The Tiger and the Wolf (43 page)

She envied Broken Axe, who could walk between the Shining
Halls and the Winter Runners so deftly. While he strode into the
village of the Spined Sons, with only Shatters Oak to worry
about, she had to find a path of shadow to follow. In this she was
aided by the clouds that chose that moment to break over the
village, bringing not torrential rain but flurrying late-season
snow. Maniye took that as her cloak and moved in.

The Boar village was laid out in an oval of low huts, each one
little more than a sloping roof that reached from the ridge pole
down to the ground, with a floor beneath propped on posts off
the ground, to ward off flood and vermin. Each had a firepit dug
at its entrance, protected from the snow by the eaves. In most,
there would not have been room for an adult to stand up
straight, but the Boar crammed their families and their goods
inside until there seemed to be not a hand’s span of space left.
The chief’s hut was the sole building on a grander scale, so that
a tall man could just have stood upright down the house’s centre-line.

She made her way, shadow to shadow, wolf and tiger, feeling
the chill of the snow on her pelt but blessing it for veiling her.
She found herself a place to hide, where the earth under one of
the huts had been eroded away just enough to fit a very small
wolf.

The air was full of the sounds of people: familiar sounds. She
could recognize voices, even: that was Bleeding Arrow, and there
the deep rumble of Smiles Without Teeth. It was as though she
had never left home.

In their own village, the sullen Spined Sons shuffled and
scuffed about, seeking refuge with each other, shoulders bowed
as they bore the unlooked-for burden of Stone River’s warband.

Then the skins at the entrance of the chief hut rippled, and
Stone River pushed his way out, snarling up at the snow. A
human snarl, though: no keen wolf’s nose to scent her out, not
yet. She guessed he had been at whatever fermented gourds or
mead the Spined Sons had stockpiled, for he had that ugly, belligerent expression she remembered from when he had been
drinking. From the way he walked, this was not just a random
venture his feet were taking him on: he was looking for someone.

Let him take long to find them
, and she crept out from beneath
the eaves and covered the distance to the chief’s hut like a
shadow herself. The skins barely moved as she burrowed
beneath them.

The hut had a firepit inside it, the smoke coiling about the
centre-line above before escaping through holes at either end.
The slope-walled interior was red-lit by those sullen embers,
and beyond the fire she saw Hesprec Essen Skese.

Broken Axe was right: they had used him cruelly. The old
man was stripped to the waist, his body seeming just a bundle of
dry sticks held together by skin. The firelight played across the
bruises and marks that patterned his hide, where the warband
had had their fun with him. Now they had him strung up by his
wrists, hanging from the centre-pole. A cord was strung taut
from wrists to the halter at his neck, hoisting him onto his toes.
He was trembling, an old man at the very far shore of exhaustion. His eyes were closed.

She hurried over to him, Stepping as she did so.
‘Hesprec,’ she whispered. ‘It’s me. I’m here.’
One colourless eye opened and rolled over to stare at her. For

a moment he did not seem to believe the evidence of his own
senses, but then his withered lips crept into something like a
smile.

