the soul of his fallen son. For the first time in a long while he had a stab of doubt, beginning to wonder if he had done the right thing.
And the huge monster Stepped, and it was just slight Maniye standing here, gazing with gleaming eyes at the dead animal, at the empty vessel that had once been Broken Axe.
Akrit was finding it difficult to draw breath. He had reclaimed his bear-killer, hands clutching white-knuckled on its haft. There she was! He had only to rush her now and he would be rid of her. And yet, if he shed her blood, the whole world would denounce him as kinslayer. None of them would understand.
‘Kill her,’ he croaked. ‘Takes Iron, Tree Striker, any of you, kill her. Kill her! Kill her now!’
At the sound of his voice, Maniye glanced up and looked him in the eye. She was shaking, and if it was grief that had struck her, she wore it like armour. It was a grief that peeled her lips back from her teeth, and made of her expression something terrible and savage.
She was saying something – he could not hear what it might be. She was speaking, and then she cocked her head as though something answered back.
But she was his child, disobedient and wayward as she was. She was his. He bared his teeth at her, and saw their history reflected in her eyes; her life spent under the shadow of his hand. And he knew he could master her again, and he hefted his falx. If it had served as a bear-killer, it would serve well enough to bring to heel whatever Maniye had become.
Then her eyes narrowed, and she Stepped.
She had not believed it possible until she saw the body: only a wolf with a dark flash of fur across its shoulders, but just as the spirits here were an invisible presence, so the death of Broken Axe left an absence, a gap in the world. There was a man who had walked with Wolves and Tigers, who had fought alongside the Bear. There lay the Wolf who walked by himself, owning to no master save his own judgement. There was the man who had saved Maniye’s mother from the hands of the man who still called himself her father. There lay the man who had hunted her across the Crown of the World; the man who had been her friend in the Shining Halls and who had fought for her freedom, even though it had cost him everything.
There lay the man who had given her a name.
And at last she looked up at Akrit Stone River, who was staring at her with his face clenched into such a tangle of hate and fear, horror and rage that surely the knot of it would never come undone unless it was cut straight through. He was pointing at her, making demands of his warriors, of Kalameshli and of the world. And for once the world was not listening to Akrit Stone River. For once, the sun and moon did not move about his drives and wants and ambition. Instead, the world was watching her.
‘Can I do this?’ she asked, as though Broken Axe might hear her. Within her breast, the tiger and the wolf that she was inheritrix to were both waiting. They did not strain against her any more; there was no rebellion left inside them, and if there was a madness in her, it was of a different order, a thing divine.
‘Can I face him?’ she whispered. A lifetime of blows, of spite, of callous little cruelties spread before her like a path of thorns. She looked on Akrit’s face, and he still meant Fear to her, as if her frightened, beaten past could have its own separate soul. If he raised a hand against her, she would cower back, she knew it.
But the voice rose up within her – the other voice as vast and measureless as the horizon, and it told her that she could.
‘My father,’ she murmured . . . but of course he was not her father, he had never been her father. He was only the man who had tried to make her his.
Her heart was rattling in her chest – her human heart – but she made herself meet Akrit’s eyes, forced herself to do so as though she held a knife to her own throat. She had intended defiance, but there must have been some yielding emotion on her face, because his eyes gleamed and he brandished the weapon at her, the blade that had carved up Loud Thunder, in the hand that had struck down Broken Axe. Here was the man who had harried her mercilessly back and forth across the Crown of the World.
And so she Stepped, and called that Champion whose lair she had found in the Godsland. Its form enveloped her, the iron strength of its muscles, the thick leather of its hide. She stretched, and felt a sullen, enduring power in every sinew, felt her new claws rake furrows in the earth, licked the jagged fence of her teeth with a black tongue.
The great weight of it, the sheer power of her new shape, made Akrit Stone River take a pace back as she closed with him. She tried to build on that: rearing up and stamping on the ground, bellowing in a voice not like a wolf’s or a bear’s or any animal’s. His eyes were very wide, but he held his ground, and then abruptly he had Stepped again, darting to one side and then towards her flank as a big grey wolf. She turned on the spot and swatted at him, missed his fleeting shape and then felt the nip of him at one side. His teeth closed on nothing but thick tufts of her pelt, and a moment later she lurched at him, bringing her bear-claw feet down where he had been and forcing him to back off.
But she could not fight well. Asmander, despite all his winged glory, had never flown. Just so for her: the shape was unfamiliar, its tolerances and capabilities unknown to her. For all her new body’s strength and speed, she was like a woman drunk and unable to use it to its fullest, slipping, overreaching, chasing the swift-footed wolf but never catching him.
He would realize that soon, she knew. So far he was surely congratulating himself on his nimble speed. But he was no fool, and when he understood . . .
