The Bear and the Serpent

  To the Storm Wolves, the Millenese and all those other imaginary societies that have welcomed me in the past.

  A Brief History of Recent Events

  Maniye, daughter of two peoples

  Maniye’s life was once dominated by fear of three men. Akrit Stone River, her father, was the chief of the Winter Runners – one of the tribes of the Wolf. Kalameshli Takes Iron was their priest, the Wolf’s voice. He was master of the magic of iron, and constantly sought to punish her for any infractions he could find. Lastly, Broken Axe was a lone hunter of fearsome reputation. And when Akrit tired of Maniye’s mother, he gave Broken Axe the task of her murder.

  Maniye’s mother was queen of the Tiger people, captured in war. Maniye therefore has two souls and can take the shape of both tiger and wolf. This is unlike the rest of her people who can Step only into the form of the wolf. When she found out her father intended to use her to subjugate the Tiger and become High Chief of the Wolf, she fled into the wilderness. She left with the old Serpent priest – Hesprec Essen Skese – whom she freed to spite Kalameshli. Broken Axe was sent to pursue them across the northern wilderlands, but they found sanctuary in the home of the Bear, Loud Thunder.

  Asmander, Champion of the South

  Also travelling the north was Asmander, a Champion from the southern Sun River Nation. His goal was to recruit the legendary ‘Iron Wolves’ for his friend and prince, Tecuman. The south was, and still is, on the point of civil war between the young Tecuman and his twin sister. And foreign mercenaries are valued there as the loyalty of local warriors remains suspect. Asmander arrived accompanied by the Dragon pirate Venat, his slave. Shyri, a girl of the Laughing Man tribe – who had been dogging his steps for her own reasons – also formed part of his party.

  As a Champion, Asmander Steps not only into a crocodile, the shape of his people, but also to the sickle-clawed Running Lizard, swift and deadly. After Hesprec’s intervention, he can also take the shape of a bat-winged reptile. These are great souls from an age before humans walked the land.

  Events at the Stone Place

  At winter’s end Loud Thunder was summoned by his cousin Lone Mountain to the Stone Place, the sacred heart of the Crown of the World. He was called by his Mother, shaman ruler of the Bear. She had sensed the same doom coming to the land that Hesprec had come north to investigate.

  Keeping ahead of Broken Axe, Maniye and Hesprec travelled with Thunder to the Stone Place. Here, the wise of all the northern tribes had gathered. Kalameshli and Akrit were already present, but so were the Tiger. Chased by her father, Maniye found shelter with the Tiger priestess Aritchaka, thence travelling west to the Shining Halls where the Tiger holds court.

  Asmander and his comrades had also been at the Stone Place and witnessed Akrit’s pursuit of Maniye. For their own reasons they set out in pursuit and met Hesprec. As a native of their own land, his priestly authority was enough to recruit their aid to help Maniye.

  Maniye on the run

  In the Shining Halls Maniye discovered the secret the world has been keeping from her. Her mother Joalpey is not dead and Broken Axe is not her enemy. Against Akrit’s orders Broken Axe had set Joalpey free because of his own personal code. However, the Shining Halls did not offer the homecoming Maniye had hoped. Despite doing her best to become a fitting daughter for the queen, Joalpey could not overlook the Wolf blood within her and they came into conflict. Maniye had to flee her mother even as she had her father.

  Fleeing the Tiger, they ran into the jaws of the Wolf. Hesprec was caught, and died shortly after Maniye rescued him. The news of his death released Asmander from his oath of fealty to him, and he reverted to his original mission. In the midst of a battle between Tiger, Wolf and the newly arrived Loud Thunder, he delivered Maniye to her father to secure the Iron Wolves for his prince.

  Maniye found herself caught between Akrit and Kalameshli. Her father wanted her death, but Kalameshli begged she could still be of use. Through this encounter Maniye divined she was Kalameshli’s daughter, not Akrit’s. In his cruelties towards her, he’d aimed to drive the Tiger from her and make her a true Wolf, safe from his god.

