Icebones tm-3 Read online

  Longtusk stayed with the bear a day and a night, comforting her, and then he walked on.

  In the summer Longtusk, wandering the land, happened to come upon a horse as she cropped a stand of grass. She was mourning loudly.

  Now the foals of Equu like to run together in herds, but they have no Matriarch, and no true Family.

  Longtusk called, "What is wrong?"

  And the horse said, "I was running with my brothers and sisters and our foals when we ran into a bank of smoke. It was a fire, lit by the Lost. Well, we turned and ran, as fast as we could. But we ran to a cliff’s edge and fell — all but me — and the Lost have taken the flesh and the skin of my brothers and sisters and foals, and I am alone."

  And Longtusk was saddened. But he knew that if Lost hunters tried to panic a mammoth Family, the wisdom of the Matriarch and her sisters would keep them from falling into such a simple trap.

  Longtusk stayed with the horse a day and a night, comforting her, and then he walked on.

  In the autumn Longtusk, wandering the land, happened to come upon a wolf as she chewed on a scrap of meat. She was mourning loudly.

  Now the wolves run together in packs. But they have no true Family.

  Though Longtusk was rightly wary of any cub of Aglu, he approached the wolf. He called, "What is wrong?"

  And the wolf said, "We were hunting. My brother was injured and he died. My parents and my sister and my cubs fell on him, and I joined them, and we fought over the entrails we dragged from his stomach. But the meat tasted sour in my mouth, and I am still hungry, and my brother is gone, and I am alone."

  And Longtusk was saddened. But he knew that when a mammoth died, her Family would Remember her properly, and those who had to live on were soothed. But when a wolf died he became nothing but another piece of meat between the teeth of his pack.

  Longtusk stayed with the wolf a day and a night, comforting her, and then he walked on.

  If you are a Cow you are born into a Family, and you live in that Family, and you die in that Family. All your life. A Family must share in the care and protection of the calves. A Family must respect the wisdom of its elders, and especially the Matriarch. A Family must Remember its dead. In a Family, I becomes We.

  All these things Longtusk knew. All these things Kilukpuk taught us, and more.

  …I know, I know. I have not said what became of Purga, brother of Kilukpuk.

  Well, Purga sired clever creatures who climbed and ran and hunted and built and fought and killed. And they became the Lost.

  But that is another story.

  1

  The Bridge

  The mammoths spent a night on the lip of the great cliff, huddled under a sky littered with hard, bright stars. Icebones was surrounded by the warm gurgles of the mammoths’ bellies, their soft belches and farts. Sometimes she heard a rustle as Woodsmoke scrambled through belly hair and sought a teat to suckle.

  But every time sleep approached Icebones imagined she was back in the maze of rock, and that a lithe black creature, all teeth and claws, was preparing to spring out of the air.

  It was with relief that she saw the dawn approaching. Finding a stream, she took a trunkful of ice-cold water and tipped it into her mouth. The mammoths were already drifting away in search of the first of the day’s forage. The place they had stood for much of the night was littered with dung.

  Autumn’s wounds still seeped blood that leaked into her ragged guard hairs. Shoot cleaned the wounds of blood and dirt with water, and plastered mud into the deepest cuts.

  Breeze encouraged her calf to pop fragments of the adults’ dung into his mouth, for it would help his digestion. But his control of his trunk was still clumsy, and he smeared the warm, salty dung liberally over his mouth. He was growing rapidly. His legs, to which tufts of orange hair clung, were spindly and long, and he was already half Icebones’s height.

  Finished with the dung, Woodsmoke trotted from one adult to another, chirping his simple phrases: "I am hungry! I am not cold!" — and, most of all: "Look at me! Look at what I am doing!" Autumn grumbled wearily that it might be better for the nerves of the adults if calves did not speak from the moment they were born. But Icebones knew she didn’t mean it.

  Icebones walked to the edge of the Gouge.

  The canyon was vast, magnificent, austere. It stretched from east to west, passing beyond the horizon in either direction. Its walls, glowing red and crimson and ochre, were nothing but rock, cracked and seamed by heat and frost and wind. Peering down, she saw gray clouds drifting through the canyon, feathery rafts floating on the languid river of air that flowed between those mighty walls.

