Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  And he knew that the changes he saw around him would one day have great significance for his little Clan.

  He had long stepped back from his role as Patriarch. There had never before been a Patriarch in all the Cycle's long history, and he had never believed there should be one for longer than strictly necessary.

  So he was no longer a leader of the Clan. Still, he had traveled farther and seen more than any of the mammoths here on the nunatak.

  And he knew that this nunatak would not always remain a refuge.

  Sometimes he wished he had someone to discuss all this with. Somebody like Rockheart, or Walks With Thunder — even Jaw Like Rock.

  But they were all gone, long gone. And Longtusk, always the outsider, now isolated by age, was forced to rely on nothing but his own experience and wisdom.

  ...Willow, on his back, was growing agitated. He was muttering something in his incomprehensible, guttural tongue. He leaned forward, over Longtusk's scalp, and pointed far to the west.

  Longtusk raised his trunk, but could smell nothing on the dry air but the cold prickle of ice. He squinted, feeling the wrinkles gather around his eye sockets.

  On the far horizon, he saw something new.

  It was a line scratched across the ice. It ended in a complex knot, dark and massive yet dwarfed by the icecap. And a thin thread rose up from that knot of activity, straight and true.

  It was too far away to smell. But it was unmistakable. It was smoke: smoke from a fire. And the line that cut across the ice was a trail, arrowing directly toward the nunatak.

  On his back, Willow was whimpering his alarm — as well he might, Longtusk thought.

  For the signs were unmistakable. After all these years, the Fireheads were coming.

  As the sun sank deeper in the sky, the light on the ice grew softer, low and diffuse. Blue-gray shadows pooled in hollows, like a liquid gathering. It was stunning, beautiful. But Longtusk knew that this year he could not stay to see the sunset.

  The nunatak's long dream of peace was, so quickly, coming to an end.

  He turned and, with elaborate care, began his descent from the summit.

  "WE HAVE NO CHOICE but to abandon the nunatak." He looked down at the Family — the fat, complacent Cows, their playful calves, all gazing up at him, trunks raised to sniff his mood. "We have been safe here. The nunatak has served us well. But now it is a refuge no more. And we must go."

  "You're being ridiculous," Horsetail said severely. "You're frightening the calves."

  "They should be frightened," he said. "They are in danger. Mortal danger. The Fireheads are on the western horizon. I could see their trail, and their fire. They will overrun this place, enslave you, ultimately kill you. And your calves." He eyed them. "Do you understand? Do you understand any of this?"

  The Cows rumbled questions. "Where should we go?" "There is nowhere else!" "Who is he to say what Cows should do? He is a Bull. And he's old. Why, if I—"

  He had expected arguments, and he got them. It was just as it had been when he had argued with Milkbreath, his own mother, trying to convince her that the flight in search of the nunatak was necessary.

  He was too old for this.

  One more effort, Longtusk. Then you can rest. Think of Rockheart. He had kept going, despite the failure of his huge body. He pulled his shoulders square and lifted his tusks, still large and sweeping, so heavy they made his neck muscles pull.

  Horsetail, the Matriarch, said sadly, "I'm trying to understand, Longtusk. I truly am. But you must help me. How can they come here? We are protected by the ice."

  "But the ice is receding."

  "Where would we flee?"

  "You must go south and east. At first you will cross the ice" — a rumbling of fear and discontent — "just as your grandmothers did. Just as I did. But then you will reach a corridor. A passage through the ice sheets, to the warmer lands beyond, that has opened up in the years we have lived here. It won't be easy—"

  "But Longtusk, why? Why would the Fireheads come here? On this rock, we are few. Even if these Fireheads are the savage predators you describe, why would they go to such efforts, risk their own lives, just to reach us?"

  Now Threetusk, dominant Bull of the bachelor herd, loped toward Longtusk. He said grimly, "Perhaps the Fireheads come because there is no room for them in the old lands. Perhaps they are seeking mammoths here because there are none left where they come from."

  There was a general bray of horror.

