Icebones

by Stephen Baxter

  "Your name will be Spiral," Icebones said. "For your tusks twist around in spirals, the one like the other."

  "Spiral." The Cow wandered away, admiring her own tusks.

  Her sister made to follow Spiral as usual, but she hesitated. "Icebones, what about my mother?"

  It is not my place to name these mammoths, Icebones thought. I am not their Matriarch, or their mother. But if not me, who? She thought of the smell of the older Cow, her tangy, smoky musk. "Autumn," Icebones said impulsively. "For she smells of the last, delicious grass of summer."

  The Cow seemed pleased. "And my other sister, the one with calf?"

  "I would call her Breeze—"

  "For her hair is loose and whips in the wind, like the grass on a windblown steppe!"

  "Yes." This little one isn't so bad, Icebones thought, when she gets away from her foolish sister. "Will you tell them for me?"

  "Yes, I will."

  "And what about you?"

  "Me?" The Cow was transfixed, as if she hadn't imagined such an honor could be applied to her. "You choose, Icebones."

  Icebones probed at the young Cow's mouth, and tasted sweetness. "Shoot," she said at last, "for you taste of young, fresh grass."

  The Cow seemed delighted. "Thank you, Icebones... But what about her?"

  She meant the Ragged One, who grazed alone as usual, irritably dragging at grass tufts and willow tips, her rough hair a cloud of captured sunlight around her.

  "She is the Ragged One," said Icebones. "No other name would suit."

  But the little Cow had already scampered away, after her sister.

  THEY APPROACHED THE LIP of the Mountain-base cliff. The wall was heavily eroded, and very steep — what they could see of it; none of them cared to approach the edge.

  At last Icebones found a steep gully that cut deep into the ground. Its floor was strewn with boulders and frost-shattered rubble, as if a river had once flowed there. It would not be an easy route, but this cleft, cutting deep into the rock behind the cliffs, offered a way down to the plains below.

  Cautiously, reluctantly, the mammoths filed into the gully.

  The rock that made up the walls was gray-red and very hard, its surface covered with sharp-edged protruding lumps, speckled with glimmering minerals of green and black. Moss grew in cracks in the walls and over some of the loose rocks. The wind tumbling off the Fire Mountain's broad flanks poured through this gap, and mercilessly sucked out the mammoths' heat. Icebones could hear the rumbles of complaint echoing back from the tall, sheer walls.

  A pair of birds flew up and down the gully, graceful, large-winged. Perhaps they were swallows.

  The mammoths found a place where the rocky floor was broken by small crevices, which provided shelter for succulent grass clumps and even herbs. The mammoths fell on this feast and ate greedily.

  Leaving the feeding mammoths, Icebones came to a broad ledge that led out to the face of the cliff itself. She walked along the ledge, curious, probing at the smooth rock with her trunk... and the cliff face opened out around her.

  She realized that looking down from the Mountain's summit she had had no real idea of the vast size of this cliff. Seen from here, there was only the cliff: a wall of blue-red rock that rose above her and out of sight, and fell away beneath her to a blur of red tinged with gray-green that might have been the ground. There was cloud both above her and below: a layer of pink-gray cirrus far above, and a smooth rippling sea below.

  The world was simple: cloud above and below, and this hard vertical cliff face, like an upturned landscape.

  She spotted a waterfall, where an underground river burst out of the rock face into the air. But the water fell with an eerie slowness, as if the air was too thick to allow it to pass, and it broke up into myriad red-glimmering droplets that dispersed in the air. This was a waterfall that would never reach the ground, she realized.

  ...And then it struck her how high she was here, higher than clouds, higher than birds — and how unprotected. Mammoths were plain animals, unused to heights. Vertigo overwhelmed her, and she inched back along the ledge toward the others, and safety.

  As they neared the base of the gully, it began to broaden and flatten, its eroded walls diminishing. But its floor was littered with rocks. The mammoths had to work their way past boulders which towered over them, and under their feet was a litter of loose rock, scree and talus that sometimes gave way under an incautious step. But the big rocks were pitted and carved by the wind, and many of the looser small rocks underfoot were worn smooth by wind or water also.

