The Bear and the Serpent Page 3

  ‘You could find worse steeds,’ Hesprec murmured in her ear as Alladai neared.

  ‘You are a thousand years old!’ Maniye hissed.

  ‘New skin, new bones,’ the dark girl replied. ‘The body knows what it wants. Sometimes the old should listen to the wisdom of youth.’

  ‘The blessings of my hand-father for bringing back our foolish kinsman!’ Alladai declared. He and his kin had sheltered Maniye when she had nothing, and she hoped sometimes that there had been more to it than simple guest-right.

  The thought made her realize that she might be leaving the Horse soon enough, bringing a stab of sadness. The Horse sang a lot and loved their drums and their reed pipes. They did not live to fight or even to hunt, and life at Where the Fords Meet seemed to happen in some other world where all the chases and skirmishes and fear that had disfigured her existence were forgotten.

  ‘Your man was lucky.’ She wanted to talk to Alladai like a friend, to joke and grin and pretend there was no distance between them. If she had been older, perhaps she could have done so. Instead she felt her youth made her role as leader precarious. Her words clung to formality even as she tried to deliver a different message with her eyes.

  ‘He was a fool.’ Alladai flourished his hands, a gesture of exasperation. ‘It will be a long time before he is trusted with something of importance again.’ He shifted footing awkwardly. ‘While you hunted, we had word from our scouts. The southern Champion is coming.’

  Maniye felt the awaited disappointment alight on her shoulders. Asmander had returned from his prince to fetch the Iron Wolves. She had begun to hope he might take more days still – everyone said how the southerners loved to talk.

  ‘I want to stay here with your people.’ She got the words out quickly before they could clog her throat. ‘You are the most open-handed hosts in the world. No guest could ask for better. Yet I can’t.’

  ‘No guest is so welcome as the one who comes back,’ Alladai told her.

  She had almost let herself forget why she had come south, spending time at peace amongst the Horse. But this morning Asmander had come back from seeing how the land lay in the south. She saw him stride into Where the Fords Meet with the dawn and knew it was the end of her pleasant interlude.

  Asmander was a lean, dark youth. He smiled as much as Alladai but it seldom seemed to touch the core of him. The Champion’s soul within him gave him a strong, alien presence, more than his frame could account for. It had little patience with the rituals and considerations of life in the Sun River Nation, she felt, and yet Asmander was always happiest when the Champion was riding him and he could pretend to share in its freedom.

  Maniye understood that now. She had an old soul inside her, just as he did: a creature from a time when human niceties and customs had yet to trouble the world. She gathered her people about a fire and told them they would be moving on. One or two looked as though they would rather have stayed but most were glad: Where the Fords Meet was a half-world to them, neither north nor south. They had been promised . . . perhaps none of them was quite sure what had been promised. Something other. A new world where the mistakes and the blame of the old would not count; somewhere they could tell their story from the start. Somewhere these errant children of the Wolf would be seen as something mythical and special.

  Kalameshli Takes Iron scowled and ground his teeth. He did not like being amongst the Horse. He had already decided he would like the Riverlands no better. Well, enough of him. He was old enough to make his own mistakes.

  Only one of their party would not follow her south. Grey Herald had never been her follower, just a man who shared a road. His painted mask of a face was unreadable. The Owl and the Serpent had been close confidants in the oldest stories. He had heard Hesprec’s warnings of a great storm coming, and his own lore had brought him to the Plains, where he had work to do.

  ‘They remember,’ Hesprec said of the Owl. ‘Better than us, some things.’

  Asmander was keen to be going. He had been closed-mouthed, but Maniye could see the tension in him. She could see whatever he had found to the south was preying on him.

  ‘Tell me,’ she asked Asmander, when they were picking their way south of Where the Fords Meet. ‘Your chief, he’s where you left him?’ Hesprec leant close to them, listening in.

