As the days grew shorter, and the cold locked them ever tighter
into the cramped space of Thunder’s hall, Loud Thunder took
to sleeping longer – sometimes for whole days and nights. When
he awoke it would take him longer to recognize them or, in turn,
become a person that they recognized. At his worst he would
blunder about the interior of his home and ignore them completely, or just shamble past and head straight outside, Stepping
to his bear form and leaving the hall to an uneasy truce between
Hesprec and Maniye on one side and the dogs on the other.
Then he was gone for three nights running, so that Maniye
began to wonder if he was coming back at all. On the third
night, though, she heard distant sounds on the still, cold air:
singing and whooping, and distant roars and bellows. Then she
knew that Loud Thunder had gone to be with his own people,
the first time all winter that he had sought them out.
‘It is the longest night,’ Hesprec murmured. ‘Hard to calculate, with all these clouds you are so fond of, but I think it must
be midwinter. Shorter nights and longer days from here, and
warmer, I sincerely hope.’
Thunder came back the next night. When he stripped off his
robe, she saw the marks of claws and teeth on his skin, all
shrunk and puckered compared to broader gashes they would
have made on a bear’s hide. One ear was torn, and there was a
welter of bruises across his face and shoulders. He seemed
unbothered by it. Certainly she had no sense that he had been
defeated in any way. Instead, this was what the Bear tribe did.
She wondered if, in fighting each other, they were fighting off
the winter.
He was drunk, too, soaked in sweat and the sweet smell of
mead. Despite looking dead on his feet, he did not sleep all
through that night but built up the fire until it blazed high, then
drank some more and sang. They were long, strange songs
about fallen warriors, the passing on of great men, souls being
reborn, and the turn of the year. To be with him then, to share
that space with him, was almost impossible. It was not the fear
of him but that he had brought the Bear with him, the unseen
spirit of the Cave Dwellers crowding out everything else in its
battle against the cold season.
After that, he slept – and it looked plain that he would be
sleeping for days. He had eaten almost everything they had, but
by now Maniye had learned a little of trapping from Hesprec, a
little of ice fishing from Loud Thunder himself. She wrapped
herself up as warmly as she could and set out to restock the
larder.
It was then, wandering far afield to look for tracks in the
snow, that she found the campsite.
The smoke caught her wolf’s nose first, impossible to ignore.
When she got there, the fire had long burned out, with only a
little heat clinging to the ashes. It had been built in a sheltered
hollow beneath an overhanging stone, not too far from the lake.
She could see where hides had been hung to enclose the space
and contain the warmth.
There was a single set of tracks leading away from it. Wolf
tracks. Half a day old, and the snow did not hold his scent well,
but she knew whose they must be.
She had thought he had gone back to spend the winter with
her father before setting out again. She had known that, beyond
argument, because who would simply wait out the winter like
this? Who was that patient and that determined?
Broken Axe. Broken Axe could fight even the highland winters to a standstill. All this time he had been there, keeping his
distance, holding to the word of promise he gave to Loud Thunder.
But that word cut her as much as him, for midwinter was
past now, the year climbing back towards the warmth of the sun.
Spring was on the distant horizon and, with spring, he would
come for her.
After midwinter and the secret revels of the Cave Dwellers, a
change came over Loud Thunder. Never talkative, there was a
despondent character to his new silence. Often he would just sit
staring into the fire, a dog either side of him, brooding on something. Only Hesprec’s stories could bring him back even a little
bit, and their charm was clearly lost soon after the last word was
spoken.
‘Let me tell you about the time that Mongoose and Serpent
tried to out-trick each other,’ the Snake priest would begin, and
the tale would be swift and convoluted as the two rivals sought
ever more ridiculous means to outdo the other. And Loud
Thunder would laugh, a rumble big enough to fill the inside of
his home. But then the story would be done, and he would
grunt and nod, and Maniye would almost see the mirth draining
from him, down some hole he was powerless to stopper.