  "Or perhaps," Longtusk said sadly, "it is me."

  Horsetail rumbled, "What do you mean?"

  "I defied her," he said, unwelcome old memories swimming to the surface of his mind.

  "Who?"

  "The most powerful Firehead of them all. She thought I was hers, you see. And yet I defied her..."

  He knew it was hard for them to understand. All this was ancient history to the other mammoths, an exotic legend of times and places and creatures they had never known — maybe just another of Longtusk's tall stories, like his tales of she-cats and rhinos and Fireheads with caps of mammoth-ivory beads...

  It was not their fault. He had wanted to bring his Clan to a safe place, and these generations of fat, complacent mammoths were what he had dreamed of seeing. It wasn't their fault that he had succeeded too well — that their lives of comfort and security had prepared them so badly for the ordeal ahead.

  But he recalled Crocus.

  He recalled how she had hunted down the Firehead who had killed her father. He knew she would not have forgotten, or forgiven.

  As long as he was alive, nobody was safe here.

  Horsetail and Threetusk approached him and spoke quietly so the others couldn't hear.

  Horsetail said, "You aren't the only one who has seen the corridor to the south. But it is harsh, and we don't know how long it is, or what lies at its end. Perhaps it is cold and barren all the way to the South Pole."

  "When we set off for the nunatak," he said evenly, "we didn't know how far that was either. We went anyway. You know, Threetusk — you're the only one left who does. You will have to show them how to survive."

  Horsetail said severely, "We have old, and sickly, and calves. Many of us will not survive such a trek."

  "Nevertheless it must be made."

  "And you?" asked the Matriarch. "Do you believe you could walk through the corridor?"

  "Of course not." He brayed his amusement. "I probably wouldn't last a day. But I'm not going."

  Threetusk said, "What?"

  Briefly, briskly, he stroked their trunks. "I know the Fireheads. You don't. And I have thought deeply on their nature. And this is what I have concluded. Listen closely, now..."

  Saxifrage watched this, fascinated, the rumbling phrases washing over her.

  Later, boldly, she stepped forward from under her mother's belly and tugged her trunk. "What did he say? What did he say?"

  But Horsetail, grave and silent, would not reply.

  THEY FILED PAST HIM, down the sloping rock face and onto the ice, bundles of confusion, fear and resentment — much of it directed at him, for even though the smoke columns from the Fireheads' hearths were now visible for all to see, they still found it impossible to believe they represented the danger he insisted.

  Nonetheless, they were his Clan. He wanted to grab them all, taste each one with his trunk. For he knew he would not see them again, not a single one of them.

  But he held himself back. It was best they did not think of him, for the ice and the dismal corridor to the south would give them more than enough to occupy their minds.

  And besides, he still had company: the little Dreamer, Willow. He had tried to push the Dreamer, gently, off the rock and after the column of mammoths. But Willow had slapped his trunk and dug his old, bent fingers in Longtusk's fur, his intentions clear.

  Company, then. And a job to complete.

  Longtusk waited until the long column of mammoths had shrunk to a fine scratch against the huge white expanse of the ice.r />
  And then he turned away: toward the west, and the Fireheads.

  5

  The Corridor

  IT WAS, THREETUSK DECIDED LATER, an epic to match any in the long history of the mammoths.

  But it was a story he could never bear to tell: a story of suffering and loss and endless endurance, a blurred time he recalled only with pain.

  It was difficult even from the beginning. Away from the warmth of the nunatak, the hard, ridged ice was cold and unyielding under their feet — crueler even than he recalled from the original trek so long ago. Where snow drifted the going was even harder.

  The land itself was unsettling. The mammoths could hear the deep groaning of the ice as it flowed down from its highest points to the low land and the sea. A human would have heard only the occasional crack and grind, perhaps felt a deep shudder. To the mammoths, the agonized roar of the ice was loud and continuous, a constant reminder that this was an unstable land, a place of change and danger.

