The Tiger and the Wolf (36 page)

The daughters of the priestesses and the families close to the
Queen learned to fight, but it was like dancing. Growing up
amongst the Winter Runners, Maniye had been resistant to
being taught anything at all, and what she had been forced to
learn had come only from Kalameshli, with his rod and the hard
back of his hand.

She suspected that most children of the Tiger learned exactly
like that, but for those close to the throne it was different. For
them, there were ways of doing things. There were stories they
were expected to know. There was battle.

They fought with long knives and with short-hafted axes, but
they learned their fights one move at a time, and strung their
moves together like beads, each flowing to the next. Their teachers – sharp-voiced priestesses like Aritchaka – emphasized the
grace of each movement, the poise and balance: where the feet
trod, where their bodies were weak. A student who took the
wrong stance could expect to receive a hard shove to show her
just where she had failed.

It was all alien to Maniye. More, the teachers regarded her
with emotions ranging from bafflement to open dislike. The
other students stared and whispered, repelled by her differences:
wrong face, wrong skin, wrong hair, wrong eyes. And small, too:
smaller than girls three or four years her junior. Everything
around her seemed set on making her admit defeat.

The girl who had hidden and skulked apart amongst the
Winter Runners, the girl whose world had been an exercise in
avoiding the notice of the powerful, she would have failed here.
But she was not that girl any longer. Looking back, she could
see that the actual privations she had thought she was escaping
were small things. She had lived a life where she was fed and
sheltered; not a thrall, nor fending for herself.

But when she had rescued Hesprec and fled, she had unwittingly broken out from a different prison: a prison of no choices.
She had defied her father, and in doing so had become
someone
for the first time.

Maniye had spent a harsh winter becoming that person. Her
flight from Broken Axe had taught her to think fast. Her months
with Loud Thunder had taught her to shift for herself. She
threw herself into her new surroundings with a will, watching
every movement, listening to every word.

In the first ten days, everything she did was wrong. After that
– well, she was learning for the first time what all the others had
been practising for years. She did not know the precise, exquisite steps; she did not know the proper and exact wording for
the tales. She recognized where the gaps were, though; she knew
the limits of her ignorance. When she came to them, she did not
turn back but just ran faster, leaping each gap as it appeared.
She found in herself a swiftness and a sureness that meant she
could keep to her feet: not able to beat the others, but not so
easy to beat.

And when it came to Step, she found she was as swift and
fierce as any of them, and as used to the tiger’s shape. She could
climb better than they, and run faster. Whilst they had learned
and practised, she had been
living
. None of the Tiger’s other
daughters had been forced to test their skills against the sharp
edges of the Crown of the World. However they might try to
look down on her, they always found her eyes staring right back
at them.

But always, when she reached deep into her soul so as to
Step, there was the Wolf, that solitary figure. She pictured it out
in the snow, banished from the fire, a little further away each
time. And yet still there. She wanted it to go away, to pad off
into the darkness and leave her forever. She wanted to step
wholly into the Shadow of the Tiger. But still it lingered, howling
mournfully at the edge of her attention.