  Icebones was the first to break out of the gully, and walk beyond the cliff. She stepped forward carefully, relishing the openness around her. Sandpipers fled from her, screeching in protest.

  She found herself walking over dwarf willows, a flattened, ground-hugging forest that crunched under her feet. A red-black river meandered sluggishly across a ruddy plain. Two cranes stood by the river, still and watchful, as many creatures of the steppe habitually were. As she approached a longspur, it sat as still as a stone on its nest of woven grass, watching her with black eyes. She could see the bird's eggs, which glowed with a smooth pink light.

  Away from the river small lakes stood out, purple-black. In the larger ponds Icebones could see a gleam of green: cores of ice that survived from the last winter, and would probably persist to the next.

  In the shimmering, complex light, this land at the foot of the cliff was a bowl of life. She saw more willows and sedges, their green vivid against the underlying crimson of the rock. And even the bare outcropping rock was stained yellow or orange by lichen.

  It was a typical steppe. It was a place of stillness and watchfulness, for the land was ungenerous. But, unlike the bare wall of the Mountain, this land was alive, and Icebones felt her soul expand into its familiar silence.

  She turned and looked back toward the cliff. Its base was fringed by conifer forest. Compared to the mammoths grazing at their bases, these trees grew very tall, Icebones saw immediately: they were slender, but they soared fifty, even a hundred times the height of a mammoth, so that their upper branches were a blur of greenery.

  But the trees, huge as they were, were utterly dwarfed by the wall of rock that banded the base of the Fire Mountain.

  Bright red, extensively fluted and carved by the wind, the tremendous cliff soared high above the broken ground. The columns and vertical chasms of its face glowed a deep burnt orange in the light of the setting sun. The gully the mammoths had climbed down was a black crack, barely visible.

  So immense was its length that the cliff looked like a flat, unbending wall, marching from horizon to horizon. The cliff was a wall that cut the sky in half, and it was oppressive, crushing: like a wall of time, she thought, separating her from her Family, like death, which would one day part her from everything she knew and loved.

  THE MAMMOTHS STAYED at the base of the cliff for a night, grazing and resting.

  The sun, easing west, passed over the cliff's rim not long after midday, and shadows spilled over the ground. The cliff turned purple-red, and the air immediately started to feel colder. Although the day was only half gone — a glance at the bright pale pink sky told Icebones that — here at the foot of this mighty barrier it was already twilight. She noticed now how spindly the conifer trees were, as if they were straining for the light they could never hope to reach.

  And in the dawn, with the sky barely paled by the rising sun, the light caught the top of the cliff, so that a great band of orange rock shone high in the sky directly above her. It was like a smeared-out rocky sun, and it actually cast a little light — though no warmth — over the night-darkened plains at the cliff's base.

  It was a relief to walk away from the cliff's brooding mass, and out of its pool of shadow.

  5

  The Ocean of the North

  THE MAMMOTHS WORKED their way steadily northward, seeking the ocean.

  The going was slow, for the land, folded and broken, was covered b
y lobes and ridges and collapsed rocky tunnels, and the mammoths were frequently forced to turn away from their northern heading. Icebones was acutely aware that every diversion lengthened the journey they must complete.

  But she was not aware of any change of the season. The last she recalled of the Island it had been autumn — but that fading memory seemed to have no relevance here. The mammoths were not shedding any winter coat, so she supposed it must be late summer or autumn. But she sensed no drawing-in of the nights, no gathering cold. Perhaps even time ran slowly here, slow as falling water, slow as coagulating blood.

  The days wore away.

  AT LENGTH THE MAMMOTHS reached a new land.

  It was an ocean of dust: a flat red plain, a line of ice close to the northern horizon, a dome of pinkish sky in which the small sun sailed. Where bare rock was exposed, it was dark and tinged with blue or purple, sheets of it eroded almost flat.

