Icebones

by Stephen Baxter

  "Very well. Spiral, you are our strength. Shall we begin the walk?"

  "We are ready, Matriarch."

  Icebones made the summons rumble, a long, drawn-out growl: "Let's go, let's go."

  Gradually their rumbles merged once more, as they tasted readiness on each other's breath. "We are ready." "We are together." "Let's go, let's go."

  Icebones strode forward, ignoring the pain in her shoulder — which, since it now affected only a small part of her greater, shared body, was as nothing. The other mammoths began to move with her, their trunks exploring the rocky red ground beneath their feet, just as a true Family should. Icebones felt affirmed, exulting.

  But as they climbed away from the valley, and as Icebones made out the high bleak land that still lay before them, she sensed that they would yet need to call on all their shared strength and courage if they were to survive.

  ...And then, clinging to an outcrop of rock at the fringe of this harsh southern upland, she found a fragment of hair: pale brown, ragged, snagged from some creature who had come this way. She pulled the hair loose with her trunk and tasted it curiously. Though it was soaked through, the hair had a stale, burning smell that she recognized immediately.

  The hair had belonged to the Ragged One.

  Part 3: Footfall

  The Story of the Great Crossing

  THE CYCLE IS MADE UP of the oldest stories in the world. It tells all that has befallen the mammoths, and its wisdom is as perfect as time can make it.

  But now I want to tell you one of the youngest stories in the Cycle. It is the story of how the mammoths came to the Sky Steppe.

  It is the story of Silverhair, who was the last Matriarch of the Old Steppe.

  It is the story of the first Matriarch of the Sky Steppe.

  It is a story of mammoths, and Lost.

  FOR GENERATIONS the last mammoths had lived on an Island. Silverhair was their Matriarch.

  The Lost were everywhere. But the Lost had never found the Island, and the mammoths lived undisturbed.

  No mammoth lived anywhere else. Not one.

  But now, at last, the Lost had come to the Island.

  Though most of these Lost showed no wish to hunt the mammoths or kill them or drive them away, they kept them in boxes and watched them with their predators' eyes, all day and all night.

  Silverhair knew that mammoths cannot share land with Lost.

  But Silverhair was old and tired. She had spent all her strength keeping her Family alive. She was in despair, and ashamed of her weakness.

  One night Kilukpuk came down from the aurora. And Kilukpuk said Silverhair must not be ashamed, for she had fought hard all her life. And she must not despair.

  Silverhair snorted. "This world is full of Lost. We have nowhere to live. What is there left for me but despair?"

  "But there is another world," Kilukpuk told her. "It is a place where there will be room for many mammoths. And mammoths will live there until the sun itself grows cold."

  Silverhair asked tiredly, "Where is this marvelous place?"

  And Kilukpuk said, "Why, have you forgotten your Cycle? It is the Sky Steppe."

  Silverhair knew about the Sky Steppe, of course. She had seen it float in the sky, bright and red — just as her world, which we call the Old Steppe, once floated in our sky, bright and blue. And, indeed, the Cycle promised that one day mammoths would walk free on the Sky Steppe.

  But Silverhair was weary and old, for she could not believe even mighty Kilukpuk. She said, "And how are the mammoths to get there? Will they sprout wings and fly like geese?"

  "No," said Kilukpuk gently. "There is a way. But it is hard."

  It would be the work of the Lost, said Kilukpuk. What else could it be? For the Lost owned the world, all of it.

  Calves would be taken from their mothers' bodies, unborn. They would be put in ice, and sent into the sky in shining seeds, and taken to the Sky Steppe. That way many calves could be carried, to be spilled out on the red soil of the Sky Steppe, as if being born.

  The bereft mothers would never know their calves, and the calves never know their mothers.

  This was very strange — typical of the Lost's eerie cleverness — and Silverhair could not understand. "How will the calves learn how to use their trunks, how to find water and food? If they have no Matriarch, who will lead and protect them?"

  "That is the second thing I have to tell you," said Kilukpuk. "And this too is very hard."

