The Tiger and the Wolf (45 page)

There was a scent on the wind, a familiar one that spoke of
hearths and food, so that she found a last cupful of strength to
push her onwards. It was a testament to how tired she was that
the smell of home seemed reassuring to her: the smell of the
Winter Runners and the Wolf.
She realized too late – even as the jolt of fear shot through
her, grey bodies were passing on either side of her. She heard a
yelp and a snarl from Broken Axe, but there were two or three
Wolf hunters between him and Maniye already. She turned,
trying to reach him, but there was Asmander – in the form of
the indomitable Champion – shrieking into her face, driving her
away.
And then he was human, his stone-toothed blade still in hand,
calling out, ‘Broken Axe, run! Run now!’
Maniye tried to do just that herself, but Smiles Without Teeth
was on her already, powering her to the root-knotted ground
and digging his teeth at her neck, trying to force her to change
form. She thought she heard Broken Axe shout her name, but
there were half a dozen wolves roiling around her already, and
more vanishing into the dark to look for him.
One of the pack was straightening up, casting off its pelt and
its hide and taking on the much worse guise of her father. Right
now, though, those familiar and hated eyes were not on her.
They were fixed on the southerner.
‘So,’ spoke Akrit Stone River.
‘You will remember our words in the Stone Place,’ Asmander
spat out tiredly. ‘You had killed another chief inside the circle,
but you had lost her. This was what you wanted.’
‘You take a long time to honour your bargains,’ Stone River
told him.
‘But honour them I do. And you will find me the Iron Wolves
my lord needs, the invulnerable warriors of the north.’
Hesprec
. Maniye felt all of her grief and loss anew, because
this
, this was why Asmander had been travelling behind her. And
then he must have met with Hesprec, his Messenger, the man he
respected and followed without question.
And then Hesprec had passed on; she had saved the old man
from her father but not from time or cold. And Asmander must
have been left wondering then where his path led. And he owed
her nothing. He had not journeyed all the way from his far
homeland just to chase around after a mongrel girl.
‘I will be High Chief as soon as the Moon Eaters recognize
me, and you shall have your warriors,’ Stone River replied carefully. ‘There will be many young hunters eager to prove
themselves. Why should they not see your homeland and taste
its joys? I am Stone River. I keep my bargains.’
And Asmander should have looked triumphant, Maniye
thought. He should have been delighted at himself for outwitting
all the Crown of the World to thus win his prize. But instead he
looked only sick, either at the world or at himself, and he nodded
as though he was accepting a punishment.

She had slept. In the end sheer anxiety had not been enough,
and exhaustion had overpowered it. When she awoke, she was
within a tent-space built about a tree, sheets of hide stretched
out over the lowest branches to give the temporary dwelling a
shape. She had half expected them to string her up, as they had
with Hesprec, but instead there was just a collar and a thick
braid of rawhide that led to a stake of iron dug into the ground.
It represented wealth, that stake: enough iron to make four or
five knives or a couple of axe-heads. She was being treated as a
thing of value, but as a thing nonetheless.

Asmander had betrayed her. But then Asmander had never
been loyal to her. The reversal still hurt her though. She was the
centre of her own world, after all. She had not stopped to think
that she was only peripheral to the lives of others. For a moment,
when they had all been together running the Tigers’ gauntlet,
she had seen them as some kind of hero-band out of the stories:
Bear, Wolf and exotic foreigners bound together by mutual
respect to triumph over all comers. But that had been a foolish
thought, and if she had not been so young she would not have
entertained it.

Trapped in her human form and unable to favour or discipline either of them, she felt them pace about within her. She
was her own cage and they were her prisoners, forced into a
proximity that neither could live with. She felt a desperate need
to return to childhood: it seemed to her now a carefree time of
freedom when she and the different sides of her nature had lived
together in harmony and joy.

‘I cannot choose,’ she told the world. ‘I am both. If I was only
one, I would be just half of what I am. How can I be asked to
choose?’

