The Tiger and the Wolf (Echoes of the Fall Book 1) Page 4

  And yet she did not want to choose. She had lived the world on a wolf’s swift paws, drunk the wind with its nose, seen the night through a cat’s mirror eyes, danced up trees and sheer walls with its fluid grace. Each of these was equally a part of her. To choose one over the other would be like being asked to choose her left hand over her right, and then to hack the other away.

  She knew where the sacrifice was being kept: there was a pit overlooked by the temple mound. Kalameshli would not have left the prisoner entirely unobserved, but Maniye guessed that the watchers would not be over-vigilant. The wretched old man would be secured, after all, so where would he go?

  Sure enough, a couple of youths were pitched under a canopy, ostensibly watching the pit but, when she slunk close, she found one asleep and the other huddled close to the fire, feeding it twigs and trying to shield it from a biting wind that was just beginning to rise. If either had Stepped into their wolf forms then they might have smelled her out, but they were no older than she, and could probably not stay in their wolf skin for long.

  That was the greatest lesson of Stepping, and it had come to Maniye very swiftly indeed. Standing on four paws, her body taut with a tiger’s graceful strength, she did not think I am a girl in the shape of a tiger, any more than she had thought of herself as merely wearing a wolf’s borrowed skin. She was the tiger. She was the wolf. That was the lesson everyone must learn eventually. Born a babe within the village or a cub in the forest, they were one and the same. Man became animal, animal became man. Each soul ran on two feet and four. Before she had quickened in her mother’s womb she had been a beast of the wilds.

  But which beast? Supposedly she should know by now – one form or the other should call louder to her and tell her where her soul belonged – but all she knew was that she was a child of three shapes, and could Step between them as naturally as thought.

  The young hunters noticed nothing of her as she crept to the mouth of the pit and looked down.

  The old man seemed to be sleeping, lying bunched up on his side, bony knees drawn up almost to his chin. She could see the dark stains about his mouth where his ravaged gums had bled after Kalameshli’s ministrations. His hands were secured to an iron peg driven deep into the ground, and there was a rope halter about his neck to prevent him Stepping.

  He looked so pale, so alien. His features were strange: a knobbly pointed chin, long face, broad nose, the taut skin of his hairless head hiding nothing of the shape of his skull. He had some sort of painting or tattooing about his cheeks and forehead, but she could not make it out.

  His eyes opened, staring up at her. She froze, knowing that it was dark and that surely he, with his mere human gaze, would see nothing.

  He saw her. She felt that shock of contact. Somehow he had found her, a shadow bitten into the circle of stars that was all they had left him of the sky.

  Abruptly she was very frightened of him, however helpless he was. The strangeness of him, that had seemed such a good omen, was now a threat just by its very presence. She backed away, changing her mind. She did not want to talk to the Snake man. She did not want her life to change. She would return to her close-walled sanctum. She would strive to pass the Testing. Life would go on.

  She retreated from the pit into the shadow of the temple mound, feeling the great weight up above that was the Wolf and its idol, all ready for the sacrifice. Sitting there, she Stepped back to the human, feeling the sharp cold through her shift, that had barely bothered her tiger self. In her hand were the hook, the toy, the arrowhead, conjured back from that inner place she had sent them.

  She felt disappointed with herself, and yet relieved. She would go back. She would find the wolf within her, pad back to the foot of her father the chief’s mound and howl to be let in. She must forget her tiger. She must cut it away.

  Movement caught her eye: a solitary figure walking one of the long thoroughfares into the village: a tall, lean man with a deerskin cloak about his shoulders. Familiar: she knew that walk and it terrified her.

  Kalameshli Takes Iron she loathed; Akrit Stone River, her father, she hated; but the man she feared was Broken Axe. He was not even one of the tribe’s hunters: a wolf who walked alone, save when Akrit summoned him. Most years, as the nights grew long, he drifted in to find shelter from the cold with the Winter Runners. But Broken Axe was a lone wolf, a law unto himself.

