Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Longtusk wondered absently what that long-dead tusker would have made of this.

Crocus looked up at her father and the Shaman, talking rapidly and jumping up and down with excitement. This skull was evidently her choice. Bedrock and Smokehat reached down and, hauling together, dragged the skull from the heap. It was too heavy for them to lift.

Then, his absurd headdress smoking, the Shaman sang and danced around the ancient bones, sprinkling them with water and dust. Longtusk had seen this kind of behavior before. It seemed that the Shaman was making the skull special, as if it was a living thing he could train to protect the little cub who had chosen it.

When the Shaman was done, Bedrock gestured to the mastodont trainers. Lemming and the others walked through the stockade and selected Jaw Like Rock and another strong Bull. Evidently they were to carry the skull off.

But Crocus seemed angry. She ran into the stockade herself, shouting, "Baitho! Baitho!"

Longtusk lowered his trunk to the ground and bent his head. With the confidence of long practice she wriggled past his tusks, grabbed his ears and in a moment was sitting in her comfortable place at his neck. Then, with a sharp slap on his scalp, she urged him forward. "Agit!"

She was, he realized, driving him directly toward the pile of bones.

As he neared the pile an instinctive dread of those grisly remains built up in him. The other Fireheads seemed to sense his tension.

He kept walking, crossing the muddy, trampled ground, one broad step at a time.

He reached the great gaping skull where it lay on the ground. There was a lingering smell of dead mammoth about it, and it seemed to glare at him in disapproval.

Crocus tapped his head. "A dhur! A dhur!" She wanted him to pick it up.

I can’t, he thought.

He heard a high-pitched growl around him. The hunters were approaching him with spears raised to their shoulders, all pointing at his heart.

The Shaman watched, eyes glittering like quartz pebbles.

From out of nowhere, a storm cloud of danger was gathering around Longtusk. He felt himself quiver, and in response Crocus’s fingers tightened their grip on his fur.

Longtusk stared into the vacant eyes of the long-dead mammoth. What, he wondered, would you have me do?

It was as if a voice sounded deep in his belly. Remember me, it said. That’s all. Remember me.

He understood.

He touched the vacant skull with his trunk, lifted it, let it fall back to the dirt. Then he turned.

He faced a wall of Firehead hunters. One of them actually jabbed his chest with a quartz spear tip, hard enough to break the skin. But Longtusk, descending into the slow rhythms of his kind, ignored these fluttering Fireheads, even the spark of pain at his chest.

He gathered twigs and soil and cast them on the ancient bones, and then turned backward and touched the bones with the sensitive pads of his back feet. Longtusk was trying to Remember the spirit which had once occupied this pale bone, this Bull with no name.

The Fireheads watched with evident confusion — and the Shaman with rage, at this ceremony so much older and deeper than his own posturing. Farther away, the mastodonts rumbled their approval.

The Firehead cub slid to the ground, waving back the spears of the hunters. Slowly, hesitantly, Crocus joined in. She slipped off her moccasins and touched the skull with her own small feet, and bent to scoop more dirt over the cold bones. She was copying Longtusk, trying to Remember too — or, at least, showing him she understood.

At last, Longtusk felt he was done. Now the skull was indeed just a piece of bone, discarded.

Crocus stepped up to him, rubbed the fur between his eyes, and climbed briskly onto his back. She said gently, "A dhur."

Clumsily, but without hesitation, he slid his tusks under the skull and wrapped his trunk firmly over the top of it. Then he straightened his neck and lifted.

The skull wasn’t as heavy as it looked; mammoth bone was porous, to make it light despite its great bulk and strength. He cradled it carefully.

Then — under the guidance of Crocus, and with Bedrock, the Shaman, and assorted keepers and spear-laden hunters following him like wolves trailing migrant deer — he carried the skull toward the Firehead settlement.

Ahead of him, smoke curled into the air from a dozen fires.

The trail to the settlement was well beaten, a rut dug into the steppe by the feet of Fireheads and mastodonts. But Longtusk had not been this way before.

He passed storage pits. Their walls were scoured by the tusks of the mastodonts who had dug out these pits, and they were lined with slabs of smooth rock. Longtusk could see the pits were half-filled with hunks of dried and salted meat, or with dried grasses to provide feed for the mastodonts; winter seemed remote, but already these clever, difficult Fireheads were planning for its rigors.

Farther in toward the center of the settlement there were many hearths: out in the open air, blackened circles on the ground everywhere, many of them smoldering with dayfires. Chunks of meat broiled on spits, filling the air with acrid smoke.

There was, in fact, a lot of meat in the settlement.

Some of it dangled from wooden frames, varying in condition from dry and curled to fresh, some even dripping blood. There were a few small animals, lemmings and rabbits and even a young fox, hung up with their necks lolling, obviously dead.

And, most of all, there were Fireheads everywhere: not the few keepers and hunters the mastodonts encountered in their stockade and during the course of their work, but many more, more than he could count. There were males and females, old ones with yellowed, gappy teeth and frost-white hair, young ones who ran, excited, even infants in their mothers’ arms. They all wore thick clothing of fur and skin, stuffed with grasses and wool; all but the smallest cubs wore thick, warming moccasins.

Some of the Fireheads worked at the hearths, turning spitted meat. One female had a piece of skin staked out over the ground and she was scraping it with a sharpened stone, removing fat and clinging flesh and sinew, leaving the surface smooth and shining. He saw a male making deerskin into rope, cutting strips crosswise for strength. They seemed, in fact, to use every part of the animals they hunted: tendons were twisted into strands of sinew, and bladders, stomach and intestines were used to hold water.

They made paint, of ground-up rock mixed with animal fat, or lichen soaked in aurochs’ urine. Many of them had marked their skins with stripes and circles of the red and yellow coloring, and they wore strings of beads made of pretty, pierced stones or chipped bones.

Many of the Fireheads were fascinated by Longtusk. They broke off what they were doing and followed, the adults staring, the cubs dancing and laughing.

Here was one small group of Fireheads — perhaps a family — having a meal, gathered around a sputtering fire. They had bones that had been broiled on their fire, and they cracked the bones on rocks and sucked out the soft, greasy marrow within. Longtusk wondered absently what animals the bones had come from.

As he passed — a great woolly mammoth bearing a huge skull and with the daughter of the chief clinging proudly to his back — the Fireheads stopped eating, stared, and joined the slow, gathering procession that trailed after Longtusk.

…Now, surrounded by Fireheads, he was aware of discomfort, a sharp prodding at his rump.

He turned. He saw the Shaman, Smokehat, bearing one of the hunters’ big game spears. The quartz tip was red with blood: Longtusk’s blood.

He saw calculation in the Shaman’s small, pinched face. Sensing his tension, Smokehat was deliberately prodding him, trying to make him respond — perhaps by growing angry, throwing off Crocus. If that happened, if he went rogue here at the heart of the Firehead settlement, Longtusk would surely be killed.