The Tiger and the Wolf (12 page)

After she was fed – and resisting the sudden urge to find
somewhere to curl up – she whined at him urgently. He was
squatting on his heels, watching her thoughtfully, apparently just
as grateful as she not to resume their sparring of before. Now he
Stepped once more, back to that little sliver of sliding shadow
that must be the smallest snake he could become.

This time, taking his place in her pack, his cold ridged body
climbed up her flank to get there. This did not seem as objectionable as she had expected and, once he was in place, his
weight between her shoulder blades was almost familiar. Perhaps she would even have missed it, had he been left behind.

She followed her nose, in the end, and her sense of the sloping
ground. She had travelled this way once before, many years ago,
when the Horse had first established a trading post in Winter
Runner lands and her father had taken a hunting party to go
and impress them. She had been too young to Step back then,
denied all these clues to help her find her way, but she had still
possessed eyes and a mind sharp enough to remember. Now she
could analyse those memories and know that she must scent out
running water, for the Horse had made their camp on the banks
of the Sand Pearl river. Even such meagre clues were enough to
guide her to where she wanted to go.

When there was smoke on the air, she turned away from it.
Since leaving the Winter Runners she had not seen anything
that wore a human shape except the Snake priest, and the more
she looked on him, the less sure she was that he was entirely
human. Seeing him in daylight had been a shock, because he
had hardly any more colour to him than he had under the moon.
She had not seen him close up when her father had brought him
in, and memory had smudged the edges of her recollection.
Now she saw that his skin really was white, as though all the
blood and colour had been drained from him, save where old
tattoos crossed his sunken cheeks and high forehead, faded diamonds of orange and purple making a snakeskin trail that led
across to his covered scalp. His eyes were almost colourless, the
skin around them pinkish and unhealthy-looking. She had never
seen eyes so wide and round before; they looked as though,
should he ever be truly surprised by something, they would pop
from their sockets entirely.

They had stopped to let her rest and to eat a little more of
their dwindling provisions. Seeing her critical regard, he smiled
thinly. ‘You must ssee few travellers here in the north. I cannot
imagine why.’

She looked disdainful at that, especially as the Crown of the
World was not
north
. North was the highlands and the mountains, the Bear and the cold. North was the Crystal Valley People
of the stories, so beautiful that no traveller who saw them ever
wished to return home. ‘We have the Horse,’ she pointed out.
He looked quite different from the Horse people, though, and
for a moment she felt very small when thinking on how far he
must have walked to reach the lands of the Wolf.

And what a wasted journey, in that case.
But, after all, if not for
him, where would she herself be? Perhaps he had been sent by
Wolf or Tiger or by some greater invisible power that had
chosen to meddle in her life.

He was carefully adjusting the cloth about his head, pulling
the strips tighter, but his pale eyes were smiling still. Rested and
warm, she could hardly equate him with the desperate creature
of that previous night, who had begged her to carry him.

‘You have a plan, of course,’ he observed, ‘for when you reach
wherever you wish the Horse to take you?’
She did not rise to the bait. No, she had no plan – or rather
the plan was just
away
, and any finer details would have to wait.
‘Why do you wrap your head?’ Always better to turn the
questions back on him. ‘Have you hurt it?’
He gave her an amused look. ‘History and reverence.’
‘You have a lot of long words that say nothing.’ She put her
hands on her hips, wondering if she should demand proper
answers, or else refuse to carry him in the pack again.
He gave a croak of laughter. ‘Stone River’s daughter, you are
a fierce huntress. Will you track down all my old man’s habits
and tear out their poor throats?’ His words were still soft about
the edges where his teeth should have shaped them, but he was
working hard on compensating for the loss. ‘As Serpent dwells
under the ground – under the ground everywhere – so we hide
ourselves likewise. To go bare-headed under the sun where our
god cannot would be disrespectful.’
‘If your Serpent is under
this
ground, he is frozen.’ She was
not sure why exactly she wanted to to dent his comfortable
composure, but the urge was strong in her.
‘No doubt you are right.’ Her words glanced off him and left
no wound, but they left him thoughtful nonetheless. ‘I am a long
way from home and, though I know that he is with me, that he
moves in the earth even here, sometimes it is hard . . .’ His next
smile was touched with pain. ‘Perhaps we should be on our way?’

She followed the scent and sound of fresh water until she found
one of the innumerable streams that laced the Crown of the
World like filigree. Running alongside the water took her to what
she guessed must be the Little Sand Pearl, a swift-flowing river
still fierce and angry after its journey from the highlands before
it joined its big sister. Her best judgement had taken her downstream, and now she was rewarded with a tangle of smoke from
a score of fires, and the unmistakable sight of the Horse trading
post.

