Stephen Baxter - Icebones

The Gouge walls were now further apart and badly defined. The nearest wall was a band of deep shadow, striped by orange dawn light at its crest. And it was pocked by huge round holes, as regular as the pits left by raindrops in sand. Inside the holes the wall surface looked glassy, as if coated in ice.

The holes were surely too regular to be natural. Icebones thought they must be the work of the Lost — though what there was to be gained by digging such immense pits in a rock wall, and how they had done it, was beyond her. Sometimes during the day she made out movement in those huge pits, heard the peep of chicks. Birds had made their nests there, high above the attention of the scavengers and predators of the Gouge floor.

One early dawn, Icebones was woken, disturbed. She raised her trunk.

The sun was still below the eastern horizon, where the sky was streaked with pink-gray. The other mammoths had fanned out over a patch of steppe. The only sounds they made were the soft rustle of their hair as they walked, or the rip of grass, and the occasional chirping snore from Woodsmoke, who was napping beneath his mother’s legs.

She heard the gaunt honking of geese. Sometimes their isolated barks rose until they became a single outcry, pealing from the sky. Now she saw the birds in the first daylight, their huge wings seeming to glow against the lightening sky.

But it wasn’t the geese that had disturbed her.

She turned, sniffing the air. It seemed to her that the light was strange this morning, the air filled with a peculiar orange-gray glow. And there was an odd scent in the breeze that raised her guard hairs: a thin iron tang, like the taste of ocean air.

She looked west, where night still lay thick on the Gouge as it curled around the belly of the world. A band of deeper darkness was smeared across the Gouge floor, and a wind blew stronger in her face, soft but steady.

She felt the hairs on her scalp rise.

Spiral was digging with her trunk under Breeze’s belly. "Let me have him. Let me!" She was trying to get hold of Woodsmoke, who, wide awake now, was cowering under his mother’s belly.

"Get away," Breeze said. "Leave us alone, Spiral…" Breeze pushed her sister away, but she was smaller, weaker. And the calf was becoming increasingly agitated by the pushing and barging of the huge creatures that loomed over him.

Autumn walked to her squabbling daughters, stately and massive. "What is this trouble you are making?"

The calf, mewling and unhappy, wanted to run to his grandmother, but Breeze kept a firm hold on him with her skinny trunk. "Make her go away."

She is selfish," Spiral protested. "He loves me as well as her."

"Enough," Autumn said. "You are both making the calf unhappy. How does that show love…? Breeze, you must let the calf go to Spiral."

"No!"

"It is her right."

Yes. Because Spiral is senior, Icebones thought, watching.

"But," Autumn said, "you must let his mother feed him, Spiral."

"I can feed him," Spiral protested.

Autumn said gently, "No, you can’t. He still needs milk. Come now." Deliberately she stepped between the two Cows, and wrapped her trunk around Woodsmoke’s head, soothing him. And, with judicious nudges, she arranged the three of them so that the calf was in the center.

The two competing Cows stood face to face. They laid their trunks over Woodsmoke’s back, soothing and warming him.

After a few heartbeats, now that the tussle was resolved, Woodsmoke snorted contentedly and lay down to nap, half buried under the Cows’ heavy trunks.

The wind picked up further, ruffling Icebones’s hair. Far above, a bird hovered, wings widespread. Perhaps it was a skua.

She looked to the west again. The light continued to seep slowly into the sky, but she could see that the band of darkness had grown heavier and denser, filling the canyon from side to side, as if some immense wave was approaching. But she could hear nothing: no rustling of trees or moaning of wind through rock.

Autumn joined Icebones. "Taste this." She held up her trunk tip to Icebones’s mouth.

Icebones tasted milk.

"I found it on Spiral’s breast. She stole it from Breeze, to lure the calf." Autumn rumbled unhappily. "Of all of us, I think it is Spiral who suffers the most."

Icebones wrapped her trunk around Autumn’s. "Then we must help her, as much as we can."

Icebones knew that Autumn’s instinct had been good. In a Family, it was not uncommon for a senior Cow to adopt the calf of another — whether the true mother liked it or not. The whole Family was responsible for the care of each calf, and calves and adults knew it on some deep-buried level. But under the stifling care of the Lost these Cows had never learned to understand their instincts, and were now driven by emotions they probably could not name, let alone understand.

But now Thunder came trumpeting. He was breathing hard, his eyes rimmed by white. "Icebones! Icebones!" He turned to face west, his trunk raised high.

That wall of crimson darkness had grown, astonishingly quickly. It filled the Gouge from side to side, and towered high up the walls. And now Icebones could hear the first moans of wind, the crack of rock and wood, and she could feel the shuddering of the ground.

Something hovered briefly before the storm front, hurled high in the air, green and brown, before being dashed to the ground and smashing to splinters. It was a mighty conifer tree, uprooted and destroyed as casually as a mammoth’s trunk would toss a willow twig.

"By Kilukpuk’s eyes," Autumn said softly.

Icebones trumpeted, "Circle!"

The adults gathered around Breeze and her calf. Icebones prodded them until they all had their backs to the wind, with Autumn, Thunder and Icebones herself at the rear of the group.

There was a moment of eerie silence. The ground’s shaking stopped, and even the wind died.

But still the storm front bore down on them. Its upper reaches were wispy smoke, and its dense front churned and bubbled, like a vast river approaching.

Icebones, pressed between Thunder and Autumn, felt the rapid breathing of the mammoths, smelled their dung and urine and milk and fear. "Hold your places," she said. "Hold your places—"

Suddenly the storm was on them.

Perhaps it had something to do with night and day.

The Gouge was so long that while its eastern end was in day, its western extremity was still in night. Icebones imagined the battle between the cold of night and warmth of day, as the line of dawn worked its slow way along the great channel. Was it so surprising that such a tremendous daily conflict should throw off a few storms?

But the why scarcely mattered.

The wind was red-black and solid and icy cold. It battered at Icebones’s back and legs. Dust and bits of stone scoured at her skin, working through her layers of hair and grinding at any exposed flesh, her ears and trunk tip and even her feet.

Now a thick sleety snow began to pelt her back. Soon her fur was soaked through with icy melt, and the cold deepened, as if the wind was determined to suck away every last bit of her body heat. The ground itself was shuddering, making it impossible for her rumbles or stamping to reach the others.

She risked opening one eye.

It was like looking into a tunnel lined by soggy snow, rain, crimson dust and rock fragments that drove almost horizontally ahead of her. She could even see a kind of shadow, a gap in the driving storm, cast by the mammoths’ huge bulk.

She had seen this vast storm approaching since it was just a line on the bleak horizon. How was it she hadn’t heard its howl, or even felt the rumble of its destruction? Perhaps the storm was so violent, so rapid, that it outran even its own mighty roar.