Longtusk

by Stephen Baxter

  "Yes."

  After that, more deaths followed: calves, the old, and one mature Bull whose leg was crushed in a fall.

  Each day the sun climbed lower in the sky. Threetusk knew the summer was ending, and if they couldn't feed and water in preparation for the cold to come, winter would kill them all as surely as any Firehead would.

  And still the mammoths walked on into the teeth of the unrelenting wind, leaving a trail of their dead on the unmarked land.

  THE LAND BEGAN TO RISE — gently at first, then more steeply. The grass-covered soil grew thin, until at last a shoulder of rock protruded, bare and forbidding. Still Longtusk climbed, the air growing colder. He stepped with caution up the steepening slopes, avoiding heaps of sharp, frost-shattered scree.

  He recalled this place from the trek. He had reached the range of low, glacier-eroded hills which marked the southern border of the ice-melt lake. And as he climbed, the land opened up around him, and he saw the great ice dam before him, lodged in its cleft in the hillside — still containing its mass of meltwater, after all these years.

  To his right, to the north, he saw the lake itself — much bigger than he recalled, a shining sheet of gray-blue water stretching to a perfectly sharp horizon. There was ice scattered on it, floes and slushy melt and even a few eroded-smooth icebergs. But the icecap which had first created this lake was much receded now.

  The water lapped at a shallow shore of gravel and bare rock, and he saw birds, loons and ducks, swimming among reeds. There were gulls nesting in the steeper cliffs below him. And he could smell the tang of salt, much more strongly now. The northern ocean, which ran all the way to the pole itself, must have broken in on this lake, turning it into an immense pool of brine, an inlet of the ocean itself.

  To his left — to the south of the hills — the land swept away. It was a rough plain, marked here and there by the sky-blue glimmer of pools and the glaring bone-white of old ice. Far away he could see a flowing dark patch, clouded by dust, that might be horses or bison. If he listened closely he could hear the thunder of hooves, feel the heavy stamp of that moving ocean of meat.

  But this blanket of life — grown much thicker since the last time he passed here — did not conceal the deeper rocky truth of this landscape. He could see how the land was folded, wrinkled, cut deeply by channels and gorges. Most of these channels were dry, though thin ribbons of water gleamed in some of them. They flowed south, away from the lake-ocean behind him, and in places they cut across each other, braided like tangled hair.

  It was a land shaped by running water — just like the muddy rivulet where he had drunk. But no rivulet had made this land, not even a great river; only the mightiest of floods could have shaped this immense panorama.

  He turned back and forth, trunk raised, sniffing the air, understanding the land.

  He knew what he must do here. And he knew, at last, how he would die.

  He set off for the ice dam itself.

  "...THREETUSK."

  He paused, lifting bleary, wind-scarred eyes. The wind had eased, for the first time in — how long?

  He raised his trunk and looked back at the column of mammoths, wearily trudging in his footsteps. They had been walking over a rocky plateau that had been even more barren and unforgiving than the rest of the corridor. Had they lost anyone else since he last counted? But he couldn't even recall the names of those who had fallen...

  Horsetail was pulling at his trunk. He saw how thin she had become, the bones of her skull pushing through tangled fur.

  But she was saying, "Threetusk — smell."

  Wearily he raised his trunk and sniffed the air.

  There was water, and grass, and the dung of many animals.

  They blundered forward.

  They came to a ridge. He stepped forward cautiously.

  The land fell away before him, a steep wall of tumbled rocks. To his left, a waterfall thundered. It was glacier melt: the ghost of snows that might have fallen a Great-Year ago, now surging into the land below.

  And that land, he saw, was green.

  Pools glimmered in the light of the low sun. He saw clouds of birds over some of the pools, so far away they might have been insects. The land around the pools, laced by gleaming streams, was steppe: coarse grass, herbs, lichen, moss, stunted trees.

  And there were animals here, he saw dimly: horses, what looked like camels — and, stalking a stray camel, a pack of what appeared to be giant wolves.

  "We made it," he said, wondering. "The end of the corridor. We had to battle through the breath of Kilukpuk herself. But we made it. We have to tell Longtusk — tell him he was right."