Or: ‘This is a story of Sees Forever, whose eyes knew neither
darkness nor mist, and who went beneath the earth and rescued
the Corn Sister with Serpent’s aid.’ And the tale would be one of
sudden ambush, of impossible guardian monsters, of a man pitting himself against the greater spirits, and prevailing. Then
Loud Thunder would become inspired, and grin, and his hands
would twitch whenever Sees Forever fought, as though some
ghost of the myth-hero touched him. But in the end his great
shoulders would shrug, all the purpose sloping off them as if to
say,
It was all very well in those days, but now we have other worries.
Maniye had seen what oppressed him: not the details of his
worry, but when it must befall him. They were inching through
the second half of winter, and nothing of any great import
would stir while the white season held its dominion in the frozen
world outside. Like a distant star, though, spring was coming.
Loud Thunder feared the spring.
One morning she was bold enough to ask him, ‘Is it because
Broken Axe will come?’
He glanced at her, frowning. ‘Is what what?’
‘The thing that troubles you,’ she pressed. ‘Only, I think he
was your friend, and I know he will come for me.’
‘That’s
your
doom,’ he replied harshly. ‘
Yo u
plan for that.
When he comes, am I to stop him?’
‘But . . .’ Something lurched within her, as if a chasm opened
up under her. ‘I thought that you . . .’
‘You have been my guest, this winter,’ Thunder told her ponderously. ‘Until winter’s last day, you are my guest still, and
Broken Axe will keep his distance. But you are his prey to hunt
once more when the days have grown long enough to challenge
the nights again. And, when that time comes, I’ll not be a man
to have guests.’
‘What is it?’ she asked him. Her own need was hammering
within her, but she fought it down.
‘Nothing . . . maybe nothing.’ But it was plain he did not
believe so.
‘Your own people?’ she divined. He just stared at her, but she
saw in his expression that she was right.
Over that winter she had many nightmares. Her twin souls were
turbulent within her, sometimes one ascendant, sometimes the
other. She had dreams where her tiger was carried away from
her in the waters of a furious, icy river. She woke with a start
from a sense of having leapt up a cliff, as she had done to escape
Broken Axe, only the wolf had been left behind, the threads that
bound it to her snapping abruptly.
She had made no choice. To take one would be to betray the
other, and they were both
her.
And yet she could feel a roiling
instability within her, a loss of control. She would go mad, she
knew. In the end those two souls would fight, and perhaps she
would lose them both and have no shape to Step to at all.
So it was that she found a night when Loud Thunder slept
but Hesprec was still alert, performing some devotion before the
empty gaze of the fire. He had a hundred of these little rituals:
burning things, burying things, drawing spiral patterns in the
ash. She wondered if he was trying to catch the tail of the future,
so that he could know what the new year would bring. Or perhaps he was speaking with his subterranean god, feeling its
movements through the frozen earth.
She knelt on the other side of the fire from him, head down
to show a due deference that was a marked change from her
usual manner towards him, and waited for him to finish. She
had a sense of him casting a pale eye at her, ever curious, but he
carried on with his secret business, whispering to the flames,
then watching them leap as though he saw an answer in their
dancing.
At last his conversation with the fire was done, and she was
itching to ask him what it had all been about. He would not have
told her anyway, and her questions would have made him defensive and irritable, but normally that would not have stopped her.
This time, though, she was going to ask for something perhaps
bigger than anything before. She was trying to approach him
with the reverential respect that she imagined his own people
might show.
‘Hesprec . . .’ No doubt there was some title for a Snake
priest in the River Nation, but he had never mentioned it.
He regarded her alertly, perhaps warily, as though something
of her purpose had already reached him. Perhaps the fire had
told him.
‘I cannot choose,’ she said simply.
He nodded soberly. ‘These things are known: your dreams
leak out of your mouth, most nights.’
‘I need help.’
That cautious look of his returned.
‘Hesprec, I cannot choose,’ she repeated. ‘I cannot let either
of them go to please the other, and they fight – they fight inside
me. So I thought of another way, a new way.’ It was a terrible
thing to think, worse to say, but now she squared her shoulders
to confront it.