Actually seeing it there, a testament to her impromptu navigation, gave her a sudden surge of hope. She was just a girl, a
pup, a cub, and yet she had travelled for two days on fleet paws,
and found herself arriving exactly at the target she had set.
Which of her father’s hunters could have accomplished the
same?

Almost all of them
, came her own caustic response, but she
shook it off, bounding along the Sand Pearl’s banks with fresh
energy.

I will sleep under cover tonight, and in my human form
, she
told herself. Save for brief rests and the odd word with the old
Serpent, she had held to the wolf’s form almost entirely.
And we
will get food and warmer clothes.
For the air was just starting to fill
with falling snow and she was starting to feel the chill through
her pelt and the clothes inhered beneath it.

And Hesprec will make them take us away from here
, she
thought.
And then . . . and then . . .
To get out from under the Wolf’s
Shadow, that was enough. What choices there were she would
make as a free woman and without her father’s heavy hand
twisting her course.
The Horse Society post was not like anything else in the
Crown of the World. They did not raise hills to build on: instead
there was a wooden wall of stakes encircling their compound,
with a gap opening on to the river and another, opposite, on to
the land. Within, the Horse had built round houses of sticks that
were set up on stilts high enough that, as a child, she had
crawled under one.
Although the walls would plainly allow the Horse men to
defend what they had, the effect of the whole was curiously
meek and unimposing. Without a grand earthen mound, such as
the least of the Wolf dwellings was set up on, the trading post
did not dominate the landscape but seemed almost to hide in it.
Despite all that heavy wood, and the work and time invested in
the construction, the trading post had a curiously temporary air,
as though the Horse might at any time simply pack it up and
haul it elsewhere.
Outside the walls were a motley assortment of tents and the
smoking remains of campfires. She remembered there being
more when she had travelled here as a child but, with winter
coming on, the itinerant traders of this land would be heading
home, whether they had obtained what they sought or not.
By the time she had trotted closer, the snow was thickening
and the air had grown cold enough that she wondered if even
the swift Sand Pearl might see some ice. She walked between the
tents cautiously, spotting almost nobody. The traders themselves
would no doubt be hurrying to conclude their business within
the palisade, and their wives and hearth-husbands had laced the
tents shut against the weather.
Nobody stopped her from entering the trading post, although
she drew plenty of looks as people satisfied themselves that she
was Stepped, and not some bold little animal come in from the
woods to steal a supper.
Although that may yet be necessary.
She was aware that, no
matter how much she had excelled so far, she would now be at
the mercy of her companion. She had nothing to barter – or
nothing she was willing to barter – that might gain her anything
from the traders of the Horse Society.
She slunk around the wall of the nearest propped-up house
until she was out of the wind and the worst of the snow. Stepping into her true shape meant immediately feeling the bite of
the cold, as her fur was stripped away.
Shivering a little, she placed her pack on the ground and
prodded it with her foot until the snake reluctantly emerged. For
a moment the little reptile just coiled in upon himself, writhing
against the chill, but before he could grow sluggish, Hesprec
Essen Skese Stepped out from its twisting loops and hugged
himself, mouth twisted in a toothless grimace.
‘You’re glad we’re going to head off south
now
, aren’t you,’
Maniye told him grimly.
He managed to raise a smile, even then. ‘Ssave me from
women who must always be
right
.’ He took a deep breath, and
the following exhalation plumed on the air. ‘Let us seek out
some dignitary of the Horse and petition him. At the least, let us
hope they offer us the hospitality of a roof, even if it is just for
as long as our words with them last.’
There were still a few people about despite the snow, and
they quickly found a couple of Coyote traders heading back for
their tents, satchels bulging with whatever the Horse had bartered to them. The Coyote were a familiar sight all over the
Crown of the World, mocked as a tribe that would be Wolves if
they only could. Still, Coyote himself was a clever trickster, and
his people survived the winters and the Wolves’ disdain equally
well.
Hesprec held out a hand to attract their attention, bringing it
back vertically to his lips in an odd, ritual gesture that must have
been a habit of his homeland. The two Coyote men stared at the
mismatched pair and exchanged glances. Maniye was uncomfortably aware that they probably thought she was the old man’s
thrall, or worse. Hunched in his borrowed sheepskin jacket,
Hesprec asked them for directions without ever really speaking,
his hands talking for him, and one of the traders singled out a
hut with a jab of his finger.
In the flurrying snow they could see little of the place but a
shadow, so they worked their way around its curving wall until
they found the three layers of hung skins that were keeping the
weather out. Inside it was absurdly warm, the heat of a central