‘Again? What bad habits you have fallen into.’ His voice was
so faint that the popping of the dying fire almost drowned it out.
‘Enough,’ she silenced him. ‘Now let me get you down.’ She
had her Tiger-made knife of bronze, that she could now Step
with without any difficulty at all. What she did not have was the
reach. He was taller than she, his bound wrists higher still.
‘I . . . I may have to climb up you,’ she decided tentatively,
because he did not look as though he would survive a feather’s
weight more burden.
And yet he nodded minutely, and closed his eyes again, bracing himself as best he could. Still she held back because he was
so frail, and she was afraid.
And then she heard a call from outside.
‘Stone River!’ Broken Axe’s voice.
‘Axe.’ Her father. ‘If you’ve not found the girl, get out of the
way. I’m not in the mood for you today.’
Maniye froze, caught stretching as high as she could with her
knife – which was nowhere near far enough. A moment later she
was crouching in the shadow that Hesprec cast in the firelight,
waiting for the worst.
Stone River shouldered his way in, obviously in a foul temper,
and there was Kalameshli Takes Iron along with him, the priest
looking scarcely happier.
‘You’ve had enough time with the Wolf.’ Akrit Stone River
cast a look towards the flap, as though fearing to be overheard.
Thankfully he did not consider that there might be an eavesdropper already within. ‘Time to tell me what he wants.’
Kalameshli looked sour. ‘What does the Wolf ever want?’
‘I ripped out Water Gathers’ throat for him in the sacred
place!’
‘Not through design,’ Kalameshli snapped.
‘But it happened!’ Stone River shouted back. ‘And here we
are. The first clash with the Tiger, in how many years? And
we lose two and end up running away.’
‘It was not—’
‘Tell it to them, not to me. What do I need to do, Takes Iron?
What is it the god wants?’
‘I am only a priest. The Wolf never spoke clear and direct to
anyone. But I think he is testing you. I think he is watching you.’
‘And he’s not impressed, eh?’ Akrit growled.
Kalameshli did not venture an opinion.
‘What, then? This old one?’ And abruptly Stone River was
standing right there, staring into Hesprec’s hollow face, while
Maniye crouched at the Snake priest’s heels and tried not to
breathe at all, not even to think.
‘I’ve told you, not
here
,’ Takes Iron said exasperatedly. ‘This is
not our place. The Boar is fat enough already.’
‘We can make this
not
a Boar place,’ Stone River mused. He
had turned back to the fire and was fumbling with his belt.
Maniye assumed he was about to piss in it, but there came no
hiss of steam. ‘Round them up and give them all to the fire: the
greatest sacrifice the Wolf has tasted for twenty years.’
Kalameshli sighed. ‘If we’d found a Deer tribe, then perhaps
yes. We’d take whoever we could catch, and the rest would run.
But the Boar . . . you know how the Boar people are. They bow
their backs readily enough, but you can only push them so far.
And we’d not get out alive if they all Stepped and came for us at
once. You know that.’
Stone River spat, still crouching by the fire. His mood was
not improved when Takes Iron went on, ‘If you hadn’t given the
prisoner to the others . . .’
‘They need to think we’re winning,’ Akrit told him sharply.
‘What better way than someone to play with?’ And then he
turned from the fire. In his hand was an iron knife, its handle
wrapped in skin, the heated blade glowing a baleful red. With a
convulsive movement he thrust it at Hesprec. For a moment
Maniye thought he would kill the old man then and there, and
she had to fight down a scream, but then the flat of the hot blade
was laid against the Snake priest’s brittle ribs.
Hesprec made a sound. Not a hiss or a yell or anything so
identifiable, but a whimpering noise of pure exhausted agony. It
