The Tiger and the Wolf (53 page)

Dawn’s light found Broken Axe pacing restlessly about the hilltop, scrambling up to find a high perch, then dropping down
again. When enough of them were awake, he Stepped into his
grim-faced human shape.

‘I scented tigers overnight,’ he confirmed. ‘I didn’t see them
but they were out there, down at the treeline.’
‘Then why didn’t they attack?’ Shyri asked. ‘They weren’t shy
about it last time, and we don’t even have a cave to hide in now.’
‘Two, maybe. Three at most,’ he informed her. ‘Scouts, but
they’ll be back in force. Tonight we’ll have to face them, I think,
if we’re still here. So tell me that we won’t still be here.’
Hesprec looked unhappy. ‘The Serpent’s path involves many
twists—’
‘Just plain words,’ Broken Axe told her flatly.
She pursed her lips in exasperation before snapping, ‘You
want words you can understand? Then know this: what Maniye
is seeking, it cannot be done. Neither amongst Wolves nor
Tigers is such a thing known. Even if she were of the Eyrie, say,
or one of the Patient Ones, it could not be achieved without
cleansing and ritual, fasting, meditation and the goodwill of her
totem – or her totem
s
, I suppose. None of this has been accomplished in the whole history of the world.’
Faced with that statement, Broken Axe blinked. ‘Then what
are we doing here?’
‘I am of the Serpent, who were the first people in this world
to undertake a great many things. And so perhaps I will be the
first to accomplish this, if Maniye remains strong.’ She held up
a hand to forestall his next question. ‘But it will take
time
.
Maniye must go on a great journey, one that laughs at all her
wanderings until now. I need water to be fetched for me. I need
a fire going. Champion, do you know the Seven Figures?’
Asmander grimaced. ‘Perhaps I can remember them.’
‘Do your best. Scratch them on stones – big stones. Make a
circle of them. And after all that is done, and after I have washed
and prayed, and let the spirits of this place walk into and out of
my mind and grow accustomed to my scent, then perhaps I will
be ready.’
Broken Axe sighed, sharing a look with Loud Thunder. ‘So,
by noon? Midnight? Winter?’
‘Every word you speak drives it further away,’ Hesprec told
him darkly.
*
Asmander had finished scratching the Seven Figures, or at least
as well as he was ever going to. They were part of every child’s
education, or of those who got an education. The Snake priests
taught them as an aid to contemplation, as the basis for the written script of the Sun River Nation. They were a relic from the
Oldest Kingdom – that lost land the Serpent people still talked
about with such bitter nostalgia.
Ah, yes, what a land we had, what
magic and majesty, before the coming of the Pale Shadow People . . .
It came to Asmander now that a great deal of what he had so
faithfully learned as a child had not served particularly to prepare him for his present circumstances. There had been, for
example, a notable paucity of information about surviving the
cold north.
There had been too many tales of heroes, and too little on
how to act like one when the time came.
He set to repairing his
maccan
, which lost its teeth as often as
Old Crocodile but sadly could not grow new ones on its own.
He was almost out of the gum he used to reattach them, and it
came to him that he had no idea what materials the Crown of
the World might furnish for providing more. It was unlikely to
be a problem that the Wolf tribe ever needed to solve.
He glanced back at the three great stones. Hesprec was kneeling there, hands on her knees, her head bowed.
Chains of
obligation
. Axe felt himself responsible for the girl because of
something to do with her mother. Thunder was here out of loyalty to Axe, and perhaps because he liked the girl also. Hesprec
was bound to Maniye by cords of obligation.
And I . . . ?
It was
time to admit that Asmander had so far made enough of a mess
of his life that serving Hesprec seemed the only honourable
path.
But, as paths go, probably not a very long one. And, like all
storied heroes, my death seems unlikely to be a private matter. I have
invited my friends along.
Even with this thought there was a footstep nearby, and then
Venater squatted beside him. Asmander studied his leering face:
the heavy jaw, the cruel, flinty eyes, the broken nose never quite
set right. There was a majesty to this man’s ugliness that the
heroes of old might kill for.
‘The Wolves will be with us long before nightfall,’ the old
pirate offered.
‘It seems likely.’
‘And the Tiger are already here – so says Axe – and more on
the way. Reckon they’ll fight each other? We’ll have a good view
of it.’
‘I think that they will mostly fight
us
,’ Asmander decided quietly. ‘Each other as well, but they will throw their greatest
strength into seizing the girl.’
‘We should just let them take her.’
‘I am not arguing.’
Venater sighed. ‘You are, though. Because of the Snake and
Broken Axe.’
‘Well, then I suppose I am.’
Venater nodded philosophically, chewing away at a strip of
jerky. ‘This is the bit,’ he spoke around a wad of soggy meat,
‘where you tell me the Serpent possesses some great magic in
this place that means somehow we win.’
‘That would be a good thing to be able to tell you, yes.’
‘Or that this thing that the Snake girl is doing turns out to be
real knife-point magic at killing wolves and tigers.’
‘That doesn’t seem likely, does it?’ Asmander continued at his
task, but cocked an eye at the other man. ‘Did you have something else you wanted to say?’
‘I wanted to say how stupid it is to have so many grown men
