The Tiger and the Wolf (6 page)

Most of the Horse party were being hosted elsewhere. Only
the Hetman, her chief trader and her two southern guests had
the honour of meeting the ruler of these Laughing Men. The
trader became almost immediately ensconced with a pair of the
locals, falling to discussing commodities for the coming year
with an ease that told Asmander that all this threat and show
was a ritual path both sides had trodden many times before. It
was the first such sign: till then he had begun to wonder if these
Plains people were sharpening their bronze knives for the
throats of their guests.

The Malikah of the Laughing Men was a woman as old as
Venater, and looking just as battle-scarred. She wore a cloak
striped with many colours, and a leather headband set with the
teeth of lions rested in her tawny hair. She had a fierce beauty
about her, as did so many of these Plains people. Every sign of
the hunt and the fight that had marked her skin only added to
her sense of presence, and now she fixed Asmander with a
frankly acquisitive stare.

‘Champion of the River Lords,’ she addressed him. ‘But you
are no more than a boy.’
‘I am as you see me,’ he replied, sitting across the floor from
her. ‘So young and yet a Champion.’
‘Asmander, First Son of Asman. Your father must be proud.’
He kept his smile steady, although for a second it was difficult. ‘The honour of our family rests in me, Malikah.’
‘And so he casts it away?’
For a moment he wondered what she had been told, but no
. . . she was simply fishing, dangling a paw in the water to see
what she might catch. ‘The cold north calls to me. I would see
the snows of winter.’
Her eyes turned to his companion. ‘And you must be a young
man too, even with your old face. Venater,’ making great play
with the end of his name, that juvenile suffix, ‘your father, is he
proud also?’
‘I am all of my house.’ Venater met her gaze steadily.
‘But you have found a new father in the River Lords? How
kind of them.’
‘I piss on the golden doorsteps of the River Lords,’ the burly
pirate told her.
‘These things are known: he does,’ Asmander confirmed wryly.
Her eyes had narrowed, but she seemed content not to peel
back Venater’s past any more than that. ‘Men come to us from
the south, this year. Men who offer us bronze coin to fight. Do
you also offer us coin to fight, Champion of the Riverlands?’
‘No.’ An easy shrug, and he had guessed that there would be
some from the Nation who had sought mercenaries here. After
all, why else was he himself heading north, if not to try and
tempt the fabled Iron Wolves to support his prince, his childhood friend?
As always, thinking on the man his family had sworn allegiance to, Asmander felt a point of pain as though the knife was
at his own chest. His honour and his family duty were both
stretched tight about the success of this mission. He only hoped
that the two did not part company, or he would be like a man
caught with each foot on a different boat.
Thinking on his father, he was grimly aware how honour and
family seldom shared the same house these days.
Eshmir the Hetman spoke then. She was a foundling of the
Horse, with the flat features and snub nose of a northerner but
the ruddy skin of the Stone People, and she danced carefully
through a conversation with the Malikah that elegantly checked
and repaired all of the ties the Society had built here. While she
spoke, the subdued, slope-shouldered men who were the
Malikah’s mates – or slaves, or both – passed back and forth
with gourds of a liquor that made Asmander’s eyes water.Venater,
he saw, was putting the stuff away with gusto.
‘Champion of the River Lords.’ He snapped back to himself
as the Malikah addressed him. ‘When you return to your lands
in triumph, no doubt you will found your own house.’
‘Many things are possible,’ Asmander allowed.
‘Before then, will you drink your fill of the women of the
Crown of the World, and cause them to lament your leaving
them?’ She had a cruel smile on her, as she toyed with a necklace of horn and gold.
‘Even this, even this is possible.’
‘They are cold, up in the Crown of the World. They have no
fire such as we have here.’ It was plain what she was after and it
was because he was a Champion, that rare and special thing.
The Laughing Men had none, he had heard, but their enemies
of the Lion did, and perhaps she foresaw his seed and her womb
breeding a hero of the next generation. In truth, there was a
power to her that was greatly attractive, as power always was,
but he shook his head regretfully.
‘Alas, I am sworn to my father. My loins are not my own.’
She snorted at that, and Venater muttered a snide, ‘This
much is known,’ which made Asmander want to hit him.
‘Do none of my beautiful daughters catch your eye, for just
one night?’ the Malikah asked him, and that made him sad for a
moment. The space that was between them was not contained
merely within the interior of her hut; it was the years between
his youth and her age. There was no sign of it on her face, but
her words showed that she felt it.
‘You honour me.’ The most polite of all refusals, contained in
the tone and not the words, and she did not press him further.