  ‘Tecuman, my Kasra,’ Asmander named his leader. Maniye did not understand just what a Kasra was, save that it meant chief of something far larger than a tribe of her homeland. The Kasra of the Sun River Nation ruled a land as great as all the Crown of the World, save that it was stretched out down the course of the river they called the Tsotec. Each Kasra was the eldest child of the last – something that was alien to the Wolf, although not to Maniye’s mother’s tribe, the Tiger. The last Kasra’s children had been twins, barely a heartbeat between them, and now the old man had died and the Nation was split in half. Asmander was pledged to Tecuman, the boy, and yet Maniye had seen his face twist in anguish when he spoke of the girl, too. He had grown up with them both, when titles and Champions were burdens none of them had to bear.

  ‘So your Kasra, what’s wrong with him?’ she demanded, because plainly something was. ‘He’s not at this stone place of yours any more?’

  ‘He is at Tsokawan,’ Asmander told her. She knew she would forget the foreign name the moment he stopped talking of it.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Tecumet is coming there too, with her soldiers.’ From which she deduced that Tecumet was the name the sister had taken since the father’s death. And ‘soldiers’ were warriors, Alladai had told her, who always remained warriors, and weren’t just hunters who fought when the season came.

  ‘There will be war,’ Asmander explained hollowly. ‘I was too long in the north, bringing you. It has already started.’

  3

  Loud Thunder would have gone with Maniye, if he could. Offered a choice, he would have taken up his axe and his fleece armour and set out into the world. Maniye, whom Broken Axe had named ‘Many Tracks’, was as good a star to follow as any. They had shared a cave all winter – and anyone who can live with a wintering bear must be doing something right.

  Instead, he was slogging west from the lands of the Bear, and not just roaming the wilds with his dogs, but travelling with his kin. Perhaps for the Wolf or the Deer that was a thing to take joy in, but the Bear did not delight much in each other’s company. He was the largest of his kin, a huge, shaggy-bearded man in a robe made from many sheepskins stitched together, and as a bear even larger. A slap or a cuff with his paw was just enough to keep discipline amongst the others, but, since Mother had made him a great man amongst his kin, every stone underfoot, every slope to climb, every shower of rain was implicitly his fault.

  It would not be like this if I were Many Tracks’ follower, he decided. Loud Thunder had done it before, just taken off south with a band who were mad with youth and lust for adventure. He, Broken Axe and the rest had sold the strength of their arms on the Plains. They had done bad things, wild things. They had died, many of them, but they had died free. And what would any of them have said, his past comrades, if someone had come to them and told them what their life must be? Would Broken Axe have bowed his head? No. Peace Speaker would have found some way to weasel out of it. And Storm Born . . . well, he had always been crazy.

  Storm Born was dead now, almost certainly. And Peace Speaker had died on the Plains when his words had deserted him. Broken Axe had perished right here at the Crown of World – because Loud Thunder had been wounded too badly to stay by his side. Of all those mad-eyed youngsters who had gone looking for their fortunes, Loud Thunder might be the only one still alive.

  But he would still rather have travelled again than have his Mother load this destiny upon him, and go before all the world to stutter and mumble as though he was one of the wise.

  His Mother had come to him – the Mother of all his kin, the great strong woman who was chief and priestess to the Bear. Loud Thunder had reached for all the defiance his huge frame could muster and it had not been enough. He was to be the war leader of the Bear, because apparently there was a war coming. Against who, nobody yet knew. But he must train his fellows, he must have weapons made. And he must travel to the Stone Place, and go before the other tribes and unite them. By saying . . . what? What could bring all those feuding people together, apart from a distrust of him?

  He had a cousin – everyone in the Bear was his cousin – called Lone Mountain, a warrior and a speaker of fine words. He had travelled and knew more than this cold high corner of the world. What’s more, he had been ready to become war leader all his life – to take up this mantle. So why not him? Thunder knew this would rankle with Lone Mountain. But Mother would not be questioned.

  Some dozen of the Bear were in his party. The Bear were never many, but each of them cast a long, wide shadow. A dozen was a lot of Bear. With them was Mother, a looming presence to make even Loud Thunder feel small.

