Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  And the Fireheads said they were sorry. But in their hearts they were not.

  When it rained, Longtusk took the Fireheads to the east, where Dreamer lived.

  Now Dreamer was a little like the Fireheads, but she was placid and kind and accepting, and she had lived for many years in caves hollowed out of the rock of a hillside. And, of course, the caves kept the rain from her head.

  And Longtusk said to the Fireheads, "You need a cave like Dreamer's to fend off the rain. See how warm and comfortable she is? There are many caves in this hillside, and you may take them for your own shelter. Isn't that right, Dreamer?"

  And Dreamer replied, "Yes, Longtusk" — for all the creatures of the world knew Longtusk — "the caves will be all your friends need, and they may have them."

  And the Fireheads muttered and calculated, for that is their way.

  And when Longtusk's back was turned, they attacked poor Dreamer, and robbed her of her fine cave, and threw her out into the rain.

  When he found out what had happened, Longtusk berated the Fireheads for their greed and impatience. "You could have taken all you needed without stealing Dreamer's home!"

  And the Fireheads said they were sorry. But in their hearts they were not.

  Then the Fireheads became thirsty.

  So Longtusk took them to the north, where the mammoths lived.

  He brought them to a place where the mammoths, in their wisdom, knew that water seeped from deep in the ground. They were digging there with tusks and feet, bringing the water to the surface.

  And Longtusk said to the Fireheads, "You must dig for water as the mammoths do. See how much water there is? And when you have learned what the mammoths have to teach you, you can find water of your own. Isn't that right, Matriarch?"

  And the Matriarch of the mammoth Family said, "Yes, Longtusk" — for all the mammoths knew Longtusk — "in the ground there is all the water your friends need, and we will teach them how to find it."

  And the Fireheads muttered and calculated, for that is their way.

  And when Longtusk's back was turned, they attacked the poor mammoths, and drove them away, and robbed them of their water.

  When he found out what had happened, Longtusk berated the Fireheads. "You could have found your own water without robbing the mammoths — oh, you are impossible!"

  And the Fireheads said they were sorry. But in their hearts they were not.

  By now Longtusk knew that all his teaching was wasted on such creatures. He had decided besides that he had spent enough time away from his Clan.

  So he turned his back on the Fireheads and walked away, leaving them to fend for themselves. They called to him plaintively, begging him to return, but he would not.

  And so Longtusk returned to the mammoths, and became their Patriarch, and...

  But that's another story. Perhaps the greatest of them all.

  What happened to the Fireheads without Longtusk's wisdom, driven only by their own foolishness, cold and wet and thirsty? Nobody knows.

  Some say they quickly died out.

  And some say they became monsters.

  1

  The Bone Pit

  ALL AROUND LONGTUSK, sleeping mastodonts lay like immense boulders. In the summer they preferred to sleep on their backs, exposing their bare feet and bellies to the cool air. From time to time one of them, startled by a noise, would rise smoothly and silently to his feet, like some hairy ghost, before settling back.

  But Longtusk could not sleep — even after the months he had been kept here in the Firehead settlement.

  He could hear small Firehead footsteps as they pattered across the hard ground, their thin Firehead voices as they came and went on their strange, incomprehensible business. Sometimes he even heard the clear voice of the female cub, Crocus, who — in another life that was long ago and far away — he had saved from freezing.

  And, worst of all, he could smell the meat they hung up on frames of wood to dry: rags of brown and purple, laced here and there by pale fat or strings of tendon, some of it even clinging to shards of white bone. Most of the meat came from deer and horse and smaller animals, but there were some larger chunks, great knobbly pieces of bone he couldn't recognize.

  And he could smell the meat that burned, slowly, in the great stone-lined pits in the ground, the billowing greasy black smoke that lingered in the air.

  At least he had put aside the panic he had felt continually when he had first been brought here to the Firehead settlement, as every instinct drove him to flee the smoke from the fires. But he would never grow used to that dreadful meat stink. It seemed to have seeped into his very fur, so that he was never free of it.

  So Longtusk endured, waiting for morning.

