‘And now the Serpent calls to you in his hour of trial. Here is
one of the Serpent’s poor servants in need of your strong arm.’
‘You said yourself, this is just some errand of your own.’
‘And you were not listening. I said this is no part of my mission here in the north, but there is no breath I take, no thought
that comes into my head, that is not the Serpent’s business. If I
owe a debt, it is the Serpent’s debt to repay. Now, will you travel
with me to the east, Champion?’
‘He won’t,’ Shyri said derisively. ‘You argue like a sick man,
priest, all begging and wind and no strength. These words sway
no one.’
‘No doubt you’re right,’ Hesprec said. ‘But here is the difference between the Sun River Nation and the peoples of the
Plains, Laughing Girl. Our words are not just solitary stones
thrown into the night. With our words, we build. What sways the
heart is the sum of all the words that went before.’
Asmander sighed. ‘You’re right, of course. Messenger, it
would be an honour.’ He could hear it plain in those words that
he thought it anything but, and yet the old man had played him,
read him, moved him like a game piece. ‘For I have been shown
the way more than once, and walked the Serpent’s back to
escape the darkness. So now will I follow it one more time.’
The stronghold of the Tiger, that they called the Shining Halls,
rose up a steep hillside, tier on tier, and all of it built from stone.
Maniye had never seen so much worked stone in one place.
There were towers three or four storeys high, and many of them
intact. In places, a high wall ran intermittently. Even the lowest
and plainest of the dwellings were of stone, and even they were
carved, their faces boasting panels depicting human and animal
figures intertwined, fighting one another, embracing one another.
The upper corners of every building projected into the shapes
of gargoyles, louring out over the broad thoroughfares that ran
between.
Higher up the slope, the buildings became grander as well.
Below were the homes of the lowly, the dens of the thralls, Aritchaka explained. Status and station was important to the Tiger:
where one was born and what one could rise to. The higher
dwellings were for warriors, for the priesthood, for the rulers.
Maniye had witnessed nothing in her life that might have
prepared her for the great temple of the Tiger. It rose in leaps
and bounds from a squat, square base, spiralling into towers that
lifted claws to the skies above, the stonework coursing fluidly
with the bodies of a thousand effigies. It should have been a chaos
of mingling, contradictory shapes, but there had been a single
mind behind it, so that the eye was led across this intricate fretted
surface with a sure hand, images and scenes leaping into the
mind.
The Shining Halls were certainly far grander than the village
of the Winter Runners, and yet, as their tired horses passed
beneath a gateless arch and under the eyes of a dozen armed
Tigers, Maniye noted that there were fewer people here than the
sprawling size of the place would suggest. As they made their
way between the buildings, ever on upwards, she saw that much
of the stonework had seen better days too. Some had been damaged and not repaired. In a few places there were signs of fire
blackening. She was left with the impression of a culture defined
by what it had come to lack, that once had been plentiful. She
kept these thoughts to herself.
‘You are taking me to your temple?’ She knew the answer.
Aritchaka just nodded.
‘And what will you do with me there?’
‘Bring you before the Tiger,’ came the short answer.
It had not escaped Maniye that some of the scenes that had
leapt at her eyes from the stonework were ones of sacrifice, and
intricately so: whole gatherings of Tiger priests officiating at the
dismembering of those they would feed to their god.
The
Shadow Eaters
, she thought. The Wolves believed they consumed
more than mere flesh.
To the temple they took her, that Aritchaka said was also the
seat of their ruler, the heart of their world. She felt many eyes
upon her as she stepped under the great stone weight of it. They
did not look kindly on her. They saw a Wolf.
Within the temple, there was a room of screens and fires. She
had expected an icon, a carven tiger in mid-leap perhaps.
Instead there was just an altar, a block of stone that was scored
and cut. Behind it, a wall was carved over and over with repetitive shapes, and she saw the outlines of running cats there, each
interlocking with the rest so that there was no part of the stone
not coursing with a limitless cascade of them. Either side of her,
the walls were fretted with a thousand holes, so that what
remained was almost a lacework of stone, and fires were lit
behind, throwing their light through that maze of gaps.