  Asmander, torn by guilt, suffered a change of heart. He rescued both Maniye and Broken Axe and took them to a camp of the Horse. Here they were reunited with Hesprec – now in the body of a young girl. He had been reborn in a new skin, as is the way of the Serpent. By then, Maniye was losing control of her two souls, and their antipathy was driving her mad.

  Maniye’s transformation

  With Akrit and the Tiger both coming for Maniye, she conceived a desperate plan with Hesprec – based on what she understood of Asmander’s Champion status. At a ritual site nearby, Hesprec sent Maniye on a vision quest into the Godsland. Their goal was to find a Champion to adopt her. She fought her own souls across the land of all the clawed and fanged gods. Bringing both the tiger and wolf within her to heel, she was visited at last by a great beast from the deep past, equal parts bear, wolf and tiger: a Champion.

  While she was questing, her friends fought both Tiger and Wolf to keep her safe. And Venat, whom Asmander freed before the fight, returned to save his former master. Broken Axe faced Akrit in single combat and fell. However, this won Maniye enough time to emerge in the vast form of the Champion of the north. She fought and defeated Akrit with the aid of Kalameshli – choosing his daughter over his chief at the last minute.

  Maniye the Champion had become a force to be reckoned with and the Crown of the World was not ready. Half the tribes feared her influence and half wanted to control her. A few hunters and outcasts offered themselves to her service, and these she took as her warband. Then she escaped the demands of the north by travelling south with Asmander, to serve as his Iron Wolves.

  The Bear and the Serpent

  Contents

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  Acknowledgements

  1

  Maniye the wolf ghosted through the tall grass beneath a Plains half-moon bellied out like a pale orange sail. A moon in foreign skies, but all moons were the same moon; the Wolf ’s moon.

  Her nose and ears told her where the others were, as they wove their own tracks between the stiff, saw-edged blades. Spear Catcher was closest, padding along a little behind her, wanting to make himself useful. On her other side, keeping level, was Tiamesh, a young woman a little too eager to win a hunter’s name. The rest – some half dozen of her Iron Wolves – were spread out to left and right, approaching the camp from downwind. The scent of lion came to them, raw and harsh in the nostrils, but no tang of wolf crept out to trouble the Lions.

  The night air of the Plains was full of unfamiliar sounds: insects; birds; distantly she heard a high whickering sound that might be the Laughing Men. She hoped not. She was going to be busy enough with the Lion raiders.

  She had come south from the Crown of the World – from the lands where she had become something
Other to those she had been born amongst. She had been Tiger; she had been Wolf: the world had cared for neither, and both her father’s and her mother’s people had done their best to kill her. Their best had not been good enough.

  A new soul had made its den within her, which was neither Tiger or Wolf or Bear or Hyena but something of all of them, and the world had looked at her differently. She had become like something out of the stories. A hero to some, a Champion; a wonder, a thing foretold. It made her a threat, also. When the young and the disaffected came to her and sought to join her warband – a warband she did not know she had, until they invented it for her – she knew she would have to lead them somewhere. Otherwise she would become a rival. Tiger, Wolf or Bear, nobody wished to share territory with somebody who was strong and would not bow her head.

  And so she had gone south, following the invitation of a man who had been her travelling companion, and then her betrayer, and at last a friend of sorts. She had answered the call of the young southerner, Asmander, and travelled downriver on the boats of the Horse Society to their great village of villages, that they called Where the Fords Meet. Asmander himself had gone further south still, to his ‘prince’, as he called the man, because for Maniye to bring her warband into the southern lands unbidden might be misinterpreted. They were the Iron Wolves, after all. In the south, apparently, they were legend.

  Maniye wore no iron. Her people were the outcasts and the misfits and the discontented. In the north they had been looked upon as nothing but trouble. Perhaps to southern eyes there would be a glamour about them.

