Stephen Baxter - Icebones

These tremendous channels were littered with huge eroded boulders, pitted and scoured by water and wind, around which the mammoths had to pick their way. Perhaps water had once flowed from the high southern lands into the basin of the north, cutting these channels and depositing this debris. But those vanished rivers must have been mighty indeed. And these huge channels were clearly very ancient, for many of them were pitted by craters, or even cut through by younger channels.

The great age of the land was obvious, the complexity of its formation recalled in the folded rock around them.

They found a flooded crater, a shallow circular lake in a pit smashed into a channel bottom. The mammoths welcomed this easily accessible pool, though they had to break through layers of ice to reach the dark, cold water beneath.

At the water’s circular edge, Icebones found clumps of grass. She would twist her trunk around a clump of stems and kick at its base to dislodge it. After beating the grass against her knees to knock off the dirt, she pushed it into her mouth, and her trunk explored for new clumps as she chewed.

She inspected the ice on the crater pond. Much of it was hard and blue. Mammoths learned about ice. Icebones knew that fresh ice first appeared as a film of oily crystals, almost as dark as the water itself. When it thickened it would turn gray and opaque, and thicken slowly. If it lasted to a second winter it would harden and turn a cold white-blue.

So the ice covering this pool was persisting through the long summer of this strange world. It was another sign that the world was cooling, and the tide of warmth and water and life was withdrawing, step by step.

Spiral lumbered up to her, complaining. "Icebones, that’s not fair. You are taking the best grass!"

Icebones slapped Spiral’s cheek with her trunk tip — not hard, but enough to sting, and to make the others turn to listen. "I am the Matriarch," she growled." I take the first, and the best. Your mother is next. And then the rest of you. It is the way." The pecking-order she was striving to teach Spiral was part of every Family’s internal structure — although no mature Family would stick to it rigidly, with food being apportioned according to need.

Spiral grumbled, "If this is what it means to be in a Family, I would rather the Lost returned." But she backed away, deferring to Icebones’s tentative authority.

Beyond the flooded crater, the ground began to drop in altitude. Though it was still broken and often difficult to negotiate, the soil was richer here, and steppe plants flourished. There were even stretches of forest, conifer trees so tall they seemed to stretch up to the pale pink sky. And there was plenty to eat now: grass, coltsfoot, mountain sorrel, lousewort, sedge, dwarf birch.

Covering ground that was rich in loam and easy under their feet, their stomachs filling up, the mammoths’ spirits seemed to lift, and they walked on more vigorously.

Icebones noticed that as they got used to the fodder of the steppe the mammoths’ tastes were starting to diverge: Thunder sought out a type of willow with small diamond leaves, while Spiral preferred the sedge. They were starting to forget the rich food the Lost had provided for them, she realized with some relief.

But now Icebones became aware of a dark smudge, like a low cloud, on the horizon directly ahead of her, to the east. And she smelled smoke.

Fire ahead. The mammoths drew closer, trunks raised.

Fire was a natural thing, of course — it could be caused by flowing lava, or lightning strikes — but in mammoths’ minds fire was primarily a thing of the Lost. Where there is smoke, there are the Lost — so went the wisdom of the Cycle.

They walked on, into the thickening smoke.

They came to a shallow crater rim. The smoke was pouring sluggishly into the air from the crater’s belly.

It was an easy climb up the crater wall to its narrow crest. But now the smoke was thick, making their eyes stream and filling their nostrils with its stink. The mammoths were agitated, for the scent of fire sparked deep instincts of fear and flight in them all.

The crater was a big one, surrounded by a ring of eroded hillocks that stretched to the horizon. A bank of smoke hung thick and dense over the crater basin.

And the basin was full of trees: fallen, burning trees, with flames licking ponderously. There were so many that they lapped up against the crater walls, and trunks lay thick on the ground like shed pine needles. But each of these "needles" was the trunk of a great conifer, stripped of its branches.

Autumn growled, "We can’t walk through that. We would suffocate in the smoke, or get trapped beneath the burning trunks, or—"

"You’re right." Icebones raised her trunk, trying to sense the lay of the land despite the distraction of the smoke, and the steady rumble of collapsing, burned-out logs. "The wind comes this way." She took a step toward the southern crater rim. "We will walk around these circular walls. The smoke will blow away from us, not over us."

"It is out of our way," the Ragged One pointed out sourly.

Icebones snapped, "We have no choice. Be careful where you step. Help each other. Let’s go, let’s go." And without further discussion she set off, following the narrow ridge that ran around the crater rim.

She didn’t look back, but she could tell from their footfalls and rumbles that the mammoths were following her.

The going wasn’t difficult, though in places the rim wall broke up into separate eroded hillocks, and they had to climb through narrow gulches or over crumbled rock. But there was no water to be had on this bare rock wall. Soon the air, hot and dry and laden with the stink of wood smoke, burned in Icebones’s nostrils and throat.

The wind veered and a gust of smoke washed over her, blinding her eyes and flooding her sensitive nostrils, so that she had to work her way over the lumpy ground by touch alone.

When the smoke cleared she saw something moving, dimly visible through the thinning gray veils of smoke.

She stopped dead, trunk raised. She sensed the other mammoths gathering around her, curious, nervous. She could see something shining, like ice, a vast bulk moving. And she could feel how its weight made the ground shudder.

Now it emerged from the smoke.

A vast boxy shape was crawling laboriously up the side of the crater. It was more like a great slab of rock than any living thing. On its back was a kind of shell, like an insect’s carapace, but the shell was flat and a pale silvery-gray, and it was liberally covered with caked-on dust and dried mud. It would have been big enough for all seven of the mammoths to stand side by side on its back. The beast moved forward, not on legs, but on its underbelly, leaving tracks cut deep in the rock of the crater rim. But those tracks were well worn, Icebones saw. Wherever this strange creature was heading, it had made this journey many times.

"It is like a beetle," Breeze said. "With a shell of ice. An ice beetle."

The ice beetle trailed huge long limbs — far longer but less mobile than a mammoth’s trunk. And in a set of shining fingers it grasped a tree trunk. The tree had been dragged over the dusty plain from a stand of conifer forest. In that forest stood a number of stumps, where trunks had been neatly cut away from their roots.

Icebones could smell, under the dominant stink of the fire, the sap of the tree trunk and the iron tang of the red dust. But she could smell nothing of the beetle, nothing at all.

As the mammoths watched, the ice beetle, in dour silence, hauled the tree trunk up the side of the steep crater wall. Dust rose up in clouds. Then the beetle spun slowly around and let the tree trunk fall into the crater, where the flames would soon reach it.