Silverhair

by Stephen Baxter

  The Lost seemed surprised by the ability of the mammoths to take the cage apart, and they were arguing, perhaps trying to decide whether to use their thunder-sticks.

  Silverhair tugged Foxeye to the calves' cage. The heavy chains at Foxeye's neck and legs clanked, trailing in the mud, and as they approached, the Lost who had goaded Croptail ran off.

  The calves were not chained up, and Silverhair and Foxeye simply lifted the cage up and off them. Croptail and Sunfire rushed to their mother; Sunfire immediately found a teat to suckle.

  Silverhair made sure she threw the cage impressively far before letting it crash to the mud. It collapsed with a clatter of metal, sending more of the Lost fleeing.

  She nudged Foxeye. "Come on. We can't wait here."

  Croptail poked his head out from under his mother's belly hair. "What's the plan, Silverhair?"

  No plan, she thought. I'm no Lop-ear... "We're just going to walk right out of here. Don't be afraid."

  She turned and faced the Lost. She looked around at their empty faces, their skinny bodies, their dangling jaws. She had the impression that these were not truly evil creatures — at least, not all of them. Just — Lost.

  "Listen to me," she said. "Perhaps you can understand some of what I say. I am not going to permit you to take my Family away from their home. And if you try to stop us, I promise you, your families will have to perform many Rememberings."

  But the Lost merely stared at her trumpeting, foot-stamping and rumbling, as if it weren't a language at all.

  She turned back to her Family. "Go," she said. "You first, Croptail. That way — out to the tundra. We won't go through the City again. We'll make for the shore."

  "Then what?" demanded Croptail.

  "Just do as I say."

  Bemused, frightened, Croptail obeyed. Soon the little group of mammoths was gliding slowly toward the empty tundra.

  AS THEY WALKED STEADILY, Silverhair stared at the decrepit buildings, the rows of silent, staring Lost. "This is a hellish place," she said.

  "Yes," said Foxeye. "I've been watching them. I think they want to turn the whole Earth into a gigantic City like this. Soon there will be nothing living but the Lost and the rodents that scurry for their scraps..."

  She told Silverhair how the mammoths had been brought here.

  After their capture in the ice chasm, they had been brought back to the beach and bound up tightly with ropes and chains. Harnesses had been fixed around them, and they had been attached to the light-bird with its whirling wings — and, one by one, lifted into the sky.

  "Mammoths aren't meant to fly, sister," said Foxeye, and Silverhair could hear the dread in her voice. "The Lost were taken away too. I think the ones who attacked us — Skin-of-Ice and the others — had been somehow stranded on the Island. The light-birds came for them when the storms cleared from the Mainland."

  "What do the Lost intend now?"

  "They don't seem to want to kill us. Not right away. They have plenty to eat here, Silverhair; they don't need our flesh, nor our bones to burn..."

  "There was rope fixed to your cage."

  "Yes. I think they were going to move us again. Fly us. Perhaps take us far from the tundra. Somewhere where there are many, many Lost, more Lost than all the mammoths who ever lived. And they would come and see us in our cages, and hit us with sticks, for they were never, ever going to let us out of there again."

  "Foxeye—"

  "I'd have given up my calves," Foxeye blurted. "If I could have spoken to the Lost, if I thought they would have spared me, I'd have given up the calves. There: what do you think of me now?"

  Silverhair rubbed her sister's filth-matted scalp. "I think I got here just in time."

  The little group walked steadily onward, through the clutter of buildings, toward the tundra. Silverhair was dimly aware of more light-birds clattering over her head. She flinched, expecting an attack from that quarter. But none came. The birds seemed to be descending toward the City, and some of the Lost who had followed the mammoths were pointing up with their paws, muttering. Perhaps this was some new group of Lost, she thought; perhaps the Lost were divided amongst themselves.

  It scarcely mattered. What was important was that still none of them tried to stop her.

  Silverhair took one step after another, aware how little control she had over events, scarcely daring to hope she could take another breath. But they were still alive, and free. By Kilukpuk's hairy navel, she thought, this might actually work.