fire combining with the bodies of almost twenty people to make
the air thick and heavy with the reek of sweat. There was barely
room there for two more, even a skinny girl and a skinnier old
man, but with a little shoving and some half-hearted curses they
managed to get themselves inside with the furs falling closed
behind them.
Most of the press were outsiders, here for the last few days of
the trading season. She saw plenty more Coyotes, short, thickset
men and women who could have passed for Wolf if only they’d
strutted more. Most of them had peeled back their clothes and
were sitting relishing the fire, with sweat glistening on their skin.
Maniye saw a couple playing a game she knew, bones balanced
on the backs of their hands and then flipped up for catching –
or perhaps to seek a glimpse of the future in the way they fell.
One pair, a man and a woman, were entwined in an embrace,
kissing ardently despite the spectators.
She saw a couple of Crows down from the Eyrie: small wiry
men who were the only friendly ambassadors those heights produced. Each had half his face painted or tattooed with intricate
curling patterns of black, and they stared at the newcomers
using one eye at a time, tilting their heads to either side just like
birds.
There was a raised platform at the far end of the hut, and it
was there that the Horse were conducting their business. There
was a man up there who seemed to be in charge, broad-shouldered and broader-waisted, and yet probably as tall as Hesprec
if he stood. He wore a thin beige robe of some material she
didn’t know – certainly not the wool she was used to. It was
richly ornamented at the hems with stitching of many colours,
and she thought it was one of the finest garments she had ever
laid eyes on. Above it, around his neck, was a torc of copper,
polished to gleam in the firelight. The sight of it made her
uncomfortable – too much like the halters that thralls wore to
prevent them Stepping. The metal did not meet at the front, and
was presumably a symbol of rank and importance, but she
could not shake the feeling that there was a touch of servitude
there, even so.
There was a Horse woman sitting up there behind him,
dressed more plainly in a long woollen shirt, and she was making
marks in a clay tablet to tally whatever the man was bargaining
for, and occasionally interrupting to give her opinion. She had
the same coppery skin as all the Horse people, with a pointed
face and a curved nose, and Maniye thought she looked very
exotic and elegant. She had heard the Winter Runner men talk
often enough about the grace and beauty of Horse women.
Another of the Horse had hopped down from the platform as
soon as they came in, and he kicked and pushed his way through
the gathered throng to speak to them. He was long-boned and
much younger than the Hetman doing the bargaining – enough
to be the wide man’s son – and he wore a jerkin of hard leather
scales over a wool robe that fell to his knees. Like all the Horse
she had ever seen, he had a calm strength to him that went
beyond merely his strong frame. His eyes were flecked and
tawny, like polished stones.
His attention skipped from one to the other, resting mostly
on Hesprec and plainly not sure what to make of him. ‘You
come to trade?’ he asked, a flick of his gaze taking in their other
visitors. ‘What goods have you?’ It was only through hearing his
voice, and the strangeness of the way he spoke, that Maniye
noticed the absence of anything similar in Hesprec. For all his
odd choices of words, the Snake spoke as though he had been
born to the Crown of the World. Except now, when he matched
the Horse man’s accent perfectly.
‘Special goods for those heading south before the ice comes.
A trade that comes along once in two span of years.’ Hesprec’s
smile was broad, but without teeth it could never quite aspire to
looking friendly. Still, he did his best.
The tall Horse man gave him a doubting look. ‘You may be
best to come next morning with your special trading, white one.
There are many here to barter before you.’ His eyes moved to
Maniye again, and he surprised her with a smile. ‘But our fire is
warm. I offer that to you at least,’ and then he was striding and
shoving his way to return to the platform.
Up there, their chief was just concluding a trade, finishing
with some grinning remark that had the Coyote woman opposite laughing – evidently a good deal for all concerned. As she
hopped down and began to make her way towards the door, the
tall man clambered up and had a murmured word with his
superior.
The man in the torc seemed to doubt him, but then looked
over and caught sight of Hesprec with almost exaggerated surprise. Maniye felt his eyes as they shifted to her, and stayed
there longer than she was happy with. With a few words and a
gesture, the Hetman had sent his man back down to Hesprec
and Maniye.
‘It seems you’re more special than you think,’ he explained, a
little exasperated by this turn of events. ‘Come . . . come with
me.’ He reached upwards, and Maniye saw that there were
struts overhead that projected out from where the walls met the
eaves, sloping up along the line of the roof but leaving a gap
where various bundles had been stowed. From there, the tall
Horse dragged down a heavy leather coat trimmed with fur and
pulled it about himself. ‘The Trading Master wants to speak
about this special trade of yours, but somewhere better fit for it.
Come with me.’