Silverhair

by Stephen Baxter

  WHEN HE DIED he — or she — must have been about the same age as Croptail. The scavengers and the frost had left little of the youngster's skin and fur, and the cartilage, tendon, and ligament had been stripped from the bones, which were separated and scattered. Some of the bones bore teeth marks, and some had been broken open, she saw, by a wolf or fox eager to suck the nourishing, fatty marrow from inside.

  He must have been dead for months.

  She touched the scattered bones with her feet, in a brief moment of Remembering. But she knew she could not linger. For ahead of her, she saw now — between herself and the glimmering surface of the ponds — was a field full of stripped and scattered bones.

  She walked forward with caution and dread.

  Soon there were so many bones, so badly scattered, it was impossible even to pick out individuals. Still, she could see from their size that most of those who had died here had been youngsters — even infants. As she approached the ponds, the bones were larger — just as dead, but the bones of older calves and adults.

  The tundra here was badly trampled, and all but stripped bare of grass and shrubs; even months of growth hadn't been enough for it to recover. The bones, too, were badly scattered and trampled. She found crushed skulls, ribs smashed and scored with the marks of mammoth soles. And she saw snapped-off tusks, evidence of brief and bitter battles.

  There had been little Remembering here, she saw with sadness. It was as the Cycle teaches: Where water vanishes, sanity soon follows.

  It was becoming horribly clear what had happened in this place.

  As the pressure to find water had grown, so the discipline of this Family had broken down. Probably the youngest — pushed away from the water holes by their older siblings, even their parents, and too small anyway to reach the water through thick ice with their little tusks — had gone first. Then the oldest and weakest of the adults.

  The diminishing survivors had trampled over the bodies of their relatives — perhaps even digging through the fallen corpses to get to the precious liquid — until they, in their turn, had succumbed.

  It had been a rich time for the scavengers and the cubs of Aglu.

  The destruction was not thorough; few of the bones close to the water had been gnawed by the wolves, she saw. But then, there had been no need to root in rotting corpses for sustenance; the wolves had only to wait for another mammoth to fall and offer them warm, fresh meat and marrow.

  At last she reached the ponds at the heart of this grisly tableau. The ponds brimmed, their surfaces thick with green summer life, swarms of insects buzzing over their surfaces. Their fecundity mocked the mammoths who must have come here in the depths of the dry winter, desperate for the water that could have kept them alive.

  Silverhair realized that, but for the wisdom of Owlheart, her own Family might have succumbed like this.

  Silverhair stood tall and surveyed the tundra. The land was teeming with life, the hum of insects, the lap of water, the cries of birds and small mammals.

  But nowhere was there the voice of a mammoth.

  With these bones, Silverhair knew at last that the fears of Lop-ear and Wolfnose were confirmed. Ten thousand years after Longtusk had led his Family here, there were no more mammoths on the Island. The winter's dryness had taken the last of the Families — the last but her own.

  And now those few survivors were in the hands of the remorseless Lost.

  She was alone: the only mammoth in all the world who was alive, and still free to act.

  She shivered, for she knew that all of her people's history funneled through her mind and heart now. If she failed, then so would the mammoths, for all time.

  ...And yet, hadn't she already failed? In her foolishness she had ignored the teaching of the Cycle, and had gone to seek out the Lost. By doing that she had made them aware of the existence of her Family — had caused the deaths of Eggtusk and Lop-ear and Snagtooth and Owlheart, and the trapping of Foxeye and her cubs — all of it was her fault.

  She sank to the bone-littered ground, heavy with despair.

  Alone, desolate, with no Matriarch to guide her — as she'd been trained since she was a calf — she turned to the Cycle.

  Mammoths have no gods, no devils. That is why they find it so hard to comprehend the danger posed by the Lost. Instead, mammoths accept their place in the great rhythms of the world, their place in past and future, as Earth's long afternoon winds through the millennia.

