Stephen Baxter - Icebones

Icebones stamped hard. "Boaster! Boaster…!"

I hear you, Icebones. It is bright day here.

High on this Fire Mountain it was not yet morning. The pinkish light of the dawn had turned the Mountain’s bulk into a deep black silhouette above her, and she could see the spreading plain at the foot of the Mountain as a jumble of shadows, lifeless, intimidating.

This Boaster and his companions must be far away, far around the curve of the world. She felt a twinge of regret. It seemed impossible that she would ever meet her immodest friend.

She said, "It is cold and dry."

Here the land is flat but it is frozen. I am tall and strong, but even my great weight leaves no foot marks, and my heavy tusks will not scratch the ice. Nothing lives. Nothing but the carnivores, who stalk us. Their bellies brush the ground, for the pickings are easy for them in this harsh land… We seek deeper places.

Yes, she thought, with new determination. Yes, that is what we must do.

Boaster said now, Yesterday there was a duel. Neither Bull would back down. One was gored, the other’s head was crushed.

"Were they in musth?"

Yes, both in musth, in deep musth.

With no Cows, the rivalry battles in that isolated bachelor herd were futile, so must be all the more savage. Frustrated, the Bulls were fighting themselves to death.

But now Boaster was saying, Be wary, little Icebones. Even as an infant I was mighty. My calf will weigh you down, like a boulder in the belly. Are you in oestrus yet?

No, she thought. And when she probed that deep oceanic part of herself, she detected no sign that oestrus was near. She felt well enough. Perhaps it was simply not her time.

When I am in musth, my dribble smells sweet. It will make you wonder, before I mount you.

"If I permit you…"

They talked on, as the planet turned.

Icebones and the Ragged One returned, weary, to the group.

It seemed to Icebones that in just a few days the air had grown distinctly colder. And it was clear to all the mammoths that they couldn’t stay here.

But to Icebones dismay the mammoths bickered about what to do.

The mother wanted them to descend from this high Mountain shoulder. Perhaps they should make for the sea, the mother suggested, for there at least they would find water.

Icebones kept her counsel. To descend was in accord with her own instincts. She knew that the seas around the Island had been salty — no use for drinking — but perhaps here the seas were different, like so much else.

The pregnant sister kept apart. Obsessed and worried about the dependent creature growing within her, she had turned inward. The Cow needed the support and guidance of her Family as at no other time in her life. But such support was not forthcoming, for her relatives did not know how to give it.

Sometimes the infant kicked and murmured, and Icebones knew it was enduring bad dreams of its life to come.

Like the Ragged One, the other sisters seemed intent on seeking out the vanished Lost. The older of them — a tall, vain creature with tightly spiraling tusks — demanded they roam around the Mountain. Her younger sister, dominated by the vain one, rumbled eager agreement. It was the younger who had been scorched by the Mountain’s falling rock, and she still bore a pink, hairless patch of healing skin.

As for the Bull, he seemed intent only on adventure. He charged back and forth across the bleak rock slope, trumpeting and brandishing his tusks, in pursuit of imaginary enemies and rivals.

Icebones growled her frustration. In a true Family at a time of decision making, all would be entitled to their say, but all would know their place. A good Matriarch would listen calmly, and then make her decision — or rather, speak the Family’s decision for them.

In a Family everybody knew what to do, from instinct and a lifetime’s training. Here, it seemed, nobody knew their roles, or how to behave. And as Icebones listened to the bickering she heard a deeper truth: without the cocoon of Lost which had protected them all their lives, these mammoths were bewildered, all but helpless, and very, very afraid.

She drew the mother aside. "You must lead them."

The mother raised her trunk sorrowfully and probed at Icebones’s scalp hairs. Her scent was rich and smoky, like the last leaves of autumn. "You want me to be a Matriarch."

"You must make them into a Family. A Family is always there — from the day you are born, to the day you die…" Icebones recalled wistfully how her own mother, Silverhair, had been with her as she grew up, with her for every heartbeat of her young life. "And without a Family—" Without my Family, she thought, I am not complete. She quoted the Cycle. "In the Family, I becomes We."

The mother said wistfully, "We don’t have Families here. The Lost saw to that."

Icebones said harshly, "The Lost are gone now. I saw them up on that mountainside — the last of them, their dried-out corpses. They cannot help you. You are the mother of these squabbling calves. Tell them what you have decided, and then lead them."

The mother seemed dubious. But she stood before the younger mammoths and slapped the ground with her trunk.

The sisters and the Bull turned, rumbling in soft alarm.

The mother said, "We must go down to the lower places. There will be warmth, and grass to eat. We will go to the shore of the great northern sea, and drink its water."

For a frozen moment the mammoths fell silent. The sisters regarded their mother. The Bull pawed the ground and growled softly.

The Ragged One stood aloof, head turned away, the thin wind raising the loose hairs of her back. She said; "Which way?"

Icebones saw the mother was hesitating. It wasn’t a trivial question: Icebones had seen from the summit that this dome-shaped Mountain was surrounded by a scarp of tall, impassable cliffs. But she knew there was a way through.

She stepped up to the mother. As if she was addressing a true Matriarch, she said respectfully, "If we follow the Sky Trail down the Mountain, we will find a way through the cliffs."

The mother, with relief, replied, "Yes. We will follow the Sky Trail. It will be many days’ walk. The sooner we begin, the sooner we will reach the sea." And she stepped forward with confidence.

Grumbling, resentful — but perhaps inwardly relieved that somebody was taking the lead — her daughters fell in behind her. Icebones took the rear of the little line, while the Bull ran alongside, keeping his separation from the group of Cows, as a growing Bull should.

At least we are trying, Icebones thought. And, wherever I die, at least it will not be here, on this dismal rocky slope.

As the little group made its way down the Mountain, following the strange straight-line shadow of the shining Sky Trail, the Ragged One followed them, distant, silent.

The rock beneath their feet was unyielding. Sometimes, when the land was gouged and scarred by ancient flows of molten rock, they had to detour far from the Sky Trail.

The only water was to be found in hollows where rain or snow had gathered. Most of these puddles were frozen to their bases, but as they descended they found a few larger ponds where some liquid water persisted beneath a thick shell of ice. Gratefully the mammoths cracked the ice lids with their tusks or feet and sucked up the dirty, brackish water.

But the taller, spiral-tusked sister complained about the foul stink of the pond water compared to the cool, clean stuff the Lost used to provide for them.

At night, when the shrunken sun had fallen away and the cold clear stars emerged from the purple sky, they mostly kept walking, their trunks seeking out water and scraps of vegetation. They would pause only briefly to sleep, and Icebones encouraged them to gather close together, the pregnant one at the center, so that they shared and trapped the warmth of their bodies.