As if summoned by her words, Akrit shouldered his way
through the flap of the tent and paused to survey her. He loomed
large in her memory, but right now he seemed even larger.

‘There you are,’ he told her, as though he had simply mislaid
her for a moment, rather than chasing her all across the Crown
of the World.

She stared at him sullenly, and he sat down cross-legged
before her, even smiling just as if this was a much-sought meeting of old friends. ‘I’ve lost a lot in chasing you,’ he told her
almost jovially. ‘I’ve had warriors killed by the Tiger, and you’ve
turned Broken Axe from me, too. If you liked him so much, you
could have had him. I told you that.’

Still she said nothing, shuffling away from him until her leash
pulled taut, her back against the sagging hide of the tent.
‘What?’ he asked her quite frankly. Her fear seemed to baffle
him.
‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why go so far? I am grown. I am not
tied to your hearth.’
‘You are of my blood and I have a use for you,’ he explained
patiently. ‘You are a tool of mine, a thing that I brought into
being when I had your mother. And I need you to fulfil my destiny.’
‘Destiny?’ she echoed.
‘Takes Iron is sure that there is a destiny at work. There are
strange things happening in the world – can you deny it? All the
people of the Crown of the World feel a change, like winter. And
you were at the Stones.You know what happened there. A great
destiny has come to the world – and it is mine.’
‘It is not mine,’ she got out.
‘You are its,’ he told her. ‘You are a part of it. A Tiger and a
Wolf child, and my only child. Who could doubt that the world
meant you for a purpose?’
She stared at him. At first she could not even imagine what
he was talking about, so much had happened to her since that
night.
His smile was encouraging, though. It invited her to meet it
with one of her own, though she refused to.
He rose in one smooth motion, rolling his shoulders and
stretching. ‘You will do what you are told,’ he said mildly. ‘When
you leave me again, it will be to do my bidding.You will see this
is the right thing to do. But you were ever a slow child, and disobedient.’ He loomed over her, and she saw the glint of a knife
in his hand. When he hauled her up she thought he would cut
her, but he just sawed at the laces of her shift until he had
stripped the clothes off her back. ‘Even grown,’ he told her, ‘you
are still a child in your mind. So you must be made to serve.’
And he had dropped her and taken up something that had been
lying near the tent flap, something she had not noticed before. A
thin switch of birch.
‘I want you to recite back to me what I say,’ he told her. His
hands sent the switch keening through the air, not touching her
yet but the mere sound sending a rush of fear through her. ‘You
will speak it back, and back, and back until it is from your own
mind you are speaking. Let us start with something simple. You
will obey your father in all things.’
Even terrified, she scowled at him.
‘Yes, I had thought that would be hard for you. It always was,
and I was too soft before. I did not see how you would grow, or
else I would have been firmer. Tell me: “I will obey my father in
all things.”’
Even as she was deciding to resist him, he struck her. The
thin line of the switch seared across her arm and back and sent
her to the floor, not with the force of it but with the pain. The
thin wood of the whip had been split, and stones braided into it.
A single lash stung like a dozen bees.
‘Tell me,’ he said again, and still in that terribly calm voice –
not at all like him, in fact. This was Stone River possessed by his
own destiny.
She would have spoken, but the sudden agony of the blow
had driven her voice from her, and so he struck her again, laying
down a second weal across her back. This time she shrieked – no
words, but somehow he read in that sound the confirmation he
was looking for. Perhaps he was not wrong to do so.
‘Again,’ he said, and drew back the lash. When she bared her
teeth at him, he put twice the force into his next blow, hard
enough to splinter the switch against her, leaving her sobbing
and hunched in upon herself.
Stone River sighed with mild exasperation, and went to fetch
another switch. She had already seen that there were half a
dozen lying there in the shadows of the tent’s edge.
‘Now . . .’ he began.
‘I will! Please, I will!’ broke from her lips. She had not meant
to say it, had not wanted to, but the traitor words got out somehow and hung in the air between them.
‘Well, now,’ he said, plainly pleased, and swished the new
whip through the air, getting a feel for it. ‘Tell me how you will
go to the Tiger for me.’
She stared at him because plainly he was mad. But of course
he could not know all those bitter things that had happened
since she had last escaped him.
‘I can’t,’ she said into the silence, and when he raised the
switch she went on, ‘I can’t! I can’t! It doesn’t work, I can’t go to
them!’
‘You will go to the Tiger,’ he said with more force. ‘You will
tell them who your mother was. I know how they are ruled.
They cannot but make you their leader, because you are the
blood of their last one. That is the way of the Tiger, everyone
knows.’
And it came to her, even as the lash rose again, that she had
found the limits of him, the walls that hedged his mind. For this
was what he had been told of the Tiger, and he had never questioned it or tried to find out more about it. His ignorance was
his hearth, and he had never explored the darkness beyond.
And he struck her again and raised another torn stripe on her
human skin and, although the leash restrained her physically,
whatever had held her back inside now snapped. She screamed
then, but she was screaming defiance at him. ‘I have been to the
Tiger! The Tiger want me dead because I am yours! My mother
lives and rules them, and she will not accept me as her daughter,
nor would I be yours! But you will never rule the Tiger through
me, because they reject me! They will eat my flesh and my soul
if I fall within their power one more time!’
He had brought the whip up for another strike, but now he
was frozen, staring at her. ‘
Alive?
’ he hissed, and then he did
break free from his enclosed ignorance, leaping from stone to
stone in his mind until he spat out ‘Broken Axe!’ seeing past the
man’s recent betrayal to that far greater one.
‘He was never yours!’ she hissed at him. ‘He was always his
own, and I will not be yours either.’ It was as if, somehow, her
mind and her mouth had forgotten the whip and the pain, just
for that moment.
But Akrit did not stike again. This much she could say for
him: within the little domain of his thoughts, he was no fool.
Already he was planning. ‘You will serve me,’ he said, whether to
her or to the world, she could not say.
The switch was lowered. Akrit’s eyes narrowed. ‘There is a
destiny. I tore out Water Gathers’ throat in the ring of stones,
and the spirits stooped low about us, watching.You ran beneath
their gaze, too, that day. You are marked by them, as am I.
Marked for great things. Or for a great doom. So I must show
the Wolf I am worthy, and to do so I must use what the world
has given me.’ His gaze rested on her again. ‘It has given me
you.’
‘Have you never thought,’ she got out, ‘that perhaps we just
did those things, and the spirits don’t care?’
He struck her three times with the full force of his arm,
though his hatred and anger, which would have made the blows
a real terror, were concentrated elsewhere, considering his next
move. Once she lay twitching and whimpering before him,
though, he barely seemed to notice her, departing again, already
calling for his priest.