  Horsetail looked at him sadly. "Where Longtusk has gone, I don't think even a contact rumble would reach him." She sniffed at the ground, probing with her trunk. "We need to find a way down from here..."

  Threetusk looked back, troubled. The journey had been so hard that it had been some time since he had thought of the defiant old tusker they had left behind.

  What had become of Longtusk?

  6

  The Tears of Kilukpuk

  CAUTIOUSLY, LONGTUSK WALKED forward onto the ice dam. In places the ice, melting, had formed shallow pools; some of these were crusted over, and more than once a careless step plunged his foot into cold, gritty water.

  He reached the center of this wall of ice, where it was thinnest — and weakest.

  The ice dam was old.

  On its dry southern side its upper surface was gritty and dirty, in places worn to a grayish sheen by years of rain. Its northern side had been hollowed out by lapping water, so that a great lip of ice hung over a long, concave wall. The ice under the lip gleamed white and blue, and more ice, half-melted and refrozen, gushed over the lip to dangle in the air, caught in mid-flow, elaborate icicles glistening.

  He could feel the groan of this thinning dam under the weight of the water — a weight that must be rising, inexorably, as the sea level rose, spilling into the lake. The ice dam settled, seeking comfort, like a working mastodont laboring under some bone-cracking load. But there was little comfort to be had.

  Instability — yes, he thought; that was the key.

  A memory drifted into his mind: how Jaw Like Rock had taken that foolish keeper — what was his name? Spindle? — riding on his back standing up. Jaw had stopped dead, and stood square on the broken ground. Spindle had tried to keep his balance, but without Jaw's assistance he was helpless, and he had fallen.

  It had been funny, comical, cruel — and relevant. For the water of the lake was poised high above the lower land, contained only by this fragile dam, just as the keeper's weight had been suspended over Jaw.

  Strange, he hadn't thought of old Jaw for years...

  "...Baitho! Baitho!"

  Fireheads were approaching Longtusk, stepping onto the narrow rim of this worn ice dam. And one was calling to him in a thin, high voice.

  On his back Willow hissed, full of hatred and fear.

  Longtusk could see them now. There was a knot of Firehead hunters with their thick, well-worked clothing thrown open, exposing naked skin to the warmth of the air. Most of them had held back on the rocky ridge. But two Fireheads were coming forward to meet him, treading carefully over the ice dam, holding each others' paws.

  And beyond the Fireheads, snaking back to the west, there was a column of mastodonts. Longtusk could hear the low rumbles of their squat, boulder-like bodies, feel the soft pound of their big broad feet on bare rock.

  Ignoring the Fireheads, he sent out a deep contact rumble. "Mastodonts. I am Longtusk."

  Replies came as slow pulses of deep sound, washing through the air.

  "Longtusk. None here knows you."

  "That is true. We are young and strong, and you must be old and weak."

  "But we know of you."

  The voices were colored by the rich, peculiar accent of the mastodonts, brought with them all the way from the thick forests of their own deep past.

  "Walks With T
hunder," Longtusk called. "Is he with you?"

  "Walks With Thunder has gone to the aurora."

  "It was a magnificent Remembering."

  "He died well..."

  He growled, and a little more sadness crowded into his weary heart. But perhaps that was all he could have hoped for, after so long.

  "Longtusk. There are legends of your courage and strength, of your mighty tusks. My name is Shoulder Of Bedrock. Perhaps you have heard of my prowess as a warrior. I would welcome sharpening my tusks on yours..."

  He rumbled, "I regret I have not heard of you, Shoulder of Bedrock, though I have no doubt your fame has spread far. I would welcome a contest with you. But I fear it must wait until we meet in the aurora."

  The mastodonts rumbled their disappointment.

  "Until the aurora," they called.

  "Until the aurora..."

  The two Fireheads approached him. One wore a coat of thick mammoth hide, to which much black-brown fur still clung, and it — no, he — wore a hat of bone from which smoke curled into the air. And the other, smaller, slighter, wore a coat that gleamed with the blue-white of mammoth ivory.

