Stephen Baxter - Icebones

"We are Cousins, Calves of Kilukpuk," Icebones growled. "You know the Oath. Every mammoth is born with the Oath, just as she is born knowing the name of Kilukpuk, and the tongue she taught us. And so you know that if the Oath is broken, the dream of Kilukpuk will die at last… But enough. I am weary. I have come far, Cousin, and I am ready to die, if I must. Leave me."

And, as the dust swirled around her, it seemed she drifted into blankness once more, as if letting go of her hold on the world’s tail.

But then something probed at her mouth: a trunk, strong, leathery, cold. And water trickled into her throat.

She sucked at the trunk, like a calf at her mother’s breast. The water, ice cold, washed away the dust that had caked over her tongue.

But then, though her thirst still raged, she pushed the trunk away. "The calf," she gasped.

She sensed the vast bulk of the Ice Mammoth move off into the howling storm, seeking Woodsmoke.

Icebones breasted a ridge, exhausted, her shoulder a clear icicle of pain. She paused at the crest.

She saw that they had reached a place where the land descended sharply. A new vista opened up before her: a landscape sunk deep beneath the level of this high, broken plain. Within huge concentric systems of rock, she saw a puddle of green and water-blue.

It was a tremendous crater. It was the Footfall of Kilukpuk.

And, even from this high vantage, still suspended in the thin air, Icebones could hear the call of mammoths.

Eagerly, her breath a rattle in her throat, she walked on, step by painful step.

The Family climbed down through crumpled, eroded rim mountains.

On the horizon Icebones made out complex purple shadows that must be the rim walls on the far side of this great crater. They seemed impossibly far away. And the wall systems were extensively damaged. In one place a fire mountain towered from beyond the horizon, a vast, flat cone. The rim mountains before it were broken, as if rivers of rock had long ago washed them away and flooded stretches of the central plain. Further to the east the rim mountains were pierced by giant notches. They were valleys, perhaps, cut by immense floods. Everything here was ancient, Icebones realized: ancient and remade, over and over.

Plodding steadily, the mammoths left the terrain of the rim mountains. They reached a belt of land around the central basin itself, a hard red-black rock, folded and wrinkled into ridges and gullies and stubby isolated mesas.

Icebones could hear the broken song of the ground beneath her, feel the deep shattering it had endured, deep beyond the limits of her perception. But since it had formed, this ancient scar tissue had been crumpled and folded and eroded. Every rocky protrusion was carved and shaped by wind and rain, and dust was everywhere, heaped up against the larger rocks and ridges.

But even here they found stands of grass and struggling herbs and trees, and shallow ponds which were not frozen all the way to their base. Already the bony rockscape over which they had struggled for so long, with its killer weed and breathing trees and distorted, resentful Ice Mammoths, seemed a foul dream, and the habitual ache in Icebones’s chest began to fade.

After many days’ walking over this ridged plain, the mammoths at last reached the basin itself.

Quite suddenly, Icebones found herself stepping onto thick loam that gave gently under her weight. When she lifted her foot she could see how she had left a neat round print; the soil here was thick and dense with life.

All around her the green of living things lapped between crimson ridges and mesas, like a rising tide.

The mammoths fanned out over the soft ground, ripping eagerly at mouthfuls of grass, grunting their pleasure and relief.

This lowest basin was a cupped land, a secret land of hills and valleys and glimmering ponds. Icebones made out the rippling sheen of grass, herbivore herds which moved like brown clouds over the ground, and flocks of birds glimmering in the air. And, right at the center of the basin, there was an immense, dense forest, a squat pillar of dark brown that thrust out of the ground, huge indeed to be visible at this distance.

Here, all the ancient drama of impacts and rocks and water had become a setting for the smaller triumphs and tragedies of life.

Woodsmoke ran stiff-legged to the shore of a small lake where geese padded back and forth on ice floes. The mammoth calf went hurtling into the water, trumpeting, hair flying, splashing everywhere. The geese squawked their annoyance and rose in a cloud of rippling wings.

Icebones watched him, envying his vigor.

Woodsmoke, shaking water out of a cloud of new-sprouting guard hairs, ran to Breeze. The calf wrapped his trunk around his mother’s leg, a signal that he wished to feed. Welcoming, she lifted her leg, and he raised his trunk and clambered beneath her belly fur, seeking to clamp his mouth on her warm dug.

Icebones might have left him to die on the High Plains.

Warily she explored her own feelings. Woodsmoke’s death would have left a hole in her that would never have healed, she thought. But she knew, too, that it would have been right — that she would make the same decision again.

Autumn, more sedately, came to Icebones. "It is a good place. You were right, Icebones."

Together they walked back toward the foothills of the high rocky plain. At the fringe of the broad pool of steppe there was a stretch of mud, frozen hard and bearing the imprint of many vanished hooves and feet.

Icebones sniffed the air. "Yes. It is a good place. But look at this. Even here the tide of life is receding — even here, in the Footfall itself."

Autumn wrapped her trunk over Icebones’s. "We are exhausted, Icebones, and so are you. Tomorrow’s problems can wait until we are stronger. For today, enjoy the water and the grass and the sweet willow twigs."

"Yes," Icebones said. "You are wise, Autumn, as always—"

They heard a mammoth’s greeting rumble.

Immediately both Cows turned that way, trunks raised.

It was a Bull. He was walking out of the central steppe plain toward them. He was no youth like Thunder, but a mature Bull in the prime of his life, a pillar of muscle and rust-brown hair, with two magnificent tusks that curled before his face. He towered over Icebones — taller than any of the mammoths of her Family, taller than any mammoth she had ever encountered before her Sleep.

He gazed down at her, curious, excited. "…Icebones?" His voice was complex, like the voice of every mammoth, a mixture of trunk chirps and snorts, rumblings from his head and chest, and the stamping of his feet. But she recognized the deep undertones that had carried to her around half a world.

"Boaster — Boaster!"

Boaster pressed his forehead against hers. Icebones grasped his trunk and pulled at him this way and that. Then she let go, and they roared and bellowed and ran around each other until they could bump their rumps. Then they stood side by side, swaying, urinating and making dung urgently.

He touched her lips, and lifted his trunk tip to his mouth, tasting her. "It is indeed you, little Icebones."

"Littler than you imagined," she said dryly.

"Yes. But I am not." And he swung around, showing her what hung from his underbelly. "There. Isn’t that magnificent?"

She realized, awestruck, that he hadn’t been boasting after all… But she said, "You will always be Boaster to me."

He growled. "You are not in oestrus, little Icebones. Have I missed your flowering? Must I wait? Who took you — not that calf?"

Thunder rumbled. "I am no calf. Would you like me to prove it?" And he raised his tusks, challenging the huge Bull.