The Tiger and the Wolf Read online

  Still she breathed shallowly and pretended to be elsewhere. There was some magic, she believed, that could cast an echo of her spirit to another place, to send hunters chasing after their tails instead of chasing her. The other girls spoke of such things, part of their arsenal when they sought to deceive parents and meet lovers. If such a thing was possible, Maniye did not know the making of it. Magic was not something Akrit Stone River’s daughter was fit for.

  He was hidden from her by the hanging meat and switches of herbs, but she felt him Step again, abruptly, no longer a man in a robe of bones, but a lean, grey wolf, scarred and cunning. She heard him sniff, finding her out by her traitor scent, despite all the clamour of chicory and feverfew. He padded forwards, eyes glinting in the dim light, and when he Stepped back to the shape of an old man, he was standing before her as she huddled beneath her makeshift window.

  ‘Your peers are all at their practice.’ He pronounced each word precisely, as though he was worried about spitting a few more loose teeth out if he spoke too hastily. ‘They fight, they run, they jump, they Step. But not you.’

  Kalameshli, was still strong enough to wrench her arm or slap her, and he had free rein to do so. She backed away as he stalked to the window. The sun caught the thousands of tiny bones sewn into the hide of his robe, playing over the intricate patterns there. Standing there, he made the place his, took the sun from her. ‘Not you, no: here you are. Why is this, I wonder?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because they hate me,’ she told him flatly.

  ‘And holding yourself aloof from them will win their love, then? Will it so?’

  ‘Then perhaps I don’t need their love.’ Bold words, she knew, for a girl who was working her shoulder blades into the wall to get further from him.

  ‘Wrong!’ he snapped, and she flinched away from his tone. ‘If the pack despises you, you will die. Or do you fancy yourself a lone wolf. Perhaps you would walk in the footsteps of Broken Axe, hmm? You’d like that, would you?’

  Because he knew that there was one man she feared more than himself or her father: Broken Axe, who had killed her mother. Her father had ordered it done, and Kalameshli had begged the blessing of the Wolf, but Axe’s hands bore the blood and everyone knew it.

  ‘What will they dare do to me, to Stone River’s daughter?’ she hissed, although her voice shook.

  When his face swung towards her, away from the window’s view, she knew he had been waiting for those words.

  ‘If you are to be Stone River’s daughter, you must be within the Jaws of the Wolf. Or you are nothing. Or you will be meat, and perhaps it will be Broken Axe following your footsteps. You must be of the Wolf or nobody will care whose get you are.’ His spitting anger, like storm clouds from a clear sky, was no surprise to her. It lurked beneath his cold surface always, and most especially when he spoke to Maniye.

  She did not answer. In those flashpoints of temper any words of hers would be provocation, but his rage came and went as swift as hunting, and now he was calm again.

  ‘Some of the hunters said that they found tiger tracks near our walls,’ he remarked.

  She held herself very still, waiting.

  He was looking out of the window again – no, he was examining the edges, with hands and with eyes, seeking for scratches and marks. ‘I told them there are no tigers here any more, and that I wanted to hear no more of it. But I went to see for myself. They looked very like tiger tracks to me.’

  ‘You should set traps then,’ she told him.

  His hard features turned towards her again. ‘They were very small tracks.’

  ‘Then set very small traps.’ She knew her expression admitted to nothing.

  For a long time he stood there, half lit by the window, trying to force his way past her guard. She had been working on that innocent face of hers since she was five years old. She had learned quickly that anything the world discovered about what she thought or felt was a knife at her throat.

  At the last, Kalameshli Takes Iron sighed and turned away, before creaking his way back down the steps in a shiver of bones.

  Wherever the people of the Wolf claimed as their home, they raised their mounds, whether it was a low heap of soil that bore some shepherd’s croft, or the vast steep-sided hills that marked their villages in those places where they had grown powerful.

  The Winter Runners were one of many tribes, not yet the greatest but far from the least.Their village was a loose scattering of artificial mounds that dominated the surrounding landscape. If those hills marked your horizon, then you stood within the shadow of the Winter Runners and were subject to their law.

