Stephen Baxter - Icebones

The mammoths began to disperse.

"It is done, Icebones," Autumn said. "The shadow of the Lost is gone at last. This is our world now."

"Yes. It is done…"

And the last of Icebones’s strength drained into the red dust. The colors leached out of the world, and her head filled with a sharp ringing. She would have fallen, if not for the support of her Family.

A watching human would only have seen the mammoths gather, heard nothing but an intense and mysterious rumbling and growling and stamping and clicking of tusks.

She would never have known that the destiny of a world had been tested, and determined.

The Song of Oestrus disturbed Icebones, startling her awake.

She sniffed the air querulously.

It was cold and damp. The sun was dim, or so it seemed to her. Perhaps another winter was coming, though it seemed no more than heartbeats since spring was done.

But then the seasons were shorter on this hard little world. Or were they longer? She could not recall.

Time flowed strangely here, like water, like blood. Sometimes it seemed that her life had fled as rapidly as the fleeting summers, for here she was, suddenly a last-molar, barely able to chew the softest grass anymore, her senses and her memories as eroded as her teeth.

Ah, but sometimes she thought she was young again, young and imagining how it would be to be broken-down old mammoth, here in this green hollow, the navel of the world.

Young dreaming of old age, or dotard dreaming of youth? Perhaps, in the end, it made no difference. Perhaps there was no past or present, young or old; perhaps life was just a single moment, a unity, like a pebble taken into the mouth to ward off thirst, inspected by the tongue from every angle…

Anyhow, whether the world was growing cold or not, she certainly was.

She lumbered toward the Breathing Tree.

Soon she was wheezing with the effort of the walk, and her shoulder ached, never properly healed from its ancient injury. Close to the Tree’s roots, where hot air gushed and warm water flowed, the Swamp-Mammoths had made their wallows. She would find some company there, and perhaps would try a little grass, or even a willow bud. And she would ruminate a while with Autumn. Ah, but poor, stolid Autumn was long dead, and she had forgotten again.

She saw a herd of caribou. They preferred to live out their lives at the fringe of the great forests of warmer climes, but came to the steppe to breed. They crossed a stream, splashing and pawing at the water, so that sunlit droplets rose up all around them. Their movements were hasty, nervous, skittish, like horses.

She found the source of the oestrus call. On a small rise a Bull had mounted a young Cow, laying his trunk over her back and the top of her head, and gripping her hips with his forelegs.

When he lumbered away from her, the Cow’s song was loud, a series of deep swooping notes repeated over and over, rising out of silence then fracturing into nothing. Soon more Cows joined her to celebrate, trumpeting and making urine together, and they reached out crisscrossing trunks to explore the ground, seeking the strong smell of the mating.

But Icebones’s battered old trunk could smell nothing, and the oestrus songs were fuzzy in her hearing — and even her heart felt only the smallest pang of jealousy. She, of course, had never come into oestrus, not once in her long life since she had woken from her strange, half-forgotten Sleep on that remote mountainside. It didn’t seem to matter anymore. Perhaps her heart had grown calluses, like the broken pads of her feet.

She walked on, laboring to breathe, heading for the Tree.

There were mammoths everywhere. They walked steadily through long grass that swirled in their wake. One of them stopped to graze, and the swaying grass fell still at the same time as the rippling of his hair.

There was a sense of stillness about the mammoths, Icebones thought: of meditation, patience, their calmness as solid and pervasive as the crimson rock beneath her feet. All creatures of the steppe knew stillness.

Where the mammoths walked, ground-nesters like plovers and jaegers flew up angrily if they threatened to step in their nests. But snow buntings and longspurs were making their nests of discarded mammoth wool. And in the winters the snow-clearing of the mammoths exposed grass for hares and willow buds for ptarmigans, and the wells they dug were used by wolves and foxes and others, and even now the insects stirred up by the mammoths’ passage served as food for the birds.

It was as it had always been, as the Cycle proudly proclaimed: Where mammoths walk, they bring life. It was right, and it was good.

The mammoths reached out to her with absent affection. But they were strangers to her.

Of course they were. By comparison with their spindly liquid grace she felt like a lump of earth, gray and dull. These were mammoths shaped by this new world. The grass grew from the blood-red dust, and the mammoths ate the grass, so that the red dust of the Sky Steppe coursed in their veins. Changing, shimmering, these new mammoths moved past her like tall shadows, shifting, growing stranger with every new generation.

And none of them were her children, or grandchildren: not one.

Taken from her mother on the Island, she had devoted her life to a quest for Family. Well, she had succeeded. She had built the mammoths into a Family, into Clans. But now the Sky Steppe was taking them away.

…Icebones.

She stopped, struggling to raise her heavy old trunk. The calling voice had been unfamiliar, and it had seemed to come neither from left or right, nor before or behind.

The colors leached out of the world. She felt herself sway.

Icebones. Icebones. "…Icebones."

She looked up. A Bull stood before her — little more than a calf, no taller than she was, his tusks still stubby and untested.

"Woodsmoke?"

"No," he said patiently. "Woodsmoke was the mate of my grandmother, Matriarch. I am Tang-Of-Dust. You recall — as an infant I loved to roll in dust dunes and—"

"Ah, Tang-Of-Dust." But his smell was indistinct, his form in her eyes only a wavering outline. "Always eat the tall grass," she said.

"Matriarch?"

"You are what you eat. That much is obvious to everyone. And the tallest grass dreams of touching the sky, of reaching the aurora. So that is what you must eat…"

Here was a pretty stand of tussock grass. Forgetting Tang-Of-Dust, she bent to inspect it. The tall thin leaves grew as high as her shoulder, rising out of a pedestal of old leaves and roots. Between the tussock clumps burnet grass grew. This sported round red flower heads that swayed gracefully in the breeze. There were other plants scattered more thinly, like ferns and buttercups and dandelions, and many clumps of fungus, some of them bright red or white, their colors a startling contrast to the deep green of the grass.

Just a stand of grass. She couldn’t even smell or taste it. All she could do was see it, as if with age she was turning into one of the Lost. But it was beautiful, intricate, like so much of the world.

She was still herself. She was Icebones, daughter of Silverhair. Nothing would erode that away: the last thing she would retain, even when the world had worn away like her molars.

She said, "He went away, you know."

"Matriarch?"

"Woodsmoke. He was born on the great Migration — did you know that? I suppose wandering was in his blood… At first it wasn’t possible, of course. The world away from the Footfall just got too cold for anything to live. Anything like us, anyhow. But gradually that changed, and off he went. But they say that where his dung fell, grass and trees grew, and the animals and birds that live on them followed. Isn’t that wonderful, Woodsmoke? As if life is spreading out from this deep warm place. He never came back, of course…"