Stephen Baxter - Icebones

They looked like mammoths. They behaved as mammoths might. But they did not smell like mammoths. And as Icebones worked her way down the slope, her sense of unease deepened.

Woodsmoke had wandered away from his mother. Two calves peered at him from a forest of thick black hair. The adults watched him suspiciously, but no mammoth would be hostile to a calf, however strange. Soon Woodsmoke had locked his trunk around a calf’s trunk, and was tugging vigorously.

Icebones announced clearly, "I am Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. Who is Matriarch here?"

The strange mammoths rumbled, heads nodding and bodies swaying, as if in confusion.

At length a mammoth stepped forward. "My name is Cold-As-Sky. I do not know you. You are not of our Clan."

Cold-As-Sky was about Icebones’s size, as round and solid as a boulder. Her hair was black and thick. There was a thick ridged brow on her forehead, sheltering small orange eyes. She had a broad hump on her back, and when she took a breath, deep and slow, that hump swelled up, as if she carried a second set of lungs there. Her long trunk lay thickly coiled on the rock at her feet. Her voice was as deep as the ground’s own songs.

Icebones stepped forward tentatively. "We have come far."

"You are not like us."

"No," Icebones said sadly. "We are not like you." As unlike, in a different way, as the Swamp-Mammoths had been unlike Icebones and her Family. "And yet we are Cousins. You speak the language of Kilukpuk."

Just as Chaser-Of-Frogs had reacted to the ancient name, so Cold-As-Sky looked briefly startled. But her curiosity was soon replaced by her apparently customary hostility. "We speak as we have always spoken."

Her language, in fact, was indistinct. This Ice Mammoth spoke only with the deep thrumming of her chest and belly, omitting the higher sounds, the chirrups and snorts and mewls a mammoth would make with her trunk and throat. But her voice, deep and vibrant, would carry easily through the rocks, Icebones realized. This was a mammoth made for this high cold place, where the air was thin, and only rocks could be heard.

Cold-As-Sky said now, "You call yourself my Cousin. What are you doing here? Do you intend to steal my air trees?"

Air trees — breathing trees? "No," said Icebones wearily. "But we are hungry and thirsty."

"Go back to where you came from."

"We cannot go back," Thunder said.

Icebones stepped forward and reached out with her trunk. "We are Cousins."

Cold-As-Sky growled, but did not back away.

Icebones probed at the other’s face. That black hair was dense and slippery, and as cold as the rock beneath her feet. She finally found flesh, deep within the layers of hair. The flesh was cold and hard, and covered in fine, crisscross ridges. She pinched it with her trunk fingers. The other did not react — as if the flesh was without sensation, like scar tissue. The trunk itself was very wide and bulbous near the face, with vast black nostrils.

To her shock, Icebones saw that Cold-As-Sky’s trunk tip was lined with small white teeth. The teeth were set in a bony jaw, like a tiny mouth at the end of her trunk.

Cold-As-Sky’s mouth was a gaping blue-black cavern. Even her tongue was blue. Icebones touched that tongue now — and tasted water.

Cold-As-Sky growled again, pulling back. "Your trunk is hot and wet. You are a creature of the warmth and the thick air and the running water." Her immense trunk folded up, becoming a fat, stubby tube. "This is not your place."

Icebones’s anger battled with pride — and desperation. "I tasted water on your lips. Please, Cousin—"

"And you have water," Thunder said, stepping forward menacingly.

Cold-As-Sky snorted contempt, a hollow sound which echoed from the recesses of vast sinuses, "If you want water, take it. Come." And she turned and began to push her way through the solid wall her Family had made.

Wary, Icebones followed, with Thunder at her side.

They came to the stand of breathing trees. Icebones saw that the Ice Mammoths had burrowed into the hard rocky ground at their roots. One Cow was kneeling, her body a black ball of shining hair, and her trunk was stretched out, pushed deep into the ground.

Icebones probed into one of the holes with her own trunk. It was much deeper than she could reach. But, around its rim, she saw traces of frost.

Icebones imagined those strange trunk-tip teeth digging into the rock and permafrost, chipping bit by bit toward the water that lay far, far below. With such a long trunk, Icebones saw, mammoths could survive even in this frozen wasteland, where the water lay very deep indeed.

"If you want water," Cold-As-Sky said, "dig for it as we do."

Now Autumn walked up, grand, dignified, rumbling. "You can see that is impossible for us."

"Then you will go thirsty."

"You have calves," Autumn said harshly. "You are mammoth."

Cold-As-Sky flinched, and Icebones saw that the Oath of Kilukpuk, which demanded loyalty between Cousins, was not forgotten here.

But nevertheless Cold-As-Sky said, "Your calves are not my calves. Your kind has come this way before — a strange ragged-haired one, mumbling—"

Autumn said sharply, "She has been this way?"

Icebones said, "If you will not give us water, will you guide us? We are going south. We seek a great pit in the ground, where the warmth may linger."

"I have heard its song in the rocks." Cold-As-Sky stamped the ground and nodded her head. "You will fall into the pit and its rocks will cover you bones… if you ever reach it, for the way is hard."

"Which way?"

Cold-As-Sky turned to the southeast. Icebones looked, and felt the slow wash of echoes from the hard folded landscapes there.

"I can feel it," Thunder said, dismayed. "Broken land… Great chains of mountains… One crater rim after another… It will be the hardest we have encountered yet."

Autumn said grimly, "The Footfall of Kilukpuk made a mighty splash."

"No matter how difficult, that is our trail," said Icebones.

Woodsmoke had been playing with a calf of the Ice Mammoths, pulling at her trunk as if trying to drag the other out from the forest of her parents’ legs. Now Breeze pulled him away. Woodsmoke looked back regretfully to a small round face, a pair of wistful orange eyes.

Autumn said to Cold-As-Sky, "Why are you so hostile? We have done you no harm."

"This world was ours," growled Cold-As-Sky, her voice deep as thunder. "Once it was all like this. The blood weed and the air tree flourished everywhere, and there were vast Clans, covering the land… Then the warmth came, and you came. And we were forced to retreat to this hard, rocky land, where our calves fall into the pits of the blood weed. But now the warmth is dying, and you are dying with it. And soon I will walk on your bones, and the bones of your calves."

That strange perversion of the rite of Remembering made Icebones shudder. But she said, "We did not bring the warmth. We did not banish the cold. If you are hurt, we did not hurt you. We are your Cousins."

It seemed to Icebones that Cold-As-Sky was about to respond. But then she turned away, and the Ice Mammoths returned to their deep holes in the ground.

Icebones said, "Let’s go, let’s go." And, with one determined footstep after another, she began the steady plod toward the southeast, where distant mountains cast long jagged shadows.

I know it is hard, little Icebones. But you have walked your mammoths around the world. And there is only a little further to go.

"But that last ‘little further’ may be the hardest of all, Boaster."

Don’t call me Boaster! Tell me about the land…