4

Leading Maniye’s warband south from Where the Fords Meet, Asmander’s head was filled with problems. No use telling himself not to think of them: they crowded so closely within his skull there was no escaping them. He could only envy Maniye. Would she trade her brutal upbringing and the hateful old Wolf priest for the maze Asmander had to navigate? It would be a poor exchange for her, he reckoned.

As they followed the Horse’s trail towards his home, Plainsmen came to stare: hunters of the Lion or gatherers of the Boar. They saw Maniye and they saw Asmander – two Champions of different tribes – and swiftly melted away. Whatever trouble was afoot was none of theirs.

To be a Champion was to host more souls than most, and take more forms. Asmander’s fighting shape was the one they called the Running Lizard: the savage, bipedal reptile with crescent claws that flinched from neither hunt nor fight. The priest Hesprec had gifted him another: a leather-winged creature with a stabbing beak that struck terror into those who saw it, and was always nagging him to let it into the sky.

But now he felt the need for his first shape, the shape of his people. For now he wanted to leave his humanity behind. The world of his people was built of a million complexities: loyalties and obligations, family, friends, honour, all pulling different ways. When he reached the river his homeland was built around, he wanted just to become Old Crocodile and slough into the waters of the Tsotec, where he could know only hunger and calm.

When Asmander had left for the north, Tecuman and his sister had been at odds, both determined that they must be the Kasra. Normally it would be for the Serpent to decide, but the priests were split too. Such a rift, with no clear solution, spelled disaster for the nation. There were a hundred stories of terrible things to come. People had spoken of the Rat cult, the Stranglers and the Pale Shadow – all the terrors from the old stories. If such times were ahead, the Sun River Nation would need the best possible leader. And yet there was no way to choose: as children, Tecumander and Tecuma had come with all the virtues in the world. Asmander had known and loved them both. He understood full well why the priests could not choose between them.

Tecumander and Tecuma were no more, of course. When their father had left them orphaned and adult, they had grown into their new names: Tecuman and Tecumet, twin Kasra of a nation that could have only one.

When Asmander left for the north, Tecumet had held the capital of Atahlan, while Tecuman ruled from Tsokawan, the fortress that commanded the rich lands of the estuary. Between them stretched the whole length of the Tsotec’s head. Enough space, surely, to allow diplomacy to prevail.

Except that all the coils of the Serpent had not sufficed to find a straight path out of this. None of the priesthood wanted war, of course, and yet there were priests who were determined that the boy should inherit, and others equally passionate over the girl’s right. The clan chiefs supporting either side had shaken their spears. Such situations were a breeding ground for fatal misunderstandings, opportunist raids, the rebirth of old feuds. While Asmander had been in the cold north gathering Iron Wolves for Tecuman’s bodyguard, the River Lords had gathered up their soldiers and mustered for war.

Asmander had left the Wolves at Where the Fords Meet and run ahead with Shyri and Venat, to make sure that a warband of barbaric northerners would be welcomed as guests when they came, rather than repulsed as raiders. What he had found was that a great force was already on its way downriver from Atahlan. Asmander’s father, Asman, had expressed frustration that he had not just brought the Wolves straight south – did he not know they were on the brink of war? Well of course Asmander had not known, but there was no use trying excuses with old Asman. His father’s expression of disappointment had been the most familiar sign of home Asmander had seen.

He glanced at Maniye, wondering if he could talk of such things, Champion to Champion, underachieving son to abused daughter. But he was bringing her to his home for the first time, the greatest nation of the world. He wanted her to see it with wide eyes, and not know all the cracks that ran through it. He kept his complaints about his father to himself.

After being dismissed by his father he had gone to find the two who had come south with him, Venat and Shyri.

‘So we go east to the islands,’ Venat had said promptly. ‘I’ve unfinished business there. You should come too. Plenty of fighting. You’d do well there.’

Asmander had just given him a glower.

‘Oh, look at the sulky one!’ Venat’s worst mockery was still easier than that look in old Asman’s eyes. ‘You can’t want to stay here?’