  Maniye slunk sullenly from the longhouse of her father, doing her best to avoid all eyes. She was a small, strange child, friendless and different. It was a difference as deep within her as her bones. The other children had sensed it from an early age, as though they had the noses of wolves even then.

  She skulked down the paths running between the mounds. Each hill that reared above her bore the dwellings of a family, their store-houses and their workshops, timber-frame and mud wall and heavy peat-clad roofs whose eaves slanted down to the heaped earth. On another reared the effigy of the Wolf, into whose burning jaws Kalameshli sent offerings, and the windowless longhouse that was the temple, its walls made with heavy stone because of the rituals of fire and hammer Kalameshli enacted there. The temple and her father’s house claimed the two highest mounds. They were the twin seats of a power that reached out through the dark between the trees to all the tributary villages Akrit had brought within the curtilage of his influence: the Winter Runners’ contribution to the greater domain they called the Shadow of the Wolf.

  The temple’s grand mound also held the training ground where the hunters would cast their spears and loose their arrows, and the growing young would practise Stepping until they could pass fluidly from man to wolf and back to man as swift as breathing. Maniye did not want to think of the training ground. The Testing was coming and, just as Kalameshli had reminded her, her fellows were up there already, in their exclusive camaraderie, practising at being wolves.

  There were seventeen others from the Winter Runners due to be Tested alongside her, and it was supposed to be something of a celebration, something of a game, something of a chance for the elders of the Wolf to laugh at the inadequacies of the young. Nobody failed the Testing. That was a point of faith.

  Except that Kalameshli Takes Iron did not seem to have that faith, and he himself should have been an expert on the subject. Kalameshli had dogged Maniye’s steps these last two moons and croaked out his warnings, like ravens circling overhead. At first she had thought it was just his cold dislike of her: that constant pushing and needling, the disapproval, the disdain. That was her due from the priest, so why should it be any different over the Testing?

  But of course, Kalameshli and his priests oversaw the Tests. She had not thought of it that way until recently, but each Testing was set by the priests of the Wolf, and so Kalameshli could make them as hard or as easy as he wished.

  She understood now that he had been biding his time, through fourteen years of loathing her and taunting her, until now when she would fall briefly, but totally, under his power.

  Nobody ever failed the Tests, but everyone knew what would happen to someone who did. Exile, or worse – torn apart by the pack, or even given as an offering to the Wolf. It was the common stock-in-trade of her peers’ conversations, each outdoing the last with their lurid stories.

  Even if those going into the Testing did not believe they could fail, none wanted to look a fool before the Wolf and the Wolf’s people. As the priest said, they had been practising all this last month, a motley mob of them charging around the circuit of the training ground, under every eave and between every hall, a constant annoyance for their elders and yet a source of fondness too. All the adults remembered their own Testing; a little rowdiness could be forgiven.

  Maniye trained also, but alone and out of sight. She avoided the othe
r youths, who mocked her, and whom she despised in turn, with not a hand’s span of common ground between them. Her own training took place after dark or in secluded corners, or even in the forest looming beyond the fields: forbidden places, abandoned times, where she would not be spied on. But all of it would be for nothing when Kalameshli gave her an impossible challenge, set her a course nobody could have run. If she was lucky he would merely humiliate her, earn her another beating from her father. Otherwise . . .

  There was a herder’s hut that lay unused at the foot of the mound. Come winter, the sheep would shelter there along with their guardians, but in these last days of fall she could creep there unseen and practise. Rat bones were piled like brittle sticks in the corners, older than the spring and with no sign of living descendants for her to hunt and take as minuscule trophies. She ranged the ten feet of dark space enclosed between the walls, no room to run and nobody to fight. Instead she practised her Stepping, fighting to master this uncertain new instinct that had only come to her during this last year.

  Essential, for this, that there were no eyes there to see her, for she faced challenges the others did not.

  No, I have gifts the others lack, that is the truth of it, she told herself over and over. Yet every time she hid those gifts, because she knew they would see her denounced, she believed a little more that they were nothing but a curse.

