Stephen Baxter - Icebones

"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.

Icebones let the sea water soak into the long hairs that dangled over her feet. The water itself was cold and sharp.

She sucked up a cautious trunkful and dipped her trunk tip into her mouth. It seemed to fizz, oddly, making bubbles in her nostrils, as if air dissolved in it were struggling to escape.

It was a bitter brine.

And in the air that blew off the face of the ocean, soft but very cold, she could smell salt.

Of course this tremendous world sea would be full of salt, just like the ocean that had surrounded the Island. This Ocean of the North was nothing but sour undrinkable brine, all the way to the pole of the world.

She sensed in their hunched postures that the other mammoths knew this as well as she did. It was as she had expected, but she felt disappointed nonetheless.