The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 3

  Her makeshift window beckoned. Impossible, of course, that either girl or wolf could escape the hall by that means, but she would go nonetheless. Not yet, for she would be looked for at her father’s elbow while he ate, obliged to hear the story of how he caught the Snake – a serpent that would grow longer and more venomous with each telling. She would sit there in an oval of perhaps fifty people, her father’s kin and his favourite hunters and their closest family, and she would sense the presence of that other for whom no place was laid. The Wolf would watch his people eat, and prowl about the edge of their firelight. The rustle of his coat would speak of the advent of winter, and warn each one of them to do their part in staving off the worst of the season ahead: mend, stitch, gather, trap, trade, raid, each of them a part of the greater living thing that was their pack, their tribe. Then the Wolf would pause in its stalking, its furnace breath hot in her hair. But what is this, and what use is it? Is it anything more than a mouthful?

  She would endure. She had always endured. Child of a murdered mother and an uncaring father, constantly under Kalameshli’s barbed attention and the mockery of her peers, she had yet survived. She had built a secret life away from them: inside her head and in all the little spaces left vacant day to day, season to season. She had sometimes felt she was more Rat than Wolf. Once, when she was eight, she had even tried to build a tiny altar of vermin bones, an unthinkable act of heresy and rebellion. Then she had felt something move in the dark – not Wolf’s familiar menace but something else, unclean and scuttling, and she had scattered the little bones and never done such a foolish thing again.

  After the meal tonight, when she could escape the scrutiny of everyone save for Wolf himself, she would retreat up here, and once the cold dark had set in, and the chamber below was a carpet of sleeping bodies, she would make her secret way out and go hunting. Because, however wretched, dirty and washed-out the old man had seemed, there was something new in the world this night, and soon enough it would be taken away from her by Kalameshli’s iron knife, by Wolf’s fire-heated jaws. Before then she would speak to the Snake.

  Let the Eyriemen talk about the might of the open sky, its storms and keening wings. Let the Deer and Boar tribes talk of the growing earth. Wolf was winter, which meant at the same time that Wolf was fire. Fire was ever hungry, so was Wolf; fire was life and death in one, so was Wolf. Fire had secrets; fire was a magic stolen from the sun by that star-coated wolf up in the heavens.

  Kalameshli paused in his hammering, noting the results were good. He was old, and three young men had learned the secrets of fire from him to carry on his work. Yet he was still strong. A life of hammer and knife would do that for you.

  His mind was full of calculations, counting the time of his hammer blows, but also counting forwards: the days until the Horse Society arrived to trade; his stock of new-made tools, the knives and axe-heads his apprentices had sweated over, that were so very valuable to barter with. It all seemed meagre, but then it always did and there was never enough to trade for everything the tribe would need, and they would make do. Wolf never stopped testing his people: Kalameshli had run alongside him long enough to know that.

  Then there was their stock of the sacred wood, which was dwindling, and there would be precious little opportunity to get some more unless he traded his finished iron for it with another priest. The workers and the slaves who had been out in the forest felling and burning all summer were back now, yet surely they had brought in more than this last year? Is it because I’m old, that nothing seems as good as it was, or are the years really getting harder?

  The omens last year had been adequate. Running Deer had given Akrit’s people a decent chase and died in the proper form, so that his antlers had graced Wolf’s jaws and the quarry’s spirit had returned to the herd. The rack itself had not been of the best, but Kalameshli had seen cautious hope there. Now he wondered if he had fallen victim to complacency. What was Wolf telling him this year, with the remarkable sacrifice that had fallen into his hands?

  Change. The forge’s hot breath was the breath of the Wolf. In Kalameshli’s great-great-grandfather’s time, before ever the Winter Runners had come to these lands, Wolf had spoken secrets to his people, to reward them for their sacrifices, their perseverance, their refusal to bow the head despite living in the shadow of other tribes. Wolf had spoken of how to make the wolf-wood from normal wood, by the long, slow burning and his careful breath. Wolf had spoken of how the fierce heat of burning wolf-wood could draw iron from the red stone, and how it could turn soft iron into hard. All these things had become known over generations, but by Kalameshli’s grandfather’s time the bond between Wolf and priest and the secrets of iron was forged and closed.