To navigate the sides of the pit, she Stepped to her tiger shape
again, descending with the beast’s agility but human forethought. All the while the Snake’s cold eyes were fixed on her,
and not a muscle of him moved. Only when she had descended
to his level did she realize that she had given him a weapon
against her: she had revealed her mother’s shape to him, that she
had hidden so assiduously from everyone she knew.

For a moment she froze, close enough to the huddled man
that she could have dug her claws in him. Had he enchanted her
somehow, that she had made such an error? Where had her habitual caution gone?

Then she understood:
he is dead.
She was already thinking of
the Snake as a dead man, the Wolf’s due. Why hide secrets from
a corpse?

She stared at him challengingly. Only his eyes moved to meet
hers, that and a slight shivering. His breath plumed in the night’s
chill.

He could not reach her with his hands, and he could not
Step. He might have tried to kick her, but it would profit him
nothing, and he was such a feeble, used-up-looking creature that
she would hardly feel the blow: a Snake without fangs.

She fell back into her human form, Stepping to leave herself
with her back up against the pit’s earthen wall. The stone, wood
and bone pricked at her hand, and she shoved the trinkets into
the waistband of her shift.

The old man still said nothing. Close to, she was struck even
more by the two sides of him: strange and pale and foreign, and
yet so dirty and ragged and thin that even Coyote would call
him starved.