  And — of course — there was nothing to eat or drink, here on the ice. They had barely traveled half a day before they had used up the reserves of water they carried in their throats, and the calves were crying for the warm rocks they had left behind.

  But they kept on.

  After a day and a night, they came to a high point, and they were able to see the way south.

  To the left the ice was a shallow dome, its surface bright and seductively smooth. To the right, the ice lay thick over a mountain range. Black jagged peaks thrust out of the white, defiant, and glaciers striped with dirt reached down to the ice sheet like the trunks of immense embedded animals.

  And the two great ice sheets were separated by a narrow band of land — colorless, barren, a stripe of lifeless gray cutting through blue-white.

  It was the corridor.

  They found a glacier, a tongue of ice that led them down from the icecap to the barren strip of land. The climb down the glacier was more difficult than Threetusk had imagined — especially when they got to the lower slopes, and the glacier, spilling onto the rock, spread out and cracked, forming immense crevasses that blocked their path.

  Nevertheless they persisted, until they reached the land itself.

  Horsetail stood by Threetusk, frost on her face, her breath billowing in a cloud around her. They gazed south at the corridor that faced them.

  They stood on bare rock, sprinkled with a little loose stone, gravel and rock. There were deep furrows gouged into the land, as if by huge claws. Here and there, against the ice cliffs that bounded the corridor, there were pools of trapped meltwater, glimmering. Little grew here: only scattered clumps of yellow grass, a single low willow, clutching the ground.

  A wind blew in their faces, raising dust devils that whirled and spat hard gray sand into their eyes. Saxifrage, the calf, plucked at a spindly grass blade without enthusiasm, bleating her discomfort.

  Threetusk said, "It's as if the land has been scraped bare of everything — even the soil — down to the bedrock. There may be water, but little to eat."

  "The calves are probably too fat, as Longtusk always says," Horsetail said briskly. "We'll let them rest a night. There is some shelter, here in the lee of the glacier. Then, in the morning—"

  "We go on."

  "Yes."

  LONGTUSK HAD A SINGLE INTENTION: not to allow the Fireheads to complete their journey, in pursuit of his mammoths, across the land bridge. And he believed he knew how to do it, where he must go to achieve it.

  With Willow on his back snoring softly, Longtusk, with stiff arthritic limbs, picked his cautious way down off the nunatak rocks. He took a final, regretful step off the warmth of the black rock, and let his footpads settle on hard ice.

  It would begin as a retracing of the great trek which had brought him here.

  ...But everything was different now.

  The ice was, in places, slick with a thin layer of liquid water, making it slippery and treacherous, so that he had to choose his steps with care. And there seemed to have been a fresh frost overnight; ice crystals sparkled like tiny eyes on the blue surface of the hard older ice.

  The nunatak receded behind him, becoming a hard black cone of rock, diminishing. It was as if he was leaving behind his life: his ambiguous position in the small society of the Clan, his prickly relationships with Threetusk, Horsetail and the others, the endless complexity of love and birth and death. Not for much longer would he have to carry around his heavy load of pain and loss and memory.

  His life had reduced, at last, to its essence.

  Soon — much sooner than he had expected — he found himself clambering down a snub of ice and onto bare rock.

  He walked cautiously over rock that had been chiseled and scoured by the retreating ice. Beyond the edge of the cap itself the ice still clung in patches. But it was obvious that the ice's shrinking had proceeded apace.

  He found a run-off stream. It bubbled over shallow mud, cloudy with rock flour. He walked into the brook. It barely lapped over his toes. He drank trunkfuls of the chill, sterile meltwater; it filled his belly and throat.

  The water had cut miniature valleys in the flat surface of the mud. The gouges cut across each other, their muddy walls eroded away, so that the incised mud was braided with shallow clefts. Here and there a patch of ground stuck out of the stream, perhaps sheltered by a lump of rock. These tiny islands were shaped like teardrops, their walls eroded by the continuing flow, and grasses, thin and yellow, clung to their surfaces. Longtusk found himself intrigued by the unexpected complexity of this scrap of landscape. Like so much of the world, it was intricate, beautiful — but meaningless, for there were no eyes but his to see it.