‘Perhaps you will tell me?’ he invited.
‘You said with the Horse . . . how they took in children and
gave them new souls. Made them belong in their tribe.’
‘It is a shocking thing, but no less true,’ he agreed.
‘And I thought . . . I thought that if the Tiger will not let me
be a Wolf, and the Wolf will not let me be a Tiger . . .’ She faltered, then pressed on, desperate to get to the part where she
actually asked him: ‘Make me a Serpent.’
He froze, mouth slightly open, staring at her as though she
bore a dreadful wound and he did not know how to heal it without hurting her even more. ‘It cannot be,’ he said at last, in just
a whisper.
‘
Please
,’ she insisted. ‘Whatever I need to do, I’ll do it. I’ll make
offerings. I’ll swear oaths. I’ll give myself over to your god and
learn all your things that you do. It must be possible.’
‘But it is not.’ His face creased in pain. ‘What did I say to you,
one of the first ever things? We of the Serpent are special.We are
the scions of the Oldest Kingdom. There is no becoming one of
us.’
‘Why? What don’t I have?’ she demanded. ‘I’ll work, I’ll take
your trials, whatever—’
But he held a hand up, and that hand signified finality, in a
way she could not define. ‘It is not done. It has never been
known. I cannot do it,’ he insisted. ‘If there is some way, then it
is a secret held by some other priest, one closer to Serpent than
I am.’ A toothless grimace. ‘I am sorry, Maniye. I cannot describe
the sorrow in me that this thing cannot be, but you must seek
elsewhere for your answer.’
She had a horrible sense of being a very ignorant girl asking
something very stupid, and that he was being far too kind in his
mild response. Facing that old, old gaze she felt callow and foolish. Before he could say anything else comforting, she stood up
abruptly, almost kicking the fire, and struggled outside, dragging
her Horse coat around herself.
She cut wood. It always needed doing and the work involved
no thought. She was good at it now: the winter had taught her
all sorts of skills that her life in the Winter Runners had not
gifted her with. She could see now, with the benefit of hindsight,
that her father had always had her in mind for someone’s
hearth-keeper, someone’s wife. There was no dishonour in that:
to gather and tend, to clean and stitch, to raise children, to meet
with the other wives and hearth-husbands and make the hundred small decisions a community relied on. These were valued
tasks and many, and yet she had tasted the wilderness now. She
had run with the vanguard of winter. She would never be content to keep a hearth.
After that, she still did not feel she could face Hesprec, and so
she took the leather bucket and headed for the lake. She was so
wrapped up in her own embarrassment – and a kind of dawning
horror as she imagined what she might have felt had he somehow said
yes
– that she did not realize she was not alone until the
lakeshore became visible through the trees. Only then did the
quiet get to her: not even those muted animal sounds that full
winter could not stifle. She was advancing into a world already
plunged into that still silence that spoke of the fear of man.
And he was there when she looked for him; not even keeping
pace but just standing a little ahead of her, as though he had
been waiting there all night or all winter. Broken Axe.
She started back, dropping the bucket. She could only think
that she had miscounted the days, that the spring was already
come, that it was time.
Then she Stepped, first to wolf, backing away with bared
teeth, then to tiger, bulking out as big as she could, snarling and
hissing and bristling every hair.
He remained very still, looking at her. If he had Stepped to
his wolf shape, then she would have fought or run. She could
not have said, right then, which course she might have taken. He
remained human, though, with no weapon to hand.
‘My oath still stands,’ he said.
There was sufficient distance between them that, if he lunged
for her, she would have time to find a form in which to meet
him, or so she hoped. She knew she should simply flee, but here
he stood, Broken Axe, and between them the iron barrier of his
word.
She let go of the tiger within her, and her human feet took a
single step back, widening the distance just that little bit more.
‘And you’ve never broken an oath before, is that it?’
‘Only once.’ Ill fortune dogged the oath-breaker, just as it
would the treacherous host, the ungracious guest, the kinslayer.