‘What now?’ Maniye could only whisper.
‘Now the Tiger will come,’ Aritchaka told her, already retreating. ‘Now you will see what it is to be of the Fire Shadow
People, the Tiger’s chosen.’
Maniye heard the fires being banked, their light leaping
higher. Shadows leapt and danced about her, running up and
down the wall so that the constant progress of the cats seemed
to falter, to change direction, their illusory movement chasing
back and forth across the face of the carvings as though some
terrified quarry was rushing amongst them.
Around her, the piecemeal shadows cast by the twin flames
seemed to thicken and coalesce, and yet she was still waiting for
some effigy to rise up, something like the iron jaws of the Wolf
that she remembered from her home.
Not my home
, she told herself fiercely.
I am of the Tiger now
.
The traitor Wolf within her walked the lonely reaches of her soul
and bayed at her, but she stopped her ears to it. Only now, here
with her mother’s people, could she admit to herself how alone
she had felt since leaving the Winter Runners. Hesprec, Loud
Thunder, these were not her people. She wanted to be with her
own kind.
The shadows scurried and swayed about her. Although the
fires were higher still, yet somehow the room was darker, until
all those weaving spots and slashes of orange light seemed like
embers on the very point of guttering out. As she watched, her
eyes took in the circular dance of the shadows in her peripheral
vision, and built shapes from it, so that the complex game of
dark and light became abruptly the smouldering striped flanks
of the Tiger – there in the room with her.
She fell to her knees, not through reverence but fear. Yes, the
Wolf had touched her during her life, but that was a distant,
dispassionate totem, a patient stalker always watching to see
what she would do, what she could endure. The Tiger was
immediate, fierce, predatory in another way entirely. Not for the
Tiger the long hunt, the patient grinding down of fleeing prey.
To be a tiger was to leap, to ambush, to strike suddenly and
sure.
And can you?
In her head, the voice was vast and low and
purring, mingled with the low thunder of the fires.
What are
you? But you do not know yourself.
I am of the Tiger!
she protested.
I am your own!
But the wolf
was still howling deep inside her, and she lacked the means to
drive it out into the cold night, and to sever it from her.
We shall see what my people call you, but I suspect it shall be
‘prey’.
She wanted to beg, but that would be weak. She wanted to
demand, but that would be presumptuous. She did not know
what she wanted. She wanted to belong. Somewhere, she
wanted to
belong
.
The red-lit shadows bunched and gathered, and in her mind
the great beast sat up and regarded her indolently.
Do you think
possessing my blood will save you?
I have the blood of your queen!
It was Akrit’s own argument,
but now she clung to it because she had nothing else.
But who truly believes that?
The lazy, amused voice, always
with a laugh hidden within it, and that laugh always cruel.
They
know you for some mixed-blood foundling, and when your blood
waters my altar, will it be any more red for all your heritage? Who
will care? Who will know?
‘I will know!’ she told it aloud, knowing that Aritchaka and
the priestesses would be listening from where the fires were laid.
‘I know who I am. Who else matters?’
Again that soft, dangerous laugh.
I so love human pride. I love
the savour of it. I will certainly enjoy yours.
There were chambers beneath the temple that never saw the
sun, and that was where they put her. The torches that burned
there only stirred the shadows; they brought the Tiger down
from its altar, let its smoky body pace instead the tangled network of buried spaces that she now had the run of. She was not
a prisoner, not quite, for these were not cells. Still, when she
encountered the steps leading up, there were always men of the
Tiger tribe there, waiting to turn her around. Other times she
could not find any steps at all.
Aritchaka came down sometimes. With her, she had thralls
who bore food and drink: corn cakes and wizened little apples
and stone jugs of dust-tasting water.When Maniye demanded to
know what fate was intended for her, the priestess just cocked
her head.
