Path of the Tiger

ponderous weight of steel, and moved as if the links were of constructed of a far lighter material.
‘Gentlemen!’ Higgins barked in English, the lingua franca of this diverse group of men. ‘We make camp here for the night. I will remind you that you are all to be on your best behaviour; treat the natives, their homes, their reindeer and other belongings with respect, and for God’s sake do not harass their women! I mean that; I’ll see any man who disobeys these orders flogged within an inch of his life! It is of the utmost importance that we win the trust of these people, that they may decide to provide us with a guide who will lead us through the great wilderness ahead. We’ve come this far, and I’ll not have anyone jeopardising our chance to make this mission a success. Is that understood?’
‘Aye sir!’ the soldiers all roared in unison.
‘Good, good,’ Higgins commented, nodding with approval. ‘Go on lads, set up your tents, then.’
Ao Maliya squatted between two of the Ewenki’s bark-covered tepees, keenly observing the outsiders as they erected their compact canvas tents in the spaces between the tall spruce, fir and pine trees of the endless taiga, while the band’s herd of domesticated reindeer grazed around them without any apparent interest in the newcomers. The young hunter had heard what the outsiders’ interpreter had told the medicine woman, and he thought her a fool to turn down such a generous offer. Granted, ancient tradition mandated that it was forbidden for outsiders to enter the land of the Old Gods … but the world was changing, and the old ways were dying. Ao’s band were one of the very last groups of Ewenki in whose collective memory and oral lore the Old Gods and Goddesses still drew breath, and most of what his distant ancestors had once known about these beings had been forgotten anyway; Ao, certainly, knew very little about them, save for the fact that they were said to walk the wilds in the living skins of beasts, although they could readily shed these and assume the forms of men and women if they so wished. In addition, they were thought to be immortal, and to possess immense powers, with which the strongest of them could flatten forests or crush mountains to dust. But the foreign missionaries, who had come even to these most remote Ewenki outposts, either from the west to preach of the lone Christian God, or from the south, to tell them of the godless wisdom of Buddhism, had all dismissed the Ewenkis’ belief in the Old Gods and Goddesses of the wilds as primitive superstition, and had urged them to abandon this supposedly misplaced faith.
The outsiders interested Ao as much as their weapons did. It was not as if he had been confined to this particular forest camp his entire life; indeed, by the very nature of his people’s existence – trekking across the taiga with their reindeer and setting up temporary camps according to the seasons – he had travelled hundreds, if not thousands of miles over the course of his twenty-three years. However, none of these journeys had ever taken him close to civilisation, and the only other people he had met along the way had all been of other Ewenki clans.
With his keen eyes – dark slits in shallow sockets set wide apart on his flat, tawny-skinned face – he studied the nearby soldiers. They were powerfully-built and hard-faced, all of them, with some standing a full head taller than himself – and Ao was considered tall for an Ewenki. The sharply-cut grey greatcoats and brilliantly glossy black boots that constituted their uniforms looked so starkly different from the furs and skins in which he and his people dressed themselves, and he could not deny that he found the bold and almost aggressive cut of these clothes quite attractive. In addition, the variety in terms of the outsiders’ physical features was astonishing to him; never before had he seen people like these. Their skin tones ranged from alabaster pale to near jet black, and their hair and beards seemed to come just as broad a variety of hues and textures, in contrast to the simple straight black hair of his people. The foreigners were at once exotic, intriguing, fascinating … and a little frightening. There was a flinty, menacing hardness in the men’s eyes, which seemed a uniform characteristic among them, whether their irises were green, blue, grey, brown or black – a hardness that Ao both feared and envied.
Of particular interest to him was the prisoner in the black robe, draped with massive chains. Not a single sliver of the person’s skin was visible anywhere; their hands were gloved, their feet clad in the same polished boots the soldiers wore, and from what he could make out of the shadow-shrouded face inside the hood, only their eyes were partially visible, glinting briefly in the light as the prisoner turned to face him. From the size of the person’s hands and feet, and the fact that they seemed a little smaller in build than the soldiers, Ao guessed that he was looking at a woman rather than a man. He only caught a fleeting glimpse of her eyes in the shadows of her hood, but in that flicker of a second a strange sensation coursed through his veins, and an eerie chill slithered down the length of his spine. There was something very unsettling about the prisoner, and Ao wasn’t entirely sure that he actually did want to discover anything more about who – or what – she was.
He stared for some time at their baggage too. There were the usual barrels, sacks and crates packed with supplies, which they had pulled into the camp on sleds, but what caught his eye were two small wicker cages among the baggage, each of which contained a homing pigeon: one white, one black. While staring at the birds, an eerie