  Asmander had promised to send word back – but his word had fallen into the paws of the Lion. Up ahead she could see the light of the Lion’s fire. Their camp was a rock, an angled slab of stone that rose from a sea of grass like an island. The wind had given Maniye a gift: her approach brought her towards the shadow side, rather than the flat face where the Lions had set their fire. This close, she could hear the Lions speaking, the voices of their boisterous young men.

  Now she paused, sinking down into the grass so that she could just see the jut of the rock like a curve of starless dark, limned by the leaping dance of the unseen flames. Spear Catcher crept beside her; he was an old man, but he moved as silently as any she’d known; a man with his own ghosts, certainly, but they were none of them free of those.

  She Stepped back onto human hands and feet. A small girl – still a small girl despite it all – skin the colour of tanned leather, hair cut short and ragged about her ears. She wore a cuirass of bronze scales, a knife of the same metal at her belt. Nobody from any land would look on her and say Champion at first sight.

  And yet there was something that this new soul had brought her. Hesprec, the Serpent priestess, had claimed this girl had a promise to her. A promise of great things, she had said.

  Spear Catcher shook off his wolf shape too – with him it was just like that, a twitch of the hackles becoming a shudder of the shoulders, as though he was shaking himself dry. He had walked the Crown of the World for more than forty years, had Spear Catcher, and yet here he was in her company; there his hearth-wife was, back at Where the Fords Meet, neither of them with the folly of youth in their eyes but neither with anything to keep them in the north.

  ‘Where are the Twins?’ Maniye whispered.

  ‘No sign. In trouble.’ Spear Catcher was almost bald, his face grooved and lined by age, and grooved even deeper by the puckered scar across his cheek and ear that had burdened him with his name. ‘I’ll scout for them.’

  ‘Hold.’ She had a sense of movement around them, as though the Champion was keeping watch and listening on her behalf. The rest of her raiding party had stopped, holding their places in the concealing grass.

  Then there was a flurry of motion above them: Maniye had her knife out, and Spear Catcher his hatchet, both about to strike. When the raven that swooped on them turned into a man, he almost became a dead one.

  There would be no use cursing Feeds on Rags, even if Maniye could raise her voice; he would only forget the words a moment later. He was no youth either – ten years Maniye’s senior at least, though he acted like a mad boy half the time. He was the only person who had ever lied about his name to Maniye, which seemed a terrible thing to her, but perhaps was standard behaviour back in the Eyrie where he had grown up. Half his face was painted with curving, sharp-edged tattoos, a turbulent night from which his left eye stared like a berserk moon. He was grinning, of course; he was almost always grinning. Whenever he stopped, Maniye started worrying.

  ‘Speak,’ she whispered.

  Feeds on Rags – or the man who claimed that name – bobbed his head animatedly. ‘Found our missing messenger. Keeping him warm by the fire, they are.’

  ‘They’re eating him?’ Spear Catcher growled.

  ‘Not till they’re finished with what they found in his baskets,’ the Raven man told them, and not for the first time Maniye wished he knew how to get to the point the straight way. ‘Happy with their guest’s generosity.’

  Maniye was about to question that, but a more urgent thought occurred to her. ‘Where’s Sathewe? Don’t tell me you left her there?’

  ‘Wouldn’t come,’ Feeds on Rags told her, his expression shifting to exaggerated misery. ‘Was going to prise the prisoner from—’

  Maniye cut him off with a hiss. Feeds on Rags and the Coyote girl Sathewe worked as a team, mostly on the basis that they could cause more trouble together than either could alone. Neither of them had the common sense of a baby. It was only in this way that they were twins, yet the name had stuck.

  ‘Go find her,’ Maniye spat at the Raven. ‘Get her out, or you’ll have her death on you.’

  For a second she saw the real man behind the bluster: the man who realized he had got it wrong yet again. He Stepped in a frenzy of flapping wings, lifting into the night.

