Stephen Baxter - Icebones

Icebones bowed to the wisdom of the older Cow.

When none of the mammoths responded, Spiral’s wails ceased abruptly. She withdrew from the others, seeking out forage in a distracted, halfhearted manner. Then, after a time, she began to make deep, mournful groans, so deep they carried better through the ground than the air, and Icebones saw salty tears well in Spiral’s small eyes. At last she was truly grieving, as a mammoth should.

And now Autumn came to her, and wrapped her trunk around her daughter’s bowed head.

Icebones, feeling very young, was bemused and distressed by the complexity of the emotions spilling here.

Icebones walked to the edge of the cliff, gathered her courage, and stepped off.

Rubble crunched and compressed under her front feet.

Cautiously she stepped further, bringing her back legs onto the rocky slope. The footing seemed good, and the rock fragments slipped over each other less than she had feared. The surface rocks were worn smooth by dust or water or frost, but some of them were loosely bound together by mats of moss and lichen.

She soon tired, her front legs aching, for it was never comfortable for mammoths to walk downhill. But she persisted, doggedly following the rubble trail Thunder had picked out, listening to the rumbles and grunts of the mammoths who followed her.

The wall of the Gouge loomed behind her. It was striped with bands of varying color, shades of red and brown, like the rings of a fallen tree. The topmost layer was the thickest, an orange blanket of what appeared to be loose dust. And the wall was carved vertically, marked with huge upright grooves and pillars of rock, perhaps made by rock falls or running water. The grooves cut through the flat strata to make a complex crisscross pattern. Great flat lids of harder rock stuck out of the wall, sheltering hollowed-out caverns that she climbed past. She made out rustles of movement: birds, perhaps, nesting in these high caves.

This tremendous wall was a complex formation in its own right, she saw, shaped by the vast, slow, inexorable movements of rock and air and water. With its endless detail of strata and carvings and nesting birds, it went on as far as she could see, a vertical world, all the way to the horizon, where it merged in the mist with its remote, parallel twin.

Now she found herself walking into clouds. They were thin, wispy streaks, and they rested on an invisible layer in the air.

She soon passed through the strange cloud lid, into air that was tinged blue, full of mist. The air was noticeably thicker, warmer and moist, and she breathed in deep satisfying lungfuls of it.

The mammoths came to a flat, dusty ledge, still high above the Gouge floor. They fanned out, seeking forage.

Icebones, probing at the ground, found there was vegetation here: yellow and red lichen, mosses, even a little grass. But it was sparse, and the only water was trapped under layers of ice difficult to crack. She knew they must go much deeper before they could be comfortable.

She prepared to move on.

But the calf had other ideas. Woodsmoke reached up to his mother’s front leg, lifted his trunk over his fuzzy head, and clamped his mouth to her heavy breast. Icebones could smell the milk that trickled from his mouth. When he was done, he knelt down in his mother’s shade and slumped sideways, his eyes closing. His belly rose as he breathed, and his mouth popped open, a circle of darkness.

Time for a nap, it seems, Icebones thought wryly.

The other mammoths gathered around Breeze and her calf. Autumn lifted her heavy trunk and rested it on her tusks. The others let their trunks dangle before them. Only Icebones, in this tall company, was short enough that her trunk reached the ground without her having to dip her head to reach.

The mammoths’ bodies swayed gently, in unison. Filled with dust, their thick outer hair caught the pink sunlight, so that each of them was surrounded by a halo of pink-white light.

Immersed in the deep soft breathing of the others, Icebones closed her eyes.

She was woken by a soft, subtle movement.

Spiral had gone to the limit of the ledge, her foot pads compressing soundlessly. Trying not to disturb the others, Icebones followed her.

The afternoon air had grown more clear, and now the deepest world of the Gouge revealed itself. The floor was carved into a series of terraces, and broken up by smaller chasms or chains of hills. And in the deepest section of all she saw the pale glint of water. But it was a straight-line slash that ran right down the length of the Gouge, even cutting through what looked like natural lakes and river tributaries. It was no river but a canal: an artifact of the paws of the Lost.

With trunk raised, Spiral was staring fixedly toward the west. Icebones squinted, trying to make her poor eyes work better.

Over the green-gray floor of the Gouge lay a fine white line. It crossed the valley from one side to the other, like a scratch through a layer of lichen.

"It is the fallen bridge."

"Yes," said Spiral, "and that is where Shoot lies, crushed like an egg. Should we go back and look for her corpse? That is your way, isn’t it? The wolves and birds will have taken the meat and guts and eyes by now. But if the bones are not too scattered—"

"Stop this," Icebones snapped, with all the Matriarchal command she could muster. "You must not think of your sister in death. Think of her."

Spiral reached forward with her trunk, as if seeking the ghost of her vanished sister. Hesitantly she said, "She was — funny. She was loyal. She always stuck by me. Sometimes that would annoy me. Some of the Lost thought she was cuter than me and would give her attention…"

"I can see how that would irritate you," Icebones said gently.

Spiral had the grace to snort, mocking herself. "She followed me. Me. And I betrayed her trust by leading her to her death."

Icebones groped for something to say. "Sometimes we have no choice about how we act. Sometimes, we cannot save even those we love. That is what the Cycle tells us, over and over." And that hard fact would be the most unpalatable truth of all for these untutored mammoths, if they ever had to face it.

But Spiral was still distant, wounded, and the Cycle seemed a dusty abstraction.

Icebones thought, Thunder, Autumn, Spiral: all of them suffused by guilt, agonized by the mistakes they felt they had made. It was because they had always been under the care of the Lost. It was because they had never had to act for themselves.

Wisdom must be earned, through pain and loss. That was what these mammoths were struggling to learn.

The mammoths were beginning to stir, blowing dust from their trunks. The calf, revived and excited, bumped against their legs.

They reached a new, steep slope of loose talus. It was more difficult to climb down, but it delivered them to the warmer, moister air more quickly, and they pushed forward with enthusiasm.

Abruptly they emerged onto a broad terrace. Stepping forward stiffly, relieved to be on flat ground again, Icebones immediately felt a soft crackle beneath one foot pad. It was the sprawled-out branch of a dwarf birch. Looking ahead, she could see that the ground was littered with patches of open water.

The mammoths fanned out, emitting grunts of pleasure as they found tufts of grass and clumps of herbs.

Icebones walked to the crumbled lip of the terrace, and found herself in a strange world.

The Gouge’s mighty walls ran roughly straight, but they were complex even from this perspective, full of great scraped-out bays separated by knife-sharp ridges. Everywhere she saw landslides: rock skirts, sloping sharply, leaning against the walls. In one place, she saw, a giant landslide had swept right across the wide Gouge floor and come washing up against the far wall.