‘This is my place.’ He had wanted to petition Venat for the man’s strength and bloody-handed ruthlessness. He had known better than to ask, though. Venat was a man of the Dragon, and he had been Asmander’s unwilling companion in the north. He had chosen service to the Champion over death, and probably regretted the choice many times over. Now he was free. He had walked this far with Asmander only because it was the road to the islands of his home.

And still Asmander wanted him to stay. Surely there was some argument that might sway the man. But Venat prized only bloodshed and violence, and even those only on his own terms. He was a soldier for no man.

‘The Dragon will have been called,’ Asmander had cautioned him. ‘You are still subjects of the Kasra, even if you are the worst and most unruly.’

The quick rejoinder had not come, instead just a long breath as Venat considered. ‘There is nothing here that can command the Dragon,’ had been his eventual response. ‘If we come, it will be to pick over the bones. Ask her,’ nodding at their other fellow traveller.

Shyri was a Plains woman, copper-skinned and swift and just as vicious as Venat when the mood took her. She was of the Laughing Men, carrion eaters whose creed was that they would one day rule the world over a mountain of corpses. Or so she said. She also spent much time mocking Asmander.

‘What about you, Laughing Girl?’ Venat had asked her. ‘You’ll come bait the Dragon with me? I have wives to claim.’

‘If there is a woman so blind and mad as to want you, old man, I have no wish to meet her. I like this river place.’ Seeing Asmander’s expression, she smiled sweetly at him. ‘I want to see what your father makes of the Iron Wolves and their Champion girl. I want to see him swallow his tongue with anger.’

‘My father will be pleased his son has accomplished the task that was set him,’ Asmander had told her, but deep inside he thought she probably had the right of it. Now he looked at the warband that was trailing him – the grey-pelts, the Wolf-iron, the savage customs.

‘I hope my father does swallow his tongue,’ he told the world at large, despite the looks it earned him. The sentiment made him feel better than he had in a long time.

***

Kalameshli Takes Iron was in one of his moods where nothing was good enough for him. He was in such a mood more often than not. When they had been guests of the Horse, he had complained about that. He had looked about their settlement – larger than any Wolf village and the centre of a network of travellers who journeyed to every land there was – and found nothing but fault. Where the Horse were simpler than the Wolf he called them primitive; where they were more complex he used the word decadent.

Maniye had realized that she did not have to listen to him. She had just got up and walked away. All her life Kalameshli had been a figure of fear, the Wolf’s great priest, the master of iron. He had taken on another unwelcome mantle when she had discovered that it was his old loins, and not Akrit Stone River’s, that had fathered her. All of this authority he had tried to put into his voice, to browbeat her into acknowledging the supremacy of the Wolf – himself. That was why she had walked away. At first he had ordered her, then he had urged her, and at last he had come begging after her, and that had shown her exactly how things stood between them.

‘Who will advise you?’ he had almost spat. ‘That little River girl?’ meaning Hesprec.

‘Always.’ She had watched the anger flare on his lined face, watched it surge back and forth because it had nowhere to go. It could not leap over to her any more.

‘I made a mistake,’ Maniye said to Hesprec the night after. Most of her own people were sleeping, save for Tiamesh on watch. Maniye and the Serpent girl huddled close to the fire, for the great open stretches of the Plains robbed the world of heat soon after the sun went down.

Hesprec waited, the firelight dancing in her eyes.

‘I should not have brought Takes Iron with us.’ Maniye rubbed her face, feeling her souls shift and twitch inside her, wanting to sleep and yet unable.

‘Why did you?’ The expression on the dark girl’s face suggested that she was well aware of the answer, but wanted Maniye to speak it herself. The Serpent was many things, but direct was not one of them.

‘If I left him behind . . . he would have spoken against me to the Wolf.’ There was nothing in Maniye’s intonation to indicate whether she meant the tribe or the god.

‘And they would listen?’

