Stephen Baxter - Icebones

These questions emerged from a continuing communal rumble, for the voices of a true Family were always raised together, in an unending wash of communication — as if, emerging from consensus, every phrase began with the pronoun "we."

"Thunder, you are our ears and nostrils. Which way?"

He stood straight and still, sniffing the wind, feeling the shape of the world. At length he said, "South. South and east. That way lies the Footfall of Kilukpuk."

"Very well. Spiral, you are our strength. Shall we begin the walk?"

"We are ready, Matriarch."

Icebones made the summons rumble, a long, drawn-out growl: "Let’s go, let’s go."

Gradually their rumbles merged once more, as they tasted readiness on each other’s breath. "We are ready." "We are together." "Let’s go, let’s go."

Icebones strode forward, ignoring the pain in her shoulder — which, since it now affected only a small part of her greater, shared body, was as nothing. The other mammoths began to move with her, their trunks exploring the rocky red ground beneath their feet, just as a true Family should. Icebones felt affirmed, exulting.

But as they climbed away from the valley, and as Icebones made out the high bleak land that still lay before them, she sensed that they would yet need to call on all their shared strength and courage if they were to survive.

…And then, clinging to an outcrop of rock at the fringe of this harsh southern upland, she found a fragment of hair: pale brown, ragged, snagged from some creature who had come this way. She pulled the hair loose with her trunk and tasted it curiously. Though it was soaked through, the hair had a stale, burning smell that she recognized immediately.

The hair had belonged to the Ragged One.

The Cycle is made up of the oldest stories in the world. It tells all that has befallen the mammoths, and its wisdom is as perfect as time can make it.

But now I want to tell you one of the youngest stories in the Cycle. It is the story of how the mammoths came to the Sky Steppe.

It is the story of Silverhair, who was the last Matriarch of the Old Steppe.

It is the story of the first Matriarch of the Sky Steppe.

It is a story of mammoths, and Lost.

For generations the last mammoths had lived on an Island. Silverhair was their Matriarch.

The Lost were everywhere. But the Lost had never found the Island, and the mammoths lived undisturbed.

No mammoth lived anywhere else. Not one.

But now, at last, the Lost had come to the Island.

Though most of these Lost showed no wish to hunt the mammoths or kill them or drive them away, they kept them in boxes and watched them with their predators’ eyes, all day and all night.

Silverhair knew that mammoths cannot share land with Lost.

But Silverhair was old and tired. She had spent all her strength keeping her Family alive. She was in despair, and ashamed of her weakness.

One night Kilukpuk came down from the aurora. And Kilukpuk said Silverhair must not be ashamed, for she had fought hard all her life. And she must not despair.

Silverhair snorted. "This world is full of Lost. We have nowhere to live. What is there left for me but despair?"

"But there is another world," Kilukpuk told her. "It is a place where there will be room for many mammoths. And mammoths will live there until the sun itself grows cold."

Silverhair asked tiredly, "Where is this marvelous place?"

And Kilukpuk said, "Why, have you forgotten your Cycle? It is the Sky Steppe."

Silverhair knew about the Sky Steppe, of course. She had seen it float in the sky, bright and red — just as her world, which we call the Old Steppe, once floated in our sky, bright and blue. And, indeed, the Cycle promised that one day mammoths would walk free on the Sky Steppe.

But Silverhair was weary and old, for she could not believe even mighty Kilukpuk. She said, "And how are the mammoths to get there? Will they sprout wings and fly like geese?"

"No," said Kilukpuk gently. "There is a way. But it is hard."

It would be the work of the Lost, said Kilukpuk. What else could it be? For the Lost owned the world, all of it.

Calves would be taken from their mothers’ bodies, unborn. They would be put in ice, and sent into the sky in shining seeds, and taken to the Sky Steppe. That way many calves could be carried, to be spilled out on the red soil of the Sky Steppe, as if being born.

The bereft mothers would never know their calves, and the calves never know their mothers.

This was very strange — typical of the Lost’s eerie cleverness — and Silverhair could not understand. "How will the calves learn how to use their trunks, how to find water and food? If they have no Matriarch, who will lead and protect them?"

"That is the second thing I have to tell you," said Kilukpuk. "And this too is very hard."

And Kilukpuk said that Silverhair’s calf — her only calf — would also be taken. For that calf, already half-grown, was to be Matriarch to all the new calves who would tumble from the shining seeds to the red soil. That calf, daughter of the last Matriarch of the Old Steppe, would be the first Matriarch of the Sky Steppe.

"You must teach her, Silverhair," said Kilukpuk. "As I taught my Calves to speak, and to find water and food, and to live as a Family. You must teach her to be a Matriarch, so she can teach those who follow her."

Silverhair spun around and scuffed the ground. "My calf is all I have. I will not give her up. How can I live?"

But she knew that Kilukpuk was right.

Silverhair listened to Kilukpuk’s wisdom. And she passed on that wisdom to her calf. And, when the time came, she gave her calf to Kilukpuk, and the Lost.

For that one sacrifice alone, we know Silverhair as great a hero as any in the Cycle’s long course. For if she had not, and if she had not taught her calf well, none of us alive today would ever have been born.

Even though, as is the way of the Lost’s clever-clever schemes, many things went wrong, and the calf-Matriarch was kept in a box of cold and dark for much longer than she should have been — so long that before she emerged, generations of mammoths had lived and died on the Sky Steppe…

Well, that was how the Great Crossing was made. But the story is not done.

For Kilukpuk taught Silverhair another truth of the Cycle: that sometimes we cannot spare even those we love.

The Crossing was hard and dangerous indeed. And Silverhair’s calf would herself have a dread price to pay for making that Crossing.

That calf’s name, as you know, was Icebones.

The land was a tortured wilderness: nothing but blood-red rock, rugged, cracked and pitted, under a sky that shone yellow-pink.

And it was dominated by craters.

The largest of them were walled plains, their rims so heavily eroded they were reduced to low, sullen mounds lined up in rough arcs. The smaller craters were sharper, and when the mammoths plowed their way over rim ridges, their neat circular shapes were clearly visible. In places the craters crowded so close together that their walls overlapped and merged, so that the mammoths were forced to climb over one smooth fold in the land after another, like waves on some vast rust-red ocean.

Icebones listened to the rumbling echoes that the mammoths’ footfalls returned from the distorted ground. She sensed giant rubble lying crammed there. She tried to imagine the mighty blows which must have rained down on this land long ago — mighty enough to shatter rock into immense pieces far beneath her feet, mighty enough to make the rock itself rise up in great circular ripples as if it were as fluid as water.