Compared to the evening cold without, the air inside the chief’s
hut practically sweated with heat from the central fire, smoky
enough to sting Maniye’s eyes.
Tonight the tribe was fasting. She could hear distant yelps
and howls as packs of the young – the recently Tested and their
siblings and relatives – ran wild between the mounds, chasing
after each other in mock hunts, engaging in brief, snarling fights.
She had no wish to join them, to inevitably become the hunted
and be reminded of her lot. Just for once, she had wanted to sit
all alone and know that she had passed; that she had succeeded
in this thing that had been looming over her for so long. She had
scaled the wall!
And now Akrit her father had sent for her.
He was seated facing away from her, staring at the fire.
Stripped to the waist, there were no war-scars on his back, for
he was a man who faced his enemies whenever he fought them.
Instead, she saw the set of savage, puckered marks left by some
ordeal or initiation, a double row of livid blemishes flanking his
spine.
Kalameshli sat nearby, watching her closely. Otherwise the
hall was empty, even the thralls had been sent away.
At last Akrit turned.There were several gourds strewn nearby,
the air ripe with the scents of honey and fermented yams, and
she realized that he was drunk, or at least a little. Normally that
would have her fearing his fists even more than usual, but
tonight he was drunk in some new way, some way that made
him happy rather than fierce and angry. He regarded her uncertainly, as though he had never seen her before.
And he hasn’t, in a way. I am a new creature now.
For once she
felt she could meet his gaze without fear. She had something to
hold her head up for.
‘Kalameshli wasn’t sure that you would pass,’ her father said
to her thoughtfully.
Kalameshli would have been delighted had I failed
, was her
instant thought, but she kept it to herself.
‘I knew, though,’ Akrit went on. ‘You’re my blood, after all. Of
course you’ve mastered yourself. You’re Stone River’s child. It
could be no other way.’
The unfairness of that – as though he was taking the credit
for all she had done – stung her a little, but his next words wiped
that resentment away.
‘It’s good. It’s as it should be. It’s good.’
Praise, of a sort? And he had not exactly been forthcoming
with such in the past – nor had anyone else. And his expression,
as he looked on her, was something warmer than the doubt or
annoyance she was used to seeing.
‘You’re of the Wolf, now,’ he told her. It was little enough,
giving her what she had already earned, and yet, all of a sudden,
fourteen years of bottled emotion began rising up in her. She
fought them back desperately, a battle as hard as climbing the
wall had been, because she would
not
appear weak before
them.
She was Wolf, and the Wolf was fire and winter, and did not
know tears.
‘When the year turns, it’s time,’ her father continued, more to
Kalameshli than herself.
The old priest nodded. ‘I suppose it is.’
‘A purpose has been laid for you, since before you were
born.’ Now Akrit’s eyes were back on Maniye. ‘Everything was
waiting on today. I had to know for sure you were
mine
, not . . .’
The thought went unfinished, but she read it in his face.
Not my mother’s
.
Not the Tiger’s.
She felt the great cat stir again within her, at that, but it felt
very far away, and buried deep. She was losing it: she was Wolf
now. That was what was proper, what she had wanted, wasn’t it?
Suddenly she fitted in, she had a place amongst the Winter Runners, within the Jaws of the Wolf. And, if one must live so, how
much better to be the teeth that tore, rather than the flesh they
ripped into.
Will I be a hunter?
she wondered.
Will I be a raider? What will
you make of me?
It was as though a hanging had been drawn
aside, and she could look into a different world, the world she
had never realized would be opened to her.
I am the Wolf. I am
the voice that calls in the night. I am that which hunts in a pack.
Akrit sat, dropping straight down into a cross-legged position,
with a small grunt of effort, and gestured for her to do likewise,
as one adult to another, a chief to one of his tribe.
‘Before you were born, we went to war,’ he remarked. ‘You
know this, even you. Back then, the Tiger was strong, and we all
lived in his Shadow. But the Wolf gave us iron claws and iron
coats, and the Boar and the Deer rose with us, even the Bear
and the Eyriemen, a little. And we broke the Shadow Eaters; we
drove the people of the Tiger into the highlands.You have heard
the stories of these things?’
‘I have heard them.’ Her voice even sounded different, not a
girl’s any more, and yet more of her father’s daughter than
before.
‘You know that your mother was of their tribe.’
There was a hard edge to his tone, but when she answered, ‘I
know it,’ without any hurt in her voice, that seemed to satisfy
him.
