Silverhair

by Stephen Baxter

  Then the mammoths would float away from her again, like woolly clouds.

  "It was the Lost," Silverhair mumbled. "The Lost and his thunder-stick..."

  But they wouldn't listen. "Even the Lost are part of the Cycle," said Eggtusk. "Though they don't know it. We are not like the Lost. Give yourself up to the Cycle, little Silverhair. Close your eyes..."

  Silverhair felt the rocks under her feet, as if her legs were burrowing like tree trunks to anchor her to the ground that sustained them all. And slowly, the Cycle's calm teaching reached her.

  She remembered how Wolfnose had shown her the Plain of Bones. She felt the great turning rhythms of the Earth. Her mind opened up, as if she held the topology of the whole Earth in her mind, and she saw far beyond the now, to the farthest reaches of past and future.

  Her own long life, in the midst of all that epic sweep, was no more than the brief spring blossoming of a tundra flower. And Lop-ear, the same. Yet they mattered: just as each flower contributed to the waves of white and gold that swept across the tundra, so she and Lop-ear were inextricable parts of the greater whole.

  And the most important thing in the whole world was Lop-ear's warmth in her belly: the possibility, still, that she might conceive his calf.

  "...To the Lost there is only the here and now," Eggtusk was saying. "They are a young species — a couple of Great-Years, no more — while we are ancient. They have no Cycle. They are just sparks of mind, isolated and frightened and soon extinguished. They never hear the greater rhythms, and never find their place in the world. That is why they disturb so much of what they touch. They are trying to forget what they are. They are dancing in the face of oblivion..."

  Silverhair raised her head. She could feel the salt tears brim in her eyes. "But it was my fault."

  "Lop-ear was much smarter than you are," Eggtusk said gently. "You couldn't have made him do anything he didn't want to do. Even I couldn't, and I fought him to prove the point — much as I regret that now, by Kilukpuk's cracked and festering nipples!"

  "But I didn't even perform the Remembering for him."

  "No. Well, we can't very well leave him like that." Eggtusk laid his trunk on her head, and scratched behind her ear. "Do you know where you are?"

  She looked around at the featureless tundra. "No," she admitted.

  "You're far from the Family. Far from anywhere. You've been wandering, Silverhair. Wandering, but not eating, by the look of you. When you didn't return, Owlheart sent me to find you. It wasn't easy."

  "I — thank you, Eggtusk."

  "Never mind that. You must eat and sleep, young Silverhair. For we have a walk ahead of us. Back to the south."

  For the first time since she had lost Lop-ear, her spirits lifted. "To Lop-ear."

  "Yes."

  "I'm surprised Owlheart let you go."

  "I had to promise we'd come back in one piece. Oh, and..."

  "Yes?"

  He bent so only she could hear. "I had to take Snagtooth with me."

  THE THREE MAMMOTHS set off at midnight. There was a layer of cloud above, but the pale orange sun hung above the horizon in a clear strip of sky.

  Heading south, the mammoths walked slowly, frequently pausing to pass dung and to feed. Despite Silverhair's urgent wish to return to Lop-ear's bones, Eggtusk insisted they eat their fill. They were coming into the richest season of the year, the time when the mammoths must lay in their reserves of fat, without which they cannot survive the next winter. As Eggtusk said to Silverhair, "I'd lick out the crusty lichen from between Kilukpuk's pus-ridden toes before I'd let you starve yourself to death. What use would that be to Lop-ear, or any of us? Eh?"

  So under his coaxing and scolding, she cropped the grass and flowers, and the fresh buds of the dwarf willows whose branches barely grew high enough to cover her toes.

  Snagtooth continued to be a problem. A growing one, in fact.

  Though the stump of her smashed tusk had healed over — a great blood-red scar had formed over the gaping socket — Silverhair saw her banging her head against rock outcrops, as if trying to shake loose the pain of the tusk root. Snagtooth had a great deal of difficulty sleeping; even the back-and-forth movement of her jaw when eating seemed to hurt her.

  And Snagtooth was not one to suffer in silence.

  She complained, snapped, and refused to do her fair share of digging, even expecting Silverhair and Eggtusk to find her rich clumps of grass and rip them out and carry them to her ever-open mouth. Silverhair could see why Owlheart had taken the opportunity to send her away from Foxeye and the calves for a while.