  ‘If you are going yourself, why don’t you speak?’ he had asked her. No need to say how much more keenly the wise would listen to the Bear’s Mother, rather than to Loud Thunder, the Bear’s most surly cub. And she gave no answer, either. It seemed to Thunder that nine parts in ten of Mother’s rule of the Bear lay in letting the silences lengthen and refusing to explain herself.

  Loud Thunder had met a man once, from the south. And then he had met a girl, in whose body that man had been reborn. Hesprec was that southerner’s name, Hesprec of the Serpent. The way Hesprec had told it, the Serpent lived on secrets and wisdom too. The Serpent was in the ground everywhere. Anyone could follow the back of the Serpent, no matter what tribe they were born to. The Serpent had built the oldest kingdom; the Serpent had held back the Plague People; the Serpent taught the secrets found
in the earth. The Serpent helped people.

  Sometimes – and always when he was very, very sure Mother would not see him – he scratched out a spiral on a flat stone, closed his eyes, and tried to feel the Serpent. Once or twice he had felt something shift in the earth, as though deep-buried coils were coursing there. So far he had received no guidance or enlightenment, but Loud Thunder was a patient man. His people generally were.

  They were travelling on four feet through the cold forests, heading south and west along the slope and fall of the land, letting their bear natures find the easiest paths. Alongside Loud Thunder his dogs trotted, drawing a sled of cured fish and meat, of bagged nuts and seeds. Currently, Yoff and Yaff were in the harness, the elder dog keeping the younger in line, while Husker, the youngest but the biggest, loped alongside, or dashed off between the trees to investigate new smells.

  His cousin Lone Mountain was ahead, a great brown-black bear trudging along with uncomplaining endurance. He was only a little smaller than Thunder, and he was pointedly in the lead, where Thunder should be. Probably the two of them would fight at some point, but Loud Thunder was actually looking forward to that. A little cuffing and bellowing would relieve some of the animosity that had grown up between them.

  There was smoke on the wind, and Lone Mountain was abruptly a man, his great slope-shouldered body wrapped in hide under a robe of fine green cloth. Adorned with shell and stone ornaments, a necklace of hooked teeth, trinkets and oddments he traded for with the Horse, he looked every inch the war leader, a thick-hafted spear in his hand and a maul slung over his back.

  Loud Thunder Stepped as well: he was perhaps a few fingers’ breadths shorter than Lone Mountain, but broader and more powerful. His weapon was a copper-headed axe a lesser man could barely have lifted in two hands. As with all his gear, when he was Stepped it became a part of him – the metal of its blade became his fangs and claws, as the fleece and skins he wore strengthened his hide when he was a bear.

  ‘What now?’ he grunted. For a moment he thought that they were all too late, that this invisible, unknowable war was already upon them. Instead, though, his eyes picked out a trailing band of figures moving through the woods.

  ‘I think Boar,’ Mountain told him. ‘We are south enough to be in their lands. There will be villages near.’

  ‘Boar lands mean Wolf lands.’ Loud Thunder frowned. ‘The Winter Runners, is it?’

  Lone Mountain nodded; he always knew these things. ‘Your friend’s people.’

  ‘Not any more.’ Maniye had been born to the Winter Runner tribe, but her current status put her outside such kinship. ‘So what do these want?’

  ‘They are here because of us.’ Mother’s voice made them both jump. She stood behind them, a vast cloaked figure with her hood up. She was not of a size with Loud Thunder, but there was something to her, a gravity and a presence, that made her seem larger: more akin to mountains than either human or bear. Mother’s face was stern, her mouth like a crack in weathered rocks, her eyes like caves.

  ‘They will fight us?’ Lone Mountain hefted his spear.

  ‘No, talk only.’ Mother drew in a deep breath. ‘They are here because the world is ending.’

  And . . . ? But Loud Thunder could not ask, only wait for the Boar to reach them, knowing that he would have to speak to them, and that he would have only his ignorance to speak about.

  The Boar approached cautiously through the trees. In the lead was an older man, short and stocky as the Boar tended to be, and wearing a long dark robe, open at the front. Despite the cold, his bare chest gleamed, rough with wiry grey hair. The wooden mask pushed up to the top of his head jutted with twisted tusks. Beneath it, his face was closed and secret and old. His staff was topped with a spray of feathers, and a little shiver went through Loud Thunder. Not just a Boar, but the Boar’s priest, a man who had opened himself to the unseen.

