Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  She was, he realized, driving him directly toward the pile of bones.

  As he neared the pile an instinctive dread of those grisly remains built up in him. The other Fireheads seemed to sense his tension.

  He kept walking, crossing the muddy, trampled ground, one broad step at a time.

  He reached the great gaping skull where it lay on the ground. There was a lingering smell of dead mammoth about it, and it seemed to glare at him in disapproval.

  Crocus tapped his head. "A dhur! A dhur!" She wanted him to pick it up.

  I can't, he thought.

  He heard a high-pitched growl around him. The hunters were approaching him with spears raised to their shoulders, all pointing at his heart.

  The Shaman watched, eyes glittering like quartz pebbles.

  From out of nowhere, a storm cloud of danger was gathering around Longtusk. He felt himself quiver, and in response Crocus's fingers tightened their grip on his fur.

  Longtusk stared into the vacant eyes of the long-dead mammoth. What, he wondered, would you have me do?

  It was as if a voice sounded deep in his belly. Remember me, it said. That's all. Remember me.

  He understood.

  He touched the vacant skull with his trunk, lifted it, let it fall back to the dirt. Then he turned.

  He faced a wall of Firehead hunters. One of them actually jabbed his chest with a quartz spear tip, hard enough to break the skin. But Longtusk, descending into the slow rhythms of his kind, ignored these fluttering Fireheads, even the spark of pain at his chest.

  He gathered twigs and soil and cast them on the ancient bones, and then turned backward and touched the bones with the sensitive pads of his back feet. Longtusk was trying to Remember the spirit which had once occupied this pale bone, this Bull with no name.

  The Fireheads watched with evident confusion — and the Shaman with rage, at this ceremony so much older and deeper than his own posturing. Farther away, the mastodonts rumbled their approval.

  The Firehead cub slid to the ground, waving back the spears of the hunters. Slowly, hesitantly, Crocus joined in. She slipped off her moccasins and touched the skull with her own small feet, and bent to scoop more dirt over the cold bones. She was copying Longtusk, trying to Remember too — or, at least, showing him she understood.

  At last, Longtusk felt he was done. Now the skull was indeed just a piece of bone, discarded.

  Crocus stepped up to him, rubbed the fur between his eyes, and climbed briskly onto his back. She said gently, "A dhur."

  Clumsily, but without hesitation, he slid his tusks under the skull and wrapped his trunk firmly over the top of it. Then he straightened his neck and lifted.

  The skull wasn't as heavy as it looked; mammoth bone was porous, to make it light despite its great bulk and strength. He cradled it carefully.

  Then — under the guidance of Crocus, and with Bedrock, the Shaman, and assorted keepers and spear-laden hunters following him like wolves trailing migrant deer — he carried the skull toward the Firehead settlement.

  Ahead of him, smoke curled into the air from a dozen fires.

  THE TRAIL TO THE SETTLEMENT was well beaten, a rut dug into the steppe by the feet of Fireheads and mastodonts. But Longtusk had not been this way before.

  He passed storage pits. Their walls were scoured by the tusks of the mastodonts who had dug out these pits, and they were lined with slabs of smooth rock. Longtusk could see the pits were half-filled with hunks of dried and salted meat, or with dried grasses to provide feed for the mastodonts; winter seemed remote, but already these clever, difficult Fireheads were planning for its rigors.

  Farther in toward the center of the settlement there were many hearths: out in the open air, blackened circles on the ground everywhere, many of them smoldering with dayfires. Chunks of meat broiled on spits, filling the air with acrid smoke.

  There was, in fact, a lot of meat in the settlement.

  Some of it dangled from wooden frames, varying in condition from dry and curled to fresh, some even dripping blood. There were a few small animals, lemmings and rabbits and even a young fox, hung up with their necks lolling, obviously dead.

  And, most of all, there were Fireheads everywhere: not the few keepers and hunters the mastodonts encountered in their stockade and during the course of their work, but many more, more than he could count. There were males and females, old ones with yellowed, gappy teeth and frost-white hair, young ones who ran, excited, even infants in their mothers' arms. They all wore thick clothing of fur and skin, stuffed with grasses and wool; all but the smallest cubs wore thick, warming moccasins.

