Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

And now a mastodont walked past with a heavy gait. He had a passenger, a skinny Firehead who sat astride the mastodont’s neck. His bare feet kicked at the animal’s ears, and he struck the mastodont’s broad scalp with a stick tipped with sharpened bone.

The mastodont had a broad, ugly scar across his face, eclipsing one eye.

It was Jaw Like Rock. And his rider was the keeper who had beaten him before, Spindle.

"Why does he accept that? He could throw off that creature and crush him in a moment."

"You don’t understand. Jaw has no choice. I have no choice. You have no choice, but to submit."

"No."

Walks With Thunder’s trunk drooped. "I was like you, once. Make it easy on yourself."

"I won’t listen to you."

And Longtusk began to push against his ropes once more. They tightened around his neck and legs and belly, but still he struggled, until he was exhausted.

The Firehead keeper came to him again, with water and food; again Longtusk ignored him.

And so it went on, as the sun worked its path around the sky.

Night fell. But it was not dark, not even quiet.

The Fireheads set up huge fires in improvised hearths all around the steppe. Longtusk could feel their uncomfortable heat. The fires sent sparks up into the echoing night, and the Fireheads sat close, their faces shining in the red light, eating and drinking and laughing.

Longtusk — hungry, thirsty, exhausted, his muscles cramped from immobility — now longed for sleep. But sleep was impossible. The Fireheads would come to him and shout in his ears, or whirl pieces of bone on ropes around their heads, making a noise like a howling wind.

Walks With Thunder was still with him. "Give in," he urged. "They won’t stop until you do."

"No," mumbled Longtusk.

"Let me tell you a story," Walks With Thunder said. "A story from the Cycle. This is of a time deep in the past — oh, thousands of Great-Years ago, long before the ice came to the earth. In those days there were no mammoths and mastodonts; we were a single kind, and we lived in a land of lush forests, far to the south of here.

"But the Earth cooled. The forests follow the weather, as every mastodont knows. Year by year the land became cooler and drier, and great waves of trees moved north across the Earth—"

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Just listen. Now our Matriarch, the Matriarch of all mastodonts, was called Mammut. She was a descendant of Probos, of course, but she lived long before the mother of the mammoths."

"Ganesha."

"Yes. Now Mammut was wise—"

"They always are in Cycle stories."

Walks With Thunder barked his amusement at that. "Yes. It’s always easy after the fact, isn’t it?… Mammut could see the way the forests were migrating to the north. And she said, ‘Just as the forests must follow the weather, so my calves must follow the forests.’ And so, under her leadership, her Clan followed the slow march of the forests, seeking out the marshy places beneath the great trees, for that is what mastodonts prefer. And her calves prospered and multiplied, filling the land.

"Now, much later, long after Mammut had gone to the aurora, another forest came marching across the land. A different kind of forest."

"I don’t know what you’re talking about," Longtusk mumbled.

"It was a forest of Fireheads, little grazer. And the mastodonts fled in panic."

"That is because they were cowards."

Walks With Thunder ignored that. "So the mastodonts called up to the aurora, ‘What should we do, great Matriarch?’

"Mammut was wise. She understood.

"As the weather washes over the land, the trees must follow. As the trees wash over the land, the mastodonts must follow. And now, as the Fireheads wash over the land, the mastodonts must follow again. That is what Mammut said. And that is what we accept."

"It isn’t much of a story."

"Well, I’m sorry. I was trying to make a point. I left out the fights and the sex scenes."

"Anyway the Fireheads are not trees."

Thunder growled irritably. "The point is that the Fireheads feed us, as the trees do. They even care for us — when they choose. And we cannot be rid of them, little grazer. Any more than the land can rid itself of the trees. Accept them. Accept their food."

Once again, Longtusk saw blearily, the Firehead, Lemming, was before him. He held up a paw, full of grasses and herbs, fragrant, freshly gathered. But Longtusk turned his head away.

It lasted three more days, three more nights.

Walks With Thunder and Jaw Like Rock were both with him.

"Your courage is astonishing, little grazer. Nobody else has ever lasted so long before."

Longtusk, beaten down by hunger and thirst and sleeplessness, could barely see through milky, crusted eyes. "Leave me alone."

Jaw reached out and, with the pink tip of his trunk, smoothed the filth-matted fur of Longtusk’s face. "Don’t let them kill you," he said softly. "That way they will have won."

Longtusk closed his eyes.

After a time he felt a pressure at the side of his mouth. It was the paw of Lemming, the keeper, once more holding out sweet grasses.

"Take it, grazer. It’s no defeat."

"My name is Longtusk."

Walks With Thunder and Jaw Like Rock thumped the ground with their trunks. "Longtusk," they said.

Lemming was staring at him, his eyes round, as if he understood.

Longtusk opened his mouth and took the food.

More days passed. Gradually his strength returned.

His ropes loosened. They had burned and cut him painfully. Lemming treated the wounds with salves of fat and butter, and with water heated in the hearths. He squeezed droplets of milk from an aurochs cow into Longtusk’s eyes, soothing their itching.

Five days after he had first accepted the food, more Fireheads came to see him: Bedrock the leader, the Shaman Smokehat with his grotesque headpiece of smoking bone, and the cub, Crocus.

Though Bedrock was cautious and kept hold of her paw, Crocus approached Longtusk. Her necklace of mammoth teeth gleamed in the watery spring sun. She reached past the ropes and ruffled the long hair that dangled from his trunk.

He closed his eyes, recalling how Willow, the male Dreamer cub, used to do the same thing.

He wondered where the Dreamers were now, Stripeskull and Willow and the others. Scattered, he supposed, turned out of the caves they had inhabited for uncounted generations, in the face of the advance of these Fireheads -

Pain lanced into his flank. He trumpeted and reared up, but he was contained by the ropes. There was a stink of burning flesh and hair.

The Shaman, Smokehat, held a piece of stone fixed to the end of a stick. The stone had been chipped and shaped to look like the outspread paw of a Firehead. It glowed red hot.

The mark of the Firehead, the outstretched paw, had been burned into Longtusk’s flank.

Like all these others he belonged to the Fireheads, and was forever marked.

He trumpeted his anger and despair.

As you know, Icebones (said Silverhair), Longtusk spent most of his years as a young Bull away from other mammoths.

Everywhere he went he won friendship and respect — naturally, since he was the greatest hero of all, and even other creatures could recognize that — and in many instances he was made their leader, and led them to fruitfulness and success before passing on to continue his adventures.

And so it came to pass that Longtusk came to live with the Fireheads, and to rule them.

Now the Fireheads are the strangest creatures in all the Cycle: weak yet strong, smart yet stupid. In the summer heat they had difficulty finding the food and drink they needed, and in the winter cold they suffered because they had no winter coat.