Sometimes she woke from Wolf dreams, pack dreams, raging
at the obstinacy of her own soul.
Sometimes her mother came to watch, and that was when she
got it most wrong. Because suddenly there was a new thought in
her mind:
I must impress her.
Those were painful times.
Her blood link to the Queen did not seem to be general
knowledge, and Maniye herself said nothing of it. Her teachers
must have been told
something
of why this Wolf-looking girl had
been forced on them, but they remained close-mouthed. No
doubt she was a constant source of speculation amongst her
unwilling peers.
One day – and she had lost count, but felt it must be close on
a month since she first came to the Shining Place – they were
spared being put through their paces. Instead, they were brought
before the Tiger.
Maniye was never sure whether this was some sacred date
that nobody had mentioned to her, or whether the Queen had
ordered it, or whether this was all because of a challenge
between two of the priesthood. They were taken down to the
temple chamber, though, and made to kneel and watch the scattered smoke and firelight dancing on that wall with its
ever-coursing carvings. To Maniye, the presence of the Tiger
was palpable, hanging in the air, moving restlessly from wall to
wall. Glancing at her peers, seeing expressions ranging from
fear to boredom, she wondered if they felt as she did. Could you
really become jaded with that brooding, bloody-minded spirit?
Or was her own mind just colouring the smoky air? Perhaps she
cast the Tiger as menacing because she knew she would never
truly belong.
She fought down that thought mercilessly. And felt a tiny
spark of approval? So she told herself.
There was music then: fierce and rapid drumming on instruments of hide and metal, and shrill pipes, all issuing from
hidden spaces about the temple. Two priestesses had stepped
out into that Tiger-haunted space between the fretted screens.
They wore much gold about them, though little else, and their
skins were streaked and striped with eye-leading patterns of
black. They carried knives like curved razors, and they began to
dance. With her breath caught in her throat, Maniye watched
them as they stepped around one another. Each move was
between positions of perfect balance, each step moved the hands
and the knife as they circled. It was the perfect expression of the
clumsy lumbering that Maniye and the other girls had been
lurching through, but as like to the latter as the flight of birds
was like to human jumping.They were exquisite in every motion,
eyes fixed on each other, moving through exacting passes with
unthinking elegance.
Then the first blood was drawn and Maniye realized that it
was actually a fight. Whether there had been some disagreement
between them or whether this was an offering to the Tiger, she
had no idea, but in a handful of seconds both women bore two
thin lines of blood across their bodies, and the tempo of the
contest was accelerating, without their movements being any
less perfect.
And then they Stepped, and fought as tigers, and it was
simply a continuation of the dance. Each flowed from shape to
shape as advantage required, two feet to four and back, and
never faltered. The keen lines of claws joined the thin scratches
of their blades. Watching them – two masters of an art that she
had only recently discovered – Maniye could only think,
How
could these people ever have been beaten?
The Wolves had nothing
compared to this, only the hard experience of a hunter, gained
piecemeal.
But the Wolves had a different way, of course, for they did
not fight alone. And she had seen herself how few in number the
Tigers were.
She almost missed the moment when one of the women misstepped, in human shape with her blade held wide, and her
opponent a tiger under her guard. Then she was down, the
snarling beast atop her, jaws agape. Maniye expected her to die.
She sensed the bloodlust of the Tiger all around her.
And the drums reached their crescendo and the pipes
shrieked, and then all was still, and the tiger was a woman once
more, stepping back from her adversary. Instantly, thralls were
rushing forwards to tend to their wounds, and the loser was
forcing herself to stand, proud before her god. Maniye was left
wondering whether it had not, after all that, been merely a dance
to long-rehearsed steps.

She felt as though she was back at the frozen lake with Loud
Thunder again, and waiting for the thaw. Her mother came to
see her, and she tried and tried, coming ten years too late to all
these traditions. Never did Joalpey speak to her; never did she
call for her daughter. Always her eyes seemed frozen with doubt
and bad memories.

Maniye knelt in the room that was the Tiger’s shrine,
crouched before that apparition of smoke and imagination that
was the closest her mother’s people got to representing their
god. The Tiger without spoke there to the tiger within. She felt
the connection as clear and self-evident:
This is where I belong.
And yet the Wolf was written in her face and in her compact
frame, in the way she spoke, in her blood. And the same Wolf
was embedded in Joalpey’s mind like an arrow.

She began to feel a terrible fear that she would never become
either of the things within her. That, in the end, neither Tiger
nor Wolf would have her. That she was lost.

She began to dream badly: confusing, tormenting nightmares
of fleeing or chasing, though really it was herself that she both
pursued and fled from. In her dreams there were no familiar
places. Each seemed to take her further from anywhere she
knew, from any sight she had seen. She was drifting away, inside
her own head. She had been given a chance to belong: it had
been within her very reach. Yet she was losing her hold on it, as
though she had climbed and climbed only to fail within sight of
the top. And that meant a long drop.

Maniye began to dread going to sleep. In the dreams themselves, though, it was waking that she dreaded. Another day
where her mother turned away from her. Another day alone
amidst all the people of the Shining Halls, because there was
nobody she could speak with about this: not her teachers, not
Aritchaka, not anyone.

Yet one morning she woke in the close stone cell where she
slept alone – the other students would not have her in their dormitory because of her face and her twitching, whimpering
nightmares. She awoke with the sense of a presence close by,
quiet and still and buried . . . and he was there.