  And Kilukpuk said that Silverhair's calf — her only calf — would also be taken. For that calf, already half-grown, was to be Matriarch to all the new calves who would tumble from the shining seeds to the red soil. That calf, daughter of the last Matriarch of the Old Steppe, would be the first Matriarch of the Sky Steppe.

  "You must teach her, Silverhair," said Kilukpuk. "As I taught my Calves to speak, and to find water and food, and to live as a Family. You must teach her to be a Matriarch, so she can teach those who follow her."

  Silverhair spun around and scuffed the ground. "My calf is all I have. I will not give her up. How can I live?"

  But she knew that Kilukpuk was right.

  SILVERHAIR LISTENED to Kilukpuk's wisdom. And she passed on that wisdom to her calf. And, when the time came, she gave her calf to Kilukpuk, and the Lost.

  For that one sacrifice alone, we know Silverhair as great a hero as any in the Cycle's long course. For if she had not, and if she had not taught her calf well, none of us alive today would ever have been born.

  Even though, as is the way of the Lost's clever-clever schemes, many things went wrong, and the calf-Matriarch was kept in a box of cold and dark for much longer than she should have been — so long that before she emerged, generations of mammoths had lived and died on the Sky Steppe...

  Well, that was how the Great Crossing was made. But the story is not done.

  For Kilukpuk taught Silverhair another truth of the Cycle: that sometimes we cannot spare even those we love.

  The Crossing was hard and dangerous indeed. And Silverhair's calf would herself have a dread price to pay for making that Crossing.

  That calf's name, as you know, was Icebones.

  1

  The High Plains

  THE LAND WAS A TORTURED wilderness: nothing but blood-red rock, rugged, cracked and pitted, under a sky that shone yellow-pink.

  And it was dominated by craters.

  The largest of them were walled plains, their rims so heavily eroded they were reduced to low, sullen mounds lined up in rough arcs. The smaller craters were sharper, and when the mammoths plowed their way over rim ridges, their neat circular shapes were clearly visible. In places the craters crowded so close together that their walls overlapped and merged, so that the mammoths were forced to climb over one smooth fold in the land after another, like waves on some vast rust-red ocean.

  Icebones listened to the rumbling echoes that the mammoths' footfalls returned from the distorted ground. She sensed giant rubble lying crammed there. She tried to imagine the mighty blows which must have rained down on this land long ago — mighty enough to shatter rock into immense pieces far beneath her feet, mighty enough to make the rock itself rise up in great circular ripples as if it were as fluid as water.

  But the land had been shaped by more than the crater-forming blows. In some places the rock had melted and flowed. Craters had been overwhelmed, their walls buried and their interiors flooded with ponds of hard, cold, red-black basalt.

  And water had run here, creating channels and valleys. Some of these cut right through the crater walls and even spilled into their floors. The channels themselves were overlaid by the round stamps of craters, and sometimes cut across by more recent channels and valleys.

  Dust lay scattered everywhere, piled up against crater walls or inside their rims and against the larger boulders, streaked light and dark. The dust was constantly reshaped by the wind: each dawn Icebones would peer around as the rocky wilderness emerged from the darkness, startled by how different
it looked.

  It was as if she was walking through layers of time: everything that had ever happened to this land was recorded here in a rocky scar or wrinkle or protrusion or dust heap.

  ...Sometimes, toiling across this unforgiving land of rock, thirsty, hungry, weary, sore, Icebones imagined she was old: with eroded molars and aching bones, in a place of moist green, surrounded by calves. Sometimes these waking dreams were so vivid that she wondered if this time of redness and desolation was merely a recollection. Perhaps this was not the vision of a long-dead prophet of the past, but a memory from the unknown future. Perhaps she was that very old Cow, on her last molars, returning to her youth in memory. Perhaps the Icebones she imagined herself to be was only a thing of memory, walking through a remembered land.

  But if that was so, she thought dimly, then it must mean she would survive these harsh days, survive to grow old and bear calves... mustn't it?

