Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

She was Remembering him, Longtusk realized. Her simple, tender actions, unrehearsed and personal, were — compared to the foolish ritualistic capering of the Shaman — unbearably moving.

Bedrock had been leader of the Fireheads from the moment Longtusk had first encountered these strange, complex, bewildering creatures. But here he lay, slain and silent, destroyed by a single arrow fired by a white-painted Firehead who had never known Bedrock’s name, had known nothing of the complex web of power and relationships which had tangled up his life. As he gazed on the limp, passive form in the pit, Longtusk was struck by the awful simplicity of death, the conclusion to every story.

At last Crocus stood up. The Fireheads reached into the pit and lowered down bones. They were mammoth shoulder blades and pelvises. Crocus used the huge flat sheets of bone to cover the body of Bedrock. Even in death he would be protected by the strength of the mammoths, which, through their own deaths, had sustained his kind in this hostile land.

Crocus reached up to Longtusk. This time she accepted his help, and he lifted her out of the grave and set her neatly on his back. Then he began to kick at the low piles of earth which had been scooped out of the ground.

When it was done, Longtusk made his way back to the hut Crocus had shared with her father, but now inhabited alone. She slid to the ground, ruffled the fur on his trunk with absent affection, and entered her hut, tying the skin flaps closed behind her.

When she was gone, Longtusk felt a great relief, for he thought this longest and most painful of days was at last done.

But he was wrong.

The Fireheads, having completed their mourning of their lost leader, began to celebrate the ascension of their new Matriarch. And it was soon obvious that the celebrations were to be loud and long.

As the sun dipped toward the horizon the Fireheads opened up a pit in the ground. Here, the butchered remains of several giant deer had been smoking since the previous day. They gathered around and ripped away pieces of the meat with their bare paws, and chewed on it until their bellies were distended and the fat ran down their chins.

Then, as the cubs and females danced and sang, the males produced great pots of foul-smelling liquid, thick and fermented, which they pumped down their throats. Before long many of them were slumping over in sleep, or regurgitating the contents of their stomachs in great noxious floods. But then they would revive to begin ingesting more food and liquid, growing more raucous and uncoordinated as the evening wore on.

The mastodonts watched this, bemused.

At last, under the benevolent guidance of Walks With Thunder, the Cows gathered their calves and quietly made their way to the calm of the stockade, where all but the most trusted of the Bulls were kept.

Longtusk, his emotions still muddled and raging, followed them.

Lemming was here, bringing bales of hay from one of the storage pits. "Lay, lay," he said. Eat, eat. Longtusk had noticed before that this little fat Firehead seemed happier in the company of the mastodonts than his own kind, and he felt a surge of affection.

All the mastodonts were in the stockade.

…All save Jaw Like Rock.

Agitated, disturbed by the throbbing noise and meat smells wafting from the Firehead settlement, Longtusk roamed the stockade. But he couldn’t find the great Bull. When he asked after Jaw, he was met with blank stares.

Then — as the night approached its darkest hour, and the drumming and shouting of the Fireheads reached a climax — he heard a single, agonized trumpeting from the depths of the settlement.

It was Jaw Like Rock.

Longtusk bellowed out a contact rumble, but there was no reply.

He sought out Walks With Thunder.

"Didn’t you hear that? Jaw Like Rock called out."

"No," said Thunder bleakly. "You’re mistaken."

"But I heard him—"

Thunder wrapped his trunk around Longtusk’s. "Jaw is dead. Accept it. It is the way."

Again that trumpeting came, thin and clear and full of pain.

Longtusk, confused, distressed, blundered away from the stockade and headed into the Firehead settlement.

Tonight it had become a place of bewildering noise and stink and confusion. The Fireheads ran back and forth, full of fermented liquid and rich food — or they slept where they had fallen, curled up by the hearths in the open air. He saw one male and female coupling, energetically but clumsily, in the half-shadow of a hut wall.

Few Fireheads even seemed aware of Longtusk; he had to be careful, in fact, not to step on sleeping faces.

He persisted, pushing through the noise and mess and confusion, until he found Jaw Like Rock.

They had put him in a shallow pit, scraped roughly out of the ground and surrounded by stakes and ropes. Fire burned brightly in lamps all around the pit, making the scene as bright as day, but filling the air with stinking, greasy smoke.

It was a feeble confinement from which a great tusker like Jaw Like Rock could have escaped immediately.

But Jaw was no longer in full health.

Jaw was dragging both his hind legs. It seemed his hamstrings or tendons had been cut, so he could no longer bolt or charge. And there were darts sticking out of his flesh, over his belly and behind his ears. His skin was discolored around the punctures, as if the darts had delivered a poison. He was wheezing, and great loops of spittle hung from his dangling tongue.

There were Fireheads all around the pit, all male, and they were stamping, clapping and hammering their drums of bone and skin. One of them was creeping into Jaw’s pit, carrying a long spear. It was Bareface, Longtusk saw, the young hunter who had distinguished himself on the fatal rhino hunt. He was naked, coated in red and yellow paint.

Longtusk trumpeted. "Jaw! Jaw Like Rock!"

Jaw’s answering rumble was faint, and punctuated by gasps for breath. "Is that you, grass chewer? Come to see the dead Bull?"

"Get out of there!"

"…No. It’s over for me. It was over the moment I tusked that spawn of Aglu. I planned it, after all, waited for my moment… But it was worth it. At least Spindle will torture no more mastodonts. Or mammoths."

"You aren’t dead! You breathe, you hurt—"

"I’m dead as poor Bedrock in his hole in the ground. Don’t you see? We belong to the Fireheads. They tend our wounds, and order our lives, and feed us. But we live and die by their whim. It is — a contract. And here, at the climax of this night of celebration, this one who creeps toward me on his belly, Bareface, will prove his courage by dispatching me to the aurora."

"But they’ve already crippled you! Where is the courage in that?"

"The ways of the Fireheads are impossible to understand… But, yes, you’re right, Longtusk. We must see some courage tonight." Jaw raised himself on his crippled legs and trumpeted his defiance. "Remember me, calf of Primus! Remember!"

And with a roar that shook the ground, he hurled himself forward toward Bareface.

The hunter, with lightning-fast reflexes, jammed the shaft of his spear into the ground.

Jaw’s great body impaled itself. Longtusk heard flesh rip, and smelled the sour stink of Jaw’s guts as they spilled, dark and steaming, to the ground.

The Fireheads roared their triumph. Longtusk trumpeted and fled.

He was in a stand of young trees in the new, growing forest that bordered the Firehead settlement. It was still deep night, dark and cloudy.

He couldn’t recall where he had run, how he had got here.

But she was here — he could sense it through his rage, his grief and confusion, the musth that burned through his body — she, Neck Like Spruce, no calf now but a warm and musty presence, solid and massive as the Earth itself, here in the dark, as if she had been waiting for him.