‘What is this for?’ Maniye asked.
‘For making talk and nothing else,’ Shyri told her.
‘Words can heal, if you let them,’ Hesprec said mildly. ‘The Plains is bleeding. Here they try and staunch that wound. They need hope. Thunder, you can speak, tell them of your victory.’
He grunted, nodding reluctantly. ‘If they will listen.’
‘And Many Tracks . . . ?’
‘I have only just found enough hope for me,’ she said. ‘I have none to spare for them.’
‘That is not how hope works,’ Hesprec pointed out.
‘And will you tell them of Galethea? Do you see hope in her?’ Maniye needled.
‘I do.’ Hesprec paused. ‘But I don’t know what I will make of her yet. So I will say nothing.’
‘What is Galethea?’ Thunder wanted to know.
‘A long story, and a difficult one.’ Hesprec shrugged. ‘Later. Not here.’
Maniye tried to follow what was being said at the gathering. There were chiefs of the Plains tribes speaking, one after another, giving numbers of warriors they had which surely must have been exaggerations, trying to outdo one another. Then someone else would speak to say that some new village was gone, just gone, the Plague taken it. Perhaps some had fled and lived, perhaps not. And the boldness would go out of those chiefs with the warriors they might or might not have, and the mood of the crowd would waver again.
Then Asman got up to address them; Maniye hadn’t even realized he was present at the council. The Champion was burning high within him – enough that everyone listened rather than talking over each other the way they had. For a moment she thought the River Lord youth would make some great sweeping speech and suddenly everyone in the Plains camp would have a knife in their hands ready to run off and throw themselves into the Terror of the Plague people. Asman was no great speaker, though. The greatness of his soul bottled itself up in the awkwardness of his words. ‘We have fought them; we have won,’ he said, but everyone there had heard about Tsokawan by then; the fortress’s name was a susurration back and forth across the crowd. ‘What else is there?’ he demanded of them. ‘The Sun River Nation is sending its soldiers, every one that can be spared. The strength of the Tsotec and the Estuary both are coming to fight the Plague People with you!’ And abruptly it was as though the Champion had his tongue and spoke through him, eloquence beyond anything he could normally boast. ‘River spears coming to the Plains! No new story, I know. But you never saw so many spears as my Kasra is mustering right now. And for once we’re not here to burn some village of yours, not here because you came and burned one of ours! Who would ever have thought the day would come when the north bank of the Tsotec was crossed in peace?’
And a little ripple of laughter eddied about them; Maniye saw heads lifted, saw the Plainsfolk re-evaluate Asman even as he mocked himself. ‘I will not say the Plague People will drop dead to see so many spears! I will not say they are just a dream, and waking together will rid us of them. You’ve fought them; I’ve fought them; the northerners have fought them. We all know the cost. We know what they are, the horror of them.’ And his voice had grown quieter and quieter, and so had his audience, to hear him. ‘We know this; so we know they must be fought. Or there is nothing.’
Then one of the Plains Boar chiefs was standing, an old man who must have been huge with muscle when he was young, but had been hollowed out by age until only a cadaverous hulk was left. ‘I believe we should go west,’ the Boar said, fatigue in every word. ‘The east is lost to them, but how far can they go? How much land can they use?’
A Lion stood, shouting down other voices to spit out, ‘They don’t use land! They just want to kill us all. And if you don’t fight, then there isn’t enough west you can travel, to save you from them!’
And even that’s a lie we tell ourselves, Maniye thought, though she could never have said so to the crowd. They don’t even want to kill us, not like that.
So many of the Plainsfolk clearly wanted the Boar chief to be right, no matter the evidence. They had fought the Plague People twice, three times, some of them. They had lost and lost, braved that withering fear and cast their lives and homes into it. They had so little left.
Hesprec was on her feet. Maniye had seen her quell a battle south of the River, but the Plainsfolk lacked that reverence for the Serpent, and none marked her. More and more voices rose in argument, as Asman stared about him in frustration. Impossible that anyone be heard now.