  "I put up with it because I can see she is suffering," grumbled Eggtusk to Silverhair. "Perhaps she has an abscess."

  If so, it was bad news; there was no way to treat such an agonizing collection of poison in the mouth, and Snagtooth would simply have to hope it cleared up of its own accord. If it didn't, it could kill her.

  Poor Eggtusk, meanwhile, was having his own trouble with warble flies. Silverhair could see maggots dropping out of red-rimmed craters in his skin, heading for the ground to pupate. Unnoticed, the flies must have laid eggs in his fur last summer. The eggs quickly hatched and the maggots burrowed into Eggtusk's tissue, migrating around the body before coming to rest near the skin of his back. Here they would have continued to grow through the winter and spring in a cavity filled with pus and blood, breathing through an airhole gnawed in the skin. The eruption of the full-grown larvae was a cause of intense irritation to Eggtusk, who, despite his colorful cursing, was helpless to do anything about it.

  Meanwhile the season bloomed around them. As the height of the brief summer approached, the tundra exploded with activity, as plants, animals, birds, and insects sought to complete the crucial stages of their annual lives in this brief respite from the grip of winter. The flowers of the tundra opened: white mountain avens, yellow poppies, white heather, crimson, yellow, red, white and purple saxifrage, lousewort, pink primulas, even the orange marigolds. All these flowers had started their cycle of growth as soon as the snow melted. And birds were everywhere. Snow buntings caught crane flies to feed their chicks. Skuas hunted the fledglings of turnstones and sanderlings. As she passed a cliff, Silverhair saw barnacle geese fledglings taking their first tentative steps from their parents' nests far above. That meant jumping. The chicks' stubby wings flapped uselessly, and they fell to the bottom of the cliff. Many chicks died from the fall, and others, trapped in scree, were snapped up by the eager jaws of Arctic foxes.

  The silence of the winter was long gone. The air was filled with birdsong — larks and plovers, the haunting calls of loons, irritable jaeger cries — and the buzz of insects, the bark and howls of foxes and wolves. All of it was laced with an occasional agonized scream as some predator attained its goal.

  It was a furious chorus of mating and death.

  Through the flat, teeming landscape, Silverhair and the others walked stolidly on. When they found a rock face where they could shelter, they slept, as the summer sun scraped its way around the horizon, and the sky faded again to its deepest midnight blue.

  Once, Silverhair woke to find herself staring at a snowy owl, a mother perched on her nest with her brood of peeping chicks.

  The mother was a white bundle of feathers, standing out clearly against gray shale. Her mate coursed over the rough vegetation, searching for lemmings to bring to his nest. The owl chicks had been born at intervals of three or four days, and the oldest chick was substantially bigger than the smallest. Silverhair knew that if some disaster occurred and the owls' food supply was threatened, the largest owlet would eat its smallest sibling — and then the next smallest — then the next.

  It was brutal. But it was the owls' way of assuring that at least one youngster would survive the harshest times. The little tableau of beauty and cruelty seemed to summarize the world, this cruel summer, to Silverhair.

  The mother owl beat her broad wings slowly, and stared at Silverhair with great sulfur-yellow eyes.
/>   As the endless day wore toward its golden noon, they drew nearer the place where Lop-ear had fallen.

  They reached the low ridge near the south coast. Silverhair remembered this place. It was here she had shared Lop-ear's warmth — here they had encountered the Lost with his thunder-stick—and here she had last seen the body of Lop-ear, like a squat, fur-coated boulder.

  The body was gone.

  But there were Lost here.

  Eggtusk led the two Cows behind an eroded outcrop of rock. The mammoths huddled together uncertainly. Eggtusk raised his trunk cautiously over the rock; the hair of his trunk streamed behind his head.

  The mammoths had not been seen. The Lost didn't seem very observant; none of them was maintaining a watch for wolves — or mammoths, come to that.

  The Lost were sitting in a loose circle on the ground. There were six of them. Three of them carried thunder-sticks, like the one that Skin-of-Ice had used against Lop-ear. And one of them — Silverhair could never forget that smooth, unnatural, hairless head — was Skin-of-Ice himself.

  The Lost surrounded the carcass of what looked like a fox. They were drinking a clear fluid from flasks, which they passed from paw to paw. They sat unnaturally upright, with strange sets of loose skin over their bodies, and only a few patches of fur on their scalps and faces.