  But then there was a roar like an angry god, and everything fell apart.

  A Lost came running forward, face red with rage. In one paw he held a glinting flask of the clear, inflaming liquid. And he carried a thunder-stick, which he fired wildly.

  This was a new type of stick, Silverhair realized immediately: one that spoke not with a single shout, but with a roar, and lethal insects poured out in a great cloud. Even the other Lost were forced to scatter as those deadly pellets smacked into the mud, or turned the walls of the crude dwellings into splinters.

  The newcomer seemed to be berating the others. And he was turning the spitting nozzle of his thunder-stick toward the huddled Family.

  This Lost wasn't going to let the mammoths go; he would obviously rather destroy them.

  He was Skin-of-Ice.

  Silverhair didn't even think about it. She just lowered her head and charged.

  EVERYTHING SLOWED DOWN, as if she were swimming through thick, ice-cold water.

  She lowered her tusks, and he raised his thunder-stick, and she looked into his eyes. It was as if they were joined by that gaze, as if total communication was passing between their souls, as if there were nobody else in the universe but the two of them.

  She felt a stab of regret to have come so close to freedom. But in her heart she had known it would come to this moment, that she would not survive the day.

  If Skin-of-Ice had held his ground and used his thunder-stick, he would surely have killed her there and then. But he didn't. In the last heartbeat, as a mountain of enraged mammoth bore down on him, he panicked.

  Even as he made his thunder-stick roar, he fell backward and rolled sideways.

  Pain erupted in a line drawn across her face, chest, and leg, and she felt her blood spurt, warm. One of the projectiles passed clean through her mouth, in one cheek and out through the other, splintering a tooth.

  The pain was extraordinary.

  She could hear the screams of Lost and mammoths alike, smell the metallic stink of her own blood. But she was still alive, still moving.

  Skin-of-Ice was on the ground, scrabbling for his thunder-stick. She stood over him.

  Again, in the face of her courage and strength, he made the wrong decision. If he had abandoned the thunder-stick he might have escaped. But he did not. He had waited too long.

  Silverhair lowered her tusk and speared him cleanly through the upper hind leg.

  He screamed, and reached behind him to grab her tusk with his paws. She lifted her head, and Skin-of-Ice dangled on her tusk like a shred of winter hair, and she felt a fierce exultation.

  But in one paw he held the thunder-stick. It sprayed its deadly fire in the air. And he kicked; his foot smashed into her forehead, and with remarkable strength he dragged his injured leg free of her tusk.

  He fell more than twice his height to the ground.

  But then he was moving again, firing his thunder-stick. The watching Lost fled, yelling.

  Silverhair charged again.

  Skin-of-Ice brought the thunder-stick round to point at Silverhair. But he wasn't quick enough.

  As she reared over him a hail of stings poured into her foreleg. She could feel bone shatter, muscles rip to shreds; when she tried to put her weight on that leg, she stumbled.

  But she had him.

  She wrapped her strong trunk around his waist and, trumpeting her rage, hurled him into the air. Skin-of-Ice sailed high, twisting, writhing, and firing his thunder-stick. He fell heavily, and she heard a
cracking sound.

  Still he pushed himself up with his forelegs. She felt a flicker of admiration for his determination. But she knew it was the stubbornness of madness.

  She grabbed his hind foot with her trunk. She twisted, and heard bone crunch, ligaments snap. Skin-of-Ice screamed.

  She flipped him onto his back, like a seal landing a fish on an ice floe. He still had his thunder-stick, and he raised it at her. But the stick no longer spat its venom at her. She could see that it was twisted and broken.

  Skin-of-Ice hurled the useless stick away, his small face distended with purple rage. Her strength and endurance had, in the end, defeated even its ugly threat.

  He tried to rise, but she pushed him back with her trunk. Still he fought, clawing at her trunk as if trying to rip his way through her skin with his bare paws. She leaned forward and rested her tusk against his throat.