Except there was one. One thin old Plainsman, standing very still and wrapped in a blanket that had been brightly coloured once and was now just dust and loose threads. He stood so still that silence fell from him in waves, until when he raised his trembling voice, everyone heard him.
‘There is a way,’ he said, and all ears were ready for it. By Maniye’s side, Hesprec had gone very still.
‘There is one voice not heard from,’ the starveling old man told them. ‘One voice that you have all refused to hear. But there is a way.’
‘No, no, no . . .’ Hesprec whispered, and Stepped, vanishing amongst the bodies pressed around them, a fine thread of a serpent weaving between them. Maniye blinked, looking around in bafflement, surprising a predatory stare from Shyri as she looked at the old man. She could see Asman was blank too, but amongst the Plainsfolk she sensed a shared understanding, a name nobody spoke.
‘The Plague People do not come to kill you,’ the old man quavered. ‘They do not come to raise their animals on your land, to take your treasure or make slaves of you.’ A cracked titter of laughter escaped him, high and weirdly horrifying. ‘They come to undo you. They come to replace you like you never were, and wipe you from the land. How will you fight that, River man? Will you stab it with a spear? Will you cut it with your stone-tooth sword? But there is a way, oh yes. There has always been a way. You tell your stories of Owl and Bat and Serpent, but you do not say the other who stood against the Plague People, the fourth brother.’
‘There is no fourth brother!’ Asman snapped, and Maniye was of the same opinion, but the Plainsfolk had different stories perhaps.
‘You cannot drive the Plague back by making war on it. List your great victories, and tell me what they have achieved. Some handful in the north, a stone tower fallen in the south? And all the while they grow strong and stronger. All the while more of them, for they come across the sea, and across the sea there are untold thousands of them, pressed closer together than you are now, like maggots in a wound.
‘But there is one who will gnaw even hollow bones.’ Again that weird, tittering laugh that seemed to come from no part of his throat or mouth. ‘There is one who will visit such horror on the Plague People that they will flee to their boats and know our land is cursed for them, and never return. There is one who will devour their stores and starve them, who will bring plague to the Plague People and sicken them. There is one who will eat their dead and their living and leave nothing for them. There is one who will do all of this, if you give him the power.’
‘No!’ And Hesprec was abruptly right in front of the old man, shouting up at him. ‘Not even in the face of the Plague. There is no place for you here.’
Serpent-swift, she lunged forward and ripped away the blanket from the old man’s shoulders. Beneath, he was naked; beneath, he was skeletal, a body gone past the point of starvation. Maniye saw lithe grey shadows skitter across his hollowed flesh and flee out into the crowd, prompting panicked cries wherever they vanished. The old man’s jaws gaped impossibly wide and a sleek, slick rat forced itself through them, so large that there was surely no room for tongue or teeth. For a moment it balanced there, staring down at the crowd in bristling contempt. Then Hesprec threw her hand towards it and Stepped, fingers becoming a snake’s jaws that seized on the rodent and ripped it loose. A widening circle formed, and Loud Thunder pushed his way to its edge with Maniye in his wake.
By the time they arrived, Hesprec was in her human form again, holding the dead rat by its t
ail. Beside her, the old man was not simply a corpse, but a body that should have been still and dead days before.
21
‘There were never four brothers,’ Hesprec said, after they had retreated to Asman’s camp. There were already a surprising number of River Lords in amongst the Plainsfolk. Many had come with caravans of grain hauled from the stores at Atahlan, a gesture of friendship that said more than any number of spears. And still it was not enough for all those who had been forced to flee their homes, leaving their harvests and their stores behind them.
Now, the little knot of them huddled in the tent they had given over hurriedly for their Kasrani’s use. Nobody had even asked the question, but Hesprec apparently felt the need to argue it.
‘The lie is that when the Plague People drove us from The Place Where We Were,’ she continued, ‘the Rat and its people stayed behind to fight, and that is why the Rat has no tribe now, no human bodies for its souls.’