made Maniye sick to hear it, more even than the smell of burning; her nightmares would be haunted by that sound for a long
while to come.
Then the chief of the Winter Runners, the would-be High
Chief of all the Wolves, stormed out of the hut, taking his priest
with him.
Again she was left with the impossible task of reaching Hesprec’s wrists, but this time he got out, ‘The halter, girl. That is
all I need.’
And she saw it at once, and cursed herself for being so foolish. His hands were bound, but a snake has neither hands nor
arms. She sliced through the thong that was looped about his
neck, desperately delicately to avoid cutting him, even though
she was on her toes to reach. A moment later he was a serpent,
coiling and writhing lethargically on the floor of the hut.
The flap moved again, and she was in her Tiger fighting
stance, blade raised, because if Stone River came back now
there would be no avoiding it. She saw Broken Axe instead,
though, nodding with brief satisfaction to see that she had got
the old man down.
‘Good work,’ he said softly, and would have said more, but
the air was rent by a terrible scream. It was a woman’s scream,
and what was worse was that it was not a first-scream, made
from a first-hurt. It was the scream of someone who has been
hurt and hurt, and held on and held on, and now cannot hold
the scream in any longer.
There was a look that came to Broken Axe’s face, then.
‘They said they had a prisoner,’ Maniye whispered. She was
gathering Hesprec’s sluggish form to her, bringing his cold coils
next to her skin. ‘A Tiger warrior, it must be.’
Still Broken Axe said nothing, but he did not need to. Another
scream tore through the air, followed by a chorus of jeers from
the same direction.
‘We have to go,’ Maniye told him. ‘Please, Broken Axe. We
have to go. We can’t do anything. I have to save Hesprec.’
Then she flinched from the look he turned on her. Most of
all, in that look, was disappointment. A revelation struck her
then. The last time he had heard a woman of the Tiger scream,
he had not acted to stop it then, only waited until later, and
saved whatever he could. She had not known it before, but she
saw how that delay had eaten into him, had made him the man
he was: determined to follow his own path.
And yes, she must save Hesprec, or why else had they come?
Yes, they could not save everyone. Perhaps a dozen Boar girls
had already suffered the same, perhaps a dozen of their menfolk
too. The world was cruel and callous, as were its people.
But they were here, and that pain and shame and agony was
here, and there was nobody else. She saw, in that moment, how
very hard it was to be Broken Axe.
‘I can run,’ she said. He thought she was abandoning him, but
that was not her meaning. ‘I can run, fast as any. I will run for
Loud Thunder’s home and the lands of the Cave Dwellers. I will
run from here, but I shall call out before I go. I shall call out to
show Stone River he has failed and that the Wolf hates him.You
must do what you must do, when they chase me.’
He weighed and measured her with his gaze, and then put a
hand on her shoulder. ‘I will bring the southmen to Loud Thunder, if I can,’ he told her. ‘Look for me there.’
‘You cannot hide this from the Winter Runners,’ she warned
him. ‘Someone will see you. They will mark you for death from
now.’
‘Nothing is forever,’ and then he Stepped, always his favourite way of avoiding questions, and he was gone.
Maniye braced herself.
I can run
, she told herself, and she
took off the skin of dead Dirhath and Stepped, feeling Hesprec
wind himself tighter around her.
Outside, the snow was swifter, starting to settle. Perfect. Perhaps the Wolf really was on her side.
She bolted through the village and, as she cleared the last hut,
she howled out a cry of challenge and knew that her father
would recognize just who it was that called him out.