  The wall beneath her was huge, tall enough to dwarf many mountains. Its face was cut into columns and gullies, carved and fluted by water and wind, the detail dwindling to a dim darkness at its base.

  But the Gouge’s far southern wall was a mere line of darkness on the horizon. She imagined a mammoth like herself standing on that southern wall, peering north across this immense feature. To such an observer, Icebones would be quite invisible.

  The Gouge’s floor was visible beneath the flowing gray cloud. She made out the ripple of dunes, the snaking glint of a river, and the crowded gray-green of forests or steppe — all very different from the high, frozen plain on which she stood. The Gouge was so deep that the very weather was different on its sunken floor.

  Thunder, the young Bull, stood beside her. "The valley is big," he said simply.

  "Yes. Do you see? It is light there, to the east, but it is still dark there, to the west." It was true. The morning sun, a shrunken yellow disc immersed in pale pink light, seemed to be rising out of the Gouge’s eastern extremity. Long, sharp shadows stretched across the Gouge floor, and mist pooled white in valleys and depressions. And, as she looked further to the west, she saw that the floor there still lay in deep darkness, still in the shadow of the world. "The Gouge is so big that it can contain both day and night."

  Thunder growled. "It is too big to understand."

  Gently, she prodded his trunk. "No. Feel the ground. Smell it, listen to it. Hear the wind gushing along this great trench, fleeing the sun’s heat. Listen to the rumble of the rivers, flowing along the plain, far below. And listen to the rocks…"

  "The rocks?"

  She stamped, hard. "You are not a Lost, who is nothing but a pair of eyes. You can hear much more than you can see, if you try. The shape of the world is in the rocks’ song." She walked back and forth, listening to the ringing of the ground. She could feel the spin of the world, and the huge slow echoes that came back from the massive volcanic rise to the east.

  And she could feel how this valley stretched on and on, far beyond the horizon. It was like a great wound, she thought, a wound that stretched around a quarter of the planet’s belly.

  Now Thunder was trotting back and forth, trunk high, eyes half-closed, slamming his clumsy feet into the ground. "I can feel it." He trumpeted his pleasure. "The Lost showed me nothing like this."

  "The Lost do not understand. This is mammoth."

  Growling, stamping, he stalked away.

  Autumn walked up to Icebones. She moved stiffly. "You are kind to him."

  Icebones rumbled, "He has a good heart."

  Autumn walked carefully to the lip of the valley. "It must have been a giant river which carved this valley."

  "Perhaps not a river," Icebones said. She recalled how she had stood atop the Fire Mountain with the Ragged One, and had seen how the land was uplifted. "Perhaps the ground was simply broken open."

  "However it was formed, this tusk-gouge lies across our path. Can we walk around it?"

  "The Gouge stretches far to the east of here. The land at its edge is high and cold and barren. It would be a difficult trek."

  Autumn raised her trunk and sniffed the warming air that rose from the Gouge. "I smell water, and grass, and trees," she said. "There is life down there."

  "Yes," Icebones mused. "If we can reach the floor, perhaps we
will find nourishment. We can follow its length, cutting south across the higher land when we near the Footfall itself."

  Autumn walked gingerly along the lip of the Gouge. "There," she said.

  Icebones made out an immense slope of tumbled rock, piled up against the Gouge wall, reaching from the deep floor almost to its upper surface. As the sun rose further, casting its wan, pink light, the rock slope cast huge shadows. Perhaps there had been a landslide, she thought, the rocks of the wall shaken free by a tremor of the ground.

  She murmured doubtfully, "The rock looks loose and treacherous."

  "Yes. But there might be a way. And—"

  A piercing trumpet startled them both. The Ragged One came lumbering up to them.

  "I heard what you are saying," the Ragged One gasped. "But your trunk does not sniff far, Icebones. There is no need to clamber down into that Gouge and toil along its muddy length."

  Autumn asked mildly, "Shall we fly over?"