wasting their time over one mad girl.’
‘Were I a priest, I would write your words in the Book of
Truths so as to last for all times. Alas, I am not, so they will be
lost when we all get ourselves killed by angry northerners.’
Venater snorted, but there was a coal of anger behind his eyes
still, a look of resentment.
Asmander sighed. ‘I think it is time that we were honest, you
and I. My father felt the hook of envy when the Champion
chose me. It was something he himself had sought all his life, yet
never found.’
Venater grunted.
‘And he has used my Champion well in pushing the interests
of our clan, but there was ever a distance between us from that
day on. A distance he would not speak of, and so it grew. And I
think we both know that, in sending me to find the Iron Wolves,
there was more than a little hope that I would not return. As
with so many of my father’s plans, he wins every way. If I do not
come back, he is rid of me; if I return with Wolves, then he gains
in Tecuman’s eyes. If I return without them, I lose that same
respect.’
‘He’s a clever bastard, your father.’
‘You say so little I can argue with that I feel disappointed.’
‘You’ll get to argue with the Wolves soon enough. We all will.’
Asmander laughed briefly. ‘The famed Iron Wolves! If only I
could tell my father: they are real, yes. Also: they want to kill me.
And they are just men – even as we are men. They eat different
food and follow different gods but, like men everywhere, they
quarrel with one another, and their stupid quarrels end in
bloodshed. How like us they are – almost as bad as the Dragon.’
‘
Nobody
’s as bad as the Dragon,’ Venater stated with pride.
Asmander tried another laugh, couldn’t manage it, and so
took a deep breath. The Champion stirred within him watchfully, sensing a moment of crisis coming but one it could not
help him with.
‘I am now ready to fight,’ he declared.
‘Not sure about that,’ the old pirate jibed. ‘Give it another ten
years.’
‘I was good enough to defeat you.’
He had been expecting an angry response, but Venater just
looked away, his mouth twisted.
‘Yes, yes, you were drunk and half asleep,’ Asmander
prompted.
The pirate shrugged.
‘But we have walked a long road together since then. And I
have gained great joy from knowing that you would cut my
throat while I slept, every night we have been together, if only
you were free to do so.’
‘You’re right there.’
‘But we are here now in this stupid land, and I am proud to
have you with me for one more dawn, Venat, though it seems
likely there will not be another.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ the pirate snarled. ‘I’ll still be . . . still be
. . .’ His jaw worked. ‘What did you call me?’
‘You heard.’
In the quiet falling between them, the laughter of Loud
Thunder rolled in from across the hilltop, startlingly loud and
intrusive.
‘What am I supposed to do with that?’ Venater –
Venat
–
demanded.
‘Whatever you want. That is the point of freedom.’
‘Why would you . . . ?’
‘Because I remember fighting you, at the mouth of the
Tsotec. Because I should have killed you – or not killed you.You
were mine. I should not have let my father chain you.’
It took the smallest motion for Venat’s stone blade to appear
in his hand. ‘And if I slice you open right now?’
‘Then we will fight, and I would welcome it.’ Asmander felt
himself tense, feeling the Champion crouch about his shoulders,
awaiting its moment.
‘It’s a long way to the River,’ Venat said softly.
‘Not too long for you.’ He could not read the other man at all,
had no clue whether to expect an attack. But then Venat shook
his head, looking oddly lost, and a moment later he had turned
away and was picking his way towards the treeline, weapon still
in hand and his tread uncertain.
‘And you should go too,’ Asmander told the air. And sure
enough there was Shyri, dropping down from her eavesdropping
post atop one of the boulders, and Stepping back to human as
she did.
She just looked at him, blinking a few times. ‘How could you
let him go?’
He knew she wasn’t talking about the loss of Venat’s blade to
help them in the fight to come.
‘The right thing to do,’ Asmander muttered. And then Broken
Axe howled, loud and long. Relieved of further explanations, t
he Champion rushed over to see what had emerged from out of
the trees.
They saw the Wolves: Akrit’s warband, that had plainly not
been fooled as well as anyone had hoped. There was a good
score of them there so far, some in one form, some in another.
A handful of those who wore a human shape were clad in shirts
of metal: the Iron Wolves whose fame had spread all the way to
the banks of the Tsotec.
Look, Father!
thought Asmander drily.
It’s your army.What can
I buy them with now, though? The only thing they want is my blood,
will that do?
‘They’ve started.’ Broken Axe was abruptly at his shoulder.
For a second Asmander thought he was simply stating the obvious, but then he glanced back to see Hesprec and Maniye sitting
together between the stones.
The Wolf grimaced. ‘How long do Snake rituals take in your
land?’
‘It varies. Sometimes they are over in as little as three days.’
‘And your big friend’s gone.’
‘He had pressing business elsewhere.’
‘Do you southerners ever give a straight answer to anything?’
Broken Axe asked exasperatedly, eyes still fixed on the warband
below.
‘Yes. I am here and I will fight, for Hesprec and for you,’
Asmander told him flatly.
He earned a curt nod. Perhaps there might have been further
words, but just then Shyri was calling out, ‘I see tigers, many
tigers coming!’
Asmander attempted a brittle smile. ‘So: everyone is here. We
can start now.’

