The Tiger and the Wolf (24 page)

At first, living in Loud Thunder’s shadow was fearful. His home
was not large, and he filled it, so that Maniye was constantly
cowering, scurrying out of the way as he stomped past. In the
early days, he seemed to forget that he had guests with each new
dawn, regarding them every morning with a surly and suspicious scowl. They were in his way, that look constantly said.
They were breathing his air, cluttering his house, eating his
food, upsetting his dogs. Any moment, it seemed, he might
throw them out into the killing cold or Step into his monstrous
beast shape and devour them.

Maniye’s answer to this was to make herself useful. She
would fetch water from the stream, breaking the ice with stones
and then filling the Cave Dweller’s clay pots and leather buckets.
She would cut the firewood into billets, sweating and grunting
with effort as she wielded a flint-headed hatchet she had found,
wearing herself down as she learned through trial and error how
the task was best accomplished. She once tried to cook, too, and
that adventure had been the first time their host had actively
deigned to notice them.

He had hunched blearily out of the buried chamber that was
his bed to find her at the morning fire, trying not to char some
squirrels he had caught.

‘What are you doing?’ he had demanded. ‘You have burned it
and you have not cooked it enough, all at the same time!’ He
took one off the fire and hung his broad nose over it, inhaling
deeply. ‘It smells of nothing but fire. Never do this again. This is
a terrible thing.’

At the time she had thought he was going to strike her, but
instead he just busied himself with rectifying the damage, his
anger – if he had really been angry at all – passing from him like
water through loose-knit fingers.

Often he left them in sole possession of his hall and went
wandering off into the snow, sometimes with the sled and sometimes without. He always took the dogs, though. Yoff and Mat
they were called, and at no time did they really warm to either
Maniye or Hesprec. Their looks to their master seemed to say,
You may have been fooled but we know a wolf and a snake when we
smell them.

Loud Thunder would leave for a handful of days at a time,
coming back with fish, or with great loads of firewood for
Maniye to cut up. It was that last which told her he was starting
to accept his guests. Since she started that duty, he never stirred
to attempt it himself, tacitly accepting her work as part of the
host’s due.

One day, with Thunder gone for two dawns, she emerged
into the bright, cool sun of a crisp morning and Stepped, padding off as a wolf into the trees.

She was on her guard, expecting the worst. The silent forest
might hold anything, and she was constantly scenting the air for
any sign of danger, whether it came on four feet or two. At any
moment she expected Loud Thunder to suddenly appear and
drag her back home. He had bargained for her, after all.

And yet she passed, swift and quiet, through the brooding
shadows of the forest, leaving behind her a trail of small prints.
No terrible fate befell her. Out there, with the cold still world
stretching on every side, and no master but necessity, she was
free. Knowing that, she realized that she had never felt free
before.
Her first jaunt was brief, returning before the sun had covered much of its course across the sky. A few days later she was
out again, and then again, sometimes as wolf and sometimes as
tiger, as the mood took her; sometimes even as no more than a
human girl.

Sometimes she found the tracks of other winter-dwellers
abroad in the snow. She ran down a deer, a young stag just short
of earning its antlers, coursing alongside its blundering flight on
wolf paws and then springing as the tiger springs to bring it
down.

When he saw the carcass hanging in his meat store, Loud
Thunder just made a slightly surprised noise, and nothing was
said of it. By then, she had begun to get used to the ways of this
man who sought a life where human contact was the exception
and not the rule. Saying nothing did not mean he was not marking each action.

Before that, there was a time he had arrived home before her,
and was standing at the entrance to his hall as she padded out of
the trees. She had frozen, obscurely ashamed, waiting to see how
he would react. And he had reacted just the same as he did to
almost everything else: a moment’s blank stare, and then nothing. She was free to come and go as she chose.

