Stephen Baxter - Silverhair

Even when there were no Lost with her — when they were all asleep in their artificial caves, the flasks and scraps of half-chewed mammoth meat scattered around their snoring forms — they would set up one of their deafening noise-making boxes beside her, and its unending stomping ensured she could never sleep.

Snagtooth was kept tied up, in full view of Silverhair. But her tether was just a single rope. Her feet were not bound, so she was free to move as far as the rope would allow her, and she was fed with pawfuls of grass and containers of water.

Several times a day, Skin-of-Ice or one of the others would climb on the back of Snagtooth. The Lost would kick at the back of her ears, as if trying to drive her forward or back. Snagtooth was rewarded with mouthfuls of food if she guessed what they wanted correctly, and strikes of a goad — not as severely as they beat Silverhair — if she got it wrong. All this was greeted with hoots of laughter from the staggering, swaying Lost.

Silverhair tried to recall the Cycle, the legends of Kilukpuk and Ganesha and Longtusk; but the Cycle seemed a remote irrelevance in this place of horror. At last Silverhair’s spirit seemed as if it was half-detached from her body, and even the pain of her poisoned wounds receded from her awareness.

When she was left alone, she would look beyond the camp, seeking solace. Somehow it seemed strange that the world was continuing its ancient cycles, regardless of her own suffering and the cruel designs of the Lost. But life was carrying on.

The cliffs above the beach were crowded with thousands of eider, kittiwakes, murres, and fulmars. Every ledge and crevice was packed with nesting birds, and their noise and smell were overwhelming; so many birds circled in the air, they darkened the sky. At the base of the cliffs was a bright carpet of lichens and purple saxifrage, fertilized by the guano from the birds.

Silverhair saw a thick-billed murre taking its turn to sit on its single egg, freeing its partner to seek food at the ice-edge. But when the attention of the murre was distracted, a gull swooped down and easily snatched the egg, swallowing it in a single movement. The distress of the murre pair was obvious, for they might not have time in the short season to raise another egg. Silverhair, despite her own plight, felt a stab of sadness at the small tragedy.

…But then Skin-of-Ice would return, sometimes with a flask of liquid in his paw. He would adjust the ropes that pinned her, perhaps tightening them around some already chafed and painful spot. And then he would devise some new way to hurt her.

Some of the Lost even seemed to show regret for the suffering they caused. They would hurry past the place she was staked with their faces averted. Or they would stand before her and stare at her, their spindly forelegs dangling, their small mouths gaping open; sometimes they would even reach up to her hesitantly, as if to stroke her or feed her.

But not Skin-of-Ice.

He knows I’m conscious, she thought. He knows I’m in here.

He knows what he does hurts me. That’s why he does it. The others may kill us for food or skin or bones, but not this one. He enjoys inflicting pain. And he enjoys humiliating.

His was a deliberate cruelty of a type she had never encountered before. And she knew it would not stop until she bent her head to him, as had Snagtooth.

Or until one of them was dead.

"…Silverhair. Silverhair. Can you hear me?…"

Snagtooth was a silhouette against the dying light of the fire.

"Leave me alone," said Silverhair.

"You don’t understand." Snagtooth was using the contact rumble, a note so deep, it was not muffled by the clatter of the noise-maker beside Silverhair, so deep it would not disturb the light slumbers of the Lost. But Snagtooth’s voice sounded oddly distorted, as if she spoke with a trunk full of water.

"What is there to understand? You have given yourself to the Lost."

"We can’t fight them, Silverhair. Think about what the Cycle says. Once, the mammoths dominated the north of the whole world. But then the Lost came and took it from us — all of it, except the Island. We have to live as they want us to live. We have no choice."

"There is always a choice," rumbled Silverhair.

"I think they want us to work for them. Lifting things, moving things about, in the odd way they have of wanting to reorder everything. But it isn’t so bad. When one of them climbs on your back, you don’t even feel his weight after a while…"

"You do," said Silverhair softly. "Oh, you do."

"They are feeding me well, Silverhair. They cleaned out my abscess. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Can you imagine how that feels?"

"Is that why you are prepared to bend before them? Because they cleaned out your tusk?"

The rumble fell silent for a long time. Then Snagtooth said, "Silverhair, I think I understand them. I think I am like them."

"Like the Lost?"

"Look around you. There are no bitches here. No cubs. These Lost are alone. Like a bachelor herd, cut off from the Families. No wonder they are so cruel and unhappy… Silverhair, I envy you. I can smell it from here, even above the blood and the rot of your wounds and the burning of Eggtusk’s flesh—"

"Smell what?"

"The calf growing inside you."

Silverhair, startled, listened to the slow oceanic pulsing of her own blood. Could it be true?

Snagtooth murmured, "For me it’s different, Silverhair. Year after year my body has absorbed the eggs of my unborn calves, even before they fully form."

Now, in the midst of her own confusing pulse of joy, Silverhair understood. She should have known: for the Cycle teaches that sterile Cows, unable to produce calves, will sometimes grow as huge as mature Bulls, as if their bodies are seeking to make up in stature what they lack in fertility.

Snagtooth said, "Now do you understand why I submit to the Lost? Because there is nothing else for me, Silverhair. Nothing."

And Snagtooth turned her head, and Silverhair saw her clearly for the first time since they had arrived at this nest. "Oh, Snagtooth…"

Snagtooth’s trunk was gone — her trunk with its hundred thousand muscles, infinitely supple, immensely strong, the trunk that fed her and assuaged her thirst, the trunk that defined her identity as mammoth. Now, in the center of her face, there was only a bloody stump, grotesquely shadowed by the fire’s flickering light.

Snagtooth had allowed the Lost to sever her trunk at its root. She couldn’t even feed herself or obtain water; she had made herself completely reliant on the mercy of the Lost, for whatever remained of her life.

The pain must have been blinding.

"It isn’t so bad!" Snagtooth wailed thickly. "Not so bad…"

The eternal Arctic day wore on.

Silverhair’s stomach was so empty now, her dung so thin, she seemed to have passed beyond the pain of hunger and thirst. She couldn’t even pass urine anymore. The rope burns on her legs seemed to be rotting, so foul was the stench that came from them. She was giddy from lack of sleep, so much so that sometimes the pain fell away from her and she seemed to be floating, looking down on the fouled, bloody body trapped between the stakes on the ground, flying like a gull halfway to the Sky Steppe.

She tried to sense the new life budding inside her — did it have limbs yet? did it have a trunk? — but she could sense only its glowing, heavy warmth.

At last, one dark and cloudy midnight, the situation came to a head.

Skin-of-Ice approached her. She saw that he staggered slightly. His hairless head was slick and shining with sweat. In his paw he held a glittering flask, already half-empty. He raised it in his paw, almost as a mammoth would raise a trunkful of water. But he drank clumsily, as a mammoth never would, and the fluid spilled over his chin and neck.