‘She was trouble, an evil woman. The Tiger are ruled by their
women. You know this?’
‘I have heard it spoken.’ She was waiting for some stab of
anguish to engulf her over her mother, but she was Wolf, and
she was calm.
I have no mother
, she could tell herself.
I have no
tiger within me.
‘They called her the Tiger Queen when she was still free –
before I took her,’ Akrit explained. ‘Even with a rope about her
neck, too much trouble.’ He gestured vaguely, shaking his head.
‘But we were hoping this day would come, when a child of hers
would come of age, and be of the Wolf. And here you are.’
A slow uncertainty was stealing over Maniye. The last thing
she had expected was so much talk of her mother. She had
stood before Akrit, feeling that half of her cut away, and now he
was fumblingly trying to join it back onto her.
‘I am of the Wolf,’ she said carefully.
Akrit nodded animatedly, and in that rapid motion she saw
just how drunk he really was. ‘But you are
her
daughter.’
‘I am
your
daughter.’ It was not something she had ever
wanted to be, before, but suddenly it was very important to her.
‘But you are
hers
. That is how they do things, among the
Shadow Eaters. The mother rules, and then the daughter.’ Akrit
grinned abruptly. ‘So it is time we bare our teeth again! This
spring the Winter Runners shall go to raid the highlands and
draw the Tiger out. And when we have their attention, when we
have bloodied them a little and reminded them of the strength of
the Wolf, we shall show you to them: the child of their queen.’
She was just watching now, saying nothing.
‘And they will kneel, because you are their dead queen’s get.
And you will bring them under the Wolf’s Shadow. You will
bring them under
my
Shadow, and they will league with the
Winter Runners, and we will be the strongest of the Wolf’s children, eh, Kalameshli Takes Iron?’
She felt as though she was tracking something through the
forest, print by print, scent by scent, and now she stood before
its lair, understanding what it was she had been hunting. She
wondered how much of this might have been couched differently, had he been sober. Akrit’s words for her were normally
few and hostile, but her passing her Test, her denying the tiger
within her, had been for him the culmination of many years of
scheming. Apparently he felt that he was allowed to relax his
guard just this much.
There was a High Chief of the Wolf, the first and only Chief
of Chiefs. Seven Skins of the Many Mouths tribe held that
honour, made such by the acclaim of his peers during the war
with the Tiger. He had masterminded the uprising of the Wolf,
when her father had been just one war leader amongst many,
albeit one who had taken more risks and won more victories
than most.
Seven Skins was old, though: years past Kalameshli’s age.
The time would come when he would pass into the forest, and
if there was to be another High Chief, who knew who that might
be? If Akrit could make the hated Shadow Eaters bow the knee,
then none would deny him.
This was the purpose he had contrived for her. It was a grand
plan, and one that might have failed at so many points, but Akrit
and Kalameshli and the will of the Wolf had made it work. Here
she now was, poised to stand before her mother’s people and
lead them into the Wolf’s Shadow.
She reached within herself to see what she thought of this.
She had never realized that the Tiger were so bound to their
bloodlines that some bastard child of their last ruler might come
and usurp control of their whole tribe. For all she knew, Akrit
was entirely wrong about that. They might just tear her apart.
Or she might bring him a grand victory for the Wolf. She
might prove herself Akrit’s daughter.
She had not ever thought that
being of use
was something she
might aspire to or value. She had spent her childhood being as
contrary as possible, as a reaction to finding herself without
friends or place or even parents who cared about her. The harsh
hand of Kalameshli had seemed almost more paternal than that
of Akrit. And yet all that time she had been in his thoughts: if
not as his child, then at least as his weapon.
If he had asked for her agreement, she might have said yes,
and been forever after bound by her own word. He took her
consent – her subjugation to his plan and his will – as a given
though. He never asked, and so never extracted that agreement
from her.
And then he added, ‘And we must find you a mate, of course.’
She went still at the thought.
‘If the Shadow Eaters are to be driven into the Wolf’s Shadow,
they will need a firm hand holding the switch,’ he went on, and
the image made her think of Kalameshli, so that for a terrible
moment she thought that the old priest was somehow being put
forward as a suitor, against his vows and all prior custom.
‘I will rule them for you,’ she said, but Akrit barely seemed to
hear her.