Later, the wolf pack came.
She encountered them when she was toiling back from the
lake with a bucket of water, the stream having frozen, then been
chipped away to nothing by her depredataions. There were five
of them, rib-thin and hungry. She knew wolves enough that she
could see they were not mad-starving yet, but this was the leanest of lean seasons. They advanced from between the trees,
spreading apart a little as they closed: not on the attack, not yet,
still cautious of a human, but they were five and she was only
one.
She took two steps back, the bucket dropping heavily into the
snow. For a moment she was convinced these were her people
come to find her. They were mute, though. One day they would
be reborn to her people as human children, but for now they
were only animals.
The Step to her own wolf form came instinctively, baring her
teeth furiously, but it did not slow their steady approach. They
were five and she was one, and smaller than the least of them.
They would not hunt her now, but they would hunt these lands,
and she would have to stay out of their sight and move on. That
was the world’s way.
Or she could join them. For a moment, the wolf soul in her
felt the loneliness of the solitary hunter, an unfamiliar, powerful
sensation. If she met them with the correct etiquette, deferred to
their leader – or challenged him! – she might be accepted. She
could run with the wolves for a winter, feast and starve as they
prospered or pined away. It had been known: need or grief or
simple alienation from human society had driven many to it,
and many heroes of the stories were counted amongst their
number.
But that moment passed. She knew well how she could lose
herself that way, the wolf soul growing until not only the tiger
but the girl was cut away. She was too young to make that
choice.
Instead, she knew that she must put her tail between her legs,
keep her head low, break eye contact and retreat. They would let
her go, magnanimously. She need only cede the wood to them.
Without warning, her wolf soul was forced aside by the tiger
inside. She would not back down. This was
her
territory, and it
was these interlopers who must move on. Maniye watched the
contest within her with something close to detachment, feeling
the swelling of an anger she had not realized was part of her.
Even as the wolves drew closer she Stepped again, and this
time they halted in their tracks. As a tiger, she was a hair’s
breadth larger than the greatest of them, burly and compact.
She opened her jaws wide, snarling and yowling and hissing, her
coat standing on its hairs’ ends to bulk her out further. The
wolves paused, milled a little, each looking to the others. There
were five of them, still, and had they been any more desperate,
then likely they would have attacked, coming at her from all
sides in a coordinated strike she could not possibly ward off.
She could hurt them, though, with teeth and claws both. Winter
was no time to be injured, to become the wolf who slowed the
pack.
And she would not give ground, feeling a fierce possessiveness over everything about her: the snow, the trees, the sky. It
was
hers
, not these intruders’. Let them brave the tiger if they
dared!
And they wavered and they whined, but in the end they did
not dare. As one, an unspoken decision made, they turned aside
from her and padded off, away from the invisible boundaries of
Loud Thunder’s home.
Only when they were out of sight did she feel the fear, the
soured excitement within her curdling in her stomach and
making her realize what a dangerous thing she had done.
When she returned to Loud Thunder’s hall that day, he
looked at her a little differently, and she did not know if it was
from a change in her or because he had somehow seen or
learned what had gone on.
At the start, she had been most worried about Hesprec. She
was working hard to earn her keep, but the old Snake would not
so much as step out into the cold most days, spending his time
huddled by whatever was left of the fire, his Horse-made coat
hugged tight about him.
She had assumed that Loud Thunder would grow tired of
him very quickly, but instead their host seemed to show Hesprec
a wary respect, just as he might offer a real serpent. Probably it
was the man’s claim to be a priest, for she guessed the Cave
Dwellers put more stock in that than her own people had.
But in any event, Hesprec did start to earn his keep, but how
he did it was to talk.
Loud Thunder had certainly made it plain that the old man
used far too many words, and was quick to shrug off his more
florid utterances, so Hesprec’s campaign to win him started with
the old Serpent telling stories to Maniye. He did so as they sat
about the fire after dark, the smoke coiling about the sloping
eaves above them. Sometimes Loud Thunder was there, sometimes he was already in his cave at the back, but Hesprec had a
trick he used, where his voice seemed to carry wherever he
wanted it, not loud but always clear. He was playing his games
with words, too, so that the more he spoke, the more the stresses
