Stephen Baxter: Silverhair

But she had him.

She wrapped her strong trunk around his waist and, trumpeting her rage, hurled him into the air. Skin-of-Ice sailed high, twisting, writhing, and firing his thunder-stick. He fell heavily, and she heard a cracking sound.

Still he pushed himself up with his forelegs. She felt a flicker of admiration for his determination. But she knew it was the stubbornness of madness.

She grabbed his hind foot with her trunk. She twisted, and heard bone crunch, ligaments snap. Skin-of-Ice screamed.

She flipped him onto his back, like a seal landing a fish on an ice floe. He still had his thunder-stick, and he raised it at her. But the stick no longer spat its venom at her. She could see that it was twisted and broken.

Skin-of-Ice hurled the useless stick away, his small face distended with purple rage. Her strength and endurance had, in the end, defeated even its ugly threat.

He tried to rise, but she pushed him back with her trunk. Still he fought, clawing at her trunk as if trying to rip his way through her skin with his bare paws. She leaned forward and rested her tusk against his throat.

For a heartbeat, as Skin-of-Ice fought and spat, she held him. She thought of those who had died at his hands: Owlheart, Eggtusk, Snagtooth, Lop-ear. And she remembered her own hot dreams of destroying this monster.

A single thrust and it would be over.

She released him.

"You Lost are the dealers of death," she said heavily. "Not the mammoths."

Still Skin-of-Ice tried to rise up to attack her. But other Lost came forward and dragged him back.

There were Lost all around Silverhair now, and they were raising their thunder-sticks.

She struggled to rise, to use her one good foreleg to lever herself upright. She could feel the wounds in her chest and leg tear wider, and the pain was sharp. But she would die on her feet.

She wished she could reach her Family, entwine trunks with them one last time.

She wondered why the Lost hadn’t destroyed her already. She looked down at them. She saw they were hesitating; some of them had lowered their thunder-sticks.

"…Silverhair. Stay still. They won’t harm you now. It isn’t your day to die, Silverhair…"

It was — impossibly — the voice of an adult Bull.

She turned. A Lost was coming toward her: a new kind, all in white. He held his cupped paws up to his mouth, and he was shouting at the other Lost, making them turn their thunder-sticks away.

"…Don’t be afraid. The Family will be safe. Nobody else will die today…"

And with the Lost was a mammoth, without chains or ropes or any restraints, a mammoth who walked unhindered through the circle of thunder-sticks with this strange, posturing Lost.

It was a Bull, with one limp and damaged ear.

It was Lop-ear.

Silverhair walked forward over the soft, marshy ground of the Island.

Autumn was coming. The sun had lost its warmth, and was once more sliding beneath the horizon each night. There was no true darkness yet, but there would be long hours of spectral, indigo twilight before the sun returned. The birches, willows, and other plants had started to turn to their autumn colors: crimson, ochre, yellow, vermilion, russet brown, and even gold. The air was peaceful, musty with the smell of leaves and fungus. But the nights had turned cold, the frost riming the ground. And the ponds had started to freeze again, from their edges; each night’s increment of ice was marked by lines in the ice, like the growth rings of a tusk.

The land was emptying. The first migrating birds were already starting to abandon the tundra for their winter homes to the south: great flocks of swans, geese, and sandpipers. Soon the silence of winter would return to the Island, and the summer’s color and noise would be as remote as a dream.

But this was like no other autumn. For Silverhair knew that the plain was barred to her by the walls the Lost had built around them: glass, Lop-ear had called this hard, clear stuff. And in the distance she could see teams of the Lost moving about the Island’s tundra, on foot or in their strange clattering vehicles.

Silverhair found a rich tuft of grass. She bent to pluck it up with her trunk, but as she tried to bend her knee, her damaged leg rippled with pain. The white stuff the strange Lost had wrapped around her leg — while Lop-ear had been steadily persuading her not to gore him — was still in place, but it was threadbare and dirty, and she could see blood seeping through it.

Still, her leg was healing. There was no denying, the Lost were clever. Not wise — but clever.

She heard a miniature trumpeting, a small rumble of protest. She glanced around. The calves were wrestling again; Sunfire, growing quickly, was almost as large as her brother now, and it was all Foxeye could do to separate them.

After Silverhair’s final battle with the Lost called Skin-of-Ice, the mammoths had been taken back to the Island across the Channel, in one of the peculiar floating metal bergs of the Lost. Then — under the gentle supervision of the Lost — the mammoths had walked north, to this glassy enclosure.

The Family had never been so well fed, so safe from the attentions of predators. But Silverhair knew she would never be comfortable again, for she was living at the sufferance of the Lost.

Even if they had given Lop-ear back to her.

"…Not all the Lost are evil, Silverhair," Lop-ear was saying. "You must remember that. I’ve been observing them, trying to understand. Just as mammoths differ in personality, so do the Lost."

"Lop-ear," she said reasonably, "they tried to kill you."

"The actions of a few Lost don’t reflect on the whole species. The Lost we encountered — Skin-of-Ice and his cronies — shouldn’t even have been here on the Island. They are criminals. They were smuggling the clear liquid we saw them drink—"

"The stuff that makes them crazy."

"They were blown to the Island in a storm. They were stranded here for most of the summer by the storms on the Mainland. They were starving; they can’t graze grass or hunt as the wolves can. They even tried to eat the meat of the ancient mammoths that emerge from the permafrost, but it made them ill. And so when they found us…"

"The Cycle teaches us that the belly of a wolf is a noble grave," Silverhair growled. "Maybe that’s true of the shriveled belly of a Lost too. It doesn’t mean I have to welcome it.

"Besides, it wasn’t their butchery that bothered me. Lop-ear, the Lost tried to kill you for no reason other than a lust for blood. They would have tortured me until I submitted to them like poor Snagtooth, or until I died. How can we share a world with creatures like that?"

"Because we must," said Lop-ear bluntly. "For the world is theirs. You have to understand, there are lots of — groups — among these Lost. And they pursue different goals.

"First there was Skin-of-Ice and his gang of criminals, with their angry-making water, and their need to survive. When the weather broke, the criminals were rescued by another group, the workers from the City of the Lost. And the workers saw an opportunity in us. They didn’t want to kill us or eat us, but they did think they could give us to others of their kind."

"Give us to them? What for? Why?"

"So we could be — displayed," he said. "To great groups of Lost, young and old—"

Just as Foxeye had suspected. "So," Silverhair said bitterly, "the Lost can mock the creatures from whom they stole the planet."

"Something like that, I suppose. But there was another group of Lost, who had been here on the Island long before all the others. They built the Nest of Straight Lines. They kept others away from the Island for years, and they didn’t have any curiosity about what lay in the Island’s interior. They just stayed put and did their work."