‘You will need a man, a hunter, to govern you,’ he told her,
‘even if the Shadow Eaters will want to hear his words in your
voice.’ He frowned. ‘Someone who will do what he’s told.’
Something inside her was turning sour, as though she had
been drinking and the liquor was curdling in her stomach. Yes,
so many of her peers had lived a life of speculation over who
they might be mated to, recounting the names of the fine young
hunters or hearth-keepers of the Wolf tribes. For Maniye, however, it had never been a consideration. She had made a virtue
of necessity. She had lived a future in her mind in which she was
self-sufficient: a tribe of one.
‘I would match you to Smiles Without Teeth,’ Akrit went on,
forging deeper and deeper into this appalling new territory and
dragging her along with him. ‘I would want him always at my
side, though. And he is . . . not the cleverest.’
Maniye had begun to shake, very slightly. She thought of big,
brutal Smiles Without Teeth, a man without humour or imagination, but very quick to strike out whenever the complex world
frustrated him. He had already taken one wife, Maniye recalled,
but the woman had been seen too often with bruises about her
face, and she had cast him from her hearth. Smiles had been
searching for a new wife ever since, but no woman would look
at him.
But her father continued talking, the drink drawing the words
out of him, and Kalameshli listened complacently. Nothing of
the conversation even required her contribution or consent.
‘But then I thought,’ Akrit went on, ‘there was one I need by
my side for the fight, and nothing I’ve done for the ungrateful
cur has ever bound him to me enough to keep him here whenever spring comes. But if I give you to Broken Axe, that must be
enough. He must know his wandering days are done, and
become my warrior.’
Maniye sat motionless, because she knew this game: this was
the game she herself had played every day up to today, up to the
Testing. This was the game she had thought she would never
need to play again. This was
show nothing on your face.
This was
where she sat and pretended that nothing that she heard or saw
affected her, because if the world knew that it could hurt you,
then hurt you it would.
Matched to the man who killed my mother
. And it was obvious
that her father saw nothing objectionable in this thought at all.
All at once she had made up her mind and knew what she
must do.
The moon was overcast tonight, so the darkness of the pit
was near total. She stared challengingly at the pale smudge that
was the Snake priest, Hesprec Essen Skese.
‘Tell me,’ she hissed, feeling inexplicably furious at him, just
for his being there, as though he was to blame for her predicament. ‘What’s the use of you? What’s a Snake priest for?’
‘I know many things,’ he said carefully.
‘What things? Priest things? Magic?’
‘Ssome magic, yesh.’
‘You have friends here in the Crown of the World? Friends
who will help you?’
He was silent. That meant no.
‘These things you know, they’re valuable? Or you can make
people do what you want, or . . . ?’ Her words tailed away to
nothing. He was bound, haltered, kept in a pit. If his knowledge
gave him genuine power, would any of those things be true?
‘What good are you?’ she repeated.
She heard him take a deep breath and then he spoke as
clearly as he could, fighting to speak around his raw gums. ‘The
wise of the north might value what I know, those who lust for
blood less than do the Wolf. The Horse people will honour me.
And I can live in many lands.’
‘You need no hunter to trap or to fish.’ His patient, quiet tone
was maddening.
‘You’ll die,’ she spat at him, striving to keep her voice low
despite her desperation. ‘If my father hadn’t taken you, you’d be
a frozen body out in the woods, or prey for our mute brothers.’
‘And yet I crossed half the world to get here.’
She thought hard. She felt as though there must be some
magic combination of words that would somehow cut the whole
knot of her problem open, and present her with a simple and
certain way out. Instead she had herself, and she had this
ragged, wretched creature.
She was leaving, she had decided. She was abandoning the
tribe. It wasn’t unknown. Broken Axe had done it, become a
lone Wolf and made his mark on the world. Much as she did not
want to think about him, perhaps in this he would be her inspiration.
Of course, Broken Axe – or the youth he had once been –
was not wanted by the chief for some mad plan to conquer the
Tiger.
‘What troublessh you, girl?’ asked Hesprec Essen Skese softly.