She had a hundred questions, but what came out was, ‘Are
you really a southerner?’
His withered lips moved, and then he spat, not at her but at
the ground, clearing his mouth of old blood. ‘Compared to you,’
he got out.
‘I thought southerners were burnt black by the sun.’ She had
heard it from the Horse Society, who travelled further than
anyone else she knew.
A smile’s ghost brushed the corners of his mouth. Those eyes
– as pale and moon-coloured as the rest of him – wrinkled a
little. ‘Mosht of ’em are,’ he got out, fighting the words. ‘I’m sh
. . . sh . . .’ A spasm of annoyance rippled his features, and he
made the sibilant by drawing breath sharply inward across the
roof of his mouth. ‘
Ss-pecial
.’
Something small and mean turned within her, seeing him
momentarily pleased at overcoming his limitations even by that
small degree. ‘They’re going to sacrifice you to Wolf.’
He nodded once, the smile gone.
‘Do you know how they’ll do it?’ she pressed. ‘The stone face
of Wolf has iron teeth – more iron than you’ve ever seen. They’ll
tie you between his jaws, and light a fire in his throat, and the
teeth will get hotter and hotter, until you roast in his mouth.’ It
felt horrible to say the words, but at the same time it was a weird
release, a catharsis she could not quite pin down.
Another bleak nod, and he even managed a shrug.
She had more hurting words already crowding her mouth.
She wanted to make him see the utter despair of his position
and, even as she opened her mouth, she understood the petty
hand that gripped her. Here was a creature lowlier than she,
without even the meagre freedoms of a thrall. Here finally was
someone she could hurt without fear of reprisal.
She stopped the words, killed them in her throat and disowned them, and instead the two of them just stared at each
other for a long while.
‘What issh your name, child?’ came his soft, mumbling voice.
‘Maniye.’ She said it without thinking. A moment later – a
moment too late – she was wide-eyed with wondering whether
he could work some magic on her, simply by knowing her name.
Filthy and wretched as he was, surely he still had a curse or two
to spare for a foolish girl who did not keep her name close.
‘I am Hessprec-Esh . . .’ He made a determined effort, ‘Hesprec Essen Skese.’
It was a great deal of name for this dried-up stick of a man.
‘Are you really a priest?’
Again that guarded nod.
‘When they kill you, will you curse Kalameshli Takes Iron –
our priest? Will you curse my f– the chief?’
His eyes were fixed on her, and she realized that she had not
seen him blink once since she came down to join him.
‘Your father, Tiger girl?’
Abruptly she was frightened of him again – even dying in the
Wolf’s jaws he might betray her, after all. She wondered briefly
if she had the courage to kill him here and now, whether as wolf
or as tiger, but knew that she did not.
‘Why did you come here?’ she demanded.
And he laughed. It was a sound as weak and pitiful as he was,
but his narrow shoulders shook with it. ‘Ssh-eeking the wishdom
of the north, to sh
ss
-peak with your prieshts.’
‘Then you’re a fool.’
‘I cannot deny it.’ He sighed. ‘How many yearsh have I ssheen, and yet I am a fool.’ He spat again. ‘When will it be?’
‘The day after tomorrow is the Testing,’ she told him, and the
thought sent dread coasting past her like the north wind. ‘The
day after, there will be a feast, and you will die. Aren’t you going
to ask me to free you?’ The words came out without her ever
forming them in her mind. Once spoken, she clamped her hands
to her mouth, but too late now to call them back.
He regarded her coolly, then shifted his body sinuously, tucking his knees even higher, holding as much warmth as he could
to himself. ‘Why would you do that?’ Not bitter but a question
posed with genuine interest, and it sank its hooks into her. She
found herself thinking of reasons immediately, each one more
appealing than the last.
Is he doing this to me? Am I doing this to myself?
Abruptly she
had used up her stock of daring. Being in this forbidden place,
with this terrible, tragic old man, was more than she could bear.
She Stepped back to the tiger and raked her way up the side of
the pit, hoping that nobody would examine it too closely on the
morrow and see where her claws had been. At the lip she
paused, hunched low and looking for the watchmen, but by now
they were both asleep. They did not fear that the old man would
escape, and nobody had even thought about some wilful girl
deciding to go down
into
the pit.
She Stepped again into her wolf, her smallest shape, and
padded swiftly back towards the foot of the chief’s mound.

She thought of him often during the next day, as she stayed out
of the way of everyone.
Hesprec Essen Skese
: that awkward foreign name had lodged indelibly in her mind. She decided she
would creep out to speak with him again that night. After all, it
was not as though she would have many more chances.

By that evening, though, the Testing had grown to encompass
her entire horizon. She could think of nothing else. All day, Kalameshli had been giving her his cold looks, as if to say,
Just you
wait . . .
And Broken Axe had been seated just a few places from
her, a guest at the chief’s fire as he always was. He went wherever he willed but, whenever he came home to the Winter
Runners, there was no more popular man than Broken Axe. It
was a popularity born of fear, she knew. Oh, they hardly feared
him like she did, but there was fear there nonetheless. Here was
a Wolf who needed no pack: a taboo-breaker, a lone-walker. A
gift of food and shelter might buy him for a little while, but here
was a man who might be capable of anything, severed as he was
from the ties of hearth and family.

And his eyes had strayed to her more than once, as he ate. He
had eyes like nobody else, did Broken Axe: pale blue like spring
ice set in the gaunt brown leather of his face.

She did not dare sneak away from her lair to seek out the
doomed Snake that night. She had the unshakeable thought that
she would find Broken Axe out there, waiting for her.