‘We deliberate,’ she said. ‘We know what you claim to be, but
a little Tiger blood – even a tiger’s shape – does not make you
her
child. Are you some trick of the Wolf’s? Are you just some
child of two tribes who seeks to steal what is precious to us? Are
you what you say? We have lit the low-smoking fires, and the
smoke has provided no answer for us, not yet. And so you must
wait.’
Aritchaka gazed at her without expression. ‘You may wish it
had been longer, if the Tiger disowns you.’
Then she departed, leaving Maniye to the near-darkness.
She walked her buried domain on human feet. She prowled it
as a tiger. It brought her no release. When she brushed against
the unseen flanks of the greater cat that filled the space around
her, she sensed its sudden snarl, the bared teeth and wide eyes,
warning her off. Warning her not to pretend to something she
had not earned.
Time slipped away from her. She could not say whether she
slept when night fell, or whether she had been swept away from
the rhythms of the sun, set adrift in this hidden world. After she
had slept five times, with no clearer answer from Aritchaka, she
began to despair. With the shadow-bulk of the Tiger looming at
her back, she seized a torch and ground it into the stone at her
feet, putting it out, swallowing up the shadows in a greater dark.
She crouched there in that blackness, her eyes slowly adjusting to the faint glow of more distant lamps. For a brief moment,
though, the Tiger was pushed away from her, a creature of
shadow that could not tolerate the utter depths of night.
In that black silence she put her hands to the stone of the
floor, desperate for some reassurance that this was not the end,
that she was not wholly alone and abandoned. Something
moved there, she sensed. It might just have been her own pulse,
but she felt the slightest of shiftings beneath her hands, as
though something vast and far deeper shifted its coils as her
prayer reached it.
She knew that she was fooling herself, and yet the idea was
fixed in her mind now. Even as her eyes banished just enough of
the darkness for the Tiger to slip back in, she felt stronger, more
hopeful, less lonely. Even here in the Crown of the World ran the
scaled lengths of Hesprec’s god.
When Aritchaka came for her, not long after, she was ready.
The priestess’s gaze was keen and searching, but she said nothing, merely beckoning Maniye to follow. There was a quartet of
warriors there, in case she demurred. She recognized Red Jaw
and Club Head amongst them, but they would not meet her
eyes. Maniye could not read Aritchaka, but the manner of the
men was curious, something of reverence, something of fear, yet
they were plainly there to ensure she played her part.
They took her into a deep chamber where water welled up
from a crack in the rock that had been smoothed and carved
until it resembled a human face. Two thralls were present, men
both, and they stripped and washed her, despite her protests.
They kept their faces averted as much as they could, and would
not speak a word to her, and the guards watched on throughout.
At no point was there any hint of desire in any of them, or not
any form of desire that might be consummated. They were
treating her with the careful, dispassionate respect they might
accord to one of their sacred carvings.
At the end, they gave her a shift of fine calfskin that was dyed
near-black and set with rows of stones: beads of amber and
green moss agate and three colours of tiger’s eye, dense and
heavy enough that she felt she had donned a cuirass of bronze.
Aritchaka then reappeared, and set a circlet about her head –
weighty enough to be gold – and anointed her with scented oils.
Maniye remembered what her father’s plan had been: for her
to come to the Tiger and announce her heritage; for them to
kneel to her and accept her as their queen, somehow usurping
their devotion and government simply by virtue of her bloodline. That was how the world worked for the Tigers, so Akrit
Stone River had believed: no challenges, no consent of the tribe,
just some sort of invisible fitness to rule conveyed by blood from
mother to daughter.
In the way they treated her, she did not sense that they had
accepted her as their ruler. A ruler, after all, was required to
engage with her people. Maniye was being treated like a thing: a
valuable thing but a thing nonetheless. And
things
were there to
be used. They could trick her up in gold and shining stones as
much as they liked, but even the most exquisite of
things
was
still property.
She thought then of the Deer people. She had heard that they
chose kings from amongst their number in spring, who lived
well and wanted for nothing, beloved of all. Until the next
spring, when they would take their happy, smiling king to the
Stone Place and . . .