  Some of the Fireheads worked at the hearths, turning spitted meat. One female had a piece of skin staked out over the ground and she was scraping it with a sharpened stone, removing fat and clinging flesh and sinew, leaving the surface smooth and shining. He saw a male making deerskin into rope, cutting strips crosswise for strength. They seemed, in fact, to use every part of the animals they hunted: tendons were twisted into strands of sinew, and bladders, stomach and intestines were used to hold water.

  They made paint, of ground-up rock mixed with animal fat, or lichen soaked in aurochs' urine. Many of them had marked their skins with stripes and circles of the red and yellow coloring, and they wore strings of beads made of pretty, pierced stones or chipped bones.

  Many of the Fireheads were fascinated by Longtusk. They broke off what they were doing and followed, the adults staring, the cubs dancing and laughing.

  Here was one small group of Fireheads — perhaps a family — having a meal, gathered around a sputtering fire. They had bones that had been broiled on their fire, and they cracked the bones on rocks and sucked out the soft, greasy marrow within. Longtusk wondered absently what animals the bones had come from.

  As he passed — a great woolly mammoth bearing a huge skull and with the daughter of the chief clinging proudly to his back — the Fireheads stopped eating, stared, and joined the slow, gathering procession that trailed after Longtusk.

  ...Now, surrounded by Fireheads, he was aware of discomfort, a sharp prodding at his rump.

  He turned. He saw the Shaman, Smokehat, bearing one of the hunters' big game spears. The quartz tip was red with blood: Longtusk's blood.

  He saw calculation in the Shaman's small, pinched face. Sensing his tension, Smokehat was deliberately prodding him, trying to make him respond — perhaps by growing angry, throwing off Crocus. If that happened, if he went rogue here at the heart of the Firehead settlement, Longtusk would surely be killed.

  Longtusk snorted in disgust, turned his back and continued to walk.

  But the next time he felt the tell-tale prod at his rump he swished his tail, as if brushing away flies. He heard a thin mewl of complaint.

  Smokehat was clutching his cheek, and blood leaked around his fingers. Longtusk's tail hairs had brushed the Firehead's face, splitting it open like a piece of old fruit. With murder in his sharp eyes, the Shaman was led away for treatment; and Longtusk, with quiet contentment, continued his steady plod.

  He heard a trumpeted greeting. He slowed, startled.

  There were mastodonts here: a small Family, a few adult Cows, calves holding onto their mothers' tails with their spindly little trunks. They wandered freely through the settlement, without hobbles or restraints, mingling with the Fireheads.

  One of the Cows was Neck Like Spruce.

  "Well, well," she said. "Quite a spectacle. Life getting dull out in the stockade, was it?"

  When he replied, his voice was tight, his rumbles shallow. "If you haven't anything useful to say, leave me alone."

  She sensed his tension, and glanced now at the hunters who followed him, spears still ready to fly. "Just stay calm," she said seriously. "They are used to us. In fact they feel safer if we are here. Where there are mastodonts, the cats and wolves will not attack... Where are you going?"

  He growled. "Do I look as if I have the faintest idea?"

  She trumpeted her amusemen
t, and broke away from her Family to walk alongside him.

  At last the motley procession approached the very heart of the Firehead settlement, and Longtusk slowed, uncertain.

  There were larger structures here — perhaps a dozen of them, arranged in an uneven circle. They were rough domes of gray-green and white. The largest of all, and the most incomplete, was at the very center.

  Crocus slid easily to the ground. She took the tip of Longtusk's trunk in her small paw and led him into the circle of huts.

  He stopped by one of the huts. It was made of turf and stretched skin and rock, piled up high. On the expanses of bare animal skin, there were strange markings, streaks and whirls of ochre and other dyes, and there and there the skin was marked with the unmistakable imprint of a Firehead paw, marked out as a silhouette in red-brown coloring. The dome-shaped hut had a hole cut in its top, from which smoke curled up to the sky.

  There were white objects arrayed around the base of the hut. White, complex shapes.

  Mammoth bones.