  The Ragged One snorted. "We will walk." And she turned to the west.

  When Icebones looked that way she saw a band of pinkish white, picked out by the clear light of the rising sun. It rose from the northern side of the Gouge, on which she stood, and arced smoothly through the air — and it came to rest on the Gouge’s far side.

  It was a bridge.

  Like everything about this immense canyon, the bridge was huge, and it was far away. It took them half a day just to walk to its foot.

  The bridge turned out to be a broad shining sheet that emerged from the pink dust as if it had grown there. It sloped sharply upward, steeply at first, before leveling off. It was wide enough to accommodate four or five mammoths walking abreast.

  Icebones probed at its surface with her trunk tip. It was smooth and cold and hard and smelled of nothing. "The Lost made this," she said.

  "Of course they did," snapped the Ragged One. "Impatient with the Gouge’s depth and length, they hurled this mighty bridge right across it. What ambition! What vision!"

  "They didn’t put anything to eat or drink on it," Autumn said reasonably.

  Thunder stepped forward onto the bridge itself, and stamped heavily at its surface. Where he trod, his dirty foot pads left huge round prints on the gleaming floor. "It is fragile, like thin ice. What if it is cracked by frost? This bridge was meant for the Lost. They were small creatures, much smaller than us. If we walk on it, perhaps it will fall."

  Icebones rumbled her approval, for the Bull was using the listening skills she had shown him.

  But the Ragged One said, "We will rest the night and feed. We will reach the far side in a day’s walk, no more."

  Autumn growled doubtfully.

  "No," Icebones said decisively. "We should keep away from the things of the Lost. We will climb down the landslide, and—"

  "You are a coward and a fool." The Ragged One’s language and posture were clear and determined.

  Icebones felt her heart sink. Was this festering sore in their community to be broken open again?

  Thunder stepped forward angrily. "Listen to her. The bridge is not safe."

  "Safe? What is safe? Did your precious hero Longtusk ask himself if that famous bridge of land was safe?"

  "This is not the bridge of Longtusk," Icebones said steadily. "And you are not Longtusk."

  The Ragged One stepped back. "I have endured your posturing, Icebones, when it did us no harm. But by your own admission you are no Matriarch. And now your foolish arrogance threatens to lead us into disaster. You others should follow me, not her," she said bluntly.

  Autumn, rumbling threateningly, stood by the shoulder of Icebones. "This one is strange to us," she said, "Perhaps she is not yet a Matriarch. But she has displayed wisdom and leadership. And now she is right. There is no need to take the risk of crossing your bridge."

  "Icebones gave me my name," Thunder said. "I follow her. You are the arrogant one if you cannot tell this bridge is unsafe." He stood alongside Icebones, and she touched his trunk.

  Breeze lumbered toward her mother, her calf tucked safely between her legs. "You are wrong to divide us. This fighting wastes our energy and time."

  Icebones rumbled, relieved, gratified by their unexpected support. "Breeze is right. Let us put this behind us—"

  "No." The older sister, Spiral, had spoken. "We must finish this terrible journey before we all die of hunger, and before another monster leaps out of the sea or sky or ground to consume us. And the quickest way is to take the bridge."

  "It is not safe," Icebones growled.

  "So you say," Spiral said angrily. "But it was made by the Lost. What do you know of the Lost, Icebones? They looked after our every need for a long time — for generations — long before you ever came here." And, for a moment, behind the gaunt face and the dirty, matted hair, Icebones saw once again the vain, spoiled creature she had first met. "Shoot? Will you come with me?"

  Shoot looked from her mother to her sister and back, dismayed. Then, hesitantly, she stepped up to Spiral.

  The Ragged One raised her stubby tusks in triumph. "We will cross the bridge, we three."

  "No," Icebones said, gravely anxious. She had not anticipated this turn of events. "We must not break up the Family."

  "This is no Family here," said the Ragged One, contemptuous.

  "If we stay together we can watch over each other. By splitting us, you endanger us all."

  "If that is so, you must drop your foolish pride and let me lead you, like these two."

  Icebones rumbled, "I can’t. Because you are leading them to their deaths."