  But mammoths have existed for a very, very long time; and, the wisdom goes, nothing that happens today is without precedent in the past. Somewhere in the Cycle lies the answer to any question. Everybody alive is descended from somebody smart enough to survive the past: that is the underlying message of the Cycle. But you must not worship your ancestors. The sole purpose of your ancestors' existence was your life. And the sole purpose of your life is your calves.

  Somehow she felt comforted. Even in this place of death, she was not alone; she had the wisdom of all her ancestors back to Kilukpuk, the growing heavy warmth of the creature in her womb, the promise that her calves would one day roam the Sky Steppe.

  And that promise, she realized, could be kept only if Foxeye and the calves were still alive. For it seemed there was no other mammoth Family left anywhere in the world, no other Family that could populate that fabulous land of the future.

  In that case, it was up to Silverhair — the last free mammoth — to save her Family from the Lost. She would make her way to the south of the Island, to the foul nest of the Lost. And this time she would enter it, not as a weakened, starved captive, but strong and free. She would destroy Skin-of-Ice and all his works. She would keep her promise to Foxeye and free her Family. And then...

  And then, the Cycle would guide her once more into the unknown future.

  Treading carefully between the scattered heaps of bones, she resumed her steady march south.

  19

  The Undersea Tundra

  AT LAST, AFTER MANY EMPTY DAYS, she reached the southern coast.

  Once more she tramped along the narrow shingle beach. The sky was littered with scattered, glowing clouds, and the calm, flat seascape of floating ice pans perfectly mirrored the sky. Brown kelp streamers lay thickly on the moist stones.

  She moved with great caution as she neared the site of the Lost nest, and listened hard for the clattering flap of the light-bird. Her heart pumped. She knew that her best chance would be to surprise the Lost, to charge into their camp and overwhelm them with her flashing tusks.

  But there was no noise save the washing of the sea, no smell save the rich salt brine.

  No sign of the Lost.

  Her plans and speculations dissipated as she reached the nest site.

  The camp was abandoned. Only a few blackened scars on the beach showed where the Lost had built their fires; only a few rudimentary shelters remained to show where the Lost had hidden from the rain and wind.

  Silverhair ached with frustration. She had been prepared for battle here, and there was no battle to be had. Her blood fizzed through her veins, and her tusks itched with the need to impale the soft belly of a Lost.

  She found the stakes to which she had been pinned for so long, still stained black with her blood. And she found the web of black rope that had trapped Foxeye. Rust-brown calf hair was caught in the web. She held the hair to her mouth.

  She could taste Sunfire. The Family had been brought here, then.

  There was a clatter of whirling wings. She turned, raised her trunk, and trumpeted her defiance.

  The noise was indeed the light-bird. But it was far away, she saw: on the other side of the Channel, in fact, hovering over the Mainland, which was clear of fog and storm at last; its ugly noise was brought to her by the vagaries of the breezes.

  She understood what had happened. The Lost had returned to the Mainland, from whence they had come.

  There was no sign that the Family had died here; if such a slaughter had taken place, the beach would be littered w
ith bones and hair and scraps of flesh and skin. Then — if they were not dead — the mammoths must have been taken to the Mainland too.

  If she was to save them, that was where Silverhair must go.

  SHE WALKED DOWN THE BEACH and stood at the edge of the Channel between Island and Mainland.

  In stark contrast to the dry colors of the late summer landscape, a wide stretch of sea was still white: packed solid by flat ice. Along the shoreline, however, was a wide band of clear water interspersed with stranded icebergs, many of them grotesquely shaped by continual melting and refreezing. Ivory gulls perched on the highest bergs, and beside the smaller blocks lodged on the tide-line ran little groups of turnstone and sanderling. The wading birds pecked at Crustacea among the litter of kelp. The best feeding place for the creatures of the sea was the ice-edge, where the ice meets the open sea. She could see many murres working there, their high-pitched calls echoing as their thick bills bobbed into the water. The cries of the birds were overlaid with the deep, powerful breathing of beluga — white whales, their sleek bodies easily as massive as Silverhair's, and capped by long, spiraling tusks — and narwal, mottled gray, pods of them cruising the ice-edge or diving beneath the ice itself.