  They were like wolves, she thought. Predators, working at a downed prey. But then, they were not like wolves, for they did not work at the fox's body with their teeth and claws as wolves will. Rather, they had ice-claws — as she called them, for they were made of something that gleamed like sea ice — ice-claws that they held in their paws, and used to cut into the fox's passive body.

  The Lost were grimy, listless, steeped in misery. They seemed to bicker and snap at each other, sometimes descending into clumsy fights.

  All but Skin-of-Ice. He sat apart from the rest, thunder-stick on his lap, watching the others coldly.

  Silverhair felt a cold, hard determination gather inside her. All her naive dreams of finding some opportunity to work with the Lost had evaporated with the blows inflicted on Lop-ear. These are my enemy, she thought. I will not live in a world that contains them, and I will oppose them to my dying breath.

  But to do that, I must understand them.

  "We're in no danger here," said Eggtusk in a soft rumble, inaudible to the Lost. "I'm sure they can't see us. According to the Cycle, the Lost have poor hearing and smell, and we're downwind of them. And besides, three grown mammoths against six — or sixty — of those skinny creatures should be no match."

  Silverhair growled. "They have thunder-sticks."

  "Those spindly things? What harm can they do us?"

  Silverhair knew it was difficult for him to imagine, for sticks that spat fire and agony on command had no place in a mammoth's map of the world. "Eggtusk, a thunder-stick killed Lop-ear. Skin-of-Ice didn't even have to come close to us to do it."

  "Then what should we do?"

  "It's obvious," complained Snagtooth loudly. "We must creep away from this place of blood and Lost, and—"

  Eggtusk slapped his trunk over her head. "Quiet, you fool."

  Now, to Silverhair's bewilderment, one of the Lost —a fat brute — shucked off layers of his loose outer skin from his body. His hairless chest and fore-limbs were pink and gleaming with sweat. He swung his ice-claws down through the air, hauling them with both paws. He cracked the fox's strong leg bones, tore through its skin, cut tendons, prized open ribs, and ripped open the organs that had nestled inside the fox's body.

  As he worked, the Lost made a noise like the caw of a gull. Almost joyous.

  When he was done, this savage one opened the fox's mouth and reached inside. With a fast slash of his ice-claw he severed the fox's tongue. Then he lifted the limp, fleshy thing above his head, cawing and rubbing his big belly, as if it was the finest delicacy.

  "They are like worms," Eggtusk whispered beside Silverhair. "They gnaw on the meat of the dead." Silverhair could hear the anger and disgust in his voice. "Especially that fat one."

  "Gull-Caw," Silverhair said.

  "What?"

  "We will call him Gull-Caw."

  Eggtusk was silent for a few heartbeats. Then he said, "We must not hate them. They are Hotbloods, like us. And they have their place in the Cycle, whatever they do. After all, it is not pleasant to watch a pack of wolves work at a seal's carcass."

  Silverhair said, "Wolves take what they need. Even the worms do no more than that. There is none of this joy in death and the tearing apart of the body. These Lost are not like us, Eggtusk."

  He looked at her. "It was you," he reminded her, "who wanted to seek out the Lost. Get help from them."

  "I was wrong," she said tightly. "I never imagined how wrong."

  Snagtooth, on Silverhair's other flank, was staring, fascinated. "Look at the way they work together."

  "You sound as if you admire them," Eggtusk snapped.

  Snagtooth grunted. "They are small and weak and isolated on this Island, but they are not slowly dying, as we are. They are not like us. Perhaps they are better."

  Silverhair, shocked more deeply by Snagtooth than she had thought possible, watched as the Lost completed their grisly butchering.

  And she wondered what had become of Lop-ear. Was it possible his helpless body had received the same fate as the fox?

  THERE WAS A CRACK, like thunder.

  All three mammoths raised their trunks and trumpeted.

  Eggtusk twisted his head and stared at his shoulder. "By Kilukpuk's oozing scabs..." Blood seeped out of a small puncture in his hide, and spread over his wiry hair.

  But Silverhair scarcely noticed. For, standing only a few strides downwind of them, were two of the Lost: Skin-of-Ice and Gull-Caw. They were both holding thunder-sticks.