She shrugged. ‘And my mother would have killed him.’ The words came from her unbidden, unexpected. Hesprec was still watching her, bobbing her head slightly in encouragement.

‘I should have let her kill him,’ Maniye hissed in a small, fierce voice. ‘I shouldn’t have protected him.’

‘For you, she stayed her hand.’ Hesprec said softly.

Maniye gave a little broken laugh. ‘What a show of a mother’s love!’ She clamped her lips together, fearful of waking the others.

Hesprec sighed. When it was plain that Maniye had no more words, she said: ‘Do you know how the Serpent lost his legs?’

‘I . . .’ With the Serpent, nothing was unconnected, but Maniye could not see the link. ‘What legs?’

‘There is a story: once, the Serpent had four legs, like the other beasts. The story can be very long and laden with detail, but I will speak it briefly for you. In those days, the people of these lands had nothing, and knew nothing, and lived like their mute siblings in the forests and on the plains. But Serpent found a crack in the earth, and twisted and twisted until he came to a great place of secrets, for all secrets worth knowing are buried deep. There Serpent met four great spirits, each more terrifying and ill-favoured than the last, but each guarding a trove of secrets that would bring ease and ambition to those who lived in the world above.’

Maniye nodded, still trying to find a path from the story to her own difficulties.

‘Each of these spirits offered to teach Serpent its secrets,’ Hesprec explained, ‘but there would be a price. Each would tear a limb from Serpent’s body in return.’

‘So Serpent is wise because it traded its limbs for the spirits’ secrets,’ Maniye concluded.

‘Would that it were so simple. Serpent did not know whether any of them could be trusted at all, but he agreed to the trade anyway. And three of the spirits were wicked. They tore away Serpent’s limbs and gnawed on the bones, and guarded their secrets still. Only one kept its word. All the wisdom of the Serpent is just one part in four of what still waits to be discovered.’

Maniye frowned, having lost her train of thought. ‘But then . . . but what . . . I don’t understand,’ she admitted.

‘Sometimes good things arise out of bad. All we have of wisdom was born in treachery and betrayal, pain and loss. Is that fourth part of the secrets of the earth something to cast aside because it was bought at such cost? No.’ Hesprec put a hand on her arm. ‘You came into this world from terrible deeds – Stone River and Takes Iron’s deeds. But that is what made you. Like Serpent, you can still come from that dark place with something of value.’ Her teeth gleamed in the firelight as she smiled. ‘So why did you save Takes Iron?’

‘Because . . . because I had thought he hated me all those years, and he didn’t. He just wasn’t good at showing it.’

‘Perhaps he still isn’t.’ Hesprec cocked her head to one side, birdlike. ‘These things are known: give to a comrade a comrade’s honour; to a parent, a child’s obedience. Or that is what they say on the River. You owed him a comrade’s debt, and paid it. I do not think you owe him more.’

Soon after, they came to Chumatla, which was a village atop a lake. On the other side of the open water was a busy riot of trees and foliage cut through with a hundred silver streams, extending as far as they could see to the south and the east. This was the estuary. Here the River Tsotec, backbone of the Sun River Nation, broke apart into a shifting skein of channels as it fought its way to the sea. Whole peoples lived within its bounds, nominally ruled by the Sun River Nation from its fortress at Tsokawan. Here, at Chumatla, they came north to trade with the Horse and with each other.

Maniye and her warband stepped out over the water with trepidation. The homes of the lake dwellers seemed fragile and temporary. Maniye took to her tiger shape, and the rest became wolves: nobody wanted to end up in the water wearing a hauberk of iron or bronze.

There were plenty of Asmander’s kin amongst the lake people, dark lean men and women with closed faces. They watched the newcomers narrowly, or else sloughed off the rafts and walkways into the water, Stepping to long, scaled shapes to vanish into the lake. She spotted a couple of heavy-set men with sand-coloured skin and blue-grey hair and knew them for people of the Dragon, just as Asmander’s friend had been. Beyond these, there were plenty of others who were dark as the River Lords but who belonged to no tribe she knew: small people; broad and paunchy people; men and women whose skin gleamed with vivid painted patterns. These were the people of the estuary forests, she guessed – those who lived within the Shadow of the Sun River Nation.