  Troubled, she walked on, as best she could, waiting for the dream to end, the memory to disperse — for herself to wake up, old and safe and content.

  But the dream, or memory, did not end.

  So the days wore away on the High Plains, where land and sky glowed red in a great monotonous dialogue.

  ONE DAY THEY FOUND a narrow valley where a pool of water had gathered. Trapped under a thin crust of ice, the water was brackish and briny. But it was the first liquid water the mammoths had encountered for days, and they smashed the ice and sucked it up gratefully.

  Woodsmoke worked his way along the pond's rocky edge, exploring the water's deeper reaches. Suddenly a ledge of eroded rock crumbled beneath him. Rock fragments tumbled into the water, quickly followed by Woodsmoke's hind legs. He scrabbled at the rocky ground with his trunk and feet, but the crumbling rock offered little purchase. The calf slid into the freezing water until he was submerged save for his head and forelegs.

  He trumpeted, his hair floating in the water around him.

  The mammoths came running, water dribbling out of their mouths.

  Breeze and Autumn fell to their knees beside the calf. They reached under his belly to lift him out with their trunks. Icebones and Spiral hurried to help — but the calf was too heavy to lift out, and it was impossible to get a purchase on his soaked, slippery hair. As they struggled, the calf's high-pitched bellows echoed from the rocky land around them.

  At last Autumn ordered the others back. Carefully she looped her trunk around Woodsmoke's neck, and drew him toward the pond's shallower end. When the water was shallow enough for his hind feet to touch the pond bed, he quickly clambered out.

  The calf shook himself to rid his fur of stinking pond scum, and his mother hurried close to nuzzle him. But he was frightened and angry. "Why are we in this horrible place? Why don't we go back to the valley? There was water and stuff to eat..." The mammoths rumbled in unison, seeking to reassure him and persuade him to continue.

  Autumn growled to Icebones, "He thinks we were safe in the Gouge. He can't see that the world is changing, because it has not changed while he is alive. He thinks it will be the same forever."

  Icebones, disturbed by the incident, wondered if that was true. What if she hadn't emerged so suddenly from her mysterious Sleep? What if she didn't have her memories of the Island and the Old Steppe, of such a very different time and place? Would she even perceive the changes from which she was fleeing — and which had already cost these mammoths so much?

  And as the featureless days wore away, and the mammoths grew steadily more weary and cold and hungry and thirsty, darker doubts gathered.

  It seemed audacious, absurd, for her to lead her mammoths across this high, silent, dead place. Perhaps it was simpler to suppose that the fault lay in her own head and heart, and not in the world around her. Perhaps she was leading these mammoths — not to salvation — but to their doom.

  But then she would think of the dried mud and bones around the ponds of the Gouge, and the wide salt flats that bordered the Ocean of the North. This world was indeed changing for the worse — she was right — and she must continue to confront that truth, and she must gather her strength of body and mind, and work to bring these mammoths to safety, as best she knew how.

  ONE EVENING, AS THE dark drew in, Icebones hauled her weary legs up the shallow rim of yet another crater. She was limping, favoring her damaged shoulder, where pain still stabbed.

  She reached the summit of a low, eroded rim mountain — and found herself facing a surface so smooth and flat she wondered briefly if it might be liquid water. But her nostrils were full of the tang of red dust. And as she looked more closely she saw rippling dunes, like frozen waves, and sharp-edged boulders littered here and there. There was no motion, no ripple, no scudding wave: this was a lake of dust, not water, and a faint disappointment tugged at her.

  Thunder stood beside her. "How strange. The other wall of this crater is buried."

  Icebones saw that it was true. The smooth, flat lake of crimson dust washed away to the south, submerging the crater's far wall. Perhaps this crater had formed on a slope, and had been partly buried when the dust gathered. Further away she saw fragmentary ridges and arcs poking out of the dust field: bits of more drowned craters. But the dust sea did not extend far. Beyond the submerged craters was more of the broken, jumbled, very ancient landscape they had become used to.

