‘I thank you for teaching me,’ she said bitterly, and made to move on, but Effey gripped her shoulder painfully.
‘I do not teach you; you will not learn,’ the Malikah said. ‘Even now you creep off to speak to your southern friends, as if their struggles were your business. You have chosen your place in the pack, Shyri. When we go into the lands of the Plague People, you will go first. You will make our fire, you will prepare our meat, and you will feel my hand, and the hand of any of my warriors, when anything is amiss.’
Shyri started back. ‘But that’s a man’s work.’ Always in a pack there would be one at the very bottom, to be bullied and pushed about at the whim of the rest, but it had never been her.
Effey glanced at the handful of men in her band. ‘Oh, but they have been true children of the Hyena, as much as a man can. While you have taken your coat to the river and tried to wash the spots from it. But you are of the Hyena, and perhaps you will remember it after we have beaten you enough.’
13
In careful stages, the Plague People had trained her to perform for them. They did not cut or burn or twist her, or even threaten these things. A physical threat she could have met with physical defiance, and perhaps the Champion would have overcome the ache of her wound and the louring pressure of the Terror and she would have died at last, as a warrior should. Instead, though, they tormented her with bright light and close walls. They offered her more food. They brought the soulless children in to beg her. That last wore her down, eventually. It was not that they were punishing the children for her refusal – the boys and girls that came to her gossamer cell seemed well fed, starved only in the soul. But they hurt her. Just the thought of them burned at her, and the sight of them even more so, watching them die inside a little each day as the taint of the Plague People seeped into them. She saw them when they were unhappy and confused, wailing for lost parents and homes, then she saw them when they were quiet and obedient, and that was worse, because the price of such contentment was everything they had once been. And so at last she did what they wanted when they demanded it, just to spare her the sight of the misery of others.
They wanted her to Step. She thought at first it was because they were trying to trap her in an animal body, as they had all the others. Then they would kill her and take her body apart, for their art or their ritual or why ever it was that they did such things.
As they watched her, though, she watched them. Their words remained nonsense, but the way their faces moved was not such an alien language. A look came into their faces when she Stepped, and though they asked her each day to trot through her captive assembly of shapes, they did not seem happy with her. Their features twisted into strange concern, and then the two curious ones would gabble at each other, back and forth at such a pace that she had no chance of learning any of their words. Then perhaps they would bring out the thin sheets they made their drawings on and compare pictures. Craning forward, Maniye once caught a glimpse of bone sketches – the skeleton of a man made so lifelike she almost expected it to leap from the page, and next to it that of a dog or wolf, lines connecting different elements.
And after days of this, feeling her spirit wither a little each time at her capitulation, feeling the deep pain that festered within her grow, she understood. She understood that they did not understand.
They had no souls. They had no shapes to Step to. Their Plague magic let them fly without wings or kindle fire in the palms of their hands, but they could not understand how she did what she did, and it bothered them. They could not let it alone, like a scab they picked at. They beat her down with their bewilderment. Their incomprehension felt like weights being piled on her shoulders. The Champion gave her strength, but she felt it dying with the rest of her, starved of wholesome air.
Some nights she tried to escape her body and reach the gods. Whether the influence of the Plague People trapped her, or whether there were no gods left to reach in this part of the Plains, she never found them, not even the abandoned hunting grounds they had left behind.
One day, without really making a conscious decision to, she stopped eating.
The thought came to her almost like an unlooked-for gift. I don’t have to take this any more. They gave her a bowl of stew, and some raw horse meat because she had eaten that greedily enough before, and never mind whether the beast it had been cut from had walked on two legs once, or been someone she knew. But now she stared dully at it all and found her hunger had been cut loose from her, to drift away into the numb distance. I don’t have to. The Champion still wanted to explode out into the midst of the Plague People, to crunch their bones and taste their flesh. But there were so many of them, and their weapons drove so deep – the wound she had taken when the Plainsfolk fell was still inside her, inching towards her heart. And she feared that they would not kill her, no matter how she provoked them. They were interested in her now. They might have ways to prevent her dying, no matter what pain they caused her. In the pit of her stomach she was afraid.
But she did not have to eat. She could send her body the way of her soul, dwindling day by day. That way she could escape them.
Her stomach protested, but she felt as though a river was bearing the sense of hunger far from her. She could sit in her cage and stare dully at the blurred world beyond, and feel only satisfaction that she had found a way to escape. The wound burned inside her; it ate her but she would starve it. She and her hurt would fall into the darkness with hands about each other’s throat.
When the two curious Plague People came in, they marked the uneaten food but were not concerned. They showed her pictures, and she Stepped from shape to shape after enough prompting. Each beast just lay there on the cell’s silk-lined floor, though, staring at them. They did not understand or know anything was wrong.
And then they came the next day, and still the food had not been touched, and they began to realize something was amiss. The Plague Woman spoke to her, and perhaps her tones were meant to be cajoling or even comforting, but were so alien that they imparted nothing. Maniye just stared at her with a wolf ’s dumb eyes, with a tiger’s mute misery at being caged.