  After she had bored herself with that, she sat and brooded, inventing dire fates for Kalameshli and Broken Axe and her father – and anyone else who crossed her mind – until she was jolted from her dark reverie by the sound of a horn.

  They’re back. For her father and his picked band of hunters had been off after tribute from the White Tails. She had been given a few blessed days when the only chain about her neck was old Kalameshli’s, and now she would be loaded with Akrit Stone River’s disapproval as well.

  But she was out of her hole before the echo had died away, to watch them return. There would be omens, after all. Kalameshli would want to see the trophy that he would offer to the Wolf. The course of the next year would thus be decided.

  She felt badly in need of omens.

  The hunters would be returning down the northern approach. The Wolves built no roads, and yet the arrangement of the smaller mounds about the chief’s own formed a rough cross, guided by alignments of the stars and the wisdom of the priests. If she hid herself in the narrow, earth-smelling gap left between this hut’s sagging roof and the ground, she could watch the hunters return, and even hear what they said. Let her fellows run and fight and chase each other about like chickens.

  Perhaps the old priest already had a presentiment that all was not as it should be, for he was coming down from the hill, descending the earthen ramp with care. ‘Stone River, the Wolf runs beside you,’ Kalameshli called out, but Maniye could hear the concern in his voice, his words almost a question.

  Akrit Stone River was at the head of the pack, and Maniye felt that emptiness in her chest that she had grown used to when looking on her father. There was no love in her for him, any more than there was any in his breast for her. And yet, and yet . . . despite every blow and curse and frown, still that gap persisted, the hollow space where she was wretchedly aware something should dwell. I cannot love my father, she told herself almost every day, and yet, and yet . . .

  Akrit picked up his pace and drew ahead of the others, loping over to the old man’s side.

  ‘Where is the trophy?’ Maniye heard Kalameshli hiss. None of the hunters was bearing the antlers of a kill.

  ‘The quarry was a coward in the end,’ Akrit rumbled. ‘Their greatest warrior? Either the White Tails are sick to death or they hold out on us. Whichever, they’re due a reminder of whose Shadow they dwell in.’

  ‘But . . .’ She could imagine the priest’s face suddenly gripped with alarm. ‘No trophy . . . the omens.’ A pause. ‘Or something else to burn in the Wolf’s jaws?’

  Maniye went cold all of a sudden, the priest’s fear and ire no longer a cause for amusement. The Tests . . . Had Kalameshli foreseen this? Had the Wolf whispered to him that a sacrifice would be needed from within the pack? Or had he already decided that she was not of the pack, after all?

  ‘Oh, we have something more than that,’ her father declared, sounding too jovial for a man who had come back from the hunt empty-handed. ‘Smiles, show Kalameshli Takes Iron what we found creeping through the Wolf’s Shadow.’

  Smiles Without Teeth, her father’s keenest bully-boy, shouldered forwards, dragging a stranger in his wake.

  Maniye stared: she had never seen the like. The captive was older than Kalameshli, and completely bald, his neck scrawny as a turkey’s, his limbs thin like sticks. He had a hooked nose and deep-set eyes, and if only he had been dressed for it, and walking free, she thought he would look like a sorcerer should. His robe was ragged and patched, though, and his skin was dirty, and beneath that so pale it seemed almost translucent. Shifting forwards, she could see the veins in his forehead, above the mottled blue-black bruise someone had given him. His hands were tied behind him and, of course, a knotted rope was about his neck.

  ‘What do we have here, do you think?’ Kalameshli asked thoughtfully.

  ‘Snake,’ Akrit spat. ‘A Snake that dares the Wolf. Well, you’ve found the Wolf now, Snake. You’ve found his very den.’

  The wretched old man bared his teeth – and Maniye was disappointed to see that they were just teeth, after all, and not the hollow fangs of his namesake. ‘You do not dare raise a hand against a priest!’ he hissed. ‘Ill fortune will dog you all to your graves!’