What does he want with me?
There were a dozen possibilities,
none of them pleasant.
And the next morning they were preparing the ground for
the Testing, and all the mad energy that had infused her peers
over the last month was abruptly gone. She stepped out into the
chill morning, and saw them standing about as though someone
had died. They were afraid. This was the day their lives had been
leading to, and they all of them feared now.
Theirs was a different character of fear to her own. They
feared bruises and welts, and the humiliation of making mistakes
before the whole tribe. None of them was going to be singled
out by Kalameshli Takes Iron, after all. None of them ran the
risk of ending the day without family and tribe, cast out from
the Wolf and destined to burn in his jaws. She remembered now
the perverse glee that had gripped her as she described the old
man’s fate to him. Somehow she had overlooked that it might
also be hers.
Up on the temple mound, before the forge where Kalameshli
laboured, lay the training ground. Usually it was a place of
young hunters and warriors running, wrestling, casting spears
and Stepping. Now the whole tribe thronged around its edges,
down to the meanest Boar or Deer thrall, and a course had been
laid out with painstaking care for the boys and girls who would
end this day as men and women of the Wolf.
Each year it was different, this course, but the intent was the
same. The youngsters would be harried from one end to the
other, and to make a swift progress past all the obstacles they
must Step from child to wolf and wolf to child, until at last their
final transformation would be into an adult.There were stretches
of open ground where a wolf might break away from its tormentors, and there were obstacles that a swift youth might vault
over. There were logs to balance along and narrow holes to dive
through.
The crowd was already in high spirits. For the young triallists
this might be a day that would stand by them for the rest of their
lives, for good or ill, but for everyone else it was sheer entertainment. All the adult Wolves – the old especially – were hoping for
a good crop of embarrassments to laugh at and retell later. The
lucky few that Kalameshli had chosen were already standing by
with rocks and rotten yams and sticks, quite ready to make the
triallists’ lives an utter misery for the handful of minutes in
which they were being Tested.
Maniye had been trying to retreat into the crowd without
thinking about it, pulling her usual trick of being overlooked.
Without warning, her father was at her elbow, one hand gripping her shoulder painfully.
‘Go,’ he told her flatly, giving her a shove towards where the
others were already gathering at the head of the course.
She cast what she hoped was a fierce glance back towards
him. It had no discernible effect.
There were over a score of others to take the Test today, every
youth of Maniye’s age in the whole of the Winter Runners. Seventeen she knew by name but the rest had gathered from
everywhere under the Runners’ Shadow. They stood, all of them
naked except for a loincloth, backs braced against the punishment they knew was coming.
Now Kalameshli was striding forwards, the thick staff in one
hand ridged with the blades of flints that the wood had grown
around before it was cut. The myriad bones stitched to his robe
– animal and human – clattered and chattered.
He singled out one of the hopefuls wordlessly, a boy whose
name Maniye recalled. There were some calls of encouragement, rather more jeers and mockery. That was the way, part of
the ordeal.
Kalameshli barked out permission, and the youth was off,
springing instantly onto all fours but stumbling a little, having to
compose himself before he could master the transformation.
Already the handful of beaters were throwing missiles: Maniye
heard a wolf’s yelp as the boy’s hindquarters were struck by a
stone. He flinched back as he reached the felled trees, knowing
he should Step to two feet to clamber across it, yet fearful of
being struck.
The beaters were already moving in behind, though, with
staves and rods. Any contender who hesitated too long would
soon regret it. When Maniye was ten, she had seen one boy
frozen with fear – of pain, or of failure – until they reached him,
hailing blows upon him until they drove him forwards, meeting
every obstacle unprepared. He had been bruised and bloodied
by the end, barely standing, unable to meet the glowers of his
people.
He was a hunter now, though. He had survived, and grown
stronger.
She watched the youth Kalameshli had chosen, knowing that
he was at a disadvantage, the first to discover the course and its