She did not return to her human shape that night, and was a tiger again for them in the morning. Her yellow eyes watched their reaction, their pacing about the outside of her prison as they tried to work out whether she had just gone the way of the others. She wondered if they would be relieved if she had become no more than a beast. Would they burn their sketches and their scribble and pretend she had never been human at all? Would that make things easier for them?
But they brought the children back, and she could not maintain the pretence before them. They knew that the girl was still within the tiger’s skull, not just her soul but her mind. She watched them stare back at her, fellow prisoners but ones who had lost so much more than she.
After five days of lapping desultorily at water, taking no food, they let her out under the open sky again. The two Plague People who were so concerned with her seemed genuinely worried that she would come to harm. Their studies were not yet concluded and so she was a thing of value to them. Under the stern gaze of a score of warriors, killing rods at the ready, she paced slowly out into the bright sun of the Plains and felt its heat, and the breeze in her fur.
She could not help herself. She returned to the form of her birth and stood there on two legs, staring up at the cloudless expanse of the sky. It was not the dour colours of the Crown of the World, but it was the same sky nonetheless. She barely marked the ripple of horror that went through her captors as she changed shape, that act of the soul they would never understand if they studied and anatomized her for a hundred years.
She saw the children had been let out, too. They were sitting in rows before one of the larger tents, and another dark Plague Woman was standing before them. Maniye began to walk towards them, feeling their stares on her thin body – she was barely a couple of years older than the eldest. Were they in her sight just to torment her, or was there
some other purpose . . . ?
In the Crown of the World, children learned from their parents or a priest, but Maniye had seen how the Sun River Nation brought many together to heed one teacher, to learn all the complex things that land had invented. And the Plague People went about things in a similar way, she saw; they were not interested in torturing her with these children. Instead, they were busy turning these unsouled bodies into more creatures like themselves. Plague People would hatch like flies from the minds of these youngsters.
Their looks, to her, were filled with guilt and shame. They would remember their parents and their grandparents, dead or fled, and their villages abandoned to the scavengers. The oldest, at least, understood that they were being made to betray everything they were, but what choice did they have?
Then one more step had taken her too close to the guards, and her eyes abruptly focused on the levelled rods that were practically in her face. The Plague warriors’ expressions were taut with fear of her; that was what she remembered most, afterwards. Even in this little shape, with blunt teeth and no claws, she remained The Unknown to them, the thing they could not conceive of. She terrified them, her whole world terrified them, and she had seen what they did with the things they were scared of.
She drew a deep breath, locking eyes with the Plague Man who was so curious about her. She would take one more step. Their weapons would lance at her and pierce her fragile human flesh. She would die in this shape before all these stolen children. Perhaps it would remind them of how a true human was, in their last sight of one. Her ghost would be trapped in her flesh, but then she did not think her souls could fly free from this place anyway, even if she died in the body of a beast. How could they find their way from the silk-walled warrens of the Plague People all the way to the Crown of the World to be reborn?
She made to take that fatal step, seeing the warriors tense, about to strike her down. The eyes of the curious man widened, bright in his dark face. He shook his head slightly, trying to communicate with her, speaking his sounds.
She made to take that fatal step and the wound within her stabbed out, as though it collaborated with its makers. She remembered instantly that great pain, where every part of her hurt to move; she remembered waking to the weakness. She would step forward, but the wound was suddenly too great a burden. She could not move. She could not stand. They almost killed her when she dropped to her knees.
When the curious man and woman came for her, she Stepped into her wolf shape, which always came easiest to her. She wanted to threaten them, but the snarl she intended was more of a whimper and she shrank from their touch. Without being forced, without even being herded, she slunk back into the tent, back into her cell. Her limbs shook with fatigue and hunger and she lay with her muzzle on her forepaws and whined and could not stop. They waved food in front of her, virtually putting their hands between her teeth, but she ignored them. Inaction was the last form of protest left to her.
She had one more visitor, though, before they left her with her misery for the night. Just when she thought she had plumbed the depths of the Plague People, there was more. After the two curious ones had gone, bobbing with concern and yammering at each other, another man stepped in past the guards. The weird pale light the Plague People made shone on his face and sent a new kind of fear through Maniye. Now she understood.
He was not tall or strong-looking, a slender man in a simple robe. He was not of the same people as the pale guards, nor the dark scholars, nor the little people or any of the others. His skin was grey and his eyes were blank white as though he was blind, though he saw her well enough. She knew that face immediately: when the priests of the Owl painted themselves with ash and drew a line of chalk paste across their eyes, there was a terror to that simple mask that no part of it could account for. Now she was looking on the original that the Owls had preserved. It was the face of the enemy their ancestors had fought in the beginning alongside Bat and Serpent, so that the people could flee the Plague and come to these new lands.
