Stephen Baxter - Icebones

As if to put on a brave swagger, the Bull, Thunder, trumpeted and charged forward into open water. Spray danced up around his legs, quickly soaking his fur, and ice crackled against his chest. "Come on," he yelled. "At least we can get rid of this foul dust for a while!" And he plunged his trunk into the water and sprayed it high in the air.

Shoot ran after the Bull into the deeper water, lumbering and squealing. The little Cow stumbled, immersing her head, but she came up squirting water from her trunk brightly. "It’s cold! And it gets deep, just here. Watch out—"

"Thunder. Call me Thunder!" And the Bull rapped his trunk into the water, sending spray over the Cow. Vigorously, Shoot splashed back.

Haughty Spiral stayed close to her mother and sister Breeze, watching the antics of the others with disdain.

Droplets of brine, caught on the wind, spattered into Icebones’s face and stung her eyes.

A flash of motion further from the shore caught her eye. It had looked, oddly, like a tusk — but it had been straight and sharp, not like a mammoth’s ivory spiral. There it was again, a fine twisted cone that rolled languidly through the air. And now she saw a vast gray body sliding through a dark lead of open water, turning slowly. She heard a moan, and then a harsh screech, accompanied by a spray of water. Perhaps this was some strange whale.

The Ragged One came to stand beside Icebones. "The water is foul," she rumbled. "I suppose you will tell us now you always knew it would be like this."

"This is not my world," Icebones said levelly. "I know nothing of its oceans."

The Ragged One growled.

"This is not the time to argue," Icebones said. "We cannot stay here. That much is obvious." She turned, trunk raised, seeking Autumn.

But there was a sharp trumpet from the water.

All the mammoths turned.

Shoot was floundering, hair soaked, struggling to keep her head above the water. Icebones could see the black triangle of her small mouth beneath her raised trunk.

But the trumpet had come not from Shoot, but from Thunder. The Bull was splashing his way out of the water as fast as he could, trunk held high, eyes ringed white with panic.

Now there was a surge behind Shoot, like a huge wave gathering.

Abruptly a mass burst out of the water, scattering smashed ice that tumbled back with a clatter. Icebones glimpsed a blunt head with a smooth, rounded forehead, and that strange twisted tusk thrust out through the upper lip of the opened mouth, on the left side. The tusk alone would have dwarfed Icebones. But even the head was small in comparison with a vast body: gray and marbled, marked with spots and streaks, gray as dead flesh, with small front flippers, and a crumpled ridge along its back. When the whole of that body had lifted out of the water, the flukes of its powerful tail beat the water with great slaps.

By Kilukpuk’s mercy, Icebones thought, bewildered.

The whale fell back into the water, writhing, with a vast languid splash. Shoot was engulfed, and Icebones wondered if she had already been taken in that vast mouth.

But when the water subsided, Icebones saw that Shoot was still alive, gamely trying to swim in the churning water. "Help me!" she called, with high, thin chirps of her trunk.

Without thinking further, Icebones rushed into the water. She ran past Thunder, who stood shivering on the shore. But the Ragged One ran with her.

Icebones slowed when the water reached her chest and soaked into her heavy hairs, and the sea-bottom ooze clumped around her feet. The Ragged One, taller and with longer legs, was able to make faster progress, and she reached Shoot first.

The whale made another run. Water surged. A school of silver fish came flying from the water before splashing back, dead or stunned. Fulmars and kittiwakes fell on this unexpected bounty, screeching.

The Ragged One had wrapped her trunk around Shoot’s, and was hauling her toward the shore. Icebones hurried to the Cow’s rear, half-swimming in the rapidly deepening water, and rammed at Shoot’s rump with her forehead.

The whale lunged out of the water, and that huge twisted tusk was held high above the mammoths, ugly and sharp.

For a heartbeat Icebones found herself peering into the whale’s ugly purple mouth. Its lips barely covered its rows of cone-shaped teeth. Its eyes were set at the corners of the mouth — and, though a dark intelligence glimmered there, Icebones saw that the eyes could not move in their sockets.

In its way it was beautiful, Icebones couldn’t help thinking: a solitary killer, stripped of the social complexity of a mammoth’s life, its whole being intent only on killing — beautiful, and terrible.

The whale fell back.

As they struggled on toward the shore, with her head immersed in the murky, icy brine, Icebones rammed at Shoot’s backside with increased urgency.

But the snap of jaws around her did not come. At last the mammoths found themselves in shallower water, beyond the reach of those immense teeth.

Shoot’s sisters hurried to her and ran their trunks over her head and into her mouth, cherishing her survival. Shoot, shaking herself free of water, showed no signs of injury from her ordeal, though the whale’s teeth must have missed her by no more than a hair’s-breadth.

The Ragged One stood with Icebones by the edge of the suddenly treacherous sea. The whale’s tusk broke the surface and cruised to and fro, as if seeking to lure an unwary mammoth back into the water, and where it passed, sheets of ice were cracked and lifted and brushed aside.

"If the Lost created this ocean," Icebones said, "why would they put in it such a monster as that?"

"Perhaps they didn’t," The Ragged One said. "Perhaps it has cruised the waters of this world ocean, eating all the smaller creatures, devouring its rivals, growing larger and larger as it feeds — devouring until nothing was left to challenge it… A monster to suit a giant ocean. If the Lost were here they would surely destroy it."

"But they are not here."

"No."

"You did well," Icebones said.

The Ragged One slapped the water with her trunk, irritably. Evidently she did not welcome Icebones’s praise. "This is not your world," the Ragged One growled. "Just as you said."

Thunder was strutting to and fro, raising and lowering his tusks, his posture an odd mixture of aggression and submission.

Icebones approached him cautiously. "Thunder?"

"Don’t call me that!" He scuffed the dusty beach angrily. "Shoot was threatened, and I ran from danger. I am not Thunder. I am not even a Bull. I am nothing."

"I know that the heart of a great Bull beats inside you. And you are part of this Family, just as much as the others."

"I have no Family. I was taken from my mother when I was a calf."

"Taken? Why?"

"That is what the Lost do. What does it matter?"

"It matters a great deal. A calf should be with his mother."

"I have no Family" he repeated. "You despise me."

"You followed your instinct," she said harshly. "The mammoth dies, but mammoths live on. That’s what the Cycle says. There are times when it is right to sacrifice another’s life to save your own."

The Bull growled bitterly, "Even if that’s true, you saved Shoot, where I failed."

She reached out to him, but he flinched, muttering and rumbling, and stalked away.

She sought out Autumn. The tall, clear-eyed Cow was standing alone.

"The Bull-calf blames himself," Autumn said. "But I led us here, to this vile and useless sea."

"How could you have known? You have lived all your life on your Mountain. It was a worthwhile gamble—"

"Because I led us here my daughter was nearly killed, and we will all starve or die of thirst. If some new monster does not burst out of the ground to devour us first."