  THE KEEPERS CAME in the gray light of dawn. They talked softly and cleared their throats to alert the mastodonts of their approach. The mastodonts stirred, rumbling, and there was a rustle of leathery skin against the hobbles that bound their legs.

  Most of the mastodonts were Bulls — not really a bachelor herd, for the tree-browsing mastodonts were more solitary than mammoths, Longtusk had found. But there were Families here too, Cows and calves.

  The keepers approached their animals, one by one, talking softly. The mastodonts rumbled and whooshed in response, reaching out with their trunks to search the Fireheads' layers of fur for tidbits of food. It was a display of affection and submission that never failed to embarrass Longtusk.

  This morning the fat little keeper the mastodonts called Lemming approached Longtusk, holding out a juicy strip of bark. And, as he always did, Longtusk rumbled threateningly, curled his trunk and backed away as far as the hobbles knotted tightly around his legs would let him.

  Lemming wore trousers and leggings of deer skin, moccasins and a broad hat of a tougher leather, and his clothing was stuffed with dry grass to keep him warm. Bits of grass stuck out around his wide, greasy face as he studied Longtusk, peering into the mammoth's ears and eyes and mouth.

  Jaw Like Rock, his hobbles already loosened, came loping over. With a deft movement he snatched the bark from Lemming's paw and tucked it into his mouth. "Waste of good food," he rumbled as he munched.

  "It comes from the paw of a Firehead," Longtusk said.

  "So what? Food is food."

  "I'm not like you."

  "He wasn't intending you any harm, you know. He was checking your eyes and ears for infection. And he wanted to see your tongue, too." Jaw opened his mouth and unrolled his own tongue, a leathery black sheet of muscle that dripped with saliva. "The keepers know that a healthy mastodont has a nice pink tongue umblemished by black spots, brown eyes without a trace of white, the right number of toenails, strong and sturdy joints, a full face and broad forehead... You have all of that; if you were a mastodont you'd be a prize."

  Longtusk growled, impatient with advice.

  "You're the only mammoth we have here, Longtusk. The keepers don't know what to make of you. Some of them think you can't be tamed and trained, that you're too wild. And the Shaman, Smokehat, is jealous of you."

  "Jealous? Why?"

  "Because the Fireheads used to believe that mammoths were gods. Some of them seem to think you're a god. And that takes away from the Shaman's power. Having you around gives even little Lemming a higher status. Don't you understand any of this, grazer?"

  "No," said Longtusk bluntly.

  "All I'm saying is that if you give him an excuse, the Shaman will have you destroyed. Lemming is fond of you. But you're going to have to help him, to give him some sign that you'll cooperate, or else—"

  But now, as if to disprove Jaw's comforting growl, his own keeper approached: Spindle, thin, ugly and brutal. He lashed at Jaw with his stick, apparently punishing the mastodont for his minor theft of the food.

  Jaw didn't so much as flinch.

  "Of course," he rumbled sourly, "not everything's wonderful here. But there are ways to make life bearable."

  And he lifted his fat, scarred trunk and sneezed noi
sily. A gust of looping snot and bark chips sprayed over Spindle, who fell over backward, yelling.

  Jaw Like Rock farted contentedly and loped away.

  THE MASTODONTS WERE PREPARED for another working day. Their hobbles were removed — or merely loosened, in the case of Longtusk and a few others, mastodonts in musth and so prone to irritability. Longtusk was a special case, of course, and he wore his hobbles with a defiant pride. As they worked the keepers were careful to keep away from his tusks, so much more large and powerful than the strongest mastodont's.

  Ten mastodonts, plus Longtusk, were formed up into a loose line. Walks With Thunder was at the head. Lemming sat neatly on the great mastodont's neck, his fat legs sticking out on either side of Thunder's broad head.

  Lemming tapped Thunder's scalp and called out, "Agit!"

  Walks With Thunder loped forward, trumpeting to the others to follow him.

  The mastodonts obeyed. They were prompted by cries from the keepers — Chai ghoom! Chi! Dhuth!, Right! Left! Stop! — and they were directed by gentle taps of the keepers' goads: gentle, yes, but Longtusk had learned by hard experience that the keepers also knew exactly where to strike him to inflict a sharp burst of pain, brief and leaving no scar.