  In Kalameshli’s grandfather’s time, the Winter Runners had come south to challenge the masters of these lands. At first they had fought against the Tiger alongside Deer and Boar. Later, when they had carved out space for the Wolf’s Shadow, they had shown those people their new masters. And while the Wolf might be a hard master, still he was not wantonly cruel as the previous lords had been.

  In Kalameshli’s own time, five times five years ago, when he had been younger and Akrit had been very young, they had warred with those old lords – the Shadow Eaters who were born between the Claws of the Tiger. Village by village, valley by valley, they had driven them back, their hard iron pitted against bronze and stone, their swift packs against the enemy’s strong champions. The war had been fought by the Winter Runners here, by other Wolf tribes north and south, each summer seeing a new offensive, new victories for the Wolf, new sacrifices for his iron teeth.

  But there had been peace for a long time now. The Tiger had retreated to the high eastern places, its power shattered. The Deer and Boar accepted the yoke and sent tribute and thralls and workers to make the Wolf stronger. Life had been good.

  That was the problem, Kalameshli guessed. A comfortable life was a weakening one. Now the Wolf sent them this message: change or die. When he came to read the future in the old Snake’s guts, perhaps the omens would show that it was time for the Wolf to go to war once more.

  Of course his predictions would be tempered by his own knowledge, for the girl was almost grown now, sullen and contrary creature that she was. Akrit’s long-held plans for her could be put into action, which would indeed mean more war to extend the Wolf’s Shadow into new lands. Odd how these things so often worked out.

  But there was the matter of the Testing. The girl thought she was so clever, the way she slunk about the mound, appearing and disappearing as the whim took her. She thought she could keep secrets, but Kalameshli had keen eyes and a sharp nose. He knew precisely what she was about, and the direction her Stepping had taken her.

  If she was to be any use to Akrit at all, then she must remain securely within the Wolf’s jaws. Kalameshli had taken upon himself the responsibility of ensuring that this particularly lengthy forging could be plucked from the fire and put to work, and he would do so no matter how hard he had to hammer at the girl, to beat her into shape.

  The meal was a fierce affair, each of Akrit’s hunters striving to outdo the last with their stories of the chase. Nobody seemed to remember that the whole endeavour had ended in cowardice and failure, and yet nobody was boasting about the Snake much either. Maniye said nothing, because she had learned long before that drawing attention to herself always ended in pain or humiliation. She sat in her father’s shadow, at his jostling elbow, and ate with a grim determination as though every mouthful might be taken away from her. As it might, of course, if she made Akrit angry. Just the sight of her seemed to do that, and she thought it was because he had sired no brothers for her, meaning she was all he had. He had not intended her as a successor, she knew: no get of her mother’s would ever become strong within the Winter Runners. That was why, once Maniye had been born into this half-life, he had sent Broken Axe to rid the world of his captive wife.

  Even the chief’s household ate sparingly. Whatever excess the year
had gifted them was being saved for the grand feast that would follow after the Testing. Then the tribe would devour everything that would not last through the winter, slaughter the animals that could not be fed, and eat fresh any meat that could not be salted. Preparations were already under way, she knew. Like so much else, it fell to Kalameshli to determine what was to be the Wolf’s share, to be eaten now, and what would be set down for the cold months before the spring. He had already been making a round of the herds, the sheep and cattle, marking animals for the slaughter with his brand and scratching tallies into a flat stone. It was magic, Maniye knew: the Wolf’s secrets taught only to those who had been chosen for the priesthood. At the same time, she had spied on Kalameshli for some years now, and she understood distantly that the marks he made were counting, numbers that existed outside of his head. The revelation, which had come to her last year in a muddled dream after a day’s covert trailing of the priest, made the business seem at once both more and less magical.