She glared at him. She would give him no blades to hold to
her throat, nor secrets to cut her with. She had crouched in her
alcove under the roof of the chief’s hall and counted over her
options, forced herself to examine precisely why she was going
to cut herself loose from her own people. The bitterness of it
was that she had finally been given something to stay for, after
all. She had passed the Testing. She had proved herself a Wolf. If
he had only left her alone after that, she would have been Akrit’s
most loyal supporter. She could have taught herself to love him,
despite all, even to love Kalameshli because he was the voice of
the Wolf, her Wolf. But that was not what Akrit had wanted from
her. He did not want
her
at all – not Maniye. He wanted a tame
Shadow Eater cub with the Tiger muzzled within her, so as to
twist her mother’s people into paying him tribute and strengthening his name. That was all she was: a thing to be used. And to
keep her on a leash, he would marry her to Broken Axe. That
ought to be the worst of it, but in truth it was that sense of being
used, as a
thing
is used: that cut deepest.
And even if the old Snake died in the cold, in the snow, in the
woods, still she would be striking one grand blow against her
father and against Kalameshli. Not only would she be taking
herself out of their grasp, she would be robbing the Wolf of his
sacrifice. The thought made her breathless with fear and daring.
If the Wolf would not accept her as herself, then she would not
hesitate to steal from his plate. She would turn her back on him.
Perhaps she would choose the tiger in her once she could put off
that choice no longer.
The thought hurt her: making that choice between the two
souls within her was like seizing briars. She knew she would
eventually have to, lest her soul split in two and drive her mad,
but she put the thought off one more time.
‘You said the Horse – you came from the south with the
Horse Society?’ she told the Snake.
‘I did.’ Still so polite and conversational, though she could
hear him shivering.
‘Would they take you south again?’
‘When I am done in the north.’
‘Done what? Done being sacrificed?’ she goaded him.
‘If the Wolf will not sspeak to me, there is still the Deer, the
Eyrie, the Bear, the Tiger. Sss-somewhere I will find wisdom in
this cold land.’
She was about to demand that, as the price for his life, he
take her south immediately, but then his words sunk in, and she
thought . . .
the Tiger
?
‘Will they receive you?’ she asked. ‘Or will they kill you? How
do you know you won’t be met like this wherever you go? We
have no kind tales about the Serpent.’
‘I don’t know.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘I have to hope. It’s very
important.’
And she found she was decided, just like that. She had a flint
blade in her hand and was stepping forwards, feeling him flinch.
‘If I cut loose your collar, can you Step? Can you climb?’
‘Better than a tiger.’ His voice, so close to her, made her
shiver.
‘You must travel with me. I know these lands.’ A gross exaggeration from a girl who, a moment before, had despaired of
finding any use for this wreck of an old man. Now, though, he
was all she had. She needed to keep him with her.
‘Agreed.’
She had her hands at his throat, the razor sharpness of the
flint against his skin. She could have killed him then and there,
another way of stealing him from the Wolf.
She seized the rope they had haltered him with, the noose
that held him to his human shape, and sawed at it, tugging him
back and forth, until the tough fibres parted and abruptly he
was free.
Instantly she jumped backwards, Stepping so that she could
see him with her tiger’s eyes. For a moment he was just the
same stiff old man, hands tied to a stake driven into the earth
floor. Then, with the impression of immense relief and release,
he Stepped. It was a fluid, elegant motion, one that ceded nothing of his age and stiffened joints. In an instant he had no arms
nor hands, and the ropes had fallen away. Before her eyes he
squirmed into the form of a serpent as long as she was tall: a
lithe, dangerous-looking creature. For a second she froze, aware
that he could strike at her easily within the close confines of the
pit.
But, of course, he had no fangs, thanks to Kalameshli. He
could only threaten. She could sink her own claws into this reptile and rip him apart.
Then he was lifting up his head, weaving up the pit’s vertical
side, and she waited for him to drop back down and yet he
never did, just ascending and ascending in a lazy zig-zag, somehow clinging to the earth with the very scales of his belly until
his head had looped over the edge and he was fully up.
She realized that she was being left behind and followed suit,
scraping and raking herself up, with far more effort than he had
shown.
At the top, she thought she had lost him. Crouching low to
the ground and relying on the cloud-coated sky to hide her in its
shadow, she could see no sign of either snake or man. Then
something moved almost under her feet and he was there, lifting
his arrow-shaped head, the forked tongue flicking.
She had hidden a pack nearby: a hide bag of stolen food and
clothes that she reckoned she could strap about her and carry
either as wolf or tiger. Now she crept towards it, waiting to see
if either of tonight’s sentries was more alert, or whether they
were still drinking to celebrate the successful Testing.
At her heels, the serpent followed. Unfanged or not, the
thought made her shiver.