  Half the mastodonts bore riders. Most of the others carried the equipment the working party would need during the day. Those without riders were led by loose harnesses of rope tied around their heads.

  Longtusk, of course, had no rider, and his harness was kept tighter than the rest. Not only that, his trunk was tied to Walks With Thunder's broad tail, so that he was led along the path like an infant with his mother.

  Then they walked slowly out of the Firehead settlement.

  The Fireheads had spread far, reshaping the steppe, and they were still building. They had made themselves shelters — like the caves of the Dreamers — but of wood and rock and turf and animal skin. They built huge pits in the ground into which they hurled meat ripped from the carcasses of the creatures they hunted. And the Fireheads had built a great stockade of wood and rock, within which the mastodonts were confined. To Longtusk it was a place of distortion and strangeness, and he was habitually oppressed, crushed by a feeling of confinement and helplessness and bafflement.

  But for now they were out of the stockade, and with relief Longtusk found himself on the open steppe. As the sun climbed into a cloud-dusted sky, they soon left behind the noise and stink of the settlement, and walked on steadily south.

  The air was misty and full of light. Longtusk saw that it was a mist of life: vast clouds of insects, mosquitoes and blackflies and warble flies and botflies, that rose from the lakes to plague the great herbivores — including himself — and a dreamier cloud of ballooning spiders and wind-borne larvae, riding the breezes to a new land.

  Through this dense air the mastodonts walked steadily, their fat low-slung rumps swaying gracefully, their tails swishing and their trunks shooting out from side to side in search of branches and leaves from the few low trees which grew here. After walking for a time they started to defecate together, a long synchronized symphony of dung-making.

  Much of the land was bare, a desert of gravel and soils and a few far-flung plants. Here and there he noticed thicker tussocks of grass, speckled with wild flowers, fed by the detritus at the entrances to the dens of the Arctic foxes, and on the slight rises where owls and jaegers devoured their prey, watering the soil with blood. Steppe melt-ponds stood out boldly, bright blue against the tan and green of the plain. In the center of the larger ponds Longtusk could see the gleam of aquamarine, cores of ice still unmelted at the height of summer.

  His footsteps crunched on dead leaves, bits of flowers, fragments of twig, a thick layer of it. Some of this material might be years old. And later he came across the carcass of a wolf-killed deer. It had been lightly consumed, and now its meat had hardened, its skin turned glassy. He knew it might lie here for three or four years before being reduced to bones.

  On the steppe, away from the Fireheads' frantic rhythms, time pooled, dense and slow; even decomposition worked slowly here.

  He came across a golden plover, sitting on her nest on the ground. She stared back at him, defiant. The birds of the steppe had to build their nests on the ground, as there were no tall trees. Some of them — like buntings and longspurs — even lined their nests with bits of mammoth wool. This plover's nest was made of woven grass, and it contained pale, darkly speckled eggs. As the mastodonts walked by, the plover got off its nest and ran back and forth, feigning a broken wing, trying to distract these possible predators from the nest itself.

  Walks With Thunder, as he often did, tried to explain life to Longtusk.

  "...The Fireheads are strange, but there is a logic to everything they do. Almost everything, anyhow. They are predators, like the wolves and foxes. So they must hunt."

  "I know that. Deer and aurochs—"

  "Yes. But such animals pass by this way only infrequently, as they follow their own migrations in search of their fodder for summer or winter. And so the Fireheads must store the meat they will eat during the winter. That is the purpose of the pits — even if all those dead carcasses are repellent to us. And it explains the way they salt their meat and hang it up to dry in strips, or soak it in sour milk, and—"

  "But," Longtusk complained, "why do they not follow the herds they prey on, as the wolves do? All their problems come from this peculiar determination to stay in one place."

  Walks With Thunder growled, "But not every animal is like the mastodont — or the mammoth. We don't mind where we roam; we go where the food is. But many animals prefer a single place to live. Like the rhinos."

