The Tiger and the Wolf (4 page)

They made a contrasting pair, Akrit and Kalameshli. The
priest was much older, a spare, sinewy creature with five decades on him. He was a man much like the iron he worked, still
strong but no longer flexible. In the heat of the hall he had
stripped down to a woollen shirt worn open down the front, and
Maniye could see his chest and belly, snarled with wiry grey
hair, sagging just a little and criss-crossed by a few old scars.

Her father was also no longer young – and for pure spite she
counted daily the inroads that time had made on him. His dark
hair and beard were streaked with grey, and his face, broad and
high-cheekboned like all of their kin, was creased now, the lines
of his ill temper engraved deep enough that they could not be
smoothed out. He was a big man, though, and burly, still the
equal of any of his followers save perhaps Smiles Without Teeth,
who had no ambition in him at all.

Stripped to the waist, Akrit’s history was laid bare. He had
fought to become chief fifteen years ago, and then fought off a
handful of challengers in those earlier years, and the marks of
each fight were still on him. There had been the war, too, when,
as a young warrior and then a chief, he had led the Winter Runners against her mother’s people and defeated them, banding
with the other Wolf tribes to drive them north and east into the
highlands. He had won a few more scars then, from blade and
claw both, but neither challenge nor conflict had managed to
topple Akrit Stone River in all the sixteen years of Maniye’s life.

The hearth-keepers, those women and men who stayed
behind to cook and clean and mend, passed about the hall serving and bringing yam beer, milk and mead. The hunters ate and
talked, and the children ran madly back and forth, re-enacting
the hunt, taking it in turns to put their hands to their brow and
pretend to be Running Deer.

And Maniye let her eyes stray thoughtfully to Kalameshli
again, and saw exactly the same pensive expression on his face
that she had expected. He would be thinking of his sacrifice, and
wondering how Wolf would receive it.

The thought that perhaps the scrawny old creature might not
find favour – that Wolf’s displeasure might light on Kalameshli
and her father – was almost reason to let the business go ahead
and just watch. She hid the thought away for later like a strip of
stolen meat. It was always an option.

But first she wanted to see him, this old Serpent man who
had emerged from the stories and the south. This
something new
that had come into her life.

Then Kalameshli met her gaze and, without saying a word,
he had put their whole past conversation back into the front of
her mind.
Remember the Testing
, he seemed to say to her.
I am
waiting for you to fail.

As soon as she could slink away, she retreated to her makeshift cave nestling up against the roof and waited for the talk
below to subside. Gradually hunters went off to their own
hearths, while Akrit’s wives and his thralls cleared away the platters and the furs. She saw the fires begin to gutter, that would
bleed out their warmth over the course of the night and be
embers by dawn.

At last, she could hear nobody awake within the hall, merely
the ocean-murmur of sleeping breath. Below her, Akrit and his
wives would sleep, their slumber curtained off from the rest of
the hall. In the other half of the space, the thralls – and a handful
of young hunters who had no mate or hearth of their own –
would lie clustered around the failing fire.

Was Kalameshli standing down there amongst them, waiting
for her to make her move? Or was he prowling the outside of
the wall, a sleek grey shadow far swifter on four paws than on
his two old human feet? If so, she would have to out-dance him.
She would have to trust to her own speed and stealth – to the
gifts of her mother.

Maniye was small for her age, just as Kalameshli had insinuated when speaking of tracks: a skinny, bony girl half a head
shorter than any of her peers. As a wolf, she was smaller still. It
was not just for the view that she had scrabbled and scratched
out the edges of her little window. Now she hooked her hands
over the sill, feeling the uneven mess of mud and sticks that she
had gouged into. She put her head out into the chill of the night
air.

All was quiet out in the world, save for the faraway, lonely call
that was some distant speechless kin of hers, lost to the human
world and living the Wolf dream.

She ducked back inside, because she might as well make this
a test of her abilities while she was at it. Beneath a tatty deerskin
she kept a tiny stash of objects that she practised with, and now
she dug them out and cupped them in her hands.