Asmander had been quiet all the journey, keeping himself apart and speaking to none but Hesprec, but now he hissed and was pouring out over the raft’s side into the water, human to Old Crocodile in an eyeblink. For a moment the Wolves formed a defensive ring, waiting for the attack, but then the same reptile surfaced ahead of them, powering out of the water to land on two human feet before a copper-skinned Plains woman of Maniye’s acquaintance.

Shyri stepped back, making a great show of wringing out her clothing from the splash. Asmander was questioning her urgently, and after a little more clowning the Laughing Men huntress was giving him some report. Impatiently he turned to beckon Maniye and her company over.

Picking their way from raft to raft was a far slower way of travelling, but nobody suggested swimming over. The water was criss-crossed with the trail of scaly backs, and the northerners had no way to tell if all of them had a human mind behind those fearsome jaws.

‘We are in time, but we must hurry,’ Asmander explained, when they were with him. ‘Tecumet’s soldiers are camped at the edge of the estuary. Her speakers are at Tecuman’s court, demanding that he kneel to her.’

‘So he needs to show them some extra teeth,’ Maniye divined. ‘Our teeth.’

‘And mine. I can’t be away from him now. He needs me.’ The personal urgency in his voice took her aback.

‘Lead then, we’ll follow. Just find us a dry path.’

He set a brisk pace over the rafts, and the locals were quick to give him room.

Shyri fell into step familiarly with Maniye, leaning close to speak into her ear.

‘Just wait till you meet his father, Northern Girl. He’s even worse than yours.’

***

‘Your sister holds great love for you.’ The thread of cold in the whip-lean woman’s voice belied the words. ‘She wishes for nothing more than that you and she should be friends once more. But she cannot permit this continuing affront to her authority. Know this, Tecuman: every day you refuse to bow before the Daybreak Throne, the laws and traditions that hold the Sun River Nation together are lessened; everything your father built is lessened. Love you as she might, she cannot ignore it.’

Tecuman shifted slightly on his stone seat, but said nothing. The Kasra did not address petitioners directly. That small motion spoke of how young he was. The rest was swallowed up by the Kasra’s regalia. The golden mask that hid his face was counterfeit, made by estuary craftsmen after the old Kasra died, for Tecumet held the original. The robes of green, russet and silver were older, the colours the Kasra wore when he brought his court to Tsokawan. They had been in storage for a generation, and they filled the air with the faint scent of perfume and rot.

‘The Kasra makes the same demands of his rebellious sister, who sits unworthy upon the Daybreak Throne.’ The voice was that of Asman, the boy-Kasra’s chief adviser. ‘If you ask why the workers stir unsettled in the fields, why the fishermen draw up empty nets, why the wise see omens in the flight of birds, you have only to look towards Atahlan. The Kasra values greatly his sister’s regard, but they cannot be reconciled so long as she lays claim to a title and a privilege that is not hers.’

Tecumet’s emissary was a Serpent priestess, Esumit Aras Talien. When Tecuman had been a child in Atahlan, Esumit had been a teacher to the royal children. She was a compact, dark young woman now, but in their youth she had been a strong-framed old man never slow to chastise with voice or hand. He – she, now – must surely have been sent in order to arouse memories of meek obedience behind the gleaming mask.

‘Do not make a fight of this, Tecuman,’ she said now. ‘Your sister will give you all honour if you pledge yourself to her cause, but she has come with more spears than you have in all Tsokawan, more than you can defend yourself from. Do not let this end in blood.’