  Big skulls had been pushed into the ground by their tusk sockets, all around the hut. Curving bones, shoulder blades and pelvises, had been layered along the lower wall of the hut. There were heavier bones, femurs and bits of skulls, tied to the turf roof. And two great curving tusks had been shoved into the ground and their sharp points tied together to form an arch over a skin-flap doorway.

  Some of the bones were chipped and showed signs of where they had been gnawed by predators, perhaps as they had emerged from the remote river bank where they had been mined.

  Now the flap of skin parted at the front of the hut, and a woman pushed out into the colder air. She gaped at the woolly mammoth standing before her, and clutched her squealing infant tighter to her chest.

  Longtusk, baffled, was filled with dread and horror. "By Kilukpuk's last breath, what is this?"

  "This is how the Fireheads live, Longtusk," said Neck Like Spruce. "The turf and rock keeps in the warmth of their fires..."

  "But, Spruce, the bones. Why...?"

  She trumpeted her irritation at him. "This is a cold and windy place, if you hadn't noticed, Longtusk. The Fireheads have to make their huts sturdy. They prefer wood, but there is little wood on this steppe, and what there was they have mostly burned. But there are plenty of bones."

  "Mammoth bones."

  "Yes. Longtusk, your kind have lived here for a long time, and the ground is full of their bones. In some ways bone is better than wood, because it is immune to frost and damp and insects. These huts are built to last a long time, Longtusk, many seasons... And it does no harm," she said softly.

  "I know." For, he realized, these mammoths had long gone to the aurora, and had no use for these discarded scraps.

  There was a gentle tugging at his trunk. He glanced down. It was Crocus; she was trying to get him to come closer to the big central hut.

  He rumbled and followed her.

  This hut would eventually be the biggest of them all — a fitting home for Bedrock and his family, including little Crocus — but it was incomplete, without a roof.

  A ring of mammoth femurs had been thrust into the ground in a circle at the base, and an elaborate pattern of shoulder blades had been piled up around the perimeter of the hut, overlapping neatly like the scales of some immense fish.

  The floor had been dug away, making a shallow pit. Flat stones had been set in a circle at the center of the hut to make a hearth. And there was a small cup of carved stone, filled with sticky animal fat, within which a length of plaited mastodont fur burned slowly, giving off a greasy smoke. With a flash of intuition he saw that it would be dark inside the hut when the roof had been completed; perhaps sputtering flames like these would give the illusion of day, even in darkness.

  Under Crocus's urging, he laid down the skull he carried, just outside the circle of leg bones. Crocus jumped on it, excited, and made big swooping gestures with her skinny forelegs. Perhaps this skull would be built into the hut. Its glaring eye sockets and sweeping tusks would make an imposing entrance.

  Now Crocus ran into the incomplete hut, picked up a bundle wrapped in skin, and held it up to Longtusk. When the skin wrapping fell away Longtusk saw that it was a slab of sandstone, and strange loops and whorls had been cut into its surface.

  "Touch it," called Neck Like Spruce.

  Cautiously Longtusk reached forward with his trunk's fragile pink tip, and explored the surface of the rock.

  "...It's warm."

  "They put the rocks in the fires to make them hot, then clutch them to their bellies in the night."

  Now Crocus was jabbering, pointing to the markings on the skin walls, streaks and whorls and lines, daubed there by Firehead fingers. The cub seemed excited.

  He traced his trunk tip over the patterns, but could taste or smell nothing but ochre and animal fat. He growled, baffled.

  "It's another Firehead habit," Spruce said testily. "Each pattern means something. Look again, Longtusk. The Fireheads aren't like us; they have poor smell and hearing, and rely on their eyes. Don't touch it or smell it. Try to look through Firehead eyes. Imagine it isn't just a sheet of skin, but a — a hole in the wall. Imagine you aren't looking at markings just in front of your face, but forms that are far away. Look with your eyes, Longtusk, just your eyes. Now — now what do you see?"

  After a time, with Crocus chattering constantly in his ear, he managed it.

  Here was a curving outline, with a smooth sheen of ochre across its interior, that became a bison, strong and proud. Here was a row of curved lines, one after the other, that was a line of deer, heads up and running. Here was a horse, dipping its head and stamping its small foot. Here was a strange creature that was half leaping stag and half Firehead, glaring out at him.