  And they smelled of mammoth: for they had smeared themselves in mammoth dung, the rich, dark stuff clinging to their loose outer skin and their bare faces. That was how they had crept up unnoticed.

  Even at this moment of peril Silverhair felt chilled at the cunning of the Lost.

  Eggtusk reared on his hind legs, raised his trunk, and trumpeted. "So you'd punch a hole in me, eh?" he roared. "By Kilukpuk's quivering dugs, we'll see about that." The great Bull's forefeet crashed back to the earth, and the ground shook as he lowered his head and charged.

  The thunder-sticks wavered. Faced by a trumpeting, hurtling mountain of muscle, flesh, and tusks, the two Lost ran, scampering across the flower-strewn plain like two Arctic hares.

  Suddenly, to Silverhair, they did not seem a threat at all. But, she reminded herself, they still carried their thunder-sticks.

  With Snagtooth, she ran after Eggtusk.

  Skin-of-Ice fell, heavily, and cried out. When he got to his feet again he was clutching his foreleg.

  Gull-Caw came back to him. The two Lost stood side by side and raised their sticks.

  More thunder-cracks.

  Silverhair felt something fly past her ear, a hot scorch. And another crack, and another: a series of rippling explosions like the splintering of a falling tree, sharp sounds that rolled away across the plain.

  Eggtusk grunted and staggered. Silverhair saw a new splash of blood on his fleshy thigh. "Get behind me," Eggtusk ordered.

  "But—"

  "Do as he says," snapped Snagtooth. Her eyes were wide, her smashed tusk dribbling fresh pulp.

  Silverhair tucked herself, with Snagtooth, behind Eggtusk's mighty buttocks.

  And now Eggtusk began to walk toward the Lost, his pace measured and deliberate. "So you think you can kill me, do you, little maggots? We'll see about that. Do you know what I'm going to do with you? I'm going to pick you up with my trunk and drown you in the pus that oozes from Kilukpuk's suppurating mouth-ulcers. And then—"

  But still the thunder-sticks barked, and the strange, invisible, deadly insects slammed into Eggtusk's giant body. One of them tore away a piece of his shoulder, and Silverhair's face was splashed by a horrific
spray of hair, skin, and pulped flesh.

  With each impact Eggtusk staggered. But he did not fall, and he kept the Lost washed in a stream of obscene threats.

  Gull-Caw was agitated. The fat one's thunder-stick no longer barked; he scrabbled at it, frightened, frustrated.

  When Skin-of-Ice saw this, he turned and ran.

  Gull-Caw roared out his anger at this betrayal. Then, seeing Eggtusk remorselessly approaching, he yowled like a fox cub. He dropped his useless thunder-stick and turned to run, but he stumbled and fell on the ground.

  And now Eggtusk was over him.

  The great Bull reared up, raising his huge tree-trunk legs high in the air. His deformed tusk glistened, dripping with his own blood; he raised his trunk and trumpeted so loud his voice echoed off the icebergs of the distant ocean.

  Silverhair reared back, terrified of him herself.

  Eggtusk reached down and wrapped his trunk around the wriggling Lost. He lifted the fat body effortlessly. Eggtusk squeezed, the immense muscles of his trunk wrapped tightly around the Lost's greasy torso. Silverhair could see the Lost's eyes bulge, his short pink tongue protrude.

  Then Eggtusk threw Gull-Caw into the air. The Lost briefly flew, yelling, his fat limbs writhing, his smooth, ugly skin smeared with Eggtusk's blood.

  The Lost landed heavily on his belly; Silverhair heard the crack of bone.

  But still Gull-Caw tried to raise himself, to crawl away, to reach with a bloodied forelimb for his thunder-stick.

  Eggtusk leaned forward and knelt on the Lost's back.

  The Lost screamed as that great weight bore down. Silverhair heard the crunch of ribs and vertebrae. The Lost's scream turned to a liquid gurgle, and blood gushed from his mouth.

  Then Eggtusk drove a tusk through his neck, pinning him to the ground.

  The Lost twitched once, twice more. Then he was still.

  12

  The Kettle Hole

  EGGTUSK PULLED HIS TUSK from the body, shaking it to free it of the limp remnant flesh of the Lost. He rooted for the thunder-stick. He curled his trunk-fingers around the black, spindly thing, and lifted it high in the air. "It feels cold."