  "Then there is nothing more to be said." The Ragged One turned to face the arcing bridge and stalked away. Spiral followed.

  Shoot glanced back at her mother, obviously distressed. But she followed her sister’s lead — as, perhaps, she had all her life.

  It was another long and difficult night, and it granted Icebones little sleep.

  As pink light began to wash over the eastern lands, she walked alone to the edge of the canyon. It was a river of darkness. She listened to the soft chthonic breathing of the rocks beneath her feet, and the gentle ticking of frost, and she strained to hear the rhythm of distant mammoth footsteps.

  She called out with deep vibrations of her head and belly and feet: "Boaster. Can you hear me? It is me, Icebones. Boaster, Boaster…"

  Icebones. I hear you.

  She felt a profound relief, as if she was no longer alone.

  We are walking. Every day we walk. The sun is hidden. It rains. We have come to a huge walled plain covered by something that glitters in the light, even the light of this gray sky. There is nothing to eat on it.

  "It is ice."

  No. It is not cold and there is no moisture under my trunk tip.

  She shuddered. "It is a thing of the Lost."

  Yes. There is a great beast, like a beetle, which tends it. The beast wipes away the dust on the floor. My brother challenged the beetle. It turned away.

  "Your brother defeated it?"

  My brother is brave and strong. But not so brave as me. And he is smaller than me in many ways. Much smaller. For example, his —

  "I can guess," Icebones said dryly. She told him she had decided to head for the basin she had called the Footfall of Kilukpuk. "But we face many obstacles." And she told him about the Gouge, and tried to tell him of the mammoths’ confusion and dissent.

  You think you have problems, he called back. Imagine how it is for me. All the time I slip up in my own musth dribble, and I trip over my long, erect —

  "You cannot still be in musth."

  Wait until we meet at the Footfall. You will see my musth flow, and you will be awed at its mighty gush. Are you in oestrus yet?

  "No," Icebones said, with a shiver of sadness.

  Good, came Boaster’s voice, deep-whispering through the rock. It would be a waste. Wait until we meet at the Footfall. I must go. We have found a dwarf willow and the others are stripping it like wolf cubs, leaving none for me. Be brave, li
ttle Icebones. We will meet at the Footfall. Goodbye, goodbye…

  Icebones stood alone in the chill, bloody light of dawn, listening to the last of his words wash through the rock.

  The Ragged One stepped onto the smooth slope of the bridge. She stamped hard on the cold surface, as if testing it under her weight.

  The bridge rang hollowly.

  More tentatively Shoot followed, and then, at last, Spiral.

  Autumn growled, her voice filled with sadness as she watched her daughters walk out into emptiness.

  "This is wrong," Icebones said. "Wrong, wrong. Mammoths are creatures of the steppe, and the open sky. They are not meant to hover like birds high above the ground."

  But none of the three rebels was listening.

  Soon the mammoths had gone so far that they looked like beetles, crawling over the mighty band of the bridge. The sun was still low in the sky, and the three toiling mammoths cast long shadows across the bridge’s smooth, pink-lit surface.

  Icebones could hear the deep thrumming vibrations of the bridge as it bent and bowed in response to the mammoths’ weight.

  The Ragged One turned. She trumpeted, her voice dwarfed by the Gouge beneath her. "You are wrong, all of you. The bridge will protect us. See?" And she raised her foot -

  Icebones trumpeted, "No!"

  — and the Ragged One began to stamp, hard, at the shining surface of the bridge.

  Icebones heard the cracking long before she could see it. It sounded like pack ice over a swelling sea, or a fragment of bone beneath a clumsy mammoth foot pad.

  A spiderweb of cracks spread over the pale pink surface. The whole bridge was quivering, and already slivers of it were crumbling off its edges and falling, to be lost far below.

  Autumn trumpeted, an ancient, wordless cry, and she ran forward to the edge of the bridge.

  Shoot turned back and faced her sister. "Go back! We must go back!"

  But Spiral, last in line, would not move. She stood on the trembling bridge, feet splayed and trunk dipped, as if frozen in place.