  Even now, Kalameshli’s mind was at work. In between long spaces of careful chewing, being an old man solicitous of his teeth, he would murmur remarks to Akrit. Maniye caught mention of numbers, of beasts, of tribute, of the expected Horse Society travellers, and how much salt they might have for trade, or whether there were Coyote packmen nearby who would have some to offer. In times like these, when his mind was solely on the future of his people, she almost forgot how much she hated him. Then his cold eyes would flick sideways towards her, behind her father’s back, and they would harden like stones.

  They made a contrasting pair, Akrit and Kalameshli. The priest was much older, a spare, sinewy creature with five decades on him. He was a man much like the iron he worked, still strong but no longer flexible. In the heat of the hall he had stripped down to a woollen shirt worn open down the front, and Maniye could see his chest and belly, snarled with wiry grey hair, sagging just a little and criss-crossed by a few old scars.

  Her father was also no longer young – and for pure spite she counted daily the inroads that time had made on him. His dark hair and beard were streaked with grey, and his face, broad and high-cheekboned like all of their kin, was creased now, the lines of his ill temper engraved deep enough that they could not be smoothed out. He was a big man, though, and burly, still the equal of any of his followers save perhaps Smiles Without Teeth, who had no ambition in him at all.

  Stripped to the waist, Akrit’s history was laid bare. He had fought to become chief fifteen years ago, and then fought off a handful of challengers in those earlier years, and the marks of each fight were still on him. There had been the war, too, when, as a young warrior and then a chief, he had led the Winter Runners against her mother’s people and defeated them, banding with the other Wolf tribes to drive them north and east into the highlands. He had won a few more scars then, from blade and claw both, but neither challenge nor conflict had managed to topple Akrit Stone River in all the years of Maniye’s life.

  The hearth-keepers, those women and men who stayed behind to cook and clean and mend, passed about the hall serving and bringing yam beer, milk and mead. The hunters ate and talked, and the children ran madly back and forth, re-enacting the hunt, taking it in turns to put their hands to their brow and pretend to be Running Deer.

  And Maniye let her eyes stray thoughtfully to Kalameshli again, and saw exactly the same pensive expression on his face that she had expected. He would be thinking of his sacrifice and wondering how Wolf would receive it.

  The thought that perhaps the scrawny old creature might not find favour – that Wolf’s displeasure might light on Kalameshli and her father – was almost reason to let the business go ahead and just watch. She hid the thought away for later like a strip of stolen meat. It was always an option.

  But first she wanted to see him, this old Serpent man who had emerged from the stories and the south. This something new that had come into her life.

  Then Kalameshli met her gaze and, without saying a word, he had put their whole past conversation back into the front of her mind. Remember the Testing, he seemed to say to her. I am waiting for you to fail.

  As soon as she could slink away, she retreated to her makeshift cave nestling up against the roof and waited for the talk below to subside. Gradually hunters went off to their own hearths, while Akrit’s wives and his thralls cleared away the platters and the furs. She saw the fires begin to gutter, that would bleed out their warmth over the course of the night and be embers by dawn.

  At last, she could hear nobody awake within the hall, merely the ocean-murmur of sleeping breath. Below her, Akrit and his wives would sleep, their slumber curtained off from the rest of the hall. In the other half of the space, the thralls – and a handful of young hunters who had no mate or hearth of their own – would lie clustered around the failing fire.

  Was Kalameshli standing down there amongst them, waiting for her to make her move? Or was he prowling the outside of the wall, a sleek grey shadow far swifter on four paws than on his two old human feet? If so, she would have to out-dance him. She would have to trust to her own speed and stealth – to the gifts of her mother.

  Maniye was small for her age, just as Kalameshli had insinuated when speaking of tracks: a skinny, bony girl half a head shorter than any of her peers. As a wolf, she was smaller still. It was not just for the view that she had scrabbled and scratched out the edges of her little window. Now she hooked her hands over the sill, feeling the uneven mess of mud and sticks that she had gouged into. She put her head out into the chill of the night air.

  All was quiet out in the world, save for the faraway, lonely call that was some distant speechless kin of hers, lost to the human world and living the Wolf dream.