And again he was a man, the falx biting down towards her, but he had made the move too swiftly, still unnerved by the Champion’s reek of deep time that cloaked her. She shouldered into him, the haft of the weapon bouncing off her ribs, and then he was down, rolling frantically to get out of her way. She charged him, lumbering forth with a sudden access of speed, but he was Stepped and out of reach long before she got to him.
They faced one another, both panting. Downslope their audience was the Winter Runners and Kalameshli. Upslope, Hesprec was standing in that gap Broken Axe had held for just long enough. The Serpent girl would die too, if Maniye failed.
She growled and slashed at Akrit, batting with her claws like a cat, sending him scuffling backwards, but then he was at her again. He rushed straight into her jaws, it seemed, but, as she snapped at him, he was past her, dodging up the slope. For a moment she thought he was after Hesprec, and she wheeled clumsily. He was only after height, though, Stepping back to human for that leap, then to wolf form for the extra distance its lighter frame would lend him, and then he was a man once more, and on her back.
She reared up onto her hind legs, snarling: it was exactly what he wanted. The hard wood haft of his falx slid under her throat until he had a hand at either end of it
. His arms were only just long enough to manage it; to put a collar about that great neck.
But in the next breath, the neck was not so great, and he was pulling her human head against his mail-clad chest, the weapon’s shaft crushing into her slender throat.
And yet he held off: he did not make that final twist or pull that would finish her. Instead he roared at Kalameshli. ‘Bring your knife, priest, now! Finish her! Give her to the Wolf!’ And she realized that, enraged as Akrit was, he did not want to bring the curse of kinslayer down upon his name.
Her mind was very calm then, somehow. The Champion was at the back of it, awaiting its moment, passing on to her mouthfuls of its strength. She gazed down at the Winter Runners, and met the eyes of Kalameshli.
The old priest shambled forwards, the little bones of his robe clicking and rattling. He had an iron knife in one hand, a piece he must have crafted himself, sweating at the forge as he acted out that secret knowledge known only to the Wolf. Akrit held Maniye rigid, just able to breathe, unable to give voice to more than a choke . . . but her eyes spoke.
Kalameshli stood in front of her: the other scourge of her childhood who had whipped her and pushed her and challenged her. The man who had known of the Tiger in her heart, and hated it, but never told her father. And she had hated him back – with reason! – for a long time, but at least she knew why he had been that man.
He had been like iron, hard as his name, through all her childhood. There had been no love, no give in him. Now he looked like a wretched, defeated shadow of himself.
‘Akrit . . .’ he murmured. ‘Not your daughter’s blood.’
‘Do it!’ Flecks of Stone River’s spittle arced close past Maniye’s face.
The old priest raised his knife and lunged forwards with it, a movement so jerky and sudden that both Akrit and Maniye assumed he had stabbed her – instead of forcing its leather-wrapped hilt into her hand.
She could not sever Stone River’s mail, she knew, not even with iron on iron. He wore no helm, though, and she stabbed back past her own shoulder with the blade, close enough to draw a line of red across her own ear. It bit solidly into Akrit’s face and abruptly he was screaming, and the pressure was gone from her throat.
And the Champion was waiting for her, just like family, gathering her up in its might and power, and she swiped at Akrit with a paw and sent him tumbling back down the slope.
He scattered his own men gathered there, but then found his footing, staggering upright with half his face clad in blood. He screamed at her; he raged, and she raged right back at him.
And he was charging her again, first as a wolf to make up speed, and then as a man, with falx raised high. He was the chief of the Winter Runners; he was the terror of her childhood.
She looked down on him – yes, down! – and realized that the fear had gone from her at last. She roared at him in a thunderstorm of sound that slowed and slowed him further, until he stumbled to a halt outside of her reach. He looked into her beast’s eyes, and saw that she was not his any more.
She advanced with one stomping step after another, swinging her head and baring the daggers of her teeth. Something went out of him then, as though his mastery of her had been his last crutch, and now she had broken it. He had nothing left to hold him up.
He backed off a couple of awkward steps, and then he became a wolf, fleeing like a swift grey shadow for the trees. He did not reach them.
Maniye could not have kept up with him, but another had been waiting for her chance. A form of fire and shadow dropped upon Akrit, raking and savaging, and then it was a woman in bronze mail with knife and hatchet, and then a tiger again, her teeth crushing, her claws ripping until the weak points of his iron hide gave way. And sometimes he was a man, fumbling desperately against her savage jaws, and sometimes he was a wolf shuddering as she stabbed and stabbed at his grey hide. But it was the end of him, in either shape. And so it was that Akrit Stone River came to die.
He died a wolf, in the end. His soul would not be a feast for the Tiger. And that was the best that could be said about the demise of Stone River.
When she had done, Joalpey stood and confronted Maniye, first looking up into her great amber eyes, then down, into her human ones. The Tiger Queen’s reddened weapons were still in her hands and there was a fighting tension in her to match.
Maniye took a deep breath. ‘Do you seek to kill me, now?’