‘I never heard this,’ Asman said diplomatically, and if he had not, certainly Maniye and Loud Thunder hadn’t. Only Shyri nodded, hearing a tale twice-told.
‘You never heard it because it is a lie,’ Hesprec said, her young face making her look sulky at having to speak the words, for all nobody was drawing them from her but herself. ‘The Rat has no tribe because the Rat devours all. When we first came to this land, so the story goes, the Rat seized on the fear and suffering of the people, refugees as we all were in those days, and grew fat and had many followers. And even now, nobody from the desert south to the icy north builds a house without keeping the stocks out of the reach of vermin – yes, and the sleeping places too, if they have any sense. Or did you think the mounds of the Wolf and the stilts of the Horse were just to make them look grander?’ Her face twisted, an old, old bitterness on such young features. ‘No, the Rat came close to ending us before we began on these shores, and the Rat has never gone away – a god without worshippers, but a god who whispers in every ear come times of hardship and privation. A god that answers desperate prayers.’
‘I . . .’ Maniye almost thought twice, but pressed on. ‘Years ago, when I was more of a child than I am now, I made an altar of rat bones. Because I was desperate, living under the hand of Stone River and Takes Iron. I was looking for something outside the tribe that could lend me strength.’
‘Some strengths nobody needs,’ Shyri murmured.
‘I . . . felt that something answered, when I made that thing. So I smashed it and scattered the pieces.’
Hesprec gave a grunt of satisfaction. ‘And found your own path out of your difficulties, as the Wolf teaches. You owe the Rat nothing. But there is always someone to open that door. The Rat comes to the starving and sends them to taste the flesh of their kin. The Rat promises a new world of power to those who slaughter the last of their cattle and spoil the last of their stores. But he has never been strong in the north – too cold even for him, up there. And along the River, well, there is nothing better for killing rats than a Serpent.’
‘But we know him in the Plains,’ Shyri put in.
‘You do indeed.’ Hesprec nodded grimly. ‘And the Stone People remember him still.’
‘We have seen their ruins,’ Asman agreed, sharing a look with the Laughing Girl.
‘Their Old Kingdom, which had silos overflowing with corn and roots, where the meanest labourer wore bronze at wrist and ankle and the kings wore gold,’ Hesprec said, her intonation almost dreamy, one who has witnessed grandeur lifetimes ago. ‘And they grew great, and could not imagine a limit to their power, and then seven dry years came together, and their wells parched, and their fields turned to dust, and in the deep, dark fastnesses of their stone halls strange priests appeared and whispered to them of a way they might preserve their majesty: the Rat Speakers. The Stone People did not make that mistake again. After they had fled their old cities and what swarmed there, they cast aside their enmities and opened their doors to the Serpent. But on the Plains it has been different.’
Shyri scowled. ‘We always fought the Rat.’
‘The Laughing Men did, yes. Because you frequent his places of bones and death. You met Rat’s eyes too often over the carrion not to know his game. But the Plains – they do not fight all the time, like the River Lords claim. But when the Plainsfolk truly go to war, it is to lay waste to all – livestock, harvest and store. And so the Rat has always had a foothold and an ear to whisper in. More tribes have starved and died in the Plains than in all the other lands together, and the Rat has gnawed the bones of every one.’ Hesprec took a deep breath. ‘But since the Horn Bearers fell, I had not looked to hear another Rat Speaker stand before me and make demands, and I should have. Of course the Plague People are just another opportunity for the Rat.’
Maniye went back to her warband with much to think of. She sat with Spear Catcher and Takes Iron and warned them of this new threat, trusting they would pass it on to the rest. By then she was tired – not the healthy tired of a day well spent, but that leaching tiredness that crept through all the days since the Plague People took her, the memory of wounds and cages. Her body wanted to curl up and hunt dreams but her mind ran swift and forever like a mountain stream. With the camp growing quieter around her, she stood and stared up at the sky – crystal clear, speckled and banded with the stars. She could find most of the constellations she knew from childhood, save for those which were northernmost in the sky. No doubt there were southern stars she did not know, which the Plains and the River people had new names for.