  She ducked back inside, because she might as well make this a test of her abilities while she was at it. Beneath a tatty deerskin she kept a tiny stash of objects that she practised with, and now she dug them out and cupped them in her hands.

  A bone fish-hook, a tiny wooden deer that had been a toy for her when she was young, a stone arrowhead, a bead of bronze.

  She thrust her head out through the gap again, into the open air, twisting to make it fit. Her shoulders tried to follow but, narrow as they were, they were yet too broad.

  She Stepped, making the shift of her form as slow and controlled as she could. Most of her peers would try to shift in an eye-blink, and so could she if she had to, but they all too often lost their footing or ended up on their backs with the sudden change of perspective and balance. Right now, she had no wish to fall.

  The change rippled through her from her nose backwards, her bones and flesh and skin flurrying into new alignments, skull lengthening into a snout, ears stretching to points, shoulders shrinking in, body longer, legs shorter, a tail springing out from the end of her spine and a glossy dark coat eating up her tan skin and her deer-hide shift, swallowing the garment into her, inhering it so that her wolf’s skin was just that little bit tougher than some unclad wild cousin’s.

  Her hands swallowed her fingers, bunching them into clawed pads resting on the edge of the hole. She concentrated fiercely on their contents, feeling the hook vanish into her, the wooden toy likewise. For a moment the arrowhead was slippery within her mind, on the point of falling from her shrinking grip, but then she had that as part of her too, the flint, the substance of the natural earth, finding an invisible home within her body.

  Her wolf ears heard the rattle as the bead struck the floor, beyond her reach. Bronze was inherently unnatural, and to become sufficiently attuned to the metal to make it a part of her would be a long, hard labour.

  She did not even want to think about iron. Learning to become iron’s kin, to make it a part of oneself, was the secret of priests. Those young hunters and warriors who walked that path were put through agonies, her peers said. The Testing of the young was nothing compared to the ordeal of carrying iron.

  And now it was time for her to be gone. She took in a deep breath through her nose, her mind inflamed by th
e sudden intensity of her senses. Her eyes were more apt for darkness, even if they were otherwise something less than those of a human, and her ears, her nose, every hair of her now flooded her with a world of new sensations.

  If Kalameshli was lurking out there, she hoped that she would sniff him out. There was no trace of him, and so she pushed at the floor beneath her and wormed her lithe way out into the open air.

  Moments later she was dropping down the outside of the hall, a primal fear leaping and yelping inside her, but she was ready for it, and in a heartbeat she had Stepped again, not to her skinny little human body but to her other birthright.

  What skidded to a precarious halt at the base of the wall, staring face-down along the steep side of the mound, was a different beast altogether. Maniye had just Stepped from her father’s tribe to her mother’s.

  Her tiger’s eyes were better still for moonlight, harvesting every shred of silver light, so that the great cross that was the Winter Runner village stood out almost plain as day. Her claws were dug into the wattle and daub of the wall itself, for a tiger – especially such a small tiger as she made – could climb and cling where a wolf would only fall.

  Her nose as a tiger was not so keen, but she still trusted her senses, and she could steal downwards, pad by pad, in utter silence. If there was anyone abroad, they would not know that the very image of their old enemies walked amongst them.

  The ‘Fire Shadow People’, they called her mother’s tribe, among other, harsher things. She passed from darkness to open moonlight and back into the dark, the changing light rippling along her striped back, and it would have taken eyes as keen as her own to discern her.

  Her mother had been great amongst the Tiger, defeated and captured in the last battles between her people and the upstart Wolves who had come to rob her of her lands and subjects. Now Maniye was both the Tiger child and the Wolf chief’s daughter, and soon enough she would have to cast off one form forever. Everyone knew that a halfblood could not hold to both heritages at once. That was what Kalameshli had been warning her of: choose the Jaws of the Wolf, not the Claws of the Cat, or she would be Akrit Stone River’s daughter no longer. And, as much as the prospect appealed, that would make her the enemy. That would turn her into prey.