A bone fish-hook, a tiny wooden deer that had been a toy for
her when she was young, a stone arrowhead, a bead of bronze.
She thrust her head out through the gap again, into the open
air, twisting to make it fit. Her shoulders tried to follow but,
narrow as they were, they were yet too broad.
She Stepped, making the shift of her form as slow and controlled as she could. Most of her peers would try to shift in an
eye-blink, and so could she if she had to, but they all too often
lost their footing or ended up on their backs with the sudden
change of perspective and balance. Right now, she had no wish
to fall.
The change rippled through her from her nose backwards,
her bones and flesh and skin flurrying into new alignments, skull
lengthening into a snout, ears stretching to points, shoulders
shrinking in, body longer, legs shorter, a tail springing out from
the end of her spine and a glossy dark coat eating up her tan
skin and her deer-hide shift, swallowing the garment into her,
inhering
it so that her wolf’s skin was just that little bit tougher
than some unclad wild cousin’s.
Her hands swallowed her fingers, bunching them into clawed
pads resting on the edge of the hole. She concentrated fiercely
on their contents, feeling the hook vanish into her, the wooden
toy likewise. For a moment the arrowhead was slippery within
her mind, on the point of falling from her shrinking grip, but
then she had that as part of her too, the flint, the substance of
the natural earth, finding an invisible home within her body.
Her wolf ears heard the rattle as the bead struck the floor,
beyond her reach. Bronze was inherently unnatural, and to
become sufficiently attuned to the metal to make it a part of her
would be a long, hard labour.
She did not even want to think about
iron
. Learning to
become iron’s kin, to make it a part of oneself, was the secret of
priests. Those young hunters and warriors who walked that path
were put through agonies, her peers said. The Testing of the
young was nothing compared to the ordeal of carrying iron.
And now it was time for her to be gone. She took in a deep
breath through her nose, her mind inflamed by the sudden
intensity of her senses. Her eyes were more apt for darkness,
even if they were otherwise something less than those of a
human, and her ears, her nose, every hair of her now flooded
her with a world of new sensations.
If Kalameshli was lurking out there, she hoped that she would
sniff him out. There was no trace of him, and so she pushed at
the floor beneath her and wormed her lithe way out into the
open air.
Moments later she was dropping down the outside of the hall,
a primal fear leaping and yelping inside her, but she was ready
for it, and in a heartbeat she had Stepped again, not to her
skinny little human body but to her other birthright.
What skidded to a precarious halt at the base of the wall,
staring face-down along the steep side of the mound, was a
different beast altogether. Maniye had just Stepped from her
father’s tribe to her mother’s.
Her tiger’s eyes were better still for moonlight, harvesting
every shred of silver light, so that the great cross that was the
Winter Runner village stood out almost plain as day. Her claws
were dug into the wattle and daub of the wall itself, for a tiger
– especially such a small tiger as she made – could climb and
cling where a wolf would only fall.
Her nose as a tiger was not so keen, but she still trusted her
senses, and she could steal downwards, pad by pad, in utter
silence. If there was anyone abroad, they would not know that
the very image of their old enemies walked amongst them.
The ‘Fire Shadow People’, they called her mother’s tribe,
among other, harsher things. She passed from darkness to open
moonlight and back into the dark, the changing light rippling
along her striped back, and it would have taken eyes as keen as
her own to discern her.
Her mother had been great amongst the Tiger, defeated and
captured in the last battles between her people and the upstart
Wolves who had come to rob her of her lands and subjects. Now
Maniye was both the Tiger child and the Wolf chief’s daughter,
and soon enough she would have to cast off one form forever.
Everyone knew that a halfblood could not hold to both heritages
at once. That was what Kalameshli had been warning her of:
choose the Jaws of the Wolf, not the Claws of the Cat, or she
would be Akrit Stone River’s daughter no longer. And, as much
as the prospect appealed, that would make her the enemy. That
would turn her into prey.
And yet she did not want to choose. She had lived the world
on a wolf’s swift paws, drunk the wind with its nose, seen the
night through a cat’s mirror eyes, danced up trees and sheer
walls with its fluid grace. Each of these was equally a part of her.
To choose one over the other would be like being asked to
choose her left hand over her right, and then to hack the other
away.
She knew where the sacrifice was being kept: there was a pit
overlooked by the temple mound. Kalameshli would not have
left the prisoner entirely unobserved, but Maniye guessed that
the watchers would not be over-vigilant. The wretched old man
would be secured, after all, so where would he go?
Sure enough, a couple of youths were pitched under a canopy,
ostensibly watching the pit but, when she slunk close, she found
one asleep and the other huddled close to the fire, feeding it
twigs and trying to shield it from a biting wind that was just
beginning to rise. If either had Stepped into their wolf forms