  Somehow, she had convinced herself that she would not see him this winter, but here he was, trailing into the village unlooked for, past midnight.

  He was a tall, long-limbed man with narrow eyes and a broken nose, and if he had ever cared to challenge her father, then he could have been chief of the Winter Runners. Everyone knew, but nobody said, that he was the one man Akrit Stone River might fear. Broken Axe gave him no cause, though. He showed no signs of seeking to lead, and when Akrit had a task for him, no matter what, he named his price and performed it, without fail.

  Such as killing Maniye’s mother.

  This was the same man. When the Tiger had given up a child into the world for Akrit’s purposes, when the screaming and the spitting of the birth was done, this was the man who had taken her into the woods and murdered her. When no other would do it – Akrit would not invite ill luck by bloodying his own hands over the mother of his child, and Maniye had heard her mother was a priestess too, always bad fortune to kill – it fell to Broken Axe to carry out the sentence. He had done it without qualm or question, just as always. Everyone said there was something missing in Broken Axe, who feared no curse nor what any might think of him. He was hard as stone and iron together.

  And here he was, and he would sit by Kalameshli and drink Akrit’s beer, and his eyes would stray to Maniye, as they always did, as though comparing her growing face and form to his memories of the woman he had slain.

  Abruptly she was a tiger again, without choosing it, and padding back towards the pit and its lonely occupant.

  3

  The history of the Crown of the World was a chronicle of the harsh land and brittle winters that either hardened the people there like old leather or drove them out. Winter Runners, Cave Dwellers, Shadow Eaters, Eyriemen, each had seized its chance to rule the rest, risen to its prime then fallen in turn. The Wolf were strongest now, but the Crown of the World was a mutinous kingdom. No tribe had ever mastered it for long.

  In the Riverlands of the south they told a different story, about building and growth. The Sun River Nation, that had once been just an idea in the heads of a handful of River Lord chieftains, had pushed its own borders steadily eastwards along the banks of the Tsotec. All the other tribes had knelt before them, not destroyed or exiled but consumed with the voracity of the River Lords’ own gluttonous totem, to be made a part of the body of the Sun River Nation that stretched out its length along the river.

  That part of the river that was the Nation’s heartland was known as the head of the Tsotec, with the fragmented islands of the estuary forming the teeth in her jaws. Above the falls that framed the River Lords’ great city of Atahlan, where the river turned northwards and began gathering in its tributaries, this was the Tsotec’s back – rough and uneven and cutting into the side of the Plains before her many tails split into the rivers and lakes and thousand streams of the Crown of the World.

  On the back of the Tsotec, heading from the endless summer of the Riverlands north to where winter was already gathering, three boats moved. Long and narrow, hide stretched around wooden spars, they were sturdy enough to forge through the current with the sweat of their oarsmen, light enough to be carried over rapids and past falls where need be, and held steady in the water each by their single outrigger. These were the canoes of the Horse Society, though they were seldom found heading north into the teeth of the cold at this time of year. Most of their brethren in the Crown of the World would already be ferrying their rafts of timber back south, loaded with whatever goods and raw materials they had been able to barter for. These three boats did not carry traders, though, but pas
sengers. Amidst the Horse people were two men of the south: Asmander and Venater. The one was an earth-dark River Lord youth with an easy smile, the other a burly, villainous-looking estuary man, far from home.

  ‘The Horse people are saying bad things about you, because you will not row,’ Asmander remarked. ‘They say you cannot have been such a pirate as you tell them, if you will not set hand to oar.’ He was bare-chested, beaded with sweat from his stint, dashing himself with river water before pulling on his thin tunic.

  Venater eyed him balefully. ‘I didn’t see you accomplishing much.’