  The male was Smokehat, of course. The Shaman's face was a weather-beaten, wizened mask, etched deep by resentment and hatred. The Shaman's tunic was made of an oddly shaped, almost hairless piece of hide. It had two broad holes, a flap of skin sewn over what looked like the root of a trunk, and its hair had been burned away in patches, exposing skin that was pink and scarred...

  It was a face, Longtusk realized — the face of a mammoth, pulled off the skull, the trunk cut away and stretched out so that empty eye holes gaped. And not just any face: that swathe of purple-pink hairless scarring was unmistakable. This was a remnant of Pinkface, the Matriarch of Matriarchs.

  This one brutal trophy, brandished by Smokehat, told him all he needed to know about the fate of the mammoths in the old land to the west.

  And with the Shaman was Crocus, Matriarch of the Fireheads, the only Firehead in all history to ride a woolly mammoth. Her hair blew free in the slight wind — once fiery yellow, now a mass of stringy gray, dry and broken. Longtusk felt a touch of sadness.

  There was a sharp pain at his cheek, a gush of warm blood. He looked down in disbelief.

  Smokehat's goad, long and bone-tipped, was splashed with Longtusk's blood. The Shaman had slapped him as if he were an unruly calf.

  "Baitho!" On your knees...

  Longtusk reached down with his trunk, plucked the goad from the Shaman's paw, and hurled it far into the dammed lake.

  The Shaman was furious. He waved a bony fist in Longtusk's face with impotent anger.

  But now a stream of golden fluid arced from over Longtusk's head and neatly landed on the Shaman's bone hat. Smokehat, startled, stood stock still. The burning embers in his hat started to hiss, and thick yellow fluid trickled down his face.

  There was a bellow of guttural triumph from Longtusk's back. It was Willow, of course. With surprising skill, he was urinating into the Shaman's hat.

  The Shaman, howling with rage, dragged the hat from his head and threw it to the ground. He jumped up and down on it, smashing the bones and scattering the embers. But then he yelped in pain — perhaps he had trodden on a burning coal or a shard of bone — and he fled, limping and yelling, acrid urine trickling over his bare scalp.

  Crocus covered her face with her paws, her shoulders shaking. Longtusk recalled this strange behavior. She was laughing.

  Now she looked up at him, blue eyes made only a little rheumy by age, startlingly familiar. She reached out and buried her fingers in the long fur dangling from his trunk. She made cooing noises, like a mother bird, and he rumbled his contentment. The years evaporated, and he was a growing calf, she a cub freezing to death in the snow, a vibrant young female riding his back with unprecedented skill.

  But her face was a mask of wrinkles, and he saw bitterness etched there: bitterness and disappointment and anger. Her life — the demands of leadership, the hard choices she had had to make — all of it had soured her.

  And her coat was grotesque.

  He recalled the simple tooth necklace she had worn when he first found her. But now, as if it had grown out of that necklace like some monstrous fungus, her coat, draped down to the ground, was sewn with many thousands of beads. There were strings of them across her forehead and in a great sheet that followed her hair down her back; there were rows and whorls sewn into the panels at front and back; there were more strings that dangled from her forelegs and belly to the ground, like the long hairs of a mammoth.

  And every one of the beads was of mammoth ivory.

  Within her suit she shone, blue-white like the ice. But Longtusk felt sure that not all the mammoths who had sacrificed their tusks for this monstrosity had gone to the aurora Great-Years before, abandoning their bones to the silt of a river bank. If the Fireheads had ever respected the mammoths, it was long ago. This coat was a thing of excess, not beauty: a symbol of power, not respect.

  The Crocus he had known would never have worn such a monstrosity. Perhaps the girl he had known had died at the moment her father fell to the Whiteskins' arrow, all those years ago. Perhaps what had lived on was another creature: the body alive, the spirit flown to the aurora.

  Now she dug beneath her coat and pulled out a double loop of thick plaited rope. She held it toward him, cooing.

  It was a hobble.