then they might have smelled her out, but they were no older
than she, and could probably not stay in their wolf skin for long.
That was the greatest lesson of Stepping, and it had come to
Maniye very swiftly indeed. Standing on four paws, her body
taut with a tiger’s graceful strength, she did not think
I am a girl
in the shape of a tiger
, any more than she had thought of herself
as merely wearing a wolf’s borrowed skin. She
was
the tiger. She
was
the wolf. That was the lesson everyone must learn eventually. Born a babe within the village or a cub in the forest, they
were one and the same. Man became animal, animal became
man. Each soul ran on two feet and four. Before she had quickened in her mother’s womb she had been a beast of the wilds.
But which beast?
Supposedly she should know by now – one
form or the other should call louder to her and tell her where
her soul belonged – but all she knew was that she was a child of
three shapes, and could Step between them as naturally as
thought.
The young hunters noticed nothing of her as she crept to the
mouth of the pit and looked down.
The old man seemed to be sleeping, lying bunched up on his
side, bony knees drawn up almost to his chin. She could see the
dark stains about his mouth where his ravaged gums had bled
after Kalameshli’s ministrations. His hands were secured to an
iron peg driven deep into the ground, and there was a rope
halter about his neck to prevent him Stepping.
He looked so pale, so alien. His features were strange: a knobbly pointed chin, long face, broad nose, the taut skin of his
hairless head hiding nothing of the shape of his skull. He had
some sort of painting or tattooing about his cheeks and forehead, but she could not make it out.
His eyes opened, staring up at her. She froze, knowing that it
was dark and that surely he, with his mere human gaze, would
see nothing.
He saw her. She felt that shock of contact. Somehow he had
found her, a shadow bitten into the circle of stars that was all
they had left to him of the sky.
Abruptly she was very frightened of him, however helpless he
seemed. The strangeness of him, that had seemed such a good
omen, was now a threat just by its very presence. She backed
away, changing her mind. She did not want to talk to the Snake
man. She did not want her life to change. She would return to
her close-walled sanctum. She would strive to pass the Testing.
Life would go on.
She retreated from the pit into the shadow of the temple
mound, feeling the great weight up above that was the Wolf and
its idol, all ready for the sacrifice. Sitting there, she Stepped back
to the human, feeling the sharp cold through her shift, that had
barely bothered her tiger self. In her hand were the hook, the
toy, the arrowhead, conjured back from that inner place she had
sent them.
She felt disappointed with herself, and yet relieved. She
would go back. She would find the wolf within her, pad back to
the foot of her father the chief’s mound and howl to be let in.
She must forget her tiger. She must cut it away.
Movement caught her eye: a solitary figure walking one of the
long thoroughfares into the village: a tall, lean man with a deerskin cloak about his shoulders.
Familiar
: she knew that walk and
it terrified her.
Kalameshli Takes Iron she loathed. Since her youngest memories he had been pushing her, bringing her face to face with the
fear of the Wolf, with the knowledge that she was not good
enough for his god, nor would ever be. Akrit Stone River, her
father, she hated – he had been the tyrant set over her simply by
her birth. He had got her on her unwilling mother, and then he
had her mother disposed of.
But the man she
feared
was called Broken Axe. He was not
even one of the tribe’s hunters: a wolf who walked alone, save
when Akrit summoned him. Most years, as the nights grew long,
he drifted in to find shelter from the cold with the Winter Runners. But Broken Axe was a lone wolf, a law unto himself.
Somehow, she had convinced herself that she would not see
him this winter, but here he was, trailing into the village unlooked
for, past midnight.
He was a tall, long-limbed man with narrow eyes and a
broken nose, and if he had ever cared to challenge her father,
then he could have been chief of the Winter Runners. Everyone
knew, but nobody said, that he was the one man Akrit Stone
River might fear. Broken Axe gave him no cause, though. He
showed no signs of seeking to lead, and when Akrit had a task
for him, no matter what, he named his price and performed it,
without fail.
Such as killing Maniye’s mother.
This was the same man. When the Tiger had given up a child
into the world for Akrit’s purposes, when the screaming and the
spitting of the birth was done, this was the man who had taken
her into the woods and murdered her. When no other would do
it – Akrit would not invite ill luck by bloodying his own hands
over the mother of his child, and Maniye had heard her mother
was a priestess too, always bad fortune to kill – it fell to Broken
Axe to carry out the sentence. He had done it without qualm or
question, just as always. Everyone said there was something
missing in Broken Axe, who feared no curse nor what any might
think of him. He was hard as stone and iron together.
And here he was, and he would sit by Kalameshli and drink
Akrit’s beer, and his eyes would stray to Maniye, as they always
did, as though comparing her growing face and form to his
memories of the woman he had slain.
Abruptly she was a tiger again, without choosing it, and padding back towards the pit and its lonely occupant.