Joalpey just stared at her, still wound up for bloodletting. From around the hill slunk her Tigers: Aritchaka and a handful of others, on two legs and four.
‘If you feared that I might be a weapon used against you,’ Maniye continued, ‘then the hand that would have held that weapon is no more.’ She was very aware of the Winter Runners bunched together and nearer to her than the Tigers were – inching closer, too, as though they were going to stand alongside her. That threw her, because she had expected nothing but enmity from them. Apparently she was still theirs, when Tigers were about. Without her father to feed them his hate, they smelled the Wolf on her.
‘If it is just that the sight . . . the knowledge of me,’ Maniye went on, hearing her voice shake slightly, ‘is impossible to live with, after what was done, then . . . Then you have killed the man who did it. I ask you to leave the hatred there with his corpse. Do not bring it to me. I have not earned it.’
And the Tigers Stepped back and forth, shifting to keep the Wolves in sight, and then again as a handful of people descended from the hilltop. Hesprec was there and the three southerners, and last of all came the slow and limping figure of Loud Thunder, a great bear with a single dog at his heels. The balance of power shivered and danced between them all: a ring of three warbands, with Maniye at their centre.
At last Joalpey took a long breath. ‘It is not over,’ she declared.
Maniye felt the Champion looming large in her mind, ready to come to her aid. ‘Let it be over,’ she urged.
‘He – he is part of this.’ Joalpey jabbed with her knife, and it was Kalameshli Takes Iron that she singled out. ‘I will have this man’s blood. I will have his soul for the Tiger.’
And, of course, she was right. Of course, the old man had played his part. Maniye was living evidence of that.
She glanced back at Kalameshli. The priest was staring levelly at Joalpey. Would he go forth and meet her, knife to knife? Perhaps, and he would die. He was old and, though he was strong, he was no warrior.
He had saved Maniye, at the end. She had left the iron of the knife behind when she Stepped, but not the memory of his actions. If he had remained true to his chief, she would be dead.
Maniye wanted Hesprec’s wisdom and Broken Axe’s calm. She had only herself, though.
‘It is your right, to ask it,’ she replied quietly, thinking through all the words she might say. ‘How can I say that you’re not owed your revenge?’
‘Then give it to me,’ Joalpey demanded.
‘Because I owe him my life. I owe him that debt. And because he is my kin, my blood. Because he is my father. The very act you are owed vengeance for is what put me here – what made me.’
‘What are you saying?’ the Tiger Queen growled.
‘I cannot ask you to forget, but I am asking you, just this once, to stay your hand. For no other reason than your daughter asks it. I have nothing more than that, nothing to bargain with save for that.’
For a long, silent moment Joalpey said nothing, and all eyes were on her. Her lips twitched once, a muscle clenched in the corner of her jaw, her hands tightened on the hilts of her weapons.
At last she spoke. ‘What is this new shape you have, daughter? Is it some Champion of the Wolf that you have called out of the darkness? Is this what will hunt my people when the moon is high?’
And Maniye found she could answer, for that was the one thing she had a full understanding of when she returned to her body from the Godsland.
‘I am a mother to wolves,’ she said softly. ‘I am sister to cats. The blood of bears and hyenas ru
ns in my veins. If I am a Champion of anything, it is of all the beasts that rend flesh with tooth and claw. No one tribe has a claim on me. I am for all the Crown of the World and beyond.’ Saying the words and knowing the truth behind them, she felt a sudden thrill of joy.
‘And whose flesh will you rend?’ Joalpey asked her.
Maniye took a deep breath. ‘Whoever lifts a hand against my people.’ And who are my people? Everyone and no one. Whoever I decide.
The Tigers were watching their queen doubtfully, sensing the shifting emotions within her. Asmander and Venater were poised to fight, Maniye recognized, and Shyri as well. The Wolves were strung as taut as bows.
Hesprec, though: the dark girl caught her gaze and nodded, just the once. Centuries of watching the world gave the small motion weight. Hesprec, at least, felt that Maniye had found the right words to say.
And then Joalpey took another long breath, and cast her knife down before her, point first into the earth.
‘It is over,’ she declared, and a great invisible burden seemed to slough off her shoulders. ‘For you, my daughter, I grant this. Let the old man be kept far, far from the lands of the Tiger, and I will renounce my claim on him. I grant you this, because there is nothing else that I can give you. I have nothing else for my daughter but this.’
The words were said without remorse, flat and empty of feeling, but Maniye’s hide was thicker these days. They did not sting her as they once might.
48
Up here in the highlands the winter was gathering its pack, ready to go hunting in the lowlands. Maniye could hardly believe that, back in those lands she called home, summer had only just spent its store of days. What a time to be travelling in this hard, cold country!
But she had been called to where few outsiders had ever gone. Of all the people she had ever known, perhaps only Broken Axe had travelled into the high country of the Cave Dwellers. Perhaps not even he had been summoned here by their great Mother.
The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 57