Maniye was left to herself, after that, in a gloom that seemed lit
up by the burning stripes Akrit had laid across her back. She
could hear exchanges about the camp, sometimes a snap and
snarl of disagreement, once what sounded like a full-scale skirmish between two of them. Akrit’s warband was fraying. They
had come this far with him, and they had been bloodied by the
Tiger, and now they must be looking to their leader and wondering. Some would be thinking of challenge. Who would be the
first? Smiles Without Teeth was too loyal, Shatters Oak was a
woman, but others would be asking themselves if their own time
had come.

The wait seemed to go on forever, any sense of time’s passing
taken from her, without the sky to mark it. The hurt from her
whipping dulled, like embers dimming but never quite extinguished. She slept a little, but fitfully, then was awoken by her
father’s voice barking loudly outside the tent. He was giving
orders, rousing the warband to move. Shortly after, a pair of
hunters came in and uprooted the metal stake between them,
not looking at her. She could have named them both but they
were working very hard at pretending that they could not see
her, even as they hauled her out at the end of her leash.

The Wolves decamped so quickly that Maniye guessed the
Tigers were still stalking somewhere nearby. She had a feeble
hope then, for if they were to move at full pace, surely they must
run as wolves, and free her to do the same. Then she would
seize the first chance she had, and she would be gone from
them, trusting to her feet once again.