Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Longtusk snorted in disgust, turned his back and continued to walk.

But the next time he felt the tell-tale prod at his rump he swished his tail, as if brushing away flies. He heard a thin mewl of complaint.

Smokehat was clutching his cheek, and blood leaked around his fingers. Longtusk’s tail hairs had brushed the Firehead’s face, splitting it open like a piece of old fruit. With murder in his sharp eyes, the Shaman was led away for treatment; and Longtusk, with quiet contentment, continued his steady plod.

He heard a trumpeted greeting. He slowed, startled.

There were mastodonts here: a small Family, a few adult Cows, calves holding onto their mothers’ tails with their spindly little trunks. They wandered freely through the settlement, without hobbles or restraints, mingling with the Fireheads.

One of the Cows was Neck Like Spruce.

"Well, well," she said. "Quite a spectacle. Life getting dull out in the stockade, was it?"

When he replied, his voice was tight, his rumbles shallow. "If you haven’t anything useful to say, leave me alone."

She sensed his tension, and glanced now at the hunters who followed him, spears still ready to fly. "Just stay calm," she said seriously. "They are used to us. In fact they feel safer if we are here. Where there are mastodonts, the cats and wolves will not attack… Where are you going?"

He growled. "Do I look as if I have the faintest idea?"

She trumpeted her amusement, and broke away from her Family to walk alongside him.

At last the motley procession approached the very heart of the Firehead settlement, and Longtusk slowed, uncertain.

There were larger structures here — perhaps a dozen of them, arranged in an uneven circle. They were rough domes of gray-green and white. The largest of all, and the most incomplete, was at the very center.

Crocus slid easily to the ground. She took the tip of Longtusk’s trunk in her small paw and led him into the circle of huts.

He stopped by one of the huts. It was made of turf and stretched skin and rock, piled up high. On the expanses of bare animal skin, there were strange markings, streaks and whirls of ochre and other dyes, and there and there the skin was marked with the unmistakable imprint of a Firehead paw, marked out as a silhouette in red-brown coloring. The dome-shaped hut had a hole cut in its top, from which smoke curled up to the sky.

There were white objects arrayed around the base of the hut. White, complex shapes.

Mammoth bones.

Big skulls had been pushed into the ground by their tusk sockets, all around the hut. Curving bones, shoulder blades and pelvises, had been layered along the lower wall of the hut. There were heavier bones, femurs and bits of skulls, tied to the turf roof. And two great curving tusks had been shoved into the ground and their sharp points tied together to form an arch over a skin-flap doorway.

Some of the bones were chipped and showed signs of where they had been gnawed by predators, perhaps as they had emerged from the remote river bank where they had been mined.

Now the flap of skin parted at the front of the hut, and a woman pushed out into the colder air. She gaped at the woolly mammoth standing before her, and clutched her squealing infant tighter to her chest.

Longtusk, baffled, was filled with dread and horror. "By Kilukpuk’s last breath, what is this?"

"This is how the Fireheads live, Longtusk," said Neck Like Spruce. "The turf and rock keeps in the warmth of their fires…"

"But, Spruce, the bones. Why…?"

She trumpeted her irritation at him. "This is a cold and windy place, if you hadn’t noticed, Longtusk. The Fireheads have to make their huts sturdy. They prefer wood, but there is little wood on this steppe, and what there was they have mostly burned. But there are plenty of bones."

"Mammoth bones."

"Yes. Longtusk, your kind have lived here for a long time, and the ground is full of their bones. In some ways bone is better than wood, because it is immune to frost and damp and insects. These huts are built to last a long time, Longtusk, many seasons… And it does no harm," she said softly.

"I know." For, he realized, these mammoths had long gone to the aurora, and had no use for these discarded scraps.

There was a gentle tugging at his trunk. He glanced down. It was Crocus; she was trying to get him to come closer to the big central hut.

He rumbled and followed her.

This hut would eventually be the biggest of them all — a fitting home for Bedrock and his family, including little Crocus — but it was incomplete, without a roof.

A ring of mammoth femurs had been thrust into the ground in a circle at the base, and an elaborate pattern of shoulder blades had been piled up around the perimeter of the hut, overlapping neatly like the scales of some immense fish.

The floor had been dug away, making a shallow pit. Flat stones had been set in a circle at the center of the hut to make a hearth. And there was a small cup of carved stone, filled with sticky animal fat, within which a length of plaited mastodont fur burned slowly, giving off a greasy smoke. With a flash of intuition he saw that it would be dark inside the hut when the roof had been completed; perhaps sputtering flames like these would give the illusion of day, even in darkness.

Under Crocus’s urging, he laid down the skull he carried, just outside the circle of leg bones. Crocus jumped on it, excited, and made big swooping gestures with her skinny forelegs. Perhaps this skull would be built into the hut. Its glaring eye sockets and sweeping tusks would make an imposing entrance.

Now Crocus ran into the incomplete hut, picked up a bundle wrapped in skin, and held it up to Longtusk. When the skin wrapping fell away Longtusk saw that it was a slab of sandstone, and strange loops and whorls had been cut into its surface.

"Touch it," called Neck Like Spruce.

Cautiously Longtusk reached forward with his trunk’s fragile pink tip, and explored the surface of the rock.

"…It’s warm."

"They put the rocks in the fires to make them hot, then clutch them to their bellies in the night."

Now Crocus was jabbering, pointing to the markings on the skin walls, streaks and whorls and lines, daubed there by Firehead fingers. The cub seemed excited.

He traced his trunk tip over the patterns, but could taste or smell nothing but ochre and animal fat. He growled, baffled.

"It’s another Firehead habit," Spruce said testily. "Each pattern means something. Look again, Longtusk. The Fireheads aren’t like us; they have poor smell and hearing, and rely on their eyes. Don’t touch it or smell it. Try to look through Firehead eyes. Imagine it isn’t just a sheet of skin, but a — a hole in the wall. Imagine you aren’t looking at markings just in front of your face, but forms that are far away. Look with your eyes, Longtusk, just your eyes. Now — now what do you see?"

After a time, with Crocus chattering constantly in his ear, he managed it.

Here was a curving outline, with a smooth sheen of ochre across its interior, that became a bison, strong and proud. Here was a row of curved lines, one after the other, that was a line of deer, heads up and running. Here was a horse, dipping its head and stamping its small foot. Here was a strange creature that was half leaping stag and half Firehead, glaring out at him.

He looked around the settlement with new eyes — and he saw that there were makings everywhere, on every available surface: the walls of the huts, the faces of the Fireheads, the shafts of the hunters’ spears, even Crocus’s heated stone. And all of the markings meant something, showing Fireheads and animals, mountains and flowers.

The illusions were transient and flat. These "animals" had no scent, no voices, no weight to set the Earth ringing. They were just shadows of color and line.