  Maniye opened her mouth, but Feeds on Rags was back with them almost instantly, both eyes wide.

  ‘More friends!’ blurted from his human mouth, and over her questions he gabbled, ‘Not Lions – from behind.’

  Maniye bared her teeth, knowing what he meant instantly: that someone had pulled the same trick on her as she had been blithely using against the Lions. Had she been in the Crown of the World it would never have worked. Here, there were too many strange smells.

  Spear Catcher was Stepped and gone instantly, rounding up the raiders without being asked, so that by the time the newcomers made themselves known, Maniye had all her Iron Wolves at her back.

  The newcomers slunk out of the grass and out of the darkness. For a moment she thought they were the Laughing Men after all, but these were different – familiar, almost. There was more than a little wolf about them.

  They had large ears, eyes that were so dark as to be bottomless, and their hides were mottled, looking muddy in the moonlight. There were more than a dozen of them, and they made a loose crescent before the wolves, jaws hanging open and panting a little. The presence of the Lions was like a stone at the back of Maniye’s mind.

  Plains Dogs; she knew them. A tribe of the Wolf fallen from favour, driven from the Crown of the World in the old days, to find a new totem and a new way of life.

  The leader of the Dogs Stepped then: she saw a man with skin more copper-red than hers, less so than the Lions or the Laughing Men. There was something of the north in his high cheekbones and his piercing eyes, but his hair was long and gleaming dark, bound into a hundred little plaits. He wore a cuirass and skirt of layered leather and there was a sickle-bladed weapon in his hand.

  He hunched closer, then closer still, eyes flicking between her and the fire-lined rock that rose behind her. She Stepped for him, met him halfway, knife in hand and ready to fight.

  ‘Lion-hunter,’ he said very softly. When she nodded, his eyes skittered across the crouching forms of her wolves and he told her, ‘Find other prey, little foreign girl.’

  ‘We claim one of the Horse whom they have taken,’ she said.

/>   He shrugged, a fluid gesture. ‘You are far from home, small hunter. These are not your wars.’

  True enough. The feuding of the Plains tribes was a knot that all of history had been tying. ‘Take all the Lions you wish, but I shall have what I’ve come for,’ she said.

  He grinned at that. ‘Or we shall take you and the Lions both. Do you think we cannot do it?’

  ‘I think you cannot,’ she said, quite seriously. He must have seen the Champion in her even before she Stepped, for the mockery was already draining from him.

  She brought the Champion to her. Maybe the Lions would see, but she needed to bring this dog to heel before he started a fight that would raise all the Plains. She Stepped, bulking out until she was huge as a bear, yet with the sleek hunting lines of a tiger and the muzzle of a wolf. When she called the Champion’s soul to the fore she was a monstrous hunting beast from an age before human feet ever graced these lands, a killer out of deep time. The Plains Dog, who had been looking down on her, was craning his neck back. He would not be calling her ‘little’ again. When she had Stepped, he was between her forepaws, almost between her jaws.

  His people – they had Stepped, some of them, with bows and spears, and others had fallen back, or rushed forward until their nerve failed. The leader of the Dogs just crouched there, looking up, and there was a wonder in his face that she had seen from others. He was a man who could look on the Champion without fear; a man with a large soul.

  He stood slowly, shaking his head. ‘Oh, we would be honoured if you would hunt the Lion with us.’

  Then there was a high girl’s cry from up on the rock – Sathewe! The Coyote girl’s luck had run out again, as it so often did.

  Maniye met the Plains Dog leader’s gaze and dipped her head in agreement. Then he had Stepped and was dashing off through the grass, his people following.

  She turned and took in the looming height of the rock, letting moon and fire tell its secrets to her: four man-heights tall and rounded, no easy handholds for human fingers.

  ‘Go after them; Spear Catcher is leader,’ she told her raiders. They could not follow the way that she would go.