  Some of the hunters were hanging back – everyone knew that to harm a priest was to invite disaster – but Smiles Without Teeth slapped the man across the back of his bald head and drove him to his knees.

  ‘We’ve seen your kind before, up from the south,’ Akrit snarled. ‘All Snakes say they’re priests, every one. It can’t be all, so none of you are. But you are come just in time for the Wolf, old man.You are very welcome by the Wolf. Until we found you, I feared his jaws would go empty. Now your thin carcass shall roast within them. How will the Wolf like that, Takes Iron?’

  Kalameshli considered the scrawny old man thoughtfully. ‘He shall like it very well, I feel. It is right that the Wolf should devour the Snake’s get, wherever he shall find them.’

  The captive hissed suddenly, driving most of the hunters a step or two back. ‘If you do not release me, I shall lay the Serpent’s Curse on you all! I shall have your crops wither in the fields, your children in their mothers’ wombs. There shall be no strike of misfortune under your Shadow but you shall see my hand in it!’

  ‘Gag him!’ Akrit snapped, and Smiles gripped the old man’s jaw, forcing it shut, and then shook him when he still wouldn’t be silent.

  ‘Something more, I think,’ Kalameshli decided, businesslike now. ‘The venom of the Snake is legendary, but it cannot bite if it has no fangs. Bring him to the forge and I shall fetch my smallest hammer.’

  The captive’s eyes widened in alarm, but Smiles Without Teeth was already wrestling him towards Kalameshli’s domain, where the magic of iron was made, while hunters went whooping off ahead of him to call for the priest’s tools.

  Maniye watched them go, finding that she did not share their enthusiasm. The old man had been weak and thin, it was true, but he had been something new just for a moment. He had been her own omen, promising change in the year to come, a reversal of her fortunes. Now they would destroy him, as they destroyed everything, and so everything would go on just the same.

  She did not want to watch, and returned to her hidden hole as the shrieks and screams started, Kalameshli Takes Iron methodically smashing out every remaining tooth in the old Snake’s head. Because what is a Snake without fangs?

  But one thought would not leave her. Her people – or those truly of her people – were born in the Jaws of the Wolf, they said. It was to prove this birthright that the Testing happened. The Eyriemen were born unde
r the Wings of the Hawk, and the children of the Boar between his Tusks. So it went that each of the People had their sign and their badge that marked them out as who they were.

  But nobody ever spoke of the Jaws of the Snake. Kalameshli had made a mistake, she realized, and the very thought of it sent a shock of hope through her. In the Coils of the Snake, that is the saying. Better break all his bones, priest, or you may find he does not go quite so easily to his death.

  2

  There were many wolves in Maniye’s world. Out beyond the extent of mound and field, the lean grey beasts, her mute kin, coursed between the trees. They hunted and bred, and everyone she knew would one day go to join them, just as, in time, their spirits would be reborn to human mothers of the Wolf tribes. They were kin and yet they were the enemy, too. They raided the herds and they culled the weak, devoted to making the lives of men harder, so that the people themselves became harder, fiercer, swifter. That was the way of the world, and that was the way of the Wolf. Maniye could not help feeling a jab of pride at knowing that her father’s kin ruled the Crown of the World almost undisputed, while the people of the Deer and Boar paid tribute.

  There was also the wolf that ran in the sky, he who had slunk into the night above at the start of fall, lean and hungry and written in stars. He was chasing the herds out of the heavens, and soon he would hunt the cold winter skies, prowling above his people each night until he sniffed out the approaching spring and brought back life to the growing earth, laying it at their feet like a trophy.

  Then there was Wolf whose people she was born to: Winter Runner, Moon Eater, Many Mouths and the other tribes within the Jaws of the Wolf, who were masters of the world. Wolf was a harsh god, but no harsher than life itself. He pushed his people, howling in the cold nights and sending them hardship, famine and enemies to fight. He taught them that together they were stronger than any of them could be alone. And, when they triumphed, as they had triumphed, Wolf was proud of them. Kalameshli himself said so and, for the Winter Runners, Kalameshli was the very voice of the Wolf.