Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Now the Fireheads knew he was there; they reacted, shouting. But none of that mattered, compared to the massive looming presence suddenly here behind him.

For it was a mammoth… and yet it was not.

It, he, was a male. He wasn’t as tall as a full-grown mammoth Bull, yet he loomed over Longtusk. He was coated with wiry black-brown hair, shorter and darker than Longtusk’s, some of it stained by the gray of age. His back was flat, lacking the fleshy hump of a true mammoth, and he was heavy-set, his chest deep, his limbs and feet broad. And he had broad stubby tusks, heavily chipped and scarred.

Four of them: four tusks.

And, strangest of all, Longtusk made out a scar burned into his muscled flank: a strange five-pronged form, burned through the layers of hair and into his flesh, exactly like the outstretched paw of a Dreamer — or a Firehead.

The other opened his great mouth and roared. A gush of warm, fetid air billowed out over Longtusk, stinking of crushed wood and sap. The not-mammoth’s teeth were cones of enamel — not flat grinding surfaces like Longtusk’s, but sharp, almost like a cat’s cruel fangs.

Longtusk staggered back. He crashed out of the trees and into the clearing before the caves, in full view of Fireheads and Dreamers.

There were cries of shock. Panicking, he whirled around.

All but two of the Fireheads had fallen to the ground before him. The two who remained standing — staring at him open-mouthed — were the strong leader and the grotesque Burning-head. The leader put down his cub and picked up an abandoned stick. This was fitted with a blade of something that glittered like ice. He held the stick up, pointing it at Longtusk.

In the Fireheads’ distraction, the Dreamers seemed to see their chance. Even the female who had been pinned to the ground was free now. Under her lead, the females gathered their cubs and, quickly, silently, began to slip away up the trail that led to the steppe. Willow pulled Stripeskull to his feet, then let Stripeskull lean on him so that he hopped forward on his one good hind leg.

Willow cast a single regretful glance back at Longtusk, and then was gone.

But there was no time to reflect.

A powerful trumpet and a slam of broad feet into the ground told Longtusk that the strange not-mammoth was right behind him. Terrified, bewildered, overwhelmed by strangeness, Longtusk turned, trumpeting. The Fireheads cringed anew.

The other’s eyes were like pools of tar, embedded in wrinkled sockets of flesh.

"Do you know what that blade is, cousin? It is quartz. A kind of rock that’s harder and sharper than almost any other. The old fellow may not look so strong, but he could throw that spear so hard that quartz tip will nestle in your heart." The not-mammoth’s accent was strange — somehow guttural, primitive — but his language, of rumbles, trumpets, growls, stamps and posture, was clear to Longtusk.

Longtusk said, "You are not mammoth."

"No. But I am your cousin. Don’t you know your Cycle? We are all Calves of Probos. I am better than mammoth. I am mastodont."

The two great proboscideans faced each other, challenging, calculating, rumbling: members of hugely ancient species, separated by evolutionary paths that had diverged twenty-five million years before.

The three Fireheads were engaged in a complex three-way argument.

"We call the leader Bedrock," growled the mastodont. "For he is strong and silent as the rock on which the world is built. His cub is called Crocus, for the color of her hair. And the Shaman is Smokehat —"

"What is a Shaman?"

Bedrock had the quartz-tipped spear raised to shoulder height, and it was still pointing at Longtusk’s heart. But Crocus was pulling at Bedrock’s free foreleg and was jabbering excitedly, pointing at Longtusk.

Meanwhile Smokehat, with his grotesque garb of bone and smoke, was all but dancing with impatience and rage.

"That Shaman wants you killed. Bedrock is prepared to do it. But his cub seems to think you saved her life."

"You can understand them?"

"You pick up a little," the mastodont said wistfully, "if you spend long enough with them. My name is Walks With Thunder."

Longtusk growled. "And mine is Longtusk. Learn it for my Remembering, mastodont, for I am ready to die."

"Oh, that isn’t the idea at all."

"What?"

The mastodont reared up, looming over Longtusk and pawing at the air.

Startled, angry, bewildered, Longtusk backed away from this terrifying opponent and plunged into the stand of trees.

He found the trail that led to the open steppe.

He turned back the way he had come and raised his trunk, sniffing the air. There was no sign of pursuit.

But there was a smell of mammoth — no, it was the sharp, wood-ask stink of the animals he must call mastodont — and, he realized with mounting alarm, it came from all around him.

He turned again. And there was a mastodont ahead of him.

Like Walks With Thunder, this was a squat, powerfully built male with four stubby tusks. But he sported a broad scar that ran the length of his face, a scar that all but obliterated the socket of one eye. "Hello, little grazer," he rumbled. "Welcome to the herd."

As Longtusk turned once more, trunk raised, he saw and smelled more mastodonts to his left and right, like a line of stocky, hairy boulders: a row of them, all powerful adult males.

Now, with a drumming of mighty footsteps, the mastodonts marched intently toward him, converging. Every one of them bore the strange scar sported by Walks With Thunder, a Firehead paw burned into hairless flesh. The way they moved together, as if driven by a single mind, was unnerving.

And, strangest of all, there were Fireheads with them. They carried sticks tipped with curved pieces of bone, which they used to tap the mastodonts on the head or ears or flanks. Some of the mastodonts actually had Fireheads sitting astride their backs, with their long, thin hind legs draped over their necks, feet applying sharp kicks to the mastodonts’ small ears.

Soon the mastodonts were close enough for him to make out what they were saying in their heavy, strange accent.

"…Well, well. What have we here? Don’t tell me it’s a grazer."

"I haven’t seen one of those grass-chewers for a long time. I thought they had all died out."

"It must be a Cow. Look at those pretty-pretty tusks. Any self-respecting Bull would be too embarrassed to wear skinny monstrosities like that."

"Hey, little grazer! Can I borrow your tusks? I need a pick to clean out my musth gland, and those spindly things are just the right size…"

He saw that the mastodonts had closed the circle around him.

The big scarred Bull facing him was being whipped, severely, by the Firehead with him. The Firehead was shouting, a simple, repetitive sound: "Agit! Agit!" It was obvious he was trying to drive the big Bull forward. This Firehead was sapling-thin with a cruel, pinched face.

The scarred Bull, seeming unaware of the multiple wounds being inflicted on him, swiveling his huge, filth-crusted rump and let out a fart of thunderous intensity. A foul brown spray knocked the skinny Firehead backward, and the line of mastodonts reacted with stomps and growls of amusement.

The Bull walked forward nonchalantly out of his dispersing brown cloud, muscles moving under his fat brown-black coat of hair. "Sorry about that. These Fireheads are an irritation at times."

Longtusk stood his ground and raised his tusks. "Come any closer and I’ll rip out your other eye."

The mastodont grunted. He reached a stand of low, twisted spruce trees. His trunk flicked out, its pink tip running over one sapling after another. Finally he settled on the biggest, strongest tree of the grove. He wrapped his trunk around its girth and, with a single flick of his huge, low-slung head, ripped the tree out of the ground, roots and all. His mouth gaped, revealing a purple tongue and teeth like miniature mountains, chipped and worn. With a crackling splinter, he bit the tree clean in half, his long jaw bones moving in a powerful up-down motion quite different from the back-and-forth grinding of a mammoth’s jaw. Then he stamped on the tree, breaking it up further.