ways. Then he was struck full on by a rotten yam, and he would
be dubbed ‘yam-head’ for at least a month after, his shame written in the tribe’s collective memory, a joke that might hound
him all the way to old age unless he accomplished something
remarkable to wipe it out.
Then he was through, having run and crouched, jumped and
balanced his way to the far end. Now his parents and uncles and
aunts went to him, showering him with congratulations, welcoming him to the world of adults, giving him gifts.
There will be no one there for me
, Maniye reflected, but even to
think that far presupposed that she would survive the course.
The others were picked out at Kalameshli’s discretion, and
Maniye was not remotely surprised to find herself being left till
last. All she could do was watch the others, learning what she
could from their mistakes. Some of them were slow, some too
timid, others reckless. They fell, they were struck, they tripped,
they rebounded off the obstacles. One girl was hit with a stone
so hard it shocked her out of her wolf shape, leaving her kneeling on the ground, clutching at her bloodied scalp and wailing,
and yet she got back on her feet and went on, because to let the
beaters catch up with her would be worse. One boy forgot himself so much he left his loincloth behind as he Stepped, arriving
at the far end completely naked, for a moment horribly abashed,
but then – realizing that he had passed the important test –
strutting and whooping with his adolescent manhood dangling
and dancing between his legs.
Then they had all gone, all of them except Maniye.
She watched the last of the pack, a girl she didn’t like, haring
off, Stepping from human to wolf with the confidence of those
who have seen the game played out plenty of times before. Even
the beaters seemed content to let these last go with only a desultory barrage. Everyone was waiting for what came next.
Everyone was waiting for
her
.
She fixed Kalameshli with a stony gaze which he met readily
enough. From his expression, he might be looking at his worst
enemy.
He shouted out an order, and something was brought out
from behind the temple. His three acolytes, brawny young men
all, were sweating and straining to manhandle it, and the crowd
eddied aside to let them through.
It was a wall, she saw. A wall of logs lashed together, rising ten
feet straight up, and the acolytes dragged it to the middle of the
course, securing it by ropes to the other obstacles. The crowd
surged forward on either side until it formed a completely
impenetrable barrier that divided one half of the training
grounds from the other.
The assembled tribe had gone very silent. No beaters had
come forth for her, but every one of them fixed her with their
eyes. She saw plenty of dislike there – those that felt she somehow wallowed in unearned privilege, and who were sufficiently
mistaken to envy her relationship with the chief. They saw this
as yet more special treatment, some sign that she was being
accorded a special status.
How about tomorrow’s sacrifice? Is that status special enough?
Kalameshli gestured imperiously, jabbing his staff at the
course, and she walked over with deliberate, mulish slowness.
Remember
, his eyes seemed to say.
She clenched her hands into fists. She had no wish to come
so close to him, but no choice either. She could smell him distinctly, even with her human nose: smoke and sweat and hot
iron.
He held out his flint-ridged staff and one of his acolytes took
it from him, handing him instead a razor-edged switch three feet
long. She saw the sunlight glint off it, and knew that there would
be stones bound into the last few inches.
‘I will be right behind you,’ he said softly. ‘Now, run.’
She was not going to give him the satisfaction, until he
cracked the switch, the flexible greenwood making a sound like
branches snapping. The fright of it had her Stepping to wolf
without thinking, because the wolf was the fastest, and abruptly
she was running from him, retreating back ten feet and leaping
up the first low barrier before she dared to turn and look.
With no great hurry, Kalameshli was walking after her. His
steps were slow, and yet every one of them seemed to eat up the
ground between them. The stone-toothed branch twitched at his
side. There was no expression whatsoever on his face.
She turned and ran, coursing swiftly, in her wolf shape,
across the clear ground and putting distance between them.
Then there was an earthen barrier to scramble up – human
hands better than animal paws for that – and the tree to balance
over, but she did it without thinking, without a moment’s hesitation, and all the while Kalameshli was following patiently and