  "But these Fireheads have nothing — no fat layers, hardly any hair, no way of keeping warm in the winter or digging out their food."

  "But they have their fire. They have their tools. And," Walks With Thunder said with a trace of sadness, "they have us."

  "Not me," rumbled Longtusk. "They have me trapped. But they don't have me."

  To that, Walks With Thunder would say nothing.

  Longtusk disturbed a carpet of big yellow butterflies that burst into the air, startling him. One of the butterflies landed on the pink tip of his trunk, tickling him. He swished his trunk to and fro, but couldn't shake the butterfly free; finally, the mocking brays of the mastodonts sounding in his ears, he blew it away with a large sneeze.

  THEY CAME TO A RIVER which meandered slowly between gently sloping hummocks. Vegetation grew thickly, down to the water's edge: grass, herbs and a stand of spruce forest almost tall enough to reach Longtusk's shoulders. Farther downstream there were thickets of birch and even azalea, with lingering pink leaves from their spring bloom. In the longer grass wild flowers added splashes of color: vetch, iris, primroses, mauve and blue and purple and yellow.

  The mastodonts were allowed to rest. They spread out, moving through the sparse trees with a rustle of branches, tearing off foliage and shoving it into their mouths greedily. Some of them walked into the water, sucking up trunkfuls of the clear, cold liquid and spraying it over their heads and backs.

  Longtusk was still hobbled. He moved a little away from the rest, seeking the grass and steppe vegetation he preferred.

  He had never been here before. It seemed a congenial place — for mastodonts anyhow. But Longtusk, clad in his thick fur, was already too hot, and mosquitoes buzzed, large and voracious. He looped his trunk into his mouth, extracted a mixture of spit and water, and blew it in a fine spray over his face and head and belly.

  He wondered what the Fireheads wanted from this place. Stone, perhaps. The Fireheads liked big flat slabs of stones to put inside their huts and storage pits — but he could see no rock of that kind here. Perhaps they would bring back wood; the mastodonts were strong enough to knock over and splinter as many trees as required.

  The keepers came to round up the mastodonts, calling softly and tapping their scalps and flanks with their bone-tipped goads. The mastodonts cooperated with only routine
rumbles of complaint.

  All the mastodonts had worked here many times before, and they appeared to know what to do. The most skillful and trusted, led by Walks With Thunder, walked down toward the river. They came to a place where the grass had been worn away by deep round mastodont footprints. They began to scrape at the muddy river bank with their tusks and feet, and clouds of mosquitoes rose up around them as they toiled.

  Longtusk could see that they were uncovering something: objects that gleamed white in the low sun. He wondered what they were.

  ...There was a sudden, sharp stench, a stink of death and decay, making Longtusk flinch. Some of the mastodonts trumpeted and rumbled in protest, but, under the calm, watchful eye of Walks With Thunder, they continued to work. Perhaps something had died here: a bison or rhino, its carcass washed along the river.

  Soon, with the supervision of the keepers, they were dragging the large white objects from the mud. Walks With Thunder dug his tusks under one of the objects and wrapped his trunk over the top; he rammed his feet against the ground and hauled, until the clinging, cold mud gave way with a loud sucking noise, and he stumbled back.

  The thing's shape was complex, full of holes. It was mostly white, but something dark brown clung to it here and there, around which mosquitoes and flies buzzed angrily.

  It might have been a rock.

  Jaw Like Rock stood alongside Longtusk, swishing his tail vigorously. "I can stand the work," the squat Bull muttered. "It's these wretched mosquitoes that drive me to distraction."

  Longtusk asked, "Are those rocks heavy?"

  Jaw turned to look at him quizzically. "What rocks?"

  "The rocks they are pulling out of the river bank."

  Jaw hesitated. He said carefully, "Nobody has told you what we're doing here? Thunder hasn't explained?"

  "No. Aren't they rocks?"

  Jaw fell silent, seeming troubled.

  Longtusk found, at his feet, a patch of what looked like mammoth dung. He poked at it and it crumbled. It was dried out, stale, half frozen, obviously old. Regretfully he lifted a few crumbs to his mouth; their flavor was thin.