She did not see what Broken Axe did next, after that fractured
moment when she had called out the whole of the Winter
Runner warband. What went through her father’s head then, she
could not imagine. He had chased her, nearly caught her, lost
her – and yet here she was again just outside his circle of firelight, howling her defiance.

And she ran, and did not see, but in her mind it played out:
Broken Axe entering the hut where the warriors were amusing
themselves with the Tiger woman. Perhaps they thought he had
come for his turn. They would greet him. He would reply, jovial
and easy, but with a tightness to his jaw they would not mark.
Then he . . . would he kill the woman to put her out of her
shame and misery? Maniye did not think he would. He was
more than that. He would take his blade and bend towards her
– and perhaps she would even recognize him, from the Shining
Halls – and with one deft move he would sever the halter that
held her confined to her human shape.

Then there would be a tiger at large in the village of the
Spined Sons, angry and hurting. Perhaps she would hunt.
But others were also hunting: others were on the trail of
Many Tracks. Even as her mind toyed with the thought of what
the strength of Broken Axe might accomplish, her feet were
speeding her further and further away from him.
And the snow fell thicker as she ran. Snow was of the Wolf,
who claimed winter for his own, his breath sent to test the
world. When last she had been fleeing the Wolf’s people, he had
sent her this cloak of snow, but then her pursuer had been
Broken Axe, who could not be thrown off the trail by a little
adverse weather. Instead the snow had nearly killed her, a punishment for her disloyalty. Now . . .
Now the Wolf exhaled, and she fled into that shifting labyrinth of white, and felt that she had a god’s favour. Her heart
was hammering high, but there was a jagged blade of excitement lodged there, rather than the fear she had been living with
for so very long. Let Shatters Oak rage, let her father curse, let
Takes Iron mumble his platitudes. She had challenged the
Winter Runners.
Despite the snow, her nose still guided her swiftly towards
Loud Thunder’s home, though it would be another long and
draining trek across rugged country. She would tire eventually,
she knew, but right then she felt as though she could run forever, like the wolf in the stars.
They were close behind her, she knew. She could not put
names to them, but glimpses and instinct told her at least three,
perhaps five, were on her trail. Would Stone River be one of
them? Surely his pride would have urged him out. Was Broken
Axe clear of the village by now?
She could not know, and she might never know. Running was
all she could contribute to his success.
About her narrow wolf chest the bonds that were Hesprec’s
body tightened. He must be cold but she could do nothing
about that. She had no pack for him to crawl into. Better the
cold than the fire, if the worst came. If he perished even as she
tried to rush him to safety, he would at least die in a fit form,
and his spirit would pass on, and some hatchling serpent elsewhere in the world would inherit all that he was.
Abruptly there was a figure racing almost beside her, and she
realized that she had been running for the long distance, whilst
her hunters were flogging themselves in a quick sprint, desperate
to catch her up. Not Stone River, this; not Shatters Oak or
Smiles Without Teeth, just some young hunter she could not
immediately name, but he was snapping at her flanks, trying to
force her aside to where others of the pack might intercept her.
She put on more speed, spending her strength, but he
matched her, a boy who had not had to run and run as she had
the day before. The snow waxed and waned, curtains of white
shifting and drawing aside before her, but it would not hide her
from this persistent youth. Perhaps he saw in her a chance to
win his name, or perhaps he already had a name that was less
than complimentary, and needed deeds to offset it. He was
determined, though. His eyes were set on nothing but her. His
breath was on her haunches, his teeth at her side.
Maniye kept her eyes fixed ahead, pushing herself harder.
They were ascending a rocky slope, slippery with the snow that
had drifted there, and she was hoping the other wolf might slip
or stumble. Luck held with him, though, and he was forcing her
to veer now, stealing her speed from her.
And then there was no more ground beneath their feet.
Maniye had seen it barely in time to react. The boy had not,
too busy recounting his own legend inside his head. They had
found a stream that had been cutting into the rocks for generations, a stone-scattered drop of ten feet to the shallow silver line
of the water below. Maniye was a tiger the moment she began
falling, landing four-footed and then kicking off on wolf paws
again. Her pursuer lost his luck, though, landing heavily, all the
breath gone from him, and she had vanished from his sight