These were the great crimes that even the most powerful took
note of. But then he was a lone wolf, a man who ran without a
pack. The stories agreed that such hunters were broken inside,
so that their word was a twisting and slippery thing.
‘I won’t go with you,’ she told him.
‘You think so.’
‘You bring back my corpse, or nothing at all.’ Even as she said
it, she wondered if she herself was making oaths she could not
keep.
‘Many Tracks, you’re young still. Is it a happy thing to fall
back into your father’s shadow? No, but neither is it the end of
the world. There are worse fates.’
‘My father will never have me for a daughter.’ She realized
that something had shifted in her over the winter, something
learned from Loud Thunder or from Hesprec, or from her own
two warring souls. She would be as good as her word: she would
not go quietly, nor become the meek daughter or hearth-wife.
‘And if there are worse fates than being Stone River’s get, how
about Broken Axe’s mate?’
She caught the flinch in his expression, swiftly disguised.
He
doesn’t know!
‘My father promised it – or threatened it – to punish me. To
bind you.’
For a long time he stared at her, and she could read precisely
nothing of his thinking in his expression. Those eyes of his
seemed to anatomize her, and eventually his silence became the
most fearful thing about him, growing and growing until it filled
the world.
‘He will have
you
for his dog,’ she said. She had meant it as a
barb, but the silence had got to her, and it came out closer to a
whisper.
‘That is between Stone River and myself,’ he said at last. ‘But
you cannot be my mate, not even if either of us found it a
thought to rejoice in.’
It was her turn to frown but say nothing.
‘Many Tracks,’ he reminded her mildly. Through all this
speech he had not moved, not so much as to shift his balance.
At first she could not see what he meant, and he was plainly
willing to wait until the world froze over before saying more.
Then the revelation descended on her like a storm, so that she
actually staggered slightly. A hunter would take a mate to keep
his hearth.Yet on the shores of the lake, when he had caught up
with her, he had given her a hunter’s name.
Many Tracks? She had not thought how he had meant it.
She’d thought it was just the mockery of a man who believed he
had caught her.
He must have seen the leap of hope in her face. ‘Do not mistake me,’ he warned her. ‘When the last day of winter dies, then
I will come for you. This I swore, even as I swore to Loud Thunder that I would wait just so long. But of your father’s plans for
you – or for me – then know that you shall be spared the fate of
being the mate of Broken Axe.’
‘And you shall not be bound to my father’s hearth.’
‘Just so.’
There were parts of her that were still urging that she flee,
but she mastered them. ‘You have lived all the winter here, without even a roof.’
A nod from him.
‘Why do you even bother with the tribe or with my father? A
man who can triumph over winter should need nothing from
them. If I could do that myself, I’d just . . .’
‘Go into the wilds? Live as the wolf lives?’ he asked her.
‘Why not?’
‘I wish I were that strong. But the call of kin, of blood, of
company, it gets to you, if you give it long enough. It’s easier to
live alone when there are people you can live alone away from.’
His small smile made him young just for a moment: the youth
who must have shared adventures with Loud Thunder long ago.
‘Perhaps one day you’ll be stronger than me.’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘Good luck to you. But do it after I’ve brought you back to
Stone River. After that you’re no longer my concern.’
And it was the strangest thing, but she could detect the falsehood there. She
was
his concern, somehow. It was not any desire
for her – she had seen that plain enough when she had told him
Akrit’s plans. There was something else, though . . .
My mother . . .
Was there some guilt there, that he had been
the one to take her mother out into the woods and cut her
throat? Surely guilt was for men other than Broken Axe.
Then he moved, and even though it was away from her she
was instantly a wolf, skittering away from him.
‘I’ll be with you soon enough,’ he called back to her. ‘You
must know that Loud Thunder will not stand in my way again.
You’ve run well, and you’ve made good use of your chances, but
where can you go now? What will you barter with next, for just
a little more time?’ And he seemed almost to be inviting her to
think of something.
Is it that he enjoys the chase and wants to prolong it?
Abruptly he had Stepped, becoming the pale wolf with the
dark mane, and went loping easily off through the trees, lost to
sight in moments.