  He moved on. His feet left shallow craters in the mud; downstream of where he had stood the water, bubbling, began to carve a new pattern of channels.

  Soon he reached a new kind of landscape. It was an open forest, with evergreen trees growing in isolated clumps, and swathes of grass in between.

  He let down Willow. With brisk efficiency, the Dreamer built and set simple traps of sharpened sticks and sinew.

  ONE OF THE TRAPS QUICKLY yielded a small rabbit. The Dreamer skinned it, cooked it over a small fire, ate it with every expression of enjoyment — and then, in the warmth of the afternoon, he lay down and began to snore loudly.

  Longtusk explored.

  The trees were spruce, fir and pines, growing healthy, straight and tall. Farther to the south he saw hardwoods, oak and elm and ash. There was sagebrush abundant in the grassy patches between the trees. The air was too warm for Longtusk and he sought out snow and loose ice to chew and swallow and rub into his fur; the melting snow in his belly cooled him, and bits of ice trapped in his fur evaporated slowly, acting like sweat.

  It was not long before he detected the thin scent of water: a great body of it, not much farther to the west. Birds wheeled overhead, some of them gulls. And that water smell was tinged with the sharpness of salt.

  It was the meltwater lake he had seen from the nunatak's summit: still dammed by its plug of ice, now joined to the ocean, grown immeasurably since he had passed by on his original trek to the nunatak. And it was his destination.

  He walked back into the forest, through the shade of the young, proud trees. He saw spoor, of horses and bison and other animals. Perhaps the warmth, and the abundance of life here, had something to do with the nearness of that body of water.

  But it was no place for mammoths, and the other creatures of the steppe. He felt a huge sadness, for a world was evaporating.

  After a night's rest, they moved on.

  THE CLAN WALKED between divergent walls of ice.

  The twin icecaps were lines of white on the horizon. Sometimes they were too far away to see — but they could always be heard, groaning as if in pain at their endless collapse and crumbling.

  The wind gathered strength, always coming from the south, howling in their faces, as if daring them to progress. Even if it was the ice that had made this place barren,
it was the wind that kept it so; any soil which formed was whipped away in a cloud of dust, and only the hardiest plants could find root and cling to the rock.

  The ground changed constantly. Where soil and dirt collected in hollows, protected from the wind, the surface was boggy and clinging. At times they had to cross islands of ice, left behind by the retreating icecaps and yet to melt. Worse, there were stretches of stagnant ice covered over by a thin crust of detritus, a crust which could conceal pits and crevasses where the underlying ice had melted and drained away.

  The going became harder still.

  Now they seemed to be descending a shallow slope, as if the whole land inclined to the south. The rock was cut through by valleys — some no more than narrow gullies, and some respectably large channels. Sometimes there were torrents of water, gushing down one valley or another, often carving a new course altogether. Threetusk didn't understand where these sudden floods came from; perhaps some dam of ice had burst, or a river valley's wall had been breached.

  Where they could, the mammoths followed the broader valleys. But more often than not the valleys cut across their path, and they were forced to spend energy climbing over sharp-crested ridges.

  Soon all the mammoths were exhausted, and several were weakening. They had plenty to drink now, but never enough to eat. Still the wind blew, harsh and fierce.

  And then the first calf died.

  He was a Bull, small and playful, younger than Saxifrage. He simply fell one day, his papery flesh showing the bones beneath, his eyes round and terrified.

  "I have no milk!" his mother wailed. "It's my fault. I have no milk to give him..."

  "We have to leave him," Threetusk said grimly to the Matriarch.

  "I know," said Horsetail. "But after this it will be harder to keep them together. Already the Cows with small calves want to strike out alone, to find pasture they don't need to share with the others."

  "That's natural. It's what mothers do."

  "We must wait until the calf dies," she said. "His mother needs to Remember him. And then we go on."