He sat beside her pallet with his back against the wall, awake
but not quite looking at her. He seemed paler and older than
ever, and the scales of his tattoos were so faded that they had
almost rubbed away in parts. His skin seemed brittle, as though
to reach out and touch him would break him into a thousand
desiccated flakes. But then his eyes flicked towards her, and a
delicate smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

‘Good morning, little Tiger,’ said Hesprec softly. ‘I came to
see that you are well.’
She had her smile ready, and was hunting about for some
mocking retort, some dismissive joke, when the tears came.
Abruptly she was sitting up and weeping, holding him close,
feeling the feather weight of his hand on her head, smoothing
her hair.

‘It is no great matter,’ Hesprec told her.
‘But how are you even here?’ Maniye demanded.
‘Does the Serpent not know all ways under the earth?’ Hesprec looked at their close stone confines almost approvingly.
‘Besides, I discovered some fellow countrymen whose aid I was
able to enlist. Serpent provides, little Tiger.’

Maniye thought about the gods of Wolf and Tiger. Did they
provide? They challenged, yes; they made their people strong by
testing them and weeding out the weak. Which sounded admirable unless you spent your life terrified of weaknesses you could
do nothing about.

Hesprec was watching her, reading each thought from the
smallest change in her expression, or so his eyes suggested.
‘Nothing lost, nothing forgotten,’ he told her softly. ‘Serpent
seeks for old knowledge in the deep earth and brings it to light.
Serpent’s coils cradle learning now gone from the rest of the
world, ready to proffer it to us when we are ready. Why do you
think the world has to suffer ancient creatures such as I, mm?
Only that we go amongst the people of the world with those
gems of knowledge Serpent has dug in the deep earth of old
time.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ she told him, but inwardly she
experieced a stab of envy at the comfort his god gave him. Then
she felt guilty for it, because she was trying to grow close to the
Tiger, not be seduced by some other way. Still . . .

