Stephen Baxter - Longtusk

And every one of the beads was of mammoth ivory.

Within her suit she shone, blue-white like the ice. But Longtusk felt sure that not all the mammoths who had sacrificed their tusks for this monstrosity had gone to the aurora Great-Years before, abandoning their bones to the silt of a river bank. If the Fireheads had ever respected the mammoths, it was long ago. This coat was a thing of excess, not beauty: a symbol of power, not respect.

The Crocus he had known would never have worn such a monstrosity. Perhaps the girl he had known had died at the moment her father fell to the Whiteskins’ arrow, all those years ago. Perhaps what had lived on was another creature: the body alive, the spirit flown to the aurora.

Now she dug beneath her coat and pulled out a double loop of thick plaited rope. She held it toward him, cooing.

It was a hobble.

It was a hated thing, a symbol of his long submission, and he realized he had been right: she had pursued the mammoths over such immense distances so that she could regain her dominance over him.

He lifted his tusks and roared, and his voice echoed from the curving dam of ice.

Crocus looked up at him, her eyes hardening. Perhaps she intended to call her hunters to put him down, to end once and for all the life of this unruly mammoth.

But it didn’t matter. For she didn’t know, couldn’t know, that his life was already over.

He stamped his foot. The ice cracked.

The surface of the ice immediately crumbled, cracking in great sheets around them. He felt himself fall, his legs sinking into deeper loose material beneath.

Willow tumbled off his back and landed in the soft ice. Crocus fell to her knees, her heavy bead suit weighing her down, old and bewildered.

Longtusk shook himself free of the loose ice and continued to stamp, here at the dam’s narrowest and weakest point.

Compared to the forces here — the weight of water, the power of this huge ice dam — even the strength of a powerful Bull mammoth was as nothing, of course. But what was important was how he applied that strength — for, like Spindle riding the back of Jaw Like Rock, the ice dam was unstable, overloaded by the brimming lake.

And he heard the dam groan.

Worn thin by years of erosion, already under immense pressure from the weight of the water it contained, stress cracks began to spread through its weakening structure, and Longtusk, in the deep senses of his bones, felt the rhythm of those cracks, and changed his stamping to speed their propagation.

There were ripples on the lake. Birds were taking to the air, alarmed.

And on the other side, water began to gush out of the dam’s dirty, eroded face — just a fine spray at first, noisy rather than voluminous; but soon the cracks from which it emerged were widening, the water flow increasing.

Willow got to his feet, and he reached out with a hairy paw to help Crocus. Crocus hesitated, then took it in her own paw. Then the two of them grabbed onto Longtusk’s belly fur.

And so the three of them were locked together, Longtusk realized — Longtusk, Willow and Crocus; mammoth, Dreamer and Firehead — locked together at the end of their lives, just as had once been foreseen by a Dreamer female, long, long ago.

He wondered if they understood what he had done.

The center of the dam collapsed.

Huge slabs and boulders of ice arced into the air, followed by a powerful torrent of water. Suddenly the air was filled with noise: the roar of the water, the shriek of tortured ice. The dam was high, and the first blocks took a long time to fall to the green land below, fanning out amid a spray of rumbling, frothing, gray-blue water. Longtusk thought he saw a deer there, immense antlers protruding proudly from his head, looking up in utter bewilderment at the strange rain descending on him.

The first ice blocks hit the ground, exploding into fragments and gouging out deep earth-brown craters. But the craters lasted only a heartbeat, for when the waters splashed over the earth the land turned to shapeless mud and washed away.

The deer had vanished. He had been the first to die today. He would not be the last, Longtusk knew.

The dam, once broken, was crumbling quickly. Gray-brown water cut down through the unresisting ice like a stone knife slicing through the flesh of a mammoth. And as the breach widened, so the gush of water extended, deepening and broadening. But its violence did not diminish, for the great mass of water pressed against the dam with an eagerness born of centuries of containment. It shot through the breach horizontally, darkening the land before falling in a shattering rain.

Willow was tugging at Longtusk’s fur and pointing back the way they had come, toward the rocky hillside.

The Dreamer was right. It would be safer if they returned there, away from the collapsing ice dam itself.

Longtusk turned and began to make his cautious way back along the shuddering dam. The whole ice surface was cracking and unstable now. Crocus was whimpering with fear, and the Dreamer put his strong arm around her, in this last extreme helping this distant cousin to safety. Low and squat, Willow seemed to find it easier to stand on the dam’s shaking surface than the taller, more elegant Firehead.

Above the rush of water, the scream of the cracking ice, Longtusk heard a remote, thin trumpet. It was a mastodont. He looked back, and saw that the mastodonts and their Firehead keepers had fled to the safety of the land, and were fanning out over the hillside there. He couldn’t see if the Shaman was among them. He didn’t suppose it mattered; with Crocus gone, so was his grisly power.

He hoped the mastodonts would survive, and find freedom.

At last the three of them scrambled onto the rocky hillside. It felt scarcely less unsteady than the ice, so powerfully did the gushing water shake it.

He looked over the flooding land to the south. New rivers surged along the dry old valleys, like blood surging through a mammoth’s veins. Already the ridges of soil and gravel, slowly and painfully colonized by the plants, were being overwhelmed and swept away.

But now the ice dam collapsed further. Immense blocks, blocks the size of icebergs, calved off the eroded walls and fell grandly to the battered land — and the flooding reached a new intensity.

A wall of gray water surged from the huge breach, a river trying to empty a sea. This new mighty flow simply overwhelmed the puny canyons and valleys hit by the first flooding, drowning them as if they had never been. A great bank of mist and fog rolled outward from the breached dam, looming up to the sky as swirling clouds.

Beyond the advancing wave front, bizarrely, the sun still shone, and the land was a placid blanket of folded earth peppered with trees. Longtusk saw a herd of bison, a black lake of muscle and fur. They looked up from their feeding at the wall of water that advanced on them, towering higher than the tallest trees.

The herd was gone in an instant, thousands of lives snuffed out as their world turned from placid green to crushing black.

And still the water came, that front of gray advancing without pity over the green, spreading out over the land in a great fan from the breached dam, as if trying to emulate the sea from which it had emerged.

…Now, though, the flow began to diminish, and the water surging over the land began to drain away. Longtusk saw that the breached dam had, if briefly, reformed; slabs of ice and boulders, presumably torn from the basin of the trapped lake, had jammed themselves into the breach, stemming the flow, which bubbled and roared its frustration at this blockage.

As the flood waters subsided, draining into shallow pools and river valleys, the drowned land emerged, glistening.

It was unrecognizable.