  She raised her trunk and sniffed the air. It was dry, cold, and it smelled of nothing but iron dust: no moisture, no life. "This raised ridge is not a good place to find water."

  "We need rest," Thunder sighed. "Rest and peace, even more than we need food. Let us stay here until morning, Icebones."

  Icebones understood: at least here on the ridge no walls of rock loomed around them. Under an open, empty sky, creatures of the steppe could rest easy, if hungrily. "You are right," she said. "We should call the others."

  Night fell quickly here. Shadows fled across the broken land, and pools of blackness grew and merged, as if a tide of dark was rising all around them. The stars burned hard in the blackness, not disturbed by a wisp of mist or a scrap of cloud, and the silence stretched out into the dark, huge and complete, as if concealing greater secrets.

  A mammoth broke from the group and padded to the edge of the crater-rim ridge. Though Thunder was just black on black, a shadow in the night, Icebones could smell him.

  Trying not to disturb the others, who were clustered around the snoring calf, Icebones followed him.

  Thunder held his trunk high in the air, peering over the dust-flooded crater. She stood beside him, trunk raised and ears spread, listening.

  ...And now she thought she heard a thin, high scraping, like the scrabbling paw of some tiny animal, coming from the surface of the dust sea. It was very soft, so quiet she would never have noticed it if not for the high, lifeless stillness of this place. But in the silent dark it was as loud to her as the bark of a wolf.

  The scratching vanished.

  Then it returned, a little further away.

  She rumbled, "Perhaps it is a lemming."

  Thunder said bluntly. "No lemming hops from place to place over great bounds as this invisible scratcher does."

  The two mammoths waited on the ridge, side by side, as the night wore away, and the invisible scratcher drifted, seemingly at random, around the dust bowl.

  And when the first bruised-purple light began to seep into the eastern sky, they saw it.

  An immense sac hovered in the air, just above the dust. It was like the skin of some huge fruit. At first it was pitch black, silhouetted against the dawn sky. It trailed a tendril, more pliant than the branch of a willow, that coiled on the ground like the trunk of a resting mammoth. But as the sac drifted, the trailing tendril scraped along the ground, making the scratching noise she had heard.

  Thunder said, "Is it a bird?"

  "It's no bird I ever saw. Look, it has no wings, although it flies... I think it is floating like the feathers of a molting goose, or as seeds are blown on the breeze."

  "Wh
at mighty tree will grow when that vast seed falls?"

  Now pale dawn light diffused over the dust pool and shone into the heart of the sac, making it glow from within, pink and gray. The floating thing was made of some smooth shining translucent substance, Icebones saw, but it was slack and loose, like the skin around the eyes of a very old mammoth. And its trailing tendril dragged something knotty and silver across the dust, exploring like a trunk, leaving a shallow trench.

  Now that the light was striking the sac it was starting to swell and rise, its surface unfolding with a slow, rustling languor. The silver knot scraped over the dust as the tendril slowly uncoiled.

  "Perhaps it rises in the day and flies on the wind," Icebones mused. "And then it sinks at night and scrapes its silver fruit on the ground."

  "But it has no bones or head," said Thunder. "It cannot choose where it travels, as a mammoth can. It is blown on the wind. What does it travel for? What is it hoping to find?"

  Icebones blew dust out of her trunk. "That we will never know—"

  The sea's placid surface erupted before them. Dunes flowed and disintegrated. A great black cylinder rose, and dust fell away with a soft rustle all around.

  Icebones stumbled back, and she made to trumpet a warning. But so profound was her shock at this sudden apparition that her throat and trunk seemed to freeze. And besides, what warning could she give.

  The cylinder of black-red flesh, twisting out of the dust, was crusted with hard segmented plates. At its apex was a nostril, or mouth: a pit, black as night, lined with six inward-pointing teeth. Dust was falling into that gaping maw, but whatever immense creature lay beneath the surface seemed indifferent. The great mouth folded around the lower portion of the floating sac. Huge, sharp teeth meshed together with a noise like rock on rock, and the sac's fabric was ground apart effortlessly.