He looked on her, his pale gaze like ice, and she saw something behind it that was not incomprehension or fear, the two reactions she was used to getting from the Plague People. Instead, she saw knowledge. He knew what she was, and that she was his enemy. He understood in a way that the guards with their killing rods did not. He held all the learning that her prying keepers would never be able to dig from her, even if they cracked her bones to the very marrow. He knew what the Plague People destroyed, just by coming to these lands, and he was glad.
Nothing about him that met the eye should have recalled Kalameshli Takes Iron to her, but the old man loomed in her thoughts as she looked on the grey-faced Plague Man. The figure of her childhood with his switch and his strap who had known no other way but to beat the Wolf into her. There was something about the contemptuous arrogance of this creature that brought those unfond memories flooding back, and she knew that the Plague People might have no souls, and perhaps they had no gods, but they had a priest.
The day after was when everything changed. It started just as all the others had, with her lids clenched shut to keep out the glimmering of dawn that the tent walls could not block. She listened to the Plague People rising, exchanging their meaningless stutters. Somewhere one of them laughed and the sound was so universal, so human, that it startled her fully awake.
There was a child crying, behind it all. One of ours. But she did not know if that was true any more.
The two curious ones came in soon after and regarded the food she had not touched. Under the stern eyes of the guards they took it away and brought in more to replace it. The man crouched down and spoke at length, the tone of his voice entreating. They had grown complacent around her. She was a wolf still, and she could have ripped out both their throats before the guards raised their weapons. They were right to be complacent, though. When the thought of moving against them touched her, her wound set up such a savage bone-deep ache that she retched, the nothing in her belly struggling to get past her lips.
She waited for them to command her to Step again. She was feeling so hollowed out by hunger that she wasn’t sure she even could. I was going to die a human. But that no longer seemed so important against the ravening hunger she was keeping at arm’s length. Let me die like this. Let them wear my pelt as a trophy. Why should I care?
Her wolf senses were telling her something was different, though. She cracked open an eye and stared at them, understanding belatedly that there was a distance between the two, who had always seemed inseparable. The change dragged a few dregs of curiosity from her and she forced herself to shrug into her human shape, though she could not make herself stand.
The woman was speaking to her. Maniye didn’t know why they bothered, but apparently this was something that needed to be said, if not understood. She talked at length, and her fellow grew angrier and angrier until he interrupted her. Then they were at it like dogs, not fighting but arguing, their chittering speech thrown back and forth like the rage of idiots. Maniye watched them, fascinated. The woman had made some decision and the man was ridiculing her – no, he was trying to dissuade her, or was he worried for her? She could not keep up with the expressions, and they were never quite the ones she was used to.
And she would never know: there was no stolen child here, who might have learned enough words of their speech to translate. In the end, the man stormed out with a forced laugh, a shot at mockery that fell flat, and the woman stayed on and stared and stared. If the grey priest had reminded her of the Takes Iron of childhood, so Maniye found herself thinking of the Testing, where she had proven herself a Wolf at the end of Kalameshli’s lash. The Plague Woman was bracing herself for some great trial.
Will she kill me now? Maniye wondered. Has she some plan to take my soul to fill that gap in her? But there was no sense of danger, or no more than the whole camp was steeped in, with the Terror of the Plague People in every breath.
Then she too left, and Maniye was none the wiser for any of
it.
She lay down on her side, trying not to think about hunger, and a voice whispered in her ear, ‘Many Tracks,’ so faint she could not tell whether it came from within her head or without it.
She froze. There was a guard at the door but his eyes were set outwards.
‘Many Tracks.’ Like the voice of a ghost.
She shifted, trying to make it no more than a tired body seeking comfort, not a suddenly alert body trying to look around. The words had been her hunter’s name in true human language.
The suspended walls of the cell had a new shadow, tucked at the back, as far from the guard and the entrance to the tent as could be. Maniye stared and stared, because she could not believe what she was seeing. She is in my mind. She is just what I wish to see.
I cannot be seeing Hesprec Essen Skese in the midst of the enemy.
But she blinked, she squeezed her eyes shut until flashes of colour burst across them, then opened them wide as could be and still Hesprec was there, a little River Lord girl with rainbow scales painted across her face and winding cloth covering her head from the sky, just as the Serpents always did.
‘How?’ Maniye made the word a breath. At the door, the guard was half asleep in the muggy sun.
‘I rode in the beak of a Heron, all the way from the banks of the Tsotec.’ Hesprec had her lips to the stretched web of the cell, and Maniye her ear to the other face of it. The words passed through but the Serpent’s soft breath did not, as though it was her thoughts alone that crossed the barrier. ‘For a priest, not a dignified way to travel, but I had to find you.’
‘Why?’ Maniye could feel sobs welling up inside her, wrestling for control of her throat.
‘Isn’t this what we do, Many Tracks? Rescue each other?’
‘You must go,’ Maniye made herself say. ‘This is a bad place.’
‘The Serpent is indebted to the wisdom of the north,’ Hesprec noted, with all of her old dryness. ‘I will hide beneath your cell. I will be the smallest serpent in the world until there is a chance to cut you from this bag.’
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 14