  He looked around the settlement with new eyes — and he saw that there were makings everywhere, on every available surface: the walls of the huts, the faces of the Fireheads, the shafts of the hunters' spears, even Crocus's heated stone. And all of the markings meant something, showing Fireheads and animals, mountains and flowers.

  The illusions were transient and flat. These "animals" had no scent, no voices, no weight to set the Earth ringing. They were just shadows of color and line.

  Nevertheless they were here. And everywhere he looked, they danced.

  The settlement was alive, transformed by the minds and paws of the Fireheads, made vibrant and rich — as if the land itself had become conscious, full of reflections of itself. It was a transformation that could not even have been imagined by any mammoth or mastodont who ever lived. He trembled at its thin, strange beauty.

  How could any creatures be capable of such wonder — and, at the same time, such cruelty? These Fireheads were strange and complex beings indeed.

  Now Crocus dragged his face back to the wall of her own hut. Here was a row of stocky, flat-backed shapes, with curving tusks before them.

  Mastodonts. It was a line of mastodonts, their tusks, drawn with simple, confident sweeps, proud and strong.

  But Crocus was pointing especially at a figure at the front of the line. It was crudely drawn, as if by a cub — by Crocus herself, he realized.

  It looked like a mastodont, but its back sloped down from a hump at its neck. Its tusks were long and curved before its high head, and long hairs draped down from its trunk and belly.

  He growled, confused, distressed.

  "Longtusk?" Neck Like Spruce called. "That's you, Longtusk. Crocus made you on the wall. You see? She was trying to honor you."

  "I understand. It's just—"

  "What?"

  "I haven't seen a mammoth since I was separated from my Family. Neck Like Spruce, I think I've forgotten what I look like."

  "Oh, Longtusk..."

  Crocus came to him, perceiving his sudden distress. She wrapped her arms around his trunk, buried her face in his hair, and murmured soothing noises.

  4

  The Hunt

  WINTER SUCCEEDED SUMMER, frost following fir
e.

  Sometimes, Longtusk dreamed:

  Yellow plain, blue sky, a landscape huge, flat, elemental, dominated by the unending grind and crack of ice. And mammoths sweeping over the land like clouds—

  He would wake with a start.

  All around him was order: the mastodont stockade, the spreading Firehead settlement, the smoke spiraling to the sky. This was the reality of his life, not that increasingly remote plain, the mammoth herds that covered the land. That had been no more than the start of his journey — a journey that had ended here.

  Hadn't it?

  After all, what else was there? Where else could he go? What else was there to do with his life, but serve the Fireheads?

  Troubled, he returned to sleep.

  And five years wore away.

  THE HUNTING PARTY OF FIREHEADS and mastodonts — and one woolly mammoth — marched proudly across the landscape. The high summer cast short shadows of Longtusk and his rider: Crocus, of course, now fully grown, long-legged and elegant, and as strong and brave as any of the male Firehead hunters. She was equipped for the hunt. She carried a quartz-tipped spear, and wore a broad belt slung over her shoulder, laden with stone knives and hammers, and — most prized of all — an atlatl, a dart thrower made of sculpted deer bone.

  "...Ah," Walks With Thunder said now, and he paused. "Look."

  Longtusk looked down at the ground. At first he saw nothing but an unremarkable patch of steppe grass, with a little purple saxifrage. Then he made out scattered pellets of dung.

  Walks With Thunder poked at the pellets with his trunk tip. "See the short bitten-off twigs in there? Not like mastodonts; we leave long twisted bits of fiber in our dung. And we produce neat piles too; they kick it around the place as it emerges..." He brought a piece of dung into his mouth. "Warm. Fresh. They are close. Softly, now."

  Alert, evidently excited, he trotted on, and the party followed.

  Over the years Longtusk had been involved in many of the Fireheads' hunts. Most of them targeted the smaller herbivores. The Fireheads would follow a herd of deer or horse and pick off a vulnerable animal — a cow slowed by pregnancy, or a juvenile, or the old or lame — and finish it quickly. Then they would butcher it with their sharpened stones and have the mastodonts carry back the dripping meat, skin and bones.