  For a heartbeat, as Skin-of-Ice fought and spat, she held him. She thought of those who had died at his hands: Owlheart, Eggtusk, Snagtooth, Lop-ear. And she remembered her own hot dreams of destroying this monster.

  A single thrust and it would be over.

  She released him.

  "You Lost are the dealers of death," she said heavily. "Not the mammoths."

  Still Skin-of-Ice tried to rise up to attack her. But other Lost came forward and dragged him back.

  There were Lost all around Silverhair now, and they were raising their thunder-sticks.

  She struggled to rise, to use her one good foreleg to lever herself upright. She could feel the wounds in her chest and leg tear wider, and the pain was sharp. But she would die on her feet.

  She wished she could reach her Family, entwine trunks with them one last time.

  She wondered why the Lost hadn't destroyed her already. She looked down at them. She saw they were hesitating; some of them had lowered their thunder-sticks.

  "...Silverhair. Stay still. They won't harm you now. It isn't your day to die, Silverhair..."

  It was — impossibly — the voice of an adult Bull.

  She turned. A Lost was coming toward her: a new kind, all in white. He held his cupped paws up to his mouth, and he was shouting at the other Lost, making them turn their thunder-sticks away.

  "...Don't be afraid. The Family will be safe. Nobody else will die today..."

  And with the Lost was a mammoth, without chains or ropes or any restraints, a mammoth who walked unhindered through the circle of thunder-sticks with this strange, posturing Lost.

  It was a Bull, with one limp and damaged ear.

  It was Lop-ear.

  21

  The Calves of Probos

  SILVERHAIR WALKED FORWARD over the soft, marshy ground of the Island.

  Autumn was coming. The sun had lost its warmth, and was once more sliding beneath the horizon each night. There was no true darkness yet, but there would be long hours of spectral, indigo twilight before the sun returned. The birches, willows, and other plants had started to turn to their autumn colors: crimson, ochre, yellow, vermilion, russet brown, and even gold. The air was peaceful, musty with the smell of leaves and fungus. But the nights had turned cold, the frost riming the ground. And the ponds had started to freeze again, from their edges; each night's increment of ice was marked by lines in the ice, like the growth rings of a tusk.

  The land was emptying. The first migrating birds were already starting to abandon the tundra for their winter homes to the south: great flocks of swans, geese, and sandpipers. Soon the silence of winter would return to the Island, and the summer's color and noise would be as remote as a dream.

  But this was like no other autumn. For Silverhair knew that the plain was barred to her by the walls the Lost had built around them: glass, Lop-ear had called this hard, clear stuff. And in the distance she could see teams of the Lost moving about the Island's tundra, on foot or in their strange clattering vehicles.

  Silverhair found a rich tuft of grass. She bent to pluck it up with her trunk, but as she tried to bend her knee, her damaged leg rippled with pain. The white stuff the strange Lost had wrapped around her leg — while Lop-ear had been steadily persuading her not to gore him — was still in place, but it was threadbare and dirty, and she could see blood seeping through it.

  Still, her leg was healing. There was no denying, the Lost were clever. Not wise — but clever.

  She heard a miniature trumpeting, a small rumble of protest. She glanced around. The calves were wrestling again; Sunfire, growing quickly, was almost as large as her brother now, and it was all Foxeye could do to separate them.

  After Silverhair's final battle with the Lost called Skin-of-Ice, the mammoths had been taken back to the Island across the Channel, in one of the peculiar floating metal bergs of the Lost. Then — under the gentle supervision of the Lost — the mammoths had walked north, to this glassy enclosure.

  The Family had never been so well fed, so safe from the attentions of predators. But Silverhair knew she would never be comfortable again, for she was living at the sufferance of the Lost.

  Even if they had given Lop-ear back to her.

  "...NOT ALL THE LOST ARE EVIL, Silverhair," Lop-ear was saying. "You must remember that. I've been observing them, trying to understand. Just as mammoths differ in personality, so do the Lost."

  "Lop-ear," she said reasonably, "they tried to kill you."