She almost did not say it, hovering twice on the edge of voicing the words without letting them out, before finally giving way.
‘I thought I felt . . . Serpent, I thought he helped me, once,
twice. He? She?’
‘Either. And most likely you did. Serpent’s coils run beneath
all the earth, and now you have met me, you may see them from
time to time. You have become something that Serpent may
notice.’ He stretched. ‘Now, there is a priestess who has said she
would speak to me of visions.’
Maniye stood up suddenly, feeling betrayed. ‘You’re here for
your mission! You’re not here for me at all!’
Hesprec rolled his eyes, spreading exaggeratedly exasperated
hands. ‘Dear me, life is so simple in the Crown of the World that
you can do one thing at a time only. I came here for you, and I
am very grateful that your meanderings took me to a place
where I might also advance the Serpent’s business.’
‘Hmm.’ Feeling backed into a logical corner, Maniye folded
her arms stubbornly. ‘If the coils of the Serpent are everywhere,
why does he need you?’
‘Because I am but a loop of those coils.’
It was past time for her to be gone to her studies, she realized.
‘Will you . . . ?’ She could still not quite understand how he was
here, alive and unfettered. ‘You will stay?’
‘For a time,’ he agreed mildly. ‘I must find some path back to
my home eventually, but for now I am here, and in no apparent
danger from your kin, thanks to, if I might say so, a remarkable
combination of good fortune and deft speech on my part. And
you, of course.’
She started. ‘Me?’
‘Yours is a name to conjure by. When I gave it, they brought
me straight before that remarkable woman who rules here. Why
was that, I wonder?’ His expression gave her no clue as to his
private thoughts.
She wanted to answer him, but the whole business had laid a
weight of secrecy on her ever since she had first left her mother’s presence. She had grown used to it being that one piece of
knowledge that was never spoken of – even amongst those who
knew the truth.
Later, Hesprec was there as she tried to match the careful
steps of the other students. In those slow passes she saw again
the fierce duel between the priestesses: the same movements at
a difference pace. It should have made her nervous, but instead
every part of the dance seemed to fall into place that much
more naturally: her bones now knew what it was all
for
. That was
the day she Stepped and took her bronze knife with her, making
the hard metal a part of her body, and finding it in her hand
again when she retook her human form. The old Serpent’s gaze
upon her made her feel proud.
Just as nobody openly stared at her Wolf face, or speculated
on her heritage, so Hesprec seemed to share in that peculiar
invisibility. He could hardly be missed, that outlandish old man
with his cloth-covered head and his corpse-pallor skin, and yet
Tiger eyes slid off him in a willing conspiracy to pretend he was
not there.
When Broken Axe made an appearance, which was rarely, he
too was looked straight through, made to disappear by the collective consensus of the Tiger. Even the Eyriemen had a touch
of it. At first Maniye saw this as an aloofness born of disdain. It
was watching Hesprec that taught her otherwise. Somehow, as
he passed amongst them, he taught her to look at her hosts anew
and see the weakness she had taken for proud strength. They
did not wish to see him, or Maniye, or any of these strangers
walking freely in their halls, because they were all evidence of
how the Tiger had fallen from the heights of its strength. She
studied the carvings then, seeing past Queens seated with great
ceremony while the world scuffed a path on its knees to their
throne. The Eyriemen would not have stalked so haughtily
through these halls in those days.
She understood, then, that the whole of the Shining Halls
could not look at these foreigners without feeling the pain of old
wounds, humiliations and indignities. Just as her mother could
not look on her.
With that particular revelation, she found herself a high place,
roosting up on the temple wall amongst the carved monsters:
the petrified jaws and claws of tigers trapped forever halfway
out of the stone. Just as she had once retreated to the high eaves
of Akrit’s hall, she perched there and stared down at the sprawl
of buildings that was the Shining Halls. At night there seemed to
be precious little about them that shone.
How long she stayed there, as the moon bellied up into the
sky, she could not later have said. She only came out of the
depths of herself at a scuffing sound nearby. Instantly she was a
Tiger, keen-eyed in the dark, and she saw Broken Axe standing
further along the wall from her, feet neatly balancing along the
same ledge that she had taken as a roost.
‘What do you want?’ she asked sourly.
His eyes fixed her against the stone. Even now that she knew
some inner part of him, she could not say just who or what
he really was. He was the Wolf that walked alone. He did what
he did for his own reasons.
‘I wanted to see how you were,’ he told her.
‘Why would you want to do that?’ she demanded. ‘I thought
you didn’t need to hunt me any more.’
He shrugged, and then lowered himself until he was sitting
close by, looking down. ‘You are a strange creature, Many
Tracks. You are something that should not have come into the
world.’ He said it matter-of-factly, without any sign that he
intended to hurt her. ‘To bring a thing into existence is to be
responsible for it. Whose hands are behind the fashioning of
you, then? Stone River, for sure. Kalameshli Takes Iron also, for
his was the thought behind it. And your mother, too, for all she
had little choice. And me.’ Meeting her fierce glare, he shrugged
again. ‘Or do you not think so? That I saved your mother, there
is the mark of my wood-knife in carving you. That I never told
you, there is another. That you grew up believing I had murdered her, a mark there. I did not bring your shape from the
wood, but I have helped finish you.’
‘You’re responsible for me?’
‘In some small way.’
‘You don’t need to be,’ she told him harshly. ‘I – what? –
absolve you.You are nothing to me. I am happy to be nothing to
you.’ It wasn’t true, of course, and she felt they both knew it. He
still frightened her, but she could not cut him away from her
history. In that, he was right.
He stretched, prior to changing the subject. ‘I have travelled
