Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

Longtusk stepped to the edge of an abandoned hole. There was a little seeping water, so thick with clay it was black, but the hole was all but dry.

He was aware that a Bull mammoth was approaching him. He did not turn that way; he held himself still. But he could not ignore the great creature’s stink, the weight of his footsteps, his massive, encroaching presence, the deep rumble that came to him through the ground.

"…You smell of fat."

Longtusk turned.

He faced a Bull: taller, older than Longtusk, but gaunt, almost skeletal. His guard hair dangled, coarse and lifeless. One of his tusks had been broken, perhaps in a fight; it terminated in a crude, dripping stump. The Bull stood listlessly; white mucus dripped from his eyes. He must barely be able to see, Longtusk realized.

Longtusk’s heart was suddenly hammering. Once the Bull’s accent would have been familiar to him — for it had been the language of Longtusk’s Clan. Was it possible…?

"I am not fat," said Longtusk. "But you are starving."

The mammoth stepped back, growled and slapped his trunk on the ground. "You are fat and ugly and complacent, and you stink of fire, you and these squat hairless dwarfs. You have forgotten what you are. Haven’t you — Longtusk?"

"…Rockheart?"

"I’m still twice the Bull you are." And Rockheart roared and lunged at Longtusk.

Longtusk ducked aside, and the Bull’s tusks flashed uselessly through the air. Rockheart growled, stumbling, the momentum of his lunge catching him off balance. Almost effortlessly Longtusk slid his own tusks around the Bull’s, and he twisted Rockheart’s head. The huge Bull, roaring, slid sideways to the ground.

Longtusk placed his foot on Rockheart’s temple.

He recalled how this Bull had once bested him, humiliating him in front of the bachelor herd. But Longtusk had been a mere calf then, and Rockheart a mature adult Bull. Now it was different: now it was Longtusk who was in his prime, Longtusk who had been trained to keep his courage and to fight — not just other Bulls in half-playful dominance contests, but animals as savage as charging rhinos, even hordes of scheming, clever Fireheads.

"I could crush your skull like a bird’s egg," he said softly.

"Then do it," rumbled Rockheart. "Do it, you Firehead monster."

Firehead monster.

Is it true? Is that what I have become?

Longtusk lifted his foot and stepped back.

As Rockheart, gaunt and weak, scrambled to his feet and roared out his impotent rage, Longtusk walked away, saddened and horrified.

The Fireheads lingered close to the seep holes for a night and a day.

Longtusk found it increasingly difficult to bear the noise of this nightmarish place: the clash of tusks, the bleating of calves.

He said to Walks With Thunder, "Why do the Fireheads keep us here? What do they want?"

"You know what they want," Thunder said wearily. "They want hearts and kidneys and livers and bones, for fat to feed to their cubs. They prefer to take their meat fresh, from the newly dead. And here, in this desolate place, they need only wait."

"So we are waiting for a mammoth to die?"

"Why did you think, Longtusk?"

"These Fireheads believe themselves to be mighty hunters," Longtusk said bitterly. "But it isn’t true. They are scavengers, like the hyenas, or the condors."

Thunder did not reply.

Somehow, in his heart, he had always imagined that his Family were still out there somewhere: just over the horizon, a little beyond the reach of a contact rumble, living on the steppe as they always had. But he had denied the changes in the land he had seen all around him, never thought through their impact on his Family. Now he faced the truth.

He recalled how so recently he had prided himself on his self-control, the fact that he was above mundane concerns, beyond pain and love and hope. He tried to cling to that control, to draw strength from it.

But the comfort was as dry and cold as the mammoths’ seep holes. And he couldn’t get out of his head the disgust and rage of Rockheart.

…The sun wheeled around the sky twice more before it happened.

There was a flurry of motion among the mammoths. The Fireheads, eating and dozing, stirred.

A mammoth Cow, barged away from a water hole, had fallen to her knees. Her breath gurgled in her chest. Other mammoths gathered around her briefly, touching her scalp and tongue with their trunks. But they were weak themselves, ground down by hunger and thirst, and had no help to offer her. Soon she was left alone, slumping deeper into the mud, as if melting.

"At last," rumbled Walks With Thunder brutally.

With fast, efficient cries, a party of Fireheads formed up, gathering their knives and axes and spears, and set off toward the Cow.

Drawn by a hideous curiosity, Longtusk followed.

The Fireheads reached the mammoth. They started to lay their ropes on the ground, ready to pull her onto her back for gutting.

The mammoth raised her head, feebly and slowly, and her eyes opened, gummy with the milky mucus.

The Fireheads stepped back, shouting their annoyance that she was not yet dead.

While the Fireheads argued, the Cow stared at Longtusk. She spoke in a subterranean rumble so soft he could barely hear it. "Don’t you recognize me, Longtusk? Has it been so long?"

Memories swam toward him, long-buried: a calf, a ball of fluffy brown fur, not even her guard hairs grown, scampering, endlessly annoying…

A name.

"Splayfoot." Splayfoot, his sister.

"You’re back in time to Remember me," she said. "You and your Firehead friends. You were going to be the greatest hero of all, Longtusk. Wasn’t that your dream? But now I can smell the stink of fire and meat on you. What happened to you?"

One of the hunters — Bareface — stepped forward. He had a spear in his paw, tipped by shining quartz. He hefted it, preparing for a thrust into her mouth, a single stroke that would surely kill her. Evidently the Fireheads, impatient, had decided to finish her off so they could get on with mining her body for its fat and marrow.

But this was Longtusk’s own sister. His sister!

Longtusk trumpeted his rage.

With a single tusk sweep he knocked Bareface off his feet. The Firehead fell, howling, clutching his leg; bone protruded white from a bloody wound. Longtusk grabbed the spear with his trunk and drove the quartz point deep into the mud.

He went to his sister and wrapped his trunk around hers. "Get up."

"I can’t. I’m so tired…"

"No! Only death is the end of possibility. By Kilukpuk’s dugs, up…" And he hauled her to her feet by main force. She scrabbled at the mud, seeking a footing. Her legs were trembling, the muscles so depleted they could barely support her weight.

But now another mammoth was here — Rockheart, almost as gaunt and weakened. Nevertheless he lumbered up to Splayfoot’s other side, lending his support as Longtusk tried to steady her.

And, startlingly, here was Willow, the squat little Dreamer. He jammed his shoulder under Splayfoot’s heavy rump and shoved as hard as he could. He seemed to be laughing as he, too, defied the Fireheads.

The Fireheads were recovering from their shock at Longtusk’s attack on Bareface. They were reaching for weapons, more of the big spears and axes that could slice through a mammoth’s hide.

But now Walks With Thunder charged at them, his gait stiff and arthritic. He trumpeted, waving his huge old tusks this way and that, scattering the Fireheads. "Go, little grazer!"

And as the water hole receded, and the motley party headed into an empty, unknown land, Longtusk could hear Thunder’s call. "Go, go, go!"