‘Where shall the wounded point, when they are asked who gifted them their wounds?’ Asman demanded. He was a shorter man than his son Asmander, the Champion, not as lean as he had been, and his hair grey as slate. He had a voice fit for a Kasra, though: it filled the vaulted court of Tsokawan and resounded from the carved walls. Now he strode to look Esumit straight in the eye. ‘Who shall the spirits of the dead curse, before the river draws them down? She who brought the battle, not he who defends his own. And when you count soldiers, you forget that the estuary holds a hundred thousand you cannot see.’

The powerfully built woman at Esumit’s shoulder tensed, staring at Asman, who blithely ignored her. Tecumet had sent one of her own Champions to add weight to her arguments, and she was plainly itching for a fight.

Esumit herself was unimpressed. She directed her own words at the golden mask. ‘How many have come at your call, Tecuman? How many of the Hidden Ones or the Mud Feet or the Salt Eaters? Do the Dragon serve you still, or do they just make free with all those you can neither control nor protect?’ Real sincerity was in her voice. ‘I beg you, go and prostrate yourself before her, seek her forgiveness and it will be given.’

‘The Kasra—’ started Asman, but Esumit cut him off sharply.

‘I have looked into the secret depths of the earth! I have asked the Serpent whose back is strongest, to carry the burdens of state. I have asked whose hand is the steadiest, to guide this nation through the dangers that we all see approaching. It has always been Tecumet. There is no shame in—’

Asman was itching to interrupt, but instead a new voice broke out, strung taut with emotion: Tecuman’s.

‘And all my life I have known it was me!’ he shouted, standing now with his fists clenched. ‘The priests of the estuary told me it was I who must be Kasra. How can they be wrong and you be right? Why does the Serpent have two heads?’

In formal court the Kasra did not speak, but Tecuman was pushed past the point of endurance. As if his breach of protocol signalled the end of all laws, Tecumet’s Champion pushed past Esumit, almost shouldering Asman in the chest to stand before the boy-Kasra.

She was called Izel: low-born and nobody’s idea of a beauty. She would never have come near any Kasra’s court save that the Champion had come to her, just as it had come to Asmander.

‘The words that were given you are just wind,’ she called out, and when Esumit plucked at her shoulder, she shrugged the Serpent off. ‘You are nothing but what your sister names you. She names you brother for now. Do not make her name you something more.’

Tecuman had dropped back into his seat, trying to gather his dignity about him. His shoulders twitched when Izel glowered at him, as though he was trying to dig his way through the back of the throne.

‘You forget your place,’ Asman intoned, but the woman was having none of it.

‘My place is here, doing what must be done for the nation. Where is your Champion, Kasra of the rivermouth? Is he gone to ride the Horse, like they say? Is he dead in the cold north?’ And she took another step, and everyone there saw she was mad enough to do it: to attack Tecuman in his own court and shatter a century of careful etiquette because she saw a chance to cut all this short.

But then there were footsteps beyond the room, echoing through the halls of Tsokawan; the click of claws and the scrape of metal.

Shyri was their herald: a high-shouldered beast slinking in with a flash of spotted hide and the hideous cackle of the Laughing Men. Behind her was Asmander, stalking in his Champion’s shape, and with him many foreigners, a whole warband of them. Some were lean grey beasts and others walked on two legs, clad in coats of leather and dull metal. These were the Iron Wolves, and at their head was a small girl – so small, so young, and yet none looked on her without knowing that she was just as much a Champion as Asmander or Izel.

Asman alone showed no surprise. ‘Here is a sign you should take back to Tecumet the pretender,’ he announced. ‘Go tell her who has come at her brother’s call. Go tell of the strength that the rightful Kasra can command.’

It seemed that Izel would not step down, for a moment. Her face flashed hatred for Tecuman, and most especially for the newly arrived Asmander. The Champion looked so large in her human face it seemed impossible she could hold to her shape – she must explode in a flurry of killing claws at any moment. But Esumit’s hand on her shoulder leached the fury from her, heartbeat by heartbeat, and the Serpent priestess bowed pleasantly to the masked boy on the throne, and to old Asman himself. When she departed she appeared not at all daunted by Tecuman’s new allies.