before he could recover.
Then she was running again in earnest, that long lope of the
wolves, forcing herself always uphill. When her path found rocks
and jutting heights, she scaled them, Stepping to tiger and feeling that extra tightness as Hesprec adjusted his hold on her, inch
by frozen inch. She heard howling, once, but it was far away.
The snow had eaten her tracks and her scent. The world had
swallowed her up.
But although she was discovering the ground ahead rock by
rock, drop by drop, she knew that this great trackless forest was
the same one in which she had played chase with Broken Axe;
the same one that she had stumbled through half-frozen to
reach Loud Thunder’s camp. She was closing with her destination, over so many miles, led by stray memories, by guesses, by
hope.
And then, with a dawn grown ripe in the sky and the snow at
last behind her, she was at a lakeshore. It was not frozen now
although the snow had made a slush out of its fringes, shot
through with the dagger-like fingers of reeds. A pair of herons
took thunderously aloft as she skidded and scraped to avoid
wetting her feet. And she knew it. She remembered this place
clear as day, despite all that had changed. Here, Broken Axe had
bearded her. Here he had given her a hunter’s name.
And somehow her long run had directed her right, despite
the snow, despite the great, great heedless spaces of the world.
She was close now; still a long way to run, but she was close.
She drank gratefully, though the water was icy cold. Her
stomach snarled at her, and so she Stepped and took out some
of the dried meat, the nuts and wizened fruit she had taken from
the Tiger.
‘Hesprec,’ she said softly. ‘Eat. Snake or man, but eat.’
For a moment he did not move, remaining just a cold line
tight against her chest, and then she thought it was too late. In
that moment – even as her heart clenched – he loosened,
dropped like a dead thing to the ground, and became a shivering, bluish-skinned man.
In that dawn’s harsh, uncompromising light, he looked more
corpse than man, so thin that she could barely think where any
muscle could fit between skin and bone. That skin, always so
pale, was crazed with lines, blotched with broken veins. His eyesockets were bruise-dark and his lips were cracked, drawn back
to expose the ravaged gums beneath. She took her coat off and
draped it across the knobs of his shoulders. He clutched it to
him gratefully, shivering uncontrollably, fumbling at the sheepskin-lined hide with fingers like claws.
‘Eat,’ she told him, and then, ‘I’ll chew it up for you.’
He looked at her at last. She could just make out a smile on
that face, and it was like the ruins of Tiger power she had seen
on the way to the Shining Halls: an echo of a strength that once
had been.
‘Dear one,’ he said. Just then the great bowl of the lake
seemed very quiet, the morning holding its breath as Hesprec’s
own plumed white in the air. ‘You are too good, but no need. No
need.’
‘Then . . .’ She offered a strip of meat to him uncertainly but
he made no move to take it.
‘No need,’ again, from those old lips.
‘You have to eat.’
He just watched her, though. His eyes were the lake’s pale
colours, which were no colours at all, even the pink of their
edges gone bloodless.
‘Hesprec.’ She tried to find some authority to invest her voice
with.
Am I not a Wolf chief’s daughter? Does my mother not rule the
Shining Halls?
‘You have to eat . . . and then we’ll move on. We’ll
go to Loud Thunder. He’ll shelter us.’
He was shivering – or more like shuddering, the mess of
angular sticks that made up his body jumping and spasming
beneath the Horse-made coat. His eyes were steady, though, as
if they had already severed ties with the rest of him.
‘You need to go,’ he said softly.
‘We –
we
need to go. When you’ve eaten, we need to go. We’re
going to Loud Thunder. I’m saving you.’
‘You must stop that, or it’ll become a habit.’ His ghost-smile
again. ‘But here I am, and I am saved. I am free. But I cannot go
further with you.’ He was so dreadfully calm despite the state of
him.
‘But your friends, the southerners . . .’
‘They will have to understand.’
‘No.’ She could feel a child’s wailing welling up inside her and
fought it down stubbornly. ‘You have to come, see . . . because,
because you have to.’
‘Maniye.’ The uttering of her name was like a spell to silence
her, to still her. ‘The coils of the Serpent are endless, their loops
everywhere.You see before you just one such loop. It has passed
into the sunlight from the earth, and curved about its long, long
course, and now the time has come for it to return.’
She stared at him, struggling to shake off the quiet he had
placed on her until at last she came out with, ‘But you still have
to come with me. Step, and I’ll carry you, and if, and if . . .’ Her
own voice was like a serpent fighting to escape from her control.
‘If . . . then your soul will pass, and . . .’
‘Did I not tell you, when we first met, that my people are
different?’ he said gently. ‘We must do everything in a way that