The thought brought back to her the sky above the Godsland, where the stars were in constant motion against the wall of the heavens trying to find a way in. Are they the Plague People, those stars? The thought seemed right, and yet not quite right.
I don’t think we can win this war. Her distant ancestors had fled from the Plague People, back in the first days. Everyone knew those legends, yet the stories had nothing to say about floating ships or monstrous roaring metal boats, or rods that sent killing darts as swift as thought. The Plague People have been busy, and we could not even fight them the first time.
Abruptly she was trembling. Not fear for herself, not fear for her friends or her people even. Fear for all of it, all the ways of the Wolf and the Tiger, the Plainsfolk, the River Lords’ overcomplicated lives, all the stories and histories, how to propitiate gods, the memories of ancestors, the souls passing from body to body. Everything that made all the people people. She had spent her life hating and fighting and resenting, and yet there had always been that safety net: if I die, I am reborn. If I die, life goes on, the cycle turns, and I will hear these stories again and walk these lands. And if the Plague People could not be stopped there would be no stories and none who knew the ways of the land, not ever again. They would be gone and the Plague People would never know what was lost.
She held herself and shook, the thought like a knife in her and tears on her cheeks. Then someone was close behind her and she leapt away.
But it was just Alladai of the Horse, come to find her on a clear, chill night.
He spoke her name, both of her names. She forgot, when he was not there, how much she liked looking at him. He was so tall! She could rest her head against his chest, feel the strength there that had never been made to fight or kill anyone. I will fight the Plague People, she thought. I have to; who else will protect you, Alladai?
She knew a few of her people marked her, when she took him to her bed. Sathewe lifted her coyote head and seemed to grin, and Amelak stirred where she slept, and probably woke enough to see what was up and smile a little to herself. And probably Takes Iron disapproved mightily, but that just showed that some parts of the world were still working the way they should.
She woke to the sound of an old woman wailing, the thin, high sound just going on and on, without any apparent need for breath. Beside her, Alladai was sitting up, very still. She heard the warband rousing, but beyond them, a greater furore, many voices asking questions of one another, and a growing turmoi
l of answers erupting in the midst of it all.
She Stepped, becoming the tiger that knew the night better than the wolf. The sight of her, flowing like embers and shadow through their midst, brought knives to the hand of more than one of her Wolves before they remembered.
Outside she knew she was seeing only the start of something. Most of the camp was still asleep, just waking enough to know something was wrong. But news was jumping from tent to tent like fire. Soon everything would blaze with it.
What has the Rat done? Hesprec’s words of the evening before were loud in her mind. Surely only a half-eaten old man was the least of it. She prowled at the edge of her warband’s little territory, wanting to rush out and hunt the word down, but knowing it would likely spread here while her back was turned.
Then a hyena’s eyes gleamed at her out of the night, and a moment later Shyri was there, breathing heavily from weaving past so many confused people.
‘What is it?’ Maniye demanded of her, from tiger to woman even as the words formed in her mouth.
‘They’ve been seen – near!’ Shyri’s eyes were wide, white all around them.
‘The Rat?’
‘The Plague People!’
Maniye’s heart clenched and she stared at the Hyena. ‘But how?’ she got out, fighting to undo the knowledge, to change the world. And yet she knew how swift the Plague could spread. The wind had blown from the east and carried them in like seeds. And where they landed, they would sprout.
‘We have to fight them,’ she said, not because her heart meant it but because she knew it was right.
Shyri’s expression was bleak. ‘We who? You and your people? Three Boar here, two Lions there?’
‘Loud Thunder and his people.’
‘I think they’re fighting already – or the Plague People attacked them first, maybe. Impossible to know what’s real and what’s shadow right now,’ Shyri complained.
‘Feeds! Where are you, Crow? I need you!’ Maniye called, and then again until the dishevelled creature was before her, hopping anxiously and wearing no more than a blanket.
The Hyena and the Hawk (Echoes of the Fall Book 3) Page 23