  A large bearded seal broke the surface near the coast, regarded Silverhair with large, sad eyes, then ducked beneath the ice-strewn water once more.

  To get to the Mainland, Silverhair would have to cross this teeming water-world.

  She remembered standing on this shore with Lop-ear—her reluctance even to dip her trunk in the sea, his playful calls to the Calves of Siros.

  Once, Longtusk had crossed this Channel to bring his Kin to the Island. It had been a great migration, with thousands of mammoths delivered to safety. But the Cycle was silent about how Longtusk did it. Some said he flew across the water. If Silverhair could fly now, she would.

  But on one point the Cycle was absolutely clear: Longtusk himself did not survive the passage.

  Today, then, she must outdo Longtusk himself.

  Silverhair gathered her courage. She stepped forward.

  Thin landfast ice crunched around her feet. The water immediately soaked through the thick hair over her legs, and its chill reached her skin. She could feel the water seeping up the hairs dangling from her belly, and more ice broke around her chest.

  She stumbled, and suddenly the water flooded over her chest and back, and forced its way into her mouth. She scrambled backward, coughing, a spray of water erupting from her mouth. But she lost her footing again and slipped sideways, and suddenly her head was immersed.

  She fought brief panic.

  She stood straight and lifted her head out of the water, opened her mouth and took a deep draught of air. The water felt tight around her chest, like a band of ice.

  Dread flooded her. She remembered the stream of runoff that had almost killed her as a calf. She had been so small then, and the stream — which she could probably ford easily now — had been a lethal torrent, no less intimidating than the Channel that faced her now. She longed to turn and flee back to the land, to abandon this quest.

  But she knew this was only the beginning.

  Deliberately she took another step forward. The ice, cracking, brushed against her chest. She lifted her head back as far as she could go, trying to keep her eyes and mouth out of the water. But at last the water was too deep, and it closed over her head.

  The cold was shocking, like a physical blow, so intense it made her gasp.

  She forced herself to open her eyes.

  The water was gray-green, and its surface was a glimmering sheet above her. She could see floating ice, thin gray slabs of it over her head.

  She thrust her trunk through the surface so that it protruded from the water. She blew hard to clear her trunk of water, and sucked in deep lungfuls of clean, salty air. She could feel her chest drag against the heavy pressure of the water, which was trying, it seemed, to crush her ribs like a trampled egg. But she could breathe.

  She was floating in the water, submerged save for her trunk, her body hair waving around her. Instinctively she surged forward, dragging at the water with her forelegs, kicking with her hind legs. Soon she could see she was pushing through the clumps of ice that littered the surface, and the air was whistling easily into her lungs.

  All she had to do was keep this up for the unknown time it would take to cross the Channel — and overcome the savage current and whatever other dangers might lurk in the deeper water — and emerge, exhausted, onto a beach crawling with Lost...

  Enough. She clung to the Cycle: You can only take one breath at a time. Her other problems could wait until she faced them.

  On she swam, into the silent dark, alone.

  THE SUN WAS LOW TO THE WEST, and it showed as a glimmering disk suspended above the water's rippling surface. She knew that as long as she kept the sun to her right side, she would continue to head south, toward the Mainland.

  Away from the coast the pack ice formed a more solid mass, though there were still leads of open water, and holes broken through by melting, or perhaps by seals and bears.

  She took a deep breath, pulled down her trunk, and ducked beneath the ice. She would have to swim underwater between the airholes as if she were a seal herself.

  She drifted under a ceiling of ice that stretched as far as she could see. A carpet of green-brown algae clung to the ceiling, turning the light a dim green; but in places where the algae grew less thinly, the light came through a clearer blue-white.