  The others behind him were of all ages: a young girl with a babe in her arms, women older than the priest, strong youngsters fit to be warriors or hunters, a child surely no more than ten who could have been either gender.

  ‘You’re going to the Stone Place,’ the Boar priest accused.

  ‘Yes.’ Loud Thunder nodded, trying to keep matters amiable.

  ‘This is not the time to go to the Stone Place,’ he was told.

  ‘Still, that is where we are going.’ This is why Mother left this to me; she would have had to work at being mysterious. I just say what little I know, and it sounds mysterious because I know so little.

  ‘You will stir up the great spirits, the Boar says.’

  ‘Perhaps they need stirring.’ It sounded trite to Loud Thunder even as he said it, but apparently the Boar had heard something different in the words. Something gleamed in the old priest’s eyes.

  ‘There is a storm coming, the Boar says.’

  Loud Thunder resisted the temptation to look into the real sky; that was not what was being spoken of. Probably. ‘The world is changing,’ he pronounced. It was, after all, the one thing Mother had said.

  And the Boar took that as some great promise by the world. ‘We will travel with you,’ the priest announced, for all that they would surely slow everybody’s progress to a crawl. And yet Mother continued to say nothing, letting Thunder have the burden of all today’s bad decisions.

  ‘Of course you will,’ he decided, more to annoy his fellows than for any sound reason, because if they were fool enough to make him war leader then he would make them understand just what a poor choice he was. Why not the Boar sharing our road? Just you watch, I will find even worse!

  When they were moving again, he began to think. All the villages of the Boar and the Deer around here paid tribute to the Wolf – as it was across much of the Crown of the World. Were the Boar looking to break free of the Wolf? And where would that leave him when the Wolf spoke to him? The world might be changing, but change wasn’t likely to leave everyone happy.

  Except Loud Thunder didn’t feel that was the sort of change Mother anticipated. She saw on the horizon not the sort of change a man might himself bring about, but the sort of change he could only hope to survive.

  ***

  His name was Sees More and he was born on the back of the Seal, as they said.

  Those who cowered from the elemental temper of the sea behind mountains were referred to by the people of the Seal as Inlanders. The sea was a terror to them. The storms and the waters would have their due. When the Inlanders thought of the Wetback and the Pebble Dweller and the Wave Dancer tribes, they shuddered. A life by the open ocean was the stuff of nightmares. Even to the Seal it was something to be respected – many of them died on the sea, seal shape or not.

  Sometimes the wise of the Seal travelled beyond the mountains, using ways few others cared to learn. They came across the Bear, who traded for fish. They travelled to the far Stone Place, but not every year. They had their own sacred places on the strand, wooden henges and stone monuments worked by the hands of the sea. They were not as bound to the spirits of the land as were the others.

  Sees More of the Wetbacks was not a young man. He had lived with the sea four decades, all his life. He had learned to swim as a boy, and then again as a seal. He had grown up with the shark and the shoal, laughing at the Inlanders and their fears.

  He had been away from his home for five days and four nights, following the schools. Let the younger hunters keep the shore and the hearthsmoke in sight when they fished. It was a point of pride for the veterans of the Wetbacks to range further afield. He had gone south down the coast to cast his nets. He had Stepped and taken the ropes in his mouth, and trawled the fish from the deep waters, where the sun was but a memory. On other years he had gone north under the ice, where life stretched from air-hole to air-hole. One day, he always said, I shall travel so far I shall reach the shining land, where all the women are beautiful and nobody needs to work or hunt, and I shan’t come back. When he said this, his mate and children would complain, and he would laugh.

  The sea had been kind to him; his lines had been heavy when he hauled them from the water, and while they had been trailing, he had been filling his nets as well. Now he was a man again, even though the sea called to him to dive into its endless waters. He was a man with a narrow boat made with the hide of his dumb brothers, a boat full of fish. Now he would return home and show the young men what a real fisherman was capable of.