  ‘I did enough to assuage my honour.’ Their boat shifted as it ground its keel in the shallows; some of the Horse Society jumped out to steady it and haul it to land. Asmander let himself over the side, plunging to his waist in water that was blessedly cool after the long, hot journey north up the back of the Tsotec. He put his shoulder to the vessel’s side with the assured joy of a man who didn’t have to, and could stop doing so any time he liked.

  Venater crouched beside him, not even bothering to get out, let alone put his prodigious strength to any use. ‘Well, boy, your father has my honour by the balls, and until he looses his grip I’ll be pissed on before I do anything for mere honour.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’ Asmander was gritting his teeth at the effort, but he was grinning around it. ‘And I can see that me doing this work is eating you up: the soft young boy of the River Lords callousing his hands! Unheard of! Plainly this world is upside-down and mad.’ He was tall and lean, with the dark, dark skin of all the River Lords, his hair cropped short save for a knot of it gathered at the base of his skull. His features were a good battleground for his customary expressions: amusement, mischief, melancholy. They had won him many hearts back home – he was a man who could have been married three times over, had he ever got round to returning any of his suitors’ sentiments. He was the blade of his family, though, and wielded always – as now – to further the ambitions of his father. Dalliances and ready smiles were never allowed to turn into anything more serious. Asmander carried responsibilities.

  ‘If those Horse girls didn’t make eyes at you so much, you’d not care,’ Venater snarled. ‘Show off for them all you like.’

  ‘They’re not my type.’ Asmander stepped back, clapping his hands together at a job well done. All three Horse craft were beached safely now on this foreign shore.

  Three days before, they had left the northern edge of the Sun River Nation behind, no matter how optimistically one drew the maps. Since the river had taken them northwards, the land to the west had soared steeply away, rising to the heights that were the Stone Kingdoms. To the east lay the Plains, green where the land met the river, but so much of it uncultivated, where in the south there would be fields and irrigation canals to wring the absolute most out of every hand’s breadth of soil. Here in the drier lands the people were fierce and unfriendly, that much was known. They held and tilled only the land around their villages, because anything beyond that was simply setting out a meal for raiders from other tribes. They fought each other incessantly, held no oaths sacred, followed gods who valued nothing but blood, and ate each other’s children for preference. Or so it was said amongst the River Lords.

  Asmander knew full well that his own people’s gods were also partial to their ration of blood. If Old Crocodile liked his sacrifices to be public and ritualized, that still left the offerings just as dead as some heart-ripping festival of the Plains people. He was a young man cynical beyond his years, who could smile at a great many things that others held terribly solemn. He knew that above all the gods and totems of the world there was one great and controlling spirit, and it was named Expediency. Honour was all very well – and something he pursued incessantly – and yet he was sourly aware that if one refused Expediency its necessary sacrifices, then the goodwill of every other god, never mind all the honour in the world, would get you nowhere.

  At last Venater deigned to step ashore, getting no more than his bare feet wet. He was a broad-shouldered creature, a man of close on twice Asmander’s age. A skin the colour of wet sand was scarred by innumerable fights, then scarred again by the deliberate tallies of deeds his people kept, an intricate and secret history of murder, raid and private brawl written in jagged weals down the broad canvas of his upper arms. He wore his hair long and unkempt, framing a lantern jaw, hollow eyes hard like flint, a nose broken more than once.

  One of the Horse Society passed them by as they stood on the bank. ‘We must make a good showing for the Laughing Men,’ he told them.

  Looking at the Horse delegation, Asmander decided ‘a good showing’ consisted of prominently displayed weapons.

  ‘Why are we even bothering?’ Venater growled. ‘Your father is sending us off to die in the north, not at the hands of these scum.’

  ‘He is not sending us to die anywhere,’ Asmander reproached. ‘And we bother because the Horse trade here, and they must keep the locals happy. And, if we want to get any further north than this place, we must do as we’re asked.’