Maniye and Hesprec sat in the shadow of the stones, in this
spirit-heavy place, with a fire burning between them and with
Asmander’s glyph-carved pebbles arranged between the bases
of the monoliths, the standing one and the two fallen. Hesprec
had covered Maniye’s hair with a shawl of bright-dyed Horse
linen. She had mixed up an ink of charcoal and water, and had
dabbed it on Maniye’s face, tracing the dotted path of coils
there, making them sisters, light and dark. And Maniye told herself that she could feel the hill shift and shudder minutely
beneath her as the Serpent rose within the earth, summoned
from its unthinkably distant southern haunts, from its sunning
places alongside the warm river. For the coils of the Serpent ran
everywhere – had she not felt its presence and seen its rainbow
scales in dreams? Had she not walked along the Serpent’s back?
She might dare to hope so if it would help her now.

Maniye was aware of her other friends moving – spreading
out around the hilltop, sudden tension in them. As though she
was truly connected via the coils in the earth, she knew that
Akrit Stone River was nearby, and that Joalpey the Tiger Queen
was close. The jaws that had been gaping for so long were preparing to snap shut, and she was where the teeth would meet.

‘There is a landscape known only to the wisest,’ the Serpent
girl whispered, ‘in whose number, of course, I count myself.’
Her voice was slow and rhythmic, becoming almost hypnotic. ‘It
is not a land of rivers and marshes or of deserts and plains, or
even of cold northern mountains and the jagged teeth of broken
rocks. It is a landscape of gods. That is where we must travel to
petition for your soul.’

And the yowling of the Tiger cried out its warning from the
trees, chilling Maniye’s blood. She shivered and made as if to
jump up, but Hesprec reached about the fire and caught her
wrist.

‘You must listen to nothing and nobody save for me. If our
friends fail, then we will be caught and killed here, because our
own minds will be far away, gone in a direction that nobody else
can ever follow. Our souls will be with the gods, and whether
that is a good thing or a bad depends on how you comport
yourself before them. So you must attend to me, and go wherever I go. When I walk in the gods’ land, there you must walk.
When I return here, you must follow hard on my heels. Or you
will be lost, understand?’

Maniye nodded.
Hesprec’s eyes flicked sideways. ‘The Stone Place would have
been better,’ she sighed. ‘Two or three could have stood off an
army on that causeway. Here, well, we are sheltered and the hill
is steep. Perhaps our handful will keep them back for long
enough.’
There were raised voices now: the sound of men working
themselves up for the fight, swearing the oaths and boasts that
prefigured bloodletting. Maniye forced the sounds from her
head and looked straight into Hesprec’s copper eyes.
‘Now I will tell you something of this land we must travel to,
and thus you will see it in your mind and let it become real to
you, and this shall become our steed to take us there.’ The Serpent priestess was still gripping her hand. ‘Are you ready to see
your gods for what they truly are?’