without hurry.
Then the wall was before her, seeming twice as high now as
when the acolytes had brought it in. The crowd thronged at
either edge, watching her eagerly.
She backed off, casting a look over her shoulder. Kalameshli
was just reaching the tree.
The wolf could never make it, she knew, but it could still
jump surprisingly high. She took a few more steps back and
then dashed forwards on all four feet, leaping up and then Stepping even as she hit the wall, scrabbling for purchase, feet
kicking, fingers clutching at the slick trunks.
She fell back heavily, Stepping to wolf before she hit the
ground and twisting to get her paws under her.
Kalameshli was close now. Impossible, surely, with all the lead
she had won herself, but there he was. Seeing he had her attention, he cracked the switch again, making that broken sound.
She faced the wall, feeling her heart speed. She tried scrabbling at it as a wolf, getting nowhere. She Stepped to human,
Stepped back, dashing to either side, hurled back by the animosity of the crowd.
And within her, the tiger was awake and demanding its hour.
She would be up and over the wall in seconds with its claws. It
knew no walls or bounds. It was proud and fierce. It wanted to
show them all just how fierce it was.
Again the switch lashed, and this time she felt the breeze of it,
whirling round and backing away from Kalameshli’s steady progress, her tail between her legs, snarling at him in terrified
defiance. His expression was disapproving but not really disappointed. After all, surely this was what he had planned. Perhaps
he had nurtured the thought of this moment for years, knowing
that a time would come when not even her father’s name would
shield her from his hatred.
She had no idea why he loathed her so, only that he always
had. Something in him had looked on her, at the moment of her
birth, and judged her unfit, as if their spirits had been enemies
in past lives, human or animal or both.
Her back, her human back, was against the wall, and the
voice of the tiger was loud in her ears, demanding to be released
from the prison of her flesh. Before her stood only Kalameshli.
His face twisted in a nameless expression she had never seen
before, on his face or any other’s, and he struck out at her.
She screamed and flinched aside, and the switch scarred the
wood beside her head.
That could have been my face. That could
have been me.
He drew back his arm again. Everyone there, the entire tribe,
was silent, almost reverent, watching their priest at his work,
driving weakness from the Wolf.
She found that she could do nothing. She would have
Stepped to tiger then, if she could, because she was beyond any
thought of her future in the tribe, but fear of Kalameshli had
frozen her in a strangling grip against the wall.
Then he lashed out again and the flint-barbed head of his
whip tore into her arm and shoulder, splashing blood across the
wood behind her, and he was already preparing for another blow.
She let out a sound that was girl and wolf and tiger all at
once, all in pain, and was up the wall, finding purchase from
nothing, scrabbling and kicking with her breath coming in shuddering sobs. At her heels, the switch descended again, striking
splinters just below her heels.
And she was at the wall’s summit, crouching there and staring down at him, and for a moment she had no idea
what
shape
she was in, or where her Stepping might have taken her.
But those eyes with which she now glared down at Kalameshli, they saw the world in human colours, and what held her
to the wall were her human fingers and toes, crooked into every
little crevice and crack she could find, bleeding from the rough
wood, her nails ragged and broken.
And Kalameshli looked up at her, and where she expected to
find bitterness was instead a kind of triumph, for she had mastered the personal Testing he had set her, and somehow the tiger
remained caged. He had made her his creature, a thing of the
Wolf only.
She slipped down over the far side of the wall, feeling numb.
The rest of the course, she walked. Nobody threw anything at
her. Kalameshli did not follow any further. His point was made,
and he was satisfied.
At the course’s end, nobody was there to greet her and exult
with her, but she had expected that. By then her shoulder was
agony, and she went to make a poultice to bind over it that
would dull the pain. It would be grim work, one-handed, but
nobody would do it for her, nor would she trust them to.
Later, when the tribe had begun the raucous celebrations that
came after the Testing, Smiles Without Teeth came for her, and
told her that her father demanded her presence.