  It was a hated thing, a symbol of his long submission, and he realized he had been right: she had pursued the mammoths over such immense distances so that she could regain her dominance over him.

  He lifted his tusks and roared, and his voice echoed from the curving dam of ice.

  Crocus looked up at him, her eyes hardening. Perhaps she intended to call her hunters to put him down, to end once and for all the life of this unruly mammoth.

  But it didn't matter. For she didn't know, couldn't know, that his life was already over.

  He stamped his foot. The ice cracked.

  THE SURFACE OF THE ICE immediately crumbled, cracking in great sheets around them. He felt himself fall, his legs sinking into deeper loose material beneath.

  Willow tumbled off his back and landed in the soft ice. Crocus fell to her knees, her heavy bead suit weighing her down, old and bewildered.

  Longtusk shook himself free of the loose ice and continued to stamp, here at the dam's narrowest and weakest point.

  Compared to the forces here — the weight of water, the power of this huge ice dam — even the strength of a powerful Bull mammoth was as nothing, of course. But what was important was how he applied that strength — for, like Spindle riding the back of Jaw Like Rock, the ice dam was unstable, overloaded by the brimming lake.

  And he heard the dam groan.

  Worn thin by years of erosion, already under immense pressure from the weight of the water it contained, stress cracks began to spread through its weakening structure, and Longtusk, in the deep senses of his bones, felt the rhythm of those cracks, and changed his stamping to speed their propagation.

  There were ripples on the lake. Birds were taking to the air, alarmed.

  And on the other side, water began to gush out of the dam's dirty, eroded face — just a fine spray at first, noisy rather than voluminous; but soon the cracks from which it emerged were widening, the water flow increasing.

  Willow got to his feet, and he reached out with a hairy paw to help Crocus. Crocus hesitated, then took it in her own paw. Then the two of them grabbed onto Longtusk's belly fur.

  And so the three of them were locked together, Longtusk realized — Longtusk, Willow and Crocus; mammoth, Dreamer and Firehead — locked together at the end of their lives, just as had once been foreseen by a Dreamer female, long, long ago.

  He wondered if they understood what he had done.

  The center of the dam collapsed.

  Huge slabs and boulders of ice arced into the air, followed by a powerful torrent of water. Suddenly the air was filled with noise
: the roar of the water, the shriek of tortured ice. The dam was high, and the first blocks took a long time to fall to the green land below, fanning out amid a spray of rumbling, frothing, gray-blue water. Longtusk thought he saw a deer there, immense antlers protruding proudly from his head, looking up in utter bewilderment at the strange rain descending on him.

  The first ice blocks hit the ground, exploding into fragments and gouging out deep earth-brown craters. But the craters lasted only a heartbeat, for when the waters splashed over the earth the land turned to shapeless mud and washed away.

  The deer had vanished. He had been the first to die today. He would not be the last, Longtusk knew.

  The dam, once broken, was crumbling quickly. Gray-brown water cut down through the unresisting ice like a stone knife slicing through the flesh of a mammoth. And as the breach widened, so the gush of water extended, deepening and broadening. But its violence did not diminish, for the great mass of water pressed against the dam with an eagerness born of centuries of containment. It shot through the breach horizontally, darkening the land before falling in a shattering rain.

  Willow was tugging at Longtusk's fur and pointing back the way they had come, toward the rocky hillside.

  The Dreamer was right. It would be safer if they returned there, away from the collapsing ice dam itself.

  Longtusk turned and began to make his cautious way back along the shuddering dam. The whole ice surface was cracking and unstable now. Crocus was whimpering with fear, and the Dreamer put his strong arm around her, in this last extreme helping this distant cousin to safety. Low and squat, Willow seemed to find it easier to stand on the dam's shaking surface than the taller, more elegant Firehead.

  Above the rush of water, the scream of the cracking ice, Longtusk heard a remote, thin trumpet. It was a mastodont. He looked back, and saw that the mastodonts and their Firehead keepers had fled to the safety of the land, and were fanning out over the hillside there. He couldn't see if the Shaman was among them. He didn't suppose it mattered; with Crocus gone, so was his grisly power.