  And there were creatures grazing on this inverted underwater tundra: tiny shrimp-like creatures that clung to the algae ceiling, and comb jellies that drifted by, trailing long tentacles. She could see that the tentacles were coated with fine, hair-like cilia that pulsed in the current, sparkling with fragmented color.

  The comb jellies, unperturbed by the strange, clumsy intruder, sailed off into the darker water like the shadows of clouds.

  She approached an airhole. The sunlit water under the hole was bright with dust. But when she drew near she saw that the "dust" was a crowd of tiny, translucent animals. She reached the airhole and her head bobbed out of the water's chill, oily calm, into the chaotic clamor of light above—

  And a polar bear's upraised paw cuffed at her head.

  Silverhair trumpeted in alarm.

  The bear, just as startled, slithered backward over the ice floe, its black eyes fixed on this unexpected intruder.

  Silverhair panted, her breath frosting. "Sorry I'm not a fat seal for you," she said. And she took another deep breath and ducked back into the sea's oleaginous gloom.

  The going got harder as she headed farther out to sea.

  The ice was very thick here, and huge water-carved blocks and pinnacles were suspended from the ceiling. Salty brine, trapped within the ice, was leaking down to cause this strange, beautiful effect. It was like swimming through a series of caves.

  She had to swim an alarmingly long way between airholes.

  Once, a seal fearlessly approached Silverhair. It seemed to swim with barely a flick of its sleek body — an embarrassing comparison to Silverhair's untidy scrambling — and the ringed pattern of its skin rippled in the water. The seal studied her with jet-black eyes, then turned and swam lazily into the murky distance.

  She neared the ice-edge with relief, for she would be able to breathe continually when she passed it. But there was a great deal of activity here. She glimpsed the white forms of beluga whales sliding in a neat diamond formation through the water. Occasionally there were the brief, spectacular dives of birds hunting fish, brief explosions from the world of light and air above into this calm darkness.

  She drove herself on, past the ice-edge, and into open water.

  There was no ice above her now, and no bottom visible beneath her, and she soon left behind the busy life of the ice-edge: there was just herself, alone, suspended in an unending three-dimensional expanse of chill, resisting water.

  The current here, far from the frict
ion of the banks of the Channel, was much stronger, and she struggled to keep to her course. As she swam on, she could feel the heat of her body leaching out into the unforgiving sea.

  As her warmth leaked away, her energy seemed to dissipate with it.

  It was as if this infinity of murky, chill water was the only world she had ever known: as if the world above of air and sunlight and snow, of play and love and death, was just some gaudy dream she had enjoyed before waking to this bleak reality...

  Suddenly her trunk filled with water. She coughed, expelling the water through her mouth. She scrabbled at the water until she was able to raise her face and mouth above the surface. She opened her mouth to take a deep, wheezing breath, and glimpsed a deep blue sky.

  She must have weakened — let herself sink — perhaps even, bizarrely, slept for a heartbeat.

  But already she was sinking again.

  She continued to kick, but her legs were exhausted. And when she tried to raise her trunk, she couldn't reach the air. The surface was receding from her, slow as a setting sun.

  Waterlogged, she was sinking. And hope seeped out of her with the last of her warmth. She would die in this endless waste of water, she and her calf.

  So the Cycle, after all, culminated in a lie: there would be no rescue for her Family, no glowing future for the mammoths on the Sky Steppe.

  She found herself thinking of Lop-ear, that first time they had come to the southern coast: how, in the sunshine, he had teased her and tried to goad her into the water, and told her tall stories of the Calves of Siros. If she had shared Lop-ear's gift for original thinking, was there any way she could have avoided this fate?

  ...The Calves of Siros. Suddenly, sinking in the darkness and the cold, she had an idea.

  SHE TRIED TO REMEMBER the sounds Lop-ear had made when he had called for the Calves of Siros. She had to get it right; she had only one lungful of air, and would get only one chance at this.