  The higher land they were leaving, to the south, curved in a great arc, a coast for this sea of dust. The "shore" was littered with gravel bars and drifts of red dust.

  There were structures on this higher ground — blocky, straight-edged shelters that were obviously the work of the Lost.

  The mammoths looked around these buildings desultorily. They were boxes pierced by straight-edged holes. Dust had drifted up against the walls of the buildings, and had filtered inside, covering their inner floors with a fine red carpet. The mammoths' broad feet left shallow cone-shaped tracks in the dust, which flowed quickly back where they had disturbed it. Near the buildings a stand of trees poked out of the bright red ground. They might have been oaks. But they were clearly long dead, their bare branches skeletal and gaunt and their trunks hollowed out, and any last leaves that had fallen had long been buried or driven away by the wind.

  The Ragged One had walked a little way further to the north, on to the dust plain. She was probing at something black and ropy on the ground. It was clearly dead, and it crumbled and broke.

  "See this?" she said to Icebones. "Seaweed. Once the sea covered all this dust and sand. But now the sea is far away. Look — you can see where the shore used to be."

  Icebones made out rippled ridges in the sand, the footprint of the vanished sea.

  "And look at this." The Ragged One walked a little deeper into the plain. She came to a set of smooth, rounded shapes that protruded from the dust. She blew on the shapes with her trunk and exposed wood, scuffed and pitted by windblown sand.

  "More work of the Lost," said Icebones.

  "Yes." The Ragged One dug her tusks under one of the objects and, with a heave, flipped it on its back, sending dust flying. It was like a bird's nest, sculpted in smooth wood. "The Lost would sit in such things as these, and float upon the water. As was their right. For they made these floating things — and they made the ocean itself, brought the water here to cover the land, brought the fish and worms and even the seaweed to live here. But now the world is drying like a corpse — the water has gone—"

  "And so have the Lost."

  "Yes. And so have the Lost." The Ragged One ran her trunk tip longingly over the eroded lines of the stranded boat. The red dust had stained the pale ivory of her tusks a subtle, rusty pink.

  Icebones felt a sudden surge of sympathy for her. She reached out and wrapped her trunk around the head of the other, ignoring the now-familiar stale stink. "Come," she said. "We must cross this dried-out seabed. If we start, the others will follow."

  Briefly the Ragged One closed her eyes, rumbling a kind of contentment at Icebones's touch. Then, sharply, she pulled away. "Yes. We must go to the water."

  Side by side, Icebones and the Ragged One began to plod across the bone-dry plain.

  THE LAND REMAINED utterly flat, a beach left stranded by a last fatal tide. When Icebones walked, windblown dust would billow around her, as if dancing in memory of the waters that had once washed over this place.

  When she walked over more compact dust or exposed rock, she felt her footsteps ring through the rocky foundation of this ancient sea. And she could tell that this plain, overlaid by the shrunken sea to the north, encompassed the whole top half of this world, a wasteland that stretched all the way to the north pole and down almost to the equator. It was remarkable, enormous, intimidating, and by comparison she was like a beetle crawling across the textured footprint of a mammoth.

  If the water was gone, then this had become a sea of light.

  Broad, shallow, wave-like dunes crossed from horizon to horizon. As the sun descended, the low light shone brightly from the west-facing slopes of the dunes, and shadows lengthened behind them, so that Icebones was surrounded by bands of shining ochre light. And when she looked at the soft ground at her feet she saw how each dust grain shone gray or red, as if defying the dying of the light.

  Here and there rocks littered the surface. Some of the rocks were half buried by dust, and their buried edges were generally sharper than those exposed to the erosion of wind and rain. She learned caution where she stepped, not wishing to cut her foot pads. Sometimes the remnants of living things clung to an exposed rock: fronds of dried-up, blackened seaweed, or small white shells.

  The dust was thick and clinging, but it had its uses. All the mammoths were plagued by ticks and lice — Icebones suspected the Lost had groomed them, keeping them clear of such parasites — and she had to show them how to rub dust and dirt into their skin to scrub away the irritants.