  "The actions of a few Lost don't reflect on the whole species. The Lost we encountered — Skin-of-Ice and his cronies — shouldn't even have been here on the Island. They are criminals. They were smuggling the clear liquid we saw them drink—"

  "The stuff that makes them crazy."

  "They were blown to the Island in a storm. They were stranded here for most of the summer by the storms on the Mainland. They were starving; they can't graze grass or hunt as the wolves can. They even tried to eat the meat of the ancient mammoths that emerge from the permafrost, but it made them ill. And so when they found us..."

  "The Cycle teaches us that the belly of a wolf is a noble grave," Silverhair growled. "Maybe that's true of the shriveled belly of a Lost too. It doesn't mean I have to welcome it.

  "Besides, it wasn't their butchery that bothered me. Lop-ear, the Lost tried to kill you for no reason other than a lust for blood. They would have tortured me until I submitted to them like poor Snagtooth, or until I died. How can we share a world with creatures like that?"

  "Because we must," said Lop-ear bluntly. "For the world is theirs. You have to understand, there are lots of — groups — among these Lost. And they pursue different goals.

  "First there was Skin-of-Ice and his gang of criminals, with their angry-making water, and their need to survive. When the weather broke, the criminals were rescued by another group, the workers from the City of the Lost. And the workers saw an opportunity in us. They didn't want to kill us or eat us, but they did think they could give us to others of their kind."

  "Give us to them? What for? Why?"

  "So we could be — displayed," he said. "To great groups of Lost, young and old—"

  Just as Foxeye had suspected. "So," Silverhair said bitterly, "the Lost can mock the creatures from whom they stole the planet."

  "Something like that, I suppose. But there was another group of Lost, who had been here on the Island long before all the others. They built the Nest of Straight Lines. They kept others away from the Island for years, and they didn't have any curiosity about what lay in the Island's interior. They just stayed put and did their work."

  "What work?"

  "How can I know that? You see, after the time of Longtusk, the Lost thought there were no more mammoths left anywhere in the world. They thought the Island was empty, and that's why, for half a Great-Year, they didn't even come looking for us.

  "And then there's another group — I know it's confusing, Silverhair — the ones who have saved us. And these Lost care about us.

  "Somehow they heard that we had been discovered by the criminals. They came here, found me, and saved my li
fe — I tell you, Silverhair, after I got away from Skin-of-Ice I was ready for Remembering, I was eating my hair and speaking gibberish to the lemmings — and then they came to the Mainland to search for the rest of the Family."

  "They were nearly too late," said Silverhair grimly.

  "That's true," he said. "With more time the workers from the City of the Lost would have flown the others away — or else killed them. If not for you. You saved them, Silverhair. You saved the future."

  "Only to deliver us into the paws of more Lost."

  He eyed her. "You still blame yourself, don't you?"

  "If I hadn't gone seeking out the Lost in that blundering way — if I'd listened to Eggtusk and Owlheart — they might still be alive now."

  "No," he said firmly. "The Lost would have found us anyway. They'd already discovered the body in the yedoma, remember. We could no more have evaded them than we could a swarm of mosquitoes, and the mammoths would have been destroyed anyway. What you did gave us enough warning to act, to save ourselves. And besides, these new Lost—"

  "These new Lost are different," she said with heavy sarcasm.

  "So they are," he said, exasperated. "Watch this." He trotted forward to the glass wall surrounding them, and touched it with his trunk.

  The wall shimmered, and filled with light.

  SILVERHAIR GASPED and stumbled backward.

  There was light all around her. A fat sun — brilliant, brighter than any Arctic sun — beat down from a washed-out brown-white sky. The ground was a baked plain, where black-leafed trees and stunted bushes struggled to grow. The horizon was muddied by a rippling shimmer of heated air. There was a smell of burning, far off on the breeze.

  This was a huge, old land, she suspected.

  Lop-ear was at her side. "Don't be alarmed. It isn't real. We're still on the Island, in the glass box on the tundra. And yet..."

  "What?"

  "And yet it is real. In a way. The Lost have made this thing, this strange powerful wall, so we could see this place, even smell its dust..."