is ours alone. Even this. Especially this. The Serpent waits for
me below, and I must return to the earth.’
‘No, but—’
‘Maniye.’ Again that quietening spell. ‘I am further from
home than I should ever be, but some things do not care for
distance. This is how it is for my people. Below us, the Serpent
coils upwards through the earth towards me, and I must go to
greet him. I have been his servant for more years than you can
imagine. I look forward to meeting with him again. This is not
the end, Maniye.’
‘I know, but . . .’ She had nothing she could say, and yet she
was still speaking. ‘But I rescued you! I got you out. I stole you
from my father! And it’s not supposed . . . it wasn’t supposed to
be –’
His hand on hers surprised her: colder than the water itself. ‘I
am rescued,’ he said simply. ‘You cannot know how great it is,
the thing you have done in bringing me away from that place.
Greater than all the pains and tortures that this body has been
spared is what you have gifted to my soul.’
And at last her words had run dry. She collapsed to her knees
beside him, holding him close, feeling his bird-bone fragility.
Then he was running like sand from her arms, dwindling and
diminishing, casting off his humanity until he was that
whip-slender snake she had carried for so long. It lifted its head,
slit eyes bright, and she knew the cold must be biting into every
scale of it.
‘Goodbye, Hesprec,’ she said, and the little reptile had found
a crack between two stones and vanished into it. She wanted to
believe that she felt the earth tremble with the smooth motion of
unseen coils, as the god came for his servant, but there was
nothing. The ground was frozen hard.
She ate then, chewing bitterly at the cold, tough meat, switching between human, wolf and tiger teeth to best gnaw it into
pieces she could swallow. As the sun clawed its way free of its
bloody birth and the new day began in earnest, the dawn found
her sitting staring across the lake, but seeing nothing at all.
Broken Axe found her there, too, padding up with his fur
bristling in the chill. For a long while he watched and waited,
and no doubt he was piecing it all together. His nose would tell
him Hesprec had been there, but was not there now, nor had left
any track to follow. When he Stepped, his human face showed
that he understood it all.
‘Many Tracks,’ he told her quietly, ‘you cannot stay here.’
She just looked up at him bleakly.
‘The southerners are close behind me,’ he told her, ‘but closer
than that, the woods are full of hunters. I outran a warband of
the Tiger to find you, and your father is not far off.’
‘What then?’ She looked at him through raw red eyes.
‘There is only Loud Thunder. I have nothing else. We must
run, now.’
She was sick of running. It solved nothing. She had run fit to
make the gods proud that night, and still it had not saved Hesprec.
But when Broken Axe put out a hand, she let him lift her to
her feet. When he Stepped, she followed.
The Tiger and the Wolf, he said, but it seemed to her that the
further they ran, the more the world around them fell silent.
Each rasp of her own breath echoed in her ears, along with the
drumming of her feet and the constant drumming of her heart.
The grand silence that had been spread out over the lake where
Hesprec had gone to earth was following her, more surely than
any hunter. It coursed past her and stilled all the sounds of the
world.
She was falling behind, so that Broken Axe had to stop and
wait, then stop and wait again. All that fierce fire that had given
strength to her legs when she had escaped the Winter Runners
seemed to have run out of her, and left only a void. Her mind
thronged with all the words she had not said to Hesprec before
the end. Everything around her, within and without, was defined
now by absences.
And those absences, the holes in her world, they were growing and growing. She felt the ground brittle and hollow beneath
her pounding feet, and that seemed entirely fitting: the Serpent
that had burrowed there was gone now, and the space it had
taken up was surely collapsing in upon itself. Even as she ran,
she felt she was standing at the brink of something vast and
cavernous.
There was a forest down there, a night-dark forest, as though
it had grown within a great chasm in the earth. She was leaning
over it, arrested at the very moment of falling. Things moved in
the spaces between the trees: a hunt . . . it was a hunt. There was
a tiger like smouldering embers. There was a wolf like a pale
ghost. Each intended murder. Each was hunting the other, and
each fled in turn. But they were closer and closer, hunters gaining with ravenous jaws agape, prey flagging and failing in its
flight. And there was a light, a glaring brightness growing in the
forest. It swelled and swelled, searing the eyes of her
mind
, not
the eyes in her head, until it had eclipsed all the world, and she
could see nothing, know nothing, be nothing, because she had
to choose now, she had to