from the Swift Backs,’ he said, naming the closest tribe of the
Wolf.
‘You lie to them like you lied to the Winter Runners?’
‘I lie to nobody. I am the Wolf alone, and I serve the Wolf in
my own way. If they believe that I must be a slave to their path,
it is not my place to enlighten them,’ he said softly. ‘Of all my
responsibilities, the chiefest to me is that I tread a path that
bears neither guilt nor shame. Those are the things that the Wolf
cannot endure.’
‘Did you . . . ?’ Asking a question of him was putting herself
in his debt, drawing back into his shadow that she claimed to be
free of, and yet . . . ‘What have you heard, of my f– of Stone
River?’
‘That he is strong with the Many Mouths now, and that the
eldest son of Seven Skins has given many gifts to Stone River.
That the Moon Eaters and the Swift Backs have exchanged
many messengers, and it seems that they are halfway into Stone
River’s camp, each for fear that, if the other joined but not they,
then standing alone they would fall prey to the rest. You know
how Stone River got his name, Many Tracks?’
‘I . . . the landslide.’ She knew the story, of course: the most
told tale amongst the Winter Runners, or at least of those
recounted within earshot of her father. During the war with the
Tiger, Akrit had come to a battle in a canyon. He had lured the
Tiger to where he had seen a great slope of loose scree and,
when they had chased him, he had brought it down on them,
killing many of their best. He had been barely older then than
she herself was now.
‘The words of the Swift Backs were only the first stones of
the landslide,’ Broken Axe told her. ‘You know what I mean.’
For a long time she stared at him, and then she finally found
the question that had been stalking her mind since she first saw
him in Joalpey’s throne room.
‘How did it happen? When did you become . . .
not
a Winter
Runner? Was it in the war?’
‘I was just a boy during the war.’
‘You didn’t fight?’
‘I fought. Boys fight, but they don’t ask questions. They
believe what they’re told. I fought well, scouted well. That’s what
they used us for, mostly. Of all the youth of the Winter Runners,
only I could walk alone into the trees and take back the night
from the enemy. I was noticed because I killed Tiger warriors.
When I left an axehead in the skull of one of their war chiefs, I
was not much older than you. If you could have met me in those
days, you’d not have found a more devoted member of Stone
River’s warband.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Afterwards, after the Tiger’s power broke – when your
mother had been captured, and they were forced to give tribute
to Seven Skins and your father, there was a hunt. Stone River
entrusted it to his best warriors – and I was one. Tell me, girl,
how many tigers you have seen in your life?’
‘Tigers?’
‘Of wolves, there are many, but you will find few tigers in
these parts or anywhere west of here. We were ordered to trap
and kill every one of them we could find. We were told to strip
the Tiger of its souls.’ He gave her a bleak look. ‘I cannot even
say what might happen then, whether the Tiger souls must
travel many miles to find a new body to be born into. And what
if there were not enough? What happens to those souls then?
And I thought about it all too long, what we were doing. And I
knew that if I just did what I was told, and it was wrong, then
being told to do it would not save me. If the Tiger himself
should stand between my soul and a new life, and demand to
know why I slaughtered so many of his kind, what could I say?
That it was Akrit Stone River who gave the order? What would
that matter to a god-spirit? More, what could I say to myself,
when I asked that question of my reflection in the waters? So I
became Broken Axe, the Wolf that walks alone. I thought Stone
River would be angry.’
‘Why wasn’t he?’ Because to Maniye, it seemed her father
had always been on the point of anger.
‘When I came back from the hunt, he saw how I had changed.
He saw how the change made the others in the village feel about
me. They saw the change in me, and they knew me for a strong
hunter and a warrior, so they feared it. And Stone River used
that. He let me go my ways so long as I went his ways, too. He
made me his huntsman, his messenger to other tribes, his fist to
lift in threat against those who uttered words he did not wish
spoken. And each time I weighed his orders, but mostly I did
what he asked. Because it did not offend me, and because, for all
a man wanders, having a home is still a good thing.’
She was going to ask it then, but he was already going on.
‘And there was your mother, of course. Your father . . . you
know what was done, what his plans were, for her, and for you.
And after you came, he gave me that order: to take her into the
forest, far enough that her ghost could not find its way back to
the village of the Winter Runners. And to kill her, while she was
in her human shape. He wanted her spirit to wander a long
while before it could be reborn, if it ever was.’
‘And that was wrong.’
A shrug, once more. ‘It seemed so to me. And Stone River
never did understand me. He never saw that I was not his creature. He gave me the name of Broken Axe, but he never realized
I was not his weapon.’
Her next question took much longer to emerge. She did not
want to think about it at all, but it could not be kept down.
‘And what my father did to her, was that not wrong?’
She forced herself to look at him, and caught the raw, hurt
expression on his face. But he had no answer for her.

A few days later, a commotion summoned her from her solitary
practice after the other students had gone. Since watching the
duel between the priestesses she had been taking every spare
moment to work through as much of the fighting dance as she
could remember, over and over until every muscle ached.

The noise, to her surprise, was the Eyriemen. They hadn’t
seemed the boisterous types when she had seen them stalking
about the Shining Halls previously, but now they had something
to celebrate. Or else, she considered, they were making sure that
their hosts appreciated them.

She followed the sounds of their rhythmic whooping and
clapping until she found them outside the front gates of the
temple. There were half a dozen of them, and they had a prisoner between them. She felt an odd twist inside her when she
recognized the man as a Wolf.