  The two of them were travelling light: easier to ship River Nation coin than to clog the boat with everything they might need. Both were warriors, though, and when the Laughing Men came down to the riverbank, they found in the two southerners as martial a display as they could ask for. Asmander had donned a quilted tunic, with a plate of flat stone sewn into each pocket to make it hard armour. A stone-toothed wooden sword – the maccan of the River People – dangled from a strap at one wrist, and there were jade spurs at his ankles.

  Venater was already wearing a coat of sharkskin, which made him a fearsome opponent to grapple and an unpleasant figure to sit next to in the close confines of a boat. Bracers of tortoiseshell covered his forearms and the backs of his hands, and his weapon was the meret, the blade-edged club of greenstone which he kept thrust through the cord of his belt. His stance suggested that he would be only too glad if the Horse diplomacy turned sour.

  The locals – the Laughing Men – were already making themselves known, sloping down the riverbank with an insolent disdain. They were all on four feet, and Asmander knew that arriving Stepped to a first meeting was common amongst the Plains people. It hid what weapons they might be carrying, locked within those lean-flanked animal forms. He could see the glint of bronze in their teeth, but there was no way to know if they might suddenly leap into human form with arrows leaving the string or spears taking to the air. Also, he had to admit, they were an intimidating sight.

  ‘Pretty lot, aren’t they?’ Venater growled. Probably he was wondering about fighting them. Fighting people was, to Asmander’s certain knowledge, one of the few subjects that really occupied the older man’s mind. Travelling with him was like walking under a sky constantly about to storm: human mind and beast soul united in perfect bloody-handed harmony.

  These things are known: you list his good points, Asmander told himself, with a slight smile.

  The shapes the Laughing Men took were not like lions, nor like dogs, but some distant cousin of both, or neither. The largest had shoulders that would rise to the hollow beneath Asmander’s ribs, and the least of them would come up to his waist. They were made oddly, forequarters broadly muscled, and front limbs longer than the rear. A crest of hair ran down their spines and their pelts were tawny and spotted with ragged patches of black. Their heads were vulpine, heavy-jawed, with baleful dark eyes. When they yawned, they showed a nest of dagger teeth that would give even a River Lord pause. As they approached, one or another would let out a weird cackle unpleasantly close to a human laugh.

  By standing there as they were, with all their weapons on display, the Horse were signalling that they came without deceit. Asmander wondered idly if that would work with these ferocious-looking creatures. There were few who lived along the head of the Tsotec who had any kind words for the Plains tribes, although perhaps that was just because the only examples that came their way tended to be raiding parties.

  For a moment, whi
le the Horse stood firm, the Laughing Men coursed around them, sniffing and heckling, thrusting their noses at their visitors and baring their fangs in disconcerting grins. Then they had drawn off a little, though still in a loose crescent that penned their visitors against the water.

  They Stepped lazily, seeming to stretch out into human form as though waking from dreams of blood and carrion. There were more women amongst them than men, Asmander saw, and certainly it was the women who had made the larger beasts. They had the long limbs and spare frames of the Plains people, and that skin like bright copper. The men had heads shaved to the scalp, but the women just cut theirs at the sides and sported coxcomb manes dyed in patterns of gold and black and red. There was a lot of metal worn at necks and wrists and ankles: copper, bronze and gold set into plates of bone and horn.

  Many of the women had armour of stiff cotton panels, though the men wore no more than loincloths and cloaks of hide. Long-headed spears and javelins were much in evidence, and Asmander could sense Venater tensing, readying himself for a fight much as another man’s mouth might fill with saliva at the scent of food.

  ‘Are we not welcome?’ The Horse people’s Hetman, Eshmir, spread her hands. She was the only one amongst the visitors not armed at all. ‘Perhaps your Malikah may wish some talk with us – or with these, our guests?’

  The leader of the Laughing Men, the oldest-looking of the women there whose skin bore the memories of many fights, nodded easily. They all smiled readily, these Plains people. Everything seemed to amuse them, and no doubt killing these new arrivals would just make them smile more. Asmander liked that honesty about them.