  It seemed very strange to have to teach a calf's skills to a tall old Cow like Autumn.

  But there was nothing to drink here, nothing to eat. The dust clogged her trunk and throat, sucking out the moisture, making her even more thirsty. The dust stank, of blood and iron.

  As they continued to walk steadily north the character of the ground changed. In places the land shone, coated with fine flat sheets of some white, glittering substance. When she tasted this, she found it was salt, another relic of the vanished sea.

  Soon her footfalls were breaking through an upper layer of dust, exposing frosty, damp mud, rust-colored. There was water here, not far beneath the surface.

  And now there was vegetation, grass sprouting out of the dirty red mud. It was nothing but tough dune grass. But the mammoths, who had eaten nothing for half a day, fell on the wiry yellow stuff as if it was the finest browse.

  Gulls hopped among the spindly grass tufts or circled overhead, their caws thin and clear in the cold, still air. Icebones thought the gulls seemed huge — their bobbing heads rose higher than her own belly hairs — much larger than any birds she recalled from the Island.

  At last the land sloped down sharply, forming a beach strewn with rust-red gravel and littered with scraps of dusty frost.

  The mammoths stepped forward cautiously.

  Beyond the beach, just a few paces away, water lapped, black and oily. It was a half-frozen ocean. Here and there ice sheets clung to the beach. Further out floes of ice drifted on the water, colliding with slow, grinding crashes. Some of the ice was stained brown, perhaps where floes had been flipped over by bears or seals, exposing the weeds that crusted their lower surface. Stretches of exposed water made a complex pattern of cracks and scrapings like the wrinkled skin of a very old mammoth, shaped by wind and current. The exposed water was as black as night. Here and there traces of fog and even windblown snow curled tiredly.

  Birds wheeled exuberantly. She spied huge-winged kittiwakes, fulmars and jet-black guillemots. Every so often one of them would plunge into the dark water, seeking plankton or cod.

  There was more life here, crowded close to this shore, than anywhere else Icebones had seen on this small world.

  She heard an angry screeching. There was a bloody carcass on the ice — perhaps it was a seal, or even a bear cub. Petrels soared over it trailing arched wings, their tails fanned out to ward off rivals. Landing on the ice, they tucked their heads right inside the corpse, emerging with their heads and necks gleaming bright red, only their pale, angry eyes showing white.

 
; The light of the pinkish sky turned the ice rust red, the exposed water a deep purple-black. The sea rolled with huge, languid waves, much taller and slower than anything on the oceans around the Island. The ice seemed to moan and wail like a living thing, as, riding the ocean's tremendous waves, it warped and cracked.

  In this setting even the mammoths looked strange, transformed; they were stolid blocks of fur and fat, their tusks shining red-pink, their bodies surrounded by crimson-glowing halos where the sunlight caught their guard hairs.

  This was not like the coast of the Island. To Icebones this rust-red shore was a strange and alien scene indeed.

  She spotted a bear, swimming through a lead of open water. His head was white as bone, and he cut steadily through the black water, trailing a fine wake behind him. He reached an ice floe and, in a single powerful lunge, pulled himself out of the water, his back feet catching the lip of the ice without hesitation. He shook himself, and water flew off his fur in a cloud of spray.

  The bear turned and glared at the mammoths with small black eyes.

  His fur caught the light, so that subtle reds and pink-whites gleamed from his guard hairs. Icebones saw that his hips were wider than his shoulders, his long neck sinuous, so that he was a wedge of muscle and power that faced her with a deadly concentration. And he was huge, she saw: much larger than any bear she ever saw off the coast of the Island.

  He crossed to the other side of his floe, his great clawed paws swinging, and slid back into the water, silently.

  She was in a hunting ground. Her underfur prickled, and she raised her trunk suspiciously.

  She stepped down to the water's edge. A few paces from the sea, petrels had dug their burrows into the unfrozen earth. When Icebones trod on a burrow inadvertently, collapsing it, a soft-plumed adult bird blinked up at her in silent protest.