and accents of his speech resembled their host’s.
He would talk of the River Lords of the south, of how their
heroes and their princes had divided the world between them,
and then fallen out over the division. He would give the flawed
rulers different voices to illustrate their shortcomings, and
sometimes Maniye would hear, like an echo, a deep chuckle that
escaped from Loud Thunder, no matter how straight-faced he
seemed. Then Hesprec would tell Serpent stories of how the
heroes of his people had gone into the dark, buried places of the
world to learn wisdom. Sitting in the Cave Dweller’s lair, surrounded by the earth, his words carried a particular resonance.
Maniye fancied she felt the god’s coils moving slowly all about
them.
Another time, Hesprec spoke of what he called the Oldest
Kingdom. Why was it called that, Maniye asked, and Hesprec
would gather his dignity and frostily explain that it was the very
oldest, the first time ever that many things had been done. Also,
came the apologetic sequel, because the great fallen dominion of
the Stone People was called by them the Old Kingdom, and so
Hesprec’s people had to make plain to them that their own lost
empire was older still. He called it the Land of Snake and
Jaguar, where his people had ruled the world, the first people to
set stone on stone and to till the soil. He spoke of this Oldest
Kingdom often, weaving it into all his other tales.
So it was that eventually Loud Thunder’s voice rumbled out
from close by, ‘So, what happened to this Snake-Jaguar place?’
Hesprec glanced up, as if surprised that their host had even
been listening. ‘Gone, more generations ago than even my
people can count,’ was his answer. ‘Gone, and we are scattered
– to carry our wisdom wherever we can. The Pale Shadow
People came from the sea, fair in person and with fair words,
but they were without souls and they seduced the men of the
Jaguar and turned our own warriors against us. The Pale
Shadow rules there to this day, and we may never return.’ And
his voice had grown wintry and distant, not like his usual voice
at all, carried a little too far off into his own soul by the thoughts
of that lost and ancient place that perhaps had never been real.
From that night on, there were three sitting at the fire when
the tales were told, and Maniye was surprised to find that Loud
Thunder could tell a tale as well as the old man himself. He did
not tell of myths and ancient heroes but of his own exploits:
escapades in the Crown of the World as it must have been
before Maniye’s birth, or venturing south to the Plains. There
was a wistful look in his eye while speaking of those days and his
comrades. One of them had been Broken Axe, at that time just
one more warrior whose tribe needed less mouths to feed and
fewer aggressive young men.
She tried to imagine that man as young, her own age. It was
not uncommon for bands of youngsters to leave a village for a
few years, to go seeking blood and trinkets and the chance to
hone their skills. Those that returned frequently became great
hunters, even chiefs, and certainly they found themselves good
wives or hearth-husbands. Had Broken Axe himself ever really
been the sort of rough, bright-eyed chancer that Loud Thunder
described? She found it hard to believe.
And then at last, one night, Thunder turned to her after finishing an innocent-enough story, and told her, ‘Your turn.’
She blinked, as panicked in that instant as if he had grabbed
her by the throat. ‘What?’
‘Your story.’
‘But I haven’t . . . you want a Wolf story?’ She knew it was not
what he meant.
‘I want a story of
you
.’
‘But I’m . . .You’re both older than me.You’ve done more . . .
I haven’t . . .’
‘You’ve done one thing, at least,’ Loud Thunder told her, and
she knew it was time: the time she had been putting off ever
since Broken Axe had slunk off into the trees.
Before their combined gaze, and with the weight of the guestbond on her, she could not refuse.
So she told them: about her mother, her father. She told them
what Akrit had revealed to her, of the destiny he had planned for
her as his obedient wolf-child, from before she was even born.
She recounted every word she could recall, not like a storyteller
but in a quiet, dead-sounding voice.
The worst thing was listening to herself, hearing these things
set out properly, in a coherent fashion. Since she had left her
father’s shadow she had been hunted, she had been attacked. A
woman had tried to kill her, and so had the weather and the
world. ‘And,’ she said, in just a whisper, ‘should I . . . ? Was all
this the right thing to do, only for
that
? Surely people endure far
more, and they survive. Would it have been so bad to stay? What
would it have cost me?’
‘Well, I for one applaud your bold decisions,’ Hesprec said
drily.
‘Your tiger soul, it would cost,’ Thunder considered.
‘But . . .’ She did not need to say it. She had passed through
the Testing now. She had one soul too many within her body,
each of them growing and warring between themselves. Choose,
or go mad.