The Tiger and the Wolf (2 page)

Maniye claimed just this much of it: a little alcove at one end
that she had appropriated and made her own, a cell fit for the
child of a chief. In all the dominion of the Wolf, this small space
was the Shadow cast by Maniye, Akrit Stone River’s daughter.
She had beads here, and hangings and furs, all she could
manage to haul up to soften the confines of her world. Though,
her favourite part of her lair was an absence. In the wattle and
daub of the end wall there was a smoke-hole that she had dug
out to be her lookout on the outer world, a narrow slot in the
wall. It gave her a view out towards the forest’s dark edge, but
surely not an escape. She was small for her age, but her bony
shoulders could never have fitted through that space, twist as
she might.

And if there were those who said that the wolf shape she
might Step into would be such a scrawny thing that it could
have wriggled through – well, the drop, down the longhouse’s
wall and then the almost sheer side of the mound, would surely
have broken her bones. Neither wolf nor girl could have made
the climb. There could be no possible basis for anyone thinking
otherwise.

And yet here came Kalameshli Takes Iron, with his bony face
full of suspicion. The scrape and rattle of his robe of bones had
tracked his path through the wives’ quarters below – the one
man allowed there. She had seen his shadow blot the firelight,
angular and angry even in silhouette, and she shrank back into
her tiny bottled kingdom, holding her breath and trying to wish
him away.

Her wishes had never had power, and how could they have
had power over
him
who was the Wolf’s priest and favourite,
and who knew the secrets of the forge?

There was a ladder placed at a slant, leading up to her, and
she saw his form shift and slide, Stepping onto four fleet feet to
scrabble up, then back on two as soon as he had ascended.
There was not quite enough space, even at the highest point
beneath the ridge-pole, for him to stand upright.

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?’

‘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 other 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 under 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.